Rex Pickett's Blog, page 4

From a "Sideways" Fan

Andrew Beall, musician and composer —

   I've gotten so much praise for a little novel I wrote that became a movie that so many people seem to love and admire and, to this day, still remember it as though it came out yesterday.  But this morning I woke to a lengthy E-mail from someone I don't even know.  He seems like a nice, very talented guy, so I thought I would publish his E-mail (I didn't bother to copy-edit) in toto because it epitomizes the kind of love I've gotten over the years for this book-cum-movie.  Thanks Andrew.  Much appreciated.

   Dear Rex, 

   As my rock quartet pulled into Elkins, WV, last night around 11pm, I was determined to find an open Wine/Liquor store so I could bookend my journey of Sideways just as I started it a two weeks ago … with a glass of red.  Not necessarily the Portuguese Serras I had enjoyed with Pg. 1, Oct. 20th, in my NYC apartment - but some form of grape, even if it was labeled "wine product", from a 711 (Lord, please no).  Without any luck, my fellow bandmate and I went searching for a local tavern, where I would ask to buy a bottle straight from the bar.  The local bar, "Journeyz" reeked of smoke, a smell I forgot existed in public establishments, and we went in for a quick scotch (the bartender just chuckled and shook her head when I asked about the wine) and then back to the hotel.  But I couldn't wait - I finished Sideways last night, sans red, con smile.  

   Thank you for writing such a delightful read.  As many, I was turned onto your novel from the movie.  The summer of 2005 I happened to be attending a musical festival in Santa Barbara, living in the mountains of Carpenteria all summer, and playing classical music.  One evening, my fiance (x) and I enjoyed the movie for a 2nd time after a 4-stop wine tasting.  30 samplings in, no spit, (had to get my $90 worth, being a starving artist and student) I got even more delight out of Sideways the 2nd time, which had already been elected my favorite comedy of all time.

   And Sideways continued its journey throughout the next 6 years with me.  I'd show it to every new friend, every new girlfriend, even ran into Paul Giamatti outside Lincoln Center before a concert, and confessed that I watch Sideways at least once a month.  

   I'm a percussionist and composer in NYC, and currently writing a Broadway musical, Song of Solomon.  My lyricist (a Stanford grad, now Philosophy professor at GA State) and I created a tradition when watching the movie - which we've now shared with our Solomon actor (an opera tenor who intoxicated me with his passions on the grape while selling me bottles at a famous wine seller in northern Manhattan) which involves 3 steps:  1)  Drink when they drink.  2) Say the lines when you know them.  3)  Dance when the music commences.  We now carry on that tradition with our 4th Sideways buddy, who is a violist/violinist, assistant conductor of Song of Solomon.  And sure, some evenings one could spot 4 grown straight men dancing about, clumsily clutching stems, trying not to spill on my rug, as we journey into the contagiously fun world you've created.

   So before our last NYC "reading" of SOS in September, I bought all 4 of us a gift, that we would start reading simultaneously after our showcase:  your novel.  I began the page-turner while preparing for my first Spiderman show (Oct 27) on B'way, and just now finished it, on tour with my rock quartet, Cordis.  When Song of Solomon becomes the mega-hit it will be, I will have the means to bring Sideways (the play) to Broadway - or musicalize it, who knows!  :)

   Thank you for never giving up on your writing (I've now learned reading your blogs and watching interviews) - it's a sincere inspiration for Neil and I, as we continue the mammoth journey of writing, rewriting, promoting, and finding investors and producers, for Solomon (which you will receive a front row invitation to its premiere).  One thing's for sure -  the beginning of all writing sessions - when Neil comes to visit for a joint writing marathon - is to let a bottle or two breath … and watch Sideways.  

Have a great weekend!

Andrew Beal

p.s.  Yup, I have already have 4 copies of Vertical for my 4 buddies, which I'll have to patiently wait to start with them, after they receive it as their Christmas present.

The Death of Traditional Publishing

   I was reading an article in The New York Times on how Amazon is now actively courting authors with branding (i.e., name recognition) and making deals wit them to publish their next book.  First, Amazon developed the Kindle, a dedicated reading tablet.  Problem is:  they needed content.  The publishing industry told Amazon that they needed $12.99 per e-book to stay in business.  Amazon knew that they had to offer e-books for under $10.00 or else their Kindle might have trouble finding an audience — and they had millions invested in the Kindle.  So, what did they do?  The took a loss.  In order to sell Kindles.  Which they did.  En masse.  But now customers expected their e-books to cost only $9.99 — or less!

   When Jobs and Apple came out with their iPad they learned that Amazon was deliberately kicking back money, in essence, to the publishing industry and said, "Hell no!"  Long story short, after much high-level hand-wringing in the publishing corridors, the publishers, most of them anyway, decided to lower the price on e-books so that Jobs and Bezos could make a profit.  I mean, how come it took so long?  What?  You don't want to sell books?  Do you really have the same expenses on e-books as you do on analog?  Don't you realize this is where the industry is headed?  Idiots.

   Then, Amazon did two interesting things.  First, they realized that tons of aspiring writers, shut out by the publishing industry's arcane, and highly subjective, winnowing process, took the bull by the horns and started publishing their own books through a slew of online publishing entities, and thought:  "Hey, we can do that."  And Amazon became both an e- and analog publisher like iUniverse, etc.  Then, more interestingly to me, going back to the above link, they said, "Not only can we publish writers who can't get published, we can publish authors who are sick and tired of being ripped off by the publishing industry on royalties."  Hallelujah!!  I never thought I would champion a rampaging conglomerate like Amazon, or whomever, but this is one case where I am all for the death of the publishing industry and whoever effects that death.

   I've written about this extensively before, but it bears repeating.  I was pressured to sell Sideways because my agents, and others, thought that not having a published novel when the movie came out, would be embarrassing.  Even with a film in the works by the likes of Alexander Payne, no one wanted the book.  So, I sold it at a fire sale to St. Martin's Press for $5,000.  Yep.  If I had not sold the book and rolled the dice and waited for the release of the movie — given now how it was received — I've been told I could have gotten anywhere from half a million to a million for my book.  I lost that bet.  Listening to publishing agents (and I'll get to why I'm glad they're also going the way of dinosaurs in a minute), and knuckling under to their "wisdom" at a time when money was very tight.  A horrible place from which to negotiate.

