So, tonight a movie that I ghostwrote a couple years back is having its cast, crew and family premiere screening here in Los Angeles. This will be the second time in a row that a movie I “wrote” screens and I wasn’t invited. The “writer”/director ignored my emails to him congratulating him on completion.
The funny thing is that I have back-end participation in this film so I think he’s probably contractually obligated to keep me apprised. I am in the process of letting shit go, but I am potentially owed a nice chunk of change so I have a vested interest. I should probably dig up that contract and see exactly what it is that I signed, especially in the other matters of non-disclosure: it was “fantastic” reading an interview with the “writer”/director about how he wrote the script and “his” process.
But it’s another great bit for my fringe screenwriting book when I have the proper mood to get back to that one. I was considering sneaking into “my” own premiere; I have done that once (twice, sort of) before so there is precedence…

Today will be the last day I am working on “Giving In” this year. After whatever output I output today, I will print the damn thing out, shove it in a folder and then not look at until after the Epiphany, whenever that is…
Since I got such an overwhelming response to the little excerpt yesterday, I will cut & paste another paragraph down below:

He had a thought and grabbed some brown sugar and dropped a slightly hardened chunk into the center of the pan. This time instead of stirring it in, Bronson just watched as the brown sugar bubbled and dissipated, sending a small, brown cloud – it reminded him of the Los Angeles smog of years past – into the rest of the cooking collard greens.

Watched “The Night of the Demons” re-make a couple nights ago. Outside of the fact that it mostly took place at night, there were demons and the whole “lipstick in the boob” gag it didn’t really remind me too much of the original. It took an extra scene to be able to recognize Edward Furlong, who was the “big” star of the cast; Mr. Furlong, wildly miscast in this, could be well cast as Peter Lorre, at least in looks and that is not a compliment. Lay off the burgers and beer, boy.
And who knows, December blogs may include video pieces I am working on. Maybe…

As it’s Cyber Monday, I should make something available for you to buy here, but I don’t – just yet. Perhaps there will be time to still purchase “A Rose by Any Other Name” on Kindle or Amazon books in time for Christmas 2010. Failing that, and more appropriately, it WILL be available by Valentines’ Day 2011 – mark my words!

As for other literary projects, I hit the 50,000 word mark on the new book, “Giving In” yesterday morning. I used the Nanowrimo.org as the deadline cattle-prod (as Dave Eggers called it in this morning’s pep talk) to help squeeze this book out.
I was asked, again, what it was about this morning. Instead of my normal reply: “It’s about 170 pages,” I said this instead: “It’s about “A Pair of Brown Eyes” as written and sung by Shane MacGowan. But I also jotted this down last week: It’s about a girl who can write the future and the man who tries to stop her.
I’m going to open the document now and cut and paste a random(ish) selection from the book below. You will have read about as much of it as me as this point:

They ate and drank and he even pulled out a couple of Abita Turbo Dogs to add some local beer to wash the Scotch back with. They talked a lot and only some of it brought fuzziness to Bronson’s eyes, but no tears to his face which was good. The beer was gone; the Scotch in real danger of extinction when she asked if she could spend the night. She hadn’t thought it all out: she had rented a car at the airport and driven there, she had had too much to drink, and-

That’s all you get, for now.

December will be spent on projects that will require less time in isolation, less time sequestered in the writing studio; if you see me with a video camera in front of my face that will be a good thing…

So, I’m thinking of maybe having a screenplay going out of business sale. Buy two, get one free kind of thing. No unreasonable offer fused or even refused. Perhaps I can even make them cheaper by the dozen. But when the professionals just lie and screw me over and the personal contacts don’t even read the materials they’ve requested from me, I must be the only one ignoring the words spray-painted on my wall in dripping red, seven and a half foot tall letters.
Point made. Check and check-mate.

I’ll just give in to scribbling, although at this point almost one-hundred and twenty pages into “Giving In” I am really not sure if it will be anything even resembling an English-language book. Not sure if anyone other than a therapist should spend any time with it.

