Category: black

            Monday I posted the usual ego-stroking Cyber-Monday list of my own books and some anthologies I’m in.  Today–as I have in the past–I thought I’d toss out some other books I’ve enjoyed this year that were written by much more talented people than me.  They’re not really in any order, and a few of them aren’t exactly new, but if you’re looking for something for that special somebody (or for yourself), it’s going to be tough to go wrong with any of these… 

            As always, you can prove you’re a morally better person by visiting your local bookstore.  There’s still plenty of time for them to order something for you if they don’t have it in stock.  Plus, some of them have connections and can get you autographed copies and stuff like that…

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire—the short, simple explanation is that this book is about all those kids who find mystic gateways or enchanted wardrobes or interdimensional touchstones, have fantastic adventures… and then eventually end up back in their normal, mundane homes again and having to cope with real life. The best thing I can think to say is that I’m so ridiculously jealous of this book. It’s just magnificent.

Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig – I am super-late to the table with this one, because Wendig’s been writing this series for five years now.  Miriam Black is a foulmouthed alcoholic who’s gifted (or cursed) to immediately know how and when everyone she touches is going to die. After years of dealing with said ability, she’s seen someone’s future death that involves… her.  It’s funny and dark and fantastic and I think there are five of these books now.

Heroine Complex/ Heroine Worship by Sarah Kuhn –superpowers are real. So are superheroes.  The two aren’t always connected.  Oh, demons are real, too, and they can possess all sorts of things.  Evie and Aveda are such crazy-fun -lovable-exciting characters that you’ll devour each book in a day.  I did.

Killing Is My Business by Adam Christopher—I mentioned the first book in this noir-robot-detective series a while back. Adam’s written more of said series.  They’re still amazing, and now there are mysteries-within-the mysteries.  You should read them.

An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King – I got to read an early copy of this and it’s just brilliant.  A dystopian tale set in future-China, where the one child policy has gone… well, just like everyone predicted.  Our four protagonists are trying to form a family while also each hiding an array of personal secrets and deciding who to trust with them.  It’s a fantastic, slow-burn book that reads like the wonderfully twisted love child of The Handmaid’s Tale and Big Love.

Sleeping Giants/ Waking Gods by Sylvain Neuvel—another one I was late picking up (but got caught up quickly).  A fantastic epistolary tale about the discovery of a giant alien robot and the team that comes together to figure out how they use said robot to defend the Earth.  It’s Contact crossed with Pacific Rim, and if that idea doesn’t excite you we have nothing else to say to each other.

            Good day to you.
            I said good day.

We Are Wormwood by Autumn Christian – a beautifully surreal tale about a young woman growing up with insanity and then… well, descending into it herself with a few nudges from her demon girlfriend.  Christian also has a fantastic collection of creepy/scary/sexy short stories called Ecstatic Inferno that I wolfed down in about a day.  I befriended her on Twitter just so I can constantly prod her to write new stuff for me to read. I’m selfish that way.

Ninth City Burning by J. Patrick Black—okay, this glorious space opera’s kind of tough to explain, because in the future Earth has shifted over to an entirely new form of technology.  In short, its about a group of people developing new weapons, learning to use them, and learning to be them.  It may take a little bit to get into this one, but it’s sooo worth it.

Revolution –by John Barber and Cullen Bunn—I was a die-hard comic fan for years, but got driven out by the constant (and often substandard) crossover events.  I started reading some of IDW’s “Hasbroverse” books last year and was frustrated when they announced Revolution, their own upcoming crossover event.
            Holy crap.  This was my favorite comic book event in at least twenty years. It begins with a conflict between the GI Joe team and the Autobots which gets disrupted when Rom the Spaceknight shows up and uses his Neutralizer to incinerate General Joe Coulton before flying off again. If you were already a fan of IDW’s GI Joe or Transformers books, you can guess how a silver robot showing up and killing the Joes’ CO goes over.  If you’re a fan of Rom… you know what this killing implies.  Revolution is honestly suspenseful and dramatic, and has amazingly solid ties to all the books involved.  It’s clearly a crossover that was planned far in advance, and it made me a regular at my comic shop again.

            And anyway, those are some of my favorite things I read this year.  Any one of them would make for a fantastic gift.  And if you’ve got some suggestions of your own, please mention them in the comments down below.

            Okay, it’s been a while since we had some solid, deep, digging-in-the-gross-stuff discussion about writing. So let’s get back to basics, shall we…?

