My Blog

I’m Glad This Isn’t MY Agent…

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I got an email today from an agent who is having trouble selling his client’s crime thriller screenplay. Every development exec he submits the script to says they aren’t interested in the project unless there is “some talent attached.” The agent wanted to know “if you have any suggestions how to get around this” and also if I was interested in reading the script… and if I wasn’t, if I knew of any producers who were looking for great new material.

I was astounded. What kind of agent needs to ask another screenwriter the best way to get his client’s material to buyers? Here’s the advice I gave him:

By “talent,” they usually mean an actor, director, or major producer. But it’s just an excuse. No offense intented, but what they are really saying is they think the script is terrible, or it sounds terrible, or they aren’t interested in your client at all. The only way I know of to get around this is to have a kick-ass idea, a great script, a powerful agent, or as the development people have told you, a big name involved with the project. The bottom line is, whoever you’re talking to simply isn’t interested in what you have to sell. Russell Crowe would have to walk in the door with the script under his arm for them to give a damn.

What I didn’t say was if this agent was any good at his job, he’d have relationships with the right development people. He’d know what they were looking for and who the right people would be to send the script to. The development people would respect the agent, know the kind of writers the agent represented, and would decide whether or not to read the script based on that. The email I received tells me this is an agent who doesn’t have relationships, doesn’t have much experience, and shouldn’t be trying to sell anybody’s screenplay. But if that didn’t tell me, his next two questions did.

Are you interested in “a terrific feature screenplay?”

Only the ones that I write. I’m in the same position as your client. I don’t buy scripts, I try to sell my own! So that kind of answers your next question, too…

Maybe if you are not looking but know someone who is you can point us in that direction?

If I knew such a person, I would be sending them my script!

I wouldn’t want this guy representing me. The screenwriter would almost be better off with no agent at all, sending his script out on his own…

What do you think?

Don’t Save Our Show

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That is is a first. Instead of a campaign to save their favorite show… fans of THE WEST WING are rallying NBC to cancel it. Who knows… twenty- five years from now, they might even take out full-page ads in Variety urging studios not to make a movie version with the original cast.

We’d Be Fools Not To

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Sarah Weinman pointed me to this fascinating interview with Robert B. Parker. I have a lot of emotional attachment to the Spenser novels… I loved reading the early ones and my first job in television was writing an episode of “Spenser: For Hire.” (by the way, that’s a picture of me with Parker at the Edgars a few years back). Leeparkerop

The comment in the interview that sticks with me the most, and apparently Sarah as well, is:

Parker: I write 10 pages a day. When I’m done with it that day, it’s what you see on the printed page. Maybe the spelling is improved or the punctuation changed, but essentially you’re looking at my first draft. I don’t do a second draft.

That’s no surprise to anybody who has been reading him lately. I listened to four of his unabridged books-on-tape over a relatively short period… BAD BUSINESS, STONE COLD, GUNMAN’S RHAPSODY, and DOUBLE PLAY…and was struck by how much he repeats the same dialogue, observations, and situations over and over, particularly ending chapters with the hero, or his girl, saying “We’d be fools not to.” That said, I loved listening to all four books. His lean, snappy, dialogue-heavy writing style is perfectly suited to the audiobook medium…and his regular performers, Joe Mantegna (the Spensers) and Robert Forster (the Jesse Stones) in particular, are terrific.

I suspect if I’d read the latest Parker books, I wouldn’t have enjoyed them as much and the repeated dialogue and situations would have grated on me more. Somehow, you’re a lot more forgiving to an author when you’re a captive audience stuck in gridlocked traffic.

Booksigning Hell

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My brother Tod, in this weeks Las Vegas Mercury, tells a few of his booksigning horror stories. Every authors has’em. I do, too. Here are a couple:

I did a signing in a now-defunct Laguna Beach bookstore. Not a single soul showed up. So the store clerk plopped herself down in the seat beside me.

“This is great,” she said.

“How so?” I replied.

“I can read you some of my erotic poetry,” she flipped open a thick notebook filled with illegible scrawl, and began to read. “Hello, He throbbed…”

I looked at my watch. I was scheduled to be there another hour-and-thirty minutes. And my wife had my car…

“My wife should be here any minute,” I said.

“Her breasts swelled, waves of lust on a sea of passion…”

* * * * * *

Another signing, this one at a Waldenbooks in the South Bay, where I was stuck at a cardtable at the front of the store. Only one person even approached me. She wanted to know where the diet books were.

After two hours of boredom, I approached the manager and thanked her for having me. “Would you like me to sign the stock?” I asked.

She looked at me in horror. “No way!”

“Why not?” No one had ever said no to me signing stock before.

“None of our customers are going to buy a marred book!”

