Why Can't I Accept A Free Book?

I'm dead tired today because I spent the weekend (starting Friday morning) at the Book Expo America at the Los Angeles Convention Center - trying to find a new publisher for Secrets Of Action Screenwriting and the *8* books worth of material I have on my computer, waiting to be edited into books.

This whole thing began on Thursday. I was supposed to have a meeting with the director of film #20 to go over the new draft of the script. But Wednesday I had a door tag for the business cards I’d ordered, so I had to zip over to the other end of the valley early in the morning and pick them up. They looked pretty good. I had some other errands to do closer to home, and did those on the bicycle... waiting for the director to call me and set meeting details. Ended up at my local Starbucks, where I wrote up 4 book synopsis and a quick bio on a single page for the Expo. I actually wrote up 6 book synopsis - but they wouldn’t all fit on one piece of paper. I also put all of the frame-grabs of E-bay and Amazon and other places that have sold my book for up to $750 on a single sheet. Hmmm, still no call from the director. I e-mailed him... and by the end of the day, no response. I went home, printed up my proposals and the sheet with e-bay screen grabs, packed the last good copies of my book in a messenger bag along with some crappy copies (just in case), plus I throw in all of my script materials in case the producer calls and I have to cut my day short for a meeting. Then I set the alarm and went to sleep.

Okay, those of you with day jobs will think I’m a complete whiner, but I hate mornings. I worked swing shift most of my life, and worked graveyards at Safeway for a while, and am just not a morning person. The great thing about being a writer is that I can sleep until 10am... and sometimes until noon. Getting up early isn’t something I enjoy.

Alarm goes off Friday morning, I shower, grab my *heavy* bag of books, and take Los Angeles’ tinker-toy subway to the Convention Center... except it doesn’t go all the way there. It stops several blocks short, and you have to get on the “Blue Line” train and get off at the first stop. I knew I was in trouble when this guy gets on the subway in Hollywood with his sleeping bag and guitar and starts playing “for our enjoyment”. Except he’s awful. Then, he *insists* that we pay him for the entertainment. He’s aggressive, combative, he’s played - now we need to pay. I give him nothing. His music was awful, but I didn’t have to buy $4.15 gas or pay $15 for parking.

I have no idea how big this event will be, and the answer is *huge*. The whole Convention Center. Every publisher in the USA, plus printing companies, plus paper companies, plus shipping companies, plus distribs, plus... well - anyone that has anything to do with publishing books is there. I pick one of the halls and start walking. The aisles are packed with people. Everyone wants to hand me a book or book catalogue. Hell, my bag is heavy enough already.

The strangest thing - you’re walking down an aisle and... that’s Dr. Ruth! Hey! And over there, that guy looks kind of familiar... oh, it’s Dean Koontz! I talk to a couple of publishers of film books who might be interested (one seems very interested in not just the Action Book but all of my other books). I give away a few of the books in my bag, but there are still a bunch of crappy copies and a handful of good sample copies weighing me down. Oh, and the huge book that lists all of the attendees, and the map of the convention, and... well, heck, my shoulder hurts like hell from the bag strap.

By the end of the day, my legs hurt from walking... and the subway is *packed* with commuters, so I have to stand with the heavy bag on my shoulder. When I get home, I check my e-mail... nothing from the director.

I start to watch Jimmy Kimmel - but it’s a rerun (no FCC clips) and watch some Monty Python instead.... The alarm goes off.

I’ve slept more than the night before, still not enough. Grab coffee at Starbucks and go to the subway station. Oh, I’ve changed bags to my rolling bag. Easier on the shoulder. I’m also taking my laptop, because I want to check my e-mail mid-day, see if the director gets back to me. And I dumped all of the crappy copies of my book - I have enough good ones for anyone left, I think. No guitar guy on the subway today.

