You can't depend on a beginning, you can't depend on an end

Anthony Rainone: But let's talk about The Lost Get Back Boogie, which I think was rejected -- what, 110 times? What was that whole ordeal like? How did you cope with it day in and day out?

James Lee Burke: By the time I was 34, I had published three novels in hardback in New York, and had a fair amount of success, and I was a Bread Loaf Fellow. I thought I was on board. With The Lost Get Back Boogie, I assumed it would be published. But, boy, I went 13 years before I was back in hardback again. And the agency that was handling my works sent everything back. They cut bait. It was pretty depressing.

-- James Lee Burke profiled by Anthony Rainone for January magazine, October 2004.

With The Neon Rain, my first Dave Robicheaux mystery. I'd been out of hardback print for a long time, nearly 13 years. A friend of mine named Rick DeMarinis said, "Why don't you try a crime novel?" I thought about it, and three days later Pearl and I were in San Fran, right down by Ferlinghetti's bookstore City Lights. I bought a yellow legal pad and walked down to this Italian café that's right across from the Catholic Church there on the boulevard. I ordered an espresso, and I sat down and started writing the first chapter of The Neon Rain. That's a fact.

As soon as I started writing, I knew it. I knew it when it started.

-- James Lee Burke to David Langness of Paste, November 18, 2014

So I've got that on him

Bruce DeSilva: Why do you write crime novels?

Robert B Parker: I write them because I know how, and because it never occurred to me not to write them. The process I go through is the same process Faulkner went through. The difference is that Faulkner writes better than I do, not because he is not writing crime novels but simply because he is a greater talent. He's dead, of course, so I've got that on him.

BD: Some people don't take crime fiction seriously. They see even your best books as mere entertainments.

RBP: Writing is either good or it isn't. It's not good because it's about 20th century angst. It's not bad because it's about a private detective. If it's good, it should be taken seriously. There is a misapprehension that it's easier to write a bad novel than a good one. It isn't. You write what you can, and if it comes out good you are lucky.

BD: Why is this such a hard lesson for some people to learn?

RBP: Literature is perceived as what you were taught in college. Professors can't teach books that are not difficult. If students read a book and they all understand it, there's nothing left to talk about in class. The second thing I would say is that most reviewing in this country is not very good. Its main function is not to do something useful but to enhance the reviewer's career. It's easier to review a difficult book because you get to explain it.

BD: Tell me how you work.

RBP: I think up a story and then I outline. The outline isn't terribly long – four or five pages handwritten. Catskill Eagle took me three months to think up. It's the hardest thing to do. I may go two, three weeks with nothing on the notepad, but I am not nervous about it because I know it will come. It always has. When the outline is completed, I write five pages a day.

BD: No matter how long it takes?

RBP: Yeah. Sometimes it takes eight or ten hours, but usually it takes no more than two. But I deliberately don't press on because if you do, then you start thinking you should write seven pages a day. It's better just to stop. I type it up in a draft, make a few pencil changes, and someone retypes it for me and sends it in.

-- Robert B Parker talks to Bruce DeSilva in 2011

Sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave

What's your writing regimen?

I think I'm going to just start writing and keep writing until they throw me in jail. Other than that, I set aside all day every day for writing and break it up with going home to see my family or having lunch or getting a haircut...

Do you see a career plan?

I don't know. I just make them up as I go along. Whatever anybody says, you're always making it up as you go along. It's like when you have babies; nobody gives you a how to book; nobody gives you a manual. It's like any of the important things in life. Whether it's your career, whether it's marriage, whether it's child rearing, you're making it up as you go along. And you try to have certain precepts, and sometimes they even change.

-- The Dramatist Poet: A David Mamet Interview by Fred Topel

Nailed it

QUQ has blogged about authors' incomes in response to an article in the Guardian.

Whenever the subject of authors' incomes is raised – in particular by someone who's been paid to do so – I reach for this, by Nick Tosches from In the Hand of Dante, my favourite rant on the subject. When I got the book from the shelf I discovered it was bookmarked: the subject must come up often.

Nick writes:

"Faulkner. His story said it all. For every writer, every publisher, every editor, every reader: his story said it all. 

