A Rocky Start ...

... to my occasional reviews of the box-o-laserdiscs recently dug out of the garage. This time it’s The Rock, (1996), directed by Michael Bay.

One thing I can say in its favor—it’s the only movie I can remember off the top of my head that spends quite a lengthy opening titles sequence setting up the bad guy. Actually, Ed Harris’ general is the classic definition of an antagonist—someone who’s not necessarily ee-vul, just in opposition to the protagonist. Granted that he has the exquisite lack of judgment to choose for his team some of the most obviously psychotic soldiers since Jim Brown and Telly Savalas were press-ganged into The Dirty Dozen, but hey, he has a lot on his mind. He’s masterminding a plot to hold the Bay Area hostage by taking over Alcatraz and aiming a whole buncha missiles containing a nasty nerve agent at San Francisco. (This concoction seems to combine the worst aspects of VX and mustard gas; i.e., it paralyzes and suffocates you by blocking synaptic action, then rots your skin just to show it means business). It’s stored in the form of large green beads, which definitely should have won some kind of design award for prettiest WMD.

(The missiles don’t have far to go—just from Alcatraz to the mainland—but they apparently do it by sheer force of will, since the missile’s entire midsection is taken up by the weapon payload, leaving no room for fuel. Pretty impressive.)

The movie’s big gag is simple and very pitchworthy: instead of escaping from Alcatraz, our team must break into it. To do this, they assemble a team of Navy SEALs, an expert in various nerve agents (Nicholas Cage) and James Bond (Sean Connery). Oh, sure, they call him “John Mason”, but he’s an ultra-suave British agent who could strangle you with the garrote woven into his Saville Row tie in less time than it takes you to say “Licence To Kill”. Trust me; he’s Bond.

So they enter Alcatraz via a storm drain (which, in movies, are always big enough to walk upright in), and Mason gets them past the first obstacle, which is some weird kind of furnace still running after 30 years (Alcatraz closed in the early Sixties). From there it gets ever more bizarre, culminating in a shootout taking place in a kind of underground steampunk dystopia that’s part Temple Of Doom, part Big Thunder Mountain and part Mordor.

Okay, enough. The movie rolls out pretty much as expected; all the SEALs are slaughtered, only Goodspeed (Cage) and Mason remain to discover mutual respect and bond (sorry). Near the movie’s end Cage has to self-inject a dose of atrophine into his heart to counteract the agent’s effects. Which can work as a last resort, although it’s a whole lot harder to push a needle (particularly a big-bore) through a chest wall than it looks. I wouldn’t leave the needle just hanging there, either—infection, tamponade, and other nastiness could ensue.

It’s certainly not as brutally stupid as Armageddon. And you have to give points to a movie that makes a throwaway reference to Roswell. But I’m not gonna be replacing this one on DVD anytime soon.

I'm rating these movies on a three-tier scale: (1) How Could I Live Without It; (2) Worth Keeping, But Not Replacing, and (3) What Was I Thinking?! The Rock gets a solid 2.

"Klaatu barada ... uh ..."

So I just got around to watching the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still on pay-per-view, and much to my surprise, it didn't suck. Too badly ...

Granted, it ain't a patch on the original with Michael Rennie. But I didn't expect it to be. I expected an FX bonanza (check); Keanu Reeves in a perfect role, that of an alien as wooden-faced as a cigar-store Indian (check); and a story that, if the gods were kind, wouldn't be too terribly preachy or condemning of the human race for making such a mess of things (check).

And I expected to be mindlessly entertained for 2 hours (check, more or less).

It didn't suck. Not exactly the most fulsome of praise, but then, we're all learning to live with lowered expectations these days.

And let's face it—it was worth the $4 for the scene with Keanu and John Cleese (in Sam Jaffe's role), playing dueling calculus on the blackboard. I mean, Keanu doing Minkowski equations? That was harder to swallow than the nanobots eating New York. (Oops; spoiler.)

The Good Old Days

I just wrote a short story.

Them as know me know that I do this about as often as the Earth flip-flops magnetic poles; not a whole lot, in other words. I have ideas for short stories all the time, but they rarely progress further. Every once in awhile, though ...

And, of course, there’s the age-old question of where ideas come from. Usually they come from some sort of experience that I’ve either had, or know of someone else having had. In this case, it was mine.

I’m not going to tell you the whole story here; I’d rather you wait until it’s published. But here are a few paragraphs from it that set it up:

It was spring, I remember, around the end of April or the beginning of May -- you’d think that, considering what happened, the date would be burned into my memory. It had to have been a Saturday, because school wasn’t out yet. I was playing with a couple of friends -- Tom Harper and Malcolm James. We’d gone up into the hills a few blocks from my house to play cowboys and Indians. We were armed and ready for trouble.

