Warren Adler's Blog, page 52

Books That Provide Insights on Power and Ambition

Many of my readers have asked what books I can recommend that offer fundamental insights into the drive for personal power and the way it affects individuals once it has been achieved. There is a vast treasure chest of books, spanning centuries, that deal with this subject and I'm sure everyone has their favorites. Numerous authors have tackled this subject in memoirs, novels and plays.

Fifty Shades of Grey, A ‘How-to’ Book With Many Climaxes

It is with trembling knees and stomach butterflies that I have decided to offer yet one more analysis of why the "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy by E.L. James has become a publishing phenomenon. For those of us in the scribbling trade it cannot be ignored.

So How Do I Get My Book Made Into a Movie?

For years I have been getting queries from writers, published and unpublished, who inquire how they can get their books made into movies. Most of them are unrepresented by agents or are self-published aspiring and hopeful writers new to the game.

The Newsroom, The Show

I saw the first episode of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s take on the so-called inner workings of television news and in the very first scene I got the message. The anchor Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, excoriates a young female student who asks the question: Why are we the greatest nation in the world?

This question sparks a long-winded insulting stem winding rant from the anchor that comes right out of the America really stinks playbook and leaves the poor student utterly embarrassed as if she were the ultimate poster girl for jingoistic excess.

The premise and contrivances of this overly talky show, given the obvious bias of its anchor, is how it can report the so-called news in a neutral way without revealing the bias of its anchor and his acolytes. There will, of course, be the usual fictional conflicts about love and sex, youth and age, moral integrity and crass profit pandering, politics, perceived truths and save-the world youthful idealism and all the usual clichéd themes involving the human condition that spew out of the Hollywood mindset with such certainty and faux conviction.

In some ways I was reminded of Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant satirical take on television, the movie Network, released in 1976, which won four academy awards including best original screenplay. It also launched one memorable line by the actor Peter Finch playing the TV personality Howard Beale, who went off the bend by proclaiming to his national audience a mad diatribe which urged people to open their windows and shout “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

In both shows, the issue is ratings, meaning garnering eyeballs, which are converted into advertising dollars. This, of course, is the object of the game, especially since both fictional shows being portrayed are getting bad ratings.

In the case of the network featuring Howard Beale, the idea is to capitalize on his exhibition of public madness to illustrate its bizarre nature as a deliberate come on to attract viewers. Chayefsky was portraying how the industry would do almost anything to get attention and how this affected the people who worked in the industry and how TV panders to the mass mind.

As a long-time news junkie, former reporter and editor, I have watched the dissemination of news go from a reasonably honest attempt to squeeze the bias out of what went out to the consumer, to what has become blatant strident propaganda for one cause or another with the spin, anger and intensity that would make even the late Mr. Goebbels blush.

What in the world are journalism courses teaching their students these days? I’m not saying it was ever a perfectly evenhanded environment. After all, we zealously cherish our constitutional right for a free press and free speech, but I seem to recall in my lifetime that there was always an attempt to leave the bias of the owners and editors on the editorial page and report the news as the chips fell without twisting the reportorial events to serve one cause or another.

Today, with sheep-like fervor, we follow those who will satisfy our prejudices, validate our opinions, and feed the “me, versus them” line with rigid propaganda points that paint the “thems” as hostile beings undeserving of our respect or interest. At work in this show, I think, is the usual “save the world” syndrome that often afflicts the Hollywood elite when they seek to portray their self-righteous moral superiority.

What makes me wonder about the integrity of Mr. McAvoy’s character is why portray him as an angry America hater from the get go? I kept wondering how he even became an anchor with such a profound distaste for his country. I mean, he really hates America. I never can understand when a television show portrays a powerful media figure who has garnered all the advantages of the American experience and offers up a regurgitating notion about the country and society that gave him such sweet success.

It makes me mad as hell and I don’t want to take it any more.

The Newsroom, The Show

I saw the first episode of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin's take on the so-called inner workings of television news and in the very first scene I got the message. The anchor Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, excoriates a young female student who asks the question: Why are we the greatest nation in the world?

My Watergate

Up front let me say that my relationship with the Watergate scandal, which happened forty years ago and brought down Richard Nixon has always been peripheral; my role, merely, the typical fly on the wall observations of a novelist in search of a story to tell.

My Watergate

Up front let me say that my relationship with the Watergate scandal, which happened forty years ago and brought down Richard Nixon has always been peripheral; my role, merely, the typical fly on the wall observations of a novelist in search of a story to tell.

I do admit that my strange relationship with this national trauma prompted me to produce a novel entitled The Henderson Equation, which in retrospect might have unwittingly struck a vein of hard truth about this seminal event not apparent at the time.

