The B-Movie Time Machine

A few nights ago I watched a B-movie adaptation of Richard Stark's "The Seventh," called "The Split," starring Jim Brown, and released in 1968.

Not a great movie, though it has its moments. (It also has a phenomenal cast: Ernest Borgnine in his pre-Wild Bunch "muscular" phase; Warren Oates; Jack Klugman -- Quincy! -- as a ruthless getaway car driver; pre-Bonnie & Clyde Gene Hackman; James Whitmore; Julie Harris; and the lovely, hopelessly-miscast Diahann Carroll.) The central heist is well-imagined (it should be; it was taken directly from Stark's book) and reasonably well-staged, and there are a couple of nice character beats with Warren Oates and Klugman, but overall, the movie is something of a mess. There are structural leaps and plot bumps that make no sense, and the director seems to be struggling to make the material mean more than it does. Tonal shifts arrive with breathtaking clumsiness, and there are logical leaps that defy rationalzation.

That said, it's a wonderful B-Movie Time Machine.

Anyone who's watched a Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Laurel and Hardy comedy shot on location in Los Angeles in the early 1900s is being given an opportunity to look over the shoulders of the film makers into the world as it was. Downtown Los Angeles was the silent comedian's back lot, and if you want to know what early 20th Century urban California was like, all you have to do is watch a Keaton two-reeler from 1921. ("The Goat" being a perfect example.)

Similarly, if you want a view of Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s that reflects the city as it actually was, watch a Republic serial. Big studio productions shot their exteriors on the studio back lot, and while the serials also did some back lot shooting, most of their car chases and exterior action sequences take place in and around the San Fernando Valley. (If you'd like a great view of what the Valley looked like in the late 1940s, check out the flying sequences from "King of the Rocketmen" -- the Lydecker brothers who created those effects did so by stringing wires between two hills on Mulholland Drive, with the Valley in the background.)

In the late 40s and through the 50s, film noir took low budget productions to the streets of The City with Six Million Stories (New York) while Dragnet dragged us back to Los Angeles. All of these movies provided us with an unwitting documentary view of mid-century America in the background of sometimes otherwise undistinguished stories.

Which brings us to "The Split."

Anyone familiar with Los Angeles as it is today will experience several minor (and one major) shock watching this movie. The 405 Freeway at Mulholland Drive features prominently in one car chase, and it's stunning to see the empty hills and half-deserted highway of 1968 (today this intersection is the site of a massive construction project, the freeway is constantly packed with cars, and the hills are crowded with homes, schools, and an expansive museum, the Skirbal Center). LAX is visited; so is Pacific Coast Highway; so is downtown Los Angeles. All are familiar and yet weirdly different -- LAX is surrounded by, well, nothing; Pacific Coast Highway is a slum; and downtown Los Angeles is several decades from the wonders of gentrification.

The real shocker, though, is the centerpiece of the film -- the heist at the Collesium.

The Collesium, of course, is physically unchanged, but culturally its place in Los Angeles' daily life is astonishingly different now from what it was in 1968.

In 1968, the Collesium was an NFL stadium, home to a professional football team.

There is something truly surreal about watching a movie involving Jim Brown as a professional thief executing a heist from a football stadium, and it's particularly surreal when the stadium in question hosts a team that no longer exists. (The Los Angeles Rams; there may be a Rams team somewhere in the world, I don't care, the L.A. Rams are no more.) The only thing that would've made it more perfectly meta would be if the Rams had been playing the Cleveland Browns.

It's a B-Movie Time Machine, and if it isn't worth watching as movie (though I think it is) it's certainly worth watching for its view of a world now lost to the smoggy past.

Writing for a living is Hard, and other Obvious Observations

I'm one very lucky son of a bitch.

I recognize this, believe me. Most people never have the opportunity to fulfill any of their childhood dreams, but I've been lucky enough to fill many, if not most, of mine. It helps that my childhood dreams were relatively modest (though at one point I did want to be Robin to my dad's Batman, a notion which for some reason he didn't embrace with an enthusiasm equal to mine). When I was nine years old, I decided I wanted to be either an actor, an artist, or a writer -- in other words, I wanted people to pay attention to me and admire me for something I performed or accomplished. (Childhood narcissism is so cute and simple, isn't it?) To that end I started to perform plays and make movies with my friends (the acting part), I started drawing (the art) and I started writing (the, uh, well, the writing). It was my good fortune that I had parents who either encouraged or permitted or idly stood by and scratched their heads while I pursued these dreams. And it was my great fortune that I grew up in a time and place that made the potential accomplishment of any of these dreams even remotely possible.