   St. Martin's Press, as has been well chronicled in my blogs and elsewhere, did nothing for the book when the movie came out.  Zero.  Zilch.  When I tell this to people they look at me dumbfounded, thunderstruck.  "You're not a millionaire from the book?" they all seem to say in utter confusement.  Under pressure from my agent, St. Martin's did come out with a movie tie-in edition, but, other than that, they did nothing.  Absolutely fucking nothing!  Because I was only making a $0.70 royalty per book I was not motivated to hire my own PR firm and do my own promotion.  However, at various wine festivals and other big events I was mobbed.  Several times I sold so many books, while fans waited in long lines, that my hand cramped.  St. Martin's didn't get it, didn't care, or just didn't want to invest in building a PR strategy — complete with Web site, other social media, etc. — around that success.  I guess they were content with the million they made off their $5K investment.  It doesn't make sense.  It still doesn't.  Nothing much about the publishing industry makes sense when you've had a taste — and, boy, is it a bitter one! — from the inside like I have.

   When all was said and done with Sideways, it sold nearly 150,000 copies, was translated into a dozen languages, and is an audio book, as well as, now, an e-book.  And I, after agent fees, made less than a hundred grand.  That's right.  Oh, sure, I got a nice check from the generous people at Fox Searchlight when the film went into produciton.  But, the book?  Less than $100K for all revenue streams.  People can't believe it.  Believe it.

   As chronicled in my Foreword to the Sideways hardcover, when the movie became a smash and ended up winning over 350 awards, including 5 Oscar nominations, my publishing agents, of course, wanted me to write another book.  I didn't know what I wanted to write.  They thought they had an idea.  They read a script I had written in the early-, mid-'90s titled The Road Back and had the cockamamie idea that it would make a great novel.  I didn't think so.  They came back with an offer from Alfred A. Knopf (the literary division of Random House) of all publishing houses.  Wow.  I was impressed.  Not with the monetary amount of the offer (high five figures), but Knopf.  Over the years they'd published some of the greatest works of literature I had read, been inspired by, and come to love.  I signed.  One of the worst "business/artistic" decisions I have ever made in my entire life.

   I struggled with the book.  Finally, after months of toil, I turned in a draft that I was happy with and was ready to roll up my sleeves with a really talented senior editor.  This was going to be hard work, but fun.  I was, my agent exhorted when I hesitated to sign the contract, working with the best.  Yeah, right, asshole.   It took the senior editor (who shall remain anonymous in her ignominy) 5 months [sic] to respond.  FIVE MONTHS!  That's a serious momentum killer for a writer, as well as a confidence destroyer.  And, what's worse, you don't KNOW it's going to be five months!  I finally got a two-page analysis — which was totally unhelpful — and 20 minutes of her time on the phone.  I wrote another draft.  Same thing!  Months flew by, squandered.   I couldn't believe it.  I'd been treated badly in Hollywood, but never like this.  And, remember, I was under contract with these people.  My agent promised me that all the shit I took from St. Martin's was going to be different with Knopf.  Are you kidding me?  

   4 months into waiting on notes on my second draft, I decided — partly because I was getting the feeling that they didn't like the book — to morph the main story into the Sideways sequel Vertical.  Because I unilaterally decided to do this they started to treat me even worse.  At one point they acted unscrupulously and, for legal reasons, I can't really go into what they, in seeming collusion with my publishing agent, did.  But, let's just say:  for the guy who wrote a novel that became a multiply award-winning, and much beloved, movie, a book/movie that lives on to this day, I didn't get much love, to put it mildly.

   In anger, I turned to the self-imprint route, found an entrepreneur who had had experience with the publishing world, knew how huge the "branding" of Sideways was, and went in a different direction with him.  I've blogged about that experience here.  We've had our share of vicissitudes in re-inventing the wheel, as it were, but it's been far more rewarding to be in control of one's own destiny.

   As an avid reader of books, especially ones that require deep immersive reading, I have a great love for the writers who have inspired me over the years.  I don't want to see literature die, though, sadly — and this is another blog — I'm seeing people read less and less.  There's no question that traditional publishing had its place.  Though it was never a perfect system — and there are tons of stories of authors who should have gotten published and didn't, and vice versa — the truth of the matter is:  if you're an aspiring writer today, and you manage to luck out and secure an agent, and that agent is fortunate enough to land you a publishing deal your joy will almost for sure end there.  If I'm any example.  I could wax on and on in detail about the little things that all added up to my contempt for the traditional publishing world.  But, let me just sum it up like this:  I will never, ever, publish with a traditional publisher again so long as I live.  Unless, unless, they guarantee me a multimillion dollar advance and a PR budget to match — which they will never do in a, well, million years.

   So, I'm elated that Amazon is taking down traditional publishing.  Okay, so they're going after name authors and probably won't be in the vanguard of discovering new writers.  But new writers, you can publish your books for less than a $1,000 and market them through social media practically for free.  And, if you gain any kind of traction, here's the great news:  you can cut out the publisher usorious take, the agent's usorious 15%, the distribution people with their greasy hands in your pocket — all of those vultures — and take all of the profit for yourself.  How does $7.00 an analog book sound compared to what I made:  $0.70?  How does $4.00 for every e-book sound compared to fifty cents?  Sure, there's still a minor stigma attached to self-imprints and it's harder to get your book reviewed.  But, you know what?  Book critics are becoming superannuated.  No one reads them anymore.  And Amazon, unwittingly, is eroding that stigma even further by publishing legitimate and established authors.  Hooray!

   I've said a thousand times about indie film and self-imprint books, as it relates to the digital world:  the good news is:  digital is going to give everybody a chance; the bad news is:  digital's going to give everyone a chance.  But, from my two experiences with traditional publishing, I have come to several ineluctable and, I believe, incontrovertible conclusions:  traditional publishing is mired in the 20th Century and though they realize that digital and social media for marketing is the future, they are ill-equipped to deal with it; their winnowing system of agents and senior editors and determining what gets published is more flawed than they would like the book world to believe.  (Tinkers, the 2009 Pulitizer Prize winner, was turned down by over 100 publishers, parked on the author's hard drive, and then resurrected by a friend and published by a tiny medical press!  And that's not an isolated story.); if you do manage to get through the Maginot Line of agents and senior editors and get your book published they will take every dime of your success and leave you scratching your head in utter dismay.

   Traditional publishing may not be dead, but it's staggering like a spavined donkey across a desolate desert, moribund at best.

Think Different

   "Here's to the crazy ones.  The rebels.  The troublemakers.  The ones who see things differently.  While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius."

