Nora Ephron/ Hart Hanson

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca: 

Sept. 13 Nora Ephron: I cut out this Globe and Mail article “She remembers everything (and writes it all down) by Olivia Stren on Nov. 13, 2010.  She interviews Nora Ephron about her books and movies.  Here are some excerpts:

It's Ephron's sixth book of non-fiction, but she remains most famous for her films (no, not the flops): When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail - romantic comedies, both witty and consoling, that follow the bourgeois and besotted.

"Rob Reiner said that romantic comedies are like that Olympic dive. That is, that plain and simple dive with a high degree of difficulty," she says. "There are no car chases and there is no sex; the sex is the talking."
Ephron's essays have that same seeming effortlessness (generally your first clue that the process was anything but easy). "Writing just gets harder. It should get easier, but I don't think it does," she says, "I have a room with a desk and a chair in it and I'm in that chair most of the day, but I'm avoiding writing for so much of it."
If her writing is welcoming and confiding, Ephron herself is more withholding, authoritative and assessing.
Her apartment, meanwhile, where she lives with her screenwriter husband of 23 years, Nicholas Pileggi ( Goodfellas and Casino count among his credits), is as soigné as she is. We sit in the office, an expansive, luminous room washed in shades of cream and, well, egg white.

Still, Ephron determined from a very young age that she didn't want to live in Los Angeles. "Before the word sexist had been invented, you certainly knew that it was not a place for women or for smart women. … I just thought, I'm getting out of here."

So she did - and resolved to become a journalist. "I had a very romanticized version of it from watching Superman and it was that you had a notebook in your purse and you were ready to cover absolutely anything that happened." (She describes her journalistic aspirations differently in her new book: "I can't remember which came first - wanting to be a journalist or date a journalist.")

It was clear, though, that Ephron didn't want to be a screenwriter, because that's what her parents were. "You always think when you're a kid that you can avoid the magnetic field, but it always gets you in some way," she says. In her late 30s, Ephron turned to screenwriting, co-writing Silkwood, which got her nominated for an Oscar.

"Of course, in my pathological way, I then decided everyone should be sure to change careers when they're on the verge of turning 40, then again at 50. I celebrated my 50th birthday on the first movie I directed. I always make things into rules."

Her mother's most famous rules - Everything is copy, Everything is material –

"It all still clocked in as 'Save this - it's going to be something some day.' "

Despite the claim she makes in her new book's title essay ("I have not yet reached the nadir of old age, The Land of Anecdote") she shares one: "When [my sister]Delia got her head stuck in between the banister rails in our house, and the fire department had to come and get her out, it was in a movie my parents wrote that came out, with Natalie Wood and Jimmy Stewart, less than a year later. That's how fast things were recycled in our house," she says. "We knew we were the raw material."

About the downside to viewing your own life - and those of others - as potential material, she says pragmatically, "It makes you a cold, heartless person that's always a bit outside of things, but that's not all you are.

"Nobody ever said, 'Delia, is it okay if we use your head-stuck-between-the-banister episode?' Nothing belonged to anybody. But that's how it is with writers."

Then she divulges another Ephron rule: "Don't say anything funny that you plan to save for your book, because they may put it in their newspaper article."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/nora-ephron-remembers-everything-and-writes-it-all-down/article1439332/

My opinion: I have to agree anything in life can be used for writing material.

Hart Hanson: I cut out this Globe and Mail article “It’s a thrilling experience when a show works” by John Doyle on Jan. 15, 2011.  Hanson is the creator, executive producer and writer of the TV show Bones.  I never saw the show.  I still like to read his path to creating a good TV show.  Here are some excerpts:
A graduate of the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia, he fell into writing for TV in Canada and, for a decade, had a typical Canadian TV career. After The Beachcombers he wrote for Neon Rider, Road to Avonlea, Ready Or Not, North of 60.and Street Legal. He was a writer and supervising producer on Traders, Global’s series about Bay Street, in the late 1990s. Then he landed in L.A. and wrote for shows such as Judging Amy and Joan of Arcadia. Next he was in charge on Bones.