Its premise was that a “fictional” Washington newspaper run by a female publisher had brought down a President and because of its newfound power was now poised to use it to create its own ideal aspirant to this high office.

That said, let me lay out an odd list of “coincidences” that in some mysterious way connect me to the place and the strange events that they describe. Perhaps it is all some narcissistic fantasy of a hyperactive imagination, a Zelig-like bit of egocentric and self-serving meanderings.

I named Watergate. Really. At the time I owned an advertising agency that specialized in real estate promotion and politics (for both parties). The builders who worked for the Italian firm that owned the land were my clients. I was an original small investor in the company that had bought the land from the Washington gas company.  For years there was a restaurant named Watergate on the property, hence my suggested choice of the name.

At a time prior to the Watergate scandal, I was a consultant to the Republican National Committee.  I was an advisor during Nixon’s campaign in 1969 and continued months after his inauguration.

As a resident of Washington during the time of the revelations, I read the daily enfolding Watergate saga as the two young reporters Woodward and Bernstein pried open the bizarre events that led to Nixon’s resignation.  It was, in truth, a battle royal between a newspaper and a President, a raw and ugly war in which the besieged politician was using tactics that were fairly typical of the chicanery that had always gone on in Washington’s ruthless political arena. Had it been considered an aberration would Nixon have continued to record oval office conversations? Would the missing twenty minutes have really changed the disastrous outcome for the President?

The journalist’s timing was perfect. By then technology was making it increasingly impossible to hide nefarious tactics from an increasingly competitive press. Blatant corruption was getting harder and harder to sweep under the rug. A stupid unnecessary burglary, a street smart judge, a blundering gang of amateur thieves, a disappointed civil servant, a couple of clueless assistants and a misguided President were all caught in a conspiracy that was mother’s milk to a newspaper flushed with its own power and trying to make its biggest score.

The arrogance of political power was being challenged by the arrogance of press power. A determined and well financed news organization could mount a campaign of destruction at will. A defense against such a juggernaut was almost impossible to mount. It still is.  But the Post had the bit in its mouth and ran like hell.

It was clearly a mismatch. The Post was at the peak of its power and Nixon, despite his enormous electoral wins, could never shake the “tricky Dick” nickname which the reporters subliminally resurrected as they wielded their once awesome weapons of newspaper clout. But that was then.  The snipers hit their mark, covered themselves in newspaper glory, created an industry and forced the President to resign in disgrace.

In another odd coincidence at the moment of his resignation, I was on a book tour of my first novel, then called Options, now called Undertow, ironically about a Senator trying to cover up an illicit affair and save his career, an event that has become a repetitive Washington staple. My only real major booking on television was in San Francisco where I was scheduled to be on its most popular TV station. I was poised on the set ready to go when the program switched to Nixon leaving Washington on the day of his resignation. I never did get rescheduled.

Yet another odd sidebar was my frequent social contact with Judge John Sirica, the judge who was more than anyone responsible for initiating what became the cataclysmic event. The Judge, now deceased, was a kind of uncut diamond, an ex-boxer who blew the whistle on the perpetrators of the burglary.

He regaled me with behind-the-scenes stories of these events but expressed his disappointment that no one had made a movie about him and his role, while the notoriety and celebrity went to prime perpetrators like Gordon Liddy who now hawks gold for a living and is a talk show host, and the late Chuck Colson who became born again in prison and created a pulpit on behalf of convicts. The event also made fortunes for Woodward and Bernstein and created a hundred spinoffs in movies, television, and a bookshelf of awesome proportions.

When my novel The Henderson Equation published by Putnam came out in 1976, The Washington Post refused to print a word about it, obviously thinking that it was an anti-Post roman à clef, a reasonable interpretation. During this time I met Kay Graham, the Post publisher, at a spa in Mexico. Kay and I bonded as tennis partners and friends at the spa.

On her numerous calls to the paper she learned that I had written this book, which touched a raw chord particularly in her tragic private relationship with her husband. I doubt if she read it but someone had provided her with a summary. Although I explained to her that this was pure imaginative fiction, she imagined it as “real” and spent an entire afternoon remonstrating and offering tearful personal revelations of her life. It left me shaken and profoundly stunned, although it did give me insight into the enormous suggestive power of the novel form to slice into the heart of the truth.

In an attempt to mollify her, I said:

“Kay you are the most powerful woman in America. You brought down a President.” She thought for a long moment, then shook her head. “No. He brought himself down.”

What that conversation taught me is that behind the façade of power lies human vulnerability, insecurity and self-delusion. Although we were never close friends, Kay was always charming and pleasant when we met. She was an extraordinary woman and her autobiography was one of the most insightful that I have ever read.

