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There is a huge difference between story and plot. Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
- Stephen King, "On Writing"
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September 9th, 2006
Monday February 28, 1933
The Guardian
Berlin was thrown into great excitement last night by two fires – the one at the Reichstag building (the German Parliament) and the other at the former Imperial Palace.
Fire broke out at the Reichstag shortly after 9 p.m., and burned so fiercely that within an hour the main hall in which representatives of the German people meet when Parliament is in session was completely destroyed. Flames leaping from the great glass dome surmounting the building could be seen for miles around, and attracted huge crowds to the scene.
Police in full force on horseback and on foot kept the crowd back, while all the fire brigades in Berlin poured water on to the flames.
Searchlights on building
The building was surrounded by the fire-fighting appliances, and high ladders were run up the walls and illuminated by searchlights. Firemen directed streams of water into the burning building, and hoses were run in through the numerous entrances to the seat of the fire, in the main session hall.
It is believed (says an Exchange Berlin telegram) that the fire was due to arson, as it commenced at five or six different points simultaneously. A man was arrested in the building . He was found clad only in his trousers.
A Reuter telegram says that the fire was started by heaps of documents which were set alight in six different places. The police assert that Communists are responsible, and apart from the man who was arrested there were several other people in the building, although the Reichstag is not in session.
Wild Rumours
The wildest rumours were circulating in Berlin last night, adds Reuter. One was to the effect that secret orders had been issued to the Nazi Storm Troopers to create a Bartholomew night on Saturday, when all political opponents of renown were to be “disposed of.”
Although the police asserted the Communists are responsible, some people think that the fire might have been started by irresponsible Nazis with the object of provoking trouble.
The fires were extinguished at 10.45 p.m. The session hall presents a scene of desolation with all the deputies’ seats, diplomats’, public, and press galleries destroyed, and all the iron pillars supporting the dome twisted out of shape.
The fire brigade state that the fire must have started at several points. It developed with extraordinary rapidity and began to find its way downstairs to the rooms below.
Communist Leaders Arrested
The police, “suspecting the conflagration to be the first of a series of Communist acts of terrorism,” have arrested a number of Communist leaders “in order to forestall any attempt to cover up tracks.”
The man who was discovered in the Reichstag building and arrested is stated to be a Dutchman named Van der Luebbe, aged 24. He is said to have confessed that he started the fire, but denied that he was acting as anyone’s agent. It is added that he said he used his shirt as firing material.
The police found a rag steeped in petrol as they entered the building, and the arrested man’s cap was found close to other firing material. He has been conducted to police headquarters, where he is being subjected to a thorough examination. His manner had been extremely calm and self-possessed throughout.
Herr Hitler, Herr Göring, Herr von Papen, and other prominent persons including Prince August Wilhelm, entered the building whilst it was still burning, and Herr Goring, President of the Reichstag and “Commissarial” Minister for the Interior in Prussia, took command of the police and issued orders to keep the crowds at a distance.
If the new Reichstag is summoned after next Sunday’s elections it is unlikely to be able to meet in the Reichstag building owing to the extensive damage done by the fire.
Palace Fire
The fire at the former Imperial Palace broke out earlier in the day in an attic, and was quickly subdued by the fire brigade before any damage had been done. The police suspect arson, as burnt matches were found in the attic.
December 8th, 2005
What can we possibly say?
“Mother Mary with the Holy Child Jesus Christ” (Oil on Canvas, 1913)
November 29th, 2005
 I joked about mistaking William Goldman for his brother James in a post about the Screenwriting Expo, but I do adore James Goldman‘s two medieval movies, “The Lion In Winter” (1968) and “Robin and Marian” (1976) and, although it is harder to fail when you don’t work as much, I think elements of both films are superior to Brother William’s best screenwriting work.
 I like period movies too, particularly those that execute medieval settings well. I’ve studied “The Lion In Winter” (1968) for years, but I went back to it, and to “Robin and Marian” (1976) also, when I was writing “Fortune and the Devil”. Both scripts are breathtaking – “The Lion In Winter” for its staggering dialog, “Robin and Marian” for its romance and heroism.
Because his more famous brother has shone more brightly, we don’t often hear James Goldman’s take on the screenwriting life. So I thought I’d offer up an excerpt from his introduction to the published version of “Robin and Marian”:
“The screenwriter is anonymous and why this is so is worth talking about. There are, it seems to me, two basic reasons why, one of them historical and the other dumb-headed.
Historically, movies don’t seem to have had writers at all. I’m speaking, of course, of the silents. Someone, obviously, had to write the captions, just as someone has to pen the instructions that come with your dishwasher. But it’s as difficult to give some writer praise or credit for “Intolerance” (1916) as it is to think of the creator of a Christmas pantomime as a playwright. Writing, we are prone to think, is words.
Not so. Aristotle, who is a permanent hero of mine, took the position that the elements of a play, in order of importance, were: plot, character, thought and then – and only then – diction. Now, movies are a branch of drama and a screenplay is a kind of play and on the screen you don’t need words to tell a meaningful story about fully realized people. “City Lights” works without its captions. Though wordless, someone wrote it. But the point is, watching it, we feel that no one did. Movie writing came in through the back door. And it stayed there.
Why it stayed there also has to do with words. I’ve got to confess that I was in my early teens before it occurred to me that someone actually wrote a movie. Tom Mix was a real man and he rode up on a real hore to a real corral. And when Tom spoke, it seemed like he was speaking for himself too. Nobody wrote that ‘Howdy’. He just up and said it.
