How to make cereal milk.

[Photo Credit: ptitchef]

Yeah, let’s keep thing scary. More from Francis Bacon.

Yeah, Candy Corn. I don’t get it. It’s not the worst thing you could get for Halloween, that’d be a box of raisins I figure. But it’s nothing that makes me happy. So? What’s your ideal Halloween candy treat?

Mommy, what’s a gravedigger?

Vanishing Act

By John Schulian

In my show business alphabet, the scarlet letter will always be “s” for syndication. The instant I started wearing it, the network and cable people doing high-end dramas treated me like I was descended from intellectual pygmies who eat rabid bats and worship Soupy Sales. Only the young and promising receive special dispensation for working on a syndicated show to get a foot in Hollywood’s door. But I was 51 when I crawled away from “Xena” and “Hercules,” old enough to have known better. I would have had to be a miracle worker to avoid being branded as a junk peddler and cast into darkness. Alas, I was fresh out of miracles.

My new status hit me like a pie in the face on my next gig, an appallingly uninspired private eye show called “Lawless.” The title had absolutely nothing to do with Lucy, though I couldn’t help wishing she were around to give our leading man lessons in how to roll with the flow instead of turning to stone whenever the camera was on him. Brian Bosworth was a washed-up football star who realized how badly he wanted to act when Bo Jackson trampled him on national TV. The Boz got his chance in a series of cheap action movies that proved he wasn’t any better at it than he was at tackling. But that didn’t stop the brain trust at Fox TV from handing him “Lawless.” The thinking seemed to be that if enough helicopters landed in Lawlesss’s mother’s backyard simultaneously, we’d have a hit.

I found myself in the trenches with Frank Lupo, who had created or co-created something like 16 series, and Richard Christian Matheson, who had scored big in TV and was now devoting most of his time to writing novels and screenplays. While the network dithered about choppers and the proper sidekick for Bosworth, our biggest decision every day was where to eat lunch. The rest of the time, we cashed fat paychecks, complained about our offices in a converted Culver City warehouse, and listened to Lupo tell stories. My favorite was about Robert Blake, in his “Baretta” days, introducing himself to this son of a Brooklyn pizza maker by saying, “I’m crazy, you know.”

On Friday nights, gang kids would gather in the shadows of our dead-end street to drink and howl at the moon while we scampered for our respective Mercedes. That was as close to the real world as we came, unless you want to consider the fate of “Lawless” itself. Fox didn’t get its desired number of helicopters and we were left to bang out scripts in a white heat. Predictably, the show was cancelled after one episode. The only reason “Lawless” lasted that long was because the network didn’t have anything to replace it at the half-hour.

Lew Jenkins

From that point forward, I could see the last of the sand running through my hourglass. I tried to buy myself more time by writing screenplays, one of them based on W.C. Heinz’s unforgettable magazine story about Lew Jenkins, a go-to-hell prizefighter from Texas who became a war hero in Korea. The Jenkins script got me a flurry of meetings and, for a minute or two, made me the poster boy for the Creative Artists Agency’s in-house campaign to have its TV writers cross over to movies. Unfortunately my timing was dreadful. “Cinderella Man” was already in the works, and so was a Meg Ryan movie about a real-life female fight manager. I wanted to tell the people who were using those projects as a reason to say no to me that Jenkins’ story was better than either of them. But I kept my mouth shut, and when movie people asked if I had any other ideas, I always mentioned Gram Parsons, who married classic country music to a rock-and-roll sensibility and died of hard living way too young. I didn’t get anywhere with that one, either. Johnny Knoxville did. Need I say more?

Eventually I did what most every frustrated screenwriter does. I changed agents. Why not? I’d changed agents, and agencies, even when I wasn’t frustrated. I’d changed them because one agent was a creep who sexually harassed his female assistants. And because my instincts told me another was a bad fit for me. And because a woman who represented me left United Talent for CAA after she became a target for an abrasive, emotionally damaged colleague she had made the mistake of dating.