* * * * * *

I fictionalized one of my favorite bad booksignings for my short story REMAINDERED, which appeared in “Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine,” a few years back. Rather then tell it like it was, here’s a bit from the story instead…

The voice of a new generation sat at the end of aisle 14, where the house wares department ended and the book section began. He peered over the neat stack of paperbacks on the table in front of him and, once again, as politely as he could, told the irritable woman in the orange tank top and slouchy breasts that he had absolutely no idea where she could find wart remover.

“You’re not being much of a help,” she snapped, leaning one hand on her shopping cart, which was filled with disposable diapers, Weight Watchers Frozen Dinners, Captain Crunch, a sack of dry dog food, a box of snail poison and three rolls of paper towel. “Look at this, it’s doubled in size just this week.”

She thrust a finger in his face, making sure he got a good look at the huge wart on her knuckle.

“I don’t work here,” he replied.

“Then what are you doing sitting at a help desk?”

“This isn’t a help desk. I’m an author,” he said. “I’m autographing my book.”

She seemed to notice the books for the first time and picked one up. “What’s it about?”

He hated that question. That’s what book covers were for.

“It’s about an insomniac student who volunteers for a sleep study and falls into an erotic relationship with a female researcher that leads to murder.”

“Are there cats in it?” she asked, flipping through the pages.

“Why would there be a cat in it?”

“Because cats make great characters,” she dropped his book back on the stack, dismissing it and him with that one economical gesture. “Don’t you read books?”

“I do,” he replied. “I must have missed the ones with cats.”

“I like cat books, especially the ones where they solve murders. If you’re smart, you’ll write a cat book.” And with that, she adjusted her bra strap and rolled away in search of a potion to eradicate her warts.

Booksigning Hell

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Any author who was published back in the pre-ebook days can tell you stories about some horrible booksignings. I did a signing years ago in a now-defunct Newport Beach bookstore. Not a single soul showed up. So the store clerk plopped herself down in the seat beside me.

“This is great,” she said.

“How so?” I replied.

“I can read you some of my erotic poetry,” she flipped open a thick notebook filled with illegible scrawl, and began to read. “Hello, He throbbed…”

I looked at my watch. I was scheduled to be there another hour-and-thirty minutes. And my wife had my car…

“My wife should be here any minute,” I said.

“Her breasts swelled, waves of lust on a sea of passion…”

* * * * * *

Another signing, this one at a Waldenbooks in the South Bay, where I was stuck at a cardtable at the front of the store. Only one person even approached me. She wanted to know where the diet books were.

After two hours of boredom, I approached the manager and thanked her for having me.

“Would you like me to sign the stock?” I asked.

She looked at me in horror. “No way!”

“Why not?” No one had ever said no to me signing stock before.

“None our customers are going to buy a marred book!”

* * * * * *

I fictionalized one of my favorite bad booksignings for my short story REMAINDERED, which appeared in “Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine,” a few years back. Rather then tell it like it was, here’s a bit from the story instead…

The voice of a new generation sat at the end of aisle 14, where the house wares department ended and the book section began. He peered over the neat stack of paperbacks on the table in front of him and, once again, as politely as he could, told the irritable woman in the orange tank top and slouchy breasts that he had absolutely no idea where she could find wart remover.

“You’re not being much of a help,” she snapped, leaning one hand on her shopping cart, which was filled with disposable diapers, Weight Watchers Frozen Dinners, Captain Crunch, a sack of dry dog food, a box of snail poison and three rolls of paper towel. “Look at this, it’s doubled in size just this week.”

She thrust a finger in his face, making sure he got a good look at the huge wart on her knuckle.

“I don’t work here,” he replied.

“Then what are you doing sitting at a help desk?”

“This isn’t a help desk. I’m an author,” he said. “I’m autographing my book.”

She seemed to notice the books for the first time and picked one up. “What’s it about?”

He hated that question. That’s what book covers were for.

“It’s about an insomniac student who volunteers for a sleep study and falls into an erotic relationship with a female researcher that leads to murder.”

“Are there cats in it?” she asked, flipping through the pages.

“Why would there be a cat in it?”

“Because cats make great characters,” she dropped his book back on the stack, dismissing it and him with that one economical gesture. “Don’t you read books?”

“I do,” he replied. “I must have missed the ones with cats.”

“I like cat books, especially the ones where they solve murders. If you’re smart, you’ll write a cat book.” And with that, she adjusted her bra strap and rolled away in search of a potion to eradicate her warts.

Who Loves Ya, Baby?

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USA Network does.