When I say “armed”, I mean something different than what the word might connote today. I was carrying my trusty McRepeater Rifle, which made a very satisfactory bang when the wheel atop the stock was turned. Tom had a deadly Daisy 1101 Thunderbird, and in addition was packing twin cap pistols. And Malcolm ... well, Malcolm was carrying his Johnny Eagle Magumba Big Game Rifle, which he’d insisted on bringing even though he had a perfectly good Fanner 50 cap gun back in his bedroom. Some people just won’t get with the program.

We were hunting Indians (the concept of political correctness -- even the term -- hadn’t been invented yet). It was the middle of the afternoon and, though it was early in the year, it was already hot enough to raise shimmers of heat waves from the dirt road.

(Suddenly) a voice shouted, “Hands up!”

Now, this is the point. It was fantasy. Make-believe. And we knew that. But unless you can remember, really remember, those Bradbury days of childhood, the unspoken social norms that we all lived by then, the secret lives and inviolate rules that bound us as fully and completely as office politics and the laws of church and state circumscribed our parents’ lives -- well, then I have no real hope of making you understand why we did what we did. It wasn’t even something we thought about -- we just did it. They had the drop on us, after all. They’d caught us, fair and square.

So, all three of us dropped our toy guns and reached for the sky.

The story after this point is considerably grimmer than what actually happened. In reality, it got to be dinnertime and we all went home. But that moment of complete and utter surrender to fantasy is something that’s always stayed with me. We didn’t know the boys who captured us. They were from another school across town, which meant they might as well have been from Outer Mongolia. (Is there an Inner Mongolia? If so, how come no one ever mentions it?) But we let them march us, before the muzzle of their toy guns, up into a ravine, where they held us prisoner. (There was talk of ransom.) On of us (not me) tried to escape, and was summarily shot—this led to considerable discussion as to whether he was actually dead, and if so, what to do with him. I made a contribution at this point which, if I do say so, was nothing short of genius. Plucking a flower, I announced that it was the fabled Mariphasa lupina lumina (I’d just seen Werewolf Of London on Channel 5 the previous night), which could heal whatever wounds had been sustained. This was immediately accepted to great acclaim. (One of our captors argued that the mariphasa was solely a cure for lycanthropy, and anyway grew only in Tibet, but he was outvoted. The Philistine.)

The whole point of it, however, was the unspoken agreement by which we all accepted -- to pretend that we were POWs. (They were acting out a WWII scenario.) I’ve mentioned in previous posts various experiences that helped point me towards a career in writing, and this was definitely one of them. (I once snagged a TV writing assignment just on the strength of telling the producer this story.) The sense of living on the cusp, between reality and fantasy, is something that I fear kids today only experience in the virtual world. Although it sounds very contradictory, I think that a child’s fantasy life should be much more real than World Of Warcraft.

Blasts (and Fizzles) From the Past

Sorry again. I can only provide so many entries to this ... as I've stated (and stated and stated ...) my typing ability has been reduced to the Columbus method (though if he'd been no better at finding a key and landing on it than I am, America would still belong to the Indians), and my voice is pretty much gone. I make entries when I can, but I've also got two books and a comic under contract, and paying work must take precedence.

So, for those days when I'm not terribly inspired with deathless prose and trenchant observations, here's something I can do that'll be (with luck) amusing:

My ex had a garage sale last week. It made the excavation of Troy look like a posthole. Among the many, many items uncovered were two large boxes of laserdiscs.

(I'm going to assume that you all know what these are. Or were ... if not, I'll just say that they are to DVDs what vinyl albums were to CDs. Ask your parents.)

I have a few laserdiscs in my collection already -- mostly stuff I can't find on DVD. Many of these "new" ones I'd forgotten I had -- which could say something about the perils of pack-ratting. So far, they all seem to be in reasonable shape, which is pretty impressive considering they've been sitting in an un-air-conditioned garage for at least ten years.

So I was thinking that, as I pull them out and watch them as whim dictates -- that I review them. I'm not going to apologize for any lapse of taste or judgment; but the last LD I bought (Cameron's Titanic -- like I said, no accounting for taste) was about 15 years ago, and it'll be interesting to see what surfaces in this cinematic Sargasso ...

Hugs!

So, I took Debbie to the airport today, so she can go to Boston for orientation on her new job. (I didn't mention her new job? She's director of a mental health unit called ACT. Fortunately the job isn't in Boston -- just the orientation.)

Actually, since her plane left LAX at 8 am, we decided to go yesterday and check into a hotel so we wouldn't have to get up at 5. Which brings me to the hugs part:

The hotel (the airport Radison) was literally swarming with people wearing white damask robes. The lobby was so packed with them it looked like a Pier One had exploded. So when we were checking in, I asked the clerk what was going on.

