Posts Tagged ‘Road to Perdition’

True Noir Presents Star-Studded Panel at San Diego Comic Con…And I’m Not Here (But Sort of Am)

Tuesday, July 30th, 2024

Regular visitors to these update/blog entries will already know that I was unable to attend the San Diego Comic Con, where a True Noir panel was a major part of our launch.

My health issues make it difficult to attend the very crowded and spread-out con, not to mention air travel, plus Barb and I are wrapped up in pre-production of our indie film production, Death by Fruitcake (based on the Antiques series she and I write as “Barbara Allan”) with shooting to begin less than a month from now.

My longtime collaborator, Phil Dingeldein, shot a video of me so I could greet the attendees at the panel, and here it is:

My terrific director, Robert Meyer Burnett, interviewed me last October (literally the day after we wrapped Blue Christmas), and Phil shot it and edited this piece into the first of what will be a number of Behind the Mystery episodes.

If you are thinking of backing our KickStarter effort, here’s the web address.

Unlike a lot of KickStarters, we are deep into production and you can order the finished product now, which will be available at the end of the Kickstarter campaign (no endless wait as is the case so often in these crowd-funding offerings).

The panel created some real interest, as in this WBOY coverage.

Here’s some press room interviews with producer Mike Bawden (of Imagination Conisseurs Unlimited, his company with Rob Burnett) and actor Anthony LaPaglia, among others.

And more here:

Some nice pre-panel attention here.

A good one here.

I’ll be posting more video shot by Phil of me discussing Nate Heller, this project, and my fiction generally, in the coming weeks. Also more excerpts of the interview Rob Burnett made with me.

Again, if you’re interested in my work at all, you’re going to love True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak.

Your support will allow us to do more – we have big plans, but we need your help.

* * *

Here’s a nice write-up on this year’s Strand Magazine Critics Awards, in which I won a Lifetime Achievement award.

There’s a nice if brief write-up about my Batman graphic novel (adapted from the Kia Asamiya original, Child of Dreams.)

Here’s an appreciation of Wild Dog, the homemade costumed hero Terry Beatty and I cooked up once upon a time.

This article talks about seven movie novelizations that are worth reading, and Road to Perdition is one of them. Unfortunately, they don’t mention that the later Brash Books edition is my entire novelization (originally cut from around 90,000 words to 40,000 for the paperback tie-in edition at DreamWorks’ demand).

The Brash Books edition of the full Perdition novel is here.

Finally, here’s one of several recent write-ups about the film version of Road to Perdition and how Tom Hanks ranks it among his favorite film roles.

M.A.C.

You Tube and Me (And How to Be a Fiction Writer!)

Tuesday, May 28th, 2024

I have gotten into the habit of looking at a lot of YouTube of late. Working on a big project like True Noir – the ten scripts for a massive audio production of the first Nathan Heller novel, True Detective (1983) – I find the bite-size offerings that YouTube serves up make ideal late night comfort food. Earlier in the evening, I have usually watched a movie on physical media with either my wife Barb or my son Nate – who comes down from his house up the street after he and his wife Abby manage to get our two grandkids Sam and Lucy to bed – and don’t feel like digging into another feature-length presentation.

The algorithm YouTube uses to generate new offerings on their “recommended” feed – fed by what you last watched and by your subscriptions – means there’s always something new to watch. Unfortunately the flaw is that if you sample something just to get a look at it in the “what’s this about?” sense, you get barraged with material generated by that sampling. Look at one Jordan Peterson video and you’ll get ten more. Look at one Jimmy Carr video and get you swamped in those, but also other “offensive” comedians. Check out Steve Schmidt’s The Warning and receive an avalanche of anti-Trump material. Videos on filmmaking often attract my attention, particularly ones on micro-budget indies.

