My Blog

The Bright Purple Interview

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Mystery File has posted Ed Gorman’s 1980s interview with John D. MacDonald. Here’s one of MacDonald’s quotes:

"Professionally, I do not recall any particularly bad memories.  The book which
just won’t jell.  The editor who gets fired when you have half a book in his
shop.  The clown who was taking my old pulp stories and changing the point of
view and selling them to Manhunt.  I
began to learn my trade in late 1945.  Had I begun ten years later, I would
never have had the chance to earn while learning.  The short-story market was
sliding into the pits.  Luck is being born at the right time.  I had an agent
who kept me out of Hollywood despite some pretty offers.  I was lucky to have a
man so wise.  I decided against doing a series character in 1952.  I had no good
reason.  It was just a gut feeling.  I didn’t start McGee until 1964.  By then I
could avoid being trapped in the series.  Saying no was the purest kind of luck."

Simon Remembers Pryor

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Screenwriter Roger Simon remembers Richard Pryor and the movie they did together, BUSTIN LOOSE.

Some time in 1979, shortly after I had done The Big Fix for
Universal, the studio called to ask if I would like to write a movie
for Richard Pryor. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Pryor was
at the top of his game then, acknowledged by many to be possibly the
greatest standup comic of all time. Not only that, he was a cultural
icon of extraordinary proportions, the very voice of black America,
"Daddy Rich." What more could a Jewish white boy who grew up on Miles
Davis want than to work with this man?

Star Trek – The New Voyages

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2n2_1I’m  astonished and impressed. I just watched the two, fan-made, original STAR TREK "episodes" that were written about in this month’s issue of WIRED magazine:

Just like the original series, each New Voyages episode
lasts 51 minutes and is structured in five acts (act breaks are where
the commercials would go, if there were any). Like the original, New Voyages begins with that ethereal theremin score. Like the original, New Voyages favors bold primary colors, velour uniforms, and leggy women in miniskirts.

The acting and writing are cringe-inducing but everything else is amazing. I can’t believe what these imaginative and extremely talented film-makers were able to accomplish on a shoe-string budget (though it helps to have the FX pros from STAR TREK ENTERPRISE over-seeing the effects). 

The STAR TREK: NEW VOYAGES episodes, made with the permission of Paramount and with the cooperation of the Roddenberrys, succeed brilliantly at capturing the feel,  sound and look of the original series, more so than STAR TREK ENTERPRISE was able to do in their clunky, fourth season two-parter. 

The first two STAR TREK: THE NEW VOYAGES episodes are available free for download (including a DVD version that looks surprisingly good on a big-screen TV).  They are worth a look. The third episode promises to be even more polished:

Each New Voyages episode is produced with the help of a growing network of Star Trek professionals. The makeup supervisor for the new episode, for example, is Kevin Haney, who worked on one of the many Trek TV series spun off from the original (and won an Oscar for makeup in Driving Miss Daisy). The script is by D. C. Fontana, a story editor for the original Star Trek series and author of some of its most beloved episodes. (Who can forget the one where Kirk steers the Enterprise
into the Neutral Zone, near Romulan territory? Or the one that
introduces Spock’s parents?) And it will star Walter Koenig, the actor
who played navigator Pavel Chekov in the original series and seven of
the 10 films. The fact that Trek pros are taking part in this fan
project is something new in the world of filmmaking, the cinematic
equivalent of semi-pro ball.

…The value of the labor donated to New Voyages by Star Trek
professionals far exceeds any out-of-pocket expenses. Makeup supervisor
Kevin Haney directed a team whose bill would have come to tens of
thousands of dollars. The show’s special effects are supplied by
Cawley’s friend Max Rem (the professional CG f/x creator uses a
pseudonym to protect his day job). Rem worked on Star Trek for more than a decade, and he has worked on New Voyages since its inception in 2003. For the second New Voyages episode, Rem created more than 200 effects shots – from the Enterprise flying through space to backgrounds for greenscreen shots – all of which would have cost more than $1 million if he had billed New Voyages.

Watching the first two episodes of NEW VOYAGES makes you realize what ENTERPRISE should have been:  a return to the STAR TREK we all fell in love with. Note to Paramount: It’s not too late.

What to Spec?

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With so few comedies on the air, what sitcom should an aspiring writer spec as a sample of his or her talent? Veteran comedy writer/producer Ken Levine tackles that question this weekend on his blog.

Select a
current show you like and think you know the best. “Current” is the key word
here. Once a show is cancelled the shelf life for your spec is about six months.
So don’t start that ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT you’ve been developing. And I hope you
didn’t pour a lot of time and effort into a spec KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL. When
RAYMOND went off the air everyone was sad but show runners. No more reading
fifty RAYMONDS a day when trying to staff! And for that same reason, please let
this be WILL & GRACE’S last year! The good news is if you’ve got a spec
FRASIER you can just change the names and send it out as an OUT OF PRACTICE. And
of course you never have to worry with a SIMPSONS because they will go on making
new episodes forever…

…Unfortunately, there are not a lot of great shows out there at the moment. What
I think we’ll see this year is everybody writing a MY NAME IS EARL. It’s clearly
the best of the new crop. The only caution I give you is that EVERYBODY will be
writing one. If that doesn’t concern you (or you’ve written it already) I say go
for it. If it does then some suitable alternates might be SCRUBS, TWO AND A HALF
MEN, EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS, or HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER (a far cry from the CHEERS,
TAXI, MASH, COSBY days).

