Ed Gorman's Blog, page 209

Something in The Shadows by Vin Packer

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Ed here: I was looking for a copy of the Vin Packer cover for Something in The Shadows (the great Dillons did it) when I stumbled across this review by Michael Carlson on his IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS site. A) This is how reviews should be written and B) This is the finest review of how Packer's finest novel (to me) relates to today's pop culture. I admire the book more than Carlson does but his points are well taken. Carlson's site doesn't seem to be active now which is too bad becaue the man can write (take a look at his credits when you link the the entire review).

FRIDAY, 27 FEBRUARY 2009

VIN PACKER'S SOMETHING IN THE SHADOWS: A Forgotten Friday Entry Michael Carlson

There's a certain resonance to Something In The Shadows now, in the light of first the HBO series Mad Men and then the Hollywood copycat Revolutionary Road, both of which try to address the restrictive boundaries of 1950s American society. The novel is arguably the best of Vin Packer's psychological thrillers, in which a small killing, of a cat, grows into a murder, but the real suspense in the story is the watching of Joseph Meaker's mind crumble. It's reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith, and therein lies part of the tale.

Meaker and his wife live in an old farmhouse, in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from which Maggie commutes to her New York job in advertising. Advertising was a buzz-word at the time, and as both Mad Men and Revolutionary Road confirm, we still see the era as defined by the take-over of the sell, the slick media presentation, over the reality of life. Joseph is a scholar, in dead-end pursuit of hex-signs on Bucks County barns, but he spends much of his time contemplating his lost college love, Varda, a Hungarian woman whose activist nature contrasted even more than Maggie's with his pseudo-intellectual passivity; the key moment in their relationship came when he fled racist hecklers at a Henry Wallace for President rally in 1948; Varda of course was working for Wallace.

http://irresistibletargets.blogspot.c...

Beyond The Valley of Burt Hirschfeld

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Ed here: The website Glorious Trash has a post about writer Burt Hirschfeld (using the name Hugh Baron here) and some of the novels he wrote in the spirit of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of The Dolls. If you were alive in 1969 you'll remember that Susann and her novel were inescapable. Susann gave good snarky tv interviews, which helped, and famously feuded with Truman Capote who dumped on her novel. She went after him with gay slurs which only raised her profile--and profits--all the higher. Dolls was pure soap opera and not particularly good soap opera at that but the book was set in Hollywood and had enough seeming insider stuff (she'd been an actress at one time) that it sold millions. Below is Hirschfeld's version of Susann. Even at GOP parties you don't meet women this mean. In Hirschfeld's defense he was a good pulp writer. I enjoyed many of his non-Susann novels and have managed to hang on to a few for forty-some years.

Glorious Trash:

It's this flashback nature which hampers The Goddess Game. In short, the storylines for each of the four women are mostly the same. The material in 1969 however is true trash gold and makes one wish for more of it. For as the narrative progresses we learn that Mandy hasn't just escaped; she's been kidnapped, and the kidnappers already have a stash worth of photos of Mandy taking part in "unwholesome activities" with a bunch of men and women.

Only Mandy's flashback sequence comes close to equalling the 1969 portion: Mandy is a true trash fiction bitch, the "Neely O'Hara" of the novel. (The entire novel comes off like a "spot the Valley of the Dolls analogue" guessing game.) Like Neely, Mandy Brooke is a pill-popping man-eater, a malicious monster who schemes and manipulates and backstabs. Her flashback is the juiciest, as she sets up "friend" Holly so as to steal her part in a Broadway play: Mandy pays some bikers to rape the poor girl, and then, while it's happening, places an anonymous call to both the cops and the gossip rags that a "wild sex orgy" is taking place with a Broadway actress in attendance. From there Mandy becomes only more deliciously conniving: she makes a famous, elderly director fall so in love with her that he divorces his wife of decades; then she sleeps with a variety of men so as to become pregnant and fool the director into believing that it's his child, so he will marry her; then she gets an abortion while he's away. Finally she literally screws the poor bastard to death; now that she has the standing of his name, she doesn't need the man himself.

for the rest go here:
http://glorioustrash.blogspot.com/

30 Rock Rocks Out

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Ed here: Last night's 30 Rock tore into the discussion about women in comedy. It was funny but it was also angry, something you don't see often on network sit-coms. Here's an interesting piece on it from Salon.