The other hall - just as many exhibitors. By the end of my day of walking up and down aisles - no publishers as promising as yesterday... but I also have a slightly different mission plan for the day... Hey! There’s Dr. Ruth again! She’s everywhere! That’s Stephen Baldwin - does he have a book? Oh, yeah - part of the plan today is to actually take some of the books they try to hand me. But only the ones I really want. I also want to grab some of the gimme-bags - most of them are canvas, and I can use them for shopping and other stuff.

Now, here’s the problem - I’m not good at free stuff. If someone tries to give me something for free, my natural reaction is to turn it down. I don’t know why this is, but I suspect because I don’t come from a rich family. You know how they have those swag bags at the Oscars? When you’re a struggling, starving actor nobody gives you anything. Once you’re a big star making millions, they give you bags of expensive stuff. Makes no sense to me... but that’s kind of how the world works. If you’re broke, no one gives you anything... unless there is either a string attached, or it’s charity (and there’s a stigma attached to charity instead of a string). When you’re poor, you still don’t want to seem so poor that you need to take a hand out. If you have money, no stigma in accepting a gift... in fact, I think famous folks *expect* to get things for free.

So I’m terrible at accepting free things. I was speaking at an event once, and they had a swag room where you filled your own bag. There was a table of electronics, and I stood in line with my bag. The company representative offered the guy in front of me portable DVD players and digital recorders and a video camera and all kinds of other stuff. He took it all. I took a wind-up emergency flashlight, because I might need it if we had another earthquake. I *wanted* the other stuff, but I had no actual need for it, so I turned it down. I didn’t feel comfortable taking it.

So, I felt like I was stealing something when I took the free canvas bags. I went to a couple of different publishers, grabbed a bag, hid it in my rolling bag, then sped away before the police tackled me. One of the bags I decided to use for books. I could have left the event with 200-300 books... and many people did. There were people with huge duffle bags on wheels filled with books. People with rolling carts. People who took a load of books home with them every day for 3 days.

My first book was the new Quarry novel from Max Alan Collins (ROAD TO PERDITION). He was there autographing books. When the very first book in the series came out, I was a kid... and I bought it. Since then I have bought all of them. And here was the writer! I talked with him for a while, he signed the book and I put it in my stolen canvas bag. A couple of rows over was the Mystery Writers Of America booth - with 4 writers autographing books. I love mystery novels... but I wasn’t familiar with any of the 4 writers, so I didn’t feel right taking free books from them. I didn’t have a use for those books (even though I may have read them and loved them and bought every book they wrote from that point on - which was the purpose of the give aways). Another of my favorite writers, Thomas Perry (BUTCHER’S BOY) was signing his new novel. Again, I hung around and talked to him. There was a line, but many people were just getting as many autographed books as they could sell on e-bay later. I could stand at the corner of the table and talk while he was signing. Cool. All of these people love their readers. And even though I had no actual need for James Patterson’s new novel, he’s the biggest name novelist in the USA, and he was at a table signing a million books... so I got in the line. He must have signed a million books that day, and was kind and treated everyone in line as if they were friends... and in a way, they were. You know, without readers a writer would go broke. Without an audience, a movie star is out of work. Without the audience, *we* (screenwriters) are working at McDonalds. We’re all dependant on each other. We all need the other to exist.

Anyway, I grabbed that book and a few others - only books that I had a use for. And turned down hundreds of others...

Then I bumped into a writer I know who was there with his 6th book. I knew this guy when he had zero books. He told me he was trying to find another publisher, and had meetings later in the day with several publishers. Trying to find a better deal.

And I realized that I was probably doing this whole publishing thing wrong. As usual, I was trying to do it all myself. One of my faults-that-I-think-is-a-strength is not asking for help or even looking for help. If I try to do something that normal way, and that fails, I try to find some other way to do it... instead of asking for help. So I end up being the screenwriter with a bunch of produced scripts... but no agent. And the guy with a screenwriting book that was #11 on the Amazon screenwriting charts and #1 seller at Sam French Bookstores... without a publisher. Without a book agent. The problem when you do it yourself is that you only have yourself. No one else has a stake in your success. No one else is there to help you. You end up alone against the world.