If you read the biographies of many authors, you may find that their life stories follow two different patterns. Some writers write for a living, other writers write as a hobby.

To clarify: Some authors are what I'll call (in my insufferable superiority) part-time, non-professional writers -- people who have paying jobs which allow them to make a living (or scrape by) and who subsequently write, more or less, as a hobby. I don't want to suggest that writing as a hobby is somehow less serious or less worthwhile than the alternative (which I'll get to in a moment), I'm simply using the term to make a distinction. People pursue hobbies because they have the time and freedom to do so, and because they want to. Hobbies are, to an extent, an escape from the stress of work. By definition, a hobby may be difficult or hard or require a great deal of effort and commitment, but it is not work. Work is something you do to pay your bills and support yourself and your family; it may be difficult or easy, it may require great effort or no effort at all, but it does require a commitment, and while it may often be fun, fun is not an essential ingredient. The essential ingredient of work is that you must do it in order to survive.

To further clarify: As opposed to the authors described above, other authors are what I'll call (in my insufferable superiority) full-time, professional writers -- people who write to pay their bills and earn a living. They may enjoy writing (and most do) but the central reality of their writing lives is that they write to make money.

For most of my adult life I was a professional writer. I wrote to earn a living, and I was lucky enough to earn a very good living. I recognize that: I was lucky. There are many talented writers trying to earn a living who are unable to do so. Why the light of fortune shined on me and not on them, I have no clear idea. Maybe I was just in the right place at the right time. I grew up in New York City in the 1950s and '60s, was well-educated, and happened to approach the comic book business for work at a time when the business was desperately eager to embrace new, younger writers and artists. I didn't have a lot of competition. I was good enough and energetic enough and ambitious enough to embrace the opportunity fate offered me. And I made good.

But here's the thing: temperamentally, though I was a professional writer who wrote for a living, emotionally I wanted to write part-time as a hobby. The same good fortune that opened the door for me to become a professional writer at 16, and gave me more than four decades of success as a professional writer of comic books, novels, screenplays, and television episodes, closed the door for me to pursue writing purely for the love of it.

I made a bargain with fate at the age of 16 and was well into my 50s before I finally managed to break free. And once again, I was incredibly lucky to find a way to do so.

Remember those author biographies I mentioned earlier, when I said the life stories of authors tended to follow two different patterns? The part-time authors are usually academics, or people who have successful professional careers (doctors, lawyers, politicians, police men or women, etc.) who write in what they amusingly call their spare time. (I really admire people who work full time and then dedicate the remaining hours of their day to struggling with words.) In contrast, full-time authors are often people who pursued other careers with little success until they fell into writing as a last-ditch effort to put food on the table. Some of my favorite authors are in that second category (usually writers of genre fiction), though several writers I greatly admire are in the first. I'm sure you can think of several in both.

Because I started writing professionally while I was still in high school I never really faced the choice of pursuing a different career. If anything I felt I had no choice. I was earning a living doing something I loved -- in fact I earned more money than my father, who worked hard, long hours at a job he didn't enjoy. Faced with the opportunity to continue to earn money as a writer (and with the example of my unhappy father's working life providing a view of the unattractive alternative) I naturally embraced a career as a professional writer. Like I say, I was lucky, though at the time I was too excited by the apparently endless possibilities before me to understand both how lucky I was, and what a devil's bargain I was making.

Here's the thing I've discovered about myself over a forty year career as a writer. I'll put it in the second person because it's easier for me to do so, but I don't mean to suggest this is a universal truth:

When you start writing because you love to write, and you end up writing because you have to write to survive, you eventually find yourself unable to write at all.

By the time I quit my career as a television writer about six years ago I'd gotten to the point where it was a daily struggle to face an empty page. After four decades of writing to make a living I'd lost my enthusiasm for writing. In fact I developed an almost pathological aversion to the physical act of sitting at a keyboard. The thought of writing filled me with an emotion I can only describe as horror. I hated my working life. I wanted out, desperately.

I got out.