"30 Rock" takes on feminist hypocrisy -- and its own
The show skewers Jezebel, sexy female stand-ups, lame period jokes -- and we all win VIDEO
BY REBECCA TRAISTER

NBC
Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) and Abby Flynn (Cristin Milioti) in the February 24 episode of "30 Rock."
Last night on NBC's "30 Rock," Tina Fey and company dove head first into the mud-wrestling match that is the ongoing conversation about women in contemporary comedy. The show took particular interest in the recent kerfuffle that erupted when unofficially-feminist-but-totally-feminist women's pop-culture website Jezebel took on the beloved "Daily Show" for not featuring enough women as on-air talent or in the writers room, and for its hiring of lissome-but-arguably-not-hilarious Olivia Munn as a token female cast-member. The episode was a direct entrance into the controversy that has lately swirled not only around Munn and "The Daily Show" but also around Fey and her "30 Rock" protagonist Liz Lemon: the one about the very combustible relationship between women, comedy and feminism.

The show begins when a website called JoanOfSnark.com takes "30 Rock's" meta-show "TGS" and particularly Fey's meta-character Liz Lemon to task for not employing enough women. In response, Liz hires Abby Flynn (Cristin Milioti), a pneumatic, infantilized, thumb-sucking trampoline jumper whose character was both an obvious reference to Munn (who took a girlish hop on the old trampoline for a Maxim shoot) and, to my eye, an even more devastating take on the pigtailed creepy-sex-object shtick of Sarah Silverman, two hot real-life funny women often credited by male critics for their comedic talent while those women who don't make their sexuality the most salient part of their personae get ignored or dismissed.

fr the rest go here:
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv...

New Books: No One Will Hear You by Max Allan Collins and Matthew Clemmons

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NO ONE WILL HEAR YOU
a new books piece by Matthew Clemens

It was Butterfly McQueen, in the role of Prissy in Gone With The Wind, who said, "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies."

That was sort of the feeling I had while Max Allan Collins and I worked on NO ONE WILL HEAR YOU, the sequel to our first Kensington forensics/serial-killer thriller, YOU CAN'T STOP ME. Max and I have been collaborating for over ten years and, most of the time, I have felt comfortable working with a writer considered by many to be a living legend.

The usual analogy for this sort of thing is that writing a book is like giving birth. If that's true, then this was like having a litter of puppies while juggling chainsaws and riding a unicycle after drinking a triple espresso.

All during the process, characters misbehaved, didn't step up to the plate and perform, or, in some cases, new characters entered the world fully-formed and ready to rock. Characters wanted, even demanded voluminous interior monologues, but that desire was slowing things down. The book was, in short, giving us fits.

Then, well into the process – me having finished my rough draft, Max about one-third of the way along on his draft - we made some decisions. First, streamline. Though response to the first Harrow, YOU CAN'T STOP ME, had been largely positive, a few readers and reviewers complained that the opening third took too long to get things set-up and the story rolling. With a large cast, it's easy to get bogged down in back story.

So, following the examples set by Ed McBain in his 87th Precinct books, Richard Stark in his Parker novels, and Dashiell Hammett in, well...everything, we cut anything that didn't drive the plot forward or inform characterization.

In our other collaborations, we had always used fewer chapters (12 to 15 being the norm); this time we tripled the number of chapters but cut their length by up to two-thirds. Where the mantra in real estate is location, location, location, ours became pace, pace, pace. The idea was to trim the fat and turn this book into a lean, mean, fighting machine. At the same time, we had been contracted to deliver at least 100,000 words – bestseller-style thrillers don't fit the 50,000-word format of McBain and Stark.

So this took us into new places, including plot twists we had neither planned nor anticipated. When Max and I decided we needed to go all Hammett on their asses, that put me a few chapters ahead of him, cutting and sometimes adding. I remember vividly calling him up and saying, "Looks like we're going to kill character's-name-here!"

"Groovy," Max said.

Although these alterations to our joint style took us out of our comfort zone, we felt these changes would turn this into a rocket ride from beginning to end.

We think we've succeeded. Read NO ONE WILL HEAR YOU and see if we're right.
=

Lee Pfeiffer's hilarious take on the "new" Academy Awards

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Ed here: Lee Pfeiffer of the excellent magazine Cinema-Retro posted this bemused take on the "new" Academy Awards coming next Sunday night. I agree with Lee--guaranteed disaster. Support Cinema-Retro!

