I Was an A-List Writer of B-List Productions

A writer of made-for-TV movies reflects on his middling successes and near-misses from a career of steady but not spectacular work in Hollywood:

“On occasion during my 30-year screenwriting career, the amount on these checks has been life-changing, enough money to buy a car or temporarily pay off our credit cards. But I don’t really expect to see that kind of windfall again. I haven’t had a movie made in eight years, and my current career status is somewhere between emeritus and irrelevant. Still, the check that came yesterday was a nice surprise. The total was $2,588.95. Included with the check was an itemized list of movies for which I had received sole or shared screenwriting credit and that had been shown again and again around the world. The biggest amounts were for Cleopatra ($716.41), a lavish and maybe-just-a-little-bit-cheesy ABC miniseries, and for King of Texas ($854.30), a Western retelling of King Lear with Patrick Stewart and Marcia Gay Harden that had originally aired on TNT. A half-dozen other movies were on the list. They included a few boilerplate TV movies like In The Line of Duty: Blaze of Glory (56 cents), an ‘inspired by a true story’ bank heist movie starring those then-titans of the small screen Bruce Campbell and Lori Loughlin; a steamy Lifetime murder mystery called Widow on the Hill ($341.60), which remains the only thing I’ve ever written that my mother implied she would just as soon I hadn’t; and The Colt ($122.53), a nicely rendered little Civil War movie that aired on the Hallmark Channel that I had adapted from a seven-page short story by Mikhail Sholokov. The Guild statement provided scant information about which parts of the world embraced these movies most fervently, but I doubt that I’m far off the mark in imagining an unwatched TV screen in the back of a kebab stand in Kota Kinabalu.”

Source: Slate
Published: Jul 11, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,455 words)

You Are Very Cold, and This Feels Like an Adventure

A writer adopts the Choose Your Own Adventure book format to write a story about a disastrous love affair:

“The answer, of course, is that you should dump Anne before it’s too late. But the absurd options the book gives ‘you’— later ‘choices’ include dueling with an Ant-Warrior, or attacking the Evil Power Master—simply highlight the completely screwed-up perspective of the co-dependent. When I was stuck in one of those terrible relationships, and friends told me it was time to break it off, I looked at them as if they were crazy—as if the options they were offering had so little to do with my actual situation they were functionally useless.”

Author: Dan Kois
Source: Slate
Published: May 5, 2012
Length: 6 minutes (1,579 words)

The Crisis in American Walking

How did pedestrians become an endangered species in the United States—and why is the word “pedestrian” wrong anyway? First in a four-part series:

“A few years ago, at a highway safety conference in Savannah, Ga., I drifted into a conference room where a sign told me a ‘Pedestrian Safety’ panel was being held.

“The speaker was Michael Ronkin, a French-born, Swiss-raised, Oregon-based transportation planner whose firm, as his website notes, ‘specializes in creating walkable and bikeable streets.’ Ronkin began with a simple observation that has stayed with me since. Taking stock of the event—one of the few focused on walking, which gets scant attention at traffic safety conferences—he wondered about that inescapable word: pedestrian. If we were to find ourselves out hiking on a forest trail and spied someone approaching at a distance, he wanted to know, would we think to ourselves, ‘Here comes a pedestrian’?”

Source: Slate
Published: Apr 10, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,618 words)

A Death in Yellowstone

What happens when a grizzly bear kills a human being in Yellowstone National Park? An examination of a special criminal justice system designed to protect endangered bears, while giving leeway to euthanize bears that kill humans in ways that are deemed “unnatural”:

“It’s a squirrely notion, that a team of government biologists might be able to figure out why a bear does the things it does, or whether any bear behavior could truly be described as ‘unnatural.’ But whatever its shortcomings, the grizzly justice system has been mostly successful over the years since it was introduced, and is reasonably popular. People seem to like the fact that a female bear can kill someone while protecting her cubs and be acquitted of the crime. According to a poll conducted by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department in 2001, more than 70 percent of Wyoming residents believe that grizzly bears are a benefit to the state and are an important component of the Yellowstone ecosystem. They want grizzlies to have the benefit of the doubt.”

Source: Slate
Published: Apr 2, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,127 words)

Where’s _why?

