tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30014344390785184682024-03-05T12:44:56.124-05:00BrilligThe Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.comBlogger644125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-59866074785946473512022-12-01T14:08:00.002-05:002022-12-01T14:28:15.447-05:00Joshua and the Query ManagerI decided to change my process for getting queries as I prepared for heading from 2022 into 2023. And here's an updated/revised version of my earlier blog post about querying.<div><br /></div><div><div>THE GUIDELINES:</div><div><br /></div><div>1. If you don’t follow the guidelines, your query will be deleted, unread and without a response.</div><div><br /></div><div>2. I'm now using Query Manager, a system that's generally been proven helpful to both agents and authors, and all queries should be submitted via https://querymanager.com/JoshuaBilmes.</div><div><br /></div><div>3. Once upon a time, I asked only for the query letter, but it's been a long time since queries were sent in #10 business envelopes with an SASE. At this point, I'm not longer accepting paper queries, and I'm asking you to send ten sample pages with your Query Manager query. This will help speed things along, since I can more easily give a "yes" or "no" on borderline queries where the pages themselves are serving as tie-breaker, and I'm less likely to ask for a full manuscript only to realize when I finally get around to reading it that I really maybe shouldn't've.</div><div><br /></div><div>4. The query letter should be brief. If you were to print it on old-fashioned paper - and I suggest you should as a test - it should fit onto a one page standard business letter without having to squeeze the font and font size to 9-point Tahoma.</div><div><br /></div><div>6. And while brief, the query should have relevant information on both yourself and your manuscript.</div><div><br /></div><div>In May 2016, I found this wonderful "Is Your Query Ready" <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ci0yzzyVEAE5X4U.jpg" target="_blank">diagram</a> via @davidrslayton on Twitter. Take a look before you hit "send" on your query.</div><div><br /></div><div>I want to talk a little more about relevance, starting with "relevant information about yourself." For a published writer, your credits are relevant. For other authors, it might be having a job or life experience of some sort that ties very directly to the book you have written. For authors without credits or credentials, it might be adding something that suggests your knowledge or familiarity with the genre or category you plan to write in. And when all else fails, tell us about where you grew up, where you went to school, but always something. Check out this <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/69332-trying-to-find-a-literary-agent-is-the-worst-thing-ever.html" target="_blank">article from Publishers Weekly</a> (I don't think it's behind paywall), about a writer finding an agent. Hate to give spoilers, but basically, the only agent who read the manuscript appears to be someone who thought he recognized the name as that of a high school classmate. If you think it's silly to start telling me where you grew up, where you went to school -- well, I can understand why; it does seem silly. But it's a lot less silly than writing a query letter that suggests there isn't a single interesting thing about the author.</div><div><br /></div><div>Relevant information about the manuscript: Avoid adjectives. You're not a third-party observer who's earned the right to say your manuscript is "romantic" or "thrilling" or "fast-paced" or any other adjective you might choose to apply to your own work. And remember it's a business letter, and not cover copy. </div><div><br /></div><div>Here’s what I want:</div><div><br /></div><div>I always like science fiction and fantasy, but there are also at least three other people at the agency who look at science fiction and fantasy. Will I look? Sure! But ask yourself if there’s some extra special reason that you want to direct the submission to me instead of one of my colleagues. I tend to shy away from the more literary part of the sf/fantasy spectrum, but I’d rather make the call here. If it looks intriguing, but not in line with my personal tastes, I may share with someone else in the office. And yes, I will look at something that has been turned down by someone else at JABberwocky, but have a really good reason before you do that.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the other hand, I also like good mysteries and thrillers, and there aren’t as many people here who share that interest. I’d love to see some great projects in these genres. People forget that I was working with Charlaine Harris for many years as a cozy mystery writer before Sookie Stackhouse hit it big, and the very first novel I ever sold was a mystery novel. I’m open to the full range of work in these categories.</div><div><br /></div><div>I want more non-fiction, and I've been selling more of it. Aki Peritz's Disruption came out in 2021 and was named a Year's Best title by both Kirkus and Christian Science Monitor. Film books by Sean O'Connell, Tres Dean, and Steve Kozak. Query Manager lists specific categories, but a few hints. I was a history major in college. I started reading Variety when I was in high school and have been fascinated by show business since forever. I see 100+ movies a year, and in 2021 when a lot of other things were shut down saw - all in movie theaters - 170. I read at least three newspapers a day, and I look at pretty much every page of every section, like not reading every single article, but there isn't much that's happening in the world that I'm not at some level interested in. All that said, most non-fiction requires credentials of some sort. </div><div><br /></div><div>The executive summary here: I want to see fiction in just the “core for me” genres of sf/fantasy and mystery/thrillers, and a few other categories detailed in Query Manager, but I mostly want to stick with what's gotten me through my first 35 years in publishing. Nonfiction, I’ll look a little more broadly.</div><div><br /></div><div>The process:</div><div><br /></div><div>It may take several weeks for me to get to the query in-box. I'm eager to be looking, but good windows of time for either myself or my assistant to delve into the query box come sporadically. I've always got manuscripts from current clients, some due to publishers that need to be read ASAP, and there's a lot of prioritization and triage to keep on top of it all.</div></div>The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-78262924492343002452022-03-27T19:12:00.033-04:002022-03-27T23:58:06.791-04:00Oscars Live Blog 2022<p>11:55 PM Poor Netflix. Poor, poor Netflix. It can put all the money it wants into movies that are like the Wonder Twins, movies which have the form of Oscar winners but which really aren’t. It can spend its riches and get award nominations aplenty. But then the actual voting begins, and more and more people come into the process, and then the hollowness of things starts to show. The Irishman isn’t Goodfellas. Roma isn’t The Prisoner of Azkaban. The Power of the Dog isn’t Unforgiven. And when the time comes for the awards to get announced, Netflix doesn’t have the top prize. Poor poor poor poor Netflix. But that said, Netflix did give us Tick Tick…Boom this year. Also, Netflix isn’t poor. But there’s a rich irony to having Apple TV+ get a Best Picture for CODA while Netflix is still waiting.</p><p>And as to the show, it’s an Oscar ceremony. It is what it is. Embrace what it is. Present the awards on the air, please. Don’t farm out production to Eon Productions, which is what happened according to the end credits, for Eon’s own James Bond movies, because that’s like the query letter where the author of a book describes their own book in the most glowing terms. Don’t make us squint to read the In Memoriam names in back of the band but do have some personal reminiscences. </p><p>Dune ended up with the most Oscar wins, as was predicted. It deserves them. CODA was nominated for three awards and won all three, which is impressive in its own right.</p><p>My personal wish - that someone at Apple is calling all the major movie chains right this second to get some screens to be showing CODA come Friday. This movie deserves to be seen in theatres by way more people than have been able.</p><p>Oh - a moment to see, with the two ASL interpreters during the CODA speech, one facing forward to the TV cameras and one facing to the cast and crew on stage. </p><p>11:42 PM three hours and forty two minutes later. And for this they added another hour of unaired ceremony to present eight awards. </p><p>11:17 PM I spoke about the Best Actor race in my pre-show comments. I’m happy for Will Smith, it’s a great performance. It’s an imperfect movie, but it’s a great performance. But - if you’re in my business, what Andrew Garfield does in Tick Tick…Boom is speak to all of us - to all the authors I’ve been blessed to work with who want to create art and have help sharing it. 11:06 PM Another glimpse of Kodi Smit-McPhee in his great tux as the Pulp Fiction people come on to the stage!</p><p>11:08 PM I was happy with the win for Best Song. Part of it is just that I really liked the song. It’s kind of short. It isn’t used as much as a recurring motif in the movie as some other Bond songs; You Only Live Twice or All Time High, as examples, are all over their respective movies. Maybe the biggest part of it is that Billie Eilish is one of the better of my pandemic memories. I can’t see 170 movies in an ordinary year. Like, I just can’t. There are so many other things to do. But not in 2021. And the documentary about Billie Eillish is one of the movies that I got to in 2021 that I probably would have skipped past in a normal year because I’m not in to Billie Eilish. But last year, I was on the train to White Plains to learn about Billie. And there’s something wonderful about the story of her and her brother. And there’s something wonderful about their joy and happiness winning this Oscar. This moment got to me.</p><p>10:57 PM Billie and Finneas seem happy! The betting money was on the Encanto song, but I liked this one best.</p><p>11:02 PM took a few notes on the people in the In Memoriam section. These are some of the ones whose involvement in particular films has a special resonance for my own personal highlight reel.</p><p>Leslie Bricusse - two James Bond themes including the all time high of You Only Live Twice, and Blake Edwards/Julie Andrew’s classic Victor Victoria.</p><p>Two Supermen. Director Richard Donner, and Otis’ own Ned Beatty. And each did so much more than that, but Superman: The Movie will forever be one of the best superhero movies ever made, and it’s much more than that. In fact, while we might debate forever which superhero movie is best, I think Superman: The Movie will forever be the most quoted. Ten Dollars, Two Credit Cards, a Hairbrush, and a Lipstick.</p><p>Douglas Trumbull worked on so many classic sf movies. He created the landscape of the imagination for science fiction fans, and the landscapes he created will survive pretty much forever. And Alan Ladd, Jr. was one of the producers of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. </p><p>You don’t know Irwin Young, but he headed up a film processing lab in New York, and if he believed in a young filmmaker he’d give them a break on some of their film and processing, which was a big expense, and without which some great movies might not have had the money to get made. A pay it forward person hidden in the shadows.</p><p>William Hurt. Seeing Altered States with Hurt in December 1980 was one of the seminal moments in my becoming such a big film fan. It was the first movie I ever saw at the Astor Plaza, the first movie I saw in 70mm 6-track Dolby that wasn’t a science fiction epic, where the brilliance of the use of sound heard on a really great sound system in a theatre with a really big screen kind of blew me away. </p><p>10:47 PM the accompaniments to the memoriam list, like having Bill Murray talk about Ivan Reitman - something I’d happily see more of. Really nice touch.</p><p>10:40 PM I was seven when my parents took me to see The Godfather - took the whole family to see Theh Godfather. Horse’s head and toll booth scene and all. I was seven. It was in upstate New York on the way back from visiting relatives who lived even further upstate.</p><p>10:38 PM: The Godfather tribute was so much better than the one to James Bond, introduced by an actual film person and leading into actual film people. Great to see de Niro, Coppola and Pacino on stage together for a few minutes.</p><p>10:36 PM: Did I just spot a shot of Anthony Hopkins in the audience? Last year’s MIA actor winner Anthony Hopkins? </p><p>10:31 PM A beautiful moment watching Questlove’s mom during his acceptance speech. And now we need the longer version, these festivals as done up in all ways as the footage from Woodstock has been.</p><p>10:22 PM Best Score - another win for Dune, and for Hans Zimmer. Zimmer’s been around for a long time. I first left humming a score of his with Rain Man back in the 1980s. Score was strong enough, or the nominees poorly selected enough, that one of the best of the year, Johnny Greenwood’s for Spencer, didn’t even make the cut, though Greenwood was nominated for The Power of the Dog. The score for Dune wasn’t hummable, but like Michael Giacchino’s for The Batman there are a lot more paths where the movie’s worse with anything or anyone else than trying to imagine there’s better. </p><p>10:15 PM and Kenneth Branagh’s been around for a really really long time. He first came to my attention in the movie Dead Again, which I saw twice when it opened in 1991, including at the Astor Plaza which was my favorite place to see a movie, 1500 seats with a great rake and great sound and a great big screen which made movies better because “here, they are.” And Branagh’s done all sorts of things. He’s done Shakespeare. He’s done superhero movies (I say the underrated Thor). He’s done Christie. He’s done big films and small films and art films and written and directed and starred. He’s been nominated for eight Academy Awards in seven different categories. It’s the thing about being nominated in seven different categories that’s worth having a think on. I don’t know if Belfast deserves an Oscar, but let’s finally have one of those on Kenneth Branagh’s shelf.</p><p>10:08 PM There’s something deeper about the wins for Kenneth Branagh and Sian Heder in the screenplay categories. As Sian said, CODA isn’t a “big” movie. Yeah, Apple paid a fortune for it after its Sundance debut, reported at $25M. But that was after the movie was made. There wasn’t $25M in the budget for a film about a family of deaf parents and the speaking daughter wanting to sing while the family struggles with its fishing business. There’s a definite Rocky quality, to CODA just coming along and winning people over for what it is. </p><p>10:05 PM The CODA speech was just plain sweet.</p><p>10:00 PM A lot of the chatter ahead of the show was that Don’t Look Up would win Best Original Screenplay, but I guess all the Netflix $$ and award touting in the world couldn’t quite make up for the fact that Don’t Look Up isn’t a very good movie. So Branagh’s win here for Belfast is somewhat a surprise for me. Belfast isn’t a great movie, but it’s a heartfelt and well-meaning one, and the other nominees in the category aren’t earth-shattering great. So, kudos for Branagh.</p><p>9:28 PM The win for CODA and Troy Kotsur is a reminder that you can tell a familiar story and do wonderful things with it and make it fresh and new and wonderful. We’ve seen the movie about the competition, sports or music or otherwise. But the specifics of CODA made it fresh, and the freshness added passio and sincerity above and beyond all the usual. It’s a shame more people haven’t had an opportunity to see it which doesn’t involve a streaming fee to watch on a small screen. The emotions in this movie are large, and best shared with company.</p><p>9:25 PM: Yay Troy Kotsur, who gave the strongest performance in the category. </p><p>8:55 PM I don’t understand the purpose of the Bond tribute. It’s introduced by people from the sports world. It wasn’t possible to find talent from the Bond movies themselves? It’s just clips with no thematic organization. It has no point of view, no theme, no purpose. Why not have a a live performance of a Bond song to accompany the clips? There’s a lot you can do or talk about when you’re talking about sixty years of James Bond, and this did none of it.</p><p>8:39 PM Cinematography was a strong strong category. Dune was gorgeous to look at. Nightmare Alley was gorgeous to look at. West Side Story - well, it wasn’t gorgeous, but it was a work of art. The Tragedy of Macbeth was memorably stylized. And even Power of the Dog - didn’t like the movie but it was gorgeous to look at. I’m glad that Dune won, but any of the five in this category did award caliber work at an extremely extremely high level.</p><p>8:37 PM ‘Nominated three times and this is the most words I’ve ever spoken here” Woody Harrelson</p><p>8:36 PM This show shouldn’t be making me uncertain about what’s live and what isn’t. That’s amateur hour, really, and it’s the second time it’s happened. </p><p>8:35 PM Is is live or is is Memorex? The Sound win for Dune feels like it was one of the pre-awards, because otherwise how did six people get up on stage the moment the award was announced?</p><p>8:32 PM Remind me not to hire the writers for this ceremony when I produce an award show. This is falling flat. Reminds me of my pat down at SLC coming back from Utah. </p><p>8:28 PM We’re 25 minutes in to the Oscars and one award has been given out. Well, except for all of the awards that were given out when no one was watching so we could have a better more engaging telecast. Which this telecast is so totally not, to this point.</p><p>8:23 PM Ariana DeBose was predicted to win for Supporting Actress. This, to me, isn’t a strong category this year. The performance I found most memorable was Aunjanue Ellis’ in King Richard, and that’s a really good job of a role that’s often kind of generic, of the wife in a biopic sitting in the background.</p><p>8:17 PM: I guess they had to do something to cover for the reduced capacity at the Dolby for this year’s ceremony, but the pepole sitting at private tables is bringing unwanted flashbacks to last year’s ceremony.</p><p>8:05 PM: But I don’t like the telecast starting with something that’s either on tape or taking place live at a remote location, and worse not being 100% sure which of those two it is. There’s no energy in the room when the thing isn’t happening in the room, and thus no kickstart to my viewing.</p><p>8:03 PM: Though if having King Richard in the race means the Oscars kick off with Venus and Serena - that’s a good thing.</p><p>7:57 PM: Best Picture - I guess it’s nothing new, but the Oscar list of Best Picture nominees includes a lot of movies that didn’t do it for me. Belfast is fine, but that’s not Best Picture caliber. West Side Story is fine, and often masterfully crafted, but I don’t think it made its case for existing and remaking the Robert Wise version. Drive My Car is fine for a three hour Japanese movie about a multi lingual production of Uncle Vanya, but that’s what it is. King Richard has some great performances in it; no complaints from my if Will Smith wins over my first choice (Andrew Garfield in TT…Boom for Best Actor), but it’s too long and worse I can identify the things that could’ve been cut because it isn’t brain surgery. Nightmare Alley is good, great, surprisingly so for a director I’ve been mixed on. The Power of the Dog is just Oscar bait, and nothing more, and I hate seeing it rewarded for existing as Oscar bait by being nominated for Oscars. Licorice Pizza isn’t close to Best Picture stuff, meandering and detouring and not in a good way. Don’t Look Up might work from home when you can be distracted and not focus on its one note, but I saw it in a theatre and around a half hour in realized it was one note and stopped hearing it. CODA, Dune, Tick Tick… Boom, Nightmare Alley. Four contenders from my POV, and six pretenders.