            A couple years back I had the fantastic opportunity to spend about an hour on the phone with Shane Black.  If you don’t know his name off the top of your head, he’s the writer-director behind (among others) Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3, and just recently The Nice Guys.  He knows a lot about storytelling, and during our talk he tossed out a dozen or so useful lessons, one of which I’d like to share with you.

            Yeah, I’ve talked about this before, but I came up with some new ways to talk about it, and I figured it’s a good refresher…

            Pretty much any book, movie, television episode, or short story can be broken down into two parts—the plot and the story.  The plotis the events and moments going on outside my characters.  The story is all the events and moments that are going on inside my character.

            Here’s another way to look at it—plot can affect lots of people, but the story is mostly going to affect my character.  A bomb going off is going to affect hundreds of people.  Phoebe marrying Wakko instead of me is mostly going to affect… me.

            Let’s go into some more detail.

            Plotis the external threats and goals in my book.  Most books tend to have the plot scribbled out on the inside flap (the jacket copy, they like to call it).  If I pick up a BluRay, they’ve usually got the plot of the movie or show on the back.  For example (using a book I’ve mentioned recently), the plot of Anamnesis is about a bottom-tier drug dealer, Ethan, who tries to learn more about a custom drug that’s appearing on the streets, and then has to try to save himself when he discovers some of the people behind this drug.

            After looking at a lot of books or movies from the storytelling point of view, one thing I noticed is that the plot is almost always an attempt to do something.  Win the big race, get the guy, stop the villain, save the orphanage, save the world.  As I mentioned above, the plot involves a goal, and any decent goal in my story is going to take some effort to achieve.

            Another thing I’ve noticed is that plot tends to get a bad rap.  A lot of artsy folks will scoff at the idea of “plot,” like it’s some crude tool that only hack writers use.  Which is just wrong–plot’s an essential part of storytelling–all storytelling.
            Now, in all fairness, there are a decent number of “plot-heavy” films and books out there.  The characters are kind of… well, irrelevant.  And these tales might be great to kill an afternoon with, but that’s all they’re ever going to be.  To anyone.
            As it happens, though, a lot of those artistic “character based” works of film and literature tend to meander and not really, y’know, go anywhere.  I think that’s because of the refusal to have a plot.  As I mentioned above, plot  means the characters are trying to do something, so “no plot” means the characters are… well… not doing anything.

            That brings us, nicely, to story.  Story is the flipside of plot. It’s all the internal desires and needs and struggles of my characters.  It’s a big part of the character arcand the reasons behind that arc.  Story tends to be what we tell our friends about when we explain why we like a character.  We enjoy the plot, but what we get invested in is the story. 

            To use Anamnesisagain, Ethan’s story is that he suffers from severe retrograde amnesia—for all purposes his life began just a few years ago when he woke up on a beach.  So the memory-erasing drug that appears on the street—and the people suffering from its effects—strikes a chord.  He feels compelled to help them, even though it’s really not in his best interests.

            Every now and then, you might hear someone say there’s really only seven plots (or six or nine or something) and there’s a bit of truth to that.  The reason there are millions of different books, though, is because of story.  If I drop two different characters into the same situation, I’m going to get radically different results, because they’re going to approach things… well, differently.  If Peggy Carter had gotten the super soldier formula instead of Steve Rogers, Captain Americawould’ve been a radically different movie, on a bunch of levels.  An example I’ve used before is Never Let Me Go and The Island, two movies with almost exactly the same plot but very different stories. End result–two very different movies.

            I’ve talked a few times about working on Ex-Isle, which came out back in February.  One thing I realized as I started the second draft was that I had a plot, but no real story.  What was going on inside St. George, one of my main characters, while the plot progressed around him?  And figuring out his story (his ongoing need to help people vs. how his position and purpose at the Mount was changing) helped solve some knots and eventually even changed the ending of the book.

            Now, let’s play with this a bit…

            Who’s heard of the Moonlighting curse?  It’s the idea that if you have a TV show with a strong “will they or won’t they” element, it’ll collapse as soon as they do. It happened famously with Moonlighting and more recently, alas, with my beloved Castle.

            But we’re talking about this as writers.  So… whydo these shows collapse at this point?

            The plot of Castle is that a wildly popular crime novelist (Richard Castle) ends up working with the homicide department of New York’s 5th precinct.  His personality grates on them a lot, but they can’t deny he has a quick mind and some amazing insights into human psychology and criminal motives.  Plus, he’s friends with the mayor… so they’re kinda stuck with him as long as he wants to be there.