                                              — Steve Jobs

   This is a little bit rambling, without the usual attention to prose detail — redundancies, etc. — as I'm wont to do, but I wanted to get it out.

   I was saddened, as was practically everyone in the world, not so much that Jobs died, but that he died so young.  I didn't know that much about him, other than the fact that he's the reason in 2002 that I threw my virus-plagued Dell laptop at the wall — literally hurled it in a fit of anger — marched down to the new Apple Superstore in Santa Monica and bought a MacBook.  I never looked back.  But in reading some of the many online panegyrics to Jobs it started to dawn on me what a visionary this guy was, and how much I had unwittingly modeled my life on his.

   Don't worry, I'm not in a million years going to compare myself to Jobs.  For one thing I actually graduated from college.  For another, I'm terrible — but getting better at — marketing and business.  My life has been one of words and images.  His has been one of marketing genius and visionary product ideas.  But somewhere for me the lines on the graph of our lives strangely converge, and I feel a kinship to how he achieved his stratospheric success.

   I have always, from an early age, been drawn to the iconoclasts, the rebels, the transgressives, the people who envisioned another world, whether it be in politics or psychology or art.  Most of my focus was on the arts — and, more specifically, literature and film.  I was also deeply taken by the rebel thinking of the great psychologist C.G. Jung and, at age 19, dropped out of school for two quarters and read his entire Collected Works.  That was as life-transformative an experience for me as when Jobs admitted dropping LSD a couple of times and how it had opened his mind to a world that, for the vast majority of people, is closed off.  LSD didn't do the same thing for me as it did for Jobs — Jung was huge, as were the brilliant minds I met at my alma mater, UCSD — but I feel a real affinity for his not finding much inspiration in the standard form of education, the standard path to success in a given field.

   From David Pogue's column in The New York Times:

   "Steve Jobs refused to go with the flow. If he saw something that could be made better, smarter or more beautiful, nothing else mattered. Not internal politics, not economic convention, not social graces.

   "Apple has attained its current astonishing levels of influence and success because it's nimble.  It's incredibly focused.  It's had stunningly few flops.

   "And that's because Mr. Jobs didn't buy into focus groups, groupthink or decision by committee. At its core, Apple existed to execute the visions in his brain. "

   These words — especially "groupthink" and "decision by committee" — really resonated with me and my writing and filmmaking life.  They would resonate with any artist who intrepidly went against the grain to try to bring to life what they had conceived in the discrete intracranial theaters of their imagination.

   The artists — writers and filmmakers — I was drawn to were the ones who mostly went unrecognized, and were wholly understood, in their time:  the visionary poetry of Arthur Rimbaud; the black comic novels of Louis-Ferdinand Celine; the films of the great Luis Bunuel (who did find fame near the end).  And many, many others.  They dared to go where others wouldn't go, and they exacted a heavy price — in suffering, personal misery, bankruptcy, addiction, and suicide.  It's extremely difficult to go against the current and, worse, to believe what you're envisioning is what everyone else should understand — and which they often come to understand years later (Van Gogh anyone?) — and then have to endure the rampant philistinism, the ignorance of the banal mind, or, even worse, the people who want to mollify your vision and somehow try to bring it more safely into the contemporary world, because now, they, see what your vision, could become.  I call it the "pilot fish" mentality.

   When I read that Jobs dropped out of school, I totally related.  When I entered UCSD I felt the same way Jobs did:  it wasn't supplying me with the education I wanted.  Oh, sure, it's easy to think others know what's best for you and to tow the line, take the required classes and get your degree, but I was stubborn, rebellious.  So, under a special university stipulation, I created my own major in the literature and visual arts departments.  I didn't want to be forced to read Chaucer and the Brontes if I didn't want to.  I didn't want to take art history courses on Etruscan art if I was more interested in, e.g., making films.  I'm very proud of what's written on my diploma:  B.A. in Special Projects, Specializing in Contemporary Literary and Film Criticism.  (Summa Cum Laude, btw.)

   I remember when I told my parents about my major they were appalled.  They were paying good money for what?  It was sort of assumed that a Special Projects major was tantamount to sunworshipping at the beach and smoking pot.  Far from it.  We were on the quarter system (11 weeks, including finals), and for one 4-unit Special Studies class I wrote the first draft of a novel.  Often I would read at least 10 novels and show up with a 30-page paper — for 4 units!  My major was, like Jobs's peregrinations in the tech world at an early age, hard work, but it was so filled with passion for seeing movies and reading difficult contemporary literature that not only was it not work, but I learned two, three times more than anyone else in a traditional major.  Like Jobs, I was the ultimate autodidact.  I learned what I wanted to learned, exposed myself to what I wanted to expose myself to because — and this is important — I was forging my own path, my own sensibility, and I needed to educate myself the way I saw fit in order to achieve what I wanted to achieve.  Jobs did the same, against all conventional wisdom.

   Many years later when I wrote Sideways I faced the same criticism that I faced with that Special Projects major.  First there was incredulity that I could write a book as bawdy and personal as that.  Just like with my filmmaking and writing career, people always thought someone as educated as me should have done something that would have vouchsafed me a safe and normal income.  I had a family business that my father wanted me to captain, and if I had I'd be a multi-millionaire today — in the laundry and leasing business (Ugh!).  My moving to L.A. and going to film school crushed his spirit.  He had it all figured out for me, had the Mercedes and the house on the beach waiting.  All I had to do was follow the script.  I didn't, and he drank himself to an early grave.  I had a passion for something that he saw wasn't going to guarantee me a nice living — and, for a long time, he was right — but I had to go my own way, risk the ignominy and impecuniousness that I would ultimately face.  It wasn't easy.  Many times I wished I had gotten into his laundry leasing business.

   When you do show talent at something, when you do have a passion for something that is out of the norm, friends and family either want to talk you out of it, or, when you start to really produce stuff, co-opt it., tell you what to do with it.  Everyone has a plan for you, everyone has an idea how you should go out to the world with your creations.  But these are the same people who are too cowardly — yes, cowardly — to go out and do it themselves.  But that doesn't stop their spate of criticism and, worse, career advice.