</p><p>7:41 PM: Thoughts before the big event:</p><p>My own Top Ten of the year has very little overlap with the Best Picture nominees.</p><p><a href="https://boxd.it/fV3PQ">https://boxd.it/fV3PQ</a></p><p>Dune and Tick Tick… Boom are my far and away favorite films of last year. I think Coda has a good chance at winning Best Picture because of the preferential ballot. If you like The Power of the Dog, Dune isn’t your second choice. If you like Dune, Power of the Dog isn’t your second choice. While Coda’s a super hard movie not to have some affection for. I wish it had been seen more in theatres, instead of opening over the summer when the box office was still highly impaired, especially in New York City. I’ve written about Tick Tick… Boom on my Letterboxd.</p><p><a href="https://boxd.it/2CoYlp">https://boxd.it/2CoYlp</a></p><p>Attica is a great documentary, but isn’t favored in that category. I don’t dislike Summer of Soul, and I enjoyed Flee a lot more than I thought. I would recommend both. But Attica is brilliant. You’ve heard about Attica, but probably just heard about it. Even growing up in New York, for an event that happened in my lifetime, I knew not near enough. It’s not just that there was a prison riot. It’s not just that the prison was stormed. It’s that NY Governor Nelson Rockefeller, goaded on by a Richard Nixon who wasn’t fond of black prisoners - emphasis on black - wasn’t much concerned for the prison guards, mostly black. It’s that most of the deaths of the prisoners occurred in wanton shooting gallery violence after the prison had been taken, which is also when upward of a dozen guards were killed by the “law enforcement” storming the prison. And then the state tried to blame the prisoners, and took state vengeance against the person (a medical examiner, in particular) who wasn’t buying into the official lie. And here we are half a century later and it’s still perfectly fine to a lot of white people if there are other whites as collateral damage in the battle for white supremacy. It’s a fact. And I should’ve been taught some of that in the decade after Attica, when I was a high school student, not finding it decades later in this great Showtime documentary.</p><p>Mass is also a great movie, which won an ensemble Spirit Award. Like Attica it’s an issue movie, but one without resolution. The parents of a school shooter and the parents of one of the victims get together for an hour of talk time. It’s not didactic. It covers all sides. It’s brilliantly acted by all concerned. The movie drips with quiet tension. You’ve never gotten the willies the way you do in the opening ten minutes here from watching someone lay out refreshments in a church meeting room.</p><p>Ennio is another documentary, about the Italian composer Ennio Morricone. It’s three hours long. It’s about a dude who composes music. But thanks to brilliant editing and passion for the subject matter, these three hours go by a lot faster than The Batman. I learned a lot about the subject. I can quibble; I’d have liked to have seen more of the music as used in the movies rather than in montaged moments. But this is on my Top Ten for both being good, and for being good when it had no right to be.</p><p>Free Guy? On my list because it’s a good movie in a genre where most of the movies are bad. It’s fresh and fun and creative in a genre where most of the movies are derivative. It brings some of the same qualities to the superhero action movie that inspired me twenty years ago to want to be in the Brandon Sanderson business. It does what its peer group barely tries doing.</p><p>Same, more of less, with Spider-Man: No Way Home. The battles are a little less overdone than most of its peer group. Tom Holland has “it.”. He’s a movie star, and he carries the movie, and he shows why he’s a better Spider-Man than Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire. He may not be a better overall actor than Andrew Garfield, but he has more “it” than Garfield does. And the movie worked even though I hadn’t seen the first Doctor Strange movie, hadn’t seen the second Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movie.</p><p>Spencer - as Nick Martell said after we watched it, it’s kind of like a horror movie. Princess Di having Xmas dinner with the royals is a little like arriving at the country house in Get Out. The pearls, the soup, the pearls, the stairs, the soup, the score. </p><p>And Pig? I like the playing off of the wildly different acting styles from Alex Wolfe and Nicolas Cage. </p><p>Dune - I thought I wrote about on Letterboxd but I guess not. For me, it’s the biggest of big screen movies I’ve ever seen. Every frame, every visual, every everything, soaks up space on the IMAX screen. It’s a little short on plot, honestly. But the cast is good across the board, and I love the sheer bigness of it. Given sufficient time in between, I will go back and see this movie on IMAX on a pretty regular basis because it gives me an engulfing experience that I rarely ever find in the movies.</p><p>Any Ten Best list, it’s a snapshot. </p>The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-48814739198465704812021-10-25T23:25:00.007-04:002021-10-25T23:25:55.944-04:00WINDERS by Ryan O’Nan <p> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">This week I’m celebrating the publication of WINDERS by Ryan O’Nan, <a href="https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/winders/525493" target="_blank">in audio from Recorded Books</a> and and in <a href="https://awfulagent.com/ebooks/winders/" target="_blank">print and ebook</a> from JAB Books.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Ryan’s a <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1645352/" target="_blank">screenwriter and actor</a> who’s written for or performed on many of your favorite TV shows. He’s currently doing both on ABC’s Big Sky, after several seasons with USA’s Queen of the South and a couple in the writer’s room for Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga. He was just seen on the big screen in the recently release Copshot, and other TV credits include Skins, Marvel’s Legion, Ray Donovan, and many more.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The thing that impresses me most is Ryan’s willingness to put in the hard yards on succeeding as a prose writer. If you’re writing for television, you’re used to having your work rewritten. A script with your name on it will have had many hands changing your words along the way, and if you’re a staff writer you’re one of the people doing that on everyone else’s scripts. But these are also jobs that come with long enough hours and a good enough paycheck that there’s something very different about doing revisions speculatively for a literary agent. I may or many not end up representing your book in the end, and I may or may not end up selling it. </span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">But there was none of that working with Ryan. Ryan’s a reader, a big fan of authors like Brandon Sanderson. For all Ryan’s success in Hollywood, he was driven to make his prose fiction work at the same level of success as his screenwriting and acting. I had to pinch myself a few times because if I was Ryan I don’t know if I’d be as patient with the process as Ryan himself was. </span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">WINDERS is a great coming of age story about two people on the cusp of adulthood.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">One, Charlie, has a great power. He doesn’t know what his power is, he doesn’t know what the consequences are of using it, and he doesn’t know how it’s already screwed up his life. He’s about to use this power in so big a way that people are going to notice.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Juniper’s one of those people. She’s grown up in a society where everyone can “wind” like Charlie can, where everyone can relive just a wee bit of their past, make the bad things go away. She’s one of the good ones, but she’s so in her own world that she isn’t entirely aware of what it means to be one of the bad ones. Because you can take it for granted.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Yeah, Charlie and Juniper are going to hook up.</span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Like much of the best fiction, you’ll find aspects of it that remind you of other things. The gift with unknown consequence, as an example, is something explored in <a href="https://awfulagent.com/ebooks/fair-coin-coin-series-1/" target="_blank">E.C. Myers’ FAIR COIN. </a>The conflict between the special people Juniper hangs with and the rest of us, there’s a taste of DIVERGENT. But there’s something special about Ryan O’Nan and WINDERS. Ryan has the story-teller’s gift. He’s writing about characters that emerged from his life in ways that he explains in a couple of the launch week blog tour stops, which I’ll be linking to and sharing. And Ryan’s story is so good because it isn’t just about Charlie and Juniper. The secondary characters in WINDERS never get short shrift in Ryan’s prose. Some of them are capable of doing cruel things, but they never seem cruel to the person doing them. There’s this narrow line between the things people do that are 100% right but end up becoming 100% cruel in their after-effects, and the things that are clearly cruel going in save that there’s there’s this inexorable logic to them for the person doing. Charlie and Juniper are two of the people who have choices to make, who can learn - or not! - to do right by the innately good.</span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I haven’t spoken as much on social media about Ryan as I have about other of my new clients. Maybe because he’s this famous actor dude that people come up to and go “are you King George” when we’re brunching at Sarabeth’s! But yeah, I’m damn proud of WINDERS, and honored to have worked with Ryan on getting this one out into the world.</span></p>The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-44401453195323286552021-04-25T19:59:00.051-04:002021-04-25T23:39:45.035-04:002021 Oscars Live Blog<p>11:30 PM Mine not to reason why. If you read my 3400 words on this blog from before the Oscars, you’ll see that I am mostly happy with the things that won and the things that did not. But it was a weird evening. The dry section in the middle was extremely dry. The beginning was extremely fresh because it was like no Oscars since I can remember, and I can remember back to things like the years when Chariots of Fire or Raiders were nominees, and I was watching in the TV room of the house I grew up in. The ending was extremely odd. But I watch most of all for the actual winners and losers. I love every frame of Nomadland, and it won for Best Picture, every frame love that movie like I do every frame of Barry Lyndon. The movies I liked least were Mank and Ma Rainey, and Mank won only in technical categories that it had an argument for winning, even in the photography category where it wasn’t my choice. Ma Rainey won some small awards, but not for the acting categories where I think there were better performances that were rewarded. My biggest disappointment is in the Supporting Actor category, where I’d have loved to see Paul Raci, but still Sound of Metal had a deserving spotlight including an award in a very competitive Editing category. But, that ending.</p><p>11:16 PM: And no complaints on Anthony Hopkins.</p><p>11:15 PM OK! There was a lot of talk about Viola Davis winning for Ma Rainey, and I just couldn’t see another person winning Best Actress other than Frances McDormand or Carey Mulligan. And I shan’t complain that it is McDormand.</p><p>11:12 PM <a href="https://letterboxd.com/jabbermaster/film/nomadland/">https://letterboxd.com/jabbermaster/film/nomadland/</a> Nomadland</p><p>11:09. But, Nomadland. I love this movie, and it isn’t often that the movie I love most takes home the Best Picture trophy. See Nomadland. See it where you can soak in every image of every frame, every sound, every choice made by Chloe Zhao as s the director, every bit of modesty in Frances McDormand’s performance. Nomadland is special.</p><p>11:08. OK. That’s an interesting approach.</p><p>11:01 PM Did I miss the acting categories, or are they doing some weird thing of presenting the Best Picture nominees and then sandwiching in two more awards before presenting the award? Weird...</p><p>10:56 PM Is this the first year that the In Memoriam has been segregated by the people who got one second and the people who got two seconds?</p><p>10:47 PM On the other hand I just got to see Glenn Close dancing away her sorrows over a record-tying 8th look with 0 wins in the acting categories.</p><p>10:45 PM If I need to endure Oscar trivia it should be at a bar where I can get a free hard cider for answering the question.</p><p>10:43 PM Since I’m doing a film-related live blog, a shout-out to Sean O’Connell, whose book RELEASE THE SNYDER CUT came out with perfect timing as a the Snyder Cut was releasing. Sean spent his week before the Oscars doing some great get interviews for his next book WITH GREAT POWER, a history of Spider Man on film, which will be published in 2022. </p><p>10:40 PM the noise in the room at Union Station seems at its loudest for the Best Song winners. I feel sorry for the people in Sweden who are up at this hour of the morning to not win an Oscar.</p><p>10:32 PM I will never complain to have Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross winning for Best Score, and better for Soul, which I didn’t see, than from Mank, sharing the award with Jon Batiste. Reznor and Ross, The Social Network. I need for a NY repertory house to give me an opportunity to enjoy The Social Network again. </p><p>10:26 PM This is the first weekend since the pandemic where two movies have done significant opening weekend business, with both Demon Slayer and Mortal Kombat over $15M. My viewing this weekend was the pleasant Together Together, which is the first indie/art movie to have gotten an actual coordinated release post-pandemic, with reviews in the papers and time for theatres to prepare for showing it, and the Sat night screenings a little introduction from the director and a post-move taped Zoom with the director and two leads. Bit by bit it’s coming back, but it’s a little like going back to the beach house after a long winter away and having a lot of work to do to spiff it up for the season.</p><p>10:23 PM <a href="https://twitter.com/geniusbastard/status/1386502894812155906?s=21">https://twitter.com/geniusbastard/status/1386502894812155906?s=21</a></p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/amaandaamaarie/status/1386502707964416001?s=21">https://twitter.com/amaandaamaarie/status/1386502707964416001?s=21</a></p><p><br /></p><p>10:18 PM Another small surprise. Did any of the Oscar preview articles I read tout Sound of Metal in the editing category? This was a hard category, though, with all sorts of good movies contending. Very nice acceptance speech.</p><p>10:12 PM I more liked than loved when I saw In The Heights on Broadway, but I am eagerly awaiting the movie version on June 11. I’ve seen trailers many times, and now many different trailers with a new one coming into theatres recently that has a little more plot focus and now this one on the Oscars, and it hasn’t yet lost its appeal, its ability to get me to look up from my iPad and watch. I am eager to see this movie on the biggest screen I can, hopefully in a glorious Dolby Atmos sound mix.</p><p>10:08 PM WTF? In fairness, Mank is strongest in categories like cinematography, but this is still an upset, taking the prize over Joshua James Richards for Nomadland. And I loved every frame of Nomadland while, again, Mank I mostly watched the insides of my eyelashes.</p><p>10:07 PM Glenn Close ties Peter O’Toole for a a record eight losses of an acting award. Chloe Zhao the first woman of color to win for Director.</p><p>10:04 PM I saw enough of Mank in between long stretches of “resting my eyes” to appreciate that it did have some achievement in production design, and the score was also excellent. So, sure. Give Mank an award. It’s still a hot overrated mess of a movie. I hate this as much as I shall forever love David Fincher’s The Social Network.</p><p>10:02 PM Seconding @justincchang <a href="https://twitter.com/justincchang/status/1386500707511988225?s=21">https://twitter.com/justincchang/status/1386500707511988225?s=21</a></p><p>10:00 PM A few minutes ago there was an ad for Google Meets. Don’t believe them. Google Meets is to Zoom what Bing is to Google.</p><p>9:57 PM Glenn Close is looking touched a little watching the acceptance speech, but she’s lost out on so many Oscars, but Hillbilly Elegy wasn’t the moment this year. I can see Glenn Close reaming out her grandson in the car, and I can see Yuh-Jung Youn looking crestfallen after the fire, or simply being a grandmother in the family’s home. It’s a nice moment for the evening.</p><p>9:55 PM Yuh-Jung Youn for Supporting Actress. The idea of her winning has grown on me over the course of the last several hours.</p><p>9:51 PM The family’s left to prepare for the work day or get ready for travel home tomorrow, so now it’s just me in my hotel room. Last Oscars I was also in a hotel room in DC, in the before time, with tasty treats from Bakeshop in Arlington VA and fond memories of meals with David Louis Edelman and R.R. Virdi. Aaaaah, the before times. Back to being me, Oscar, some very good mini black and white cookies from Costco, and the apple strudels that will likely be offered to the hotel front office staff in the morning.</p><p>9:38 PM The “little bit dry” that Bryce Moore mentioned is becoming more apparent as the evening goes on. Nothing dry about Bryce’s Perfect Place to Die, which is coming in August. Some energy missing from the festivities.</p><p>9:23 PM They’re showing clips!</p><p>9:19 PM I just had to explain to my nephew what a dot matrix printer is/was. Hard to believe that the technology could have come and gone so very very quickly. Kind of like how I expect aa movie like Mank to sink out of view.</p><p>9:00 PM The story of how I care to fall in love with Chloe Zhao is kind of embarrassing. I was going to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm with Nick Martell, and never dreamt that it would be sold out on a Monday night. But, it was! And I hadn’t gotten advance tickets. Seeking an alternative, I suggested we see The Rider, which sounded like maybe it would be kind of meh but had gotten such reviews. So we saw it on a teeny screen at a teeny art house multiplex. And we loved The Rider. And that was how I came to eagerly anticipate Nomadland. </p><p>8:59 PM No surprise that Chloe Zhao won for Nomadland, but it makes me immensely happy/</p><p>8:54 PM with all due respect to the MPTF workers, when this speech is going on for so long it’s kind of reminding me why I tell authors to watch the head-and-shoulders gestures. The best way to avoid going overboard is to try not to use them at all, and we’re at that stage with letting the acceptance speeches drone on for forever.</p><p>8:45 PM not a fan of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, but Ann Roth has been designing great costumes for about as long as I’ve been alive, and I think I read that she is, at the age of 89, the oldest person so far to go home with an Oscar statue. Check out her filmography. It is the definition of illustrious. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Roth">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Roth</a></p><p>8:31 PM & the best part of Daniel Kaluuya’s win is seeing the looks on the faces of his family members in London, something that would have gotten lost in the large scale of the traditional ceremony at the Dolby Theatre. This evening is such a nice “if live gives you lemonade...” moment, for the first half hour. LIke, the acceptance speeches are going on, but it’s nice for a half hour. We’ll see how it goes for another two-and-a-half.