When I talked myself into believing she had lost sight of whatever it was I did best, I jumped again, to Paul Haas, at ICM. It was the worst move I ever made professionally. When I think of him now, I’m reminded of Murray Kempton’s analysis of Bill Clinton: “too smart by half.” Haas wasn’t book smart, though; he was Hollywood smart, slick and self-absorbed, almost feral in his quest to get to the top of the meat pile. Not unusual qualities in an agent, but I failed to see the warning sign that said “by half” until he told me to meet with the producers of a show about a fat cop who was a martial arts wizard. It was exactly the kind of claptrap I wanted to get away from, so I refused. Then the producers of another show about a fat cop said they didn’t want to meet with me because I’d done “Xena” and “Hercules.” They robbed me of the chance to say no to them first, the bastards.

Far worse, however, was that Haas soon lost interest in me. He had bigger fish to fry, more important clients who could make him more money, and a more prestigious place at the table to claim for his own. The only attention I got from him bordered on condescension. When I wrote pieces for GQ and Sports Illustrated to maintain my sanity, he congratulated me on “reinventing” myself, as if I’d never told him that I was a newspaper and magazine guy at heart. That wasn’t the only thing he didn’t pay attention to. There was also my Lew Jenkins screenplay, which he handed off to two of ICM’s young sharks. Their names were Todd and Danny, and on those rare occasions when I look at the trade papers now, I see they’ve prospered. But when they were supposed to be championing my cause, I never heard from them. After a year of being ignored, I complained to Haas and quickly got a call from Todd. Or Danny.

“That was a great script,” whichever one I was talking to said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Remind me what it was about, would you?”

I hung up. If it hadn’t, I would have told Todd – or Danny – I had a new screenplay that I had written specifically for the purpose of sticking up his ass. Even now I have moments when I fantasize about seeing one of them in some fancy-schmancy restaurant and decking him. Not so much as a “Remember me?” Just lights out. But I’m too old for such nonsense and too weary to get exercised over the everyday cruelties that pass for standard business practices in Hollywood. Maybe I was gassed back then too and just wouldn’t admit it. How else to explain the fact that I never fired Haas no matter how useless he was?

It took an old friend from “Midnight Caller,” Stephen Zito, to open the door for me at “JAG.” The show was more fun than I expected it to be with one exception: its creator and executive producer, Don Bellisario. With a foul-smelling cigar smoldering in his mouth, a disdain for any idea that wasn’t his, and a tin ear for dialogue, Bellisario leeched all the joy out of writing. He was a bully and a lout and a war lover who’d never been to war. You’d have to go a long way to find anyone in TV more despised. I’m surprised I lasted 25 episodes. Not that things improved when Haas steered me to “Outer Limits” and I promptly shot myself in the foot by telling an executive producer with a lube-job haircut that a story he embraced was no story at all. That would have been my last stand if David Israel hadn’t brought me aboard as his right-hand man on “Tremors.” It had monsters, oddball humor, and weird characters in a forgotten desert town. Hits have been made of less. But we were saddled with the two amiably passive-aggressive guys who wrote the movies on which “Tremors” was based, and they refused to adapt to the realities of TV. They just made the same mistakes over and over until they looked up one day and the show was off the air.

I was as far as I could be from those heady times when Steven Bochco invited me to come out and try my hand at writing scripts. Where once the TV business had given me with hope, I now felt diminished. I found myself remembering the long-in-tooth writers who had come in to pitch their tired episode ideas on “Miami Vice” and “Midnight Caller,” and how I had promised myself I wouldn’t end up the way they had. If I insisted on squeezing the last drop of juice from the orange, that was exactly who I’d be – short on pride and dignity, just a beggar with a nice car. It felt as though there were less of me every time I turned around. I was in a bad sci-fi movie and I was slowly vanishing.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

Aliens (1986)

In 1979, director Ridley Scott brought us “Alien“, a horror/sci-fi film revolving around the crew of a space freighter Nostromo battling a merciless extraterrestrial being wanting to use humans as “hosts”.  The alien being “attached” to the face of the victim, and implanted its egg down the victim’s throat.  The egg would grow and eventually a new “baby alien” would announce its presence by bursting through the victim’s chest.  Oh, and the blood of these aliens appears to be a highly corrosive acid, so please don’t let any of it get on you.