            The story of Castle is about the developing relationship between many-times-married Castle and married-to-her-job homicide detective, Kate Beckett.  They each have a lot of baggage, but they also have a lot of chemistry.  And the chemistry kept growing even as they came to accept (and even admire) each other’s quirks and hangups.

            All sounds great, right?  But does anyone see the problem?  It’s something we’ve talked about before…

            See, the basic plot of Castle is pretty much infinite.  I think we can all agree there’s no foreseeable future where New York City is going to have a drastic shortage of homicides.  So that part of the series can keep going forever.

            But… the story of Castle pretty much ends once Castle and Beckett become a couple.  Our whole story was “will they or won’t they,” so once they do… that’s it.  Done.  My story’s over. Sure, in some cases we can stretch things out a bit with all the usual new-relationship stuff (early riser vs. late, snoring, family and friend approval, toothbrushes, how far is this going, etc.), but the longer a series runs, odds are a lot of that will already be established and resolved.  Hell, before the two of them ever kissed, I think Becket had celebrated three or four Christmases with Castle, his daughter, and his mom. 

            Y’see, Timmy, the plot of Castle was still going, but the story’d come to an end.  Which means the series either stumbled into that plot-heavy area I talked about up above… or it came up with a reason to extend the story. And as we’ve talked about in the past, that kind of artificial extension usually doesn’t go over well.

            So, plot and story.  Every good tale should have both.  They can overlap.  They can intertwine.  But if I’m missing one or the other, no matter how many excuses I want to make… my work’s going to be lacking.  And my audience is going to be able to tell.

            Next time…

            Well, next time is going to be a few days before Christmas.  And Hanukkah.  We’ll all have things to do, so I’ll try to do something brief.

            Until then… go write.

            Okay, first off, I’m afraid I need to have a shameful self-promotional moment. The Ex-Heroes series is Amazon’s Kindle deal of the month.  You can pick up digital copies of all four books for less than ten dollars.  So… there’s that.

            And now, moving on to our actual topic of the week…

            Last week I gave some more-or-less quick answers to a couple questions and requests folks had left here on the ranty blog.  This week I wanted to address one in particular that was worth a little more space.

            So… here we go.

            I’d love to hear your thoughts on plotting and pacing. I’m struggling with knowing when to do what plot elements so things don’t drag and so they seem natural, and don’t feel like the story is on rails.
            Okay, this is another tough one because every story is going to have its own specific pace. 

            One of the reasons a lot of folks end up worrying about this, in my opinion, is because of an often misunderstood writing rule that gets thrown at them all the time—start with action!  There’s a bunch of problems with this statement, many of which I’ve talked about before, but one key one is that it gives people a very skewed view of pacing.  If my story starts cranked up to eleven, it’s hard to make anything feel urgent after that point.  And if it doesn’t start at eleven, well, why is anyone going to keep reading, right?

            Part of this is about dramatic structure, knowing where things should happen in my story for maximum impact.  It’s also about compressing time so things don’t sprawl.  Yeah, maybe four hours passed while Wakko was pulling his turn standing watch, but do I really need eight pages of him standing around doing… well, nothing?

            I think that’s one of the biggest problems when people have “pacing issues.”  It’s not whether or not my chapter is slow or fast, if it’s filled with action or dialogue or inner monologues. It’s about whether or not anything’s actually happening.  When my story come to a grinding halt, it’s not because I’ve got characters doing research instead of kung-fu… it’s because the story’s come to a grinding halt.  It’s stopped moving forward. 

            A good way to check pacing is to go through my story and ask myself this—what purpose does this element/ scene/ chapter have in the overall story?  Is it forwarding the plot?  Is it forwarding a character’s story?  If it doesn’t do either of these things… why am I spending time on it?  As William Goldman said in The Princess Bride, “What with one thing and another, three years passed.”

            Speaking of famous screenwriters, Shane Black once made a great observation about what he called “shoe leather” scenes in scripts.  If I have a scene where two guys are having a conversation and anotherscene where there’s a key news story on the television… why aren’t they the samescene?  A good part of storytelling is trying to accomplish two things at once rather than spreading things so thin they’re see-through.  It’s great to have a character scene, sure, but maybe those character moments could also advance the plot somehow.  I really want to use a lot of this research material, but could it advance someone’s story?