</p><p>8:28 PM My nephew points out that we aren’t getting clips for the Supporting Actor category, but we are getting some personal notes which take excellent advantage of the intimate Union Station setting for this year’s Oscars. And I like it.</p><p>8:22 PM No surprise that Another Round won, but Quo Vadis, Aida is the better film. I can’t rave enough about Quo Vadis, Aida. <a href="http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2021/04/oscar-2021-way-too-many-coming.html">http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2021/04/oscar-2021-way-too-many-coming.html</a> where you can read my mini-review, and why I am not super happy to see the glorification of alcohol in Another Round getting an Oscar. There’s nothing to complain about as a piece of filmmaking, but...</p><p>8:17 PM I liked the Expedia ad.</p><p>8:12 PM Not sure I was expecting The Father to win for Adopted Screenplay, but I don’t mind that it has. I mean, Florian Zeller is up at 2am in Paris France to get his Oscar. Better he should get it than just pose in his tux. And Christopher Hampton at 1am in the UK</p><p>8:09 PM Glad there was no orchestra to drown out that nice acceptance speech from Emerald.</p><p>8:07 PM As I mentioned in my pre-Oscar 3400 words, Emerald Fennell kind of had to win for Promising Young Woman. It’s a great script, full of fun with dark undertones and navigating shoals and shoals and shoals. If I were ranking the nominated movies that you should see, this is right at the top of the list. Promising Young Woman.</p><p>8:06 PM There’s this belief that Hollywood’s privileged, and it’s kind of true, but the intro for the Original Screenplay is making it clear that people have to work their way in.</p><p>8:03 PM “Our love of movies helped to get us through.” Very true for me. So very, very true. </p><p>8:00 PM I didn’t get to watch a lot of the red carpet, but I’m impressed with what I’ve seen of how they’re doing this. Actual people in an actual place with an actual red carpet feel. Good first impression.</p><p>7:58 PM We’re doing this! I’ve got company, which I haven’t had for an Oscars in decades probably, but we’re doing some live blog here.</p>The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-4327616497562810972021-04-25T11:37:00.003-04:002021-04-25T11:37:41.615-04:00Oscar 2021 - way too many coming attractions!!!<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The Oscars are happening today. </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">And I’ve read many an article or analysis, which I think generally true, that the world doesn’t very much care, and that the ratings are going to plummet as they have for other award shows, and even for a lot of sporting events.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">But, I care! </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I’m not sure what I’ll be doing for my live blog. If all goes well, I am going to have some fully vaccinated family members joining me in my (very large!) hotel room for at least part of the evening, and might not be able to give my full attention to the posting. So I’m putting a little more effort into the pre-show this year.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">In spite of and because of the pandemic, I ended up seeing as many or more of the nominated films as in a typical year, all in theatres. I went some six months in 2020 where I saw only one movie, a fan favorite welcome back of Superman: The Movie at a theatre in Connecticut that opened for around three weeks in June before closing its doors to allow the cobwebs more time to cob, and which has yet to reopen its doors. That was it, from March 8 until mid-September. But, once theatres were able to reopen in NJ and CT, and I was able to start going, I realized, putting it simply, that I needed to go. I say that unapologetically. I went three months of 2020 without having an in person conversation beyond the “conversation” at the check-out register. And then another three months where I might have had a handful of days if that with an employee joining me in the office but were mostly more of the same. That wasn’t sustainable. I, my sanity, needed something, and hopping on the quite empty commuter trains to go to the quite empty movie theatres seemed safe enough. I never dreamt that I would know when the hourly trains from Stamford were headed back to New York City. And a few weeks later, theatres were allowed to reopen in New York State, outside of the five boroughs. And I went. Manchester, Stamford, White Plains, New Rochelle, Garden City, Westbury, Bellmore, Hoboken, Elizabeth, South Orange, Paramus, Red Bank. I went, and I went, and I went, and I went some more. And when the theatres could finally reopen in New York City on March 5, the IFC Center had a “what we missed” series where I could fill in a lot of the blanks.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">There are eight moves nominated for Best Picture, but I feel like there’s only one, and that’s Nomadland. I’ve done a full review of that elsewhere, and I’ll add links to this post down the line. It’s a beautiful movie on so many levels, and a movie that achieves greatness through modesty. I’ve seen it three times, all on IMAX, and would happily see it again. I saw it on a private screening, with one other couple in the IMAX, and on opening weekend with fewer than ten of us. </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Promising Young Woman was the consensus favorite of a three-movie blitz over Christmas, and the pre-shows I’ve read elsewhere call it, perhaps accurately, the nominee that’s lost the most from this weird year, where a conversation-starter of a movie was never able to get the conversation started. It’s got a brilliant lead performance by Carey Mulligan. It’s got a clever script. It’s got some good supporting turns, especially by Bo Burnham who has as much a tight rope to act in the quiet supporting role as Mulligan does in the lead. It’s a movie that’s of the moment but doesn’t drown in it. It’s got an ending that’s uplifting without losing the internal truth of the lead character. Emerald Fennell, the writer and director, nailed this one, and is deservedly nominated in both categories. If Nomadland were to lose, which would be a stunner, this is the movie I’d wish to see it lose to.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The Christmas blitz also included Wonder Woman 84 and News of the World, all as part of private theatre rentals. Which deserve a mention. Cinemark was the first chain I saw doing these, allowing up to 20 people in for a private viewing for prices that went into the mid double figures for off hours oldies in markets with less expensive tickets to $200 for new movies, and I think these covered a good chunk of the payroll at a lot of Cinemark locations. AMC then acted like they had invented the idea, and had prices approaching $400 at better performing locations in the New York market. I feel a little uncomfortable about the idea, how people with a spare $150 could see a movie more safely than people without, but even now as business is starting to pick up there are some Cinemark multiplexes with five or more screens used solely for the viewing parties.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">New of the World was perfectly fine, and Wonder Woman 84 I both liked more than expected (for me, the first movie underperformed against the reviews and expectations I had gong in while the sequel overperformed) and loathed for some of the laziness of the script and film-making. </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">But, getting back to the Best Picture candidates:</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Mank is godawful. A great score (nominated!) and great photography (nominated) in service of a dull script and dull acting. You want some David Fischer, rewatch The Social Network.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The Father is one of the many movies I saw at unplanned and unwanted private screenings. I didn’t want to go theatres with too many people in them, but the number of private showings for really good movies... It’s really good, with amazing acting, but I had to work harder to understand it than I really would have wanted. If you’re a movie critic/reviewer you might well have gotten a copy of the screenplay or other press materials that make it more comprehensible, but it’s a movie that would be rewarding by repeat viewings for anyone else without justifying going back for seconds. </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Judas and the Black Messiah is an energetically made film, well-acted, but it’s a movie that tells me a lot about how Fred Hampton died without telling me enough about how he lived to invest me in how he died.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I’ve seen movies about failing farms for a long time now, like Places from the Heart with Sally Field in 1984. Minari doesn’t add enough to the genre to justify its being a Best Picture winner.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Sound of Metal is a deserving nominee but not a deserving winner. There’s a slow patch in the middle where we need to understand a little more about the lead character than the script allows us to. Riz Ahmed deserves his Best Actor nomination in part because of his success in acting the part beyond what’s on the page well enough that I could almost not have noticed the level of remove, but it’s there.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The Trial of the Chicago Seven is fine or better in lots of different ways. I liked it, I’d recommend it, I don’t mind seeing it on the Best Picture ballot, but there’s no way I’m rooting for it.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Best Director, just like Best Picture, it’s either Chloe Zhao for Nomadland or Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman. Thomas Vinterberg was nominated for Another Round, a Scandinavian movie about a bunch of drunk dudes, without the movie being nominated for Best Picture.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">In Best Actress, there’s a sense that it might go to Viola Davis for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. I’d again prefer Nomadland (Frances McDormand) or Promising Young Woman (Carey Mulligan). This is one of the most problematic characters for me. Maybe it’s more the writing than the acting, but I think Vanessa Kirby’s character in Pieces of a Woman was a hollowness at the core of the movie, and I’d happily have her out of the category and Julia Garner from The Assistant in place of Kirby. And I’d happily see Zendaya from Malcolm and Marie in place of Viola Davis. Malcolm and Marie is indulgent and navel-gazing a little and has characters that aren’t the most pleasant, but it’s a beautifully photographed movie with really good acting and it’s thought provoking and gets into its characters. It can be a bit of a dodge to use the “but what would you leave out” defense when someone says this person or movie was unjustly robbed of a nomination, but this is a category where I can hands-down identify performances that were overlooked in movies that were overlooked.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Best Actor is tough this year. Riz Ahmed does the exact opposite of Vanessa Kirby. He takes an underwritten role and turns it into an award-worthy performance in Sound of Metal. Anthony Hopkins in The Father is a master class. And then there’s Chadwick Bozeman in Ma Rainey, and there’s nothing about that performance that makes me think of Chadwick Bozeman over my overall “meh” toward the movie.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I rested my eyes through too much of Mank to evaluate Amanda Seyfried. Of the performances I was awake for, I’m team Maria Bakalova. Comedy is hard, and she is subsumed completely into the somewhat scripted and somewhat not comedy of Boras Subsequent Moviefilm. For Supporting Actor, I was surprised to sit down with the ballot and realize I most wanted Paul Rici to win for Sound of Metal. He’s the heart of the movie in so many ways, visions of the past and visions of the future and the paths that Riz Ahmed has. I can see him on the screen as I type, see the words and the signs and the face I saw when I went to the movie seven months ago. </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Original screenplay has to be Promising Young Woman.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Adopted screenplay, much as I like Nomadland this could go to The Father, or to Borat Subsequent Moviefilm or to The White Tiger, and I would be every bit as happy as if it goes to Nomadland. I liked The White Tiger a lot more than the critical consensus, and I’m mostly happy to see that it got on the Oscar ballot. </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I am going to be the only person in the world rooting for Over the Moon to win in Animated Feature.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Documentary Feature, I’ll go with Collective. I thought of seeing Time, but I can’t bring myself to. All of the reviews and the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and all the everything else, I just can’t.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I did see Crip Camp. A lot of the pioneering work for disability advocacy was before I was politically aware. A lot of time is spent on a sit-in during the Carter administration when I was a teenager, and it passed me by. I’m interested in that history. But the movie wants to say that all of that happened as a result of people going to a summer camp in the Catskills where they spent their nights as teenagers learning and plotting what would become the advocacy that led ultimately to the ADA, thus the title. But there’s no support for that thesis at all. What the movie actually tells us: if you were a disabled teen with enough support at home in the 1960s or early 1970s that your parents could get you to a summer camp (for many of them, a summer camp way far out of state) for disabled teenagers, you had a stronger chance of having the structure and support that you could, in the late 1970s, participate in protests and sit-ins. The existence of the movie is a feat all by itself because a lot of the main participants in events forty years ago aren’t with us today, but I wish the movie could have found a way to be more about the events, even looking a little at the events from the other side, from the POV of people in the Carter administration and some now/then on how they feel about slow-walking regulations, rather than spending as much time as it does on the thin reed of its premise.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Collective starts with searing and difficult-to-watch as-it’s-happening footage from within a Romanian night club where dozens of people died when a fire engulfed the premises starting a stampeded to closed and blocked exits. It’s one of those stories that keeps repeating. Happy Land in the Bronx, the Kentucky night club decades ago. But it’s not so much about that. It’s discovered afterwards that the hospitals were using diluted disinfectants. That burn victims were being sent to in-country hospitals without burn units that were supposed to have super duper burn units, that the care was so bad patients had maggots in them. All of which the government would rather not deal with, until it’s forced to appoint a young public health advocate to reform from within,which lasts only until the next election when the government is booted out in favor or a return to le ancien regime.It’s a documentary about a great many things in under two hours, full of heroes and villains, twists and turns, deeply resonant to counties and political systems far away from Romania’s. Quite excellent.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">MLK/FBI is missing from the category, which is a shame.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Collective is also nominated in International Feature, where I’ve seen four of the five films, a much better percentage than usual. Better Days is the film I didn’t see. The Man Who Sold His Skin is the film that has no chance of winning. </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Another Round — I don’t know what to say about this. I avoided seeing it for a while. I don’t like movies about alcoholics and alcoholism, which can’t resist either glorifying something that should never be glorified, or asking us to wallow deep in the misery of it all, and this movie’s about a handful of long-time friends, teaching at the same high school, who set out to prove a thesis that we all function better with a moderate but not over the top blood alcohol level. Great idea! At least for me, this is like the greatest of great ideas - NOT!!!! - for a movie. But as well as it’s done in the Oscars, nominated both here and for Best Director, I went. If you want to ignore the scenes where one of the teachers does his best teaching ever while under the influence of alcohol, it avoids some of the glorification, but you can’t ignore those scenes. It does show all of the main characters having some problems with work, family or friends, and one of them the problems get to be more than just a little serious, so it doesn’t show the behavior as being without risk or consequence of any sort. But we get to the end of the movie and it’s suggesting alcohol as a fountain of youth. Really? I can’t separate myself enough from the morality of the movie to want to see it on an Oscar ballot, let alone winning.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Quo Vadis, Aida? is the movie I’d like to see taking the International Feature category. Jasmila Zbanic wrote, produced and directed this searing movie about a genocidal attack by Serbian general Ratko Mladic, where over 8,000 men theoretically under the protection of the UN is Srebrenica were separated from their families, murdered, and buried in mass graves. The lead, played by Jasna Duricic, is a UN translator trying to save her husband and sons. It’s a real world version of the classic cliffhanger of the walls closing in, only there’s no escape hatch. The lead performance and the movie are both absolutely top notch. The lead character’s a school teacher. The movie could have ended with one of the massacres, the camera outside on a piece of military equipment studiously avoiding a view of what we know’s happening inside the building we’ve just left, but it goes on to show the main character rebuilding her life, kind of. Back in school, teaching another generation. But what’s she teaching them? What is there to teach at all? </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Original Score - the best thing about Mank is the score. James Newton Howard does a good one for News of the World. Terrance Blanchard does a really good one for Da 5 Bloods.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Sound, I’ve seen only three of the movies. Haven’t streamed Greyhound, didn’t see Soul. Everyone thinks Sound of Metal will win for a movie that’s as much about the absence of sound as its presence, and I’m fine with that.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I don’t give a crap about make-up. The category includes two movies I haven’t seen, two I slept through, and one (Hillbilly Elegy) where the make-up is so over the top...</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Costume Design, a lot of the same movies and a lot of the same thoughts.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">There are some beautiful movies in the Cinematography category. Chicago 7 is nominated in part for managing to merge the real of the demonstrations with the shots from the cameraman, I would expect. But if anything wins other than Nomadland, then (like Billy Joel(), I’m gonna start the fire. Joshua James Richardson is named Joshua, after all, and Joshua deserves always to win. But I saw this movie on IMAX thinking it was a little bit silly to head out to Paramus to see a movie that would open more widely in a few weeks on screens other than IMAX, because it’s just this little art movie about someone living in a camper. But then, I watched the movie. It’s a parade of glorious imagery, from the close-ups of Frances McDormand’s face to the desert glow at sunset to the Pacific coastal to an inside of a luncheonette counter at Wall Drug. It’s rapturously filmed. </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Let The Father have Production Design. I didn’t pick up on all the subtleties that the critics with their liner notes etc. etc. did, but from what I read there’s a lot of subtle stuff going on in this one. I’d rather Mank take its award for Score. Ma Rainey doesn’t have good production design; it reeks of the back lot. News of the World and Tenet are fine choices as well.