The film provided a rarity … a female lead character (Ellen Ripley, portrayed by a then-barely known Sigourney Weaver) that didn’t launch into a “Perils of Pauline” dialogue during a crisis.  The movie was an unexpected hit.  Seven years later, James Cameron, fresh off his massive hit “The Terminator,”  gave us “Aliens”.  Rarely has a sequel measured up to its predecessor, let alone surpassed it.

As the film opens Ripley, (the only human survivor from the destroyed Nostromo of the original film) is rescued and revived after drifting for years in a space shuttle while in a form of “hypersleep”.  Her employers, a corporation named Weyland-Yutani, do not believe her tale of the “alien” encounter as no physical evidence of the creature survived the destruction of the Nostromo.   She has her space flight license suspended as a result of this, and learns that LV-426, the planet where her crew first encountered the Alien eggs, is now home to a terraforming colony.

Ripley is later visited by an employee of Weyland-Yutani, Carter Burke (Paul Reiser, in a rare dramatic turn)  and Lieutenant Gorman (William Hope) of the Colonial Marines, who inform her that contact has been lost with the colony on LV-426. The company decides to dispatch Burke and a unit of marines to investigate.  Ripley is given the chance to restore her flight status and have her work contract picked up if she will accompany them as a consultant. Naturally shell-shocked by her previous encounter with the Alien, Ripley initially refuses to join, but finally accepts as she realizes she can face her post-traumatic fears. Aboard the warship Sulaco she is introduced to the Colonial Marines, including Sergeant Apone (Al Matthews, who it turns out actually was a Marine for six years), Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn, working with Cameron again after starring in “The Terminator”), Privates Vasquez (the wonderful chameleon of an actress Jenette Goldstein) and Hudson (Bill Paxton, another Cameron holdover from “The Terminator”), and the android Bishop (Lance Henriksen, and yes, he appeared in “The Terminator” as well).

The Marines are dropped onto the surface of the planet and find the colony seemingly deserted.  The gungho troops, pumped up by Sergeant Apone but led by the soon-to-be-revealed very inexperienced and over-his-head Gorman, have never encountered anything like this.  Their entrance into the colony’s main building is at first executed with typical military precision, but when things start to turn against them, and members are picked off one-by-one by Aliens, Gorman freezes, and Ripley takes over.

A little while later, two living Alien creatures (having hatched from the eggs that had been inside their human hosts) are found in containment tanks in the medical lab, and the only colonist found is a traumatized young girl nicknamed Newt (Carrie Henn).  Henn, no more than eight or nine when the movie was shot, gives a wonderfully nuanced performance.  It is an exquisite look of utter blankness and shock upon her face as she is discovered, initially resists being “captured” by the Marines, and finally allows Ripley to hold her and calm her down.  (Interestingly, this is Henn’s only acting credit in her life . . . she grew up to be a schoolteacher).

Flashing forward a bit, Ripley discovers that Burke hopes to return Alien specimens to the company laboratories where he can profit from their use as biological weapons. She threatens to expose him, but Bishop soon informs the group of a greater threat: the planet’s energy processing station has become unstable and will soon detonate with a catastrophic impact. Now it becomes a race not to save any survivors on the planet, but to just get off the planet.

Ripley, with her maternal instinct dial now at “full”, and Newt fall asleep in the medical laboratory, awakening to find themselves locked in the room with the two facehuggers, which have been released from their tanks. Ripley alerts the marines, who rescue them and kill the creatures. Ripley accuses Burke of attempting to smuggle implanted Alien embryos past Earth’s quarantine inside her and Newt, and of planning to kill the rest of the marines in hypersleep during the return trip. The electricity is suddenly cut off and numerous Aliens attack through the ceiling. An extended and tense battle scene ensues, with Hudson, Burke, Gorman, and Vasquez eventually all killed and Newt captured by the Aliens.