If he sang it, we’d know different. For while singing is a natural thing, the invention of melody is not something most of us can do. But inventing sentences?? We’re all like Moliere’s ‘Gentilhomme’: we’ve made the staggering discovery that everybody speaks in dialogue.
Or, put it this way. Improvising at the piano seems slightly miraculous. How does the fellow do it? But improvising dialogue occurs every time one opens one’s trap. The inevitable result is that most of the conversation we hear in movies sounds to everyone – except the writer – as if nobody wrote it…
We also know the words aren’t improvised when the dialogue sounds, in one way or another, composed. I have in mind not only Bible epics – no one ever talked like that – but writing that is noticeably witty, stylish or complicated. ‘Notorious’ seems ‘written’, ‘Bullitt’ does not: Steve McQueen seems to say whatever comes into his head, but Cary Grant is working from a script.
So by and large, the film writer is unknown because his work seems unwritten…”
Or should seem unwritten, if he is doing his job.
August 15th, 2005
 I’m not a Christian, but I am a fan of the life, work, example, and thrilling story of Yeshua of Nazareth (aka “Jesus”). The great Roman historian Tacitus mentions Jesus in his description of the scandal and chaos that followed the terrible Fire of Rome (of “Nero fiddled while Rome burned” fame):
“…the blaze came to be believed to be an official act. So, in order to quash the rumour, (Emperor) Nero blamed it on, and applied the cruellest punishments to, those sinners, whom ordinary people call Christians, hating them for their shameful behaviour. The originator of this name, Christus, was sent to execution by Procurator Pontius Pilate, during the reign of Tiberius, but although checked for a moment, the deadly cult erupted again, not just in Judaea, the source of its evil, but even in Rome, where all the sins and scandals of the world gather and are glorified. (“The Annals” xv.44.2–3)
Today is the 60th anniversary of VJ (Victory over Japan) Day, the end of WWII. Following the dropping of a uranium fission bomb named “Little Boy” into the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 – which killed approximately 140,000 people – then the detonation of a plutonium fission bomb named “Fat Man” over the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 – which killed approximately 70,000 people – the Japanese surrendered, and the war ended.
FUN FACT: If you could regenerate the bodies of all the people killed in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and lay them end to end, the line of corpses would stretch 200 miles, and their combined weight would near 6000 tons!
“Hiroshima” is a household word. Whenever we look forward to the use of nuclear weapons in the future, we use the name of the Japanese city as short-hand for “13,000 tons of TNT”. We say: “If this XYZ device exploded in the middle of a pre-school in New York City, it would do so with the strength of 10,000 Hiroshimas!” We tend to say it gleefully, as if we were happy that our nuclear weapons have so admirably outdone the quaint Little Boys of our forefathers.
FUN FACT: Today, Hiroshima is the home of the Hiroshima Toyo Carp baseball team, six-time champions of Japan’s central league and winner of 3 of the Japan Series.
 Most citizens of the Allied nations are less familiar with the city of Nagasaki. Nagasaki, capital of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu, was the center of European influence in medieval Japan and so was one of the first Japanese cities to be Christianized. In fact, it was Europeans – Portuguese traders who ran aground near the town – who literally put the insignificant little village on the map. In 1945 Nagasaki had the largest Christian population in Japan and was home to Urakami Cathedral, which had been the largest Cathedral in eastern Asia. Nagasaki’s Christian population blossomed still further after World War II.
FUN FACT: The names of both “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” have appeared in the titles of French films!
If I’m not mistaken, scientists have proven that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved many thousands of lives.
Following are some of my favorite lines of dialog from the story of Yeshua of Nazareth (aka Jesus). These are from his biographies. We don’t really know for certain whether the biographies were “authorized biographies” or not, or if they were just fan fiction. But I am a trained writer of movie scripts and have a pretty good ear for language, and it’s interesting to sometimes read lines that sound more like real human speech and less like movie dialog. I tend to like those realistic sounding lines the best. Some of Jesus’s greatest hits are in a collection called “The Sermon On The Mount”, which reads a bit like a college student’s lecture notes, as if one of the Disciples was sitting there scribbling as fast as he could: “Dude. Wait. Can you say that last thing one more time? ‘Ed Meese shall inherit the earth’?? Oh, ‘the MEEK’. Gotcha. Okay. Go on…”
Happy VJ Day!
10 SAYINGS OF JESUS
(his words in GREEN)
1. “…Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God…”
2. “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”
3. Then came Peter to him, and said, “Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?” Jesus saith unto him, “I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.”
4. “Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.”
5. Jesus said unto him, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.
6. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”
7. “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
8. “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you?”
9. “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
10. “For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.”
June 30th, 2005
MY 10 FAVORITE AUTOCRATS
(in alphabetical order)
1.) Akhenaten, aka Amenhotep IV (1352 – 1336 BC)
2.) Alexander The Great (356 – 323 BC)
3.) Queen Boudicca of the Iceni, aka Boadicea (died 61 AD?)
4.) Emperor Claudius (but only as fancifully depicted in the BBC mini-series “I, Claudius”)
5.) Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603 AD)
6.) The God Emperor, Leto II (from the book “God Emperor of Dune” by Frank Herbert)
7.) Henry II of England (1133 – 1189 AD)
8.) King Lear (from the play “The Tragedy of King Lear” by Shake-speare)
9.) Sauron (from the book “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien)
10.) Prince Vlad III Dracula, aka Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler (1431 – 1476 AD)
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