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The Father also makes sense for Film Editing, but all the movies in this category are quite well done.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">VIsual Effects, Tenet.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Even this year, I decided not to spend hours sitting for the short features, when I never see them in non-pandemic years.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The LA Times has several good articles today on the Oscars.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">One article I read said it’s a shame that the Oscars are giving us all of these depressing movies when we want fun, but Hollywood doesn’t make very many good fun movies any more. The fun movies are almost entirely bludgeoning SFX spectaculars, and then when Hollywood does come up with a glorious piece of fun like The Prom, a lot of the critics dump on it. But there’s something hopeful about Sound of Metal and Nomadland and Minari, even though they wear their dark well. There’s something truthful about The Father. Judas and the Black Messiah and The Trial of the Chicago 7 are stories worth telling and retelling. </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">And Promising Young Woman takes the movie that isn’t supposed to be fun, that’s been made the no fun way, and makes it quite a bit of disorienting fun. I’m thinking I should see it again.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">And folks, the movies will be back. </span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I wasn’t worried when WarnerMedia announced it was putting all its movies on HBO Max at the same time they went into theatres. To me, it meant there would for sure by 17 movies with major studio booking heading into movie theatres in 2021. There are some changes ahead for the film business. There are going to be fewer places to see movies. The South Orange cinema I visited a few times is closed. The Landmark 57 West in New York City is closed for good. The Mazza Galleria in DC, that’s gone. More of this to come, for sure — more of this to come.</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">But I love going to the movies. I’m not the only person who loves going to the movies. It’s about the “going.”. My TV set and my iPad aren’t going anywhere, and aren’t going anywhere (two uses, purposefully).</span></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 13.1px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Maybe it will be only 10 million people tonight watching whatever the Oscars have to bring, but I saw some great movies over the past year, and I can’t wait to see who wins.</span></p>The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-1880269478197356652020-11-25T13:12:00.001-05:002020-11-25T13:15:58.864-05:00On Being (& Becoming) Grand - Charlaine Harris<p>On the occasions of Charlaine Harris being <a href="https://mysterywriters.org/mwa-announces-2021-grand-master-and-raven-award-honorees/" target="_blank">named a 2021 Grand Master honoree</a> by the Mystery Writers of America...</p><p>It was a Cub game. The Mets and the Cubs at Shea Stadium in 1989, when you could bring a backpack into the ballpark, and my backpack would have a manuscript to read, when we still read those on paper. That’s when I remember reading <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/real-murders-an-aurora-teagarden-mystery/9781625675125" target="_blank">REAL MURDERS</a> by Charlaine Harris, during a rain delay.</p><p><a href="http://charlaineharris.com">Charlaine</a> was looking for an agent. She had successfully placed two books on her own in the early 1980s, <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/sweet-and-deadly-9780727869487/9781625671202">SWEET AND DEADLY</a> and <a href="https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/secret-rage/61675">A SECRET RAGE</a>, to the legendary Ruth Hapgood at Houghton Mifflin, and then taken a few years off to when she had her first two children. A then-client of mine, Barbara Paul, recommended that Charlaine get in touch with me, and so it was that I found myself reading the first Aurora Teagarden mystery, and I was very much in love.</p><p>Not to knock the idea that it helps to write a good novel, which REAL MURDERS was and is, and do well by the people you work with, which Charlaine Harris has done for every moment of a long career, but there’s still a lot of fortune involved in the successful writing career, and for myself, Charlaine, and Aurora Teagarden, fortune came wearing the name of Janet Hutchings. Janet is now, and has been for many years, the editor of <a href="https://www.elleryqueenmysterymagazine.com" target="_blank">Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine</a>, but she was then the mystery editor for Walker & Company, a small-ish family owned publisher with a deeply creditable mystery list, and she was the only editor -- the only! -- to make an offer on REAL MURDERS. $4,000.</p><p>I was crushed. I had taken this wonderful novel out with much enthusiasm and great expectations, and all I had to show for it was a $4,000 offer. But my boss at the time, Scott Meredith, sent me one of his famous scrawls on 3x5 note paper to tell me that it wasn’t easy bringing an author back into the market after a several year absence, and that I had done good. And I reckon, with the passage of time, that this was a true statement.</p><p>Janet left Walker after buying the second Aurora Teagarden novel, and Charlaine and I didn’t cotton as much to Janet’s replacement. We went looking for a new home for the third Aurora Teagarden. And this time, fortune came wearing the name of Susanne Kirk. Susanne edited a mystery list for Scribner, another family-owned publishing company with a rich and storied and even more deeply creditable mystery list. She wasn’t sure about picking up the Aurora Teagarden series, which had been with a smaller publisher with modest sales. I can’t say that I persuaded her. She told me later that it was Charlaine herself who did the trick, charming the room at a mystery convention, that told Susanne she should have some Charlaine of her own. </p><p>And then Scribner was engulfed and devoured by Simon & Schuster. Susanne hung on for several more years, but big publishers like Simon & Schuster don’t enjoy publishing (not then, in the mid 1990s, not now, not for a very very long time) the steady but modestly profitable books of the world, and the mystery list Susanne edited turned much more heavily toward the lottery ticket approach, squeezing out Charlaine and the Aurora Teagarden series.</p><p>This time around, fortune came wearing the name of Elizabeth Story, a young editor at St. Martin’s whom I’d met a few times during a monthly networking night at the Cedar Tavern on University Place. Elizabeth ended up leaving publishing, and the Cedar ended up leaving the world entirely, but that connection helped in selling <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/shakespeare-s-landlord-a-lily-bard-mystery/9781250107282" target="_blank">SHAKESPEARE’S LANDLORD</a>, the first of the new and rather darker Lily Bard series of cozy mysteries by Charlaine, and after Elizabeth left St. Martin’s we ended up in the care of the (then very young) Kelley Ragland. </p><p>I have always been a fan of the Aurora Teagarden books, dating back to that rain delay at Shea Stadium, and I spent a good chunk of this period of time trying to get Kelley to pick up some more books in the series. This was not easy. The Lily Bard books had their level of success, and it was not intuitive that the series that had already been dropped by two publishers deserved to have a third. But, I persisted. The Aurora Teagarden series moved to St. Martin’s, and ended up selling better than the Lily Bard novels. Never bet against Aurora Teagarden.</p><p>It was also around this time that Charlaine made the decision to do something entirely new. She felt she was mired in the midlist, and this wasn’t where she wanted to be. And with some inspiration from Laurell K. Hamilton and Tanya Huff and Buffy guiding her muse, she wrote a novel called SOUTHERN FRIED VAMPIRES which introduced a very very different character named Sookie Stackhouse. And boy, was it different. I wasn’t even such a big fan, but this time it was Charlaine who persisted. We agreed to send the book along to Dean James, then an important bookseller at Houston’s Murder by the Book and now very well known as <a href="http://www.catinthestacks.com" target="_blank">Miranda James</a>, and accept his verdict. Dean liked SOUTHERN FRIED VAMPIRES, so I took it out to market.</p><p>These vampires didn’t want to sell themselves. It wasn’t for lack of a good marketing letter. In a remarkable bit of prescience, I said that the combination of Charlaine’s loyal base in the mystery field with the genre-crossing merriment that had made Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake into a force to be reckoned with would work its magic on book buyers. But, nobody was buying it. We had one offer from a very small publisher that I persuaded Charlaine to turn down; it was very one-sided for a book that would probably succeed more on the basis of Charlaine’s name on the front cover than the publisher’s name on the spine. </p><p>Finally, I sent it off to John Morgan, a young editor at Ace (Laurell/Anita’s publisher), who was starting to acquire. I could have sent it to Ace sooner, but the established editors sometimes had slow response times. And it worked. John liked SOUTHERN FRIED VAMPIRES. He was able to get his boss, Ginjer Buchanan, on board. And we got a two-book offer for less money per book than Charlaine was getting at St. Martin’s. Not the most auspicious sale for a book Charlaine had hoped would take her out of the midlist.</p><p>But we got a new title you might all be familiar with. <a href="https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/dead-until-dark/59519" target="_blank">DEAD UNTIL DARK</a>. We got a great cover. And lo and behold, and exactly as I had promised in my marketing letter, we got buy-in to the book both from Charlaine’e established mystery readership and from the Laurell K. Hamilton fans, and DEAD UNTIL DARK sold, and sold, and sold, and hasn’t stopped selling for twenty years. So well and so quickly that Charlaine was almost immediately offered a contract for the third and fourth Sookie Stackhouse novels, and then when the second book was published for the fifth, sixth and seventh Sookie novels -- the first time in over twenty years that Charlaine had a big enough advance that she could feel truly comfortable as a writer.</p><p>The rest of the story, you probably know. Or a pretty good chunk of it.</p><p>What you might not know: TRUE BLOOD came out when Alan Ball was early for a dentist appointment, and came across DEAD UNTIL DARK while browsing the shelves of a nearby Barnes & Noble.</p><p>Charlaine’s one of the very few authors to have not one, or not two, but three different series make it to television. (So far…) I sometimes feel like a bystander to her success, but not when it comes to the <a href="https://www.hallmarkmoviesandmysteries.com/aurora-teagarden-movies" target="_blank">Aurora Teagarden series on Hallmark</a>. Just like at St. Martin’s, I advocated for the series that had been around a time or two (the creator of Simon & Simon was going to write a pilot for CBS in the 1990s, before a management shuffle left the project orphaned even before the contract was finalized), and the book-to-film agents at APA, Debbie Deuble Hill and Steve Fisher, took my words to heart, and found producer Jim Head, who packaged things for Hallmark. The 15th Hallmark movie is wrapping up production right about now.</p><p>There are so many instances where fortune has played a major role in Charlaine’s success, but it’s of no small import that she’s forever displayed great courage in directing her career. She put Aurora Teagarden aside to launch the Lily Bard books. She killed off Aurora’s husband. She stopped writing Lilly Bard novels when she felt she’d ran out of things to say. She put an end to the Sookie Stackhouse series, and went on to start two more, the Midnight Texas and Gunnie Rose novels. She took a big gamble on starting the Sookie books. </p><p>It’s only with the passage of time that I’ve come to truly appreciate how fortunate I’ve been to work with Charlaine. My agency has in many ways grown along with her, with some high stakes discussions that were nerve-wracking at the time because I’d never done them before, but as I’ve done them more and more have realized that they could have been even more fraught. </p><p>You don’t get to be a Grand Master without winning the respect of your peers. When you’ve been told a thousand times, as Charlaine has, that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person, it can seem a little artificial, but this award is the moment when you realize it’s entirely true.</p><p>Charlaine’s been loyal. For all her success, you can still go to a convention and see her hanging out with a lot of the same people today as she did thirty years ago, only the surrounding crowd has gotten so much larger. I’ve been blessed to get to work with other authors like Toni L P Kelner and Elaine Viets in no small part because of Charlaine’s good word.</p><p>Charlaine’s been there for her family, and they’ve been there for her. </p><p>And all along the way, I’ve simply known how lucky I’ve been to be in the Charlaine Harris business. In the mid and late 1990s, I wasn’t prosperous, not by a long shot, but finding the money to be in DC for Malice Domestic weekend was always important to me. I wanted to be there for Charlaine. I’ve always known.</p><p>I consider the Grand Master honors to be the most significant a genre author has a decent chance of receiving. The Nobel and Pulitzer don’t often get awarded to cozy mysteries or fantasies. You can leave any given Bouchercon with any of three different awards, or collect a Hugo and Nebula and World Fantasy withiin the space of a few months. I don’t know in my career if I’ll get to have another Grand Master. There are but a handful from the major writer’s organizations in a year.</p><p>I’m so grateful to the Mystery Writers of America for awarding Charlaine Harris a 2021 Grand Master honor, and for recognizing not just what she’s done, but who she is is. And even more to the point, I’m honored that I’ve gotten to hang out with Charlaine for thirty one years and counting -- to go to the Real Murders club with Aurora Teagarden, working out at Body Time with Lily Bard, getting creeped out by Manfred, checking into the hotel at Midnight Crossroads, wandering across the dangerous landscape of Texoma. Being there as Sookie helps Hunter to make his way into the world, and as Anne DeWitt comes to the aid of her charges. And always, Bobo Winthrop. And always, always, Grand.</p>The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-27321212080146520712020-11-19T20:22:00.002-05:002020-11-19T22:38:29.062-05:00On Doing Better...<p> One of the great joys of Fantasy novels is the opportunity to experience the way characters evolve and grow, and to see that process demonstrated through the choices they make. The characters we love best are those whose sense of personal responsibility expands ever outward as they recognize their own power to effect change in the world – to aid someone in distress, to right wrongs. </p><p>We love this journey, in part, because it reflects our best hopes for ourselves. Most of us know that too often we narrow our own sense of responsibility, rationalizing that we are limited in what we can or even should do in our lives to help others when they need us. We call it being realistic or practical. Usually, it is an excuse for cowardice.</p><p>I’ve been thinking a lot about the limits of my own sense of responsibility in the context of my reflections on a moment where I failed to act when I should have.</p><p>As some of you reading this already know, in 2009 I hosted a JABberwocky dinner at a World Fantasy Convention in San Jose. At that dinner, a friend and valued colleague, Janci Patterson, was subjected to unwanted and unacceptable behavior by another guest at that dinner, which made her deeply uncomfortable. </p><p>I did nothing but watch as one of my authors made comments that made her feel awful at an event that I put on.</p><p>I wish I could precisely reconstruct my thinking on that night. Why didn’t I intervene? It wasn’t that I couldn’t empathize. From early in life I had plenty of personal experience -- the harshness of middle school or the awkward high school parties -- with the pain and discomfort that can be caused by other people’s bad behavior. </p><p>On that night in San Jose I should have known how wrong this thing I was witnessing was. And yet I did nothing to stop it. </p><p>I have no clear answer for why I made that bad choice except to say that somehow I determined it was not my responsibility. </p><p>And, in doing so, I failed a crucial test. </p><p>I have apologized to Janci for my failure. But no apology is sufficient unless it is coupled with an honest effort to change.</p><p>So that is what I am committing to in writing this. I have made a promise to myself and to any who read this that I will expand my sense of responsibility, as I hope we have all learned to do over the past year or two. </p><p>I don’t expect that doing so will be easy. But that is what taking responsibility means and that is what I pledge myself to do. It is part of what I believe I owe to Janci and, as importantly, to myself in my own efforts to be the kind of person I wish to be. </p>The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-74694013580484165742020-03-01T23:51:00.001-05:002020-03-01T23:51:48.148-05:00Corpus ChristiOne of the Oscar nominees for International Film, and quite wonderful. Like, even if I hadn't known Parasite was going to win the actual Best Picture prize, I'd have been rooting for Corpus Christi three weeks ago had I caught up with it before the Oscar ceremony. <br />
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If you're going to do a melodrama, why not go all in!<br />
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Start with a lead character who's getting parole from a violet juvie prison to work at a saw mill out in the countryside. Only, the parole thing -- they haven't made any arrangements for room & board, so have the lead character to to a church to hang out after work.<br />
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Having left the prison swearing to arrive sober at the saw mill, have him go a wild night before bender and take a priest's collared shirt from one of the other partiers. Have him joke with an attractive teenage girl at the church, end up taking out the shirt to back up his joking boast about being a priest, and then Dear Evan Hansen style the deception just keeps going and going.<br />
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Not only is there no arrangement for room & board, there's no attendance check that he's actually at the saw mill.<br />
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Oh, also, a local priest who needs to head out of town on the down low for some medical tests/treatment and doesn't want any of his loyal parishioners to know.<br />
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The town bulletin board has tacked onto it the faces of six local kids who died in a car accident several months ago. All in one car, and crashed into (or did they crash into) by the car of a man whose wife is on the outskirts of town in more ways than one.<br />
