News Bits, In Brief

Today's capitol-b Book News is a lot like those old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ads -- you know, the ones where two jerks bump into one another and say, "You got chocolate in my peanut butter" and "You got peanut butter on my chocolate." Except, instead of combining two delicious flavors of questionable nutritional value, it's a mash-up of the two most over-hyped personalities in recent publishing publicity: Oprah and O.J.
Via Publisher's Weekly: "On September 13 Fred and Kim Goldman will appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show along with Denise Brown to discuss the publication of the controversial O.J Simpson fictional confessional If I Did It to be published by Beaufort Books."

MovieCityNews.com offers this unique way out of debt: "Now that the movie's out, and Laura Linney embodies the icy socialite Mrs. X, Nanny Diaries producer Harvey Weinstein (according to the New York Post) was overheard offering some 'well connected socialites' $100,000 to unmask the 'real Mrs. X.'"
(Editor's note: You rich people suck. Haven't you ever heard of the 'Stop Snitchin', Stop Lying' campaign?)


According to The Associated Press, one in four adults read no books at all in the past year. According to me, 1/3 of the 75% of the adults that claimed to have read books really did not, but lied so as not to appear stupid. Another third only read the new Harry Potter.

And now, a classic News Bit (from a 3 year old BoingBoing post)
How Fanfic makes Kids Into Better Writers
"FictionAlley, the largest Harry Potter archive, hosts more than 30,000 stories and book chapters, including hundreds of completed or partially completed novels. Its (unpaid) staff of more than 200 people includes 40 mentors who welcome each new participant individually. At the Sugar Quill, another popular site, every posted story undergoes a peer-review process it calls "beta-reading." New writers often go through multiple drafts before their stories are ready for posting. "The beta-reader service has really helped me to get the adverbs out of my writing and get my prepositions in the right place and improve my sentence structure and refine the overall quality of my writing," explains the girl who writes under the pen name Sweeney Agonistes?a college freshman with years of publishing behind her.
Like many of the other young writers, Agonistes says that Rowling's books provide her with a helpful creative scaffolding: "It's easier to develop a good sense of plot and characterization and other literary techniques if your reader already knows something of the world where the story takes place," she says. By poaching off Rowling, the writers are able to start with a well-established world and a set of familiar characters and thus are able to focus on other aspects of their craft. Often, unresolved issues in the books stimulate them to think through their own plots or to develop new insights into the characters. "

Free First Chapters!

To test the Top 10 Books on the NYTimes Best Sellers List (Hardcover Fiction), click the links below.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Devil May Cry by Sherrilyn Kenyon

The Quickie by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

Sandworms of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

The Secret Servant by Daniel Silva

Spook Country by William Gibson (audio version, read by Gibson!)

High Noon by Nora Roberts

The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke

Waking With Enemies by Eric Jerome Dickey

Lean Mean Thirteen by Janet Evanovich

News Bits, In Brief

Attention stoners and/or senior citizens: Is there a long-lost book whose title you've been racking your brains to recall? For just $2, you can submit a description to Stump The Bookseller, and their staff will try to reunite you with that favorite tome. At last, a website designed for rapidly deteriorating memories like yours.

So much for doctor/patient confidentiality. The Bellevue Hospital -- one time care provider for such celebrities as Tupac Shakur, Courtney Love and John Lennon's assassin, Mark David Chapman -- is about to launch its own publishing imprint, The Bellevue Literary Press. From the AP article: "Among the first titles of the Bellevue Literary Press, released this spring, are a novel interweaving themes of sickness and recovery into a 1940s family drama, a collection of editorial cartoons by an accomplished physician-artist and an experimental nonfiction work that explores the mind-set and meaning of awkwardness. The press plans to release four more books, including another novel, in the fall."

Real cyberpunks only listen to their podcasts on 7" vinyl. BoingBoing.net has just posted their newest podcast, and their special guest is author William Gibson.

Go, Read...Nicholas Gurewitch's Perry Bible Fellowship comic strips. Not only are they not religious, they're free for online perusal! Oh, and the book collecting them, The Perry Bible Fellowship: The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories, comes out next month.

If Christianity Is Correct, This Post Better Buy Us Some Slack Come Judgement Day

The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy is currently receiving stellar reviews, a TIME Magazine cover story, as well as a place on the New York Times bestseller list. Here's an old interview with the good Reverend...conducted by the agnostic Woody Allen!



A few Billy Graham fun facts, care of Wikipedia:

1. He has not completely allied himself with the religious right, saying that Jesus did not have a political party.

2. Graham opposed segregation during the 1960s and refused to speak to segregated auditoriums, once dramatically tearing down the ropes that organizers had erected to separate the audience. He paid bail money to secure the release of Martin Luther King from jail in the American South during the 1960s civil rights struggle; he invited King to join him in the pulpit at his 16-week revival in New York City in 1957.