Sometimes that’s okay. You learn things and at times your interests are fed (as opposed to simply your curiosity). I watched a Ballistics Burgers video and enjoyed it and now I’m on my way to learning how to make a delicious cheeseburger, if I ever get around to trying. And the algorithm thing led me to Robert Meyer Burnett of Robservations and Let’s Get Physical Media, who is now my collaborator on the Nathan Heller audio project, and Heath Holland, whose Cereal at Midnight I am now guesting regularly on (or irregularly – about once a month). Both Rob and Heath are now good and valued friends of mine.

You quickly learn that some of the presenters on YouTube are naturals at it – like Rob and Heath – and others are just guys in their basements with the appeal and communication skills of somebody who just starts talking to you in the supermarket. A YouTube video with a subject that interests you, or just intrigues you, is not guaranteed to include a presenter who ought to be presenting. It’s a democratic landscape, but we all know democracy is messy.

Recently I checked out a few videos purporting to teach novices how to write. I am always willing to learn – after all, I’ve only been doing this since I was in junior high in the early 1960s, and writing professionally since 1971. I have since been bombarded by tips on how to avoid “filter words” (a very popular phrase right now) and words to never use (like “very,” which I just did).

What is disconcerting about these videos – and I’ve sampled a bunch, meaning my YouTube feed will drown me in the damn things for a while – is they feature (A) very young writers…damn, I did it again!…or (B) writers you’ve never heard of, or (C), young writers you’ve never heard of. Many tend to be young woman (under thirty) who speak with clear-eyed confidence in training others how to do what has enabled them to become successful writers. Being a successful writer among these self-appointed teachers of the craft often means they self-publish, though that fact is usually glossed over quickly.

Not all of this advice is good, but neither is it necessarily bad. But who are these people, except up-talking young ‘uns who have no business giving advice to anyone? Never mind, because (as I say) not all their advice is bad, and they often do discuss important topics like writing a good first sentence and whether or not to outline.

The problem, beyond too much self-confidence and an overwhelming desire to fill a YouTube screen with their face, is that fiction writing can’t really, not exactly, be taught. I used to do seminars – for a long time, it was every summer at Augustana College in Rock Island, and a lot of my attendees went on to successfully publish – but I always made the point that fiction writing has no rules, just strategies. No right or wrong, just what works. For you. The individual.

I had tips and shared them. For example, I discouraged opening with a line of dialogue, a practice in which a lot of writers (including published ones, even successful ones) indulge. I would point out to those attending the seminars that opening with dialogue does not tell you enough – you don’t know who is speaking or where they are uttering this supposedly reader-catching bit of fake human speech.

Both opening with dialogue and avoiding doing so, however, are a strategies. Tactics. Not rules.

I have written here before about how useless I consider advice from the likes of Elmore Leonard and Stephen King is to wannabe authors. Not because I think Leonard and King are bad, but precisely because they are good. Better than good. They are great storytellers who have developed their methods by trial and error, and by having grown up as little Leonards and Kings consuming a lot of narrative storytelling, both novels and movies and maybe even the occasional play.

No quick path to learning how to write fiction is available. None. You have to be obsessive about storytelling – wanting to tell stories, wanting to read/see/and-ultimately create stories. But it’s mostly strategy.

What should the first line be? Is the basic story I have in mind better served by first person prose or third person? How is point of view best served in this piece of fiction? The answers to such questions come from the individual writers.


James M. Cain

Mickey Spillane

Donald E. Westlake

James M. Cain taught me to write dialogue (also Jack Webb on 1950s Dragnet). I never met Cain (or Webb), but they taught me by example. Raymond Chandler and Mark Twain schooled me in writing in first person. I came to know – personally know – Mickey Spillane and Donald E. Westlake. But I learned writing action/violence scenes from Mickey and sublime point-of-view technique from Don, long before I met either one outside of the pages of their books.

