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Sunday, February 22, 2009

Writing For Pictures Workshop - London, 7 March, 2009

For you who are in London - or England - or anywhere in the UK - anywhere in Europe, for that matter - I'm conducting a workshop for writers, the first week in March...

Writing For Pictures

honing skills for writers of film, tv, games, comics

a workshop by Neal Romanek



Date: Saturday, March 7, 2009


Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm


Location:


Price: £30 in advance (£50 at the door if spaces are available)


Ealing Friends Meeting House
17 Woodville Road
Ealing, London
W5 2SE
United Kingdom



Register Now:


Phone: 0754 508 7629
Email: workshops@nealromanek.com



Description:


A 2 hour workshop designed to help writers of all skill levels practice and improve their skills for writing scripts for image-based media – film, tv, comics/graphic novels, games.

The workshop is open to anyone interested in writing for film, tv, games or comics – from veterans trying to perfect their skills to people who have never written fiction before.


The workshop will emphasize practice over theory, doing over observing. You will get out of it exactly what you put into it. It's like an intense session at the gym – for media writing.


Price: £30 (payable via cash or check - PayPal link will be available within the next few days)


We are offering this low introductory rate for this first workshop only. Those who attend for this first night will receive a discount on later courses, starting up at the end of March. Spaces are limited. Sign up early.



The facilitator Neal Romanek is a graduate of University of Southern California’s renowned Cinema-TV Production school. Neal has written for the screen, games, and motion picture industry magazines and websites. He has had intensive training from some of the world's best teachers in writing and creative process.



To reserve a place, or for further questions


email: workshops [at] nealromanek.com



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Saturday, April 19, 2008

Video - 1 Hour of Screenwriting

Screenwriting is hard. Screenwriting surrounded by hungry cats is harder. Screenwriting surrounded by hungry cats, soothing a crying baby, well ...



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Monday, March 31, 2008

Daughters of Writers


Tomorrow, my wife starts her new job far away in the wastes of North London.

This means I will be back full time taking care of The Small Child, while being back full time writing a feature motion picture screenplay for great big heaps of worthless American dollars.

I'm a little concerned, of course, because writing is very very hard and taking care of a child is very very very hard. And so I fear my life is about to become very very very very very hard.

Perhaps we need to hire some child care. But do I really want some filthy stranger taking care of my child? Some filthy stranger who takes care of children for money? I mean what kind of person would do that, would take care of a child for money? Disgraceful. They could be foreign too. What if they were foreign? That would be even worse - a filthy foreign stranger who takes care of children for money taking care of my child. I'd sooner leave her with the cats.

Hmmm. The cats.

That may be worth looking into.

They're affectionate, the cats. And vocal. And robust. And they have excellent values. And they have no felony convictions that I am aware of. So maybe the cats could take care of my daughter from eight to noon while I work. That might work perfectly. I'll have to check with them. They're busy cats. They may already be booked.

Script Research Interesting Fact #11: Seville's cathedral occupies the spot of the great mosque built by the Almohads in the 12th century.

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Friday, November 30, 2007

Top 10 Writers To Detain In A National Emergency

There are enemies out there. Many enemies. So many enemies.

But the most dangerous enemy is the enemy within. The Homegrown Enemy.

You know, most things that are made in the home are dangerous. Homegrown vegetables - dangerous. Homemade toys - dangerous. Homespun wisdom - very dangerous.

When the next American National Emergency comes - and it will come - we will have to act fast and act good. The first thing must be an "appeal for calm". And an "appeal for utter silence" is even better. Because if you're about to drive a bus off the road and over a cliff, the last thing you want is a bunch of back-seat drivers yelling for you to stop and ruining your concentration.

So when the Time of National Crisis & Sacrifice comes, I strongly suggest we neutralize the 10 journalists on the list below.

In peacetime we have indulged their extremist and radical views, but as we all learned when we studied the Bill Of Rights in school, extremist and radical views have no place in a society that lost 3880 innocent lives on September The Eleventh or whatever. 

(click a link to learn more about each scallywag)
  1. Juan Cole 
  2. Amy Goodman
  3. Seymour Hersh
  4. Dahr Jamail
  5. Naomi Klein
  6. Paul Krugman
  7. Scott Ritter
  8. Jeremy Scahill
  9. Gore Vidal
  10. Naomi Wolf
These writers are wiley - cunning - and even though recent changes to the law make it easier to deal with their kind, they often will continue to operate below our radar. Luckily, we have means.


Applying terror can be a fine way to get results. By "terror" I do not mean the use of bombs and spectacular, awesome, shocking displays of destruction and stuff like that. I mean simply good old fashioned frightening of people. So how do you frighten a gaggle of smug Cassandras who have no respect for the sanctity of the American System?

What you do is: Arrest Seymour Hersh for making secret classified material available to The Enemy in his various New Yorker pieces. Put him in jail - regretfully, sadly, without bail, but this is a national security matter and all.  Mr. Hersh need not remain detained indefinitely. Only for a few months.  Or for the duration of The Emergency, say - however long that is.

Also apologize repeatedly to the American people about how Judith Miller and Dan Rather got off so lightly, and make a promise that it will never happen again.

After Sy Hersh spends a little time in a Halliburton Hilton, the rest of the gang will shut up and fast.  All except that damnable Gore Vidal. Who does he think he is?

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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Cecil Castellucci - Interview



Cecil Castellucci on Art, Transformation,
and Not Being Boy Proof

interview, Cecil Castellucci &
 Neal Romanek

CECIL CASTELLUCCI has fronted punk bands, has written, directed, and acted in theater and film, has encouraged and coached fellow artists with enterprises like L.A.'s Alpha 60 filmmaking collective, and has an extensive resume as a journalist writing about media and media technology. She is not just a role model for the teens she writes for, but also for a whole generation of cross-platform authors.

Her novels, "Boy Proof", "The Queen Of Cool", and, most recently, "Beige", feature teen characters caught between worlds, on the cusps of a transformation. She was a natural choice to write the debut graphic novel in DC Comics' new "Minx" line of comics for teen girls. "The Plain Janes", illustrated by Jim Rugg came out this May to critical acclaim and is the flagship book for a whole new division of DC.
I talked with Cecil, while she was holed up in Amherst, Mass. with fellow writers, a dog, and a boyfriend.



Neal Romanek: So what are you up to in Amherst?

Cecil Castellucci: I came to Amherst to write. I am secluded in a house where my friend - boy friend - is house sitting, and there is a dog and a large yard and lots of food and wine and great conversation. We go into town and sit in a cafe with a bunch of other writers - and we write and write and write.

NR: You seem reluctant to use the word "boyfriend".

CC: No, I just never had a boyfriend before. And so I didn't know how to say it! I am usually an old maid! It's all so new! And this is the first interview where I say "I HAVE A BOYFRIEND!"