You missed my first professional spoken-word performance, I think ever, Wednesday night at El Cid as part of Jamye Waxman’s Sexy Tales night. I really couldn’t gauge how I did, but I have been asked back so I guess I didn’t totally tank. Thanks for showing up to Paynie & Cupcake.

And I have seen a rough-cut beginning of the animated music video artist Jeanne Hospod is creating for my friend’s Austin-based band, The Boxing Lesson. Looks like I’m going to be featured fairly prominently in this pretty fantastic and more than a little erotic art piece. ‘Nuff said…

Hiding the baseball lead down here on you, but in my less than humble and informed opinion, they didn’t name the award for Cy Young for being a .500 pitcher with a lot of strike-outs and for his ERA. They named the award for the man with the most WINS BY FAR of any hurler who has thrown in the long and storied history of Major League Baseball. Young’s 511 victories are nearly a hundred more than his closest competitor. So, yeah, I am biased toward CC Sabathia, but I believe my point, regardless.
I will be far more upset if the very deserving Robinson Cano gets screwed when the AL MVP gets announced.

Okay, I won’t mention baseball again until there’s really something to mention outside of Robinson Cano winning both the Gold Glove and the Silver Slugger at second base – and very deservingly – bode well for his MVP award.

Nearly 100 pages into the new book – “Giving In” – and although I haven’t read more than a page here or there and I am still not sure if it’s going to wind up an indecipherable, confused and confusing manifesto or something that would interest a 22 year old Canadian girl enough to buy it and tell all her friends to also.
Perhaps I will start putting an excerpt on here from time to time as I scribble away in the writing studio. I know I said I was going to do that with the screenwriting book, so don’t hold your breath.

If you’re reading this from anywhere near enough to Los Angeles to come hear me read as my nom de porn Marco J. Spumante at a Sexy Tales night at El Cid on Sunset. Wednesday, Nov. 17th 7-9pm and I am sure there will be far bigger draws than me.
Speaking of far bigger draws, I just did some modeling for my friend’s band’s new music video; somehow the last couple of sentences are linked, but you know I am nothing if not a gentleman.

Okay, fine, here’s your excerpt:

She told him she loved him for the first time in a foreign language he did not speak. Another She whispered, “I love you,” for the first time so it didn’t count. Yet another She asked him if he loved her, but like any good trial attorney she already knew the answer.
He once had the misfortune of meeting a woman who loved everything about him, who didn’t want to change a thing about him. Thing was, she wanted to change everything about herself the way a snake sheds its skin. He once had a woman tell him she didn’t want to change anything about him other than his address. Thing was, she never did change his address and he had really wanted her to.

ESPN made the first big splash of the hot-stove league by pulling the plug on their Sunday night baseball broadcast team of Jon Miller and Joe Morgan. The former was clearly collateral damage and reports are that he’ll be fine; Miller wasn’t the problem and expect to hear him on ESPN radio still at the very least and on Giants’ broadcasts.
And although I rarely rejoice in someone’s dismissal I will make a major exception in regard to Morgan. If you were an occasional viewer or, and more importantly, if your team played in those Sunday night games you know how awful an announcer Morgan had become. I will give that this was not always the case, but he acts like he has superior knowledge, that he does not possess. Very obvious to me during Yankee games, Morgan would even yell over Miller who broadcasts Giants game on a regular freaking basis and is far more informed on that team than Morgan ever will be. It was especially galling to hear Miller kowtow to Morgan undeservedly.

George and Billy VI? Both Yankee icons are on the Veteran’s ballot for the next Hall of Fame ballot and I defy the committee to send them in together, locked in a duo even after death. I suppose I am biased, but it sure does make sense and it’s the kind of thing baseball is all about. Selig immediately came out with a statement saying that GMSII belongs in the Hall for the astounding changes he made to the game and for his success in winning and in restoring the once great Yankee traditions.