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You've got love, religion, power struggles, town secrets -- all sorts of stuff, and I'm kind of making fun of it because the movie piles it on, piles it on some more, and then manages to pile even more on when you think the movie should already be falling over from the weight of all that melodrama.<br />
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But the movie plays all of this for real pathos, asks real questions about mercy, power, justice, the day-to-day uncertainties of human existence, about compassion and rehabilitation and faith. Or is it the other way around? Is the film ultimately mocking all of the important stuff by surrounding it with volcanic preposterousness?<br />
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In the lead role, Bartosz Bielenia is absolutely brilliant, and very much a name and face to watch. And what a face. I don't know what his English is like, but on looks and charisma and expressiveness Bielenia's ready to step into stardom. He manages to pull this off, up until an ending that would have worked just as well in a slightly more Grand Guignol version of First Reformed, and an epilogue that takes the movie -- well, I've absolutely no idea where the lead character's gong at the end, and strangely, I don't care.<br />
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Highly recommended.<br />
<br />The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-31319322440990101792020-02-09T19:27:00.003-05:002020-02-10T10:46:34.419-05:00Oscars 2020The Morning After... <br />
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If you’ve watched Tootsie, the very long acceptance speech from Renée Zellweger ultimately started to remind me of Michael Dorsey’s when he wants to reveal the truth about his identity and knows where he’s going but is very lost in getting there. As Renée is the co-star of Jerry Maguire, which is one of my all-time favorite movies, and gave a performance in Judy that shows her in utter command at very moment of a character who is clearly Judy in every moment and maybe Judy Garland in very few of them, and as she has had a career with quite a few bounces to it, some of them off the table and rolling around on the floor for a few years, I am deeply happy for her win. And as someone who was raving up every acting award, I sure do wish her speech had been less improvisational than Michael Dorsey’s.<br />
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Joaquin Phoenix’s speech also rambled. I’m not entirely sure what he was saying though I heard every word of it, and am intrigued the morning after to discover that it is a paean to veganism. I might have interpreted it differently. I was most interested to see if or how he would deal with the tragedy of his brother, another deeply gifted actor, and the quote from River Phoenix’s poem was a moment of few words and few details that said quite a bit.<br />
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Whether or not they wish to admit it, many of the people who write about Hollywood and the Oscars were strangely blind to the inevitability of the Parasite win for Best Picture. Many other times, we’re told how important the actor’s branch is, how it’s the largest in the Academy, how hard it is to win for Best Picture without having nominations for the actors, or for movies that are all about CGI and robots and spaceships to win. And yet, I saw very few columns looking at the tea leaves of the standing ovation that the cast of Parasite received at the SAG Awards. To be sure, that standing “O” had to battle the fact that there were no acting nominations for Parasite, but let’s give a think to something. How easy is is to judge acting by people speaking in another language? In a movie with a fairly large cast with good-size roles for half a dozen people and substantial above-the-title roles for none of them? And none of them people you’ve heard of. And no lack of really good roles for people we have heard of them. I do think it’s legitimate to ask which of the people who were nominated should have been kicked off the ballot in favor of the other thing you wish were nominated instead. All of this in mind, that standing ovation at SAG said a clear something about an enthusiasm for the movie which might not have easily manifested in individual nods. <br />
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And let’s call that a wrap,.<br />
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11:56 PM I am going to do a final wrap in the morning; have to start back to NYC bright and early and need my beauty sleep. But lots to talk about and more TK.<br />
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11:22 PM The Best Actor/Actress wins as expected, but those speeches. Well, more to come. Best Picture is at hand.<br />
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11:22 PM Wow, a half hour since my last post. Caught up in the magic as it all heads into the home stretch.<br />
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10:50 PM Contrast — from a new voice in scoring for Hollywood and only third female to win in a category to Elton John and Bernie Taupin winning after what Elton tells me in his acceptance speech is 53 years of banging the keys around together. Based on the performances tonight I’d give this one to the song from Harriet, but based on the work of a lifetime this one’s up there with Brad Pitt getting his first Oscar for acting a few decades into an acting career.<br />
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10:47 PM I’d also like to get on my soapbox about Marvel movies. On the whole, DC movies have better scores from better composers, and I simply don’t believe Marvel cares on the whole very much about the quality of the music in their movies. The score for Joker was good, very good. How many Marvel movies other than Black Panther, where Ryan Coogler was able to push thru a lot of stuff that Marvel movies aren’t known for, have anything better than ninety minutes of bombast. So, another happy-making moment for me as Hildur Gudnadottir takes home a prize.<br />
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10:45 PM & Joker joins the list of movies to have won at least one Oscar this evening.<br />
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10:43 PM <span style="border: 0px; color: #494949; font-family: "ddg_proximanova" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_0" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_1" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_2" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_3" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_4" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_5" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_6" , "proxima nova" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "segoe ui" , "nimbus sans l" , "liberation sans" , "open sans" , "freesans" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; font-stretch: inherit; font-weight: 600; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Hildur</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: "ddg_proximanova" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_0" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_1" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_2" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_3" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_4" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_5" , "ddg_proximanova_ui_6" , "proxima nova" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "segoe ui" , "nimbus sans l" , "liberation sans" , "open sans" , "freesans" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px;"> Guðnadóttir is only the third woman to win in the Best Score category</span><br />
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10:42 PM And it was a great intro with Brie Larson, Gal Gadot and Sigourney Weaver on stage. And Joker soundtrack from a female composer, as they are slowly starting to make inroads into what has been a guy’s world of movie music composition.<br />
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10:41 PM More musical moments. I’d very much like for John Williams to win one more Academy Award. There might not be many more chances. But I also very much like the music for Marriage Story.<br />
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10:36 PM The music of the moment. A good performance by Elton John. A good night for Tiny Dancer, which appears in the musical moments montage and then in the very effective ABC promo for American Idol. <br />
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10:20 PM So much harder than twenty years ago to have a grand sweep of the Oscars. The award for Bombshell to go along with wins for Once Upon a Time..., Ford vs Ferrari — the people who vote take it seriously. There are the consultation prize wins for Screenplay or a supporting role sometimes, but it’s a good job of looking film-by-film at where the best in the business are dong their best.<br />
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10:15 PM I would not complain if every Oscar song performance were as good as the number from Harriet. <br />
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10:00 PM “I am Spartacus.” Tom Hanks did a great job with the promo for the Academy museum, and I loved the roast at Colin Jost getting snuck into it. The pictures I’ve seen of the 1000 seat movie theatre in the past week as they did a press tour — another of the occasional reasons to which I lived in LA. As a movie lover, being there with that theatre, being able to see movies at The Dome, at The Village, the one thing LA still has which we don’t have in New York is great single screen theatres, and the Academy museum is going to have a theatre that vastly out-punches the Moving Image or the Walter Reade or the Metrograph.<br />
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9:57 PM Amaaaaaazing. Ford vs Ferrari wins for Film Editing. It is so difficult to get me to sit in a movie theatre for two-and-a-half hours without once looking at my watch. The importance of film editing to that accomplishment cannot be understated. I am so happy to see that recognized with a gold statuette. I may have to look for a theatre that’s still screening this one, and give it a second viewing. <br />
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9:53 PM I’d have preferred the Cinematography award go to Once Upon a Time, but while I don’t much like 1917 I can’t complain to have Roger Deakins taking the award. I did like the presenter patter before this award. This is one of the categories where I didn’t see all the nominees, because, The Lighthouse. The Lighthouse won some awards yesterday at the Spirit Awards.<br />
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9:42 PM Was the segue planned? From the explosion of music and sound with Eminem to the sound awards? I’d love if both 1917 and Ford vs Ferrari are getting token awards here - 1917 because it winning just a token award would be just great, and Ford vs. Ferrari because it’s a great piece of audience pleasing filmmaking, and as Donald Sylvester said, James Mangold is worthy of being nominated for Best Director. Ford vs. Ferrari is a master class in directing. The editing - two-and-a-half hours and I never looked at my watch. The sound, The photography. The acting, none of which was recognized. So darn tootin’ happy that the movie can forever announce itself as an Oscar winner.<br />
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9:37 PM The montage of great musical moments was just great. Those are classic moments all, and also frightening ones to see Kevin Costner looking so much younger, Kevin Bacon looking so much younger, Leonardo DiCaprio looking so much younger. I know Titanic is twenty years ago, but I guess, yeah, once upon a time he looked that young, even younger in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. And then Eminem just knocked it out of the park. After a batch of cringeworthy musical moments in this evening’s Oscars, the show hit it out of the park here. Just amazing.<br />
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9:36 PM Applause Worthy! Standing O from my hotel room.<br />
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9:24 PM But just to say you could have filled the entire list of acting winners with people from Marriage Story, with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson to go along with Laura. So many good supporting men that I’m not sure Ray Liotta or Alan Alda quite fit into the conversation but they’re darn good in Marriage Story. Wallace Shawn is better with a few minutes on screen in Marriage Story than a lot of other acting highlight reels. It’s an amazing cast top to bottom, given great lines to speak, sensitively directed, backed up with a wonderful under score from Randy Newman. It’s a great movie. So glad to see Laura Dern. And Noah Baumbach has done this twice. Fifteen years ago with The Squid and the Whale, which is also a bitterly brilliantly scripted movie with a cast that excels in every role.<br />
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9:22 PM My choice for Best Picture is Marriage Story, so I’m happy that Laura Dern got the Oscar she was expected to win for Best Supporting Actress, and she gave a helluva acceptance speech. For me the nicest moment of the evening so far, and she seemed to touch a lot of people in the room.<br />
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9:16 PM reviews of the documentary shorts from Peter Debruge ‘2020 Oscar-Nominated Short Films: Documentary’ Review – Variety<br />
<a href="https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/2020-oscar-nominated-short-films-documentary-review-1203497465/maz/">https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/2020-oscar-nominated-short-films-documentary-review-1203497465/maz/</a><br />
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9:13 PM Netflix may not have a Best Picture this year, but has now proven it can get a win in the Best Feature Documentary category. <br />
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9:01 PM I’d have loved seeing the Costume Design award go to Once Upon a Time, too, but I think it was inevitable that Little Women wears going to win something, and this might be the best award it’s nominated for to accomplish that necessary.<br />
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9:00 PM But an hour in and already two bathroom break moments. I’m enjoying these presenter comments a lot more than the people blogging at The NY Times are. <br />
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8:57 PM Once they finally got round to presenting the Production Design award... there were a lot of good choices here, but Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood is the best. At least on the first time through the movie I lapped up every moment of the loving recreation of the past, from Hollywood Blvd. to the Bruin and Village in Westwood to the menace of the Spahn Ranch. That by itself not enough to make the movie hold up as well as I’d have liked on a second viewing, but it’s a brilliant job of finding the past in our present. Congratulations!<br />
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8:55PM Is there an award for Worst Patter by Presenters in an Oscar Ceremony?<br />
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8:46 PM Jo Jo Rabbit: The rare movie that I can’t say if I liked it or not. It was weird and different and tonally all over the place, and I loved all of that and I’m not sure it added up to anything more than confusion, and I’m not sure that it doesn’t.<br />
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8:42 PM I’d like to thank Bakeshop for supplying my Oscar desserts this year. But if the red velvet cupcake isn’t as good as R R Virdi told me his was...<br />
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8:41 PM The original screenplay category was not certain in a lot of the preview pieces. The question is whether Parasite’s victory is a consolation prize or an augur of things to come.<br />
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8:39 PM Keanu looks amazing.<br />
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8:33 PM Any chance next year that @johnpicacio could produce the Oscars?<br />
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8:31 PM I wish I needed to go the bathroom, because the Oscars have put in a bathroom break just thirty minutes into the festivities. <br />
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8:30 PM Now we are having a musical performance with no discernible reason for existing.<br />
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8:27 PM In a victory for writers everywhere who are deep into a series, Toy Story 4 just won an Academy Award. This movie was the little side story that becomes the novella that’s published as Book 7B of your long-running series. But in sf/fantasy we don’t generally give those things awards. <br />
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8:20 PM: The M&Ms commercial was to M&M commercials what the Holiday Mint M&Ms is to M&Ms. Sublime. The opening number and the “monologue” are like bringing rice cakes to your seat from the concession stand.<br />
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8:16 PM: Yay, Brad Pitt! Watch the Spahn Ranch sequence in Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood. It’s a master class in 5,329 things in making movies, and Brad Pitt is top among them.<br />
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8:14 PM A better idea is having a medley of clips for the acting nominees, rather than a clip accompanying the reading of each nominee’s name.<br />
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8:13 PM. In theory the pairing of Chris Rock and Steve Martin is a great idea. In practice I’m with Dave Itzkoff on The NY Times blog: <span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: , , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">That was an excellent argument to never have hosts again.</span><br />
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8:05 PM This mighty have been one of those numbers that plays better in the room than on the TV, but it’s done nothing for me on my TV.<br />
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8:03 PM Is it too early to say I’d rather be watching the cast of Cats performing a number?<br />
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7:53 PM American Factory was produced by the Obamas. If a Democrat wins in November, both President and Senate, I hope the new administration will pass legislation that was talked about twelve years ago which Obama decided against pushing. It’s called card check. You get 50% of the employees to sign a card asking for a union, you get a union without an election. Imagine if employers have to live in deathly fear at all times that a majority of employees will sign a card. Imagine it! Instead, we have a system where the cards have to be followed by an election, giving the employers more time to fire the union organizers, to hold mandatory meetings, to spend two months being nice and giving raises while making threat after threat after threat. A lot of what goes on in those two months is technically illegal, but it’s a lot cheaper to rehire an illegally fired employee with back pay two years later than to lose a union vote. With card check, you have to do better by your employees all day every day. I consider the failure of the Obama administration to push card check to be one of its biggest failings. You want to know the legislation to push for when you’re new —- the legislation that the opposition is spending the most time telling you is too divisive or too something something something.<br />