I did meet most of the significant players in that strange era including John Mitchell, Ben Bradlee, and those who surrounded Nixon as he tried to wriggle out of an untenable position. In retrospect, the event can be characterized as the fifth assassination of an American President who was hardly the reprobate he was made out to be. True, he had his glaring faults but then as we learn in the age of Google more and more about our Presidents present and past, he was hardly as evil and blundering as some and, in many ways, more competent than most. There are those still alive whose still hot hatred of Nixon cannot be chilled at any resurrection of his image. His punishment was disgrace in his lifetime.

But for many who have not lived through those days, the patina of evil is rapidly flaking off his sculpted image revealing a President whose strange lack of public charm, and an odd transparency that favored his darker side, was a detriment to his defense.  But then if he hadn’t single-handedly unbolted the gates of China who would we be borrowing money from to sustain our way of life for decades after his demise?

The Knee-Jerk Standing Ovation

I have been baffled for the last few years by audiences rising up like ecstatic robots to give a standing ovation to every Broadway show I have recently attended, no matter how puerile, how badly performed or conceived, no matter how mediocre, as if they have just experienced a high point in national culture.

Are Best-seller Lists Irrelevant?

It may be time for the media that covers the book business to stop publishing best seller lists. They are, in today’s book choosing environment, disorienting, unhelpful and confusing, a valiant but failed attempt to make sense out of disorder.

“The Womanizer” Review by Aaron Lazar

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Warren Adler is a master student of the human mind, its inner workings, and the interesting, bizarre pathways that occur in (particularly) disturbed or non-heroic figures. In THE WOMANIZER, Mr. Adler delves into the life of Allen Harris, a man who has had three intense love affairs while being married to his adoring, long-time wife, and in his usual, inimitable fashion, the author evokes unexpected empathy for this seriously flawed character.

I despise the behavior of infidelity, (I believe marriage is forever unless there are some very bad extenuating circumstances, and I really look down on adulterers!), but Mr. Adler actually made me sympathize with his Mr. Harris. Now that’s true talent. I admire the writer who can take a despicable man or villain and elicit sympathy from his readers, in spite of the awful truths that cannot be denied. Mr. Adler is very good at shades of gray in the literary painting of his characters; he provides a great example for those of us who always seek to improve our own writing and characterization.

The journey from current day reflection (“I am up for a new prestigious job, will they find out about my affairs and disqualify me?”) to the intense and really convoluted thoughts flashing back to past relationships (“I really love my wife and would never leave her, I don’t know why I’m doing this, but I’m still a good husband…”) to the obsession about how deeply our protagonist must have affected the women with whom he had these affairs (“Will they seek revenge? Will they ruin my chances?”) to the deeper, darker thoughts that made me wonder if this guy would simply kill them all to shut them up…  it was quite a ride!

Here is a passage that depicts the inner workings of Mr. Harris’s delusional brain, with apologies to Mr. Adler for removing a few of the more provocative words for the sake of making this review easily accessible to all:

“In a strange way, time had distorted the old fear. Once his primary anxiety had been exposure, blatant, in-your-face exposure, a full-blown confrontation, in the midst of, as they say, flagrante delicto in living color, imagined as a kind of movie in his mind. There he would be, caught in the act by someone, a photographer perhaps, disengaging in panic, revealed with moist dwindling tumescence, his skin flushed pink by aborted passion and embarrassment, while his partner of the moment was poised and ready. There they would be the three of them in a tableau of expectation, rage, shame, and humiliation.

Explanation would be impossible, although he had gone over the possibilities in his mind again and again. He would have had to compound the felony with meaningless protestations as if the female human he had held in thrall at that moment did not exist, was an illusion, a kind of ghost. It was nothing, he might whine, merely a roll in the hay, a passing moment of pure lust, “commanded by the one-eyed monster,” as McNaughton, his partner, a blatant philanderer, put it often. The truth lay elsewhere. He could, of course, find excuses and rationalizations like Sandborn’s contorted explanation, implying the ruthlessness of the male libido, which could attack self-discipline like a virus.*”

*Adler, Warren (2010-09-23). The Womanizer (Kindle Locations 1515-1520). Stonehouse Press. Kindle Edition.

There is a lovely surprise twist toward the end, and although it felt like the very end was a little abruptly ended (my humble opinion), it is worth the read, especially to those who marvel at the capacity of the human mind to delude itself.

Mr. Adler professes to write “genre-less” fiction. If pressed to assign a genre, I’d say this falls into literary fiction or psychological drama. Not that it matters, it’s still a fascinating read.

Recommended by Aaron Paul Lazar, www.lazarbooks.com