Some young blue-eyed girl, staring out at you from the television (or “monitor,” to you younger folks) is not going to tell you what a grown-ass woman like Fannie Flagg or even Ayn Rand will. Rand is a good example because she did a lot of things wrong, but also a lot of things right. That kind of successful writer can stimulate thinking along the “I should do this but not that” line. People of less than genius intelligence (like me) can learn more from Harold Robbins in The Carpetbaggers than Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past – particularly when you are starting out to teach yourself in junior high school.

I don’t mean to pick on the females here, because plenty of guys – particularly in the screenwriting area – are turning their own experiences into rules for the easily swayed. I started watching a video where the interviewer was acting like he was in the presence of a real master of the craft – Robert Towne, maybe, or (again) Elmore Leonard – and when the uber-confident dispenser of screenwriting craft’s credit was finally mentioned, the guy had written a Charlie’s Angel movie.

When I was doing seminars, I worked with a lot of young women of all ages who wanted to be romance writers when they grew up (some of these young women were twenty, others sixty with all stops between). They did a lot of things right, in their fiction, and often came together in writers’ groups and helped each other learn and grow. I found then, and believe now, that this kind of thing is positive. Workshops, like the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa where I fought many battles, gets you down in the trenches with other writers, discussing specifics like plot and character, not “rules,” learning tactics, not “never use adverbs.”

Most of the people telling you never to use adverbs do so in sentences that contain adverbs.

There is only one teacher who can teach you writing: you. The fiction you love will guide the way. Looking at novels and stories (and movies) that are favorites of yours, but doing so in an analytic way, can be helpful. Hitchcock can teach any writer and that isn’t even what he’s trying to do.

Of the young, clear-eyed women teaching others how to write on YouTube (often with pets lurking in the background, scene-stealing), almost none of them discuss first-person writing, or understand that many of the “filter” words to avoid are crucial to writing effective first-person. Barb and I (as “Barbara Allan”) use two narrators in the Antiques novels, neither of whom is a trained writer, which is a great source of fun for us in the books and, we hope, for readers.

One of these very young (“very” again!) writers weighed in on a topic I’ve explored here quite a bit – the wrestling match I sometimes have with editors and even readers about my insistence on describing what a character is wearing. This young writer said she got around that by simply stating something along the lines of “Joe was a sharp dresser” and never describing Joe’s wardrobe again in any way throughout the novel. That’s a choice. A tactic. But I consider physical description and a rundown on wardrobe to be key elements of characterization, at least as I approach it.

That’s all for today. I have Steve Schmidt and Jordan Peterson videos to watch.

* * *

The first Quarry’s Return reviewer has appeared and it’s a nice one.

How to read the Nolan books in chronological order.

And Road to Perdition is once again cited as an outstanding film from a comics source.

M.A.C.

Winning and Losing

Tuesday, May 7th, 2024

NEWS FLASH: True Noir: The Nathan Heller Casebooks, the ten-episode full-cast, fully immersive audio adaptation of the first Heller novel (True Detective) is now in production! The Kickstarter crowd-funding effort will go live soon, to enable us to add physical media and other bells and whistles to the project. Watch Robert Meyer Burnett’s various YouTube shows and appearances for ongoing updates.

* * *

We did rather well at the Iowa Motion Picture Awards (held in Forest City, Iowa, on May 4).

Actor – Award of Achievement
Blue Christmas
Rob Merritt

Actress – Award of Excellence
Blue Christmas
Alisabeth Von Presley

Direction – Long Form (60 minutes +) – Award of Achievement
Blue Christmas
Max Allan Collins, Chad Bishop


Screenplay (Produced) – Award of Excellence

Blue Christmas
Max Allan Collins

We were also nominated in the Best Feature Film category and Best Supporting Actor (Chris Causey as Jake Marley).

There were any number of categories we were not considered in, because every category you enter in this award competition comes with a somewhat stiff entry fee. I settled on what I thought we had a chance at winning (roughly speaking, the Award of Excellence is first place, the Award of Achievement is second place).

What I like about the Iowa Motion Picture Awards is that each category has a separate slate of judges (and the second round is out-of-state). That gives a film several bites at the apple…though you have to pay for each bite.