NR: Congratulations! But you've had boyfriends before.

CC: Never! Okay, yes. But a really long time ago. I have always been more Emily Dickinson than AnaÏs Nin.

NR: You and Jen Sincero devised a play you performed in Los Angeles called "Spinster".

CC: Exactly!

NR: Why the caution?

CC: Because it's so new. But I am so in love

NR: You're feeling like a teen.

CC: Yes.

NR: You write about teens, and for teens. If you settled down with a 9-to-5 and behaved sensibly and married a doctor, would you fear losing touch with that Cecil-teen?

CC: Yes. That's why I could never settle down with a regular type. Or if I did, then I would be the kooky wife and put glow-in-the-dark stars on everything and eat only popsicles.

NR: It seems like there is a theme of "settling down" - or avoiding settling down - or having to cope with it in some way - in your novels and also in "The Plain Janes". There's relocation. Or dealing with a new environment or new paradigm.

CC: Yes. Isn't that always the way things are? Big or little, there is always transformation. But I think that settling down, sometimes people think that's scary. But it's not. It's just settling into yourself, becoming who you really are.

NR: And maybe finding that someone who understands who you are.

CC: Yes.

NR: Or understands at least, who you're not.

CC: In "The Queen of Cool", the dad character has settled into someone that he thinks he is supposed to be. So has Libby, the main character. She has settled into being the "cool" girl. But then they both transform into their real selves.

NR: And they're transformed through a relocation, right? Or she is.

CC: Libby's transformed by doing a science internship at the zoo.

NR: And the zoo is that new "Special World", where she has to set aside that old self. It's a great location choice, because it's the same with the animals, who've been relocated too.

CC: Yeah! I never thought of that! I had thought of it as a clear and simple way to talk about cliques. Like the gorillas and the zebras and the lions all hang out with each other but still they are all in the zoo. Kind of like the cool kids and the nerds all in the same school.

NR: And every type has a specific name, habits, routine that is expected of them. But your own growing up seemed to be really free of conventional restraints, yes?

CC: Yes. I never had chores. I never had curfews. My parents were - are - research scientists. And French. So, you know, it was a free for all! Also I didn't go to a typical high school. I went to the Laguardia High School of Performing Arts.

NR: What kind of science did your parents do?

CC: My dad was a neurobiologist. My mom was a molecular biologist. And genetic engineer. They still are.

NR: That's fascinating, because both those professions would seem to be about trying to control and manage life. A little discouraging of the artistic impulse.

CC: I think that they are very similar to being an artist. With neurobiology, my dad studies the mechanics of memory, which I think is beautiful and poetic. My mom studies genetics, the building blocks of life and the pieces that make us human. And isn't that what we do as artists? Study memory and also try to figure out what makes us human? I think so.
NR: You're right! And also there is the discpline in both science and in art to label a thing correctly and precisely. That's kind of the beginning of art – or of writing, at least. To name a thing exactly.

CC: Also in both there is a need to think very creatively and outside of any boxes. Growing up, my parents were always going to the lab to do their experiments. That's what I do. Experiment. Only it's with stories. Artists and Scientists are people who have very similar hearts.

NR: People always talk about the temperamental & suffering artist. But they don't talk about the suffering scientist, do they?

CC: They talk about the mad scientist!

NR: Yes! Of course!

CC: Same thing, different manifestation.

NR: Dr. Frankenstein.

CC: Exactly!

NR: ... aka Mary Shelley herself.

CC: And Dr. Jekyll.

NR: And Prospero.
CC: Yes.

NR: Prospero, who is both artist AND scientist.

CC: See! Shakespeare agrees!

NR: Do you use many actual incidents from your life when you write? Is there ever any memoir element?

CC: Yes, but the facts become so warped and changed that they are hardly recognizable as any real thing. It's the visceral emotional element that is more interesting to me. But I can point to many places and be like, "this is where that comes from.". It might be interesting to annotate and dissect a book like that one day. Describe where each idea originated.

NR: Could you give an example?

CC: Like in "Boy Proof", the mom comes from a slight combination of Jennifer Aniston's mom, who always said, whenever I was sleeping over at her house in High School, "How can you leave the house without your faces on?" if we didn't wear make up. And also my friend Chastity Bono's mom, Cher, who was making a comeback at the time. Both those girls were friends of mine in high school, I'm not in touch with them now, but their moms certainly gave me a seed of something and I can see tiny elements or threads of those ladies in Egg's mom. There are not any specific traits I used, but there is a certain something that I was inspired by.

And as far as "The Plain Janes" goes: I myself was in a terrorist bombing when I was very young. It has always affected me. Always marked me. But there is no similarity to the events in "The Plain Janes" and my experience. I could never understand why someone who didn't know me, the IRA, would want to harm me. And I couldn't understand why someone would do something so ugly. And I struggle to find beauty in everyone and everywhere because of it. I was 9, I was in Belgium at La Grand Place, it was like, the 2000th birthday of Brussels or something. The British Army Band was playing in the square. The IRA put a bomb under the stage. I was in a beer museum, not drinking. The stage had been empty five minutes before, and I had been dancing on the empty stage. Five minutes later, when I was in the museum, the stage blew up. The museum was the most damaged building. A window fell on me. It was very frightening. I'm still affected by it. Obviously it's much better now, but I still struggle with that fear that anything could happen at any moment. And people could just start screaming ... I don't like thinking about it. Anyway, all that to say, that yes, there are elements of my real life in my books.

NR: Thanks for sharing that.

CC: I think that's your job as an artist, to take and mold and twist and glean and use your experiences to try to reach out and find a universal human truth. I also think it is your job as an artist to go out and have a lot of experiences. To eat, love, live, dance, jump, cry, scream, kiss, drink.

NR: There does seem to be in your stories an echo of being blasted out of the world. And then trying to find a way back to it.

CC: Yes. That's a good way of putting it.

NR: In "The Plain Janes, the solution to the trauma - not literally, but at least the thing that happens after the trauma -...is the bringing forward of the arts. Creativity. And trying to help others with it. Did you get any of that in your own experience at La Guardia? I envision lots of couches and fingerpaint and hippy teachers with no bras.

CC: Well, creativity has always been my answer to everything. Sadly there were no couches and hippy teachers with no bras. I wish it had been that bohemian. I longed for that growing up.

NR: It sounds very romantic. But how was it really?

CC: There was a crazy kind of fabulous teacher named Mr. Anthony Abeson. He had us doing yoga poses and officially he taught drama, but it was more like he taught how to look at the world and live life as an artist. He was always quoting someone, but once he said - I don't know if it is him or someone else - but he said, "'In general' is the enemy of all mankind."

NR: Again - art is the attempt to name a thing exactly and precisely.

CC: Exactly. That's a life lesson that I still think about at least once a day.