I was at a writing event once and had dinner with a bunch of speakers including a book agent. Somewhere, I have his e-mail address. He would remember me (or, at least, pretend that he did). I’m going to track him down and see if he reps non-fiction - specifically screenwriting books. Even though I think I have a publisher who is very interested, what if this book agent can find me a better deal? What if he can just guide me through this deal I may have set up?

Strange as it may seem, I’m going to try to be *less* independent.

So, for all of you folks that want to know when the new version of SECRETS OF ACTION is coming out - I’m planning on having a new publisher soon, along with a deadline for the revisions (which will force me to stop playing around with old scripts and new specs and just get ‘er done), and eventually a street date,

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Know When To Hold "em.
Yesterday’s Dinner: BBQ chicken at Century City Mall food court.

Movies: STUCK - Remember that news story about the Texas woman who hit the pedestrian, and the guy got stuck in her car window and took *days* to die in her garage? Well, Stuart Gordon has done a fictionalized version of that story, with Mena Suvari as a rest home nurse who runs into recently downsized and evicted Stephen Rea in her car. Afraid that this will ruin her impending promotion, she parks the car and Rea in her garage and waits for him to die... and this begins a face off between the two, as he does everything he can to escape the window or signal for help, and she hits him with a board and does other nasty things to stop him. The story has some twists and turns, some extreme violence and gore, but keeps reminding you of better movies. It’s crude, squanders its chances for suspense through inelegant direction, and works primarily due to the performances of its two leads.

Rea just won’t die, and that reminds you of BLOOD SIMPLE, which takes the same situation and does it a million times better - the reveal of the empty back seat where the dead guy was, the suspense of trying to get him before he’s seen by any other cars... and a truck is coming down the street! The sound of the shovel on pavement. Grabbing the guy just as the truck zooms past - almost hitting them! All of the suspense and surprises (the gun in Hedaya’s pocket) and gritty stuff of killing and burying a man in BLOOD SIMPLE is a real nail biter - and juts keeps building until you can take no more. In STUCK, there’s a scene where Rea escapes from the car window, and it’s just kind of bland. Where is he? Oh, there on the floor. No surprise, no suspense, no style.

While Rea is in the garage, there are several scenes where he tries to get help. One, with a just out of reach cell phone, reminds you of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN... except that film did it a million times better, and was *filmed* for suspense. Here we get one shot instead of using different shots edited together to build a rhythm and suspense. This also reminded me of a Hitchcock directed TV episode called FOUR O’CLOCK based on a story by Cornell Woolrich. In that story a man is tied up in his basement with a bomb ticking away, and a kid’s ball rolls up to the basement window. When the boy goes to fetch his ball, will he see the tied up man? When he sees the tied up man, will the man be able to get across that he’s in trouble and not playing some sort of game? Will the boy be able to convince his parents that there is a man that needs help? All of those things were big suspense elements in the Hitchcock TV episode, in STUCK we get a similar event... that has no real suspense. It just happens. No build. No small set backs. No little twists. Stuff just happens. When the boy goes back to tell his parents about the man stuck in the car window, it reminded me of another movie based on a Woolrich story, THE WINDOW, about a boy who witnesses his neighbors kill someone and has some problems convincing his parents that it happened. The great scene in that film that could have been in STUCK is when the parents take the boy to the killer’s house so that he can apologize to them... and now the killers know the kid saw them, and the killers are after the kid. Great suspense and great twist. Here - nada. Since I’m on a Woolrich roll, another Hitchcock Presents episode based on a Woolrich story - BOY WITH BODY about transporting a dead body in a car.... early in the film Mena Suvai has to get her car home with a dead guy stuck in the window... but the TV episode is unbearable suspense. Here - we get a quick scene where she drives past some policemen, but there is no build, no almost seeing her, nothing. It’s just flat.

