You've probabiy seen this before

I've had time to think about my trip to Windsor, the little city across the river from Detroit. And of course that means, "what stories can I use for something new."

Now that I'm waiting for Hallmark to decide if they want to use one of my three ideas for one of their Hallmark movies, of which I've explained in the past. My producer sent the 2 page stories a few weeks ago so from now on, it's out of my hands.

In the interim, a director friend of mine is trying to sell a screenplay I wrote some years ago, a weird story that he suggested. Quickly, it's about a hitman who is sent to a city to kill a union agitator but the hitman has to save him from a gang and thus is now his unlikely friend who turns out to be gay. But the real story is about the hitman and conjoined twin women and he falls for one of them.

What?

Yeah, I said it was weird. Here's what they said on a website I trust:
 

"The main characters are well-defined, the story moves along at a good pace, tension mounts appropriately."


"I really liked it from the first page, it got a little weird with the intro of the twins but after awhile I began to appreciate the inventiveness of it all. Very clever, Bravo"

"Reminded me of Chinatown, best part is the Sally/Sophie characters that compliment each other"

"This script is great. This story is great. I read this story with the girl upstairs, we started reading yesterday and she came home and demanded we finish - the story had so captivated her imagination."

"This was certainly a strange tale, but it grew on me."

"You've created the perfect film noir world, your penchant for character, mood and atmosphere, the progress of the story became a very enjoyable experience."

"The fact that you have both a plot and character is a commendable quality in and of itself."

So what do you think?

Some of my writer and director  friends think it's the best thing I wrote. 

And I didn't want to write it. But the director pushed me on, even though I know little of gay life except for that time in Detroit when my car was broken and I walked into a bar where there were a lot of friendly women. Only friendly women. I had a couple of beers waiting for the auto club and actually had some conversation with them.

And I had very little knowledge about co-joined twins. I didn't even know the word "conjoined".  And the word "Siamese" seemed dated. And why was that word used so long?

So how does a small-town farmboy who moves to the big city write a story of a world he doesn't know?

I treated them like everyone else. In other words, as I wrote their world (with suggestions from my director friend who has a thing for weirdness) as they saw it, just like everyone else. To them, nothing was unusual, the twins worked in a fish packing place, the gay union guy is married to a woman and life goes on.

If you read it, you see that in the writing. Nobody really thinks they're weird, no more than the old lady who lives beside me, who clips leaves off the trees at 6am. Nor the girl with orange hair, or the woman who steals magazines at the Ventura/Van Nuys magazine rack. 

I guess we all have odd things about us, at least to some people.

But by making every "odd person" in the story very normal, it worked out a lot better than if I was trying to write how a co-joined couple live or laugh, or in this instance, love. 

Yes, the hitman and one-half of the conjoined pair make love.

Like I said, I've never written a story like that. In fact I've only written a love scene which was inspired by that same director. I gotta find new friends.

But what was strange to me, was how people reacted. The thought of watching love-making with a cojoined twin would be interesting.

So I just said "they made love." Let the director figure it out.

Besides, my mom, if she was still alive, would probably go with it. If she discovered that Ellen was a "lizbee-an" and still liked her, she'd like the two sisters.

Thinking about it, I might posts the entire screenplay if I can figure out how to do it. Then you can read it and see what you think.

Meanwhile, I wait for Hallmark.

4 Movies you should see - really

Last Thursday while going back and forth on netflix and finding nothing, I discovered one of my forgotten favorite movies, Beautiful Girls. I can watch that movie over and over.


So what?

Over the past few days and talking to a few friends comprised of two writers, a director, two actors, an agent, a comedian and a locations manager.

They all agreed.

Here's what I figured out. Beautiful Girls is part of a group of four movies that have a lot of the same story, yet each of them is really good by themselves. And there is a strong connection. They are (in connection) a really good version of at least three generations.