NR: What I imagine is that you might in that environment learn how to integrate art into your daily life more. Learn how to make it a part of your daily work.

CC: I think that, for me, that did work like that. Because half our day was art, and half our day was academics. So it just really was the same thing. They informed each other for me. I also learned from another teacher of mine - a Russian from the Moscow Arts Theater, Mr. Marat Yusim - that to be a great artist you must see a lot of great art. So I made it my mission in high school to go see a lot of plays, movies, museums, and also to read a lot of books and plays. That was all because I was interested in stories. I've seen and read a lot, but I still feel as though I am so far behind and have so much more just basic stuff to read. I feel like I'll never catch up!

NR: They keep writing them, is the problem.

CC: It's true. And also, you read one thing, and then you want to go to the source. Like Greek tragedies! Or Norse myths Or you know ... EVERYTHING!

NR: LIke when you watch "Oldboy", you want to dust off your Edith Hamilton.

CC: Exactly.

NR: I myself have read absolutely nothing - which is helpful because then everything you pick up seems a revelation.

CC: That's how I feel.

NR: But you don't just write. You do music. Theatre, film, and write journalism, fiction, sequential art.

CC: But it's all telling a story.

NR: What is the satisfaction you get out of telling a story?

CC: I think it's that the whole world is yours. You can go anywhere. As a writer, you can try being anything. I suppose it's the same way actors feel. It's like getting a chance to try out everything. And go anywhere. even dark places. Or tall places. Or boy places. Or outer space places. Or old places. Or then. Or now.

NR: And do you need - or crave - an audience? A partner? Or is it just the stories themselves?

CC: It's always nice to have an audience, you know. You don't make art in a vacuum. It's nice to see how it affects someone else, but that audience can be one person. But mostly it just pleases me. Or is something I want to see or read.

NR: So most of the time you just want to do something for yourself.

CC: Yes.

NR: And there isn't necessarily the need to have it heard or witnessed?

CC: It's because I have to. But then, I do also feel compelled to share it too. But I would do it anyway.

NR: I get the feeling that with the audience reaction not foremost and dominant in your mind, it allows you to create less self-consciously.

CC: Yes. I have played a lot of rock shows to five people, sometimes to total drunks in bars who are yelling "Show me your tits!" I do try to put it out there. But not my tits. I will say that I sometimes do write with the hope that someone will smile. Like with "The Plain Janes" I felt like I was writing it for Jim Rugg, because he was drawing it. So I wanted him to smile and have fun.

NR: Which he did, by all accounts.

CC: It kind of felt like I wanted to do better or the bar was higher because he was my audience. So even though I wrote it for myself, since we were partners in crime, I wrote with Jim in mind.

NR: I heard you say at a reading once that you write the kinds of things you loved as a teen. Is there that sense of sending something to yourself back through time? A message in a bottle for a young Cecil?

CC: Sure! The things I longed to read when I was a teen, that teen inside of me still wants and longs for that. I'm always happy when the 8-year-old, 12-year-old, 16-year-old, 25-year-old, and 37-year-old me are happy!

NR: And if you can make all of them happy at the same time, then that's when you have a masterpiece.

CC: Yes! That is when you have a masterpiece.

NR: Thank you very much, Cecil.

CC: Thank you!

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Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Mike Carey on Comics Writing & Beyond


"Mike Carey on Comics Writing & Beyond"


conversation, Mike Carey + Neal Romanek


I had the privilege of interviewing Mike Carey, writer of "X-Men" and the "Sandman" spin-off "Lucifer", as well as creator of the Felix Castor series of horror/detective novels by Orbit Books. Mike has also recently written "Re-Gifters" for DC Comics' new "Minx" imprint of graphic novels for teen girls. His third Felix Castor book, "Dead Men's Boots", will be available this September.



How did you become involved in DC's Minx line and "Re-Gifters"? Did you have to employ any new tools to write specifically for a young female audience?


It was less of a stretch than it looks. I'd already written "My Faith In Frankie" (Vertigo), of course, and that gave me a chance to exercise these particular muscles - to try out writing for a younger audience or at least in a "teen fiction" mode. I really enjoyed it and I was hugely satisfied with the result.


Then when Shelly invited me to pitch for Minx, her first suggestion was that I could team up with Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel - bringing the Frankie creative team back together again. We already knew each other's strengths and foibles, and we'd alreadly got into a really good work groove on that first outing, so pitching "Re-Gifters" didn't feel like much of a leap at all. It was very much a question of applying the "Frankie" aesthetic to a different - non-fantasy - context. Structure wasn't an issue because we knew that Sonny could take style shifts and flashbacks and multiple points of view in his stride. So we pulled out all the stops. "Re-Gifters" is "Frankie" with a bigger core cast and a bigger canvas.


Well, that's not true, of course, because "Frankie" also had that element of playing on mythological themes and questions of religious belief. In "Re-Gifters" that wider dimension is much more subliminally present in the relationships between the different L.A. subcultures and the protagonist's trying to find her niche within that complex web of relationships. But what I mean is that we knew where we were going, and we knew how we wanted to get there. There was never a phase of sitting around and asking ourselves "How are we going to do this?"


Clearly, though, the narrative techniques are very different from my superhero work and from most of my Vertigo work. That was part of the fun.



As your career has progressed, and the popular media industry with it, how have your attitudes and your approaches changed?


I guess the big difference is that I'm writing for a living now. When I started out, and way, way into my run on "Lucifer", I was a teacher who wrote in the evenings and at weekends, around the edges of a very demanding job. Then I made the big jump - as two smaller jumps, because at the college's invitation I took a sabbatical before I quit teaching for good - and for the past five years I've just been doing this, full-time. That was a huge change in my life, and at first it was hard to adjust. Obviously I began to take on a bigger volume of work, but that's never really been a problem: what was weird was sitting at home, waving my wife off to the office and my kids to school, and then hammering away at the keyboard in a room by myself for eight hours.


But that's just logistical stuff, obviously, and you get used to it. In a more significant sense, I had to start seeing writing as a career rather than a hobby and I had to start making decisions about where I was going, what I was aiming for. That didn't come naturally to me: I'm both a disorganised person and a retiring one, so I don't push hard towards specific goals, treading the slow and the unwary under my feet. My instinct is to keep plugging away and wait for things to happen, which was why it took me so long to progress from comics journalism into comic scriptwriting. I'm still not aggressive: but I do have more of a sense of direction now, even if it wavers a lot.


What's the biggest roadblock you've had to face as a writer?


Probably the biggest crisis came quite early on in my relationship with DC. I wrote "The Morningstar Option" for Alisa Kwitney, and in the process became very good friends with her - which was hard not to do because she was an inspirational and very supportive editor. But then Alisa took maternity leave and left Vertigo - as it turned out permanently - and I didn't know anyone else at DC from Adam. Or Eve. There was a very real danger that I'd suddenly find myself on the outside looking in again, losing all the ground I'd gained.