So STUCK is just kind of there. A real waste of a potentially suspenseful story. And it seems like this film gets so close to many of these things that I wonder if they were all in the screenplay... but never made it to screen.

- Bill

Welcome To Fango 2008!

Every once in a while when I’m doing my Horror Class, someone asks me why I feel qualified to teach about horror screenwriting. Fair question. When you look at my credits, it’s mostly action and thriller films, with that odd family comedy. But NIGHT HUNTER started out as horror action (until it was stripped of the horror part) and I have written a bunch of horror scripts that didn’t get made (though a couple got really close - and I was once up for a HALLOWEEN sequel). I’m a horror movie fan, and one of my first scripts was about an OMEN homage about a Satanic cult made up of Pacific Gas & Electric executives who brought death and destruction to anyone who opposed their nuclear power plant plans for Point Arena, California. I have been attending the Fangoria weekend Of Horrors for about 15 years, now - and if you ever bought any of the behind the scenes of horror movies video series called THE DEAD BEAT, check the opening credits... I was one of the three principals behind that series.

If you aren’t familiar with Fango - it’s the magazine for horror movie fans, run by Tony Timpone, and every year in Los Angeles (and other major cities) they have a convention where horror movie stars and horror movie makers interact with fans. When I first began going, it was at one of the LAX hotels, then they moved to the Burbank Hilton, and this year they moved to the Los Angeles Convention Center downtown.

Horror movie fans have changed over the years - when I first began going to Fango, it was 95% geek guys and 5% geek gals and wives who didn’t understand. Then, a few years ago, Goth happened... and now probably over a third of the audience are goth gals covered with tattoos wearing really hot outfits. And last year at Burbank there seemed to be more crossover - with mainstream film fans joining the audience. Part of that is due to horror being hot right now - every couple of weeks there is a new horror film in cinemas - and movie stars are often in these films. For a while, there, horror was a ghetto, and the movies starred people mainstream audiences have never heard of.

When they announced that Fango was moving to the Convention Center, my first response was - Where will we drink? Where will we eat? The Convention Center is in a section of downtown surrounded by an area where you don’t want to park your car. For all the talk about rebuilding downtown, there aren’t really any places to eat... and the bars are scary. There are a couple of hotels in walking distance, but on site the only place to eat is the Convention Center cafeteria - where I paid $9.50 for the worst hamburger I have ever eaten in my life... and I can’t figure out how you can screw up a hamburger. My friend Regent bought a salad he said tasted weird - chemically - so they are able to screw up salads as well as burgers. The 99 cent burger at Carl’s Jr is a million times better than that $10 Convention Center burger...

But I’m getting ahead of myself....

The reason for Fango going to the Convention Center - last year they had to turn people away at Burbank. It was crowded. To get your ticket, you had to stand outside in the heat for hours in a line that stretched around the hotel. Once inside - you might have to stand in back to hear Guellermo del Toro talk - and the dealer’s room was really a whole bunch of rooms... a main room and a half dozen smaller rooms. The show needed more room. But when I arrived on Friday, there was no real line for tickets - maybe a dozen people compared to the hundreds last year. Strange.

Events like this used to have the weekend pass and the day pass, but now they have Gold Passes (first five rows for all panels and free autographs) and Silver Passes (next ten rows and something) and Preferred Pass (next five rows) and then the weekend and day passes... so the Weekend Pass isn’t on a lanyard anymore, it’s a wrist band like the day passes... but you wear it for all 3 days. Meaning - you shower with it. This is not convenient. In fact, it’s kinda gross.

So I wander into the auditorium for the opening ceremony - and it’s empty. It looks *really* empty, because it’s so big, and because there are only a couple dozen people in the first 20 rows. You’re sitting in row 21, and there are hundreds of seats in front of you that you are not allowed to sit in. Maybe it will fill up on Saturday?