I've spent the past six years gradually rediscovering the original love I felt for writing. I've consciously avoided taking on assignments that might require more than a casual commitment. I take my time writing scripts when I do take assignments (to the considerable grief of my editors, I'm certain -- sorry, Joey; sorry, Jim). I write deliberately, and as thoughtfully as I can. I try to approach writing as a hobby -- as a passion project, a way to express my personal vision of the world, and whatever insights and with whatever empathy I can bring to that vision. As a result I've written very little in the last half-decade, but what I have written, I've written because I wanted to write it. Not because I've had to. I'm now working on a Young Adult fantasy-horror novel, and I'm loving every minute of it.

The fact that I've found the freedom to do this after a lifetime of pursuing a career as a professional writer is nothing short of miraculous. I recognize that. Very few people get a second shot as pursuing their childhood dreams... especially when they've already had a first shot, and enjoyed considerable success doing what they thought they wanted to do.

I am, as I say, one very lucky son of a bitch.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

The sadness of the "Green Lantern" movie

Making movies is hard.

This is obviously not a newsflash for anyone remotely conscious, but it's important to remember, as William Goldman put it so aptly, no one ever sets out to make a bad movie. (Even Uwe Boll thinks he's doing something good.) Like a well-written villain, bad movies are the product of what appear to be, from the inside, good intentions. In the case of "Green Lantern" those good intentions are obvious, which makes the failure of the film to achieve its goals a sadness.

Look, I was in the film and television business for (gasp) almost thirty years, and while I was certainly party to several projects that went down in flames and ended up being truly awful, I can honestly say that for the most part, everyone involved in almost every project wanted to do something good and tried their best to accomplish that goal. But here's the problem: when you're inside looking out, it's really really hard to see that what you're doing isn't as good as you think it is.

It's human nature to equate hard work and maximum effort with positive results -- and people making movies work very very hard, at maximum effort. Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever spent time in a gym knows, hard work and maximum effort don't always produce the results you expect. In my thirties I worked out a lot, hoping to build up my shoulders and get that Charles Atlas body I knew the ladies liked, but even though I became pretty damn strong, my genetic makeup was basically ectomorphic not mesomorphic -- so, no big shoulders for me.

In the same way, sometimes a movie is so fatally flawed at the conceptual level that no amount of talent and effort can change the final result. "Green Lantern" is flawed in that way -- not the concept of Green Lantern, as such, or even the world of the Corps, or Hal Jordan as a character. What is flawed in "Green Lantern" is the concept of the movie itself. By attempting to introduce the mythology of Green Lantern before and during the introduction of Green Lantern as a character, the film gives the viewer too much information to process during what should be an emotional journey. The filmmakers were so taken with the mythological backstory of the Lantern that they forgot it's a backstory and put it in the foreground, instead of putting Hal Jordan in the foreground, and making the story about him.

This was made clear to me the other night when I finally got around to watching the extended cut of the film. In truth the extended cut isn't really that much better than the theatrical cut, but it does do one thing the theatrical cut failed to do: it put Hal Jordan at the center of the story, at least for the first half hour. Then it all flies to pieces, just as the theatrical cut does, with information dump after information dump, an emotionally dead-end villain (who is eliminated before the climactic battle), characters who aren't fully developed but who we're clearly supposed to care about, and a life-and-death Cosmic Stakes Battle that's resolved by not much effort at all in a "Why didn't almost anybody else think of that?" deus ex machina that's embarrassingly pitiful.

I swear to you, though, the people involved with making "Green Lantern" undoubtedly thought they were making a really fine film.

In the mid-1980s I had the opportunity to work on a number of animated TV shows during the toy industry-sponsored syndicated cartoon era. Without exception these were shows motivated into existence for one purpose: to sell toys. And, without exception, the talented writers who'd been hired to develop these toy-based properties into cartoon series would write extensive series "bibles" that sometimes ran over a hundred pages, with enormously well-worked-out back stories about alien wars and strange robot-races and trans-dimensional dinosaurs. Also, without exception, each of these toy show bibles began with the same assertion:

"This is a character based series."

No, it was a toy-based series, but in order to motivate themselves to do good work, the writers and artists involved had to convince themselves that they were, actually, doing good work. And so they closed their eyes to the reality, embraced the contradictions, and sold themselves a myth that allowed them to put in the hard work and long hours any film or TV project demands.

It's how you survive in the business. And it's why bad movies get made. And it's why when a movie is bad, it's a sadness. Because the people involved tried so hard to make it something it was never going to be.