3. Graham would not allow himself to be seen or photographed in public with his daughters (or any other women) without his wife, Ruth, present. He did not want to give any sort of impression of marital infidelity. When then-First Lady of Arkansas Hillary Clinton invited him to lunch as he arrived in Little Rock for a crusade in 1989, Graham declined and said, "I don't eat with beautiful women alone" and met her in a hotel dining room instead.

Rowling's Reported Mystery? It's Been Solved.

The only topic getting more media coverage than Oprah's next book club pick is what J.K. Rowling is up to now that the Potter series is done. Speculation reached its zenith during the Edinburgh book festival, when Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin reported that his wife, Miranda, had seen Rowling "scribbling away" in an Edinburgh café, supposedly hard at work on a detective novel set in the Scottish capital. This anecdote was immediately reported that night in an early edition of The Sunday Times, after which it was picked up by The Associated Press and spread like celebrity sex tape footage through the rest of the world. The only problem? Rankin was kidding. According to the Guardian UK, Rankin has confessed, "This is a joke that got out of hand."
Whoops. Nice fact-checking, folks.
So what is Rowling up to?
Your guess is as good as ours (and The Times' and The Associated Press').

Poetry News and Reviews, In Brief

An Edgar Allan Poe fan has taken credit for creating the writer's 'graveyard visitor' legend. But there are those who would claim that this raven old lunatic's heart tells false tales.


At long last, the world will finally know what sorts of cartoony goth characters Sylvia Plath used to doodle on her jeans. Paintings and drawings by the Bell belle, many of which have never been seen before, are to be published in October to mark the 75th anniversary of the birth of the American poet and novelist.


"I married the girl I loved, yet poisoned her life
Lies began to coil in my heart and call it home."

The Los Angeles Times reviews Raymond Carver's collection of poetry, All of Us, here.


"What kind of spring is this,
Where there are no flowers and
The air is filled with a miserable smell?"

The New York Times holds court on the recently released, Poems From Guantánamo. Their verdict?
"The bulk of these poems are so vague, their claims so conventional, that they might have been written at any point in history by anyone suffering anything."
An anonymous source at the Pentagon agrees.

Don't Forget This Wednesday's Author Event!

This Wednesday, August 22, at 7:00 PM the Inkwell Bookstore will host a reading and Q&A with Thomas Cathcart, one of the two authors of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar...Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes. This is, without a doubt, the funniest book we've had the pleasure to promote at our store. Not only that, reading it might make you smarter (although the author offers no money back guarantees).

For a bit of back story on the book (care of Buzzflash.com), click here.

For a few reviews: The Writing Doctor, Harvard Magazine, Lancaster Online

And to hear the NPR interview with the authors...click here.

Bards Behind Bars

I already stole from CrimeTime.co on Thursday for the Jim Thompson piece, but I wanted to highlight one other great link that I found there: School For Writers: A Prison Cell. It's an article about the many great works of literature written behind bars. An excerpt:

"Writers in prison and prisoners who write have produced, between them, an oeuvre of global significance. From Boethius in 6th-century Rome, they have triumphed over carceral adversity through a combination of willpower and literary excellence. Malory, Bunyan, Cervantes, Vanbrugh and Voltaire might, at first glance, seem a pretty disparate lot. It is only where one throws in their 'previous convictions' that a mutual connectedness becomes apparent. In far-flung prisons across half a millennium, each man managed to transcend his predicament by drawing strength and inspiration from it."

Best of all, this isn't some NPR-produced work of underclass romanticism-cum-condescension. It's written by Peter Wayne, himself a recently released convict/wordsmith.
That's what the kids call 'keepin' it real.'

Oh No He Didn't!

Via The Associated Press:
Bill Schneider, Provincetown's administrative director of tourism, has admitted that he made an "error in judgment" by claiming that his self-published book had been selected for Oprah Winfrey's book club and that he had been interviewed by the talk show diva.
(Editor's Note: By an 'error in judgment,' he means 'a motherf**king lie.')
The book, Crossed Paths, was self-published by Schneider in March, and recounts the story of two men who fell in love in the 1970s. One later committed suicide.
(Spoilers: Schneider lives!)

News Bits...Well, Two Of 'Em, Anyways

Not content with killing the record industry, Apple has unveiled its plans to do the book industry in as well. The first step: Book excerpts are about to be featured on the iPhone.

Beowulf comes to the big screen! Directed by Robert Zemeckis, adapted by Neil Gaiman... and starring a CGI Angelina Jolie?

Author Du Jour: Jim Thompson

Biography
(courtesy of: The Killer Beside Me: The Jim Thompson Homepage)

Born September 27, 1906, James Meyer Thompson grew up in Oklahoma to become one of the finest pulp novelists of The Cold War era. His life during the Depression and his up and down family history of working the wildcat oil fields of Texas seeped into Jim's dirt-under-the-nails writing as he created characters at displaying both brutality and empathy.