            Y’see, Timmy, if I’m lucky and somewhat skilled, my audience might let me have one scene that doesn’t really do anything.  Maybe two.  But pushing it to a third means my story is dragging, and four is going to get eyerolls.

            Now, all that being said (yep, there’s always a however), there is still one thing to keep in mind for pacing.  Every story is going to start slow and pick up speed, yes.  And all those stories are going to be moving at their own pace. I need to be careful, though, when I try to slow things down, for whatever reason.  If you’ve ever driven a car with a manual transmission (or know of such things), you’ve probably heard the term downshifting.  It’s when I shift into a lower gear to help with slowing down (you’ve probably seen James Bond do it a few times).  It’s one thing to go from fifth gear to fourth, it’s something else entirely to go from fifth down to second.  Odds are that’ll going to leave parts of my transmission  (read—story) scattered behind me, possibly on fire.

            So if my story involves a lot of zero-to-sixty-to-ten-to ninety-to-fifteen pacing—yes, even though it’s still technically moving forward—I may want to rethink a few things.  And if it doesn’t involve any forward motion…

            Well, I may need to rethink a lot of things.

            Next time, I’d like to talk about how Darth Vader killed Luke Skywalker’s father.

            If you’ve been following this ranty blog for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard me mention Shane Black once or thrice.  For those who came in late, he’s one of the men behind the million-dollar spec-script boom 20 years ago.  You might know him as the writer of films like The Monster Squad, Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight. 

(Supposedly, an unwritten part of his deal for Lethal Weapon was getting to be in an action film, so the studio stuck him in some stupid alien-fighting-bodybuilders-in-the-jungle movie that no one was going to see–never expecting that Black would rewrite all his dialogue to become one of the most memorable characters in the film…) 

            He took some time off from Hollywood and then returned a few years back as the writer-director of the award-winning Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, which propelled Robert Downey Jr. back into the public eye.  Then the two of them got together again for this summer’s Iron Man 3, which Black directed and co-wrote.

            Anyway, back when I used to write for Creative Screenwriting, Black was kind of a Hollywood legend as a person and as a writer.  So when the editor of CS Weekly asked us for December article ideas, I tossed out doing a general interview with Black.  After all, the man’s set almost every movie he’s written at Christmastime—he had to have something to say about it.  My editor agreed it would be a neat thing and put out some feelers, and we both kind of forgot about it.  We were a very small, niche film magazine, and he was… well, he was Shane Black.

            So when Black wrote back in less than a week and said “Sure, let’s grab a coffee or something,” you can imagine the girlish squeals of glee.

            Alas, reality hit just as quick.  At this point the magazine was starting to struggle financially and my first novel, Ex-Heroes, wasn’t going to see print for another three months.  The squeals of glee faded and I suddenly realized I couldn’t afford to grab a coffee.  Hell, I wasn’t sure I could afford gas to drive to a Starbucks to meet him.  After the shame faded, I wrote back with some lame excuses about sound quality and not wanting to waste his time.  We set up a phone interview and I missed my big chance to hang out with Shane Black for an hour.

            Fortunately, he was very pleasant and gracious on the phone, and it was one of those conversations where I felt like I learned more about storytelling in forty-odd minutes than I had in some college classes.

            A few of the usual points…  I’m in bold, asking the questions.  Keep in mind a lot of these aren’t the exact, word-for-word questions I asked (which tended to be a bit more organic and conversational), so if the answer seems a bit off, don’t stress out over it.   Any links are entirely mine and aren’t meant to imply Mr. Black was specifically endorsing any of the ideas I’ve brought up here on the ranty blog—it’s just me linking from something he’s said to something similar that I’ve said (some of it inspired by this conversation). 

            By the very nature of this discussion, there will probably be a few small spoilersin here, though not many.  Check out some of his movies if you haven’t already seen them.  They’re damned fun and filled with fantastic characters.

            Material from this interview was originally used for a “From The Trenches” article that appeared in the December 18th, 2009 issue of CS Weekly.

            So, anyway, here’s me talking with Shane Black  about Santa, Christmas, storytelling, and Frankenstein in the Wild West.
            Happy Holidays.

