Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: Escape from Rikers Island

“Almost” Doesn’t Count: On Trying and Losing (Repeat as Needed)

In the event you don’t keep track of these things, the Los Angeles Dodgers lost the World Series last month, four games to one, to the Boston Red Sox.  It was both the Dodgers’ second consecutive World Series appearance and defeat.  From the point of view of many a long-suffering fan here in L.A., collapsing yet again mere inches from the finish line amounts to nothing more than another season-long strikeout, a yearlong exercise in futility, a squandered investment of time and emotional support.  “This is where baseball breaks your heart,” someone said to me in the waning days of the season.  To be sure, I share the sentiment:  It’s hard as hell to get so frustratingly close to the Golden Ring only to go home empty-handed.  A miss is as good as a mile, after all.  Close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades.  “Almost” doesn’t count.

As recently as a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known, much less cared, who won or lost this Series—or even who played in it.  I came to baseball relatively late in life—around forty—as I recounted in “Spring Fever,” the gist of which was this:  For whatever reason, neither I nor any of my boyhood pals were born with the “sports gene.”  We were all pop-culture fanatics, more likely to be found at the local comic shop than Little League field.  When we saw the Bronx Bombers play the Indians at Yankee Stadium in 1986, none of us knew what the hell to make of that abstract experience; when we watched them face-off again in David S. Ward’s Major League in 1989, in the context of a Cinderella narrative, suddenly the rivalry had meaning.  We loved movies and comics; sports we simply had no use for.

A few years later, I found myself formally studying comics (under legendary Batman artist and DC Comics editor Carmine Infantino) and cinema (in college) in preparation for making a career in those fields.  What they don’t tell you in school, though, is that when you turn your passions into your profession, you often do so at the expense of the joy you once took in those pastimes.  Worse still, so many of the things that directly inspired me to be a screenwriter, from Star Wars to superheroes, I eventually grew to disdain.  And what Dodgers baseball restored in me, outside my conscious awareness as it was happening, was the innocent pleasure of being a fan of something again; it’s been a welcome, even analeptic, reprieve from the tyranny of passion.

Game 2 of the 2018 World Series

The Dodgers’ reentry into the World Series this fall, and the collective hope it kindled of their first world-championship win in precisely three decades, coincided with a sobering anniversary of my own:  It’s been exactly twenty years—October of 1998—since I signed with my first literary manager off a screenplay I’d written called BONE ORCHARD.  It occurs to me only now, as I type this, that the project was something of a creative precursor to Escape from Rikers Island, trafficking in many of the same themes and concepts:  an urban island left to rot and ruin, overrun with supernatural savages (demons, not zombies), with a neo–hardboiled detective at the center of the action.  (I’d studied Raymond Chandler in college and have since been heavily influenced by his fiction.)

Anyway, there I was, twenty-two years old and only a few months out of school, and everything was unfolding right on schedule.  The script would be taken to the spec marketplace and I would soon join the ranks of working screenwriters.  You study for a career in the arts, and you get one—simple as that.

Christ, if only.  BONE ORCHARD didn’t sell.  And while I was halfway through writing my follow-up, the management company repping me shuttered.  Young and naïve though I was, I nonetheless intuited I wasn’t likely to move the needle on my screenwriting career in New York—an ambition I was resolute about fulfilling—so I left the comforts of home behind for Los Angeles.

When you first arrive in Hollywood, good luck getting anyone with even a modicum of clout to give you the time of day.  Not gonna happen.  What you do—and what I did—is seek out aspiring filmmakers at the same level and pool resources.  In addition to screenwriting, I’d had experience as a film and video editor, so I started cutting USC thesis shorts pro bono.  Within a year or two, I’d established a circle of friends and colleagues, all in our twenties, who were collaborating on “portfolio projects.”  I was editing by day and writing by night, hoping to network my way to new representation—an objective that would, to my slowly percolating astonishment, take another half-dozen years to realize.