Thompson began his career as a more "traditional" writer, publishing his first two novels, Now and on Earth and Heed the Thunder as hardbacks. After these books failed to find wide audiences, Thompson found his voice in crime fiction, grinding out hellish tales for paperback mills such as Lion Books and Gold Medal. While on the surface indistinguishable from the rest of their kin, those who dropped a quarter on one of Thompson's novels were exposed to a vision of the world as seen through Thompson's eyes; much of it ugly, little of it good, where redemption goes for a premium and an unnerving honesty to oneself pervades.

Thompson's best known novel is The Killer Inside Me, the story of a doomed small town sheriff unable to control his blood lust as circumstances force him to kill and kill again. Other notable books include Savage Night, The Getaway, and his often-overlooked novella masterpiece, The Criminal.

In the mid-fifties, Thompson began walking the long rough road to Hollywood. He worked with a young Stanley Kubrick on screenplays for two of the director's earliest films, The Killing (w/Sterling Hayden, from the novel Clean Break by Lionel White) and Paths of Glory (w/Kirk Douglas). What would seem a promising start never materialized, and Thompson's screen fortunes took a downward turn after that, and he spent the rest of his career writing unproduced screenplays and teleplays for low-rent television programs like Convoy and MacKenzie's Raiders.

Like jazz and Jerry Lewis, Thompson's writings found a life in France. Besides translating several of his novels, two films, Coup du Torchon (based on Pop. 1280) and Serie Noire (A Hell of a Woman), were made to much acclaim by French filmmakers.

A good number of Thompson's works have been put on screen by American filmmakers with varying degrees of success. These include The Getaway (twice, three times if you include the first half of the Rodriguez/Tarantino B-movie rave-up From Dusk 'til Dawn), The Grifters (nominated for four Oscars),and After Dark, My Sweet. The latest, This World, Then the Fireworks (w/ Billy Zane and Gina Gershon), was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 to a positive audience.

Two biographies of Thompson have been published. The first, Sleep With the Devil, by Michael McCauley, was published in 1991. Savage Art: a Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito, was published by Knopf in 1995. Polito's book won both the Edgar and National Book Critics Circle awards.

Thompson died on April 7, 1977, and had his ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean. As he had predicted, Thompson did not live to enjoy his own success.

The Classics
(stolen from the highly recommended site, CrimeTime.co.uk)

Nothing More Than Murder (1949)

Thompson's first noir classic and a variation on the old double indemnity shocker. Joe Wilmot and his wife Elisabeth (a woman with "trouble spelled all over her") jointly own and run a profitable smalltown movie house. Their marriage is empty and passionless and made more complicated when Carol Farmer, a business student, comes to lodge with them. Despite Carol's singular unattractiveness compared with Elisabeth, Joe has an affair with her: Elisabeth finds out (she craftily encourages the liaison) and blackmails the couple to fix an insurance scam in which she supposedly dies (substituting an innocent victim in her place) and nets the lucrative pay-off. Murder, arson, blackmail and suicide combine to make an exciting edge-of-the-seat thriller.

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

Perhaps Thompson's finest book. Stanley Kubrick called it "the most chilling and believable first person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered." The main character, Lou Ford, a smalltown sheriff, suffers from "the sickness," a psychopathic need to kill. Ford conceals his true identity under the guise of an inept, wise-cracking lawman: in truth he is one smart cookie (he reads psychological treatises and solves calculus problems for enjoyment). He is also a schizophrenic thug with a compulsive need to control, and if necessary, destroy, others. Thompson also invests Ford with a sickening, black humour: "I think I've broken the case," says Ford, after he's just secretly snapped the neck of one of his key witnesses held in custody! This disturbing, compelling masterpiece redefined noir.

Savage Night (1953)

A bizarre gangster novel which pays homage to the hard-boiled style of writers like Dashiell Hammett. Savage Night tells the story of Charlie "Little" Bigga, a pint-sized hitman who is blackmailed out of retirement by "The Man" to kill Jake Winroy, whose testimony as a key witness in a racketeering case threatens to expose the mob. Features all the usual Thompson ingredients of human depravity: lust, blackmail, murder, and a particularly gruesome rape scene where the consumptive Bigga ravishes Ruthie, a one-legged girl!

A Swell-Looking Babe (1954)

Thompson uses his experience as a former hotel bellboy to supply the authentic background to this novel about Bill "Dusty" Rhodes, a bright, good-looking young nightporter who finds himself embroiled in the seductive Texas underworld. The babe of the title is the vampish blonde bombshell, Marcia Hillis, working a scam with gangster Tug Trowbridge to rob the hotel. Look out for Oedipal images of incest and patricide. A disturbing tale of lust, avarice and murder presented in a third person narrative.