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7:42 PM I thought the year in movies was just fine. But whereas many years recently have had an abundance of good documentaries, this year was lacking. I didn’t see three of the nominated movies, and I didn’t like the two that I did see. Honeyland has beautiful photography, but held me at a distance for reasons I can’t 100% understand. Part of it, I believe, is that the documentarians were so lucky to hit on just the right year to make this movie for interesting happenings, and I might have liked more the version of the movie that was just about the main character of it without the miraculous conflict that animates the actual version. American Factory is a sad and depressing story about the state of unionization in America with fired employees and lying employers, and it doesn’t require or much benefit from or would be much different without the extra bonus that the employer in this instance is a Chinese-owned company. Why not have the same movie about a unionization drive with a US owned company, so many of which do all of the same things pulled from the tool kit of the same law firms that specializing in helping employers to squelch unionization drives.<br />
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7:39 PM As is often the case, I am not in thrall of the movies that are most buzzed about for Best Picture. Parasite was, like, fine. But it’s so far short of what the critical establishment says it is, and I’m so not into it. But I’d rather Parasite win than 1917, which takes a gimmick that isn’t terribly new to make a been-there-done-that movie. My own Top Ten list can be found <a href="https://letterboxd.com/jabbermaster/list/top-ten-of-2019/" target="_blank">here</a>, and includes only four of the movies on the slate of nine Oscar nominees.<br />
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7:27 PM Settling in for a half hour of pre-Oscar chit-chat!The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-63973746029490935632020-01-21T20:27:00.002-05:002020-01-21T20:27:31.596-05:00Boskone 57 - Boskone 2020 - This Year's BoskoneI've said this a lot, but it bears repeating:<div>
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When I was a teenager, the whole chain of events that ultimately led to me becoming JABbermaster started out when I was staying at the Boskone hotel, by chance and serendipity and coincidence. So I'm happy that I've been able to go to Boskone for near on each of the past fifteen years now, participate on the program, and pay it forward. And even happier that I have several clients as a direct result of my attendance at Boskone.</div>
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And a quick thank you to the people on the Program Committee for Boskone. The final schedule email they sent is 100% ready just to paste as is. It doesn't have people's email addresses hiding in it or other things needing to be edited out. So that's pasted below, exactly as I got it. </div>
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I hope I'll get to see some of you, and the Kaffeeklatsch I have is always a great opportunity for one-on-one in an intimate setting. As always, I have a great bunch of co-panelists. One of my panels I even get to share with two of my clients. This is a good convention for people who love reading sf/f, with a lot of people who come back year after year. Join the jamboree, and I'll hope to see you there.</div>
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JOSHUA</div>
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BOSKONE 57, the 2020 BOSKONE -- Scheduling the JABbermaster</div>
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Editing from Agent, to Editor, to Publisher</div>
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Format: Panel</div>
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15 Feb 2020, Saturday 14:00 - 14:50, Marina 2 (Westin)</div>
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Writing is only half the work when crafting a story, novel, or article. Once the words are on the page, what happens next? Our panel discusses the review, revision, rewriting, and more needed at each stage of the process before the finished piece lands in the hands of a reader.</div>
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Melanie Meadors (M), Joshua Bilmes (JABberwocky Literary Agency), Beth Meacham, John Kessel (North Carolina State University), James D. Macdonald</div>
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Troubleshooting Troublesome Manuscripts</div>
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Format: Panel</div>
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15 Feb 2020, Saturday 15:00 - 15:50, Marina 2 (Westin)</div>
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Our intrepid authors come together to share tips and tricks for tackling the most notorious issues that arise when writing and editing their work. Find out how to fix hidden plot holes, dangling loose ends, and the endings that just won't end!</div>
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Joshua Bilmes (JABberwocky Literary Agency) (M), Matthew Warner (Deena Warner Design LLC), Steve Miller (Liaden Universe), Sharon Lee (Liaden Universe), Tabitha Lord (Association of RI Authors)</div>
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Kaffeeklatsch: Joshua Bilmes</div>
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Format: Kaffeeklatsch</div>
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15 Feb 2020, Saturday 18:00 - 18:50, Galleria - Kaffeeklatsch 2 (Westin)</div>
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Joshua Bilmes (JABberwocky Literary Agency)</div>
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Game to Fiction/Fiction to Game</div>
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Format: Panel</div>
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15 Feb 2020, Saturday 20:00 - 20:50, Burroughs (Westin)</div>
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Game designers have to come up with an interesting world and compelling story in much the same way as authors who write fiction. So, what does it take to adapt a game to fiction or fiction to game? What new opportunities does the process create? What obstacles need to be overcome?</div>
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Gregory Wilson, Dan Moren (M), Joshua Bilmes (JABberwocky Literary Agency), Auston Habershaw, Mur Lafferty</div>
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Killing Characters</div>
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Format: Panel</div>
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16 Feb 2020, Sunday 10:00 - 10:50, Burroughs (Westin)</div>
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Why would you create wonderful characters and then ruthlessly kill them? Perhaps it inspires a hero to action, or it makes the narrative more poignant. It might be that you’re tired of these characters or their story arcs have reached their ends. At any rate, what are some of the more creative ways (Reichenbach Falls?) of killing characters? What are the problems relating to creating an interesting death? Major and/or minor characters? Are there rules? Is it moral? Fair? Does the writer have a responsibility to the readership? (And what are the repercussions of this?) Should you plan for a possible (or surprise) comeback?</div>
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Teresa Nielsen Hayden (Tor Books), Cadwell Turnbull, Joshua Bilmes (JABberwocky Literary Agency), John Chu (M), KT Bryski</div>
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Play Mistborn!</div>
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Format: Gaming</div>
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16 Feb 2020, Sunday 11:00 - 12:50, Harbor III - Gaming (Westin)</div>
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Game on! A semi-cooperative resource-management game, Mistborn: House War is set during the events of Mistborn: The Final Empire, the first novel in the bestselling fantasy series by Brandon Sanderson. Join Brandon's agent Joshua Bilmes for a special demo of this fun new board game!</div>
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Joshua Bilmes (JABberwocky Literary Agency)</div>
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The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-26480514998578181752020-01-21T20:18:00.000-05:002020-01-21T20:18:36.512-05:00Struggles!Here's a letter I sent to several reporters at the Washington Post about the, um, "struggles" of the Trump administration to tell the truth. Curious when or if anyone will respond...<br />
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Dear Messrs. Rucker, Hudson, Harris and Dawsey:<br />
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I am writing about a line from an article of yours from last Tuesday’s paper which i find deeply troubling, which is "The result is a credibility crisis for an administration that has long struggled to communicate factual information to the public.”<br />
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Your colleague Margaret Sullivan, whom I am cc’ing, writes frequently about the media’s need to do a better job covering the Trump administration, and this sentence is a poster child for falling short of the mark. <br />
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I understand the constraints journalists operate under. I know, as an example, that there are strong legal reasons to use the words “alleged killer” prior to the plea or guilty verdict. Even when it’s obvious.<br />
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But I do not believe that the circumlocution you used in last Tuesday’s article fits under any of those constraints. You’ve all spent three years documenting the constant lies put out by the Trump administration. The Post’s fact checker has documented over 15,000 lies. It stated on the first day of the administration with the press conference about the crowd size, and continues day in and day out.<br />
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If your sports department is struggling to get a late-ending game score into the first edition, it means The Post is covering the game and writing an article on a tight deadline. If any of you are said on a given day to be struggling to get to a meeting on a bad day for the Red Line, it means you’re on the way to the meeting and not sitting at home. One could say that Margaret Sullivan is struggling to get the media to cover the Trump administration more firmly; see today’s column. I need to first submit a book by a client in order for it to be said that I am struggling to sell it. One can simply not say in any factual way within the customary meaning of English idiom that the Trump administration struggles to put out factual information. I believe “not consistently communicated factual information to the public” might have been consistent with the actual facts and still have struck me as being mild, but the phraseology you chose is inaccurate and wrong.<br />
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Here’s hoping that your response isn’t to disclaim responsibility by each of you saying you hardly knew the other guys in the by-line, the fact that you just shared a by-line and work at the same paper and probably have been photographed together on multiple occasions to the contrary. <br />
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Sincerely,<br />
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Joshua Bilmes,The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-62369028087301389352019-02-24T19:51:00.003-05:002019-02-25T00:06:45.469-05:00Oscars 2019<div>
12:05 AM - And we'll call this a wrap for the Live Blog. I may have more to say about some of my favorite movies of 2018, but for the Oscars, it's a night. I know I've done better jobs on the live blog than this year, but since they eliminated around a half hour of Stuff, they eliminated a lot of the down time when I could pay less attention to what was on the screen, and more to my typing. I'll take that trade-off any day. <br />
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12:03 AM -- Best Actress. Prior to going for a repeat viewing of The Wife a couple of weeks ago, I don't believe I've ever gone back twice to a movie just to see a brilliant performance by an actress. I am deeply disappointed for Glenn Close. I might have a hard time separating out Olivia Colman's performance from my overall dislike for the movie she was in. But even allowing for that, I can't see Colman's performance as better than the third or fourth best in the category, because Melissa McCarthy is a knockout in Can You Ever Forgive Me, and as up and down as A Star Is Born is, it would almost certainly be down-er with anyone else in the lead role.<br />
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11:58 PM - Talking more about the Adapted Screenplay category. I didn't see Beale Street, but there are arguments to be made for all four of the nominees that I did see, while the Original category is full of weak links in stronger movies. Can You Ever Forgive Me takes an assortment of unlikeable characters -- even Jane Curtin as the literary agent isn't the most likable literary agent, which is scandalous, and makes us love their faults and imperfections. A Star is Born gets progressively weaker as it goes along, but at its best it takes a story that's decades old and makes it feel utterly contemporary, and it tackles issues of class differences that aren't required from the original movies. But the Screenplay category, both for awards and nominations, is often where the consolation prize is given, and it's a great place to give Spike Lee his first competitive Oscar. I'd put Spike Lee's career against that of Martin Scorsese. Neither has many Oscar statuettes. Both have done films that are highly variable in quality. I'm glad to see him with an Oscar to put on his shelf. <br />
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11:45 PM - I'm more upset with Green Book winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay than I am about its winning Best Picture. The Oscars will be the Oscars, and if anything they've gotten better and less Oscar-y over the course of my lifetime. Last night I saw Goodfellas at the Loews Jersey, with around 300 people in attendance to see a film that's some thirty years old. It lost Best Picture to Dances With Wolves. I doubt the Loews Jersey would program Dances With Wolves. If it did, I doubt 300 people would show up to see it. But the most notable thing about that year's Oscars isn't that Dances With Wolves beat Goodfellas for Best Picture. The more enduring film loses often, and if you take a look at the Amazon rankings, it ain't like there aren't people still interested to buy a copy of the movie. What's noticeable is how Dances With Wolves swept so many of the smaller award, and once upon a time the Best Picture always racked up Oscar after Oscar. Now, it's much more common to see the spreading around of the statuettes as we saw this year with Roma, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book and Black Panther all taking home multiples. But for Screenplay? The remake of Driving Miss Daisy wins for Screenplay? And yet, even there, my disappointment is tempered. This year's Adopted Screenplay category was full of contenders. The Original Screenplay category? Well, The Favourite wasn't winning. Vice? First Reformed and Roma are both better movies than they are screenplays. Roma's strengths weren't in its underwritten screenplay; I don't know that even the movie's fans would say the screenplay was its strength. And First Reformed is similarly flawed to Roma. There's just too much in both screenplays that we don't see on the screen. Without Ethan Hawke and the passion that the screenwriter also brought to his direction, First Reformed is a clumsy mess that flips its lid as it goes over the top in the ending, and Roma is full of contrivances and the under-explained in its screenplay. But. Still. Green Book, for Screenplay?<br />
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11:32 PM - Returning to earlier items... So I joked about Ludwig Goransson's ago, but quite well-meaningly. He's 34 years old. And winning an Oscar for Best Score at the age of 34 -- well, that takes some work. You don't get to score very many motion pictures fresh out of college. You've got to become known, apprentice, gain trust, have reputation enough that the music branch of the Academy will think of you as a possible Oscar winner. If we looked back over 90 years of Academy Awards, how many winners will we find who were younger? It's also a tribute to Ryan Coogler, to spot the talent in someone he meets at college, and have the confidence to give that person work. It's easy enough in to do in his debut movie Fruitvale Station, but then you have to be willing to stick with your man when the studio starts to say "Superhero movie, we need to have the score by the guy who does the loud obnoxious Superhero Movie music." Also worth noticing is the delicacy with which Goransson's scored the quite different Creed and Creed II, where the score requires a different touch, including playing the obligatory homage to Bill Conti's original and enduring themes from the first Rocky movie, which Goransson always does with skill and grace. Now, if Goransson would be willing to study just a little bit more at the knee of a John Williams and get even better, because Williams is getting on, Michael Giacchino isn't doing as much as he could be doing to assume the mantle, and we need people for that role.<br />
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11:15 PM - Green Book. Well!<br />
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11:03: We don’t always get what we want in life. Green Book won an Oscar for its screenplay, and Glenn Close did not win for The Wife. I shall have more to say on these things.<br />
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10:50 PM - Rami! I believe Bohemian Rhapsody is currently in the lead with four Oscars. Very good Nike ad. Roma is the only movie with a shot at overtaking Rhapsody.<br />
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10:45 PM - Already at Best Actor?!?!?<br />
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10:36 PM - after a few minutes of music from E.T., the bulk came from Superman: The Movie, the music over the funeral of Jonathan Kent, which brings tears to my eyes as an adult when I am lucky enough to see the film on the big screen. Fitting selection in a year when Margot Kidder is amongst thise whose lives were commemorated.<br />
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10:25 PM - Ludwig Goransson said “twelve years ago” in his acceptance speech. He doesn’t look old enough! Since I didn’t like any of the score nominees, I opted to root for Black Panther in this category, and am glad to have another win for the movie.<br />
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10:20: The Good. The Bad. And The Ugly. And having Green Book win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay is definitely in the Bad column. <br />
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10:09 PM - I quite liked how they non-introduced Shallow, just had Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper come on up and sing. Would have been better if theybalso used the occasion to reenact that famous piano number from The Fabulous Baker Boys, but, OK. And how have so many people been doing the “Star Was Robbed” thing. It’s a great first third of a movie that gets worse with each trimester. Really! It isn’t a great whole movie.<br />
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10:05 PM - quoting @kylebuchanan “<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Only 3 black women have won Oscars for anything other than acting. 2 of them just happened tonight.”</span><br />
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9:57 PM - First Man. Won an Oscar.<br />
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9:53 PM - American Idol ad is the first standout in a while. The cell service providers are dragging the whole thing down.<br />
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9:50 PM - Whatever happens with Roma as Best Picture, Netflix has three Oscars in hand tonight.<br />
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9:48 PM - “I can’t believe a film about menstruation just won an Oscar.”<br />