"'I have written THE book, of which those other things were but foals,' he had told Boni & Liveright, the publisher of his first two, God-awful novels, after finishing the manuscript of Flags in the Dust, in the fall of 1927. He was right. And the book was published in due time, in the summer of 1973, eleven years after he was dead. 

"The house of Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith did, however, publish another one of his great books, The Sound and the Fury, in the fall of 1929. Depression or no depression, bestsellers then, as now, could and did sell in the millions. All Quiet on the Western Front, also published in 1929, would sell more than three and a half million copies throughout the world in the span of eighteen months. The Sound and the Fury sold one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine copies. 

"When Harrison Smith saw Faulkner's next book, Sanctuary, he responded aghast: "Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail.'" Smith eventually summoned his courage, and when Sanctuary was published, in early 1931, it sold more than six thousand copies – a degree of commercial success that Faulkner would not see again for another eight years. 

"Random House acquired these books when it acquired Smith's company and became Faulkner's publisher in 1936. As Smith had shown bravery, conviction, and devotion, so did Random House. Though it took almost thirteen years, from 1931 to 1943, for The Sound and the Fury to sell another thousand copies, bravery, conviction, and devotion paid off. For Random House, The Sound and the Fury, and the rest of Faulkner's novels, became in years to come one of the most profitable and prestigious treasure-troves that any publisher could dream ever to possess. 

"The catch, of course, is that, while Random House has justly prospered from its bravery, conviction, and devotion, the sweat and suffering of Faulkner's own brilliance and bravery have, as they say, earned out only after he has taken his place beneath the dirt. 

"I'm sick of these sons of bitches who moan and groan about how they work so fucking hard for their families. They're full of shit, every fucking one of them. Only the artist truly works for his loved ones and descendants alone. And this is because they are the only ones who get to see the fucking paycheck. Artists are not paid hourly. They are not paid weekly. They are not paid monthly. They are not paid annually. They are paid posthumously. In life, there is nothing: not even a decent down-payment, not even the token gesture of a ten-percent lagniappe."

Nick Tosches, In the Hand of Dante (Little, Brown and Company, 2002) pp.99-101 

Photo:  Sylvia Plachy  / No  Exit Press

Why we work

 

Pretty much everything that ever inspired me to become a writer right there. Although I don't know if I could work with that view. Opening titles from Columbo, 'Murder by the Book' (1971), c/- @columbophile.

Re-reading; remembering

INTERVIEWER

I read somewhere that you started writing because you wanted to be a musician.

SHEPARD

Well, I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.

INTERVIEWER

Did you start right in?

SHEPARD

Not immediately. My first job was with the Burns Detective Agency. They sent me over to the East River to guard coal barges during these god-awful hours like three to six in the morning. It wasn't a very difficult job—all I had to do was make a round every fifteen minutes—but it turned out to be a great environment for writing. I was completely alone in a little outhouse with an electric heater and a little desk.

INTERVIEWER

Did you already think of yourself as a writer?

SHEPARD

I'd been messing around with it for a while, but nothing serious. That was the first time I felt writing could actually be useful.

-- Sam Shepard interviewed by Benjamin Ryder Howe, Jeanne McCulloch, Mona Simpson for The Paris Review.

Got wood? Ed Wood?

I sat down with Jonathan King to view the first and very rough assembly of Realiti, and it's looking good. We have about three shooting days in total to go, although they include capturing something complex that I dashed off quickly. To paraphrase Harrison Ford, you can type this shit, but you can't film it. But I have faith that Jonathan will. He has so far.

The best thing about the movie so far is the direction and the performances. The actors are nailing it, and the images are lovely.

To date, only one corrupted file (touch wood) which our editor Jonathan (no relation) saved by importing it a frame at a time, and one misbehaving computer (cue Wilhelm scream), now reformatted. My role now is mostly sitting nearby saying, 'I'm sure it'll be alright' and, more than once, 'Why don't you just cut that line completely?... Yeah, that's better.'

In the same month, I finally got my writing desk out of storage. It's been a long time, baby.

Clothes of authenticity

I'm in two minds about Henning Mankell. He doesn't do plot -- surprisingly, for such a mainstream writer -- but, like some other Swedish authors, he really does coffee and sandwiches. Such details bring the Wallander novels alive. Here is the reluctant crime writer on crime and location:

Q: Your 'Wallander' novels too seem to chronicle important changes in society.