A Hell Of A Woman (1954)

Once again, deadly and alluring femme fatales grip Thompson's febrile imagination. Frank "Dolly" Dillon ("Dolly," incidentally, was Thompson's bellboy nickname while Dillon was his Communist party alias) is a salesman who comes across a depraved old woman who prostitutes her attractive niece (Mona) for downpayments on goods. Frank is attracted to the girl but is still married to his trampish wife, Joyce. Mona discloses to Frank that the old woman has a hidden hoard of cash ($100,000) and together they plan to kill her, setting up an unsuspecting alcoholic hobo to take the fall. Things are complicated by the suspicions of Frank's wife and his creepy boss, Staples. Expect blood, infanticide, pumpkins(!), blackmail, more twists and turns than Spaghetti Junction and the disintegration of the narrator's personality on the final page. Gripping stuff!

After Dark, My Sweet (1955)

The compelling tale of an escaped mental patient and ex-boxer (William "Kid" Collins) who gets mixed-up with a crooked ex-cop ("Uncle Bud") and booze-sozzled, spiky femme fatale (Fay Anderson). Together, the threesome hatch a plot to extort ransom money from a wealthy family by kidnapping their son from school. "Kid" Collins, however, is set-up by his treacherous accomplices as the fall guy in this taut, gripping novel of avarice, lust, betrayal and ultimately, sacrificial redemption.

Wildtown (1957)

Lou Ford returns but this time as a more humane, benevolent figure (and obviously at a time pre-dating The Killer Inside Me).

The action is set in the seedy location of Ragtown featuring David "Bugs" McKenna as a prickly, paranoid ex-con who accepts a job as a hotel detective. McKenna believes he has been hired to knock off the infirm, wheelchair-bound hotel owner by the man's glamorous young wife. Bugs accidentally kills the embezzling hotel accountant and is then plummeted into a dark world of easy sex, bloody betrayal and multiple double-crosses. Nasty!

The Getaway (1959)

What starts off as a simple bank heist yarn eventually mutates into an horrific nightmare when the book's two major protagonists, Doc McCoy and his wife Carol, find sanctuary in the kingdom of the enigmatic dictator, El Ray. After escaping capture by enduring two days in underground caves and being holed up in a mound of farmyard dung, the McCoys find that the mysterious El Ray's kingdom they flee to is no safe haven. In fact, it's hell on earth, where fugitives have to pay for their liberty with added financial and psychological interest. It's a place where one's worst imagined fears become incarnate. The effect of Thompson's grim metaphysical musings at the book's conclusion still divides the critics (both film versions dispensed with the book's original, arguably unfilmable, ending). A disturbing masterpiece.

The Grifters (1963)

The classic tale in which Jim Thompson gives the lowdown (with the help of sadistic mobster, Bobo Justus) on how to serve oranges to a person you don't like! Roy Dillon, the son of Lillie, a racetrack collector for the mob, is master of the "short con." He has a romantic entanglement with another expert grifter, Moira Langtry, who sells sexual favours to her landlord in return for the rent money. Together, the three characters get caught up in an incestuous, double-crossing menage-a-trois culminating in betrayal, infamy and murder. Another Thompson masterpiece.

Pop.1280 (1964)

Lawman Nick Corey is fat, lazy, foul-mouthed and an irritating practical joker. His memorable, moronic catchphrase is "I wouldn't say you was wrong, but I sure wouldn't say you was right, neither." But like Lou Ford before him, Corey is a sharp-witted malevolent killing-machine masquerading as a witless, innocuous clown. Set at the turn of the last century in a backwater town, Pop.1280 begins as a raucous, almost farcical comedy but descends into an apocalyptic bloodbath. A dark, disturbing novel that ranks alongside Thompson's best work.

The Rest:

Now And On Earth (1942)
Heed The Thunder (1946)
Cropper's Cabin (1952)
Recoil (1953)
The Alcoholics (1953)
Bad Boy (1953)
The Criminal (1953)
The Golden Gizmo (1954)
Roughneck (1954)
The Nothing Man (1954)
The Kill-Off (1957)
The Transgressors (1961)
Texas By The Tail (1965)
South Of Heaven (1967)
Child Of Rage (1972)
King Blood (1973)
The Rip-Off (1987)

Novelisations:

Ironside (1967)
The Undefeated (1969)
Nothing But A Man (1970)

Screenplays:

The Killing (with Stanley Kubrick)
Paths To Glory (with Stanley Kubrick and Calder Willingham)

News Bits, In Brief

Punishing Your Kids -- From the Cradle to the Grave!
Newsday.com heaps more fuel on the anti-geek fire by promoting Sci-Fi Baby Names, a book advertising "500 Out-of-this-World Baby Names from Anakin to Zardoz," with explanations as to each one's origin, character, and a trademark quote.
Prospective parents of the Comicon crowd, as a fellow cosplay fetishist, I beseech you: Unless you're planning on giving your kid double their required amount of lunch money every day until they graduate, and are then willing to shell out good money for a mail order bride/groom/lovedoll, do not name your children after sci-fi characters. It's not only cruel, it's impractical. Do you know how hard it's going to be to find monogrammed paraphernalia that features the name Zardoz?