Two things saved me. One was that Alisa commissioned a second miniseries - "Petrefax" - from me before she left DC, giving me a lifeline and an ongoing link to Vertigo for at least four months. And the other was that I made the decision to go to San Diego that year for Comic-Con and made contact with Shelly Bond, who edited me on a short story for the Flinch horror anthology and ultimately commissioned the "Lucifer" ongoing. I stayed in the game, in other words - with the help of two exceptional editors. And everything since, as far as my career is concerned, has really followed on from the decisions of that time.



There's the adage: "It's not enough to have talent, you must have a talent for having talent." So how do you operate as the Mike Carey "brand", as a business person who may sometimes have to act and think differently from the author?


I think you develop a kind of double-vision where - even while you're immersed in one project - part of your mind is always engaged in racking up the next one. That's a change that comes about as soon as you're relying on your writing income: you worry about gaps, about periods when there's nothing happening, so you try to keep them as short and infrequent as you can. I'm always talking to editors, and I'm always throwing out pitches or jotting down rough ideas for possible stories. Having said that, though, I know a lot of creators who are much more pro-active, much more aggressive than I am in doing that stuff - who set up and maintain the brand with great skill and great dedication. I'm kind of ham-fisted at it, if I'm honest. And I do the bits of it that come easy to me, like writing the blog and chatting on the occasional message board, and doing signings every so often. Stuff that looks daunting I shamelessly duck.


The part of marketing that I enjoy most is going to cons. I don't really regard that as work, because my own inner fan-boy is still alive and well and any sci-fi or comics convention is going to provide me with a lot of pleasure and diversion. But it does also get you onto people's radar, so in that sense it's a promotional thing.



The communications revolution has affected the balance of power in all areas of business. Do you see UK and European popular media changing in prominence or influence? Or do you suppose there'll be more consolidation of US influence, with stuff farmed out to international artists?


I think the hegemony of the US media is very deeply entrenched now, across the globe. And speaking as an English writer working overwhelmingly for US publishers, I can see exactly how this process works - at least in a niche market like comics. The truth is, although there is still arguably a UK comics market, there probably isn't a living to be made in it. Certainly not for a writer, anyway. If you get in at 2000AD, you may end up writing a regular strip for them: but that means five or six pages a week, at forty or fifty quid a page, for however long the strip lasts - then a frantic round of pitching and developing to get the next strip up and running. It's fine when you're young and unencumbered, but it's not going to get you all that far in the longer term. A lot of people see that as just a calling card for the American market, because there's nowhere to progress to in the British market. Literally nowhere.


Having said that, European publishers like Humanoids and Soleil are making increasing use of British creators: unlike the UK they have a robust domestic market that scarcely intersects at all with the market for translated American books. So DC and Marvel rule the roost but they're not the only game in town - and I don't think we're seeing a gradual process of cultural saturation and colonisation. It amazed me when I was at the Lille Comics Festival last year to see how the three audiences - for US superhero books, for the home-grown "Franco-Belge" strips, and for Manga - exist side by side and are even served to some extent by separate specialty shops.



What have been your observations of the "New Authorship", with creators working easily across multiple media - in your case, films, prose, comics. Is there a real falling away of specialization - or pigeonholing? Or has it always been this way?


It's probably always been there. Look at how many successful novelists have written movie screenplays, going way back to the fifties. It's almost inevitable, if you're making a name for yourself in one creative field, that you'll eventually get noticed and get offers from adjacent ones.


The degree of inter-penetration we're seeing now though strikes me as something new, if only because it's been formalised and institutionalised. San Diego Comic-Con has so many movie and TV people in attendance now that the straight comics stuff has come to seem almost like an off-shoot. DC and Marvel are aggressively recruiting novelists to write books for them, both because it's a fair bet that they'll already know how to write and because they bring fresh perspectives with them. Not to mention dedicated fan bases in a lot of cases.


I don't see this as a bad thing. Very few writers in my experience think of the medium they work in as their natural home or as the limit of their ambitions. Most writers like telling stories, and most writers like to experiment: I know generalisations are dangerous but I believe those things to be true. The medium may be the message, in a lot of cases - has to be, in a lot of cases - but for that very reason, if you've got something different to say you'll often reach out for a different medium to say it in.



What's the most practical lesson you've learned? The thing you've used most in improving your craft?


This isn't my insight - it's Peter Gross's (artist "Lucifer", "Chosen", et al)- but I quote it all the time because it's so useful as a mantra when you're breaking into the business and when you're trying to establish a name for yourself.


Peter says there are three qualities that it's desirable for a comics creator to have: to be really good, really quick or really nice. To be all three of those things would be great, but any two will do. It's the honest-to-God truth.



Will we see you this July at Comic-Con?


I should be tacking between the Hachette, Marvel, DC and Virgin booths, and I expect I'll have signing sessions at all three. Don't know if I'll be on a panel, but I'll do it if I'm asked. On the floor... man, SDCC is so huge these days that you're unlikely to meet the same person twice in the aisles over the whole week. But it is right at the end of a three-week signing tour for me, so I'll be the guy who looks like a used dishrag.




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Monday, May 14, 2007

What's It Like Being A Screenwriter?


Being a SCREENWRITER is like ...

  • being an architect who draws up blueprints for elaborate and complex buildings and then goes door-to-door trying to sell them.
  • training intensely week after week, year after year, for the Olympics with virtually zero possibility of ever even getting close to the Olympics.
  • endeavoring to be a professional writer of Shakespearean sonnets.
  • being an extreme obsessive-compulsive trying to organize a kids party - but less pleasurable.
  • being the one who tells a president that his policies are unworkable and even dangerous, and knowing in your heart that when your warnings are proved valid, you will get none of the credit.
  • being a mother in a society that says that swears that it treasures motherhood, but frowns on maternity leave.
  • being the smart kid in class who deliberately messes up his life so he won't be socially outcast.
  • a maker of elaborate and tremendously expensive Italian elbowpads that only 10 people in the world will ever buy.
  • trying to observe every law in the Old Testament and still maintain an exciting and enviable lifestyle.

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Monday, April 16, 2007

Henry Miller Quote


"The child is very keenly aware of the aura which surrounds men and things. Grown-up children like myself, who are often only addle-pated adolescents, forget all about the aura, just as the scientist forgets about the dwarves which inhabit the metals".


- Henry Miller, "The Waters Reglitterized"

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Saturday, April 14, 2007

Vonnegut

So that was Kurt Vonnegut. All done.

I'm glad we got him. He was good.

My wife wrote a paper on Kurt Vonnegut when she was at Boston College. The faculty resisted heavily because Kurt Vonnegut was considered a "popular" author - and a writer of science fiction, heavens forbid - and so beneath academic study. But she won out.