HENNING MANKELL: It is twenty years since I wrote the first book, and in that time some interesting things have happened. When I started I realized that crime itself was going through changes, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of Eastern Europe. Earlier you'd only see criminality in a big city like Stockholm but now you can buy drugs even in small towns. Look at where Ystad is situated, down south in Sweden in a border area close to the European continent – you could say that the Baltic Sea is our Rio Grande.

Q: Your choice of setting the books in Ystad appears to have created a trend.

HM: Yes, but today, I'm sorry to say, there's a lot of very bad crime fiction being written in Sweden where writers use small town settings without any real point. If you set a crime novel in Gotland just because you spend your holidays in a cottage there, I'd call it ridiculous. With a few exceptions, much of the crime fiction published in Swedish is trash.

Martin Cruz Smith is a journalist who wrote pulps before sweating 11 years on Gorky Park, the novel that would become the first of several starring Arkady Renko. The subsequent Renko novels have tapered off in length -- Smith returning to his pulp habits, maybe -- but maintain the tone, and are thick with detail. Smith spoke to Anna Mundow about researching place and time:

Q. "Stalin's Ghost" revisits the Chechen war. Are historical events starting points for you?

A. Well, I had to begin somewhere, and the Chechen war is practically a coloring book of disasters. I was interested to read about Chechens in Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago." Then I read a little Lermontov, a little Tolstoy where there is a theme of this wild, hono r-bound, somewhat privileged society. That's one of the great things about what I do; I'm allowed to follow any trail.

Q. Is Arkady's environment increasingly bleak?

A. With "Gorky Park" I thought I had done my Russian book. Then Russia changed. I couldn't get back in, so I got on the factory ship, the Polar Star. I could sense that things were changing. Then at the end of "Red Square" there was great hope that things were coming together, a triumphant feeling. That has disappeared. Arkady is more and more thrown back on his own resources, which makes what he does all the more singular and dangerous.

Q. You literally couldn't get back into the Soviet Union?

A. Literally. I was barred from the country.

My friend Paul Reynolds loved John Le Carré. One birthday when I made the error of gifting him yet another copy of Single And Single he accepted it with enthusiasm -- 'One can never have too many,' he said. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is built almost entirely on details of time and place: the narrative plays out in the characters' memories. (The action centerpiece is Peter Guillam stealing a folder from a library.) Here is Le Carré on location in an interview by George Plimpton in 1996:

There's some kind of constant interaction between the fantasy that I brought with me to the location — the place as character — and what happens to me after that, the way the fantasy takes on some semblance of truth. What we want is not authenticity; it is credibility. In order to be credible, you have to dress the thing in clothes of authenticity.

There was something aboard

"On 16 July mate reported in the morning that one of the crew, Petrofsky, was missing. Could not account for it. Took larboard watch eight bells last night, was relieved by Amramoff, but did not go to bunk. Men more downcast than ever. All said they expected something of the kind, but would not say more than there was SOMETHING aboard."

-- Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)

Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897) The Demeter is the Russian ship that brings Dracula to England. During the voyage the vampire sustains himself on the crew, picking them off one by one until only the captain remains.

Star Trek, 'Where No Man Has Gone Before' (1969) Samuel A. Peeples, Gene Roddenberry. Two crew members become invested with terrifying mental powers. As their abilities grow they lose all human empathy and threaten the crew.

Alien (1979). Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett. An alien infects a crewmember, hatches on board the vessel and infests it, feeding off her crew.

Firefly, 'Our Mrs Reynolds' Joss Whedon: (2002) A stowaway con artist overcomes the captain and crew, betraying the vessel to her cohorts.

The Star Trek and Firefly episodes are two of the most satisfying of their respective series. In each, the antagonist's actions force the protagonists to reveal their character through action. By the end the audience requires no further introduction to the characters: the exposition is an integral part of the drama, and the story is complete.

Let's be careful out there

Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost has prevailed in a legal argument over film rights. In 2008 film producers MVP Productions negotiated to purchase the rights to Frost's book The Match. A year later, says the The Hollywood Reporter, attorneys representing both parties had made statements in the affirmative:

On April 30, 2009, William Jacobson, the attorney representing MVP, proposed certain terms and stated, "Let me know if this is okay and we'll send paperwork..." Alan Wertheimer, representing Frost, responded, "done....thanks!"