Killer Lineup of Upcoming Book Releases
According to E! Online, "a literary agent working on behalf of Ron Goldman's family said Monday that she has found a publisher for O.J. Simpson's once scuttled hypothetical memoir, If I Did It, which contains passages describing how the ex-NFL star would have gone about killing Goldman and his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, if he had been the one
to commit the double murder."

In semi-related-depending-on-how-you-vote news, The Washington Post reports some secondhand information overheard at a hunting lodge: Karl Rove plans to write books after he leaves the White House 18 months from now.

Them Vs. Them
Via Publisher's Weekly: The NBCC announced today that it is launching a new project tied to its blog, Critical Mass. Critics will take turns blogging about NBCC Award winners and finalists, with the goal of reintroducing readers to the hundreds of authors who have been nominated for or won the literary prize. Some of the pairings include Charles Baxter on William T. Vollmann, David Orr on Elizabeth Bishop, Lev Grossman on Richard Hofstader, and Joshua Ferris on Don DeLillo. The focus of each post will be a discussion of a winning book or nominee. Other posts will feature review roundups, reminiscences of award winners by friends and former students, group discussions, and excerpts from books. The first post appears today.

A Glimpse Into the Advertising of 2037: Expect Thom Yorke Flying Virgin America and Eric Schlosser Eating Big Macs

Today's last news bit is a sad lament care of David Pescovitz over at BoingBoing:
"Two of my patron saints as pitchmen. At left, Timothy Leary's 1993 print ad for The Gap. A copy is currently up for auction on eBay. At right, a still from the William S. Burroughs TV commercial for Nike from 1994. View the blipvert on YouTube."

New & Notable: Art Books

Via Cartoon Brew: A new Cinderella storybook that uses Mary Blair’s concept art from the Disney film will be released August 28th. If you're not yet familiar with Blair's deceptively simple work with pastels and paints (as well as scraps of cellophane and fabric), click here and be wowed.

Police guitarist Andy Summers' book of photography, I'll Be Watching You: Inside the Police 1980-83, washes up on our shores August 26th. To view the first 24 pages, click here.

Alisa Golden's Expressive Handmade Books would seem to be the sort of fetishistic read that book lovers would salivate over. And unlike the other books mentioned, this one is already out.

Pulling Away the Curtain to Reveal the Little Man Behind the Movie Screen

Honest, uncensored accounts of the movie making process are rare. Ones marketed as non-fiction are rarer still. Since Tinseltown's formation some 100 years ago, there have only been a handful of instances where journalists have been allowed unfettered access to every aspect of a film's production (from the creation of the script through the first few weeks following its release; where they were allowed to travel among the cast and crew, taking notes as well as names while documenting the egos, the insecurities, the heartbreaks, the stupidity, the well-meaning disasters and the kaleidoscopic shifting of false blame and unearned claims of credit being made). Among these, two reign supreme: Picture, by Lillian Ross, and The Devil's Candy by Julie Salamon. Reprinted below are reviews of both, written by two of the Hollywood's own -- one a well-known screenwriter and novelist, the other an uncredited scribe for Entertainment Weekly magazine.

November 23, 1952
What Makes Hollywood Run?
By Budd Schulberg

Picture
By Lillian Ross.

Miss Ross has anatomized Hollywood," S. N. Behrman has said of "Picture," describing it as "the first blow-by-blow account of what really goes on" and "the funniest tragedy I have ever read."

It is a book with many morals. Perhaps the first and most obvious is that, if you value your privacy, if you do not want to be caught with your clichés down or your pretensions showing, Miss Ross is not the lady to ask into your home. She has explored Hollywood with a camera eye and a microphonic ear. The result is "Picture," which is hardly the "impartial" and "tactful" treatment of Hollywood Miss Ross' publishers claim. (The quality of Miss Ross' impartiality and tact already are well known to The New Yorker's readers of her gentle profile of Ernest Hemingway in 1950.)

I find myself reviewing "Picture" in double vision because in a sense I have already reviewed it: when it appeared in a number (too large a number, it seemed to me then) of New Yorker installments, I reviewed it for my wife and children and friends and anybody else within earshot. Maybe it was what David O. Selnick once described as my "producer's blood" that reacted, but whatever the nature of that fluid it was boiling all the same. I knew it was not good for my soul to fall in with the Hollywood powers, but I found myself echoing their cries of anguish and protest. (In Hollywood a certain trade journalist, with the tolerance for which he is known, closed his column with: "I leave you with two dirty words--Lillian Ross.")

Now that I have read the articles in book form, I find myself wondering whether Hollywood hasn't once more gone off the deep end, an acrobatic feat my home town has perfected through years of practice.

For "Picture" presents Hollywood's more heroic attitudes as well as its more foolish and familiar ones. Never blind to Hollywood's persistent creative effort, it is sharply observant of the business mechanism that blunts the points of some of the industry's sharper talents. It plays back with an unfailing ear some of the wise things that are said in that keyed-up, pent-up industrial town, as well as the wise-cracking, the bathetic and banal.