This is, in a way, an important competition for us, because we were looking to do well enough to be able to legitimately put some impressive-sounding Laurel wreaths on our poster and on the Blu-ray and DVD sleeves. And we accomplished that. This is preferable to, say, the Cedar Rapids Film Festival, where they have a large slate of awards but only two awards (essentially first and second place) apply to indie feature film projects, the rest to corporate and student. No acting, writing, directing awards. That means being an official entry, as we were in that festival, is an accomplishment in itself; but it isn’t as impressive as, say, Best Actress.

I had originally hoped to attend the Iowa Motion Picture Awards, but it’s a twelve- hour round trip drive from Muscatine, Iowa, to Forest City, Iowa. And we had a conflict, too, which had us cancelling our motel room at the last minute and not making the trip. Our star, Rob Merritt – who won several awards not just for our production but a couple of others (he’s the busiest actor in Iowa and for good reason) – was there to represent us, as was Jake Marley, that is, Chris Causey.

We had also decided not to attend the Edgar Awards, which were just a few days before the Iowa Motion Picture Awards. That was a different situation. For one thing, we figured the NYC trip would cost probably at least $3000 and that was a conservative estimate. For another, the minute I saw that a biography of James Elroy was nominated in the same category as my (and Jim Traylor’s) Mickey Spillane bio, I knew we were (what is the term?) fucked.

Elroy is inexplicably (from my biased viewpoint) a writer worshiped by any number of readers, reviewers and, of course, Elroy himself. He’s the only writer whose work I truly despise. I have not hidden this view, nor have I hidden that it likely derives from my being jealous because he’s hugely successful working my side of the historical street. And I also have not hidden the fact that any number of smart people think he’s a genius.

The thought of shelling out three or more grand to go to New York and sit through a long evening to watch a book about a writer I abhor beat a book about a writer I admire was just one rubber chicken too far. There’s an irony here, of course, which is that many in the mystery field still feel about Mickey Spillane the way I feel about James Elroy. It just goes to show what a sick sense of humor God has (it’s uncomfortably like my own).

I have nothing against the writer of that book or the book itself, not having read it. It came down to, “Is this how I want to spend three grand?”

And it was a good call.

The award – the reward – for our Edgar-nominated book is the book itself. I am so happy to have written it and found in Jim Traylor a copasetic collaborator and in Otto Penzler an enthusiastic publisher/editor, who has a true affinity for the mystery genre and its history. I wouldn’t trade our book for a barrel of Edgars.

It is kind of funny that an Elroy book beat us.

Of course, in that same category there were two books about Poe (after whom the award was named) and another by an author who passed away recently, so even if the Elroy bio hadn’t been there, one of those would have likely beat us. And since I haven’t read any of the competition (including the Elroy bio), I have no opinion as to the quality of those books – any one of them could be better than ours…including the Elroy one.

Two Poe books up for the Edgars reminds me of when I was a presenter at the Eisner Awards at San Diego Comic Con a while back, and one of the two guys up for the award was Will Eisner himself. And I said to the audience, “I’m not sure which is worse – being up against Will Eisner for the Eisner, or being Will Eisner and losing the Eisner.” (He won.)

I should probably not be talking about this at all. Frankly, I’ve always been somebody who wants to be outspoken and yet loved by everyone…in other words, something that has zero chance of ever happening. To anyone. But it has made me reflect on my competitive nature and my desire to win. Which may be a little sick, but what would a desire to lose be but psychotic?

For me the ultimate award was being made a Grand Master Edgar winner by the Mystery Writers of America. That was something I had hoped for and dreamed about for decades. Anything else that followed would be gravy. So why at this late date do I still care about winning awards?