   I remember when the iPad was released, David Pogue wrote an article in The New York Times.  It was two separate reviews:  one was a review for the techies, and the other was a review for the non-techie consumers.  Predictably, the former was a pan and the latter was a rave.  In other words, the techies had all kinds of criticisms, they hated it, they consigned it to failure before it was even launched.  If Jobs had brought these techie critics into Apple Inc. and asked them — remember the word "groupthink" and "decision by committee" — what they thought about this new device that he was about to release because he was, God forbid, insecure about it, and if he was thin-skinned and listened to them, there would be no iPad … no iPhone … no iCloud or, at the very least they would have been released it in a very compromised way.  Jobs didn't give a shit what they thought!  He had a vision.  And if he was tyrannical in seeing that vision to fruition, then I'll let others comment on that, but he didn't listen to his critics.  Listen to your critics and you'll always end up compromising and following the low common denominator "groupthink" opinion.  The resultant product — be a novel or a new radical smartphone will be half, or less, of what you imagined.  It won't be innovative; at best, it'll be just okay; at worse, imitative.  This explains why Apple made with their phones and tablets and other many companies like Hewlett-Packard were left in the dust.  One man forged the vision, others pusillanimously waited to see if he would fail or not.

   And the groupthink never stops for those who are forging new directions.  When I showed early copies of Vertical around to close friends, even though it was now destined to be a self-imprint, even though I was coming off the huge success of a novel that no one wanted, that people told me to burn, there was still criticism, as if now that the creation were extant, if I just did this, or just tweaked that, I could make it that much better.  Everyone had their own perception of what a Sideways sequel should be.  Others looking at the small picture — as Jobs never did — were mildly offended by some of the language or a few graphic sex scenes — and seemed, at the time, to see the larger design of the book I had envision and spent years writing.  Now that there was a sequel to the iconic Sideways, everyone had an idea what it should be, after the fact.  Some criticism is good — especially if it hits home — and I take it well, so I consented to some minor changes, but, like Jobs, I had to go with my instinct, with my heart, which was the core theme of his now famous '05 Stanford graduation speech, in which he exhorted the graduating class to listen to their inner voice, and not to the cowardly naysayers — be they parents, or Hollywood agents, or nervous publishers or cold-feet venture capitalists.  Hold true to your vision.  I've been trying to do this all my life.  It's not easy.

   Why listen to anybody if you have a vision of something that nobody else does and want to will it into existence?  I listen to people.  When I hear something that makes sense, I'll make changes.  Writers, unlike Jobs who could forge ahead with his ideas — especially as he became increasingly more powerful and successful — are more subject to groupthink and decision by committee.  A lot of it has to do with money.  A well-known producer told me recently:  "When we buy your script, we feel like we own you."  It's something that's bedeviled artists from time immemorial.  In the end, of course, it's whether the finished product is a success or not.  But, even then, a failure may one day turn out to be a success.  In Jobs's world, success is measured by the reaction to a product.  His Apple TV is clearly a tech disappointment, but the iPhone, iPad … huge successes.  In my case, success is measured by numerous other factors, but the ideation, the creation are similar to what Jobs went through.  And, then, ultimately we have to go to the world with our creation.

   Going to the world with our creations is the hardest thing.  Even the greats have weathered failure.  Perseverance, belief in yourself, against whatever insuperable odds, are key.  It's not easy.  It never has been.  Dreamers, visionaries, are, usually, at first, despised, vilified.  Hemingway's own mother called The Sun Also Rises "despicable smut."  His mother!  Then, when — if they are — recognized, the flummery starts.  Often by those who were the vilifiers.  Maybe the dreamers need this push-back from the philistines and the idiots, the ones who can's see the future of a business or an art-form in order to break though in a new direction.  Maybe that's part of what drives them.  For me, I see something in my imagination, and I just want to go there, damn the consequences, and play it out, see what happens.  Why should I censor myself because of what I think will be better for the market?  But consequences I have paid, continue to pay.  It's never-ending.

   When Jobs died I truly believe the international outpouring of emotion for his passing had less to do with the fact that so many tens of millions — hell, billions — had so anthropomorphized his innovative products like the iPod and the iPhone and therefore felt a special kinship with the man who had created them — but more because Steve Jobs epitomized the type of dreamer who everyone wants to be, but whom few can emulate.  I cannot tell you the number of people who come to me wanting to be writers or filmmakers or whatever, seeking my advice, seeking some words of wisdom that will inspire them to live their dreams.  There's no way I can teach someone how to have ideas, how to write, how to make films.  That they have to work hard and find on their own.  What I can tell them is to have, like Jobs, the courage of their convictions, even though it flies in the face of everything they hear — from parents, from friends, from lovers, from future business people who get involved in their careers.  They're going to hear so many things that absolutely don't jibe with their vision, and then it's just a question of how much courage they can muster to forge ahead and not sell out to these competing, and often conflicting and disparate, voices.  Filmmakers, dating back to Orson Welles, have had to watch more powerful men destroy their films — The Magnificent Ambersons by William Randolph Hearst — writers have seen their works bowdlerized and rewritten because they were too transgressive, like Lawrence and Miller and even James Jones's From Here to Eternity.  Every time, it seems, you try to forge a new direction, someone is out to compromise you, if not downright quash your vision.  Even the venerable Alfred A. Knopf threatened not to publish Vertical if I demanded to keep my somewhat controversial ending — an ending which has readers in tears.  I didn't cave.  I've compromised many times before, and every time I rue the day.  What I want to say to these people is:  go suffer to write your own fucking novel.  And the more successful you become, the more you have to weather.  And in this digital day of the Internet, you have to weather from so many, now, uncredentialed quarters, it's frightening, increasingly difficult to train your ear to your own inner voice.

   The tears for Jobs are not because he created a brilliant smartphone; the tears for Jobs are because he dared to live a life that others are too cowardly to live, but would like to, if only they didn't have to risk failure, critical opprobrium, personal embarrassment, financial hardship, corporate bankruptcy, and all the rest that comes with the territory of being an iconoclast, a visionary, in whatever field.  Jobs will be remembered more because of the life he led and the way he led it, and less for the products he created.  When my works touch someone in a special way that resonated with them in some personal manner, that's when I know all the suffering, all the naysayers I've had to listen to and try to block out, was worth it.  My only wish is that it would one day cease.  But it never does.  I truly believe Jobs felt the same way:  if only they would see that he is right and they are wrong and just leave him alone and do what he says.  But, no doubt, his critics will follow him to the grave.  But, in the end, he won, and those critics, those pissants, desperate for their little moment of ephemeral glory, will be forgotten like so much chaff in an October wind.