Ripley and an injured Hicks reach Bishop and a rescue dropship, but mama Ripley refuses to leave Newt behind as the countdown to planet extinction nears.  She locates Newt, and torches the Alien queen’s hive of eggs, enraging the queen.  In the film’s climactic scene, we see Ripley’s transformation from simple “employee” to “soldier”. She dons an “exosuit” normally used for loading heavy cargo, and utters to the Alien queen the catchphrase of the movie, summarizing her maternal instincts and pissed-off attitude in six simple words.

“Get away from her you bitch!”

Grab your popcorn, settle on your couch, and hold onto a pillow … tight.   You are in for one scary adrenaline-fueled ride.

And you can put that on my momma, exclamation point, quotation, comma.

[Photo Credit: ATrak]

Left panel “Three Studies for Self-Portrait,” By Francis Bacon (1974)

If you’ve never been to this spot, well, what the hell are you waiting for?

Sasha Frere-Jones has a nice piece about the new Tom Waits record this week in The New Yorker:

“If you break open a song, you’ll find the eggs of other songs,” he told me. “Misunderstandings are really kind of an epidemic and acceptable. I think it’s about one thing, but someone else will say, ‘That song is kind of a rhino in hot pants on a burnt rocking horse with a lariat shouting, “Repent, repent!” ’ I think that’s great.”

…In the past thirty years, Waits, as a songwriter, has tried to retain a sense of craft while finding musical settings that take his compositions out of some nostalgic tar pit. On “Bad as Me,” he sounds like someone who knows the history of pop and uses only the bits he needs to make the hybrid creature that will carry him to safety. “I’m always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time,” he told me. “The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you’re drowning, and it’s there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.”

I love the part about sounds changing their meaning. Wonderful.

Saturday night, 9 PM reservations for four. Two in our group celebrating an anniversary, one of them pregnant. We show up a little early hoping a table is ready. “We’re running on schedule,” says the sleek hostess with dark hair so shiny we see our reflections.

We try the bar, but it’s just a trough at this point, crowded with diners who didn’t have reservations. I love the idea of being able to eat at the bar, but what about people who need to use it as a bar? I guess they need two bars. Our pregnant friend is a trooper but I see her look longingly at the seats.

Several tables look like they are going to leave at any moment, but then they never do. Nine PM approaches and the hostess walks over and assures us that we are going to be seated shortly. “In their laps?” I thought to ask but kept it to myself. Our pregnant friend is shifting weight from one foot to the other and smiling through it all. I learned that dance from my bad knees and bad back.

Nine fourteen. Now everybody is looking at me. Tension is filling our tight space in the walkway between the bar and the tables we long to occupy. I made the reservation, I should be the one to complain. But I’m staring at the hostess the whole time. She’s keeping track of us with an appropriate level of concern. Maybe it’s a relic of my bachelor days, but I can tell when someone is paying attention to me.

A terrible minute passes where my best friend, his pregnant wife and my wife all stare me down trying to get me to act on our growing unrest. But I wait. And yes, the manager gets a whisper from the hostess and he’s on his way.

“I’m so sorry about the wait. I thank you for your patience,” he says. “Can I help in any way?” I ask if he has an extra seat available for our pregnant friend. He does. Our friend sits and relaxes for the first time since we got there. “Now we can wait forever.”

We wait for fifteen more minutes, not exactly forever, and receive one more visit from another contrite manager. We finally sit down and enjoy a lovely meal. And when we talk about the wait, which we only do for about thirty seconds, we talk about how well they handled it and how they defused the tension.

Privately, I think they could have found that chair the second we walked in, but I can also chalk that up to not asking for it sooner. I don’t mention it though, because I don’t want to spoil the good mood.

Man Ray

Here’s another favorite from our man with the new CD:

Dig this amazingness from Kottke, a most dope site.

History of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow from SansGil—Gil Cocker on Vimeo.