They show a bunch of trailers - including Indiana Jones and Ironman and some other non-horror films that appeal to the horror crowd... then the trailers change to low budget horror films that you’ve never heard of. I open up my program to see who the guests are this year... and wonder if I’ve been given a program from 15 years ago by mistake. Okay, there’s Clive Barker - he’s there every year. And Reggie Bannister from PHANTASM. And David Naughton from AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. And the cast of the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. And Tony Todd from CANDYMAN. And Angus Scrimm from PHANTASM. And Gunnar Hanson from the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. And... well, a bunch of other people from the past. Plus a bunch of panels from low low budget horror movies (some backyard productions) and the crew from FEAST to talk about 2&3 and “The Girls Of Moonlight” and... well, no one from a studio horror film. No panels from a single film with a budget over $2 million. What the heck is going on here?

So on Saturday and Sunday - all of those front rows were still mostly empty. And no one thought it might be a good idea to get rid of some of the empty Gold & Silver & Premium rows so that they place didn’t look like a ghost town, and those of us who had paid the standard $60 to get in weren’t so far back that we needed binoculars.

They always have a screening room at Fango, that shows a mix of “classic” horror film from the 80s and new films getting a sneak (not uncommon for someone like Frank Darabont to bring his new movie and the Fango crowd gets to see it before anyone else)... that was upstairs at the Convention Center... and the escalator was not on. Took until Sunday afternoon before someone switched it on! So you had to climb the stairs to get to the screening room... which was about the size of the last screen in that multiplex in BACHELOR PARTY. Okay, maybe not that small - but about 30-50 seats. That ended up not really being an issue for two reasons - nobody came to Fango this year, and the movies they were showing were all low low budget crap. The only “classic” film was THE DEAD PIT (most of you have never heard of this film) - which was made on a very very low budget in the Bay Area with my late friend Curt Wells on the FX crew. It was direct to video. Not quite in the same league as the usual “classic” films they’ve shown in the past.

I ventured into the Dealer’s Room, which was where the action was - instead of a main room and satellite rooms you may never even know exist, one big room. The good news for dealers was that they were all more or less equal (though David Naughton had an autograph table in the very back of the room facing the wall - most people probably never got back that far) it also exposed the number of tables for single films - movies made in someone’s backyard that they were selling on DVD at Fango. And this year there seemed to be a new type of dealer - people selling sex. There were pin up calenders and photos and even a T shirt place had a stripper pole and dancers to help advertize their wares. Usually Fango is kind of a family friendly event - even though there are companies selling crawling severed arms and scary masks and props from horror films, the “tween” kids are a big part of the horror movie audience. I was into horror movies as a 13 year old boy. I think part of the reason for this is that kids at that fragile age feel stronger if they can conquer and control their fears, and horror movies allow them to do this. But this year the dealer’s room was filled with strippers and girls with their asses hanging out - and lots and lots of boobs in tiny tiny bikini tops. Now, these things probably also interest 13 year old boys (they interested me at 13), but not with mom & dad standing next to them. And mom & dad don’t really want their kids to see this stuff. I kept thinking that in the old venue, they could have had a PG-13 main dealer’s room with some R rated satellite rooms. Here, you couldn’t avoid the asses hanging out. Even for boys older than 13, it was, um, distracting.

The first row of the dealer’s room was supposed to be the prime real estate... but the traffic tended to flow forward, down the center aisle. So you had to remember to go back and look at the 8 Films To Die For booth and the Anchor Bay booth. Studios - not here this year!

The only thing crowded was the literature table - which was way too small for all of the junk on it. Usually there are give away mini posters and post cards for all kinds of films and services... but this year the table was half the size with twice the junk. Lots of xeroxed movie posters and fliers, and post cards for websites for films that don’t exist... yet. One of the days there was an avalanche of junk, and mini posters and postcards flowed onto the floor. Swell!