Later, Frost decided he did not want MVP to make the film. ('Allegedly,' says THR, 'Frost felt MVP's execs were "dishonest" about their industry experience.') But in light of their discussions, the production company argued that a deal had been made. Now, after litigation, a California court has ruled that the author was in the right:

According to the latest ruling, it is undisputed that [Frost's attorney] didn't have actual authority to transfer the copyright.. but MVP argued there was a triable issue whether he had "ostensible authority," roughly meaning that appearances were made so as to lead others into believing the presence of a true authority.

But the appeals court says it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is actual authority, which only comes through a writing signed by the copyright owner. 

I think every writer has an interest in stories like this -- particularly that last sentence.

Hollywood writers are typically portrayed as victims but that's less often the case in real life. I recently attended a seminar by Brian Helgeland who roundly trashed the notion that studio executives and writers don't get along. 'Executives are very smart guys,' he said, respectfully. 'Even if they don't get story.'

I'd lived with the characters, and I cared about them

Tony Scott discovered Quentin Tarantino in 1991:

Tony Scott: When I was directing The Last Boy Scout, my assistant was hanging out with this quirky guy named Quentin Tarantino, and he'd be around the set. She said, "You gotta read his script."

Quentin Tarantino: When you're a nobody, it's murder to get anyone to read your scripts. The original True Romance script started with a long discussion about cunnilingus. Most people said the script was racist and that the grotesque violence would make people sick. I told Tony, "Read the first three pages. If you don't like it, throw it away."

Scott made True Romance, but changed the ending:

I took True Romance and I took Reservoir Dogs. I'm a very slow reader but I read them straight through. I said, 'I'll do both.' He said, 'No. I'd like you to do True Romance.' He's a brilliant writer, he fully conceives every character, no matter how small they are. Actors came to the set not wanting to change a word, which is unusual. The only thing that I did change was the ending. The original was very different. It ended with Alabama. She puts a gun in her mouth. She doesn't shoot herself, and then she just says, 'Oh fuck it, he isn't worth it.' She throws the gun out of the car window and drives off. Quentin thought it was truer to the character. I was trying to make a commercial film, I wanted a happier ending. I'd lived with the characters really, and I cared about them.

Who knows what people will say about Tony Scott now. But I remember reading (would it have been Premiere magazine?) that when the director hired Tarantino to do a script polish for Crimson Tide (1995) for a lot of money and very little work, it was as a thank you for True Romance.

Oxygen

There's a way in which a writer can do too much, over-whelming the reader with so many details that he no longer has any air to breathe. Think of a typical passage in a novel. A character walks into a room. As a writer, how much of that room do you want to talk about? The possibilities are infinite. You can give the color of the curtains, the wallpaper pattern, the objects on the coffee table, the reflection of the light in the mirror. But how much of this is really necessary? Is the novelist's job simply to reproduce physical sensations for their own sake? When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it.

-- Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger (Sun & Moon Press, 1992)

1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?

-- David Mamet, Memo to writers of The Unit, 19 October 2005

A leaf on the wind

A moving and clear-eyed piece by Peter Carey on the late Robert Hughes:

Nor should anyone doubt the massive affection he felt for his country. When, in the tabloid aftermath of his car accident in 1999, Australia turned on him, it is hard to underestimate the anguish he suffered in private.

Choire Sicha remembers David Rakoff:

The work he leaves behind — both recorded and in the collections Fraud, from 2001, Don't Get Too Comfortable, from 2005, Half Empty, from 2010 — are all ahead-of-their-time documentations of the way we actually do live now. There was no better correspondent from New York City of his time.

At the Shanghai Literary Festival a fellow author leaned across the table and asked me the sort of low voice normally reserved for selling drugs: 'Chad, Do you like... science fiction?' Why yes, I said. And so over the clatter of plates at M on the Bund we yammered on to each other about Firefly. Here is the very emotional Firefly reunion at Comic Con 2012.

Readers

In 1983 Nobel Prize winner-to-be and Greg Bear fan Doris Lessing wrote a novel under the pen name 'Jane Somers' to test publishers, their readers and critics:

'I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that "nothing succeeds like success," [Lessing] said in a recent telephone conversation from London. 'If the books had come out in my name, they would have sold a lot of copies and reviewers would have said, "Oh, Doris Lessing, how wonderful." As it is, there were almost no reviews, and the books sold about 1,500 copies here and scarcely 3,000 copies each in the United States.'