When we eventually sit down in a quiet corner, I ask him: “How did that happen? How did you go from a typical Canadian career to running a huge show on Fox?”

I’d been running Traders and in 1998, I think, we’d just won our third Gemini,” he says. “It was nice but kind of depressing. Traders had about one million viewers, but it aired against ER and ER was getting more than three times the number of viewers. I was just turning 40. I had this feeling that it was time to move on. I wanted to work on something with a bigger audience.

“The next day, actually, I got a call from an agent in L.A. At that time several American network shows were being made in Canada for tax reasons and a low dollar, and this agent asked if I was interested in being the showrunner in Canada for one of these productions. It was flattering, I suppose, but my reaction was to tell him I wanted to test myself, to see if I could cut it in L.A. I just wanted to see if I could do it. He told me my first test was to write a “spec” script for a U.S. show, which I did. I came here and I wrote episodes of Cupid, a show that only lasted a season, but it got a lot of praise. I learned things. I was lucky.”

After that, Hanson wrote episodes of Snoops, an offbeat detective show created by David E. Kelley, then the hottest thing in TV because his Ally McBeal was huge. “I left Snoops and was offered a contract to develop shows. Best thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “A clause in the contract obliged me to create a new show idea and that is what led to Bones. I was asked to meet this producer who had bought the rights to the books and life story of Kathy Reichs, the forensic anthropologist. I met the producer but I told him and my agent, “I’m not doing a forensics show. Not a CSI thing. Not a police procedural. It’s just not me.”

But after reading the books by the Montreal-based Reichs and watching a documentary about her work, Hanson knew there was a show in the material – what he calls “a sort of comedy-drama-romance-forensics series.” And that’s what Bones is – an immensely clever series that relies on both the chemistry between FBI Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) and tart-tongued forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan (Emily Deschanel), while filling each episode with the science of forensic anthropology. “The network said, ‘Fine, okay, go with it,’ but I knew they were lying,” he says, and laughs. “They didn’t know what they were getting. We were the last pilot to be picked up by Fox that year.”

It was like working on a Canadian show, where you’re always up against these huge other shows.” Soon, Hanson adds, the show will introduce a character who will be the basis for a new show that Hanson is developing. Not a spinoff, he insists, but a new show that starts with an episode of Bones.

I ask Hanson what it means to be “showrunner” on Bones. “Everything,” he says. “Every decision goes through me. It sounds like an evil, maniacal job, but it isn’t. I’m the one in charge, that’s all.”

I have 30,000 followers and I did the math. That’s way less than one per cent of the viewers on Bones. I can’t hear myself think, listening to the noise from those really vocal people.”

My opinion: This article was inspirational.  He was truthful like how his show was the last show to be picked up by FOX and how working on a Canadian show, you’re up against all these other shows.  I did some research, and Canadian shows and networks do want these Canadian shows to succeed.  They put most of them in the summer or mid-season.

Shows like The Listener and Rookie Blue air during the summer.

Murdoch Mysteries: They came out in Jan. 2008.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1091909/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Republic of Doyle: It came out in Jan. 2010.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1297754/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Cracked: It came out Jan. 2013.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2078576/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/hart-hansons-journey-from-beachcombers-to-bones/article621696/

The Sisters Brothers/ Patrick deWitt

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Aug. 31 The Sisters Brothers: I cut out this National Post book review “A Western that charts fresh new territory” by Michael Christie on May 28, 2011.  He reviews the book The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt.  Here are some excerpts:

And most importantly, what he does get right are the flawed and jagged hearts of his characters, which is all the real this reviewer needs.

What Western is real anyway? Aren’t they all revisions and stylizations of the past? From the kindergarten morals and the ridiculous bloodlessness of Hollywood Westerns, to Louis L’Amour’s pat Harlequin Romances for men, to the populist machismo of spaghetti Westerns and their impossibly slow gun duels, the genre has never registered very high on the reality scale.