            Well, it’s interesting.  I watch all the old Christmas movies and I like them for odd reasons.  Like It’s A Wonderful Life.  It’s a Christmas movie, but within it they have a lot of bizarre, Capra-esque touches that are more indicative of just life.  The scene where the gym starts to open–the floor starts to pull back and there’s a swimming pool underneath.  Someone falls in and then everyone just jumps in the pool.  That moment is as fresh today as it was back then.  That kind of crazy improv moment where everyone starts laughing and jumping in. Even as a kid I was struck by that.  “Wow, that’s a different kind of moment than most movies.  That feels like it just happened almost by accident.”

            My favorite Christmas film is probably this Spanish Santa Claus movie.. It’s called Santa Claus and I even used a bit of it in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.  Basically, Santa Claus fights the Devil.  The Devil tries to stop Christmas.  There’s this one scene where he just runs around the room doing gymnastics.  You’ve got to see it.  You’ve got to pick it up and look at it— The Devil’s this really athletic, slightly gay-looking guy who can blow flames through a phone line.  If he calls you on the phone, flames come out the receiver and they singe your ear.  That’s probably my favorite.  Santa’s really lame and the effects are terrible.

            My other favorite was called Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny.  There’s no snow.  It was filmed in Florida in broad daylight.  Santa’s sled is stuck because there’s no snow, and they’re all waiting for the Ice Cream Bunny.  While they’re waiting Santa tells all the kids the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, which takes roughly 50 -75 minutes.  At the end of which the Ice Cream Bunny shows up and everyone says “now we’re safe.”  I can’t believe some of the frauds–even as a child–that were perpetrated on me (chuckles).    It’s pretty amazing.

            Yeah.  Christmas for some reason…  Even though it’s a worldwide phenomenon I always associate it with a certain kind of American way of life.  It’s also sort of a hushed period, during which, for a period of time, we agree to suspend hostility.  I’m always fascinated by the almost palpable sense in the air that something’s different at Christmas.

            If you look at a tipping point scenario– how many people does it take to start a standing ovation?  Just one.  And then in five seconds two other people, then three, then four, then 75,000 are clapping.  Because the tipping point is as simple as one person pushing in that direction.  And it can go ugly just as easily.  It can go the other direction.  One person starts to get out of hand and then everyone’s out of hand. 

            So Christmas to me represented the best we have in terms of keeping things on that side of the dial.  A period in which, for whatever reason, the tipping point was more likely to bump into someone on the street and have them say “Oh, hey man, my bad,” then to have him say “Fuck you, buddy!  Watch where you’re going!”  That was remarkable to me.

            Also in California, Christmas, if you look at it as a substance almost, as a thing more than an idea, Christmas exists out here in California but in these indescribably beautiful ways to me.  You have to dig for it.  It’s not a 40 foot Christmas tree on the White House lawn, it’s a little broken, plastic Madonna with a flash bulb inside hanging off a Mexican lunch wagon.  It’s a little strand of colored light in some cheap trailer in the blinding sunlight, but it’s still protesting its Christmas-ness.  I adore little touches of Christmas that indicate subtly…  It’s like talismans.  You walk around and these are the magic.  These are your touchstones. Little bits of Christmas that remind us that this doesn’t have to be a blinded, blighted, sun-washed, hostile place to live.  Christmas has always had that magic ability to me, to exist almost like a magic substance that you find little bit of if you dig carefully enough for it.  I know that sounds kind of crazy.

            Along the way. Well, Lethal Weapon is a Frankenstein story to me.  It’s a guy who’s a monster of sorts, who sits in his trailer and watches TV.  People despise him, they revile him, because… it’s like a western.  They think the west is tame.  They think they’re safe and secure in this sedentary little suburbia.  This sort of lulling effect that whatever violence and terror are in the world, we’ve managed to secure ourselves from it.  But he knows different.  Frankenstein in his trailer, he’s been with violence, he’s lived violence.  He knows that its still there.  The west is not tame, it is not gentrified.  When violence, in Lethal Weapon, comes to the suburbs and takes this guy’s daughter and kills cops, they go to Frankenstein and say “Look, we hate you for what we do.  We think you’re an anomaly at best and a monster at worst, but now we need you because you’re the only one who understands this.  We’ve gotten hypnotized by tranquility.  We forgot that violence is still there, and you’re the one who can deal with that, so now we need to let you out of your cage.”  That was the idea.  Christmas, it seemed to me, was the most pleasant, lulling, hypnotizing atmosphere in which to forget that violence can be so sudden and swift and just invade our private lives.