From The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Could you tell us more about how you put the Jane Somers hoax over on the critical establishment? It strikes me as an incredibly generous thing to do, first of all, to put a pseudonym on two long novels to try to show the way young novelists are treated.

LESSING

Well, it wasn't going to be two to begin with! It was meant to be one. What happened was, I wrote the first book and I told the agent that I wanted to sell it as a first novel . . . written by a woman journalist in London. I wanted an identity that was parallel to mine, not too different. So my agent knew, and he sent it off. My two English publishers turned it down. I saw the readers' reports, which were very patronizing. Really astonishingly patronizing! The third publisher, Michael Joseph (the publisher of my first book), was then run by a very clever woman called Phillipa Harrison, who said to my agent, "This reminds me of the early Doris Lessing."

Lessing believes that by the time the novel was published, 'four or five' people knew the secret.

We all expected that when the book came out, everyone would guess. Well, before publication it was sent to all the experts on my work, and none of them guessed. All writers feel terribly caged by these experts — writers become their property.

Jane Somers earned mixed reviews:

A lengthy review of ''If the Old Could. . .'' in The New York Times Book Review last June, for example, said the novel ''fails to achieve greatness.'' But, the reviewer added, ''This is an extremely courageous attempt, and Jane Somers is a courageous writer.''

The Washington Post's reviewer said of ''The Diary of a Good Neighbour'' last year, ''Jane Somers extends one's comprehension of the possibilities life offers, and does it with wit and compassion.''

But The Los Angeles Times's reviewer found ''If the Old Could. . .'' a ''cryptic novel.'' It is, the reviewer said, ''a little like a beautiful sweater made by a woman with arthritis. Through unravelings and dropped stitches, you can make out a lovely pattern, but can't quite figure out what it is.''

Nowadays Lessing's concerns seem quaint. Publishers are more than willing to gamble on unknown writers, and lately they have been betting large:

Gabriel's Inferno and Gabriel's Rapture, popular books that started as Twilight fan fiction, have been acquired by Penguin's Berkley imprint in a "substantial seven-figure deal,” the publisher announced.

Berkley will immediate take over publishing the ebooks from Omnific Publishing. Trade paperbacks will follow in the next few months, with Berkeley planning a 500,000 copy first printing.

I once asked an editor what sort of book sells half a million copies. He smiled: 'Nobody knows.'

UPDATE: speaking of best-selling franchises: Grace Bello interviews Ryan Nerz about ghostwriting Francine Pascal's young-adult series Sweet Valley High:

Nerz: Sweet Valley High is this series that just goes on and on and on. So you're always having to come up with new plots. You're always having to come up with new character arcs. We would just sit around and come up with new ideas. And then they would hire out freelance people, like what I eventually became. You get a one-off amount of money, which is okay. Meanwhile, Francine Pascal sits in a château in France. I'm not even sure if Francine Pascal wrote a single book, which is really funny. She just came up with the idea and the Bible for it.

So the titles that you wrote, did you pitch those ideas?

No; the would-be writers, we would have to do a two-chapter sample, about 30 pages. They have to see that you can match the style and the tone and pull the heartstrings of anonymous 13-year-old girls across the country.

Were there a lot of men writing?

There weren't a whole lot of men. There were few men, predominantly gay, and one other guy, Daniel Ehrenhaft, who now is a fairly successful young-adult writer. Other than that, no. There weren't many men. It was mainly post-college women. That was the main ballgame. There were some dudes. But not a whole lot.

Read the full interview here.

(Pic: Fay Godwin)

Crisscross

Philip Matthews has collected images and texts on my favourite David Lynch film, Lost Highway in an effort to trace its origins:

The beautiful-sounding phrase "psychogenic fugue" became the official explanation for the Fred Madison/Pete Dayton switch in Lost Highway but there is another source, one I'd never considered, one which seems obvious now given the timing (a mid-90s production, a 1997 release). The endless road, the car chase and police sirens, the homicidal jealousy, the murdered girl and her shady friends ... this was a rare instance of Lynch topicality, of stories ripped from headlines.