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A Couple of Gen Xers Talk Movies, Screenwriting, and Zombie Prison Breaks

Recently, I participated in a lively Q&A over at Bookshelf Battle about nearly every pop-cultural topic imaginable:  the genesis of Escape from Rikers Island; rumors of the zombie genre’s demise; whether the hero or villain is more crucial to the conflict and meaning of a story; if, in our Era of the Endless Reboot, there are any Hollywood remakes I’d actually endorse; what aspiring screenwriters need to learn (and how they can learn it); and my exclusive, foolproof plan for breaking out of a prison full of flesh-eating undead monsters.  To paraphrase Stefon from Saturday Night Live:  This conversation has everything!

Rest assured, this only LOOKS hopeless…

I invite you to join in with your thoughts!  Feel free to leave a comment on either post—that one or this one—and I will, as always, be delighted to respond.

Please find my discussion with Bookshelf Q. Battler here.

State of Grace: How a Movie No One Saw Heralded the Last Days of Old New York, Old Hollywood—and Even My Own Innocence

Last month, we talked about the subject of creative inspiration:  that an artist’s many influences affect his worldview and sensibilities in ways totally unique to him, and that they, along with his particular life experiences, constitute his voice.  In time, those influences become so embedded in his subconscious that he is no longer necessarily aware of the sway they hold over the art he produces, and as his confidence in his craft intensifies, his intellectual capacity to identify them in his work diminishes in kind.

As it happens, a week or two after posting the treatise, I received an object lesson in its very proposition.  The experience was an acutely emotional one for me, though not at all unpleasant or unwelcome, and a reminder of what storytelling at its best can do:  A story can comment on its times while reflecting timeless truths.  It can depict a very specific world that is nonetheless universally relatable.  It has the power to preserve a moment or an episode in all its emotional complexity, serving as a time capsule that can continue to yield new insight with age.  A good story changes the course of history, in some unquantifiable measure, influencing subsequent real-world events and artistic works in ways that, I think, go mostly unconsidered.

Here’s how one movie no one’s ever heard of exerted appreciably more impact on my personal and creative evolution—and even on my forthcoming novel—than I’d heretofore considered, and how it had something profoundly meaningful to say to me, both then and now.


Two years ago, I published a post with recommendations for Irish-themed movies to help celebrate St. Patrick’s Day; among them, a long-forgotten crime drama from 1990 about the Irish Mob in Hell’s Kitchen called State of Grace, which had the cosmic misfortune of opening the very same week as Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas.  The latter, as I’m sure you know, was a box-office hit that deservedly claimed an immortal place in the cultural consciousness, while the former—starring no less than heavyweights Sean Penn, Ed Harris, Gary Oldman, Robin Wright, John Turturro, John C. Reilly, and Burgess Meredith—quietly disappeared from theaters within two weeks of release and promptly faded into obscurity.  No one really saw it, and the bankruptcy of its studio, Orion Pictures, soon thereafter assured that it mostly remained unseen in the years to follow.

Sean Penn (as Terry Noonan) and Gary Oldman (as Jackie Flannery) in Phil Joanou’s “State of Grace”

My cousin’s husband owned a video store out in Jersey at that time, and he was always bringing by screener copies—sometimes even bootlegs—of current films, which was how I first experienced both State of Grace and GoodFellas when I was fourteen.  For a kid that had up till that point subsisted on a cinematic diet of almost exclusively Spielbergian fantasy, the comedies of John Hughes and Eddie Murphy, and the action extravaganzas of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, those two movies—‘cause I hadn’t yet seen The Godfather—were nothing short of revelatory.

State of Grace was a particular favorite, and I even managed to score a copy of the promotional one-sheet from my local video shop in the Bronx when they were done with it, which hung in my bedroom throughout high school.  The movie was my introduction to newly minted Oscar-winner Gary Oldman, and he delivers a searing, unsettling, heartbreaking performance that made me a fan for life.  But by the mid-nineties, my secondhand VHS of Grace had gotten misplaced, and given the scarcity of the film’s availability, I haven’t had occasion—despite trying in 2016 for that best–of–St. Patty’s post—to see it since.

Until this month, when I found a wonderful Blu-ray reissue, limited to 3,000 units, and, like the story’s troubled protagonist, I ventured back into Hell’s Kitchen to reunite with some very old faces…

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Artistic Originality: Is It Dead—or Was It Merely a Fallacy to Begin With?