Learning how to code, and searching for a legendary figure in the Ruby programming community who mysteriously disappeared:

“Hackety Hack solved the ‘Little Coder’s Predicament’: It was fun enough to engage a kid, and smart enough to teach her something to boot. But just a few months after launching it, to the astonishment of the community of Ruby programmers who treated him with something approaching messianic worship, _why vanished.

“On Aug. 19, 2009, his personal site stopped loading. He stopped answering email. A public repository of his code disappeared. His Twitter account—gone. Hackety Hack—gone. Dozens of other projects—gone.”

Source: Slate
Published: Mar 15, 2012
Length: 31 minutes (7,873 words)

I Watched Every Steven Soderbergh Movie

Twenty-three movies in 23 years suggests an already amazing, Woody Allen-like productivity. But Soderbergh has been even more prolific than that number indicates. During the first part of his career, development struggles and the learning curve of a new filmmaker put him on a two-year cycle. His debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, was released in 1989; Kafka, in 1991; King of the Hill, in 1993. But following the movie that blew up his old career and created a new one, Schizopolis—more on that later—Soderbergh’s been on a tear unmatched by any filmmaker I can think of. In the 13 years since 1998, he has directed 18 feature films. Oh, and one of them was a two-part, four-hour epic. Oh, and he directed every episode of a five-hour HBO series. Oh, and he also read like 20 books a month.

Author: Dan Kois
Source: Slate
Published: Sep 14, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,612 words)

I Watched Every Coen Brothers Movie. Here’s What I Learned

When I was 9 or 10, I watched Raising Arizona on VHS and thought it was one of the weirdest and funniest things I had ever seen. A frequently jailed stickup artist with surprisingly florid diction (Nicolas Cage) and his barren police officer wife (Holly Hunter) kidnap a loudmouth furniture magnate’s quintuplet and run into trouble with two escaped convicts and the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse. I didn’t get it, really, but I didn’t care: It was hilarious and strange, with amusingly quotable dialogue (“I’ll be taking these Huggies and, uh, whatever cash ya got”) and hummable music (the “Ode to Joy” on a banjo, yodeling) throughout. During my high-school years, I caught up with the rest of the Coens’ output and considered myself a fan; their best movie to that point, Fargo, came out just before I graduated and was the first I saw in a theater.

Source: Slate
Published: Aug 10, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,530 words)

How Gays Helped Make and Remake America

The American right presents homosexuality as something alien to the American experience—an intruder that inexplicably gate-crashed America in 1969 in the form of a rioting drag queen clutching a high heel in her fist as a weapon. The statements of Michele Bachman, Rick Santorum, or Mitt Romney insistently hint that the fag does not belong under the flag. But there’s something odd here. For people who talk incessantly about honoring American history, they have built a historical picture of their country that can only be sustained by scrubbing it clean of a significant part of the population, and everything they brought to the party (if not the Tea Party).

Source: Slate
Published: May 23, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,344 words)

I’ve Seen Every Woody Allen Movie. Here’s What I’ve Learned

Like Ian Fleming and P.G. Wodehouse, Woody Allen returns compulsively to the same creative ground. In Allen’s case, it’s ground trod by anxious, well-to-do white people, who swap partners and drop cultural references in an empty, godless universe. The extent of the similarities from one film to the next is remarkable. It’s not just that he recasts actors or that he revisits the themes of domestic boredom and cosmic insignificance. He reuses the same font, EF Windsor Light Condensed, for his titles and credits. He recycles character types: the neurotic Jewish New Yorker (the filmmaker’s spit and image), the adulterous intellectual, the hypochondriac intellectual. He recycles plot lines. He even recycles punch lines.

Source: Slate
Published: Mar 31, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,267 words)

The Unsung Hero of the Nuclear Age

I went ahead and dedicated my new book to Maj. Harold Hering because Maj. Hering sacrificed his military career to ask a Forbidden Question about launching nuclear missiles. A question that exposed the comforting illusions of the so called fail-safe system designed to prevent “unauthorized” nuclear missile launches. How can any missile crewman know that an order to twist his launch key in its slot and send a thermonuclear missile rocketing out of its silo—a nuke capable of killing millions of civilians—is lawful, legitimate, and comes from a sane president?

Source: Slate
Published: Feb 28, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,362 words)