I haven't read as much Kurt Vonnegut as I should - another peculiar result of my tendency toward avoiding things that I know will make me happier. But I will. I will read more. I will read "Slaughterhouse Five" (1969), for example. I remember "Slaughterhouse Five" sitting on desks of friends in high school. I think they must have been reading it for a class. Very enlightened high school I went to.

I read "Cat's Cradle" (1963) and "The Sirens Of Titan" (1959) a couple years back. They were fascinating and very, very funny. Reading them, I had the suspicion I was being distracted by a first-rate entertainment, so the writer could, in the meantime, perform some fine-tuning of my mental and spiritual state.

Certainly, Vonnegut's service during WWII, and his first-hand experience of the bombing of Dresden and its aftermath, are key influences in any study of his work and absurist point of view. Perhaps experiencing such horror first-hand produces an understanding that the most vital things must never be approached with an attitude of gravity:

"Who am I to shade this staggering moment with so light and shallow brow!"

Dresden, ca. 1900

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Monday, January 22, 2007

Gordy Hoffman & BlueCat Screenplay Competition

Last week, I talked with Gordy Hoffman, writer-director and founder of the BlueCat Screenwriting Competition. The deadline for this year's BlueCat is March 1, 2007. Grand Prize is $10,000, five finalists win $1500. BlueCat gives written feedback on every screenplay entered. Entry fee is $45.

Gordy Hoffman, teaches screenwriting at University of Southern Calfornia's School of Cinematic Arts. He oversees the BlueCat competition with film festival producer and publicist, Heather Schor.

And yes, Gordy is the older brother of Academy Award winning actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman. But writing is actually a lot harder than acting. I've done both, and it's totally harder being a writer. Trust me. It is.


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Neal Romanek: I see by BlueCat's MySpace page that you're a scorpio?

Gordy Hoffman: Actually I am a libra. Heather is a scorpio

Neal: Ah, I see. Yes, it actually also says that you're female too. So, yeah, that must be Heather.

Gordy: Yes.
bluecat hoffman schor
Neal: So when and how did you start the BlueCat Screenwriting Competition?

Gordy: I started BlueCat back in 1998. I had the idea for awhile, having gone through experiences myself as a screenwriter submitting to various contests. So I went and ahead and set up a website and started this journey.

Neal: Obviously there are lots of screenwriting contests out there now. Do we need another one? Do we need BlueCat?

Gordy: There were a lot of contests when we started too, in 1998. But, yes, there are so many more now. BlueCat provides a service to screenwriters. It would be much easier for us to not provide written analysis to every person who enters. Most major competitions do not read past page 30. But we do. I also believe we strive to read and adjudicate our submissions fairly and honestly, and this has led us to great discoveries.

Neal: What was it like for you entering contests as a writer? And how has that affected how you've structured the BlueCat Competition?

Gordy: I hated that I never knew why I didn't win. This is why we give analysis to all the BlueCat entrants. I also hated that it seemed to cost so much to enter. Our fees have always been low, probably too low, and it's still fair. And I love that you can use the contest deadlines to force yourself to write. That's valuable.

Basically, I am a director and a writer. I am not a screenplay contest entrepreneur. This is not a good way to become rich. The heart of BlueCat has always been in the right place. We want to serve writers in their dream to become better. This is what satisfies us. "Us" meaning "me and Heather". So, as a writer, I am in there for the fight.

Neal: So you can't get rich doing a contest? Bummer.

Writers tend to be isolated. Have you been able to develop community among screenwriters via BlueCat?

Gordy: We have a great MySpace page, and this has been amazing, but no, we don't have the community that we would like. We will be opening a conventional forum shortly, but I would really like to take the idea of community and peer review beyond the Zoetropes and TriggerStreets. I would love to develop a way that the mechanism of the contest can happen within a large group of writers, where they discover themselves, and there's a carrot at the end. Something akin to the Sundance Lab, but beyond, where production of the screenplay is realistic. I would love to get any input from your audience on what they would want. Let's make this happen. There should be something beyond just reading each other's scripts.

Neal: Well, web media makes all that so much easier. It's really a change from the idea of the writer in the room who hopes to one day make it big and he'll be "discovered".

Gordy: Yes, exactly. And shooting on HD makes production change.

Neal: Do you ever have the sense, in doing a contest, of being a middle man between the writer and money people?

Gordy: BlueCat is a middle man, a very good one. We don't take money from the screenplays we set up. I think we might take an executive producer credit in the future, but no money. Writers want BlueCat to be that bridge.

Neal: Yes. There's always that hope that writers have: "If I win a contest, then I'm much more likely to be noticed by…fill-in-the-blank..."

Gordy: Well, it's true. Our 2005 winners were about to give up, and now they are repped by UTA and their movie will be out this year, GARY THE TENNIS COACH

Neal: Great. And the better your winners do..

Gordy: The better the winners do, the better everyone who enters does, as our ability to serve our mission grows. Every year, it gets easier to plug people into the industry.

Neal: So do you also have contact with producers, studios, agents? Ideally you would want them to be as interested in contest deadlines and announcements as the writers, right?

Gordy: BlueCat is on everyone's radar. Every one in town knows about Gary the Tennis Coach (Rick Stempson, Andy Stock, writers) Seann William Scott stars and Danny Leiner is directing. These are studio-approved professionals that have been directly involved with profitable product. So when they pick a screenplay from a competition, every one comes running. That's how it works. I personally handed the screenplay to a producer, Peter Morgan, that I had a professional relationship with. He took it from there. Yes, we have contacts. That's how they movie got made. BlueCat's contacts.

Neal: So is there The BlueCat Agency in the future? BlueCat Management? BlueCat Studio?

Gordy: No, we don't want to represent writers. We want to discover and nurture gifted artists, and then introduce them to a professional network. Would we like to award a greenlight every year? Yes. We're working on that.

Neal: An agent friend of mine said that he never looks at contests. That he thought contests were not worth entering. And were not worth an agent's time looking at.

Gordy: I don't think UTA thinks that anymore.

Neal: That is a very good answer.

Gordy: Most contests focus on driving up the number of entries and they don't focus on adjudication. If you look at our winners, they keep winning. They are real screenwriters. We pride ourselves on our eye for talent. Not every contest can find great scripts. This hit me like a ton of bricks this year. I saw this unimpressive screenplay I had read win a major contest. Suddenly I understood that there was a big difference in the judging. Listen everybody: Judges are not all the same!

Neal: There's always that paranoid suspicion that every writer - rightly or wrongly - has that they are much smarter than the people judging their writing.

Gordy: Writers always think they're smarter than people who don't like they're writing. I always do, initially - then I try and gain value from every comment.

Neal: How did you begin teaching at USC? My alma mater.

Gordy: One thing led to another and I found myself with an interview. I didn't want to go it, but I've learned to walk through open doors.