Over the course of the many insightful conversations generated by the recent post on Star Wars:  The Last Jedi—sincerest thanks to all who shared their time and thoughts—the subject of artistic influence was discussed:  what role it played in the creation of some of Gen X’s most cherished movie franchises of yore, and what part, if any, it has in our now-institutionalized praxis of remaking those films wholesale—of “turning Hollywood into a glorified fan-fiction factory where filmmakers get to make their own versions of their childhood favorites.”

Because where is the line drawn, exactly, between inspiration and imitation?  If the narrative arts are a continuum in which every new entry owes, to a certain extent, a creative debt to a cinematic or literary antecedent, is originality even a thing?

If so, what is it, then?  How is one to construe it concretely, beyond simply “knowing it when we see it”?  And, as such, is there a way for us as artists to codify, or at very least comprehend, the concept of originality as something more than an ill-defined abstraction to perhaps consciously strive for it in our own work?

 

THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND INFLUENCES

Since it was Star Wars that provoked those questions, let me start with this:  George Lucas is one of my eminent creative influences.  When I was in high school in the early nineties, during that long respite between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, when Star Wars was more or less placed by its creator in carbon-freezing, I became aware that the same mind had conceived two of my favorite franchises, and went to great lengths to study Lucas’ career:  how he learned the art of storytelling, where his ideas came from, how he managed to innovate the way in which blockbusters were created and marketed.

“Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” mastermind George Lucas, my first creative idol

In order to more fully appreciate what Lucas created in 1977 when he made Star Wars—a work of fiction so thrilling and inspired it seemed to emerge fully realized from his singular imagination—it behooves us to consider the varied influences he drew from.  The 1936 Flash Gordon film serial Lucas watched as a child provided the inciting animus—a grand-scale space opera told as a series of high-adventure cliffhangers.  (It also later informed the movie’s visual vocabulary, with its reliance on old-fashioned cinematic techniques like opening crawls and optical wipes.)

In a case of east meets west, Joseph Campbell’s study of comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces provided a general mythic and archetypal blueprint to endow Lucas’ sprawling alien-world fantasy with psychological familiarity, while Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress served as a direct model for the plot he eventually settled on (after at least three start-from-scratch rewrites).  Lucas ultimately patterned the series’ three-part narrative arc after Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle (which later directly influenced his high-fantasy franchise-nonstarter Willow), because, prior to Star Wars, closed-ended “trilogies” weren’t really a thing in commercial cinema.

In addition to his cinematic and literary interests, Lucas is also a passionate scholar of world history (as evidenced by Indiana Jones, particularly the television series), and a direct line can be drawn from the X-wing assault on the Death Star to the aerial dogfights of World War II, to say nothing of the saga’s allusions to the Roman Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Vietnam War.  As for where the Force and lightsabers and the twin suns of Tatooine came from… who knows?  The sheer number of disparate interests that met, mated, and reproduced within the confines of Lucas’ brain can never be fully accounted for, even by the man himself.

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Home for Christmas: (Not) a Hallmark Presentation

I’ve spent a somewhat embarrassingly disproportionate share of my free time this holiday season watching those endless made-for-Hallmark Christmas movies.  Good God—the scripts come off like bad first drafts banged out over a weekend, though somebody is probably making a handsome living writing them.  (Any chance you’re hiring, Hallmark?)  There are a few variations on the formula, but most play out something like this:

A work-obsessed city gal—typically a “marketing exec,” though clearly zero research has been conducted as to what precisely that entails—finds herself stranded in provincial New England, British Columbia, at the heart of the holiday season (kindly disregard the lush summer foliage in the background of every wide shot), where an earnest Bill-Pullman-in-While You Were Sleeping clone, far too manly and pragmatic to have ever participated in something as frivolous as an acting class, teaches our heroine, often with the aide of a precocious (and fortuitously motherless) child, the true meaning of Christmas—read:  small-town livin’ in the real America.  Twirling gape-mouthed in an obscenely production-designed town squarebrought to you by Balsam Hill!blanketed in a freshly fallen silent shroud of SnowCel, our newly enlightened protagonist declares, “This is what Christmas is supposed to look like!”