"Sideways" Stage Update (Oct., 2011)

   The Ruskin Group Theater Co. just held the second "cold read" of the Sideways play.  After the first read I went back inside, as I reported in an earlier blog, and did a major rewrite.  The rewrite dealt more with time and staging issues than it did with narrative ones.  We had a slightly larger audience of about 15, and we had a video crew there to document it.

   We got underway a little late, but the actors were terrific reading, without the benefit of props and staging, etc., and, for some of them, the first time out loud.  So difficult to get everything right, especially given that some of the dialogue is lengthy and peppered with polysyllabics, as is my wont — as is the wont of Miles, I should say.

   I and the Ruskin Group — Jason Matthews (the driving force behind this); Michael Myers, their Managing Director; Mike Reilly, their Production Director; and John Ruskin, the Creative Director — felt that this second draft had made leaps and bounds toward beginning pre-production.  The first act still timed out a tad long, but the second act was really tight.  There was a lot of laughter!  A lot!  One of their overriding concerns was:  what was I going to cut?  It wasn't that it was too long narrative-wise, it was that it was just a little too long in terms of getting an audience in and out and home in a reaonable amount of time without compromising the play.  I told them not to worry.  Only the writer knows what got cut; the audience is oblivious to that.

   We're now going to move into the next phase and secure a director.  While we undertake that process I'll go back inside and make some judicious cuts, try to streamline Act I a little, but mindful of several facts:  a lot of streamlining will be done in the rehearsal process vis-a-vis how, and what, problems, manifest in the staging; I don't want to lose perspective, and that's a legitimate danger coming off of material that I originally wrote back in '98!

   What's going to be so exciting is to see this play come to life.  Jason approached me some 8 months ago about the prospect of doing a play of Sideways, and I was initially reluctant.  But as I've gotten to know him and the "two Mikes" (as we call them) and John Ruskin, it's just such a joy to work with people who are into theater for the love of the work, for the love of this particular material.  Then, too, it's also going to be gratifying to be working in a medium where the writer is ostensibly king.  Unlike screenwriting where, once you sell your script, you have zero control — in fact, so little control they can elect to throw you off the set if they way — in the theater the director and writer work closely together to shape the play with the cast.  They can't change a word of my dialogue without my permission — I don't even think Aaron Sorkin has that kind of control!

   Anyway, I've been posing the following question:  what piece of material has gone from novel to screen, and then on to stage.  No one has been able to come up with an answer until yesterday when Mike Reilly said that Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men went exactly that route.  I'm not, in a million years, going to compare myself to Steinbeck, but that's pretty august company.

   The play is happening.  We're going to set a date some time next week.  We're all looking for a January premiere.  We hope to have week sponsored by a different winery.  My refrain:  "No Yellowtail Merlot in plastic cups!" at the Sideways play.

   Stay tuned.

Thoughts on a Day of Waiting ...

   (Warning sign for the wheelchair-dependent in China; reminiscent of a scene in Vertical.)

   So, I finally joined the Twitter crowd.  I sort of understand it, and I sort of don't.  I guess E-mail is borderline moribund, especially logorrheic e-mail, which I'm wont to write.  If the Internet wasn't already obliterating deep immersive reading, certainly Text-ing (hate that word) and Tweeting (even more embarrassing) are surely driving our increasingly shorter and shorter attention spans into veritable oblivion.  I'm no exception.  I'm just as guilty as the rest of the world.  And yet every day I feel this tremendous need to turn everything off and just read, in silence — whatever I can buy living on this prosperous alley where gleaners come in all social classes — and let myself go to another world.  What did Jung say?  "We owe an incalculable debt to the imagination."  The Internet is destroying the pure imagination of our discrete intracranial theaters.

   I was pondering this a few months ago while watching HBO's 5-hour miniseries, Mildred Pierce, starring Kate Winslet.  It was nominated for 21 Emmy's, and though it didn't win as many as it had hoped, there was something interesting about it to me, a writer, a writer of novels — as well as screenplays, too.  Todd Haynes, the director, dared to take James M. Cain's lesser novel — which had previously been made into a feature film starring Joan Crawford and utterly vitiated in terms of what they did in changing the plot — and film it virtually scene for scene, word for word.  I have to admit, it kind of dawdled in places and, like I said, it's not Cain's best — that would be The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity — but what amazed me was not only the fealty to the source material, but how a novel, a deeply feminist, period piece one at that, could have another chance in film form, thanks to HBO.

   Why do I bring this up?  I fear for the future of the novel, especially longer novels.  I fear so much I'm not sure I would ever embark on writing one again.  For a long time I've wanted to adapt Raymond Chandler's masterpiece, The Long Goodbye.  It was made by Robert Altman in 1973 and the result, which I re-watched a few weeks ago, starring Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe (??) is atrocious, one of the worst films I've ever seen.  If it was any other film I wouldn't care.  But it was a film based on the great Raymond Chandler's magnum opus, a book he labored on for over five years, and Altman treated it like some airport rack, dime-store novel, destroyed everything about it that made it so masterful.  So, as I said, I've always wanted to do it, or adapt it and have someone else direct it, but as the studios have grown increasingly risk-averse with their franchise films and 3-D poppycock and sequels and prequels, a film like The Long Goodbye would just be too expensive, probably not appeal to a mainstream audience because, after all, it's a pretty downbeat novel in the end, even if Marlowe does solve the brilliantly convoluted case.  I.e., it would never get made today by a studio.

   But … but, after seeing Mildred Pierce, a flare went off in my head:  a 5-hour miniseries on HBO or wherever.  You can do period cheaper on television because you don't have to recreate backgrounds with such accurate verisimilitude.  And The Long Goodbye needs that 5-hour leisurely pace to really play out its sensibility of deep lament.  You can't truncate that novel to two hours and hope to have it make much sense, let alone elicit the themes that Chandler worked so hard to achieve.

   So, I guess what I'm saying is that maybe the future of novels is in their being TV miniseries.

   That said, Snooki has 1,000,000 more Twitter Followers than the Dalai Lama.  Bravo, which started out as a cable channel devoted to independent and foreign films, is now the all Real Housewives from Airhead Nowheresville.  Kim Kardashian is a mega-star for doing nothing except being a friend of Paris Hilton, who has never done anything except being born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and for being in a sex tape — well, both of them.  Almost all newspapers now are practically nothing more than content farms, including the once Top 10 paper, The Los Angeles Times.  Nothing is sacred.  It's open season on anything that once had substance.  Conversations are shorter.  You have to make phone reservations through E-mail and text-ing just to talk to a real human voice these days.