On Saturday night we all walked down to the Holiday Inn’s bar and had several drinks. For no apparent reason, actress Tiffany Shepis (NIGHTMARE MAN) sat on my lap at one point. We’re friends, but any time a hot actress sits on my lap is worth mentioning. A fist fight broke out in the bar, and the hotel’s security guy stepped in to break it up... which resulted in the security guard fighting one of the guys... and they fought through the lobby to the elevator banks... and when one elevator door opened, the guy knocked the security guard into the elevator... and then moved in to continue the fight... then the elevator doors closed over them. I kept watching the elevators for one or the other to come down, but when the elevators doors opened, other guests exited. Obviously the two were fighting on some floor up there. Maybe a half hour later, the elevator doors opened and the messed up security guard stepped out. This was like something out of a movie.

Most of the rest of the event was kind of dull, the high points being a panel with Joe Dante and Robert Picardo (from THE HOWLING and many other movies that are favs of mine... even though Joe hasn’t done a feature since 2003's LOONEY TUNES movie) and George Romero and the cast & crew of the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD - lots of great behind the scenes stories, including that Duane Jones (Ben) hadn’t been written as African American, he was just the best actor they auditioned... and when Martin Luther King, jr was assassinated they realized that life had mirrored the end of their film... making it more topical than they had intended (the Viet Nam War was always part of the film’s background). These were the highpoints of the 3 days.

So they have this big venue, and nada. Why not have side-bar classes on writing horror and directing horror and make up and FX stuff? There was room for it. I have volunteered to Tony to do my horror class for free every year. Since they had the trailers for Indiana Jones and those other big films with cross-over, why not have a guest speaker or panel from those to bring in a larger crowd? I’ll bet you could get the screenwriter of the new Indiana Jones movie to speak (no one ever asks screenwriters to do anything, and I’ve seen David Koepp speak at other events) and we’re in the publicity push for IRONMAN, so someone could have shown up from that. Why not try to bring in the mainstream audience with big summer tentpole movies... and treat them to the world of horror flicks?

Why not show better movies in the screening room? A couple of years ago someone passed my zombie script to a low budget producer who called me, wanting to buy it... but he was making films for pocket change, and offered me even less than he should have (so I turned it down)... then made a zombie film that seemed *very* similar to mine called EVILUTION. So I figured I’d watch it and see if it was worth suing his @ss over... but after 20 minutes I left the screening room *screaming*!

It was that bad.

The scene where the gang members introduce themselves to the lead in a stilted exposition dump that seemed more like reading character bios from the casting notice than conversation is an example of this film's *terrible* writing.

Suing them would be an insult to my script.

I’m really not sure the idea of *anyone* being able to make a movie is a good thing. I mean, in theory it’s great that anyone can just make a movie... but shouldn’t they try to learn how first? This was a terrible script, terrible acting, terrible direction. Guess what? You can learn how to do all of those things - I have a website where you can learn about screenwriting for *free* and there are places to learn about directing and acting and how to deal with actors. Why not do some plays with community theater to get a handle on how actors think? Why not prepare *before* you make the film? And why don't producers who have no idea what good writing is, *stop rewriting scripts*? I've said this before, but there are lots of low budget producers in this biz who can take a script that might have sold for $500k and turn it into a movie that isn't even worth half that.

One of the strange things about this Fango was that it seemed incestuous - horror movies made by fans for fans seems like a good idea, but it seemed like they were rejecting the studio films completely... which leads to a program of low budget stuff that seems like it was cobbled from pieces of other movies. There was a comedy film they showed clips from that starred all of the people from 80s horror movies doing in-jokes that only fans of 80s horror films would get. This *limits* the audience. Why not try to expand the audience?

Maybe next year they’ll figure it out...

- Bill.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: How You Tell The Story
Yesterday’s Dinner: Tomato-Beef at City Wok in Studio City.

Movies: I'll talk about them in the next post.