Month: December 2010
Did you ever see the movie Wag the Dog, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Deniro, directed by Barry Levinson and written by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet? The film is about a lot of things, but at its core it’s a portrait of a Hollywood producer. The character of Stanley Motss, played by Dustin Hoffman, is, by all accounts, a spot-on portrayal of Robert Evans (who produced The Godfather and Chinatown, among many others.) What does a producer do? Nobody knows. Even in the movie biz, no one appreciates the producer’s art. “Did you know,” Dustin Hoffman complains at one point…
Read More[This Friday’s “What It Takes” is the first from my publicist Callie Oettinger. I’m sure the first thing most readers will think is, ‘Does a writer really need a publicist? How can you afford it? Isn’t that over the top?’ I first worked with Callie on a job-by-job basis. Her forte is the military; she’s based in Washington, D.C., and has done outreach for a number of successful military writers. She helped me on the launch of The Afghan Campaign. Her work has been invaluable. But what really got us working together full-time is this blog. “Writing Wednesdays” was Callie’s…
Read MoreI did an interview for Ishita Gupta and Matt Atkinson’s online magazine fear.less that’s going to run in January. I was proofing the text this morning and I thought, “There’s a section in here that’ll be perfect for an end-of-year Writing Wednesdays post.” The section was about Mike Nichols. His AFI Lifetime Achievement tribute had just aired a couple of days earlier. On the show a number of actors including Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep had thanked Mr. Nichols, quite emotionally, for among other things creating a safe space for them in front of the camera. It struck me that…
Read MoreIn our “What It Takes” series (adjacent), we’re getting into the inside stuff of publishing, marketing and promoting The Profession, my upcoming novel. Here, for a look at the other side, is an event from the writing of the book. Here is every writer’s worst nightmare: When it crashes. When the wheels come off smack in the middle of the project—and you’re left dazed by the side of the road, staring at the smoking wreckage of your work. That happened with this book. Last Christmas, two years into it. I thought I was finished. I thought the book was done.…
Read MoreSean Van Vleet is a Chicago-based musician, songwriter, and lead singer of the alternative-rock band Empires. In March, Empires released their highly-anticipated sophomore effort Bang and have spent much of 2010 on the road in support of the release, with stops at SXSW, Verve Music Festival, and CMJ Music Fest. MTV.com called the album “great, all ethereal and doomy like the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or the Black Angels, but with a little bit of My Chemical Romance snarl thrown in for good measure.” Alternative Press said the band has “set about doing this right. It’s a sentiment reinforced by these…
Read More[Continuing our “What It Takes” series, an inside look at the process of publishing and promoting a book in 2010-11 … here’s Post #3:] The first book signing I ever did was for The Legend of Bagger Vance. It was at a Books-a-Million store in Lakeland, Florida. I flew 3000 miles from Los Angeles. Nobody showed. Not a soul. I felt terrible for the store manager, who had set up a beautiful table with stacks of books and even a poster-sized photo of me. We were there at seven in the evening, all alone. It was like a scene out…
Read MoreI’m going to try something new over the next few months. Remember, a few weeks ago, we commandeered this Writing Wednesdays space to post a series called, with apologies to John Steinbeck, a “A Writer’s Journal of (Finishing) a Novel?” I was, then, in the final writing throes of a book I’d been working on for the past three years, and I posted a blow-by-blow account of that adventure. Well, now I’d like to do that for the next stage: the editing, publicizing and marketing process. This doesn’t mean the end of our regular Writing Wednesdays posts, I promise. But…
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