Unfinished Business #4: Rough Dark Seas Ahead

 Dragon's Ark: It only looks hungry when you're alone, at night, walking by the side of the road.

Lately, I’ve been writing about the challenges awaiting writers in the new world of independent publishing. An enormous number of avenues have opened up for writers otherwise frustrated with traditional publishers, who seem to be undergoing massive reductions as they rely more and more on a few guaranteed best-selling writers and take fewer risks with new, untested ones (such as me, and, maybe, you).

New writers are not the only ones having to sail this rough, strange sea. These stormy waters also threaten to drown or shipwreck established mid-list writers too, those great veterans, both high-lit and genre, who rarely break the top ten—or even the top fifty— but who are oftentimes the best writers around.

One of these mid-listers—no name—recently informed me he had been dropped by his major publisher, even though he’s one of the most respected, admired genre writers anywhere.

Also among the endangered writers list, I’d put England’s Ramsey Campbell. Campbell, despite his reputation, hasn’t published a U.S. hardcover edition of his books in the United States since the early 2000s. You can only buy his work in mass-market paperback around here, unless you want to order overseas. 

Worse, one of my predictions is that, maybe sooner than we realize, the entire field of the traditional mass market paperback will be washed away into the buzzing ocean of e-books and some of literature's most distinct voices will sink beneath hissing waters.

As both a finicky reader and a new writer, how will I—and the writers noted above--deal with this new world? With the sheer volume of books flushing into the market place, how can I keep my own novel, Dragon’s Ark--which will also be available as an e-book—from falling into the same dumpster file as Hot-Pants Hannah and the Vampire?

Now, I know all the basic answers to that: “blog”: use social networks, etc. etc. But I can’t elude the coppery feeling that all this frenetic interneting will only get me—and others--so far. I may be scoring 500 to 600 visitors a week (and trending up), but that is still a low low number and I still feel like a tiny click in the deep electron sea.
 
For a specific example, take a look at the e-book publishing site Smashwords (where you can download an old, funny screenplay of mine, Whackers, for a mere $2.00, cheap laughs guaranteed). According to Smashwords, they’ve published over 2 billion words so far. While I have published on Smashwords—to no particular effect—I’ve not read any of the novels published there for the simple reason that I’m unable to tell which of them would be worth my time.

As you may guess, I’m a pretty flinty-eyed reader. Most of what I pick up, I put down, and I close the lid on quite a few books. On Smashwords, there's no real discrimination--every book is treated the same. (It appears marketing and publicity matters are entirely up to the writer). The only remote signposts regarding quality are starred reader reviews, which tell me less than little. 

One of the best-reviewed e-books on Smashwords right now is called Samson’s Lovely Mortal ($4.99), vampire erotica about a male bloodsucker with erection problems (I guess this is set in the B.V. era—Before Viagra). These strike me as reviews by readers who sink their teeth into any vampire erotica they can find, good or not—like the pulp novels of old, read once and delete.

Two of the most downloaded works are Zombie Nights (free) and A Letter to Justin Bieber’s Hair (also free). (These are the kinds of books that Dragon’s Ark will be competing with in a couple of months, but we’ll all have a good smirk at my expense about that later).

In short, there’s no way to for me, at least—and you, I'd  guess—to tell what’s really worth time and money and what is not.

If this is future of publishing, then is it a future worth having, and, if not, what might be done about it?

[To be continued]

Copyright 2010 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by Author

Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark will be published March 15, 2011 by Ambler House Publishing. Other essays and postings can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.

 

Whackers: The Story of an Unproduced Screenplay

During the 1990s, I worked as a freelance legal assistant in San Francisco, while I pursued the improbable dream that I could write a screenplay that Hollywood would want to buy and—maybe—produce.

Sometime around 1994, I was working at a giant beehive of a law firm in the financial district, when I developed another one of my periodic (and failed) romantic fascinations, this time with a compelling first-year associate at the firm. (No names because (1) I am a gentleman; and (2) she is an attorney).

I believed then that one should always perform some gesture in tribute to these feelings—preferably a civilized one, success or no--so I called her up and asked her out. She called back and left a polite “no” on the home answering machine. She ended by adding that she was already engaged to be married (I don’t recall that I ever saw the Ring on her hand).

Rejection took place on a Friday. Saturday I went to work and suffered the sting of running into her. That afternoon, I took my pummeled ego out for a beer at a favored watering hole, The New Delhi, an Indian bar and restaurant at the edge San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

My bartender at the New Delhi that day was a cheerful Nepalese named Rabi Kunnar, who also worked as a doorman at a nearby hotel.. Slumped behind my beer, I whined my tale of woe, concluding with her upcoming engagement.

“Thomas!” Rabi cheerfully scoffed with a dismissive wave. “Don’t feel bad! Tell you what! You give me five hundred dollars, I go kill her fiancé and THEN you can have her!”

My hat about flew off my head as I straightened up on the barstool, my finger in the air, the ecstasy rising in me like sap:

“That,” I cried in my best bad Hitchcock voice, “is a moooo-veee!”

I was in the middle of another script at time, and though I knew it would not turn out to be a good one, that job had to be finished. So another six months passed before l sat down and took a year and a half to write the funniest movie I could think of. Even looking at it fifteen years later, I think I succeeded. Even in the spare, dry restricted language of screenplays, its joyful music still plays.

And now, strictly as an experiment, I’m presenting Whackers for your reading pleasure over at Smashwords online publishing, where you can download it to your computer your e-reader . . . or even your i-Phone!

The pitch for Whackers goes, more or less, like this:

WHACKERS: A law clerk’s blind passion for an attorney puts him on the fast track to hell when a glib n’ greedy hit man hires himself to whack the attorney’s fiancé. A madcap slapshtick nightmare about the awful things that can happen when a dream comes true.