It was either a lucky or an ingenuous choice that led Miss Ross to "The Red Badge of Courage" as the picture to follow step-by-step from the first ritualistic rumors of High Priestesses Parsons and Hopper to the New York reviews and the box-office returns two years later. The "Red Badge" was the ideal hook on which to hang a study of the classic conflict between serious artistic effort (well, fairly serious and the cold, economic logic of box-office, stockholders and the hierarchy of Loew's, Inc. John Ford knew this conflict when he took a risk with "The Informer" and "The Long Voyage Home," and did his obeisance with "Wee Willie Winkie" and "What Price Glory." For years King Vidor balanced such artistic successes but commercial flops such as "The Crowd" and "Our Daily Bread" with less ambitious box-office winners. Hollywood is not always a Garden of Eden where writers and directors sit by their pools and dream of bigger salaries and bigger pools. A surprising, and largely frustrated, number of them dream of better pictures. For all their insecurity, their compromising, their posturing, these choose--occasionally--to face into the riptide of public opinion and high finance.

John Huston, the director of "Red Badge," and Gottfried Reinhardt, his producer, may remind you of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in modern dress, this time in Hollywood slacks and English tweeds. They are ludicrous, devoted, ingenious, ennobled, funny when they are being serious and somehow impressive even when Miss Ross catches them (and oh how she loves to catch them!) saying "I always wanted to direct a picture on horseback," or "The titles are just marvelous. . . . Piccolos under your name, strings under mine. You will go out of your mind."

Quotations. Like Durante, Miss Ross has a million of 'em. Only Jimmy is more human. Just the same, Miss Ross makes good her threat to learn something about the American motion picture industry. And her eavesdropping with a vengeance begins to take on the meaning and unity of a novel. Dore Schary, the new tycoon who is for the picture, wins out over L. B. Mayer, the erstwhile or last tycoon who does everything in his power (which is legendary until he is eased out of the studio he founded) to keep the "Red Badge" from being made. "You don't want to make money, you want to be an artist," Mayer accuses Reinhardt. Mayer, like his satellite Arthur Freed, believes in clean, cheerful, romantic, American entertainment. Schary does too, of course, but he's willing to take more chances on off-beat stuff like Huston's and Reinhardt's "Red Badge." Schary stands by the picture in his fashion, trimming it, simplifying it and removing some of the scenes that made teenagers laugh and that Huston and Reinhardt had considered their best.

When it's all over, the picture gets respectful reviews, but not what Huston and Reinhardt had hoped for when they first shared a dream of "a great artistic picture that would also make money." "Red Badge" opens in New York in a small theater to poor business. The Academy Award for that year is won by "An American in Paris," produced by Arthur Freed, the man more interested in making money than making art. And who has the last word? Miss Ross has chosen her Greek Chorus shrewdly. Not John Huston nor Gottfried nor Dore Schary nor even L. B. Mayer sits in final judgment. It is Nick Schenck, who runs M.G.M. from his office in New York as head of Loew's, Inc.

"Now, three thousand miles from Hollywood * * * I began to feel I was getting closer than I ever had before to the heart of the matter," writes Miss Ross. "I felt that somewhere in the offices upstairs I might find the few decisive pieces that are missing."

So finally, upstairs she finds Schenck. And this Caliph of Caliphs says, "I supported Dore. I let him make the picture. I knew that the best way to help him was to let him make a mistake. Now he will know better. A young man has to learn by making mistakes. I don't think he'll want to make a picture like that again."

Nick Schenck is wrong, of course. For all his wisdom, there is a restless, stubborn creative streak in a John Huston, in a Gottfried Reinhardt, even in a Dore Schary brought-to-heel, that will make him say again what Huston says to Lillian Ross as this book opens: "They don't want me to make this picture. And I want to make this picture."

November 15, 1991
Play Dough
Entertainment Weekly Magazine (writer uncredited...how Hollywood!)

The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire Of The Vanities Goes To Hollywood
By Julie Salamon