American Graffiti 1973
Diner 1982
The Breakfast Club 1985
Beautiful Girls 1996

All of these movies are very similar to each other but the casts are very different, the 60's movie was basically my teenage story. Following that Diner was my brother's movie, The Breakfast Club was showing distance from my world, but not really. Beautiful Girls wraps it all up.

Let's look at each one closer;

American Graffitti made a lot of stars from that movie, including Richard Dreyfuss and of course, Harrison Ford and Ronny Howard who graduated from the Andy Griffith Show and to become a successful director himself. And at least a dozen others who went to movies and TV series. 

Graffiti was about graduating from high school, going out into the world that was waiting to tear you apart. We were the JFK people, three assassinations before 1970. Graffiti was just before that, when America was ready to go to the moon. And they did, but at a cost.

Diner was what happened to the graduates that followed my boomer generation. They were GenX and Diner reflected very much the same as Graffiti, the music was different but the story of a group of people was very much identical.  

The big names of Diner were Kevin Bacon, Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, all still working. Again it was built around males, rather than females, but that's the time it was. I think women have not yet caught up.

Breakfast Club, set in one day of highschool. And again a group of high school teens who were being punished. This time the cast was more mixed, although no ethic groups. That would come later. Actors in it were Emilio Estevzz (Charley Sheen's younger brother) and Molly Ringwald had reasonable runs in the business, but the others quickly dropped off.

Then Beautiful Girls with Timothy Hutton, Matt Dillon and a small part for Uma Thurman. This story was about a group of guys again facing thirty eventually. Like Diner, they were of working man stock, not rich nor having any chance of it. The highlight of Beautiful Girls, however, was a 15-year old girl playing 13. Natalie Portman. She steals the movie (below).

Like Jennifer Lawrence does now.

So there you go. I could have mentioned Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but that wasn't a group like the ones I've mentioned. I also considered The Big Chill which probably could have squeezed into this group.

Then there was the music.

American Graffiti blasts every other movie, it had early 60's rock and roll every minute of the movie, and not just parts. It was wall-to-wall music so I won't even start, it would take another page.

Diner had similar music, maybe a lot more Black music being that the movie was set in Baltimore whereas Graffiti was in very white northern California farmland. 

Breakfast Club was set "somewhere" in Illinois and had GenX music although some Cream in there. By now the music industry realized that using real music from bands and singers could bring money. When American Grafitti got a ton of songs, the music industry realized that money was to be made. 

Now, if you want 30 seconds of a 60's song it could cost $100,000.

Beautiful Girls was set in Minnesota in winter. It had a combination of music, Billy Preston, Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" and "oldtimer" Neil Diamond. Otherwise the rest of the music was from bands nobody heard of. 

So there you go.

The Stooges and me...

 It's that time of the year again and hundreds of people are preparing for Saturday, November 30th. I and some friends will be gathering at the Alex theater for none other than the 16th "Three Stooges Big Screen Event".

We're not talking about Lady Gaga (whose costumes often feel inspired by the Stooges) nor bad comedians like Dane Clark... nor Iggy Pop and the Stooges.

 We're talking about the real 3 Stooges.

I haven't attended each event but at least half of them and always enjoyed it. So what happens at the 16th annual Stooge event?

First of all, the event draws fans from everywhere and even women show up, more each

year. There's an issue about women here; it's mostly accepted that the Stooges are for men while women shake their heads and wonder what the attraction is.

I've always said that there are two things women dislike; air conditioning in a car and the 3 Stooges. Their quota of eye gouges and banging heads together just isn't their piece of pie. BUT in recent years women began showing up in larger numbers and when the host asks for the traditional "Woo, woo, woo" (a Curly expression), the women's side is often louder than the men as they proudly shout out.

It all began the the Stooges black & white short films that played in my hometown when Ii was about 8. These were mostly with Shemp rather than Curly. Curly, the bald one, is everyone's favorite (audiences felt for him as he was always the one picked on and the one who was more innocent). Believe me, there is a lot of psychology to what the Stooges did.