Clearly, this is a wish fulfillment tale. It’s also part film noir parody and the story of a con man and his patsy (a setup that doesn’t seem as popular now as it was in the days of Abbott & Costello and Billy Wilder). Those two clowns, talented but haplessly besotted Bryce Doolittle and scheming but foolish Jack Studd, were the easy parts to write. I encountered significant but enjoyable challenges with the patsy’s “romantic interest” (enigmatic Elaine Wilder) and the climactic showdown where all three collide. The Elaine problem was solved when I happened on a news photo of a young girl jumping joyfully into hurricane-driven surf. For the chase, I opened a dozen
doors, until one led me to where I thought the movie needed to go.

For much of the way, I had no title until perceptive singer/songwriter Pat Johnson, during a long beery conversation at the Club Deluxe in San Francisco one afternoon, pointed to the “whacking” that triggered the main plot, and said, “How about ‘Whackers’?”

I got good advice from a screenwriting critique group, but in the end, I found the best approach was to pass it around to six or seven readers who both knew and did not know each other. The response was perceptive, mostly highly positive, even enthusiastic. Women seemed to like it more than men. The harshest criticism from this group was that it was “way out there” (where I fully intended to send it). One reader admitted he didn’t like comedies anyway and also wanted something closer to a Hollywood ending rather than the bittersweet flavor I gave it.

When it was done, I set Whackers sailing into the Hollywood Fog. And, as with most of the other screenplays I wrote, I was tortured with encouragement. Almost everyone liked it. The Seriously Big Hollywood agent (and nice person) Catherine Tarr at Creative Artists Agency had once asked me if I had a comedy in me. Whackers was my response. Her response: “But I didn’t mean a slapstick comedy!” The rest were intimidated for financial reasons (Bryce, for example, is a frustrated crooner and my idea was to score the movie with classic love songs, the licensing for which would have sent the production budget to the moon. This is why writing novels is better. In novels, there are no budget considerations on the imagination)

The one person who did not DID NOT like, really REALLY hated Whackers was a friendly old gentleman screenwriter I met on a flight home from a screenwriters conference in Austin. I sent it to him after it was done, then called him a few weeks later. His verdict: “Awful. Terrible. Bad. Six drafts? That’s all you could do after six drafts!?”

Lesson learned: Never submit your comedy to a man who worked on Raging Bull.

After over a year of constant peddling, the small barrel of agents and producers who (a) appeared reputable and (b) would enjoy something as righteously off-the-wall as Whackers ran dry and I moved on. My favorite of my screenplays—and definitely one of the most entertaining things I’d ever written—crawled sadly into the drawer with the others.

Looking back, it’s just as well. Whackers is both too “whacked” and too expensive to be a Hollywood movie. And if they had produced it, it might have gone the way of so many other offbeat scripts—its racy, zany spirit weighed down with leaden realism, its wings clipped to make it more pablumatic for the bland-minded audiences that the Hollywood is beholden to.

Hollywood is always looking for the next Titanic, the next Avatar, the next E.T., the next Knocked Up. Whackers frolics far away from those mainstream blockbusters. A righteously outrageous yet sophisticated farce that portrays organized crime and federal law enforcement as multicultural hotbeds of alternative sexuality and ends in a huge vacation resort with a cartoon-like chase out the Silent Era might be beloved by comedians, serious comedy aficionados (meaning people who know who Jack Benny is) and critics, but the “mainstream” audience would go off in search of ever-safe Jennifer Aniston and Sandra Bullock.

Whackers, at best, would become a cult item. No one sets out to make a cult movie.

In case I forgot to mention it, Whackers is a comedy. Here’s a list of some of the movies that directly and indirectly inspired its writing: Laurel & Hardy’s The Music Box; Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last; Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Sherlock Jr.; Bringing Up Baby, Abbott & Costello’s Pardon My Sarong and Buck Privates Come Home; The Three Stooges’ Dizzy Pilots; Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot and The Fortune Cookie; the oeuvre of Sylvester the Cat, Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote; Going in Style; Monty Python & the Holy Grail; Sleeper; Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Airplane!

Maybe I’m getting old and reactionary, but few of the comedies I’ve seen since I wrote Whackers even try for the oddball alchemy I was trying to create, but a few of them are: South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut; Cannibal!; Strangers with Candy (the film); Hot Fuzz; and 30 Rock.

The lists only hints at what kind of movie to expect because you don’t care how many movies I’ve seen or how darn many clever references I’ve woven into Whackers, right? If you don’t laugh like I think you will, none of that matters.

NOTE TO NON-SCREENPLAY READERS: On normal paper, Whackers comes out to about 110 pages. Smashwords uses a different formatting so don't be intimidated by the Smashword page count. It reads very fast.

NOTE TO SCREENWRITERS: I no longer care whether or not anyone buys Whackers, so I’ve insolently violated several of the Sacred Tenets of Screenwriting to make reading this screenplay more entertaining to the general reader (the vast majority of my loyal but small audience); for instance, the use of Times Roman font, which is much easier on the eyes than Courier, especially on non-paper media; Whackers is also a movie where some of the world’s great love songs are almost characters in themselves, so I put back the titles of all the songs I could only hint at and put more in where they weren’t. Yes and “they” hate things like “ACT I”, etc., . . . pardon me while I sit right down and cry over it.

Now go read and enjoy. I still think Whackers is funny. I'm betting many of you will too.

(Photo by author with the assistance of Elizabeth Burchfield, Annette Roux, Christine Henry and Don Herron).

(Revised 2/14/10)