Adrien Brody is Michael Caine in reverse apparently. He keeps showing up in dreck that keeps showing up in my mailbox courtesy of Netflix who, I strongly believe, are out to get me. Last night’s piece of crap in question was called “Splice” and it co-starred Sarah Polley who I have had a crush on for a long, long time. Not as early as Baron Von Munchausen but as soon as she was growed up. Even she couldn’t save this movie that was as stillborn as the “baby” at the center of the plot of this stinking pooch should have been.
I am going to go through my queue and remove any movie with Brody in it. There was a joke on some show about no one going to see his movies and it ain’t no joke. If I were you, I’d save myself the aggravation and delete his movies too.

“I need a fix and a kiss”
Well, at least I have a winter’s worth of the latter. My MLB package is still on and they have pretty much every single game for the last five or six seasons available to watch on archive. My first choice was kind of a doozy: a game picked more or less at random within the guidelines of it being a Yankee game I would not have seen since I would have been out at that thing in the desert on September 1, 2006.
Right off the bat the fact that the game was started for the Yankees by a dead man is pretty off-putting; Cory Lidle was introduced by Bob Shepherd with Bernie Williams not too far from Joe Torre in the bench. It was a rainy night in the Bronx at the Old Yankee Stadium and the opponent was the Twins so the Yanks win was actually a foregone conclusion in many ways.
Lidle tossed six shut-out innings and the pen protected an 8-0 lead into the 9th when a guy named TJ Beam who I swear I don’t recall in the least, gave up one run. There was also a Guiel (Aaron) wearing Andy Pettitte’s number and playing first base…

I am giving in to “Giving In” and knocked nearly 15,000 off the marble block in the first full week of Nanowrimo. I’ve been pretty much doubling up my efforts with my regular morning writing session followed by an evening one while my brain is in a different place altogether than when I first get going.
As soon as I can afford to replace the hot/cold water dispenser in my writing studio I’ll be able to stay in here for longer spells of time without any interruption. I’ve gotten into a few good rhythms out here, but none so strong that I have had to use Thurman’s studio litter box … yet.

So, it’s about one-hundred days until pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training. 99 days on the wall, 99 days on the wall…
Baseball and the world lost one of the greatest, modern characters Sparky Anderson yesterday. He was about as close a throw-back to Casey Stengel so, even though he led the Reds to my first crushing defeat – the 1976 sweep – I will indeed let bygones be bygone. RIP Sparky…


Spoiler alerts aplenty: Watched “Until the Light Takes Us” on dvd last night courtesy of my weird friends over at Netflix. I am not even sure how this documentary found its way onto my queue and then eventually my mailbox. I think I have to blame Saxifrage.
And I really wish that I hadn’t read the little description on the dvd sleeve. What starts out as one of those music documentaries on a particular scene (in this case, the Norwegian “Black Metal Inner Circle” of the late 90’s) complete with the much-needed competition/bad blood between the two leading bands slowly begins to unravel as something else.
Turns out one of the kids around the scene is a murderer; the bands seem to think that’s neat. And then a very old church gets burned down. It’s more a political move against the Judeo-Christian powers that in the bands’ minds have stolen their culture, disrespected it and instituted its own. Okay, great! But then it quite quickly descends into this Satan-worshipping cult according to the news and before you know it, heavy metal kids all over Norway are burning churches and marking them with Satanic shenanigans.
I have just “ruined” it for you, too… So sorry. Still worth watching. There’s much that I haven’t even touched.


Nano’ing right along; actually did a second evening writing session with a little assistance and wound up turning in a 2400 word day bringing me up to nearly 8500 words after four days.
And much like how I found the major plot point/twist that I needed on Monday, I may have found the novel’s “voice” last night as I stumbled about in the haze. May have to go against my own rules and read what I wrote at some point. Right this moment, that would seem more like an excuse not to move forward than anything else, so I will resist that stalling tactic and move forward into the past in today’s work. It’s time…