He told me they were all here to see an Indian guru woman named "Amma". He described her as "Mother Teresa, but with hugs."

Hugs.

The woman evidently gives great hugs. The clerk told me every hotel in a ten-block radius was booked. People come from all over the world. To get hugged.

I'm in the wrong line of work ...

Sorry ...

Been wrapped up in deadlines, plus a short story I'm working on. Gimme another week or so ...

How To Write Good

The question I get asked more than any other is: "How can I write a script for my favorite TV show?" So I thought I'd reprint something I wrote some time ago to address this:

Writing a script for your favorite TV show is easy. Just sit down at your word processor or typewriter or clay tablet and do it. Selling a script to your favorite TV show, however, is nearly impossible. But it can be done. Here's how:

First, research the show you're aiming for. Know it backwards and forwards, inside and out; be prepared to quote every single memorable moment from every single episode since it first went on the air. (Don't be silly; of course you can. We live in a world in which the Bible has been translated into Klingon. You don't have to go that far.) Know those characters as well or better than you know your own family. When you feel you've done that, come up with a story that illuminates them in a way you've never seen on the show. Important tip: Do not bring in a new character and tell his/her story, unless by doing it you bring to light a side or aspect of the main character(s) that we haven't seen before.

Now write the script. If you don't know how to write in production format, there are lots of books out there that will tell you, or you can download script examples from many places on the Web. But beware falling into the quagmire of obsessing over shot headings, transitions -- in short, the mechanics of it. It's the story that's important. There's really only one technical detail to remember: film is a visual medium. Therefore a script with more action description than dialogue is to be preferred over the other way round. Actors might love to declaim, but directors and producers hate it. If you can write something in which the characters have enormous depth and resonance, yet never say more than four lines at a time, they'll not only hire you, they'll canonize you.

When you've finished the script, polish it. Go over it and over it until it shines, until every comma, parenthetical, line of dialogue, etc., is absolutely the best you can do. That doesn't necessarily mean be a lapidary with every word. You're writing the blueprint here, not the finished product. Your script is only going to be read by a few dozen people, tops, and deathless prose isn't their primary concern. Strive for a balance between functional and evocative. Active voice ("he runs") is better than passive ("he's running"). Like that.

Take your time. You've only got one shot at that show with this script, so you have to make sure it's your best possible effort. I mean this. You're lucky if you get the staff to read it once -- they won't read it twice.

Next, get it to someone on the show who will read it and who can (ideally) buy it. If he's one of the many who can say "No" but can't say "Yes," find a way to get it to the showrunner, or one of the producers. This is the hard part. If you know someone on the show, ask them to read it. If you don't, use every means within the law to put yourself in the same room with one of those someones and get to know them. Yes, this probably means moving to LA -- you can't network long-distance, even in the Internet Age. How badly do you want this?

Most shows will not look at a script that's been sent in "over the transom" (i.e., not by an agent), for legal reasons. To find a reputable agent, call or write to the Writers Guild and ask them for a list of agents. Start calling them or writing to them, and keep doing it until you find one who will send your script to the show. In short, get the script to the people on the show and get them to read it, by any means short of stalking or otherwise alienating them. Remember: a producer's job is to get episodes produced and on the air. It's not to find new writers and guide them along, unless he/she is convinced that by doing so his/her job (getting episodes produced) will be made easier. If a producer does read it, and feels that there's potential in the script but that it's not quite there, he will do one of two things: Buy it for the story and assign it to be rewritten by one of the production staff, or ask you to do a rewrite. (Don't worry about having your idea ripped off -- it doesn't happen. Well, hardly ever ...) Obviously, you want the rewrite. Again, try by every means possible to convince them that you should be allowed to shepherd your work through to the end. If they're adamant that, due to time restraints or other contingencies, they want the rewrite done in-house, smile and take the cut-off money. Be nice about it, and in all probability they'll ask you to pitch (come up with more story ideas) again.

Yes, it does sound a lot like the old Steve Martin routine about how to be a tax-free millionaire ("First: get a million dollars ..."). But it can be done. It is done, by lots of people all the time. I did it. You can do it. The information on how to do it is out there. (In fact, what with webpages full of downloadable scripts and DVDs of damn near every show from The Honeymooners on, it's a helluva lot easier than it was when I was coming up.)

Speaking for myself, when I was a writer-producer, the thing I looked for in a writer boiled down to one thing: Could I use him/her more than once? A lot has changed in the business since then, but that hasn't. Nor is it likely to.

If the talent and the drive is in you, you can make it happen.