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9:47PM -first time presenters have done two awards?<br />
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9:38 PM - Not so happy about Supporting Actor category. The winning performance could have been in the Best Actor category, and I just have a lot harder a time seeing Richard Grant or Adam Driver being swapped out for actors as good or better, while with Mahershala Ali, I can easily plug in three or five. Richard E. Grant first came to attention in the late 1980s with Withnail and I, which I didn’t see, and How To Get Ahead in Advertising, which sadly I did, an overpraised art film but Grant made an impression. He resonated more positively in Steve Martin’s LA Story, and over the past thirty years he’s been in everything and anything, genre-wise, that you could be in, a lesser known actor from the Mchael Caine school choice philosophy. But there’s nothing in that thirty years to hint at the offbeat power and brilliance of his performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me,, which is a tone perfect tone poem about a deeply imperfect man playing off an ewually imperfect character played by Melissa McCarthy. I reckon being nominated and getting to play the award circuit is for a Richard E. Grant somewhat its own reward, but an Oscar would be a bigger one. And Adam Driver is an actor of deep subtlety as seen also in movies like Paterson. So, here, two performances I much preferred to the one that won.<br />
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9:26 PM - from David Itzkoff in the New York Times — <span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 16px;">Trevor Noah reflects on his own life as “a young boy growing up in Wakanda,” and recounts the many people in his life who approach him by saying “Wakanda Forever.” “Even backstage, Mel Gibson came up to me like, ‘Wakanda forever.’ He said another word after that but the Wakanda part was nice.”</span><br />
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9:16 PM - I could’ve filled out half of a Ten Best list just with documentaries. Bathtubs Over Broadway, Three Identical Strangers. Science Fair. Filmworker. In addition to the the two I placed on.</div>
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9:12 PM - When Justin Chang says it for you, <a href="https://twitter.com/justincchang/status/1099853879921930241?s=21" target="_blank">quote Justin</a>: <span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Foreign-language film winner Alfonso Cuarón, making the second of likely three appearances on stage tonight, has a lot of cinephilia to go around: This time he tips his hat to CITIZEN KANE, JAWS, THE GODFATHER and BREATHLESS and quotes Claude Chabrol.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><br />
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9:09 PM - Black Panther didn’t make my Ten Best, but I find myself pulling for it because the films I liked more are often not contending. And it is the work of an actual filmmaker in Ryan Coogler who tried jard to bend the superhero movie to his vision, and crafted a film that wears the influence of other great films on jts sleeve, rather than other superhero movies. I am pretty much dead to the world of superhero movies at this point in time, but this has more staying power with me.<br />
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9:05 PM - Geek note, Ruth Carter was the Costume Designer for Joss Whedon’s Serenity.<br />
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8:53. Serena!<br />
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8:44 PM - Moving along so briskly, not a lot of dead time for blogging!<br />
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8:37 PM - Walmart ain’t my favorite place. McDonalds neither. But they step up to the plate with their Oscar ads.<br />
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8:27 PM - the guys are killing it with the tuxes this year😀👍😊😁👍😊<br />
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8:26 PM - Vice is not a good movie. <br />
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8:25 PM - and a great Rolex ad. Google did someg soecialir the Oscars, but seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey abused that way. Yikes! Ugggh!!<br />
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8:21 PM. That was a great Cadillac ad, and then gets followed by a very prosaic Verizon ad.<br />
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8:18 PM - But Free Solo also made my Top Ten, and I wish I had gotten back to see it in IMAX. Missing from the category is Three Identical Strangers. <br />
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8:16PM - What a great category. Minding The Gap, Free Solo, RBG all good. Me go for Minding the Gap.<br />
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8:10 PM - Regina King is favored to win, and Beale Street is the one film all over the awards season that I took a pass on. No dog in this hunt. I couldn’t have done worse seeing Beale Street over The Favourite, which I loathed.<br />
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8:08 PM Sparkly! Love the tux Chadwick Boseman is wearing.<br />
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8:04 PM An Oscar buffet fit fir a Queen</div>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/justincchang/status/1099835759186477056?s=21">https://twitter.com/justincchang/status/1099835759186477056?s=21</a></div>
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7:48PM - Getting ready! Post from when nominations were announced <a href="http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2019/01/oscar-nominations.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://letterboxd.com/jabbermaster/list/best-of-2018/" target="_blank">my Top Ten</a> for last year.The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-61591636693179271712019-01-22T11:20:00.001-05:002019-01-22T11:31:13.952-05:00Oscar Nominations!Most of the films I liked most didn't get anywhere near a nomination for Best Picture. There is 0% overlap between the Academy and <a href="https://letterboxd.com/jabbermaster/list/best-of-2018/" target="_blank">my Ten Best list</a>, and if I get around to posting a "worth mentioning" there might be three from that list. But there are lots of things to be praised in the selections.<br />
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And just to note, I signed up around Thanksgiving for this social media site called <a href="https://letterboxd.com/jabbermaster/" target="_blank">Letterboxd</a> where I am listing every movie I see, and expect to review a good chunk of them.<br />
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Black Panther was one of the best superhero movies in years, but that's a deeply degraded standard since most of them aren't very good at all. But Black Panther is the work of a major filmmaker, who made a superhero movie steeped in influences from major works in the cinematic cannon rather than other superhero movies. Sure!<br />
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BlacKkKlansman is one of Spike Lee's best movies, it boasts great performances, it's timely. Sure!<br />
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Bohemian Rhapsody isn't a good movie, but the last twenty minutes are about as transcendent an experience as I've ever had in a movie theatre, helped by seeing it on a big RPX screen with great sound. And since you can't get directly to the transcendent experience, I've got no problem with the Academy bestowing a Best Picture nomination on the film. Sure!<br />
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The Favourite. WTF. There's a thirty point gap on Rotten Tomatoes between the critic and audience rating. I'm with the audience rating. WTF. WTF. WTF. And with Roma, I can understand and appreciate why the critics are fawning over the film even though I didn't like it all that much. My dislike of Roma veers into the kind of passionate dislike which at least suggests it's gotten under my skin. The Favourite? WTF WTF WTF.<br />
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Green Book: This would be kind of like having a really great slightly modernized version of a 1980s military sf novel come out in 2019, and be nominated for a Hugo Award. It's not a bad movie. I laughed out loud in parts, as did the audience I was with. Again, lots of good performances to go around. The movie's safe and comfortable, but I think not entirely so because there's some squirminess and discomfort in the mens store scene or the country club scene that bring it a little more into today than the same movie might have been thirty years ago. But at the same time, you can't shake from the movie that there are parts of it that seem so thirty years ago. Meh.<br />
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<a href="https://letterboxd.com/jabbermaster/film/roma-2018/1/" target="_blank">Roma</a>: So I didn't like this movie very much. It's so full of all the things those deep within the critical establishment like. Deep meaning. Rich and wonderful black-and-white cinematography. Very auteur. It was pretty much foreordained from its earliest screenings to be an Oscar nominee, but I would have liked a character to care about, a tiny bit of a sense of humor, something that wasn't so fully and self-consciously auteur. Meh.<br />
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A Star is Born: I'll apply the same guidance as I did for Bohemian Rhapsody, only in reverse. The first third of the movie is danged good. It goes steadily downhill, the middle third somewhat worse and the final third I'm thinking really really hard about the Bumblebee puzzle in that weekend's NY Times Magazine. But the good parts are dang good. Sure!<br />
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<a href="https://letterboxd.com/jabbermaster/film/vice-2018/" target="_blank">Vice</a>: No. Not Best Picture material. Nominate it for make-up, nominate it for Christian Bale, but this is not Best Picture material.<br />
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& Moving down the list...<br />
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Actor: Willem Dafoe got a nomination for a movie nobody has seen. I don't need to look at the "Snubs and Surprises" list to know what one of the leading Surprises will be. I would give this to Rami Malek, because how you give a great performance in a bad movie with those teeth leading into one of the most transcendent sequences on film...<br />
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Actress: Glenn Close is impeccably good in The Wife, and it's a movie about an author winning a Nobel Prize for Literature. How can I not root for that? But all the competition is strong.<br />
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Supporting Actor: Hard to choose, We'll toss Mahershala Ali for being in the wrong category. We'll toss Sam Elliott for doing a great job with cliches in a cliche ridden movie. Sam Rockwell is good, but I'm sure there are five other performances as or more deserving. And I still wouldn't be able to choose easily between Adam Driver and Richard E. Grant. But I'll go with Richard E. Grant in Can You Ever Forgive Me, because it's closer to my profession.<br />
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Supporting Actress: Amy Adams. Because The Favourite isn't very good, I didn't like Roma, I won't go see If Beale Street Could Talk. And Amy Adams was great. But whether or not I go and see Beale Street I think Regina King has this. (Why am I not going to see Beale Street: Me no like the overly arty Moonlight full of weird shots of people coming onto the frame out of focus. Unless there's a chance to do this as part of a double feature...)<br />
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Director: Spike Lee. <br />
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Animated: Spider-Verse. More because of how much love it's inspired from people I love, more than because I loved it myself.<br />
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Screenplay: First Reformed in Original. BlacKkKlansman or Can You Ever Forgive Me for Adapted.<br />
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And let's talk about First Reformed. Ethan Hawke is great in it, and the movie has some indelible aspects and images that I won't soon forget. The ending! The ending! But really, the movie is just too damned weird, and the unique and special qualities of the weirdness don't entirely compensate for the fact that the movie is trying to do way too many things at once, with too many important moments happening way too quietly to the point that you wonder if they're motivated at all. The weirdness of the movie, its offputting-ness, is nicely demonstrated by the fact that Willem Dafoe has an Oscar nomination for a movie nobody say, and Ethan Hawke does not. Since a lot of my problems with the movie have to do with its screenplay I hesitate to award it an Oscar in that category, but I feel like the movie deserves an award someplace.<br />
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Cinematography: Cold War and Roma are both fabulous.<br />
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Documentary: We are living in such a great era for documentaries, and Free Solo and Minding the Gap are both wonderful. And even though I liked RBG, I think it would be a disappointment, awarding a perfectly fine documentary for being in the moment when there are other movies which are just plain better.<br />
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Editing: Bohemian Rhapsody. You don't get twenty minutes of transcendent filmmaking at the end without editing the heck out of it.<br />
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Tech categories: A brief moment of silence for First Man, which has a couple nominations down ballot. I wanted to love this movie, with a director and actor I both love both doing some solid work, but at the end of the day the movie never makes a persuasive case for existing when we already have The Right Stuff, already have Apollo 13, etc. <br />
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Good News: No need to see Mary Poppins Returns on account of its Oscar nominations count, which is slim.The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-73747653587211032292019-01-21T12:12:00.001-05:002019-01-21T12:12:04.127-05:00Boskone ScheduleExcited to be heading up to Boston on President's Day weekend for Boskone 56. It's forty years this day that I was staying by coincidence at the Boskone hotel, got free samples of the recently launched Omni magazine as a result, and started on the road to reading sf/fantasy that led to everything else. <div>
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Starting bright and early with my first panel at 4pm on 15 February, I've got a great schedule, with lots of great co-panelists. I'll also be doing a demo of the Mistborn: House War board game, which Crafty Games was gracious enough to donate to the convention's games library, and doing a Kaffeeklatsch with Barry Goldblatt, which is a great chance to be part of a very small group getting advice from two really good agents. I hope I'll get to see some of you.</div>
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In part because I've attended Boskone with fair regularity the past dozen years, I have a lot of clients who are in the Boston area. Dan Moren, Auston Habershaw, Greg Katsoulis, Suzanne Palmer, Kenneth Rogers, Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld, Toni L. P. Kelner and Steve Kelner are among the JABberwocky authors you can see at Boskone this year. I'll be meeting with an author I met last year, who's currently in revision on a promising military sf novel, And in 2017, Boskone's where I met up with Nick Martell for the first time, and a year after that I sold his first novel. Networking and con-going can be a big part of finding early success in this business. If you miss me at my panels, you might find me in the dealer's room, at the art show reception, or hanging out in the hotel's lobby bar.<br /><div>
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The Life Cycle of a Book</div>
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Format: Panel</div>
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15 Feb 2019, Friday 16:00 - 16:50, Lewis (Westin)</div>
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Most of us just see the finished product on the shelf. However, there are lots of little (and big) steps associated with getting the book to the store. What's the life cycle of a book, from submission to publication? It's not as simple as "the author writes it, then the publisher prints it." What are the direct, indirect, and associated steps involved in the production and publication process — from editing to marketing, selling, reviewing, reprinting, and more?</div>
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also on the panel: Gene Doucette, Andrea Corbin, Nicholas Kaufmann, LJ Cohen</div>
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Editing Your Manuscript for Submission</div>
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Format: Discussion Group</div>
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15 Feb 2019, Friday 17:00 - 17:50, Griffin (Westin)</div>
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Join our panel of editors and agents for a discussion on what they look for in a submission. Is submitting to an agent different from submitting to an editor? Are they seeking the same or different things on first reads? Do you submit a precis, a chapter or chapters, the whole manuscript, or other material and, if so, to whom and when? How do you prepare your novel for submission? What are some tips and tricks on how to cut, embellish, or shape a manuscript?</div>
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also on the panel: Joshua Bilmes (joshua@awfulagent.com), Auston Habershaw</div>
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Mistborn: House War Game Demo</div>
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Format: Gaming</div>
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16 Feb 2019, Saturday 12:00 - 12:50, Harbor I - Gaming (Westin)</div>
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Game on! A semi-cooperative resource-management game, Mistborn: House War is set during the events of Mistborn: The Final Empire, the first novel in the bestselling fantasy series by Brandon Sanderson. Join Brandon's agent Joshua Bilmes for a special demo of this fun new boardgame!</div>
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The Great Agent Hunt</div>
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Format: Panel</div>
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16 Feb 2019, Saturday 17:00 - 17:50, Marina 3 (Westin)</div>
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Finding an agent can be a bit of a mystery. Whom should you contact? What should you say? How much of your manuscript should be finished before you call? And what about established authors who have to change representation? Our pro agents share their experience and advice on the key steps in your agent-finding process.</div>
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also on the panel: S L Huang , Barry Goldblatt (Barry Goldblatt Literary Agency), Christopher Golden, Lauren Roy</div>
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Stereotyping Authors</div>
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Format: Panel</div>
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17 Feb 2019, Sunday 12:00 - 12:50, Harbor III (Westin)</div>
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Some authors get known for writing only one particular type of fiction: hard SF, or urban detective fantasy, or grimdark milSF mystery nurse romance … This sort of branding can bring a writer great success — while plunking them straight into a pigeonhole. Some find it quite difficult to escape. But breakouts are possible. Our panelists discuss the ups and downs of becoming a "known quantity," and how it affects the arc of their careers and the fiction they publish.</div>