Some books arrive with a buzz. The Devil's Candy, Julie Salamon's exquisitely detailed account of the making of the movie The Bonfire of the Vanities, is such a book. Weeks before it landed in stores, le tout Hollywood had already read it and was talking about it. Bernard Weinraub, the New York Times' new entertainment reporter, had plugged it with abandon. Variety, knowing where its bread is buttered, had taken a preemptive swipe at it. In Hollywood, what everyone seems to be asking is: Why did director Brian De Palma allow someone like Salamon-a bona fide journalist from The Wall Street Journal, not some easily controlled hack-to roam free on his movie set? How could he have been so stupid? We non-Hollywood types, however, are likely to have a different reaction-one of gratitude to De Palma, who, as Salamon puts it in her acknowledgments, ''opened the door, without condition, and then never flinched.'' The question of why good people make bad movies has never been answered more persuasively than in this book. It's a question worth asking because, as a general rule, movies have become increasingly banal as they've become more expensive to make. Bonfire cost more than $40 million, and with so much on the line, the instinct is to play it safe. Bad decisions are the inevitable result. Hence, the role of the judge-a Jew in Tom Wolfe's best-selling novel- is given to Morgan Freeman because, according to studio executives, a black actor could offer some ''likability, empathy, racial balance.'' Bruce Willis is cast not because he fits the role of down-and-out journalist Peter Fallow but because he is a movie star and might draw teenagers to the theaters. On and on the list goes. At one point, Warner Bros. president Terry Semel becomes so agitated by the spiraling costs that he demands that De Palma pay any cost overruns for a scene budgeted at $75,000. De Palma promises to bring it in on budget. Semel's is an act of sheer panic, and it makes you realize why Hollywood's creative community is so contemptuous of ''the suits.''

Not that Salamon participates in this contempt. That's part of what makes her book so good; she lends a sympathetic ear as these smart, likable people explain why they did what they did. She also captures something about the context in which movies are made these days. Throughout the filming, controversies erupted, rumors leaked out about trouble on the set, costs soared. All of this backdrop seeped into the public consciousness, so that by the time the movie was released, its notoriety overshadowed the actual images on the screen. Critically and financially, The Bonfire of the Vanities was a bomb, but it's hardly the worst movie ever made, and what stunned the people who made it was not that it failed at the box office but that it was released to such vitriol. They hadn't heard the tom-toms beating in the background. But Salamon heard them, and so did we. That's one of the reasons we stayed away from the movie in droves. In American culture today, movies also arrive with a buzz.

In It For The Money

800-CEO-Read is a website aimed at corporate fat cats who, when not enslaving underage workers and exploiting natural resources, love to read. While I can in no way recommend their online sales service ( as it surely pales in comparison to ours...at least I hope it does), I do give the thumbs-up to their daily blog. On it, they not only provide their own reviews of the latest business-oriented literature, they also showcase lengthy book excerpts, offer pithy quotes, and best of all, make lists!
This past Wednesday, Todd Sattersten, CEO of the CEO website, posted a reading list for executives that he 'guarantees will help you be more productive and make smarter decisions.'
I'm going to give you the titles, but for the reasons as to why each one was chosen, you're going to have to click here.

1. Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter
2. Execution by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck
3. In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman
4. Good to Great by Jim Collins
5. The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker

Wait a minute. Where's The Winner Within by Pat Riley and The Art of War by Sun Tzu? I could've sworn that Def Jam/Rockafella Records CEO, Jay-Z, has said that they're the hustler's handbooks.

News Bits, In Brief

Harry Potter may not make lifelong readers out of children, but it's responsible for at least one enterprising child's life of crime. This past week, French police arrested a 16 year old boy who had been posting his own translation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows online. While the rest of the free world has spent the past two weeks shaking their heads at the anti-climactic way Rowling chose to end the series, the book's French publisher, Gallimard, will not be releasing the book until October 26th.

The Sydney Morning Herald tempts a slap across the face from Mr. Darcy's frilly glove when it dares to ask, Where's the Sex in Jane Austen's Sensibilities? My initial response was a dismissive, 'What do you expect? She was British.' But then, so are the subjects of our next News Bit...

Via Boing Boing: Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie discuss their erotic comic, Lost Girls, over at SexTV. (Don't say we didn't warn you: this video contains sexually explicit material. It may not be appropriate for children, Jane Austen fanatics.)

News Bits, In Brief

Starbucks Strikes Back: 'You Sell Coffee In Your Bookstores, We'll Sell Books In Our Coffee Shops'

Concerned that caffeine is no longer providing enough of a pick-me-up for their clientèle, Starbucks is making the next selection in their book program a collection of 50 inspirational stories. Listening Is An Act of Love, along with its accompanying CD, will be sold in US Starbucks locations beginning on November 8, 2007.
While bookstores the world over lament this newest corporate competitor, what the hell were they expecting? If we had all just stuck to books and left the coffee and pastries to the coffee and pastry people, maybe none of this would be happening.


Big Deal Means Big Dollars For Big Eyed Comics Characters

The William Morris Agency has signed Tokyopop to represent the publisher's original intellectual property for film, television, digital, merchandising, and game development. Stu Levy, Tokyopop's CEO and Chief Creative Officer says, "We are excited to join forces with WMA as we further develop the Tokyopop brand worldwide. This partnership takes us one step closer to realizing our dream of merging the leading edge of manga entertainment with Hollywood."
Well, just so long as they don't make a movie of that awful Courtney Love comic book.


Tired Of Their Good Reputation & Critical Accolades, Penguin Asks Rock Stars To Design Their Book Covers

The results are, quite predictably, horrid. The Guardian UK has the details.