This novel follows two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, infamous assassins sent on an errand to kill Hermann Kermit Warm, an ingenious (and, as it turns out, extremely likable) man, who is accused of stealing from their boss, a fearsome figure named the Commodore. Luckily for us, the genre permits deWitt to turn his considerable powers loose, allowing him to rummage the treasure chest of English with much less constraint than a story staged in the contemporary world.

People with unspeakable pasts and damned futures — full of equal measures depravity and virtue — who long ago came apart and simply kept going. He also manages nicely to fry some bigger thematic fish in the process. Of San Francisco, Charlie notes, “It’s a good place to kill someone, I have heard. When they are not busily burning the entire town down, they are distracted by its endless rebuilding,” offering perhaps the best description of America I’ve read in years.

At the book’s centre is Eli, the narrator and softer of the two, certainly the most endearing character. We learn early that Eli’s heart has never really hardened to killing, and the soul of the book lies in his emotional thaw.

deWitt’s Dostoyevsky-like renderings of a mind that knowingly does wrong are where his writing really soars. “My very center was beginning to expand as it always did before violence, a toppled pot of black ink covering the frame of my mind, its contents ceaseless, unaccountably limitless.”

Eli is an increasingly sensitive man in an insensitive world, and even begins to pity his disabled horse, Tub, an unheard of thought-crime in the Old West. This is a contemporary mind dropped into a historical situation, but who cares about accuracy,
because Eli’s mounting compassion for the one-eyed animal is perhaps the most touching aspect of the novel.

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/05/27/book-review-the-sisters-brothers-by-patrick-dewitt/

Patrick deWitt: Here is the National Post interview with the author on the same date.

Patrick deWitt was rummaging through unwanted treasures at a yard sale a few years ago when he came across The Forty-Niners, a weathered, leather-bound volume in Time-Life’s Old West series, which is the kind of thing one only finds at yard sales. It was a history of the men, women and children who journeyed to California in the mid-19th century seeking fortune. While the writing was unremarkable, the images caught deWitt’s eye: daguerreotypes of old miners and grizzled prospectors, ships abandoned in San Francisco’s harbour by crewmen off to strike it rich, and other scenes of the gold rush. The book cost 25¢. He bought it.
At the time, deWitt was just starting work on his second novel. A few years earlier, he’d written the words “sensitive cowboy” in his notebook — an idea which eventually spawned a fictional conversation between two bickering outlaws, but nothing more. 

He “mutilated” the book, posting the pictures on a corkboard above his desk, and began to write. Over a number of months, these two cowboys came to life, first becoming siblings and ultimately The Sisters Brothers, the name of deWitt’s recently released novel.

The cowboy is one of the most reliable archetypes in American pop culture; the word conjures up both bandits like Billy the Kid or Jesse James and actors like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, novels such as Lonesome Dove or True Grit and films such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The Sisters Brothers, however, turns the stereotypical cowboy on his hat.

The novel tells the story of Eli and Charlie Sisters, two cowboys of indiscriminate age, who also happen to be killers-for-hire. They are also troubled men: Charlie, a charming psychopath capable of ending a life as quickly as downing a shot of brandy, is a drunkard; Eli, who narrates this outstanding novel, is a cowboy unlike any other. “I am not any one thing,” he says at one point in the novel, and it’s true: He’s a lovelorn fool, a neurotic cowboy self-conscious about his weight, a killer unsure about killing, and, most of all, an endearing, if conflicted, man.

“I wanted to subvert the character of the Western hero, and neurosis is really underwritten in Westerns — it doesn’t really exist,” deWitt says on the phone from his home in Portland, Ore. (he’s bounced back and forth between Canada and the United States since being born on Vancouver Island 36 years ago). “Everyone knows exactly who they are, and they don’t really doubt themselves — unless they’re a coward.”

He subverts other aspects of the Western, a genre with a very specific iconography and set of traditions: the duel, the man in black, the lone gunman. For deWitt, breaking these traditions was part of the appeal.