And that got me thinking:  What should Christmas look like?  I mean, if each of us could put the holiday season on a postcard to serve as the perfect representation of what it evokes in our hearts, what would yours depict?

Perhaps this?

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A Conversation with “Shots Fired” Writer/Co-Producer Marissa Jo Cerar

Marissa Jo Cerar is a film and television writer who grew up in a family of eight adopted kids, five of whom her parents adopted from foster care—at once.  That fateful decision has provided her with endless material, and life as the only brown girl in rural Illinois, population 1,600, was unique, to say the least, because she only saw people who looked like her on television and in the movies.

After placing on the Hit List and the Black List in 2012, a pair of annual surveys of studio and prodco execs that rank the most well-regarded unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, her script Conversion sold to KperiodMedia in January of 2016.  She is a co-producer on the upcoming film Burden, currently in post-production.

Marissa Jo spent three years on the television show The Fosters (seasons 1–3).  Last year she joined the writing and producing team of Shots Fired as a co-producer; the 10-hour limited series premiered at Sundance and currently airs on Fox, Wednesday nights at 8/7c.  She now works as a Supervising Producer on season two of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, set for release in 2018.

Screenwriter Marissa Jo Cerar

I first met Marissa Jo in 2009 at an industry Christmas party in Century City (isn’t that how the plot of Die Hard got started?), and a few months later, along with six other working screenwriters, we formed a writers group that met twice monthly to trade notes and war stories over dinner.  Speaking for myself, it was an invaluable association that made me a better writer as well as a sharper analyst, and was a great source of camaraderie and confidence—two short-supply resources in a vocation as solitary and enervating as this one.

An uncommonly emotive screenwriter, Marissa in many respects served as the emotional barometer of our workshops.  For instance, when I first pitched Escape from Rikers Island in 2010, the group enthusiastically helped me brainstorm the high-concept potential of a “zombie outbreak”–meets–“prison break” genre mashup, but it was Marissa who responded from the get-go to the story’s emotional through-line—the volatile dynamic between the two leads, a white Gang Squad detective and black gangbanger forced by circumstance to team up—thereby encouraging me to make that the primary focal point of the narrative:  It would be a story about two lower-class city kids who grew up to be men on opposing sides of the law, who share more in common than either would care to admit, and whose relationship would be examined in all of its messy, morally gray complexity; that zombies were exacerbating the tension between them became almost incidental.

Somehow, to my pleasant surprise, this action thriller about alpha males trying to escape a detention center overrun with cannibalistic monsters became, at heart, a funky sort of love story—one about the love between enemies.  I don’t think I would have otherwise been inclined to reach so high—and dig so deep—with such a pulpy, commercial premise had Marissa not inspired me to do so.  In a business that’s always looking for the hook, Marissa’s instincts are to find the heart.

That profound sensitivity, coupled with her one-of-a-kind formative experiences, have been a tremendous asset to the character-driven television dramas to which Marissa Jo has contributed, which have explored such thematically challenging subjects as multiethnic blended families and LGBT equality (The Fosters), race relations between the police and public (Shots Fired), and teen suicide (13 Reasons Why).  She’s brings a unique point of view, a master’s command of her craft, and a fearlessness to her writing—because it takes courage to put your heart on the page, and risk having crushed the very thing you only wish to share.  For those reasons, I’m delighted Marissa agreed to be the subject of my first interview here on the blog:

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Ghosts of October

I can sometimes still remember, even all these years later, what autumn smells like.

I’m not talking, mind you, about the artificial fragrances manufactured and sold to us by Starbucks and Yankee Candle.  No, I mean that sweet decay of wet leaves clumped into a strangled quilt in the gutter, carried along by a chilly gust from the Hudson River that would sweep across my Bronx neighborhood, rattling single-paned windows of prewar houses and apartment buildings and hurrying us home before the overcast skies ruptured.  That was my favorite time to be out—when the wind was blowing but not raging, the thunderheads gathering though not yet sobbing.  Such moments were when you could enjoy the stormy sense of danger autumn provoked precisely because you knew, with unshakable certainty, you could beat it home.  I would quite literally venture into the woods, despite Mother Nature’s ominous admonitions, because it felt so good, after thirty of forty minutes of taking in the scented air and golden hues, to finally come in from the cold.  For as far back as my memory extends, I have loved the fall season.