Actually, the people who say it’s a win just being nominated aren’t wrong. A few years ago, Jim Traylor and I did a really good book on Spillane and the film/TV adaptations and did not get nominated at all. Neither of the massive, extensively researched and groundbreaking Ness non-fiction books with Brad Schwartz – one about the Capone years, the other about Cleveland and the rest of Ness’s life – even got a nomination. So you bet it’s a “win” to be nominated.

But what is not a win is sitting through an endless banquet waiting to hear if you win or (much more likely) lose. I think I’m done with that. It’s a masochistic pursuit that, in the greater schemes of things, adds up to nothing. It’s much better to be at home, minding your own business, and learn by phone or e-mail that you’ve just lost or even won.

Don’t get me wrong. Awards are great, and so are nominations. But let me briefly return to the subject of bad reviews. As I mentioned last week (I think it was), I have been blessed with many good and some even great reviews. Even at this late date, the occasional bad one stings. Rarely – actually very rarely – something is pointed out by a reviewer that resonates with me and improves my writing by pointing out a weakness I can work on.

Generally, however, a bad review irritates me not because my feelings are hurt, but because it’s going to cost me sales. And a good review doesn’t make me feel good because it builds my ego, rather because I know there’s a pull quote in there I can use to promote that book in an ad, and/or that can appear on the dustjacket of my next book (or the interior opening pages of a paperback).

Which brings us back to Blue Christmas and the two competitions I entered here in Iowa. I love hearing that people like a film of mine, because it’s not just me being praised as a writer/director, but indicates my cast and crew are succeeding, and that is truly gratifying.

Yet ultimately it’s about how published, public praise can be utilized in promoting, in selling, the work. What we truly got out of the Iowa Motion Picture Awards (in addition to some nifty physical awards) was the right to affix Laurel wreaths bragging about our film on posters and on physical media. That is what we were after.

And we got it.

* * *

Here is a great piece on The Ten Best Mob Movies (That Aren’t the Godfather). Road to Perdition is number two! (Of course The Untouchables is number one, a great movie with a not-great Mamet script…I like Mamet almost as much as I like James Elroy!).

Finally, here is a link to variant versions of the True Noir proof-of-concept audio.

M.A.C.

True Noir, Dick Tracy and King Kong

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024

The crowd-funding campaign for True Noir: the Nathan Heller Casebooks at KickStarter is set to go live on May 1. I have delivered the first of ten-episode scripts (the production is based on my novel True Detective) and everyone seems pleased. Director Robert Meyer Burnett has started casting. Todd Stashwick of Star Trek: Picard and the 12 Monkeys TV series has been onboard to play Nate Heller for a while now, and in fact you can hear the 12-minute sample starring him – our “proof of concept” – as Nate right now. Right here:

Longtime readers of the Heller saga will recognize this as the beginning of Stolen Away, but that was just chosen as a way to intro newcomers to Heller and to give director Rob Burnett a chance to get the concept on its feet. We’re starting with True Detective, the first novel of course. In addition to Todd, several other notable actors have signed on, including a favorite of mine, Jeffrey Combs of the Re-Animator movies, as Mayor Anton Cermak. The image we’re sharing here is still in progress but you should get a kick out of it.

Jeffrey Combs as Mayor Anton Cermak in True Noir

I am about to dive into the remaining nine scripts (each episode should be in the 35 – 40 minute range) and this is now my current major project. I have a very busy remainder of the year ahead: the last scheduled Mike Hammer novel (Baby, It’s Murder), another Antiques novel (we have just signed to do two more!), and what looks to be the final Heller.

This past week was a busy one. Work on preparing the materials for the VCI/MVD release of Blue Christmas continued, with producer Chad Bishop in the lead. I recorded three (!) Blu-ray commentaries – Chad and I did the Blue Christmas commentary (and he did a great job), and for VCI I recorded commentaries for two mid-‘40s RKO Dick Tracy movies: Dick Tracy Vs. Cueball and Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome. These are for an upcoming Blu-ray release of the four RKO features, a boxed set that looks to be a jam-packed affair with multiple commentaries and much more.