OJ Simpson? I think he's right.

Lost Highway is written by the great, great Barry Gifford who wrote The Sinaloa Story and Perdita Durango. He's also B-movie / noir movie buff and to understand where Lost Highway was coming from it might also help give a sideways glance to his collection of essays on the genre, The Devil Thumbs A Ride. As a fan and a critic Gifford is well aware of the effects of practical limitations on film making -- e.g. censorship, budgeting problems, arguments with studios, problem actors. To me Lost Highway always felt like a compendium of such "mistakes": two films mashed into one; the same role played by two different actors; one actor playing two roles, etc.

Later Lynch would double-down on the one-actor-playing-two-roles trope for Mulholland Drive, to great effect.

Maybe everyone else already knows this... I haven't read around.

Also: Patricia Arquette. Twice.

Gifford was published in the UK by Rebel Inc, an imprint of Canongate Books, so I was introduced to the full range of his work when Canongate were publishing Shirker. After I read The Sinaloa Story and The Wild Life Of Sailor and Lula, my writing changed.

Dreams of typing

I have finished revising and have things to type up, but I can't – I need a rest first. So in the meantime I have dreams of typists. In these dreams I hand the scrawled manuscript to someone and he/she types it up and gives it back to me and I mark up corrections and he/she types it up again on double carbons. Let's be honest, I'm not visualising Hoffman. He only types with two fingers.

(Pics: All The President's Men, The Big Store, Mad Men, Secretary.)

Those about to die

The Hunger Games is a book or something. I don't need to know what it is because I've seen it before. Death sport on the big screen is at least as old as Ben Hur. My favourite examples are from the 1970s. Punishment Park (1971), a cinema verité showdown between military and the counter-culture that looks disturbingly real from the next century; Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 (1975), as unwatchable and unforgettable as the best Corman fare; and Rollerball (1975), the sine qua non in any discussion of sci-fi futures.

Set in a dull grey Euro-America, Rollerball follows a professional deathsport player as he goes round and round, spiralling upward instead of down. The game is a substitute for war and no man can be greater than the game: the premise is simple. But the resonance of the images and performances is a feast. I love this film for its jump cuts, its soundtrack looping and dropouts, the grainy Medium Cool camera style, and its lack of finish. It's a ballsy, six-cylinder blat, violent and empty, the screenplay relying almost entirely on the mise en scène. For instance, the decadent party in which stoned footballers' wives laser a pine forest at dawn: that's everything you need to know about this world, right there.

Rollerball began -- as is so often the case with good movies -- as prose fiction. William Harrison's short story 'Roller Ball Murder' was published in Esquire magazine in 1973. Harrison adapted it for the screen (those were the days) for director Norman Jewison.

Jewison talked about the movie at The Hollywood Interview:

Rollerball was my first, and only, film about the future, the not too distant future. I tried not to get caught up in the technology too much. I wanted to isolate the areas in which I would work. I found the BMW building in Munich, which was perfect, as our main location. Its design was very ahead of its time. We were the first ones to use identity cards to get into places and all that sort of thing which is quite commonplace today. It was an interesting film to do from a political aspect, because it was a film about a world where political systems had failed and multinational corporations had taken over. It deals with violence used as entertainment for the masses, which goes back to the Circus Maximus. I think when you use violence for entertainment, you're getting pretty low on the human scale. (laughs) I think it turned out to be a pretty interesting film, very stylized, packed a wallop. In Europe it became a cult film, whereas in America a lot of the critics went after it as being exploitative, of just being about a violent game.

Rollerball is contrastingly enigmatic and action-packed. Philip Strick observed that it loses steam when its protagonist, Jonathan, is not playing, but that was part of the point: life without the death sport is boring. The players are prisoners of an existential world. There is no THX 1138 sunscape to run off to and no Logan's Run leafy wilderness. And there is no Soylent Green twist that explains it all, either. When James Caan finally gets to question the computer that runs the city the machine blows bubbles at him and remains silent. Even the Alpha 60 in Alphaville rasped back.

Young viewers should also be warned that the movie contains scenes with John Houseman.

In 1978 Jewison said of the film:

Rollerball looked into the future in which all-powerful corporations provide a murderous sport to let people work off their aggressions. I worry about how much direction we have over our own lives.