But I barely recollect what the cold feels like any more than I do the perfume of dead leaves.  Real cold, that is—not the regulated airstream that pumps out of the A/C all day and night and lets me pretend, in concert with the aroma of Pumpkin Spice Latte, I’m someplace else.

This is my sixteenth autumn, such as it is, in seasonless Southern California, and now more than ever I miss the changing weather and weeping skies this time of year used to bring; I miss the drives we’d to take up to Sleepy Hollow (the actual one) and Bear Mountain, with its panoply of colored foliage, and riding the Bx9 bus past the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage on the Grand Concourse at East Kingsbridge Road.  I’ve always missed those things—since the day I moved to L.A.  It’s just become more pronounced in recent years.  When I was young and immortal, I was entirely reassured by the infinite number of autumns ahead of me, confident I would get back to them… somedayBut I turned forty earlier this year, a rite of passage which inspires no small degree of existential introspection, and now I wonder how many more I’ll miss out on here in the Land of Sunshine and Strip Malls, with its palm trees that remain as reliably green throughout the year as the weather stays hot and dry.  These days, my favorite holiday, Halloween, mostly just reminds me of the particular autumnal delights even Hollywood, for all its world-building artifice (those signature palm trees aren’t indigenous), can’t credibly reproduce.

A photo I took on December 22, 2013 of the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, built 1697

A photo I took on December 22, 2013 of the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, built 1697

Someone asked me, quite recently, why I love the spooky season so much, and I found myself, as I answered, really thinking through the issue for the first time in my life.  Why do I love Halloween?  Why do l love monster movies?  Why do I love these things that, ostensibly, inspire such fear and dread—that represent death instead of life, dark instead of light, cold instead of warmth?

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“I Heard You Were Dead”: What the Career of John Carpenter Demonstrates about the Nature of Legacy

I write all my fiction to movie soundtracks.  Instrumentals only—lyrics in my ear are too distracting while I’m trying to compose words, and I usually wind up tuning that noise out entirely, in which case:  What’s the point?  At the beginning of a project, I’ll choose a good mix of selections from movies that represent the tone or theme I’m going for, then compile a playlist that cycles in the background—turned up just enough to register but not actively listen to—for as long as it takes to complete the manuscript; that playlist serves as an aural compass, or “temp track,” keeping me in touch with what the world I’m creating should look and sound like at all times.

Just the other week, I finished the first draft of what will be my debut novel, Escape from Rikers Island.  The influences on EFRI are too numerous to quantify, but include novelists Richard Price and Elmore Leonard, as well as filmmaker John Carpenter.  In both title and premise, Escape from Rikers Island owes a great creative debt to Carpenter’s exploitation thrillers Escape from New York and Assault on Precinct 13.  His movies, love ‘em or otherwise, have a look and feel all their own, owed in part to his eerie, synth-driven soundtracks; he is one of very few directors who’s scored most of his own movies, so writing EFRI to his music seemed like a no-brainer.

As fate would have it, right around the time I began the draft, Carpenter released his first album of original material, Lost Themes, so EFRI got a soundtrack of its very own, with music I now almost exclusively associate with my work of fiction rather than any specific film of his.  One of the cuts, “Vortex,” even became, to my mind, the novel’s unofficial theme song:

John Carpenter is touring this summer to promote Lost Themes and its just-released follow-up, Lost Themes II, and I went to see him perform last month at the Orpheum Theatre here in Los Angeles with my friend and fellow horror enthusiast Adam Aresty.  Adam is a burgeoning master of horror himself, having written the literal bee movie Stung (now streaming on Netflix), the chilling short story “Recovery” (which evokes—and I mean this as the highest compliment—Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 literary classic “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), and the brand-new sci-fi novella The Communication Room.  Don’t take my word for it, though:  Sample for yourself some of the free fiction on his Web site, including one of my favorites, the James M. Cain–style noir tale “Wrought Iron”.  If you like what you read and you live in the Los Angeles area, perhaps consider coming out to Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard on Tuesday, August 2nd at 7:00 p.m. to hear Adam read from The Communication Room.

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