Neal: Helping other writers is vital for one's own writing though, don't you think?

Gordy: Yes, it is vital. Through BlueCat and USC, I have grown immensely. We don't graduate from the school of screenwriting, so I am always open to the mystery of this art.

Neal: I had thought that maybe BlueCat had started as a result of your teaching.

Gordy: No, i started BlueCat in 1998 and teaching at USC in 2006

Neal: What you teaching there, rather.

Gordy: Right now I'm teaching a rewriting class. It's exciting.

Neal: Rewriting. That's where you spellcheck, right?

Gordy: Yes, you just drag your Chewbacca cursor down through your Final Draft file and look for stuff that's lame.

Neal: Exactly.

Gordy: While YouTubing.

Neal: And you just keep going to the last page and checking ... Is 120 yet? … Is it 120 now? … Now is it 120? ...

Gordy: Right. You might want to pad out the dialogue to make it at least 100. Describe someone's shoes a little longer.

Neal: I tend to describe everyone's shoes. To my agent's horror.

Gordy: People describe too much! In an effort to avoid writing the uncomfortable.

Neal: What is the biggest negative you've noticed in the screenplays that have been submitted?

Gordy: They are not writing what is bothering their hearts.

Neal: I hear professionals say over and over and over how few good scripts there are out there. That everything they read is stale and lousy. Then I read scripts by people I know that seem to me to be beautifully written, and fresh, and thrilling, but they say that no one is interested.

Not me, of course. You know, just ... friends.

Gordy: If something is wonderful, the writer might not be persistent. If the world is saying no, I say rewrite.

Neal: If five people tell you that you have a tail, then it's time to check your ass?

Gordy: I refuse to believe there are hundreds of gems that will never be discovered. They're not gems yet.

Neal: So you do believe that eventually the cream WILL rise to the top?

Gordy: Yes. It's the responsibility of the writer to keep showing up as an artist through the process of revision and as a business person by exposing the work. Art and commerce.

Neal: What would you say to the screenwriter about business? I think people tend to believe the business ends with a high concept and proper formatting. I know I have.

Gordy: Compelling story equals hit. But compelling story comes from personally invested, vulnerable work.

Neal: And how do you treat that compelling story you're really invested in like a product?

Gordy: You write what you care about, and bring your craft and diligence, and it works out.

Well, let me respond to your question about product:

If a man who has never made love to a woman comes to a wall, and in the process, finds the love of his life, and the audience wants this happiness for both of them - as we have for ourselves - that makes for a beautiful, compelling story that we would encourage our friends to see. Yes?

Neal: Sure.

Gordy: And with everyone going to see it, the thing makes about 150 million dollars, after everyone tells their friends about this story, this sweet story. And what do we call this movie?

Neal: Shrek? No, um …

Gordy: The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Neal: Ah, right!

Gordy: I think Shrek was about beauty, inner and out. But that was also why it made money, the sweetness.

Neal: But if you're not personally invested in a sweet story, if your taste and voice happens to fall more along the lines of Stanley Kubrick? Then I guess you better be doubly good and work twice as hard in order to pull it off. Like Charlie Kaufman.

Gordy: It's not sweetness all the time, of course. Again, Kubrick was able to rivet us with compelling people in struggle. It's the identification that makes for compelling material. And comedy functions for the audience differently than drama.

Neal: Charlie Kaufman is very sweet too actually, now that I think about it. His films are really all warm & fuzzy at their core.

Gordy: Yes

Neal: So what's the best thing you've seen in scripts submitted to BlueCat? In terms of trend, approach, skill, etc?

Gordy: Just audaciously original choices. People need that. They need to be bold and look within.

Neal: And when they hear a voice say, "This is crazy", maybe just do go ahead and do it anyway.

Gordy: YES! YES!

Neal: I think that's a great note to end on.

Gordy: Thanks, Neal.

Neal: Thank you, Gordy, very, very much.


(end)


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Saturday, December 02, 2006

Zombie Survival with Max Brooks

In his intro to George Romero's zombie masterpiece Night Of The Living Dead, Max Brooks explained: "Yes, there were zombie movies before Night of the Living Dead, just like there were space movies before Star Wars ..."

Likewise, there were technical manuals describing how to survive hideous, unnatural apocalyptic threats to human survival before Max Brooks' "The Zombie Survival Guide", but...

In 2003 Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft - a legacy which I'm sure must haunt Max constantly, like some relentless zombie that just won't stay down) published "The Zombie Survival Guide", a meticulous textbook on how to survive in a world plagued by the shambling hungry dead.

I love "The Guide" (as those of us on the front lines call it) very, very much. I bought it for my girlfriend - now wife - hoping it would make her get serious and face the genuine threat closing in on us from all sides. She read it, and she laughed and laughed and laughed. I was ready to go machete-shopping. But I'll take what I can get.

World War Z coverMax's follow-up book, "World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War" is now available for study. Last September, even before the book was on the shelves, the film rights to "World War Z" were the object of a massive bidding war between the production companies of Leonardo Di Caprio and Brad Pitt. Brad won - by shooting Leo's agent through the head with a speargun. That's the only way you can kill them.

On a gloomy Tuesday night a couple weeks ago, Max began the Barbican Centre's "Max Brooks' Festival of The (Living) Dead" with his brief introduction to the first film of the series, Night of the Living Dead. The film was followed by a Q&A moderated by horror film scholar and Time Out writer, Nigel Floyd. Copies of the new zombie book were available for purchase and Max was ready for autographing.

In a quiet half-hour before the evening kicked off, I interviewed Max Brooks about "The Zombie Survival Guide", about "World War Z", and about the horror, the horror of it all.

I asked him about the genesis of the first book. It thought it must have had its origins in American post-9/11 trauma. But Max had originally written it in response to the hysteria over Y2K.

Remember Y2K?

To refresh your memory: In the days before The Terrorists, and the bird flu - but after the Soviet evil empire - we lived day and night with the imminent threat that computer clocks would automatically reset themselves to the Year Zero at the stroke of midnight Jan. 1, 2000 A.D. If we failed in this task, banks would implode, planes would fall out the sky, and Tetris would fail to work properly. The next millenium would begin in a Age Of Darkness. Oh, our hubris! We had dared make machines in the likeness of our own mind, and one absurd oversight would lay low man and machine alike, for a long, long time. Or is that lie low? It's lay low, I think. Anyway, you know what I'm getting at. To avert the disaster, billions of dollars were exchanged among big companies and many computer experts were interviewed on television.

And "Y2K" stands for "Year 2000". Catchy, eh?

Max had been a writer of spec motion picture photoplays and believed that was where his future career lay. But year after thrilling year of sitting on executive couches hearing bulemic business majors say "We loved it. But it's not for us. What else do you have?" was losing its luster. Amid the Y2K ruckus, he wondered what the threat of a national zombie disaster might look like. With Vulcan-proof logic, he created a flawless handbook for survival in that emergency.