This week New York magazine's culture column Vulture ran the numbers on The Hunger Games publicity machine:

Size of production budget: $80 million
Size of marketing budget: $45 million

Soon newspapers and blogs will be trumpeting the box office take, and how the studio income is trending, and thus people like me who know nothing about the movie shall be entertained. Thumbs up or thumbs down? Will the franchise survive or be killed off? Today the death sport is money.

I've paid my dues to make it

Walter Mosley on writing, interviewed by Charles L.P. Silet:

MysteryNet: Obviously you don't see much distinction between what we would describe as genre or crime fiction and straight fiction or literature.

Mosley: No, I don't see any difference in it. Of course, in the genre there are certain kinds of things that you have to do, but it's the same in a coming-of-age novel, somebody has to come of age. So you have to follow the conventions. Good fiction is in the sentence and in the character and in the heart of the writer. If the writer is committed to and in love with what he or she is doing, then that's good fiction.

MysteryNet: Who have you read both in crime fiction and in regular fiction that's had an influence on you?

Mosley: In crime fiction, I've read lots and lots of people. Charles Willeford, I just adore. Every one of his books is so deeply flawed plot-wise, but it matters nothing to me because he's such a wonderful writer. I was reading one of his books the other day about some old guy and his wife; he was seventy-two but looked older and she was sixty-three and looked older than him. It was so funny; just the way he wrote it. My God, this guy is fantastic! Hoke Mosley is a real guy. It's so right. I've read everybody -- Gregory MacDonald -- I've read all the Fletch books. I thought they were wonderful. Parker, of course. Vachss, who I adore, because I think that he is so deeply committed to what he believes in. I feel the heart coming through it, and I compare him to Dickens. Rex Stout. I've read almost everything Simenon ever wrote. The people I love for writing are the French: Malraux, Camus, Gide, for just the style of writing. It is almost the heart of fiction for me. Then the older guys like Proust, and tons of black poets: Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott, Amiri Baraka. It doesn't matter who writes it, no matter their sex or their race or what period of time they lived in.

Raymond Chandler, from Frank MacShane's The Life of Raymond Chandler (1986):

My theory was that readers just thought that they cared about nothing but the action; that really although they didn't know it, they cared very little about the action. The thing they really cared about, and that I care about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description.

Driving down your freeways

James Ellroy in the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

You were away from Los Angeles for twenty-five years. Why'd you come back?

JAMES ELLROY

One reason: Cherchez la femme. I chased women to suburban New York, suburban Connecticut, Kansas City, Carmel, and San Francisco. But I ran out of places, and I ran out of women, so I ended up back here.

INTERVIEWER

Did you miss the city?

ELLROY

While I was away, the Los Angeles of my past accreted in my mind, developing its own power. Early on in my career I believed that in order to write about LA, I had to stay out of it entirely. But when I moved back, I realized that LA then lives in my blood. LA now does not.

Full article is here.

Do you like my tight sweater?

The Danish Broadcasting Corporation has been hitting it out of the park with crime series like The Killing and, now, Borgen. The dramas are complex and gory, subtitled, made with relatively low budgets and yet have gone on to enjoy international success. How do the Danes do it? It has to do with writers:

[DR's] annual income is an eighth of the BBC's, and slender resources of about £20m a year for drama mean the emphasis is on picking winners. Over the past 20 years, executives, producers and writers have refined that art to develop the classiest, most efficient drama factory in world television.

The rules are straightforward. Commissioners insist on original drama dealing with issues in contemporary society: no remakes, no adaptations. The main requirement is material for the 8pm slot on Sundays, when gripping drama helps Danish audiences through the long winters. Writers have the final say. Hammerich said: "We give them a lot of space and time to develop their story. The vision of the writer is the centre of attention, we call it 'one vision' – meaning everyone works towards fulfilling this one vision, and very few executives are in a position to make final decisions. I believe this is part of the success."

The Killing isn't perfect by any means -- the second series wanders off -- but it has a voice and a tone and a mood, which is all a story really needs for you to fall in love with it. "Trusting the writer" was once the mantra of the BBC: AMC and HBO now chant it every day. Writers, of course, knew this already but now and then a broader industry discovers it, to its profit.

Full article is here.