   Just some thoughts while I wait on notes on the last draft of my HBO pilot.  I'm very excited about the Sideways play because it means I'll get to go to a theater 5 days a week for casting and rehearsal and all the rest and interact with real human beings and not be married to my laptop and smartphone.  Maybe, too, theater is the future of the novel as well.

   I still believe in the novel.  Please don't die on me.

New News on The "Sideways" Play ...

  (Above:  De Kooning; before he descended into alcoholism and dementia.)

   The next reading of the Sideways play has now been scheduled for Sat., Oct. 1, at 2:30, at the Ruskin Group Theater Co. in Santa Monica.  If anyone wants to come, you have my e-mail, you know how to reach me, let me know.  This is the second "cold" read.  There'll be some different actors and some of the same.  I rewrote the play after the first read, cut it down by almost 1/5, restructured it a little for Act I and Act II purposes, and revised quite a bit for staging logistics and the like.  I have to admit, I'm pretty excited, and nervous, to hear it read again.

   It now appears that because of production exigencies and minor delays on the Ruskin Group Theater Co.'s next stage production that a mid-Dec. opening of Sideways would butt up against the holidays.  We're planning a much more realistic opening date of early January, 2012 (obviously).  This will allow us more time to coordinate some of the multi-media things we're hoping to pull off, not to mention have enough time to involve wineries — great wineries! — in sponsoring given nights.

   At some point, Loose Gravel Press (Tim Moore and yours truly) will publish the play and it will be available on our Web site.

   Keeping this post blissfully short.  I have to get back to my HBO pilot, those Twitter tweets, those Miles and Jack FB uploads, and all the rest in a busy life.  I don't know how people do it with children.  Here it is now nearly 6:30 p.m. PDT and I haven't looked away from my computer screen but a few times since I woke this morning around 6:00.  I think I forgot to eat lunch.

   Rex

First Sideways – Now Vertical

First Sideways – Now Vertical:

Grape Radio Interview.  Very fun.  

Rex Pickett (me) Update:

   Above:  Miles's great great great great … great … great grandfather …

   Getting ready to head off to Santa Barbara where I'm going to be doing a series of radio spots for this Mille Miglia Concours d'Elegance event.  Say, what?  Well, I'm going to be a celebrity guest in this vintage Italian car rally that journeys from Santa Barbara to Napa/Sonoma and back.  Then we bivouac in Santa Barbara for 2 days at the S.B. Polo Club.  I don't really envision myself in a vintage Italian car, but I'm kind of surreally looking forward to it, as any writer might who's always seeking new material.  Will not, however, be caught on a polo pony.

   On a more serious note.  We're gearing up for the second cold read of the Sideways play.  The first one went better than expected, but since a play is always a work in progress until opening night it did necessitate another draft.  That was completed last week, Jason Matthews (who has been shepherding this for the Ruskin Group Theater Co.) is arranging the next read.  I cut down the play a fair amount.  I eliminated a lot of extraneous characters.  I sharpened some of the scenes, compressed others, and took out some lines and exchanges that didn't get the laughs I had hoped for.  I think the next read is going to be much more streamlined.

   I'm very excited about the play.  I'm very critical about my work, and, as a result, I wouldn't do it if I didn't think it worked.  And it definitely works.  It was evident to everyone who sat through the first cold read.  There's just something about Miles and Jack, I don't know.  They're funny, in their drunken antics; they're flawed (i.e., real); and they really do — especially in the theatrical version — experience pain and heartbreak and the whole gamut of emotions that anyone in mid-life feels.  Also, doing the play kind of takes me back to my indie filmmaking days.  And though obviously a play is not something shot out on location, unlike a novel it does have actors and staging, elements that are much closer to filmmaking than novel writing.  And … the nice thing about writing a play, unlike writing a novel that's going to be made into a film, is that, within reason, I have final say on things like casting, who's going to direct, etc.  I also like the fact that it's a collaborative medium.  Novel writing can be very lonely at times.  Filmmaking, when it was going well, was fun because there was a camaraderie with a gaggle of talented people that I hope to re-experience in theater.

   My wine-themed HBO pilot is rounding into shape.  I finished the first draft and am now launching into the second.  We're still in the development stage, but there's a lot of excitement.

   Man, I got more comments and feedback on that Gary Vaynerchuk blog I wrote last week.  I really think Gary has been maligned by the wine industry, sucked up to, and then talked behind his back.  I hate this kind of hypocrisy and elitism.  Gary, love him or not, was great for wine.  I personally loved his Wine Library TV shows.  The guy wore his heart on his sleeve, wine was — and still is — his passion, and he should be lauded by the wine community instead of given all these "good riddance" elegies for his shows.  Sheesh!

   Sorry for such a boring, seemingly informational, blog, but I've been writing every day, all day, and it's been a challenge to stay fresh here, but some people have been interested in what my day is like, so there you have it.

   Rex

R.I.P. Wine Library TV

   About five years ago I was bored or bummed out or something and I was doing a Google search for Sideways, something to uplift my spirits when I came across these YouTube videos of this young, short-haired, dark-headed, brash young man (30) delivering wine reviews from a stark desk with a New York Jets helmet dump bucket [sic] and a chalkboard on the wall behind him with cryptic aphorisms.  I think the first show of his I saw was a Sideways-themed episode on Kris Curren's Sea Smoke wines.  That's when I first "met" Gary Vaynerchuk.  He opened his show strongly, like that government poster of Uncle Sam with the red-white-and-blue top hat on, head leaning forward, his finger brandished into the lens:  "We want you!"  Gary, instead, said, "Hi, everyone, welcome to Wine Library TV.  I am your host, Gary Vay-ner-chuk.  AND THIS MY FRIENDS IS THE THUNDER SHOW!  Aka, the Internet's most passionate show on wine."  I think I got it right from memory.  I kind of had mixed feelings after that bombastic, in-your-face opening.  Clearly, this Gary Vaynerchuk was a force of nature.  But did he know anything about wine?

   In that first Webisode, and in all the subsequent shows I've watched, Gary was witheringly critical.  He dissed Curren's Sea Smoke 10 (clearly an overrated, overpriced Pinot cashing in on the fame of Sideways) and gave higher points, I believe, to the less expensive, less heralded, and better, Botella.  After that, I started to take Gary seriously and his show became a kind of "guilty pleasure" of mine afternoon after afternoon.  (I even found myself catching up on old shows when he didn't post that day.)