“I enjoyed coming at something that was already sort of realized, and already fully formed, as a backdrop … and then to fill it in however [I] wanted to fill it in,” he says. “Approaching something that’s already been addressed so many times was sort of a challenge, but also comforting, in some ways.” That said, the novel features a duel, and a final showdown between hero and villain. “As much as I enjoyed writing about things that weren’t part of the tradition, I also liked addressing things that were a part of the tradition, and then trying to make them different in some way.”

When he began writing The Sisters Brothers, deWitt asked some friends in the publishing industry if writing a Western was a wise decision: “The general consensus I got was it was tough, that it was maybe not the smartest thing to be doing.” Fortunately for deWitt, the landscape has changed.

“In my first book (2009’s Ablutions) there’s a horse that gets punched in the face. People are asking me what my problem is with horses. I don’t know.”

There’s a scene, three-quarters of the way through the book, where the brothers encounter a prospector who has lost touch with reality; he thinks the dirt he brews is actually coffee. Charlie blames the man’s insanity on solitude. I ask deWitt if writers, often spending years alone working on their books, are threatened by similar afflictions.

“Yeah, I think it’s terribly unhealthy to spend all that time by yourself,” he says, laughing. “Today it’s this beautiful sunny day for the first time basically in eight months, and I’m sitting in my office all day. It just doesn’t make sense.”

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/05/27/the-good-the-bad-and-the-neurotic/

My opinion: It was interesting to get inside the book and the author’s mind to see how he created this book.

Sept. 20: I have a question.  Do you guys like it when I send emails/ blog posts about book reviews and writer interviews?  You are either:

“Yeah, I like reading books and I like to know what I should download next into my e-book.  I also like reading author’s interviews.”

Or:

“I don’t read books and I don’t care about reading author interviews.”

I would like some feedback on this.  Either way, I will keep sending book reviews and author interviews because I find them interesting.  It’s okay, if you don’t want to read this topic.  It’s not like I’m going to take the bus over to your house and get you on the computer and force you to read it.  I’m sure some of you guys are laughing at the image of me taking the bus to your house and standing over your shoulder as you read the email/ blog post.

Ray Bradbury/ Margaret Atwood

 This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Aug. 31 Ray Bradbury: I cut out this Globe and Mail article “Bradbury: We live in a world of his making” by Robert J. Wiersema on Jun. 7, 2012.  Here’s the article:

It is difficult to think about the influence of Ray Bradbury, who died on Tuesday in California at the age of 91. Not because of any lack of influence; quite the opposite, in fact.

Trying to discern Bradbury’s influence on our literary and popular culture is akin to the cliché of asking a fish to describe water. We swim in a world of his making.
Bradbury’s fiction doesn’t defy genre categorization so much as ignore it completely. Fahrenheit 4 51 is only science fiction in as much as George Orwell’s 1984 is; The Martian Chronicles eschews SF trappings for social commentary.

His fiction, characterized by wonder and a childlike sense of play even at its darkest, was story in its purest form, and revelled in the unfettered potential of the imagination while rooted in the reality of human nature. Something Wicked This Way Comes, for example, roots the terror (and wonder) of a travelling carnival in the simultaneous celebration and subversion of a small-town Americana that may never have actually existed.

Reading Bradbury as an adult is a reminder of the power of storytelling, a force often lost in the capital-L Literary world.

Reading Bradbury as a child or a young adult, though, has the power to change lives.
Since its publication in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 has been both one of the most banned books and one of the most taught. The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes, along with a dozen or so of his best stories, are also fixtures in school curriculums.

Read at an impressionable age, Bradbury’s stories explode in the mind. For those at all creatively inclined, the lessons from his fiction are clear: There is nothing you cannot do, no place your imagination cannot take you, and there are no rules.

Stephen King has acknowledged his debt to Bradbury explicitly, and you can see it in his fiction: his Castle Rock seems almost a deliberate homage to Bradbury’s Green Town, Ill., and that same small-town Americana, celebrated and subverted, is a recurring trope. Similarly, Neil Gaiman, creator of The Sandman comic and novels including Coraline and American Gods, cites Bradbury as an influence.
But these are obvious examples; Bradbury’s influence runs far deeper.