They’re so thrilled with the footage they’ve been seeing of Ving Rhames in their new KOJAK movie, that they’ve ordered a series. The episodes, which will be shot in Toronto, start airing in March.Vingrhames_240_001

This will be the third revival of KOJAK. Several years after the original series was canceled, Telly Savalas reprised his signature character in two exceptional TV movies for CBS (THE BELARUS FILE & THE PRICE OF JUSTICE) in the early 90s, then later in a series of not-so-good TV movies for ABC (in a mystery movie wheel that included COLUMBO, BJ STRYKER and GIDEON OLIVER). Andre Braugher, who would later break-out in HOMICIDE, played his assistant in the ABC films.

Detecting LA through Mystery Writing

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The excellent blog LAObserved pointed me to this interesting book review by my friend Paula L. Woods, author of the Charlotte Justice mysteries.

For her first novel, “Summer of the Big Bachi,” Naomi Hirahara has chosen as her hero another iconographic albeit little-known figure in the Los Angeles landscape — the Japanese American gardener. [The hero] traverses the breadth of Japanese American Los Angeles, treating readers to snippets of the Japanese language in addition to well-drawn scenes in Crenshaw District homes still occupied by elderly Japanese, San Fernando Valley ramen shops, hostess bars on Sawtelle Boulevard that cater to Japanese businessmen, Gardena bowling alleys and illegal card games in Little Tokyo.

It’s not so much the book itself that struck me, but Paula’s observations about how some writers are using the mystery as a tool to examine LA from fresh perspectives.

The best Los Angeles crime fiction is distinguished by its ability to transport readers to unfamiliar corners in our multicultural metropolis. The house-proud black neighborhoods sleuthed by Walter Mosley’s midcentury detective Easy Rawlins, the gay and lesbian enclaves of Katherine V. Forrest’s Kate Delafield police procedurals, the Persian American elite and other diverse groups investigated by John Shannon’s P.I. Jack Liffey all leave readers more knowledgeable than they started about people seen only from a distance and lives imagined only in the broadest of outlines.

I’ve read Mosley, of course, but I’ll have to check those other authors out… as soon as I break out of my mystery reading funk.

Ashlee Simpson “Sings”

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The whole brouhaha over the revelation that Ashlee Simpson was lip-synching her songs on SNL is hardly a surprise to anyone who has actually seen Ashlee Simpson “sing” (the only people fooled by her are the nine-year-olds who buy her albums). The real story is what this scandal says about SNL, the folks who used to expose and ridicule this kind of cheap fraud rather than committing it.

The real story was summed up very nicely in, of all places, a comment left on former-kid-actor-turned-author Wil Wheaton’s blog.

i missed the ASHLEE SIMPSON fiasco for many of the same reasons you and TONY PIERCE mentioned…it is hard to maintain your edge when you’ve been cutting with it for 35 years…when i think of SNL now…i think of bad television parodies…loud, senseless, time consuming sketches that that seem to have been made to order copies of all that have been played out on SNL before…the ASHLEE episode is the kind of pop SNL used to avoid…such candy coated pop was a favorite SNL target for derisive humor…now the humor is lost in the parody of itself that SNL has become…is this a sign post that SNL can look to as a signal that a change is needed…or will the irony of it all be lost to them…at some point you have to have different aspirations than to be the 7,462th man on the moon…too many trips to the same old place…there are other planets out there to explore…is anyone ready to make the trip?

Buffy Vets Slay TV

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The TV biz won’t have Sarah Michelle Geller or Joss Whedon to kick around any more.

Geller’s movie THE GRUDGE was a surprise hit this weekend, pulling in $40 million. Anyone who can open a movie that big is officially a movie star. I doubt she’ll be considering any TV series offers now.

And BUFFY creator Joss Whedon, who is currently making a movie version of his short-lived Fox series FIREFLY, announced today that he is getting out of the TV series business.

“Twentieth Century Fox TV has approved Whedon’s request to halt his overall deal at the studio, effectively shuttering his Mutant Enemy production shingle. Besides wanting to focus on his feature career, Whedon said he decided to take a break from TV because, quite simply, he had run out of series ideas.

“I spent a lot of time trying to think what my next series would be,” Whedon said. “I couldn’t think of anything. When that happens, it generally means something is just not working. I didn’t feel like I could come up with anything that the networks would want.”

It’s not surprising that his decision to get out of the TV biz comes while he’s in the midst of writing/directing the movie version of FIREFLY, his only other TV series that wasn’t a BUFFY spin-off. It must be bringing back some unpleasant memories of his dealing with the Fox network. It was a troubled project from the start. The original pilot was scrapped, effectively changing the creative direction of the series…and the series never quite recovered, not that it was given much of a chance. Fox canceled the series after only a handful of episodes. I imagine that experience, as well as the WB’s surprising cancellation of ANGEL, undoubtably had an impact on his decision to stop toiling in TV for a while. That, and the current state of television…

“I have a bitter taste in my mouth with where TV has gone in the past five years,” said Whedon, who called TV’s reality trend “loathsome.”