   After 5 years and 1,000 shows, Gary retired Wine Library TV and started the Daily Grape, in an effort, I assumed, to keep doing the show, while also keeping up with his punishing travel schedule promoting his books which, ironically, are not about wine, but rather marketing, especially in social media.  After only 89 episodes he folded the tent on Daily Grape.  It had lost its energy, the production values weren't as good — and they were pretty bare bones on Wine Library TV — Gary had lost his energy, the shows were shorter, less inspired, it was time to let it go.

   Gary V. (as I, and many of his fans, like to call him) was a lightning rod in the wine industry.  Because of Sideways I've been afforded some privileged access to people and places that others, except those in the wine world, are afforded.  When Gary's name came up, as if often did, it was almost universally met with disdain.  I didn't understand it.  I actually genuinely liked the guy and his show and I tried to take his side.  Okay, it's true, Gary could be very self-aggrandizing, promoting himself and his brand with a zeal that some people thought was disingenuous and downright obnoxiously self-serving, but which I came to learn was intrinsic to his personality.  I'll admit, Gary could be annoying when he would chop off august guests like the great Jancis Robinson or Heidi Barrett, as if they were the sideshow and he were the star.  Well, folks, guess what?  Gary was the show.  And though you might have held him as an upstart in contempt — Robert Parker ring a bell, anyone? — you were shameless in politicking to be on his show.

   I experienced a lot of the same jealousy that comes with success as Gary did, though in an entirely different way.  Gary, it's true, inherited a liquor store from his family, and with the passion of a dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur, turned it into a mega-million dollar business.  He was one of the first people to realize the raw power of the Internet, the tsunamic force of social media, and apply it to the sale and promotion of wine.  Now, everyone does.  His 50-100 point scores were borrowed, of course, from Parker's much maligned rating system, but Gary didn't abuse them like Wine Spectator and someone truly contemptible in the wine business, James Suckling.  Okay, Gary's "sniffy sniff" bordered, at times, on the ludicrous.  But, frankly, I always found the "winespeak" of so-called wine professionals to be grandiloquent to a fault.  I've loved the language, because I value words, and I love the way people reach for words — the only thing they have in their arsenal — to describe the aromatics of a wine, the front palate, the mid-palate, and the finish.  Okay, Gary sometimes waxed pretty bombastic, but then so does Parker and many others.  Why should he take so much heat?  I'll tell you why:

   Gary was charismatic, funny, youthful — yes, youthful! — and made you believe what he was saying about the wines he was assaying.  And he delivered it in a way that wasn't pedantic or pretentious.  He ventured far and wide — and though some might have criticized him for trying to out-iconoclast everybody else in a  kind of deliberately ostentatious manner, I viewed it differently:  Gary is a restless guy, he wanted you to see the world through wine, and he was going to be your tour guide.  Love him or hate him, Gary made talking about wine seem fun, exciting.  I once sat in on a Burgundy seminar chaired by the great Allan Meadows.  What a crashing bore!  Droning on and on about how many hours of sun a certain vineyard got in the Cote d'Or.  Are you kidding me?!  Fucking pour the wine, Burghound!

   Okay, a disclaimer:  I've had dinner with Gary and a few friends.  He also was generous to write a very short, one-page mini-Foreword to the hardcover edition of Sideways (although it took a month to wrest it out of that busy guy).  And, yes, I sent him a copy of my sequel, Vertical.  But I've been known, like Gary, to speak my mind.  I've taken my hits for it, from everyone in the wine world, and elsewhere.  If I thought the guy was a joke, or was just using wine — as some people have accused — as a springboard to other ventures, I'd tell you.  I personally think Gary is passionate about wine.  I think he probably did use it, by his own admission, as a stepping off point for something greater because, again in his own words, he's an entrepreneur at heart, not a wine critic or wine writer.  So, what's wrong with that?

   In his six years of Web TV shows he cut a huge swath through the wine world.  Like Sideways, he drew an increasingly younger and younger audience to wine appreciation, to the point where he had a following in the thousands.  And where do you think the future of this industry is?  In the livers of those over 50 who still read The Advocate as though it were some sacred scroll?  Give me a break.  Gary wore his heart on his sleeve, and that's something that I personally relate to because that's what I've tried to do in my writing.  And it isn't easy.  He may not have been your Average Joe, but he never talked down to anyone, he never lorded his knowledge over his audience — as use to happen to me all the time at wine tastings.  He spoke fondly of his family, his passion for the NY Jets, could be wickedly funny, or sometimes just a kid with his predilection for mass market candies.  Agree or disagree with his assessments, the guy knew his wines, he knew the players, he was fascinating, mesmerizing, to watch.  He sported an uninhibited exuberance for the grape that flew in the face of the often stuffy, reserved, rarefied world of "professional" wine criticism.  He demystified wine without dumbing it down like some others I won't name.  He understood that wine was a complex subject, that it changed every year and was difficult to stay current on, but he didn't think it was beyond one's power to not at least attempt to grasp some of its complexity.  Sometimes he did it by exhorting his loyal followers to try new wines, to explore new regions.  He hectored them, he charmed them, he drew them in with his you're-going-to-like-me-no-matter-what outsized personality.  He was unlike anyone the wine world had ever seen — except for maybe someone like Randall Graham, but the Internet made Gary larger than life, way more huge than any other wine luminary, which he had meteorically become.

   Gary was right when he said that the three most important things to happen to the wine world in the past ten years were — he said it, I didn't — Sideways, Two Buck Upchuck (my moniker), and Wine Library TV.  Without question.  The wine industry has benefited hugely by those three seismic phenomenon.  And what do they all have in common?  Disdain from many people in the wine business.  Until Sideways became a hit movie it was reviled by everyone.  They even mounted a campaign to shut the film down two weeks before beginning principle photography because certain individuals thought it was a too transgressive look at the Santa Ynez Valley wine world.  To which I shout:  Hypocrites!  Two Buck Upchuck deserves all the opprobrium heaped on it and more, even if it did rope in a lot of people who were drinking Zima and piss-water beer and transform them into wine drinkers.