Later when I moved to the city I saw Curly for the first time and he was my favorite. Living across the river from Detroit, I watched Stooges three times a day and even my younger brother became a fan.

The Stooges were the remnants of the vaudeville entertainers who worked the circuits of theaters across America, this was mostly before movies but even after movies began there was always the vaudeville entertainers.

The entertainment was always pretty raw, pretty girls, jokes and slapstick which included slapping, tripping and anything else that looked dangerous.

The Stooges were also considered not as artistic as Chaplin or Buster Keaton who were truly experimenting in film. But the Stooges managed to keep going year after year and produced hundreds of short films that were shown before the movie in theaters everywhere.

Then, around the late 1950's, they resurfaced as TV began to show the Stooges among a dozen or so other forgotten vaudeville entertainers. And that's where a new fan base occured - us baby boomers.

I have gone to all four graves of the 3 Stooges here in LA. They were Moe, who had the moptop haircut, Larry, with long curly hair and then Curly and Shemp, who were brothers. Shemp replaced Curly after he passed away early in life.

My brother always said that everything you needed to know about life, you could find in a 3

stooges short film. They were always looking for a job and they made fun of the rich. They even mocked Hitler in one of their shorts.

It was a rite of passage for most of my friends, we all loved the Stooges because in some ways, they expressed a lot of what real life would become for us, looking for work, making mistakes, trying our hardest and just finding a place for our world. 

The Stooges continue to entertain people in 2013 and all over the world. I know a woman from Guatamala who watched the Stooges in her country, not needed to understand the language, the Stooges visual language was and still is universal. She said her mother used to call her Larry, after her own curly hair.

And here's

a photo here where my brother and I duplicated a scene from a Stooge film in which Larry carries up an ice block up a long stairway. We discovered the real stairway and it looked pretty much the same as back in the 1940's.

So, I'm looking forward to another shot of my childhood that stayed with me. I'm a true "knucklehead" as we're known.

The disadvantages of writing anything, anymore.

The disadvantages of writing anything, anymore.

My director friend and I often talk about the fact that we've probably seen every kind of storyline there is. Being boomers, we go back to Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy and of course, Casablanca. We weren't born then, but we got to see them on TV. 

Black & white TV, that is. My parents got their first color TV in 1962.

But adding it all up, we've seen everything at least a dozen times over. I've watched The Searchers for at least fifty times.  And the Three Stooges too.

So does that mean it's all over for writers?

If it's any help, theoretical physiscist Michio Kaku says that there'll always be room for content (aka writers). And there'll always be room for new audiences.

But the only issue that I can see is this; there are supposedly 10,000 screenwriters in WGA, nobody knows the real amount but it's somewhere around there.

And there's a few thousand aspiring writers who graduate in film from college or other schools. And some of them never even wrote a screenplay. Maybe a lot of them.

So, if you're looking at the numbers, don't. It'll just make you sick. Especially when you go to mandy.com wherein writers leap at any type of writing gig that producers (or supposed producers).

You can find producers looking for writers and for the most part, they want writers who have studio credits or Nichol award writers or anyone who has a script, or wants to write.

The catch is that most of these jobs are also for free.

One producer had these demands for him having interest in your project. But you have to show him your idea and your first draft and the first season's scripts and a co-partner to produce and a deal with a network and and all the arcs for the next two seasons.

My answer would be: What exactly did this producer do for anyone? And in reality he has made one movie and owns trucks for movies. 

The idea of getting writers for free was rare until hundreds of schools and colleges and universities began throwing out screenwriters at a frenzied pace. I know this because I taught UCLA extension classes for screenwriting.

I taught variations of screenwriting which began with a complete screenplay in eight weeks. Of that class, I actually got about ten screenplays from ten of them and the other five almost finished.

My next course, however, was now "the first act" and so on, in which I realized UCLA was extending classes to make more money. We had the first act course, the second act course, etc. etc.

So with all these writers coming out, and already a flood of writers who have never found a job, there are a lot of writers out there.

So where are the jobs that Michio suggests?