By Lee Pfeiffer

A.M.P.A.S. is still desperately trying to attract younger viewers for its annual Oscar telecast. Once considered to be "must-see" TV, the broadcast's ratings have declined in recent years. This resulted is an annual pledge to do something radical to attract younger viewers. The most contentious plan was to change the rules to include ten nominees for Best Picture, double the usual number. However, since only five director's can be nominated, everyone realizes that the other five are largely superfluous choices designed to honor films that stand no chance of winning. Consider this a sop to fans of The Dark Knight who complained that the Academy wasn't hip enough to nominate the blockbuster for Best Picture. Changes this year include getting rid of the tag-team of Barbie and Ken types who present an Oscar together amidst the God-awful "spontaneous" banter. Instead, there will be more responsibility on the two hosts, James Franco and Anne Hathaway, who are the youngest people ever to host the event. The fact that most people over the age of 30 may not have even heard of them may result in a lack of enthusiasm for the older audience that remains Oscar's most loyal viewers. There also won't be film montages of classic genres. The gimmick is being retired after last year's awful tribute to horror movies that was compiled by people who think modern slasher films merited more time than the Universal monsters classics or Hammer horror flicks. They are also going to do away with dispensing with the Best Song nominees in a collective number and once again present the songs in their entirety. Given the fact that it seems there hasn't been a memorable song nominated since Ronald Reagan sat in the White House, this should ensure plenty of bathroom breaks for those viewers with weak bladders. There will also be the cringe-inducing gimmick of watching a selected groups of mothers and grandmothers, who will be referred to as "Mominees", to Tweet their observations about the broadcast on their Twitter accounts. That's the final straw for me. I'll be on vacation in the Dominican Republic and I was reluctant to leave the temptation of island drinks and cigars to be cooped up in a hotel room watching the Oscar broadcast. I'll now leave it to friends who are house sitting for me to give me their observations, but it might constitute cruel and unusual punishment. For the Hollywood Reporter's story about the changes to Oscar

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news...

Joe McGinnis looking bad?

Ed here: I hope the following isn't true. Way back in the Sixties Joe McGinnis wrote The Boys in The Bus, his adventures in covering the Nixon campaign. Hunter Thompson created one kind of political sub-genre, McGinnis another. Since then he's had a successful if spotted career. Some of his books I didn't care for but I never doubted his scruples. If this is true, I'm disappointed. Or am I being naive? In truth I'd rather read the other guy's book anyway. He actually worked for the dragon lady.

Huffington Post:


JUNEAU, Alaska — The author accused of helping leak an unpublished tell-all on Sarah Palin is releasing his own book on the former Alaska governor this summer.

Amazon.com lists a Sept. 20 release date for author Joe McGinniss' "The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin."

McGinniss made headlines last year when he moved next to the Palins in Wasilla while researching the book. The move prompted complaints by Palin, who extended the fence between their properties.

More recently, McGinniss has been accused of helping leak a draft of an unpublished tell-all by former Palin aide Frank Bailey.

McGinniss didn't immediately return messages Tuesday. His book agent, Dave Larabell, told The Associated Press that McGinniss wasn't the only person in the publishing world to see the manuscript. He declined further comment.

One more ebook venue - unproduced movie scripts

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From The Huffington Post:

Film and television director Hubert de la Bouillerie just launched EMovieBooks.com, the first online company to sell Hollywood writers' stories electronically for downloading on iPads and eReaders.

The site features traditional formats of screenplays, as well as its own unique format that removes direction cues. It also features published and unpublished novels and novellas and film and TV treatments compiled as short stories.

"EMovieBooks.com crosses two frontiers," said de la Bouillerie in the site's press release. "First, it gives readers access to brand new content from writers who are fantastic storytellers; and second, it fulfills the needs of today's readers - eBooks for mobile devices like the iPad that, at an average of 100 pages each, are quick reads that fit into busy lifestyles."

The site will initially only feature unproduced scripts by film and TV professionals who have at least one creative credit on IMDb. It already contains the work of writers Mark Medoff, Robert Klane, and Warren Lewis.

Lewis said, of the website, "When Hubert came to me with the idea, I thought: 'This is brilliant. Just because a movie doesn't get made doesn't mean it's not a fabulous story. Why not give readers everywhere access to these stories and let

Kiss Me Deadly - Robert Aldrich

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Ed here: Peter Bogdanovich writes the best kind of blog, informed, amused and opinionated, even though some of his opinions collide with mine i.e. his mandatory put-down of Mickey Spillane. But this post is a fine example of a man who knows both Hollywood and the history of film writing about an infamous masterpiece and a director who occasionally had true greatness in him. http://blogs.indiewire.com/peterbogda...# You should definitely bookmark the site.