Baseball season is done; long live the hot-stove league. I’ll give them the five days that MLB teams now have to negotiate exclusively with their now, automatically filed for free agency, players. I’ll ignore how Yahoo sports twisted Hal Steinbrenner’s comments about the Jeter negotiation saying they could “get messy” was taken out of context. Still it will be entertaining to see if any of the other twenty-nine squads out there will make a run at The Captain or Mo.
Giants’ World Series parade commences down San Francisco’s Market Street in about forty-five minutes.
So far, so good on the new November novel: two days down and slightly ahead of schedule, but still hoping to have some other writers onboard to either serve as pace car or fast-approaching in my blind-spot.
Oddly enough, Netflix sent me two movies that had some things in common with what I am writing. I probably put the movie on my queue because the title was a Wilco song, but the lead from Party Down was very good with a script that, well I think I could have written it. I felt like even more of the cliché than I thought.
Amusingly enough, just when I realized that the theme of “Passenger Side” was to answer, “yes, please.” One of the leads said those very words. By the way, the lead in the movie is a writer, living on the grungy East Side of Los Angeles who eschews many aspects of modern life: no cell phone or even call-waiting or voice-mail on his phone, manual typewriter, tape deck—you get the point. And of course, (*SPOILER ALERT*) he’s stabbed in the back by his brother over a girl.
I followed that one up with “Please Give” which was more the entitled New York version of the indie drama. Very nice cast including Catherine Keener, Oliver Platt, Amanda Peet (who I realized looks like a friend, or vice versa) and the kind of geeky, tall, awkward brunette that I’ve found myself with eyes for.
Finished reading Sarah Silverman’s autobiography, The Bedwetter, and really enjoyed that. Also learned that Winona was born Moskowitz (or something like that) and not Ryder and is retroactively added to the very near top of my Jews I Do list.
Okay, back to the book. It’s called Giving In and I’ll give you the synopsis as soon as I figure that out…

The Giants win the Series! The Giants win the Series! And in such impressive fashion one must really take their hats off to them. This team of studly, crazy starting pitching, an impressive bullpen and squeezing enough from those castaways and wire pick-ups really showed their mettle all the way down the stretch and carried it through the entire post-season.
They were far from the best team on paper, but the game’s the thing, and the Giants took those extra 11 games and took home that trophy. Good on them and their long-suffering, waiting fans. I am sure San Francisco went about as crazy as it’s able to last night.

Dario Argent, long my absolute favorite Italian genre/giallo maestro should really hang it up. I don’t know why I even bother any longer. My expectations were so low for Mother of Tears, the long overdue completion of the Mothers trilogy he started in the 1970’s, that I was able to get some sort of “enjoyment” out of it when it came out on dvd a few months back.
Last night, Netflix deemed me worthy to screen Giallo (yellow in Italian; the genre title comes from the fact that the little nourish thriller dime novels long considered the source for these cinematic excursions into madness had yellow covers) in the privacy of my own home.
And you wonder how Adrien Brody wound up starring in this flick. Or, maybe you don’t; when’s the last time you watched one of his movies by choice? And the movie is utterly predictable from the get-go so even mentioning spoilers seems redundant.
Argento shoots some lovely trademark locations. I wonder if the opera house came decked out all in red or if the director (who has made a number of movies around operas, opera houses and operatic themes; he’s also directed a couple actual operas in Italy) was able to get them to redecorate to fit his needs.
Anway, Brody channels Fox Mulder as the “spooky” inspector from Brooklyn, who works alone from the basement of the police station. Sad to say, this movie and the American-written screenplay, which I imagine came from some Argento fan-boys, had nothing to it—not even one of those traditional, sick and twisted, sexual twist, but I was glad when it ended.

Started the new Nanowrimo novel yesterday and maybe figured out a major plot-point as I was fumbling around in the dark. And although the back story is all ancient history, this tome will look into the future and that’s as pleasant a change as I can come up with.
There’s a nibble on one of the short scripts – the adaptation of “Charlotte’s Web” – but I won’t bore you with details until they are actually details.
And Marco is still threatening to come back to life via the prodding of a waiting audience. Or cash money. More like the latter…