The Murder That Refused To Die

What a year! First OJ announces that he's written a book 'imagining' his wife's murder, titled If I Did It. Then, following a huge media frenzy and a medium-sized public outcry, the book gets cancelled. (Quick question: Does anyone know if Simpson got to keep the $3.5 million advance?) Immediately after this is reported to the press, the Goldman family -- kin to the male murder victim, and one of the loudest voices calling for the book's cancellation -- files suit, asking for the publishing rights. Fast forward eight nail-biting months to last week, when the courts ruled in favor of the Goldmans' claim. As if on cue, the Juice re-appeared, saying that his 'hypothetical account of killing his ex-wife' was actually invented by a ghost writer and 'filled with errors that he refused to correct for fear of appearing to be guilty of the crime.' Okay, so even if that is true, why would OJ choose to come clean about it now? In hopes of killing sales (pun intended) when the book finally does hit stores. After all, who wants to pay hardcover pricing on a fake murder confession?! But that's not the end of the story. No, not nearly. This past Monday, the book's ghost writer, Pablo Fenjves, stepped forward for his fifteen minutes. This is his statement: "The whole book, the whole idea for a book, originated with O.J. Simpson and a couple of his handlers."
One can only wonder how Simpson will respond to this false allegation and obvious attempt to besmirch his good name. Murder, perhaps? Or worse -- another book.

Author Du Jour: Chester Himes

Biography
(courtesy of wikipedia.com)

Chester Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri on July 29, 1909. He grew up in a middle-class home in Missouri and in Ohio (and) attended East High School in Cleveland Ohio. While he was a freshman at Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio, he was expelled for a prank. Years later, he entered prison for armed robbery. In prison, he wrote short stories and had them published in national magazines. Himes stated that writing and publishing was a way to earn respect from guards and fellow inmates, as well as avoid violence.

By the 1950s Himes had decided to settle in France permanently, a country he liked in part due to his critical popularity there. In Paris Himes was the contemporary of the political cartoonist, Oliver Harrington, and fellow writers, Richard Wright and James Baldwin.

Some regard Chester Himes as the literary equal of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Ishmael Reed says "[Himes] taught me the difference between a black detective and Sherlock Homes" and it would be more than 30 years until another Black mystery writer, Walter Mosley and his Easy Rawlins and Mouse series, had even a similar effect.

Works
(again, wikipedia.com)

Himes's novels encompassed many genres including the crime novel/mystery and political polemics, exploring racism in the United States. He wrote about African Americans in general, especially in two books that are concerned with labor relations and African American workplace issues. If He Hollers Let Him Go — contains many autobiographical elements—is about a black shipyard worker in Los Angeles during World War II struggling against racism as well as his own violent reactions to racism. Lonely Crusade is a longer work that examines some of the same issues. Cast the First Stone is based on Himes's experiences in prison. It was Himes's first novel but was not published until about 10 years after it was written. One reason may have been Himes' unusually candid treatment — for that time — of a homosexual relationship.

Himes also wrote a series of Harlem Detective novels featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, New York City police detectives in Harlem. The novels feature a mordant emotional timbre and a fatalistic approach to street situations. Funeral homes are often part of the story, and funeral director H. Exodus Clay is a recurring character in these books. The titles of the series include A Rage In Harlem, The Real Cool Killers, The Crazy Kill, All Shot Up, The Big Gold Dream, The Heat's On, Cotton Comes to Harlem, and Blind Man With A Pistol; all written in the period 1957-1969.

Cotton Comes to Harlem was made into a movie in 1970, which was set in that time period, rather than the earlier period of the original book. A sequel, Come Back, Charleston Blue was released in 1972. And For Love of Imabelle was made into a film under the title A Rage in Harlem in 1991.

My Personal Favorites
(care of me)

If He Hollers Let Him Go
I normally hate dream sequences, so I wasn't thrilled to see that every chapter in this book started with one. Funny thing is, they work wonderfully here. Instead of surreal space filler, the dreams act as a glimpse into the main character's mind, foreshadowing each progressively worsening day at his job at the south central L.A. shipyards.

Cast The First Stone
This book probably would've been a million seller had it taken place in a foxhole instead of 'the hole.' A prison novel that chronicles the minutia of life behind bars from the first day to the last, Cast's real strength lies in its uncensored examination of the complicated relationships formed by men living in prison.

News Bits, In Brief

This year, U.S. revenue for self-help books will exceed $600 million. While their effectiveness is debatable, publishers, at least, are feeling great.

Audio books are destroying book clubs everywhere! The latest divide among book lovers is not about what they are reading, but if they are reading at all.

This weekend saw a new push in the media for e-books. The 'library in your pocket' pitch was used for the umpteenth time, as well as a new 'save money and trees' angle aimed at politically minded, shallow pocketed college students.

I hate his artwork and loathe his writing, but I never fail to read his delusional interviews. The comics creator you love to hate, Rob Liefeld, talks independent publishing, Image Comics and his Youngblood series at Newsarama.com.