It's not on mandy.com, nor The Black List, nor any of those useless sites.

Some of it is "code", but that's not really writing. 

The only real thing, is to find something that you really like, a story you've always wanted to write or a story you have written. You've read my blog on how I created the spec pilot and how it became real. 

And this is the hardest part. You really have to like your idea, you tell all your friends or anyone who will listen. You have to sleep with it and wake up at night to put down a note or two that you may have dreamed about. I use a little recorder that I've learned how to manipulate in complete darkness.

Your idea has to become your life even if it takes years. My screenplay Emperor of Mars was written in 1989 and has been optioned six times or so, and I still push it. BTW you can read a little of Emperor of Mars on Amazon. I think I have a link on my Stuff on the left side of the blog.

And don't let anyone say it's useless.

Because as long as I have been in the "business", someone has always told me every year for thirty-five years  that "this (fill in the year) year has been the worst there ever was."

And I'm starting a new screenplay in a week.

 

You've never seen this one...

I've had time to think about my trip to Windsor, the little city across the river from Detroit. And of course that means, "what stories can I use for something new."

Now that I'm waiting for Hallmark to decide if they want to use one of my three ideas for one of their Hallmark movies, of which I've explained in the past. My producer sent the 2 page stories a few weeks ago so from now on, it's out of my hands.

In the interim, a director friend of mine is trying to sell a screenplay I wrote some years ago, a weird story that he suggested. Quickly, it's about a hitman who is sent to a city to kill a union agitator but the hitman has to save him from a gang and thus is now his unlikely friend who turns out to be gay. But the real story is about the hitman and conjoined twin women and he falls for one of them.

What?

Yeah, I said it was weird. Here's what they said on Kevin Spacey's website:
 "The main characters are well-defined, the story moves along at a good pace, tension mounts appropriately."


"I really liked it from the first page, it got a little weird with the intro of the twins but after awhile I began to appreciate the inventiveness of it all. Very clever, Bravo"

"Reminded me of Chinatown, best part is the Sally/Sophie characters that compliment each other"

"This script is great. This story is great. I read this story with the girl upstairs, we started reading yesterday and she came home and demanded we finish - the story had so captivated her imagination."

"This was certainly a strange tale, but it grew on me."

"You've created the perfect film noir world, your penchant for character, mood and atmosphere, the progress of the story became a very enjoyable experience."

"The fact that you have both a plot and character is a commendable quality in and of itself."

So what do you think?

Some of my writer and director  friends think it's the best thing I wrote. 

And I didn't want to write it. But the director pushed me on, even though I know little of gay life except for that time in Detroit when my car was broken and I walked into a bar where there were a lot of friendly women. Only friendly women. I had a couple of beers waiting for the auto club and actually had some conversation with them.

And I had very little knowledge about co-joined twins. I didn't even know the word "conjoined".  And the word "Siamese" seemed dated. And why was that word used so long?

So how does a small-town farmboy who moves to the big city write a story of a world he doesn't know?

I treated them like everyone else. In other words, as I wrote their world (with suggestions from my director friend who has a thing for weirdness) as they saw it, just like everyone else. To them, nothing was unusual, the twins worked in a fish packing place, the gay union guy is married to a woman and life goes on.

If you read it, you see that in the writing. Nobody really thinks they're weird, no more than the old lady who lives beside me, who clips leaves off the trees at 6am. Nor the girl with orange hair, or the woman who steals magazines at the Ventura/Van Nuys magazine rack. 

I guess we all have odd things about us, at least to some people.

But by making every "odd person" in the story very normal, it worked out a lot better than if I was trying to write how a co-joined couple live or laugh, or in this instance, love. 

Yes, the hitman and one-half of the conjoined pair make love.

Like I said, I've never written a story like that. In fact I've only written a love scene which was inspired by that same director. I gotta find new friends.

But what was strange to me, was how people reacted. The thought of watching love-making with a cojoined twin would be interesting.

So I just said "they made love." Let the director figure it out.