            Nah.  I took theater classes at UCLA.  I was studying stagecraft and acting.  It was a Mickey Mouse major.  My finals often were painting sets, y’know?  It was kind of a cakewalk though college.  I took all the requirements– I liked theater, I liked movies, but I’d never seen a screenplay and I thought they were impossibly difficult.  Coming from back east I just assumed  movies were something that floated through the ether and appeared on your TV screen and some magician wrote them, but there was certainly no way I could.  Then I read a script and it was so easy.  I read another one and said “I can do this.  This is really rather simple.”  So I never took classes, I just read scriptsI loved.

            My style, such as it is, that sometime people comment on, is really cribbed from two sources.  One is William Goldman, who has a kind of chummy, folksy, storytelling style.  It’s almost as though a guy in a bar is talking to you from his bar stool.  And then Walter Hill, who is just completely terse and sparing and has this real spartan prose that’s just punchy and has this wonderful effect of just gut-punching you.  I took those two and I slammed them together, and that’s what I use.  People say it’s interesting.  Mostly it’s a rip-off. It’s Goldman meets Walter Hill.

            No, the first scripts I wrote were scripts I wrote after I decided to go out and see what they look like.  So I picked up William Goldman,  I picked up Walter Hill, and then I wrote Shadow Company, which even on the page, the ’84 version, looks exactly like a Goldman script.  Lethal Weapon, it’s pretty much in the style of those two writers.  Material aside.  Material is different, I’m talking solely about the style on the page and learning the logistics of how to do it.  Those two were my mentors.  Later mentors were people like James L. Brooks, who taught me an amazing amount, and Joel Silver, of all people, qualifies as a mentor.

How do you generally write?  Do you use outlines or notecards or just start cranking it out from page one?

            I don’t really use notecards.  What I do is I try to figure out what the piece is about and link that to the story arc or the character arc.  I always think there’s two things going on in any script–there’s the story and then there’s the plot.  The plot is the events.  If it’s a heist film, it’s how they get in and out.  But the story is why we’re there, why we’re watching the events.  It’s what’s going on with the characters.  And theme above that.  Once I get those things, once I know what the theme is and what it’s about, I can start trying on story beats and plot beats to see if they feel like they’re moving, but they have to relate to the overall theme.  If you look at The Dark Knight, you’ll find before those guys wrote a word of script, they knew exactly what their movie was about.  All the themes were in place.  Sometimes they has to bend the scenes in The Dark Knight to fit the theme they were trying to get across.  It’s clear they didn’t write the scenes and then look for what they were about, they clearly knew where they were headed.  So thematically I get a sense of what the movie’s gotta be, but I don’t use notecards.

            I can juggle a lot in my head.  I can’t get more than say, twenty pages, without planning ahead.

            I try to keep by studio standards, which is three months.  They give you three months from commencement pay to final payment, and I think that’s enough time if you really work at it.  We did a draft that I really loved, and it did not make the screen, of Last Action Hero, my partner and I.  We did that in six weeks and I was very proud of that.  From sitting down with this original screenplay and completely rewriting and retooling it. We were good, we were fast.

            Lately just to facilitate things.  It takes me so long to think of ideas and so long to convince myself to get to work, and there’s so much fear involved.  Writing to me is a process of just desperately trying, on a daily basis, to concentrate until something becomes more interesting than my fear.  Then you’re sucked in and you start doing the work, but up ’till then it’s just horrifying to me.  So if I can have help, if someone’s in the sinking boat with me, even if we’re both going to drown, at least there’s a comfort to not being alone.  I’ll write the next one solo.

Now, you took time off, came back with a new script you shopped around, and nobody knew who you were.  That was Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, right?

            It was.  Most people would have nothing to do with it.

            No, I thought about that.  That was when I was dealing with Jim Brooks.  He basically said “You don’t need to worry because you direct on paper.  You don’t call shots, but you call mood and you call progression and pace and emphasis and just about everything else.”  So I may have even done a little more of that on Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

            No, except I’m even more conscious of what will later be shoe leather.  The greatest shoemakers in the world supposedly can make a pair of shoes and leave no [extra] leather.  They didn’t waste any.  I’m very conscious now as a director.  If you’ve got two scenes, like a newscaster and a scene before that of a conversation, can’t you have the conversation with the newscaster in the background and do it in one?  It’s just shoe leather.  No shoe leather.

Oddly enough, every year about this time, for no reason I can fathom, I watch The Exorcist, my favorite movie [chuckles].  Every year I’m reminded of how it doesn’t age, not one single day. It’s as riveting as it ever has been.