And then, there’s this:

Class is in session.

There is a wonderful profile of our man Pete Dexter by Ellis E. Conklin in today’s Villiage Voice:

Of his writing regimen, Dexter says: “It’s work. You’re pulling stuff out, like I did with Spooner, that doesn’t want to come out. The only time I really enjoyed the process was writing Spooner. I didn’t want it to end.”

For Dexter, the most essential quality a novelist must possess is the ability to entertain his or her readers. “There’s nothing more important than that.”

It’s a good mystery that most entertains Dexter. In Philly, Dexter became a regular at the Whodunit bookstore, where he first met Tex Cobb. He likes Mike Connelly’s stuff (“He knows what’s he’s doing”), and Scott Turow (“He always aims high. You can see him really trying”), and just about anything by Elmore Leonard.

Among more traditional novelists, Dexter admires Padgett Powell, Thomas McGuane, Tom Wolfe, and Jim Harrison. But it is friend and author Richard Russo (Nobody’s Fool, Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Straight Man, Empire Falls) who is Dexter’s absolute favorite.

“I got a call from The New York Times some time back, asking me what the best novel of the last, I forget, 25 or 50 years was,” Dexter recalls. “And I told him it was Straight Man,” Russo’s poignant 1997 novel about a wisecracking professor trying to navigate his way through a highly dysfunctional English department at a central Pennsylvania university.

Dexter’s respect for Russo is mutual. In an e-mail, Russo writes: “Pete Dexter has always been a writer after my own heart: sly, yet deeply honest, full of twisted wit and spirit. He wears both his prodigious talent and knowledge of the human heart ever so lightly, as if they’re hardly worth mentioning, a mere parlor trick, and not the stuff of which great art is made.”

Dexter has this wonderful ability to get to the heart of something without hitting directly on the head. He creeps up on the outside, or up from beneath, in a way that is surprising. He’s a huge talent but he doesn’t let his talent that get the better of him. His prose is restrained without being forced. And he doesn’t coast. Writing is not easy for him, every sentence, every word, is worked over until it’s right. Steve Lopez, the accomplished columnist, said that Dexter is “the guy who makes you want to give it up, sell shoes, take up heavy drinking, or just shoot yourself.” And that’s true. But he also makes me want to try harder.

“He’s some kind of genius,” Richard Ben Cramer told me recently. “He’s just ferocious.”

“The Gulf Stream,” By Winslow Homer (1899)

I remember looking at this picture as a boy. I wondered how the man on the boat could appear calm, sharks around him, a storm in the distance. The picture, which is part of the permanent collection at the MET, didn’t make me anxious so much as me aware that death is unavoidable. I tried to think what I would do in that situation. And I admired the resolve or the acceptance of the man on the boat.

More music from Eric the Great.

Over at the Daily Beast check out this list of the 20 unhealthiest cereals. Some might surprise you.

Then again, some of the most delicious crap, won’t.

Hercules Unchained

By John Schulian

While “Xena” began to kick out residual checks, I plunged back into the hellhole that was “Hercules.” My foremost problem was finding road-tested veterans and bright young writers to take a shot at a freelance script. They wrinkled their noses at the thought. A syndicated show? A cartoon with human beings? Better they should starve and wait for “NYPD Blue” to call.

The glossiest freelancer we got in my tenure was Melissa Rosenberg, who now writes the “Twilight” movies and delivered a splendid script. Most of the time, however, I was dealing with freelancers who couldn’t write or were connected to someone whose ass Rob Tapert was kissing. I remember telling the worst of them that there were only two words in his script I ever wanted to see again, and then taking a call from his network executive wife, who told me she thought he’d really knocked the assignment out of the park.

Things started to turn when I brought in Bob Bielak, whose credits included “Tour of Duty” and “In the Heat of the Night,” to freelance three scripts at the end of the first season. He came through in a big way, which convinced Tapert to give the gate to our season one writing staff, the useless Brit and the petulant kids. So it was that Bielak and I marched into the second season as the smallest staff in television. Reinforcements never showed up.