Book Review: "The Score" by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake)

The first time I encountered Parker, he was almost extinct.
This was in the early 1970s, near the end of Parker's original run of novels. I picked up "Plunder Squad" in hardcover, which in hindsight was not the best introduction to the series. For one thing, it was longer than the average Parker novel. For another, by the time of "Plunder Squad" Parker's self-identification as a loner and a renegade was becoming a thinly-disguised self-delusion. I don't mean to say that Parker wasn't a renegade (by society's standards he clearly was and remains an outsider), but his deeply-held belief in his own self-sufficiency was clearly at odds with the network of allies and, yeah, friends, who peopled "Plunder Squad" and the "final" book in the series, "Butcher's Moon." Parker, in these later early-70s novels, thought he was one kind of man, but in reality, was a very different man altogether.
That's why I say that when I first encountered him, Parker was almost extinct.
Donald Westlake, Parker's creator (as Richard Stark) obviously felt the same way. As happens with writers who devote considerable time and attention to writing a series character, Westlake, I believe, had come to see Parker as a more fully dimensional being than his original creation. In spite of Parker's expressed determination in the early novels (like "The Score") to remain rootless and unattached, Parker had in fact developed roots and attachments. The fact that Parker apparently refused to see and accept this truth about himself made him an intriguing, multi-layered protagonist, but it also must have made it harder for Stark/Westlake to write him with conviction. The Parker of the early novels saw the world simply, but the Parker of the later (1970s) novels lived in a more complicated moral universe. For Westlake, the contradictions must have become too great to overcome. (Contemplating those contradictions undoubtedly gave rise to Westlake's second greatest criminal creation, the hapless John Dortmunder.)
Anyway, back to "The Score."
As an early Parker novel, "The Score" manages to walk the line between Parker's uncomplicated world view and the more complex reality created by the intersection of conflicting human motivations. The set-up is simple: a group of criminals plan and execute the looting of an entire town. It's really the ultimate heist. And it works as planned, without a single technical foul-up. As always in the best crime stories, the fly in the ointment comes from the human factor, and here, we see a hint of the contradictions the later Parker novels (like "Plunder Squad") would express. The heist is almost thwarted by one of the planner's "personal motives." For Parker the professional, "personal motives" are an incomprehensible and potentially deadly distraction from the work at hand. What makes this ironic and foreshadows the end of the original series of Parker novels, in 1974, is that the first time we encounter Parker, in "The Hunter," Parker himself is driven by extremely personal motives, despite his grim self-identification as an untouched and untouchable professional.
Like Ian Fleming's Bond novels, the Parker novels are really separate chapters in the story of a character's evolution from believing himself to be one kind of man, to understanding himself to be another kind of man entirely. In Bond's case that realization led to existential despair. Where it leads for Parker is for you to discover. If you can't begin at the beginning with "The Hunter," "The Score" is as good a place as any to start looking.

Where I Am Now

I do most of my commenting and posting these days on Twitter and Facebook. Find me there at

www.twitter.com/gerryconway

or

www.facebook.com/gerryconway

The Longest Way 1.0 - one year walk/beard grow time lapse

Cool.

Olympians

My daughter is a big fan of these books, and she's gonna go crazy for this:

Bruno

Oh, yeah.

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

Stare

I love absurd humor.

David After Dentist

Emmanuel Kant couldn't have put it better.

Just Likin' This Photo of My Ladies

KC RC photo
Originally uploaded by Gerry Conway

Add me to the list

of millions of people who apparently love this video.

Hit and Run

'Bout sums it up from my point of view.

What's in the Box?

Wow, is this cool or what? Nice work for an amateur film.

The Second The Camera Stopped, Muffy Ate Him

Time lapse of a baby playing with his toys

Hilarious!

I Am So In Geek Heaven Right Now

You may have heard, our new President is a collector of Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics. If you do the math (uh, let's see, he's 47, and most kids reach their peak interest in comics around age 12, which leads me to suspect he read Spider-Man thirty-five years ago, which would have been 1973, which means... OMG, he knows I killed Gwen Stacy!) you'll realize the Spider-Man stories he read were probably those written by yours truly, and the Conan comics he collects are most likely those scribed by my buddy Roy Thomas.

Which makes this Onion article all the funnier for me, particularly the reference to Conan the Destroyer.

Yippee!