Kiss Me Deadly

by Peter Bogdanovich


Talk about the tension between a director and his material—which was one of the critical cornerstones of the French New Wave's reassessment of American movies—-and they were the first to point out this frisson in the work of iconoclastic director-producer Robert Aldrich; perhaps most noticeably in his aggressive independent film, the dark and dangerous 1955 thriller, KISS ME DEADLY (available on DVD). Aldrich hated detective-fiction writer Mickey Spillane's novels so much that he took one of the author's most popular and typical Mike Hammer private-eye stories and transformed it into not only the best picture ever made from Spillane (which isn't saying much) but a savagely angry film noir classic of annihilating dimension—-literally: At the end, everybody, including Hammer, gets blown away in a dusk-lit Malibu beach house by no less than a nuclear blast. What then happened to L.A. is left to the imagination.

The whole thing starts out quietly one night with a terrified young woman—-Cloris Leachman's first role—-running barefoot along a deserted blacktop wearing only a raincoat. Hammer—-played exceedingly tough, with virtually no charm, by Ralph Meeker—-picks her up, tries to help her. When she gets murdered anyway, it really pisses him off and this is how he gets involved in the labyrinthine mystery that unfolds and remains fairly difficult to figure out all the way through. But, though often impenetrable, it's also completely riveting—-like a down and dirty The Big Sleep—-Howard Hawks' equally mystifying 1946 detective picture with Humphrey Bogart as Raymond Chandler's detective, Philip Marlowe (also available on DVD).

New Books: LONG PIG by James L. Ross

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LONG PIG. James L. Ross
318 pages. Perfect Crime Books. ISBN: 978-1-935797-10-4
Publication date: February 24, 2011.

My favorite line in LONG PIG comes near the end: "If he couldn't help anybody, at least he could fuck someone up once in a while."

Hayes has served his prison time over a Pentagon billing scandal. Now he's done with the D.C. crowd. His daughter has hired him as an off-the-books investigator at her P.I. firm in Hollywood. He's got a scriptwriter lady friend who's twenty years younger than him. He knows he's an anachronism, knows all his points of reference are out of date, takes small comfort in the scriptwriter's occasional reference to him as "Studkins"—suspecting she's joking. This is the kind of character I like, because I've known people a little like him: over the hill, doubting that the past meant much. Hayes knows he can't reform the Washington system. He knows he bought into a lot of b.s. as an army helicopter pilot. He had an epiphany in prison that his old beliefs were like water going down the shower stall drain. So then the complication: a political fixer back in D.C. thinks Hayes is leaking a damaging story about the war-hero President. Since it's a story Hayes may have picked up from a gay sergeant who served with the Prez in Nam, this could be a little worse than a Swiftboat tale. The sergeant is conveniently deceased. Now the political fixer sets out to shut Hayes up.

What I liked to imagine was: How would a guy like Hayes, at this stage in his life, deal with people who believe he's a pushover?

I knew a guy more than twenty years ago who had been at the U.S. compound during Tet, and some of his background made its way into Hayes's. Hollywood and D.C. people might be a little recognizable. I didn't want to write a roman a clef, but I like stories that have at least shallow roots in things I've known. So they have life beyond the immediate needs of the plot.
JAMES L. ROSS February 19, 2011

One more for Uncle Leo

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This is not only a frame from my favorite Uncle Leo scene (it's hard to choose just one, no kidding) but also my favorite of his array of 1970s leisure suit jackets, the turd brown one. Just looking at him makes me feel better.

Robert Bob Levinson is a fine mystery writer and a fine reporter on the Hollywood he grew up in and remains a part of to this day. If Bob ever writes his autobiography it will be a best seller. Bob was nice enough to end me an e mail about Len Lesser, Uncle Leo.

Hi, Ed...

Len was a lovely gent. Lived within blocks of my son's pizza restaurant; came in often, until health problems led him to phone ordering for home delivery...During my time as president of the Hollywood Press Club, Len starred for us as Harry Cohn in a one-act play written by the late Malvin Wald (of "Naked City" fame; Jerry Wald's brother). Suffice it to say, he was terrific...A couple years ago, a mutual friend asked if I might be interested in co-authoring Len's autobiography. I declined, given it's not what I do, but did put Len together with another friend. Last I heard, the work was going well and she'd gotten Seinfeld to write an intro, but otherwise I have no idea of the project's current status...

Stay well.

Warmest regards,
Bob