I wish I’d had the brains and courage to give assignments to the lean and hungry newcomers Tapert and Sam Raimi had lured into non-writing jobs with their horror-movie cred. God knows the kids have gone on to do great things. David Eick was one of the masterminds on “Battlestar Galactica.” Liz Friedman, who worked herself into an ulcer on “Hercules” and “Xena,” survived to become a highly regarded writer-producer on “House.” And then there was Alex Kurtzman, who was a go-fer the last season I worked on “Hercules,” a great kid who, like Eick, was always asking questions about writing. He and his partner, Roberto Orci, now write zillion-dollar action movies like “Transformers” and they’ve got a hit TV series too, “Fringes.” Liz wound up writing for “Xena” and Alex and Bob were the last to run the “Hercules” writing staff, but I was gone by then, done in by the ceaseless in-house battles that left me increasingly surly.

The lone moment of grace I can recall from that period occurred as I was driving to work on Ventura Boulevard. I pulled up next to a city bus that was stopped for a light, and there on its side was a large print ad for “Hercules” and another for “Xena.” They were my babies, just like they were Rob Tapert’s and Lucy Lawless’s and Kevin Sorbo’s. I’m not sure I ever felt prouder of those shows than I did then.

Fifteen minutes later I was back in the soup, dealing with directors who promised to do one thing when I met them at Universal and went native once they got to New Zealand. Tapert was no use whatsoever in reining them in. The actors were running amok, too, especially Hercules himself. Sorbo was jealous of Lucy’s instant success as Xena, and he wanted us to change the tone of “Hercules,” make it darker, quirkier, more violent, the way “Xena” was. Apparently wiping out a horde of mercenaries in loincloths wasn’t enough for him.

Sorbo thought he was going to be the next Harrison Ford, when it was a far safer bet that in 10 years he’d be the answer to a trivia question. But that is not to say that I didn’t appreciate what he did for the show. He was the perfect Hercules, as far as I was concerned, and I told anyone who would listen that very thing. But insecurity runs through actors like a fever, and Sorbo had it bad. I left cooling him out to Tapert, who never seemed to want me to have any kind of relationship with our star. That was fine with me. I had words to put on paper. But then Sorbo tried to make more of himself by running down the quality of the scripts in an interview with Newsday. Believe me, I knew they weren’t going to make anyone forget Shakespeare or Sam Peckinpah, but they were as good as you were going to find on a syndicated action show. When I wrote a letter to tell Sorbo as much, I challenged him to be a pro and do his job. If he didn’t want to do that, he could go to Tapert and Raimi and get me fired. And if that still wasn’t good enough for him, we could go out in the parking lot the next time he was in the States and he could try to kick my ass.

Sorbo was on the phone minutes after my assistant faxed him the letter. He said he’d been misquoted. Bullshit. You don’t give an excuse like that to someone who was in newspapers for 16 years. Then he said he didn’t want to fight. And he certainly wasn’t going to get me fired. Oh, no, Kevin Sorbo swore, he wasn’t that kind of a guy. Of course, all I heard after that was how Sorbo’s agent was saying he wouldn’t sign a new contact unless I was gone.

It took him six months, maybe more, but he got me. After 48 episodes of “Hercules,” 15 of which I wrote and another 25 or so that I re-wrote, I packed my bags and headed for the door. Tapert, after all the betrayals and backstabbing, told me it was the worst day in the life of the series. But had he stood up to Sorbo and his agent? No. Had he gone to the Universal brass and said I deserved a deal that would give me an office and a steady paycheck while I spent a year or two writing pilots? No. Had my agent advanced that argument, when such a deal was standard for someone who had delivered the goods the way I had? No. I’d helped put Universal in a position to make millions upon millions of dollars, but there were none of the traditional parting gifts for me.

Years later, David Eick told me how he and Liz Friedman had looked at each other after I’d been gone long enough for them to get a handle on what had happened. “We said, ‘John really got screwed.’”

Amen.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.