Besides, my mom, if she was still alive, would probably go with it. If she discovered that Ellen was a "lizbee-an" and still liked her, she'd like the two sisters.

Thinking about it, I might posts the entire screenplay if I can figure out how to do it. Then you can read it and see what you think.

Meanwhile, I wait for Hallmark.

Everything old is new again again.

Everything old is new again again.

Lately I've been watching ME-TV, a local L.A. channel that broadcasts old TV shows from the late 1950's to the late 1960's. Shows like Ironsides, Rockford Files, Gunsmoke, Rawhide and lots of others. These were the shows the boomer generation watched as kids. Boomers, for those who don't know were born from 1946 to 1964 and represented the "baby boom" after WW11 when the soldiers came home.

A lot of my generation always talked about the great old TV series we had then and great ideas and stars.

But watching lots of these old shows, I have to admit some of them weren't very good at all. And I find it hard to watch the hour-long shows of the good series. After a while, I watch only a handful and even there just one or two.

And it also came to me that our generation has watched more movies and TV shows than any other generation in history. Of course we started watching TV in the mid 50's for most of the country (U.S. and Canada). We also watched old movies a lot, in fact my little town theater played movies that were made 20 years before I started to see movies.

Still, there were a lot of plotlines and ideas that spilled out and by now, we've seen almost every idea there ever was. The studios are even making remakes and sequels for the new generation of movies and TV shows we watched as kids.

And they now are coming back -- for the newer generations.

Lately there was an Ironsides sequel but was cancelled and Law & Order is a remake of an old series called Arrest & Trial. And when it comes to movies, how about remakes and sequels from Star Wars, Star Trek, Superman, Batman and on and on...

That's why many of my generation will say that most of the new stuff is crap. I don't think it's crap, they're made much better in terms of production values although you can't beat a good black & white movie from the 1940's. Casablanca anyone?

But there is a lot of "crap" out there now, but there always was a lot of "crap" back in the late 50's onwards. 

We had a new wave of filmmakers that came up from film schools in the late 60's, Coppola and Lucas and Spielberg and Scorceses and Milius and a lot of others. And a lot of them are still working.

So what about the latest generation; the millennials.

They certainly aren't as great as that film school group, in fact barely even able to make anything new. Their stories seem to revolve around going back to that home town to find that girl/guy who dumped them. You should watch Scorcese's Mean Streets to see a great "first film". 

He did one previous but Mean Streets is his best. He had DeNiro and Keitel and a couple other great actors.

And that's also where millennials fail... their cast. Millennial actors just don't seem to have that presence of form that the previous generations seemed to have. It just isn't there. Maybe it was because the 50's movies were written by people who experienced World War 11 and boomers dealing with assassinations of great men and Vietnam.

Maybe the millennials never experienced anything else than iPhones and texting instead of talking. 

And they rarely, if ever, watch old movies the way we did. Maybe because it was new to us and they grow up with 500 channels. 

A good example of bad and good is a series on Me-TV is "Wanted: Dead or Alive" about a western bounty hunter (bounty hunters would hunt down criminals; they still do now). It was a typical TV western, shot on a studio lot and most of the stories weren't very good but it had Steve McQueen (not the director now) and McQueen had something that millennial actors don't seem to have. And he could carry the show.

Carrying the show means simply, that with his presence people would watch. The boomer actors seemed to have much more presence, and it makes up for a bad script or a poor movie.  Notice CSI has a boomer lead actor, there's also Tom Selleck in another TV show. In fact you'll see a boomer lead in most TV shows except for CW stuff.

They're there for the boomer audience of course, but they're also there because they can carry the show.  Except for CW whose ratings are always at the bottom even though it's made for millennials.

Go figure.

Anyways, just a piece of history for around 40% of you who regularly read this blog.

And don't feel bad, because we boomers had lots of bad movies.


 

The Bear and me...

The Bear and me...

About two weeks ago I received one of those green envelopes from the Writer's Guild of America. It's the envelope every writer loves to see because of it's contents.

