“Faced with the indefinite suspension of negotiations, the union representing striking Hollywood writers told its members Saturday it would try to deal directly with Hollywood studios and production companies, bypassing the umbrella organization that has been representing them,” reports John Rogers of the Associated Press. Specifically, David Letterman’s show plans to make a deal that will put new shows back on the air.
Category Archives: Authors
Sci-Fi Is a Telling a Good Story
Author John Scalzi discusses science fiction, saying it’s a commercial genre. “Academia generally wants you to show you can write [hence literary fiction]; science fiction generally wants you to tell a story.” The idea is that if you can write and tell a great story, then you have a blockbuster or enduring classic on your hands, but that ain’t necessarily so.
Nobel Prize Speeches
Another post from Mr. Key, this one comparing the speeches of Al Gore and William Faulkner.
Live from the Front of the Writers Strike
Shawn Macomber records the skinny on a writers strike rally in Washington Square Park: big names and faces.
The Writers Guild strike is everywhere because when you go to one of their rallies you get to see Tony Soprano’s wife standing next to Joe Pantoliano on stage while Sopranos creator David Chase and Richard Belzer, holding a small dog to his cheek, look on. It’s because even if Tina Fey looks like she’s not into it, she’ll still pose for a photo with you and the guy who plays Kenneth the Page on 30 Rock. It’s because the ex-intern from The Office will nod at you if you smile at him as he leans nonchalantly against a tree. . . . . The gathered heard a thousand times this day how brilliantly writers are able to express themselves, yet, aside from one Daily Show personality and comedian extraordinaire, Colin Quinn, no one saw fit to let the writers speak for themselves. (“I want this to end so the Writers Guild can go back to doing what they do best,” Quinn ribbed. “Sending three giant envelopes of detailed health plan information out every week.”)
Jack’s birthday
Somebody mentioned it today, and I looked it up, and it’s true—it’s C.S. Lewis’ birthday. He was born November 29, 1898. I’m not an anti-smoking zealot, but I wish he hadn’t been a puffer. We might have had him around into the ’70s or ’80s.
Not that this helps you. You read this blog tomorrow, don’t you? I’m a day late. I should have told you about it Wednesday.
That’s me. Always on the receding slope of the bell curve. Yesterday I looked at my desk calendar to see when I needed to send out memos to instructors, so they could get their book orders to me.
Turns out I should have done it last week.
Today as I was leaving work, I thought about stopping at the grocery store. Then a voice in my head said, “No, you have something else to do tonight.”
“What could it be?” I wondered. I consulted my pocket calendar.
I had an appointment to give blood.
Two nights ago.
Ack. I’ve become one of those embarrassing old bachelors who misses all his appointments, dribbles food on his vest and is the last to know when he has holes in his clothes.
I need a keeper.
Ad Lib
A critical point in Steve Allen’s career shines a new light on the current writers union strike. Allen began The Tonight Show in 1954 and originated the concept of modern TV talk shows. When Doris Day did not show up for an interview,
Allen was left to his own comic devices with twenty-five minutes of airtime on his hands, which he filled by interviewing people in the studio audience, lugging an old stand-up mike up and down the aisles. ‘The physical thing of carrying this big mike around the room helped to get laughs. I just horsed around, like with my pals. That opened up a lot of possibilities.’ He later wrote: ‘I don’t recollect what was said during the next twenty-five minutes, but I do know that I had never gotten such laughs before.’ … Allen had discovered his natural ability to play it as it lays, to talk without a prepared script or format. ‘For two years I had been slaving away at the typewriter … with only moderate success. Now I had learned that audiences would laugh much more readily at an ad-libbed quip, even though it might not be the pound-for-pound equivalent of a prepared joke.’
Where are comic talents like this today?
Authors Sue Publisher
Mr. Holtsberry posts news that conservative authors are suing their publisher over the claim of low royalties.
Authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”
That means the authors believe the Eagle is undercutting what money they could earn from their books by distributing the books through books clubs, which they say is nothing in some cases.
I have to agree with Mr. Holtsberry on this. The authors appear to have identified a real problem, but shouldn’t this have been worked out in contract? Perhaps this situation is only a dishonorable, if that, choice by the publisher and something unforeseen by the authors. Are publishers competing with authors, or are they their compatriots? No doubt, it varies.
Military History Reading
Here’s a book you may have missed, The National Guard: An Illustrated History of America’s Citizen Soldiers by Michael Doubler and John Listman. The book notes “The Guard fought at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, New Orleans, First Bull Run, San Juan Hill, the Meuse-Argonne, Omaha Beach, Operation Desert Storm, and in many, many other engagements.” We owe them a lot.
On the Michael Doubler’s website, he offers a few other recommendations for history reading. Very interesting.
Teachout on Mailer
Norman Mailer died last week at age 84. Terry Teachout reminds us why this isn’t that big a deal. “[He was] to literature what the Kennedys are to politics, a living, breathing relic of the vanished era of high hopes.”
From Blog to Book
Editor and writer Anna Broadway has blogged herself into a book with Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity. I don’t think the blog is the book, but maybe it is.
The essays on Makoto Fujimura’s blog are to become a book as well. That should be good.