   And Gary V.?  He put a recognizable physiognomy to wine.  He single-handedly, in my humble opinion, hoisted wine into the 21st Century.  He stomped down barriers of access and privilege like no one else before him and vehemently argued that anyone could develop a palate, you didn't have to have the wallet of an affluent man, bulk up a cellar and then pretentiously point out at wine tastings how you had a half case of '58 Chateau d'Yquem hoarded there, all the while looking down your aquiline nose and wearing your ascot to hide your turkey neck.  I hate that snobbery, which is so endemic in the wine world.  Gary, wittingly or unwittingly, worked indefatigably to shatter the ramparts of elitism which have kept the wine world so mired in the 20th Century.  And he became famous, ridiculously so:  he was on Oprah, Letterman, et. alii.  And, so, naturally, when you get a little whiff of celebrity they're going to come after you, they're going to try to tear you down, deservingly or not.  I've experienced it first hand.  It's not a fun place to be sometimes:  the sniping behind the back and all the rest.  Gary, much of it unbeknownst to him, took more than his fair share, but like Bill Clinton and his Teflon persona, he moved on, fighting the good fight and not allowing himself to get pulled down into the ditch with his petty, pissant, Pinot-sniffing critics.  Gary forged his own path, his own identity, made millions, it's true, but he entertained a lot of people, got them excited about wine, and now has moved on.  He, like me, did everything that many in the wine world wished they could have done if, to quote John Gregory Dunne on screenwriting, they had the time, or the inclination, or the energy.  Gary had it, and he had it in spades.  

   I don't give a shit what anyone else says in the wine world, where corruption and greed and hypocrisy are rampant, Gary's show and his magnetic personality will be sorely missed.  The wine world may kick him in the seat of the pants as he goes out the door, but, like Kelly Slater in the surfing world, Tiger Woods in the golfing world, etc., there won't be another Gary V. for a long time to come.

"Sideways" Play Cold Read - 08.19.'11

   The Sideways play "cold read" was held two days ago, Friday, at the Ruskin Group Theater Co., where it will be presented probably sometime in December.  We had an audience of around 10.  And about that many actors to match.  I was nervous.  I'd never written a play before.  I've written scripts, novels, short stories, magazine articles, even audio porn in my youth, but I'd never written a play.  It was adapted from my novel, not the screenplay, for legal reasons, so, naturally, I was both eager, and anxious, to hear it read.  By actors … and not eidolons in my head!

   The Ruskin Group Theater is a small space.  The stage is actually quite ample given that it only seats about 75.  In my mind, it's a perfect venue to see if a stage adaptation will work.  Also, one has to make allowances in a cold read for the fact that the actors have never done this before with the other actors, have not rehearsed or been directed, are obviously not "off book," don't have the benefit of props, or movement, etc.  There's zero production design, no lighting, no music; ergo:  the moniker:  cold read:  8 actors sitting in chairs facing the audience.  It can be an unnerving experience.  I remember sitting through the cast read-through of Sideways, held two weeks before they started shooting.  I don't want to go into the particulars, but everyone was really noticeably nervous.  There was much hilarity throughout, a good feeling that they had something, but afterward they all realized there were things to work on.

   The actors the other day included Peter Cilella as Miles, Amy Jacobson-Ruskin as Maya, Ashley Noel as Terra, and a terrific actor whose name I'm blanking on as Jack.  Other actors, some playing multiple parts, included artistic director, Mike Myers, William T. Ensley, Edward Edwards, and Nicole Millar.  As I wrote in an earlier blog I adapted the play from the novel relatively fast.  I had to condense some things, and set certain scenes in different locations, as it were, but I wrote it very fast (3/4 weeks max).  I never re-read it — something I've never done before.  I did a spell check and just sent it off.  I wanted to be fresh to the material when read (a) and (b) I knew that it was going to go through many changes in the coming weeks.

   My biggest fear was that it would read too long and that I would have to go in and do major surgery.  That fear was allayed somewhat when it clocked in around 2 hrs. and 15 mins.  And that's with Mike reading the stage directions and some of the pacing a little slow due to the actors having to read from loose pages clutched in their hands.  I'm still going to go in and cut it down, but my overall impression — and that of everyone there — was that it was funny as hell and quite poignant, and that it moved.  Unlike in the movie, scenes have the opportunity to really stretch their wings; i.e., they don't have to be truncated as much as they do in a screenplay.  And stretch their wings they did.

   Sideways is a very dialogue-driven novel.  That was the rap from the publishing world when they unanimously turned it down — over 100 rejection letters.  They more or less complained that it was a glorified screenplay, that it wasn't literature, that it was unpublishable (I guess I had the last laugh).  But it is true, in a sense:  it's very screenplay- or play-like, and it was fun to see the scenes really play out.  What surprised me the most was that the same dialogue, with some minor changes, that I wrote a dozen years ago seemed to stand the test of time, that the universal truths about male bonding, male anxiety over getting married, males out catting around looking for adventure, resonated as truthfully today as it did when I wrote it in 9 weeks of artistic and professional desperation and destitution.  I can only felicitously imagine how it'll work when it's rehearsed, when the actors are all off book, when there's a whole production design with lights and music and rear-screen projection and … a full house!  The laughter promises to be infectious.

   As I wrote before, the reason I wanted to do this when Jason Matthews approached me about the possibility is because I really wanted to return to my indie filmmaking roots.  This may be as close as I get to seeing something of mine realized in a live-action way.  Novel, film, theater, they are three different animals, but I feel really confident it's going to work in all three mediums.  Or, to put it differently:  two down, one to go.  And I thought Jason said something interesting after the read.  He told me that most theater — I'm not really a theater-goer, so I wouldn't know — is very "feminine," that it's rare to see a play that's about guys and guy things.  I hadn't really thought about that, or why that is, but I take his word for it.

   Anyway, I came away, well, totally emotionally wiped.  My friend Pamela said I was contorting in my seat throughout the entire read I was apparently so into it.  Here I am after the read:

   Just kidding.  That's a picture I took of a guy passed out in Downtown L.A.  But that's sort of how I felt.  I'm really excited about the play.  We're planning to start with wine tastings an hour before the play begins.  Great wineries in my Sideways sequel Vertical, as well as from the movie — e.g., Foxen Winery, Au Bon Climat — will be represented.  You'll imbibe fine Pinots, then you'll be treated to the theatrical version of the film that so many of you have personally told me you love so much.  We have a lot of work to do in the coming weeks, but I want to congratulate, in advance of its hoped-for success, Jason Matthews, John Ruskin, Mike Myers, and the other Mike (production designer extraordinaire) for believing in this as a theatrical reality.  I can't wait to roll up my sleeves and make this a reality.

   Stay tuned!