Commonly called "Residuals", it comes down to this; money we get for not doing anything.

A lot of writers at this point will say "No, Jim, we've earned that money."

But a lot of others will say "it's free money." Even my director friends, who also receive residuals agree. It's kind of like you're walking down the street and someone hands you $100 or $2000 just like that.

What are residuals? It's a payment for every time one of my shows, either feature film or TV series, is played somewhere in the U.S. and Canada and all over the world, sort of. I'll explain the world later.

These residuals usually add up in formulas I never quite understand, sometimes annually and sometimes bi-annually. The amounts vary from $2000 to as low as $1. An actor friend of mine actually received a residual for $00.00. It cost 47 cents to mail it.

And the bear?

Well, that's Gentle Ben, a movie I wrote in 2000 and that plays or sells all over the world. The residual check I got recently was for $2000 so that bear is working for me. I get a complicated list of where it played and how much it earned but the bottom line is that it's essentially "free money."

Why do I say that? Well, I was paid Writer's Guild Minimum for writing the screenplay. They paid me when I handed the screenplay over. Done. The cameraman gets paid and they're done. The editor is paid and they're done.  The lighting person is paid and they're done.

Only writers and actors and directors get residuals. But there is a catch with writers, naturally, in which we lose a little of that free money. And this ties in with foreign "royalities" ( another word for residuals).

It goes back to copyrights. When I write a screenplay I own the copyright in much the same as someone can copyright an invention. It belongs to them no matter what and forever. 

Except in America.

Studios, notorious for cooking their books (aka stealing from us) learned long ago to "buy the rights". But how can they when international law says the copyright stays with the writer? Well, they figured out that if they hire the writer under the category "Work For Hire". What this means is that they have bought the copyright and you don't own it anymore. Regardless of international law. And guess who shares your residuals? 

Yes, once again the big guys figure out how to get back some of that money they paid you.

However, Europe and Canada  and other countries collect and pay writers a royalty (also called a "foreign levy) that is based on usage, how often the program/movie is played. And the writer gets all of this money. So even if Gentle Ben is paying US residuals I also get the foreign money once a year and it's for several of my movies and totals around $2000 a year.

So that's why I see it as free money. I didn't work for it, I didn't write a word or even ask them for money, they just send it to me. And the bear has been feeding me for 12 years so far.

Thanks, Ben.

How an idea comes and goes

Having written for around 40 years or so (who counts after that many years?) I seem to be getting more ideas than ever for a screenplay.  My latest one came when I watched consumers storming big box stores and malls for Black Friday sales. I had to return a suitcase to Macy's and thought I'd drive by the Fashion Square Mall near me to return it.

But it was not to be, the streets were blocked off as though a hurricane was coming and traffic cops were everywhere. And it was all for the mall traffic. Needless to say I turned around and went home.

But on the way back, I started thinking about Black Friday. I'm always looking for a holiday movie for Hallmark or Lifetime, and I thought that maybe a movie called Black Friday could work. It would be about four or five people who have adventures in a shopping mall on that big day.

But then Black Friday was a great title for a horror movie too. Maybe even better than a family movie for Hallmark.

I thought it over for the rest of the day, bouncing each idea around and trying to imagine what kind of story I could write, and for which idea.

By Saturday, I was focused on the mall idea, and with green screen and CGI, it could be made for those mini-budgets that Hallmark deals with. You wouldn't need a thousand extras, you could create them on computers.

But the dark side of me was also pushing the horror film. My first movie, Ghostkeeper, was a horror movie, although it could be labeled as a "supernatural thriller". There wasn't really a lot of horror in it because I'm not the kind of person who wants to see people being cut up.

And that brought me back to the nice Black Friday. A friend suggested I see that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Jingle All The Way (remember that one?) where Arnold fights for a special toy for his son.  Maybe I could still make the family version.

But by Sunday both ideas started to look lame, the horror movie definitely not what I wanted to write and the family one was too much about money and buying stuff, and I didn't think that was particularly inspiring either. 