You can see it everywhere genres are flouted or ignored, as in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife and the novels of Andrew Pyper, or when a childlike wonder combines with an adult sensibility, as in Robert J. Sawyer’s The Quintaglio Ascension (dinosaurs were a delight for Bradbury) and W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe. Even in the capital-L Literary world, you can see that sense of freedom and limitless potential in the likes of Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers and Alice Hoffman.

An anthology to be published next month acknowledges this influence. Shadow Show: Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, edited by Sam Weller and Mort Castle, includes stories and testimonials from many of those already mentioned, as well as the likes of Harlan Ellison, Joe Hill, Kelly Link and Margaret Atwood (whose Headlife is available at byliner.com).

The true measure of his influence, however, may be best observed not in the creators who follow in his footsteps but in the audience he created.

Having experienced Bradbury in their youth, readers and viewers instinctively hope for wonder in the art they consume, a hope too often disappointed with bland genre staples. When a book or movie or television series escapes from those conventions, though, the audience is there. Bradbury gave us all a taste for wonder, and when we find it – whether it is Lost or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who or Game of Thrones, the films of Charlie Kaufman or Spike Jonze – we recapture that feeling we might have thought lost to us, those moments of limitlessness, that we first encountered in the pages of Bradbury.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/ray-bradbury-gave-us-all-a-taste-for-wonder/article4237139/

Margaret Atwood: Here is the Globe and Mail interview where Michael Posner interviews Margaret Atwood about Ray Bradbury on the same date.  Here are some excerpts:

In the notes at the bottom, I explain that I read Ray Bradbury as a teenager and that those stories really sank in, especially The Martian and the other stories in The Martian Chronicles, and Fahrenheit 451. Some writers jump straight to what we might call “deep metaphor,” writing at a mythic level, and that is what these stories do.

Posner: You’ve written about him elsewhere as well.

 

Yes. In Negotiating with the Dead [Atwood’s non-fiction book about writing], I have a couple of bits about Ray Bradbury. One is about The Martian and one is about Fahrenheit 451. He was particularly pleased with those because he felt earlier that he wasn’t being treated as a serious writer.

Posner: There are fantasy/sci-fi in your later work as well.

 

Some of it. Orwell’s 1984 came out just in time for me to see the lurid paperback of it. I have a piece in the current New Yorker about encountering a story about spider women who bite men in the neck.

Posner: Would you call him an influence?

 

You never know about influence. Where does this stuff come from? It’s really impossible to say, because it’s all so pervasive. Is it Ray Bradbury or Grimm’s Fairy Tales? Or was Ray Bradbury influenced by Grimm’s Fairy Tales?

Posner: What is it about his work that spoke to you?

 

That’s a literary question, but I’ve given you the clues. He’s in the line of American, non-realistic writers.

Posner: His output was prodigious.

 

He was of that generation that felt you should be able to make your living that way, and he did, because there was a market for it.

You could live off magazine fiction, especially if you changed your name often enough. He was a model for [the character] Alex in The Blind Assassin. He said he’d write a story a week and he did. Then, $25 actually bought you something – more than five lattes.

Posner: Your favourite Bradbury book?

 

Probably The Martian Chronicles. Read Hawthorne’s story Young Goodman Brown and then read Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. The Stepford Wives? It’s all the same story. Look at American right now. What do you see?

Posner: I’ll let you answer that.

 

Everybody distrusts the neighbours, because you don’t know what they’re thinking or if they’re terrorists. That’s been going on since the 17th century and the Salem witch trials. Are they really a witch? It’s a deep undercurrent in American writing. Stephen King picks up on it too. Who are you really married to?

Posner: So he crops up a lot for you. That speaks volumes.

 

Doesn’t it?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/ray-bradbury-stories-really-sank-in-margaret-atwood-says/article4237264/

My opinion: I’m inspired reading about Ray Bradbury and Margaret Atwood.  I have actually seen Atwood talk when I was in college.  We were reading her book Oryx and Crake for English 101 class.