Living on the Border Between Mundane and Surreal

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No, we’re not talking about TJ HOOKER masturbation fanfic, but the Chicago Tribune’s rave review of my brother Tod’s new short story collection SIMPLIFY.

Tod Goldberg’s collection, "Simplify," contradicts its title: Goldberg
complicates things, in brilliant and moving ways, in stories that live along
the border between the mundane and the surreal.

A young married couple
meet Jesus and the devil every holiday season (Jesus is a coffee drinker, the
devil likes German beer), and their lives are both blessed and cursed. A
dys lexic creates an all-encompassing alphabet, a distinct symbol for every
person and event in his world, evoking the language of a book in
a Borgesian infinite library. A picture of Elvis Presley bleeds, making
its owner a reluctant celebrity.

Goldberg’s prose is deceptively smooth,
like a vanilla milkshake spiked with grain alcohol, and his ideas
are always made more complex and engaging by the offbeat angles his
stories take.

“t3h ebil fanficcers”

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There was an interesting comment that somebody calling himself  Inside Fandom left in the "Masturbation" post. I didn’t write it, and I don’t know who did, but I didn’t want it  to get lost in the clutter:

"t3h ebil fanficcers"

Fanspeak. Sort of like jive, but with wurz speling. In fandom communities the
presumption is that anybody who isn’t really a fan – they actually refer to it
as ‘passing’ – can possibly get it, when they say ‘get it’ they mean ‘fandom in
general’.

In other words, youse either with us or you don’t get it. Sorta like what we
used to tell our parents when we were teenagers and they wanted to know the
names of the kids we were ‘hanging’ with, and what funny smell emanated from our
clothes, or how pretty the plant with five leaves growing on our windowsills was
and how nice we’d taken an interest in horticulture.

At some point, the childish stuff ends. That happens when we grow up. When we
just get older and we don’t grow up, we look for fanfic about TV characters
masturbating so that we can masturbate to it. We continue to have the hots for
David Cassidy in all his 15 year old glory on the Partridge Family. We have
intense and heated arguments with others over the characterizations of cartoon
characters.

We keep doing that even after we get degrees and jobs and look perfectly
normal to the outside world. Whenever somebody questions our proclivity to
invade the sexual privacy of real people, or why we like to write fanfiction
about children having sex, we trot out the degrees and the jobs and we call what
we do ‘scholarship’ and wonder what sort of pervert the person questioning the
action is. That’s called transference.

The most intense discussion of what happens here on Mr. Goldberg’s blog takes
place in LiveJournal land in threads that are largely protected.

Authors, scholars, whoever, do not make any statements here because who wants
their publisher or tenure committee to know that they used to write, and maybe
still do write, lies about real people’s sex lives. Heaven forfend they know we
get off on writing stories about underage people having sex. How about it coming
out that the author of that hot new fantasy series still gets off on Mutant
Ninja Turtles slashfic and spends her off hours making fun of people on Fandom
Wank under an assumed name then TALKS about it on the journal she keeps under
her real name?

There are academic papers to be had in all of this, but the only ones taking
it seriously are the ones with a vested interest in making it appear harmless.

This rings true to me. How about you? And I may be revealing my vast ignorance (which I do here daily) and the limitations of my well-thumbed edition of Websters Dictionary, but is there really such a word as "forfend?" Is there a reason why the "fen" don’t use the word forbid?

Talk About Taking Your Role Too Seriously…

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VertbrancatoapLillo Brancato Jr.,  an actor who played a wanna-be mobster on THE SORPANOS, has been arrested for the murder of an off-duty New York cop. It seems Brancato was as doomed in real-life as he was on the show — the moron and a buddy broke into a vacant house that was right next door to a cop’s home. The cop caught them, sparking a shoot-out. The officer was killed and both Brancato and his cohort were shot multiple times but survived, albeit in critical condition:

Officer Daniel Enchautegui, 28, collapsed in the driveway of his Bronx home
and died shortly afterward.

The wounded suspects were quickly captured. Investigators identified one as
Lillo Brancato Jr., an actor who got his break in the Robert De Niro-directed
film "A Bronx Tale" in 1993, and played doomed mob wannabe Matt Bevilacqua
during the 1999-2000 season of "The Sopranos."

He’s Back!

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078601709001_sclzzzzzzz_There are only a few living authors of western literature who can truly be called legends in the field — Richard Wheeler is one of them. He started a fascinating blog some time ago, then abandoned it, offering his views on writing and publishing on Ed Gorman’s blog and in comments here. But now he’s back with a blog of his own. Whether you read westerns of not, I highly recommend you put him on your blogroll for his valuable insights, candid opinions, and informed take on the biz (he was an editor before he became a novelist, so he knows both sides of the biz)

Today, in a discussion of Gary Svee’s book SANCTUARY, he blames publishers with a deeply-held, anachronistic view of westerns for the demise of the genre in print:

In the last several decades, western fiction has been forced into a procrustean
bed by New York’s mass-market publishers. And now almost all the western lines
are defunct as a result.

The idea, apparently, was to have a "line" of
books with similar classical covers and contents, and this would surely reach
the vast market of western readers pining for stories with 1940s titles that
employ words like "vengeance" and "showdown." This notion had the power of
religious conviction in New York, and still does even though most western lines
have gone to heaven, or hell as the case may be.

Wheeler’s new book FIRE IN THE HOLE is saddled with one of those traditional western covers…which bares no relation to the actual story. The hero isn’t a U.S. Marshal, he’s a detective posing as a vermin exterminator in a filthy, Montana mining camp. Not exactly your typical western hero or setting.  All you have to do is read the opening chapter and you’ll be hooked.