By the end of the day I dropped both ideas and this morning put them into my files for projects that might be resurrected, or maybe not.

But then there was that mall cop movie with Kevin James, but it didn't do much business.

But then I remembered a screenplay I read that was written by Sam Peckinpah, the great screenwriter and director whose movie The Wild Bunch, is a classic. He had written a screenplay about someone locked in a department store all night and was being terrorized by an unknown presence that seemed to be hunting him. 

Well, that's not a horror film completely, it's more "Hitchcockian" as they say. Suspense. I could write a suspense movie. 

I'll see how I feel Tuesday.

Re-inventing boomers

Or like anyone under 30 needs to hear this

Some time ago I dropped by a restaurant here in Sherman Oaks called Corky's. It's one of those classic 60's places like Norm's, huge meals for decent prices and photos of the valley on the wall going back to the 1930's.

I was there to hear a friend of mine sing in the bar which itself was classic. There were a handful of people there, a guy at the bar and definitely a 60's or 70's feel to it. You'd almost expect Jim Garner as Rockford enter to get info from a con man.

My friend was also the lead actress in Ghostkeeper way back in 1980. She never really sang until last year, never even imagined singing. Even her ex-husband was surprised. Like most of us she had her ups and downs and managed to raise her daughter and send her through school after the divorce. She also teaches yoga.

In her late 50's, she would qualify for that almost new word reinvention that's being used more and more as boomers age. Just to qualify it, boomers are that age group born from 1946 to 1964, meaning the oldest ones are 65 and the youngest are around 47.

So what about writers? 

I posted this question on the WGA writer's website, not the official one, but a separate website only accessed if you're WGA. I got 3 replies.

Out of at least several hundred writers. 

Three.

Does that mean 99% of WGA writers are under 46? No, it means either they don't care or they don't want to bring it up. More writers than you think have short careers, some with one screenplay to their credit. How does one reinvent themselves when all they do is write.

I've often said that much of my survival in this business was due to the fact I was experienced in making films, filming, editing, sound and other aspects. I'm still doing this and at present have a pilot for a half-hour travel series unlike anything out there so far.

I did the pilot myself, along with a friend, filming in Nevada and then editing it. You've probably seen the 5 minute trailer for it, it's on the list on the left side of this blog. I've also just finished the novelization of Emperor of Mars and hope to have it on Amazon in the next few weeks.

And I'm considering a book on screenwriting. Isn't that what you do when you don't have a real job? Like we need another book on screenwriting?

Why not?

Mine would be based on my UCLA lectures as well as probably some of this blog that deals with writers and writing. And it wasn't my idea, okay, so don't start on the ego thing, this is more the practical thing.

Reinvention.

Nobody's buying my screenplays right now, Christmas Carole is on hold until probably next year as 3 companies say they want to make it, the trouble is that Hallmark has it's quota of Christmas scripts this year with deal from Larry Levinson, who brings movies in cheaper than anyone else.

The only other markets have specific topics; Lifetime only wants true woman-in-jeopardy stories, ABC Family wants family stories featuring the next Hannah Montana.

But it gets better and worse. Better for boomers and worse for under 30's. Several studies show that a significant amount of under 30's are found to be unreliable and not much interested in jobs. Not all of them, okay, but a significant amount.

As a young comedian said on Letterman when he found difficulty in finding a job, "it was obvious that my parents hadn't told the world how brilliant I was".

Bummer, huh?

I remember my grandfather, who at 67 spent his days staring out the window until he finally died. Boomers seem to want to hang onto youth no matter what it takes. Employers find they can use retired boomers for less money and can count on them doing the job.

And then there's Andy Rooney from 60 Minutes who finally retired last night from his weekly short clips. He was 92 and wasn't stopping writing, just quitting the show.

So I guess I'm still a bit away from being a Walmart greeter, but I'm practicing the smile just in case. I did work at K-Mart when I was out of high school.