Baby Store Fail

Thoughts on "Lost"

I was reading a discussion thread about the new season of "Lost" over on Boing-Boing, and had to jump in to give my own two cents' worth. Thought I'd pass along here what I said there:

***

I'd like to bring some professional insight to the discussion, since most of the criticism of "Lost" in this thread seems to grow from the premise that "the writers are just making it up as they go along."

To establish my bona fides, I'm a writer, and I wrote episodic television for almost twenty years, and produced some too. So I'd like to think I speak with some authority here -- if not about the specific situation the "Lost" producers find themselves in, then in general terms, the specific situation *any* television producers find themselves in, creating a TV show week-to-week.

Point one -- the writers *absolutely* knew where they wanted to go with the show, from the day they first pitched the concept.

Point two -- where they wanted to go *absolutely* changed over the course of developing the story and the series week to week and year to year.

This is because creating a television show is more than just writing words on paper and having them translated magically into film. It's an organic, living process that is influenced by forces that are inevitably beyond your control -- and ultimately is the better for it. Let me give you one small example from personal experience.

A few years ago I was writing and producing a show about a pair of detectives. I created a love interest for one of the detectives, and developed a year-long arc for the relationship. We cast the part of the lover; the actors had chemistry; we did a three-part introductory story; and then the actor we'd cast as the lover LEFT THE SHOW because he wanted to be free during pilot season. (Pilot season is when networks and producers make life hell for casting agents of ongoing series; all the good actors refuse to commit because they want to be available for casting in their own pilots.)

As a result, we had to drop the long-planned romance in mid-story line, to the considerable detriment of the series. Should we have locked up the actor before we began the arc? Probably; but we were laboring under certain economic constraints, and we thought we had an understanding with the actor's agent. Sure, we knew they'd probably f**k us if they got a better offer, but we figured they'd at least wait till they got the better offer before f**king us. (Happily, the actor in question never got cast in a pilot, and because of the reputation he developed from this and similar diva behavior, he hasn't been cast in any other ongoing series since. Good riddance.)

Anyway, point is, the writers of "Lost" are constrained by simple reality as they develop their series. Actors cast for minor roles suddenly take off and are lost to the show; actors who you think will bring something special to a plot line turn out to fall flat, and have to be cut; other actors who are cast as minor figures suddenly play so well you start writing more and more material for them; and so on. (This is probably why Ben has become so important -- a potentially minor character is played brilliantly by an actor, and the writers are inspired to develop more material for him. This isn't to say the writers would not have created a similar character to serve the story as Ben now does; it's just to say it might not have been Ben.)

In addition to the impact performers have on the writing process, you also have to take into account the impact the network executives have -- both positive, when they're supportive of what you're trying to achieve, and negative, when they actively seek to undermine your efforts. (I believe most of what went wrong with "Heroes" in year two was a result of network interference.) The creators of "Lost" probably had a clear vision from the start of where they want to take the show, but I'm betting they had to struggle through most of the first three years to get the network brass to let them tell the story their way. That's why Season One consists mostly of single-episode "flashback" anthology-style stories, focusing on character backstory: it's something network execs could understand and relate to. It's also why "Season Two" began to get more complex, as the network suits allowed the writers to play around with their overall concept and begin to lay the groundwork for the end game. And it's most certainly why "Season Three" went down the rabbit hole for the first six weeks, because the writers were forced to create an artificial six-week self-contained story line simply to address the network's desire to have two blocks of shows, one in the fall season, and another beginning in late January.

The point is, whatever problems the show may exhibit from time to time, in terms of inconsistencies and inelegant transitions or reveals. most likely has more to do with practical issues of production than with any overall lack of a planned outcome. One can argue that it's the job of show runners to deal with the practicalities in such a way that it appears as if they intended to go the way they have all along, and you'd be right. In that sense, I think "Lost" is a brilliant series of adaptations to the realities of producing a weekly television series. The producers know where they want to go, but the path they have to take to get there is constantly changing.

By the way, that's how it is for every writer, except the most disciplined and sterile hack. You know where you want to go, and you move in that direction, but sometimes as you follow the path, the destination changes, and either you adapt, or your story dies.

Viva "Lost."

Thanks for the Memories

As the final hours tick down toward the conclusion of what might be judged from the long view of history as the worst Presidency since James Buchanan dithered us into the Civil War, let's take a moment to remember the good times. And by good times I mean these.