I had done commentaries for the other two Tracy films (Dick Tracy and Dick Tracy’s Dilemma) in 1999 for the late Cary Roan, and these are included. Now, a quarter of a century later, I found myself completing the quartet of B movies for Robert Blair at VCI. I’ve always been fond of these films, though the sometimes lauded Gruesome is by far my least favorite, but did not expect to revisit them ever again.

As I have expressed here on occasion, my bitterness over being essentially fired from Dick Tracy – the strip that I had, in my estimation and that of others, saved from cancellation – had been deep and abiding until I was called upon by editor Dean Mullaney (who had first published Ms. Tree) to put on my Big Boy pants (so to speak) and write introductions for the IDW volumes that would collect the complete Chester Gould. I took on that task, spanning a number of years, and reminded myself how much I liked the strip and basically came to terms with the firing that frankly opened the door on much else good that has happened for me. Probably no Road to Perdition, for example, had I still been on Dick Tracy.

This is not to say I don’t retain some bitterness. I was told by a reliable source that the Joe Staton and Mike Curtis team (who’d been approached to take the strip over after Dick Locher’s passing) asked why the Trib wasn’t returning to me. The editor there (a newer one I had never met) reportedly said, “Why would we make the same mistake twice?”

Nonetheless, revisiting Tracy in both the IDW volumes (a long-running series now completed) and again last week by way of those four fun RKO B-features was indeed like Old Home Week. Tracy was my childhood introduction to crime fiction (and comics), and the first big break of my career.

Speaking of Road to Perdition, I was pleased to see the movie version again turning up with some very impressive neighbors — number 17 on Ranker’s list of The 90 Best Mafia Movies Of All Time.

By the way, when I recorded the two Tracy commentaries I did so with my longtime collaborator Phil Dingeldein at my side. Phil is the Director of Photography on most of what I’ve done in the world of indie filmmaking starting with Mommy (1994) and continuing through this year’s Blue Christmas. Between the two recording sessions for the pair of Tracy movies, Phil and I took lunch and discussed the revision I did recently of my script for a proposed film of Road to Purgatory, my prose sequel to Perdition. It’s a low-budget version (not “low” in my usual scrounging sense, but the Hollywood sense) designed for me to be able to direct myself.

That, frankly, is part of why I undertook doing Blue Christmas and am preparing another feature to shoot late this summer – I want to see if the Old Boy still has it in him. And I’m not referring to Phil.

Road to Purgatory has been the dream project for a long, long time. We’ll see if a dream is all it is.

* * *

For several years now I have spent Saturday afternoons with my grandson Sam, watching movies. We began with animation, including classic Warner Bros and the Fleischer Popeye and Superman cartoons. After that it was 3-D Blu-rays that were mostly CGI – Pixar and others – with occasional live action like the Spy Kids movies (some of which are also 3-D – my obsolete 3-D screen got a workout).

In recent months we’ve delved into comedies, in particularly the Pink Panther movies (skipping the first two) and The Great Race, the latter being more of writer/director Blake Edwards at his comic best. I’ve been edging up on some things that I loved as a kid, and Sam’s father Nate also loved (though not Lone Wolf and Cub yet – Sam is just eight!) (of course so was Nate at the time).

So this week we watched the 1933 King Kong. Barb had warned Sam that the first half hour or so was pretty boring, a lot of it on the ship sailing to the island with Skull Mountain. But Sam never wavered. He wanted to see the whole thing. When Kong arrived in all his gorilla glory, I explained stop motion to Sam – that Kong was mostly a puppet recorded incrementally, and that also a giant head and hand had been used. He did not get frightened but he was into it.

At the end I searched YouTube and found a colorized clip of the fight between Kong and the T-Rex. Sam told me to make sure I stayed with it till we saw Kong flapping the defeated dead T-Rex’s jaw, which was his favorite part (mine too).

Then Sam announced that he liked the black-and-white version better.

There is hope for the world.

M.A.C.