The book was a labor of love and, as labors of love will, went into a drawer and bided its time. In the meantime, Max was a staff writer on Saturday Night Live for a couple seasons, but still wasn't having great success with his original longer-form material.

The zombie myth rises from the fear that nothing in earth or heaven can stop an evil whose time has come. On the flip-side, nothing can stop a zombie book whose time has come. So one day, in a year when the ghosts of September 11 were still very angry, and a new Golden Age of Zombie Movies was beginning, and Iraq was making good on its promise of becoming a real slaughterhouse, a friend said to Max: "Hey! What about that zombie book? I really liked that zombie book."

Phone calls were made, manuscripts mailed to and fro, and "The Zombie Survival Guide" rose from its drawery slumber and was published in 2003.

Max had been training for years to write "The Zombie Survival Guide". He was a history major in college and an Army ROTC student. "Most of ROTC was basically survival skills," he said. It might as well have been zombie apocalypse survival school. He wasn't just making it up when he said that the M-16 was a crummy gun that was destined to be a liability when the zombies arrived. He had fired M-16's and learned first-hand why they were undesirable and what was the better alternative was. M-16 fans on the net are miffed at his appraisal of the gun. But who'll be laughing when the zombies come? Max also dipped back into his ROTC survival manual when writing the chapters on the zombie threat in various terrains.

Ah, the ROTC survival manual.

When my father retired from the Air Force, he taught Junior ROTC and we had several of those survival manuals around the home. It's a must-have for writers, by the way - particularly writers of adventure or action. Or comedy. In fact, I actually quoted directly from the "Mountain Terrain" chapter of the ROTC manual in the Mountain of the Imagination podcast. I finally sold my copy of the book a couple months back, before the move here to London. Was that wise? There are factoids I learned from that book that are still indelibly etched upon my mind. For example, in most Middle Eastern countries, though belching after a meal is good form, "breaking wind in public is considered a serious breach of manners". Also when you are climbing a mountainside, your body should be aligned with the force of gravity (standing straight up and down), not parallel with the surface of the slope (on your belly, in position for a fatal slide). And also, snow is a much better insulator against radioactive fallout than you'd think.

The ROTC manual is extensively illustrated with line drawings of military personal serenely coping with a variety of dangers. It is probably one of the best basic survival manuals in the world. Next to Max's book.

Knowing the ROTC book as well as I do, "The Zombie Survival Guide" is all the more enjoyable. You think, "He's got all this survival stuff absolutely correct! The zombie info must be accurate too."

But my favorite part of the book is the concluding section of "Recorded Attacks", starting with 50,000 year old rock paintings in central Africa depicting the walking dead with arms ravenously outstretched, to a 2002 zombie appearance in the Virgin Islands (where, coincidentally, Brooks spent a college year abroad). Most of the major historical periods and world cultures get their chance to do battle with the undead.

I love zombies. But greater than my love for zombies is my love for Roman history - particularly British Roman history. So, when you've got zombies vs. legionaries in Roman-occupied Britannia ... the only thing that could make it more sublime is if the legionaries had light sabers. And there are lots of Roman-era accounts of zombies in the book. In fact, I wondered when I first read them "Why so many? Hmm. Maybe this Brooks fellow just likes Romans. Well, good for him. Or ... wait a... could it be ... is it just because the Romans kept better records?!" So I asked Max, why so many Roman accounts? And he replied that it was because, yes, the Romans kept better records. Of course, the important lesson to learn form the Roman stories is that the discipline and training is the best defense against the zombie horde.

The new book "World War Z" in some respects begins where the "Zombie Survival Guide" accounts left off. It assumes a world-wide zombie outbreak and is a collection of first-person accounts of encounters with zombies during this period. The book was much more difficult, Max said, than the first, primarily because of the massive amount of research necessary. Not research about zombies - he already knows about them - but research about modern places, professions, technology, society in many different parts of the world. As with "The Zombie Survival Guide", the stories in "World War Z" will only be as effective as their factual, mundane details are. Most horror is based on the supposition that the audience will suspend disbelief. The goal of Brooks' kind of horror verite is to leave no room at all for disbelief. The wonderful result is either fascination, dread, or belly laughter.

He was inspired by Studs Terkel's "The Good War", a collection of personal narratives of WWII veterans and by the work of Ed Victor, whose 2002 book coldly examines the causes and conditions of a Third World War from the point of view of some far-future historian. Wonderful. Max Brooks is the Peter Watkins of the zombie world.

As if all these great zombie doings weren't wonderful enough for the fans, Max's next project is the adaptation of the accounts at the end of the "The Zombie Survival Guide" into graphic novels. People have said that writers seeking the best home for their stories work toward becoming tv writer/producers. But the best avenue, we are learning, particularly for those of us who like to write spectacle is the graphic novel. Later, during the Q&A with Nigel Floyd, when Max announced this plan to the pre-movie audience, a collective gasp of excitement filled the theater.

I asked Max if he was planning then on promoting "World War Z" at Comic-Con next year. He said he didn't know and confessed that he had never been to Comic-Con. I was shocked. There is, literally, no other event in the world with a more zombie-receptive audience.

To whom do I address my complaint? To Max's representation? To the publishers? To Comic-Con itself?

Guys, why hasn't Max been down to Comic-Con yet? Why is this? It's only the most important yearly event for horror, fantasy, and sci-fi entertainment in the world. Do you not want Max to do well? What do you have against Max that you are holding him back like that? I believe you're jealous. Yes, I do. I do believe you are. That is why you won't let him go to Comic-Con. I'll say it once: get Max's ass down to Comic-Con in 2007. And get him on his own full-on panel. Not one of those little panels. One of those massive Hall H panels. If you don't, then ... well, I can't be held responsible for the consequences.

It was a great night really. Great to meet Max and talk with him. Great to see one of the best horror movies ever made - maybe one of the best movies ever made. But best of all, I learned the most important fact I am likely to learn about my new life in here in London:

During Nigel Floyd's Q&A, an audience member asked: "Max, what is the best place in London to hide during a zombie outbreak?"

Max said without a second's hesitation: "HMS Belfast."

Thank you, Max, in advance, for saving my family.

Damn, I forgot to ask ...

... can we bring the cats with us?

HMS Belfast on The Thames

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Sunday, November 12, 2006

American Werewriter In London

And they rejoiced. Throughout the Universe they rejoiced. And not because it was Neal R's birthday. No, not because of that. Although that is cause for rejoicing.
It really is.
Yes, it is.
No, the reason they did rejoice, you know, is because for Neal R. did resume unto his podcasts. That is the reason why.

In this brand new and very gloomy "fog-cast", direct from London, where "customer service" means always having to say you're sorry, Neal gives it straight on a screenwriter's life in The Britain:

CLICK

HERE

TO LISTEN (right-click to download)


or HERE:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/rabbitandcrow/American_Werewriter_In_London.m4a

but not

HERE
(highly suspect British 'link')

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Saturday, May 27, 2006

Top 10 Best Names from Edgar Rice Burroughs

One of the great talents possessed by the sci-fi-adventure novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs was the effortless creation of elegant, illustrative, poetic - in all ways perfect - names for his fantastic characters, places, creatures.

Here are ten of his best:
  1. Banth
  2. Barsoom
  3. Dejah Thoris
  4. Kerchak
  5. Mahar
  6. Pellucidar
  7. Phutra
  8. Sabor
  9. Tars Tarkas
  10. Tarzan

Read 'em & weep, GEORGE LUCAS! Who's your daddy, beeeeeaaatchhhh ?!!!


Pellucidar book cover

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Thursday, May 25, 2006

Gilbert Sorrentino (1929 – 2006)

Obituary of writer Gilbert Sorrentino, quoted in full from today's LATimes.com:

Gilbert Sorrentino, 77; Avant-Garde Novelist, Professor

By Elaine Woo, Times Staff Writer

May 24, 2006

Gilbert Sorrentino once wrote, "If you make a better book the world will build a mousetrap at your door."

With one exception over a five-decade writing career, the mousetrap was always at Sorrentino's door.

The author of 15 novels — including a parodist's feast called "Mulligan Stew" — Sorrentino was a master of avant-garde fiction whose work was admired by other writers. That the world never beat a path to his door did not unduly concern him. That most critics found him hard to peg bothered him more, but their neglect made no appreciable dent in his prolific career on the imaginative rim of American letters.

"Sorrentino was an American master," novelist Don DeLillo said Tuesday of the longtime Stanford University professor of literature and creative writing, who was 77 at his death Thursday in New York City. The cause was complications of lung cancer.

"His work has humor, anger, passion and deep-reaching memory. But he wrote against the times," DeLillo said, "against the pressure to be commercially successful. There was an edge in his work that wasn't always easy to accept."

Said Bradford Morrow, a novelist and editor of the literary journal Conjunctions: "I think of him as a contemporary Swift. Writers adore him. He just didn't do the right move to get famous, like a Norman Mailer barroom brawl. Sorrentino was very retiring. And he was not going to court the culture he was attacking."

Sorrentino's novels could be surreal, erotic and always humorous. His characters were surface-deep, the better to mock their motives, desires and dreams. As befitting a postmodernist, he chose forms that contrived to puncture expectations, leading readers into what one reviewer called "one hall of mirrors after another."

Sorrentino wrote eight volumes of poetry in addition to the novels, and also had worked as an editor. He founded a literary magazine called Neon in 1956 and was an editor at Kulchur magazine in the early 1960s before joining Grove Press, where he edited Alex Haley's "Autobiography of Malcolm X."

He eventually left publishing for academia, teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University and the New School for Social Research in New York before Stanford hired him in 1982. "He had a sharp wit and did not suffer fools gladly," recalled Jonathan Mayhew, a student of Sorrentino in the mid-1980s who now is a professor at the University of Kansas.

He stayed at Stanford for 20 years, despite a strong aversion to California culture. On his arrival, he grudgingly learned to drive — at age 53 — but remained "completely bollixed by the suburban lifestyle," Sorrentino, a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, told Publishers Weekly a few years ago. "The happiest day of my life was when I sold my car" just before returning to his native Brooklyn in 2002.

"He was like a fish out of water in California," said his son, Christopher, also a novelist. Sorrentino is also survived by his wife, Victoria Ortiz; another son, Jesse; and three grandchildren. A daughter, Delia, died three years ago.

The son of a Sicilian immigrant, Sorrentino grew up in a working-class environment. He attended Brooklyn College for two years, which were interrupted by service in the Army Medical Corps from 1951 to 1953. By then he knew that he wanted to be a writer and embarked on what he later described as "this massive, hopeless novel," which remained in the drawer after he finished it.

He put out two volumes of poetry — much of it inspired by New York and its people — before turning out his first published novel, "The Sky Changes," in 1966. A story about a miserably married couple on a trip across America, it is told out of sequence because "there really is no past that is worse than the present and there is no future that will be better than the present," Sorrentino told the Grosseteste Review in 1973.

His later novels continued to experiment with form. "Steelwork" (1970), inspired by Sorrentino's Brooklyn childhood, "is made up of 96 separate but interlocking dramatic vignettes, scenes which, in their arrangement within the novel, scramble chronology," critic Jerome Klinkowitz wrote. His last novel, "Little Casino" (2002) has unnamed characters and stops arbitrarily at 52 chapters — the number of weeks in a year. "All form is utterly artificial," he declared in an interview.

Such departures from convention annoyed many critics, such as Jeffrey A. Frank, who wrote in the Washington Post in 1990 that Sorrentino "is an acquired taste."

In "Mulligan Stew," Sorrentino pulled out all the stops. A mulligan stew is a mishmash of ingredients, little bits of lots of things. Sorrentino's novel combines what critic Michael Dirda described as "morsels for every literary taste," parodies of forms including cheap detective fiction, the western, bad poetry and pornography.

Critics called it his masterpiece.

Kenneth John Atchity, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said "Mulligan Stew" was a "singular event in the history of wit and imagination." Dirda, in the Washington Post, wrote that it "contains some of the best parodies since S.J. Perelman at his most manic, and perhaps the most corrosive satire of the literary scene since early Aldous Huxley." John Leonard, in the New York Times, wrote: "There is a very real question as to whether avant-garde fiction can survive Gilbert Sorrentino's new novel." The New York Times Book Review named it one of the best books of 1979.

The main character is a writer of middling success named Lamont, and the novel contains Lamont's novel-in-progress. The surreal aspect is that Lamont's characters lead their own lives when Lamont leaves his desk. The well-read reader would glean their heritage: One character, Ned Beaumont, is from Dashiell Hammett's "The Glass Key"; Daisy and Tom Buchanan are from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"; and Dick Halpin once worked for a "Mr. Joyce" — in a footnote in James Joyce's colossal "Finnegans Wake."

When Lamont's novel collapses, his characters abandon him.

Such utter failure may have been Sorrentino's fear. He received 28 rejection notices for "Mulligan Stew" before Grove embraced it in 1979.

He was famous for a brief period, then fell into obscurity again, publishing 10 more novels with small presses that were barely noticed by critics.

"He just didn't care … if people didn't get it. He was always his own man," said Morrow, who knew Sorrentino for more than two decades.

Or, as Halpin says to his fellow characters before he deserts Lamont: "To you other cats and chicks out there … a shake and a hug and a kiss and a drink. Cheers!"

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