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Ginjer Buchanan, Christopher Golden, Darlene Marshall</div>
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Kaffeeklatsch: Joshua Bilmes and Barry Goldblatt</div>
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Format: Kaffeeklatsch</div>
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17 Feb 2019, Sunday 14:00 - 14:50, Galleria - Kaffeeklatsch 1 (Westin)</div>
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combined with Barry Goldblatt of the Barry Goldblatt Literary Agency, bgliterary.com</div>
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The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-20969088903451376432018-08-06T16:00:00.001-04:002018-08-06T16:01:23.827-04:00San Jose - here I come!My second WorldCon in San Jose, and it's starting next week.<br />
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Here are some things I remember from ConJose in 2002:</div>
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John Hemry/Jack Campbell and I went looking for lunch, and we walked and walked and walked on a kind of hot day, and we never exactly found the restaurant. John still holds this against me. And I kind of can't blame him. But, like -- there was barely MapQuest in 2002, let alone the wonder of Google Maps.</div>
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Tobias Buckell isn't a client of mine any longer, but I had the honor of representing him at the start of his career, and we had a pretty long chat at the Starbucks in downtown, around the corner from the Waldenbooks now long since gone, about the wonderful novel that became Crystal Rain. The Starbucks is still there, and I'll think fond thoughts of Toby and Crystal Rain every time I pass by.</div>
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It was an adventure getting to the party floors at the Fairmont, finding the secret stairs to walk up and up and up because the elevator service wasn't up to it. Sadly, this is a familiar story at lots of conventions. Rarely do hotels have elevator service designed for peak hours.</div>
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The Marriott didn't exist yet.</div>
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Those were the days when you could still head out and catch a mall bookstore, a B&N, a Borders, more -- all in close proximity. I visited sooooo many bookstores in 2002. Borders in Milpitas and Los Gatos and Fremont and Emeryville and Dublin and San Ramon and here and there and lots of other bookstores besides. The store in Milpitas, not far from the Cisco HQ, was a fabulous store for science fiction and fantasy. And back then, the front of the store wasn't being sold off to the highest bidder and was still largely determined by what was doing well at each store, so you knew the moment you walked in that you were in science fiction heaven. L. E. Modesitt visited as many or more bookstores as I did, and however many I went to in 2002, but he had a car.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Still around, the Barnes & Noble on Steven Creek Pkwy, which I took the bus out to, and which was an amazing store as well for science fiction and fantasy. I kind of miss when my life was a little less busy, a little simpler, and I could more easily explore the world beyond WorldCon when I went to a WorldCon.</div>
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Meisha Merlin did exist. </div>
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In any event, it's sixteen years later with one World Fantasy at San Jose between now and then.</div>
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Maybe you can help me create some new memories this year?</div>
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There are three JABberwocky authors up for Hugo Awards this year -- Marie Brennan, Suzanne Palmer and Brandon Sanderson. The last time I was in San Jose, I had read some Brandon Sanderson but not yet Elantris, and we weren't officially author/agent for another six months. </div>
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My 2018 schedule:</div>
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Friday, 11am, 211C in Convention Center</div>
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Negotiating Book Contracts</div>
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Saturday, 3pm, 211B in Convention Center</div>
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Kaffeeklatsch</div>
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This event will require an advance registration through the convention</div>
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The link on internet to my schedule page is here:</div>
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<a href="https://sites.grenadine.co/sites/worldcon-76/en/worldcon-76/participants/1300/Joshua+Bilmes">https://sites.grenadine.co/sites/worldcon-76/en/worldcon-76/participants/1300/Joshua+Bilmes</a></div>
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For another couple of days, I've opened an express line for querying me. If you are going to San Jose, and if you put WorldCon in your schedule line, we'll give top priority to looking at queries. What better way to find a great new manuscript for me to take on, and maybe even talk about it at the Starbucks just like I got to talk about Crystal Rain with Tobias Buckell sixteen years ago.</div>
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Find my query guidelines <a href="https://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2016/01/joshuas-winter-in-queryland.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</div>
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I'd love to have more panels on my schedule, so more definite places where you can hear me speak, find me after, collect a business card -- that sort of thing. But I'm going to WorldCon to be part of it. I'll be around the Dealer's Room when I can be, so maybe you'll find me roaming about there. If you're a SFFWA member, I'll pop into their hospitality suite. I'll be hanging at whatever hotel bar all the publishing people end up hanging at. I like to visit the different bid parties or publishing parties, so sometimes at night it's just a question of being in the right place at the right time as I rotate from the bar to the SFFWA suite to the bid parties to a publisher party. And wherever I am, unless I'm in a meeting I'm there to meet people.</div>
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WorldCon, Baby!</div>
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WorldCon!!</div>
The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-22314361621394488352018-05-14T15:52:00.000-04:002018-05-14T16:01:49.260-04:00Balticon 52 - Program ScheduleCan't wait to be back at <a href="https://balticon.org/wp52/" target="_blank">Balticon this Memorial Day</a> weekend, and am sharing my full program schedule below. The convention and all of the events are at the Renaissance Inner Harbor hotel.<br />
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This is a special convention for me. Balticon was the first convention I attended as a pro, heading down to meet up with Elizabeth Moon the year she won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel for Sheepfarmer's Daughter, which is about to be reissued in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sheepfarmers-Daughter-Deed-Paksenarrion-Elizabeth/dp/1481483463/?tag=awfulagent-20" target="_blank">a 30th anniversary trade paperback edition</a>, with a new introduction from Elizabeth. Last year's Balticon was where I sat down in the Renaissance, read the opening page of <a href="https://twitter.com/macmartell" target="_blank">Nick Martell's</a> The Kingdom of Liars, and knew instantly that I'd found a great new author, ultimately doing my best deal ever for a debut author. <br />
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Balticon has done a great job keeping with the times, broadening its program to appeal to a wide range of ages and a wide range of interests, all unified by their love of science fiction and fantasy in all its many forms.<br />
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It's a great opportunity to get some quality time with me. JABberwocky client Jack Campbell is also attending; link to his schedule follows mine.<br />
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JOSHUA'S SCHEDULE<br />
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Friday May 25, 2018, 6pm<br />
Intellectual Property and You<br />
St. George<br />
James R. Stratton (moderator), Harold Feld, Joshua Bilmes, Doc Coleman<br />
What you need to know about the legal framework for protecting your works.<br />
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Sunday, May 27, 11am<br />
Best Books on Writing<br />
Mount Washington<br />
Joshua Bilmes (moderator), Val Griswold-Ford, Sarah Pinsker, Scott Edelman, Marilyn "Mattie" Brahen<br />
What books should you have on your shelf when you're trying to read about writing?<br />
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Sunday, May 27, 5pm<br />
How to Incorporate Critique<br />
Guilford<br />
Joshua Bilmes (moderator), Day Al-Mohamed, John Appel, Leah Cypess, Alan Smale, Rosemary Claire Smith<br />
What do you do when you have two readers giving you different or even contradictory feedback? How much are you willing to let the feedback change your work?<br />
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Sunday, May 27, 8pm<br />
Long Live the King: The Success of Black Panther<br />
St. George<br />
John Edward Lawson (moderator), Joshua Bilmes, Inge Heyer, Devin Jackson Randall<br />
Black Panther shattered box office records from the time tickets went on sale. What about the writing and visual storytelling resonated so strongly with audiences?<br />
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Sunday, May 27, 9pm<br />
Tales From the Slush Pile<br />
Mount Washington<br />
Joshua Bilmes, Neil Clarke, John Edward Lawson<br />
Editors share tales of some of the gems they’ve received, and give advice on how to avoid becoming fodder for future panels like this.<br />
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Monday, May 28, 10am<br />
Who Cares About the Critics?<br />
Room 8006<br />
Track: Television/Film<br />
TV and film crtiics have a habit of panning genre works, even if it's exactly what the audience wants. What's the disconnect?<br />
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Monday, May 27, 11am<br />
Pitches We're Sick Of (and Ones We Want to See)<br />
Mount Washington<br />
Sarah Avery (moderator), Joshua Bilmes, Neil Clarke<br />
Agents and editors discuss trends in submissions.<br />
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ALSO ATTENDING:<br />
<br />
Jack Campbell, <a href="http://jack-campbell.com/" target="_blank">website</a> and <a href="https://schedule.balticon.org/#prog/query:campbell" target="_blank">con schedule</a>The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-77464977362957499142018-03-04T19:53:00.001-05:002018-03-04T23:55:58.957-05:00Three Oscars Outside Hollywood, CA -- the 2018 Oscar Live Blog11:55 PM - 3:53, but thought it moved at a decent clip. At the end of the day, no great surprises.<br />
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11:46 PM - Three Humbugs Outside Queens, New York.<br />
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11:37 PM - "We'll be opening this envelope when we come back."<br />
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11:22 PM - I melt in Timothee Chalamet's smile.<br />
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11:20 PM - John Avildsen for Rocky, Jonathan Demme for Philadelphia, Michael Ballhaus for Fabulous Baker Boys, Roger Moore when all I wanted was a sweet distraction for an hour or two, Sam Shephard for The Right Stuff,<br />
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11:14 PM - del Toro not my first choice, but he gave a really nice speech. <br />
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10:59 PM - well, multiple great scores had to lose, and no complaints here about what won.<br />
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10:56 PM - This Is Me. Best for Last. The only musical number when I closed by iPad to watch the whole number without distraction. What a great number,more at performance, great anthem. Can this please win? And the movie such a word of mouth audience driven hit.<br />
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10:51 PM - Deakins!<br />
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10:38 PM - Screenplay was an interesting race. A school of thought for Three Billboards, but even people who liked it often didn't like it all the way through. A lot of love in the room for Jordan Peele and Get Out. And his speech was on the long side but had a vivid passion and purpose, as did the movie. It captured a moment without every trying to be important or worthy. Have sometimes told my clients not to worry too much about theme in writing, because theme arises from whom they are, and whom they are provides guide rails which will provide the theme. Tell a good story, the theme takes care of itself. The speech Michael Stuhlberg delivers in Call Me By Yoir Name -- the acting puts it over and it's a really really good speech, but doesn't it also show a lack of confidence in the writing to put across the message without announcing it? I'm not upset or surprised to have a win for Call Me By Your Name, but doesn't make me more of a fan of that style of filmmaking.<br />
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10:35 PM - Listening to the long, worthy, stolid acceptance speech from James Ivory encapsulates in a minute or so my general dislike of the Merchant Ivory school.<br />
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10:32 PM - Len Wein didn't last long enough to hear his name read on an Oscar telecast.<br />
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10:16 PM - There are only nine awards left to go. I actually think they're doing a not bad job moving things along.<br />
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10:14 PM - Woth a title like "Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405" how can you not win an Oscar.<br />
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10:09 PM - "do not aim the hot dogs at the vegetarians"<br />
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9:59 PM - "I'm am editor. I should be able to do this."<br />
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9:57 PM - Editing. Another tight category. Dunkirk deserves, but Baby Driver especially, hate to see lose.<br />
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9:54 PM - Blade Runner 2049!<br />
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9:52 PM - Shouldn't Spider-Man have a Queens accent?<br />
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9:49 PM - Verizon ads -- like, isn't there some other ad agency, any other ad agency, that would be better for Verizon than the one it's using? <br />
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9:41 PM - Looking over my list of movies seen in 2017 during the animation awards I don't care about. One of two clear snubs for me is in the animation category, I actually saw Captain Underpants, and I really, really enjoyed it, and I can't believe it wasn't better than one or another of the movies that were nominated. Second snub, Jake Gyllenhaal in Stronger. The acting categories are tough, since you've always got to ask who gets the boot to make room for your preferred. But that was such a vivid, memorable performance, and I don't believe in 20 years that anyone will study Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour as a lesson in acting the way they might pore over every frame of Gyllenhaal's performance in Stronger. They don't get better, just don't.<br />
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9:35 PM - What a pod. The Hans Zimmer Walmart ad, the AARP ad, and the T Mobile all rocked.<br />
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9:28 PM - A consensus that Janney would win, but could you watch Laurie Metcslfe in Lady Bird and not want very very badly for he to take the award? I have this sudden urge to see Lady Bird again after watching that clip. Like, I liked I Tonya and I liked Janney's performance and yet can't feel right now very very clearly that the wrong person won.<br />
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9:23 PM - First year I can remember that I've seen not a one of the Foreign Film nominees. <br />
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9:20 PM - Rmember Me production number drew my attention to the TV screen over my iPad more than the Mary Blige performance did. The very long Google ad did nothing for me at all.<br />
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9:11 PM - Shape of Water wins for Production Design, a category I don't mind having it win in. It is very stylized, very much an artistic vision, and none of the other nominees strike me as being better or more so.<br />
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9:10 PM - "I am from Pakistan and Iowa; two places that no one from Hollywood can find on a map."<br />
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9:06 PM - And this is a good opportunity to talk about the Best Score category, which has so many amazing and very different scores. At least two of three when I saw the movie I tweeted "this should be an Oscar nominee," amd they were. It's hard to think of watching Dunkirk with a different score. Carter Burwell's for Three Billboards was different and pitch perfect. Johnny Greenwood also different and tonally adroit over the course of the movie. Anything other than a multi-way tie, and multiple deserving scores are going to lose. About as close as Oscar ever comes to the difficulty of knowing every tennis match will have a loser when you really really like both players.<br />
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9:00 PM - The Sound categories -- tough this year. Sound so integral to Dunkirk and to Nolan's vision. Saw Blade Runner in IMAX and wow! A Star Wars movie. A movie like Baby Driver with music so integral and action so timed to the music. Can't complain to have Dunkirk win both, but poor Blade Runner. But maybe in Cinematography for Blade Runner moment.<br />
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8:50 PM - What do we think of the Twitter ad?<br />
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8:46 PM - <img src="https://avatars.slack-edge.com/2016-07-11/58791435491_b1d83d1e01ef728a7332_48.jpg" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; border-bottom-left-radius: 5px; border-bottom-right-radius: 5px; border-top-left-radius: 5px; border-top-right-radius: 5px; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: middle; width: 45px;" /><br />
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Justin Chang</div>
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Willam Hoke has this comment: "Since when does having a microphone allow you to attack someone? So far Jimmy Kimmel has attacked Mel Gibson and others by name. How is that decent? Let us all remember that Obama's attack on Trump got us where we are today. This is shameful."</div>
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A good point, actually -- though we are losing sight of the idea that we hold the President to a higher standard of behavior than we do a talk show host. Part of the damage that may not get undone in my lifetime, the coarseness of discourse.<br />
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8:42 PM - Funny story: I went to see Icarus and slept through almost all of it. Abacus the other one I was interested in, but having read extensive coverage of the event it described in New York Times and New Yorker, figured movie wouldn't add anything more to my knowledge of it.<br />
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8:37 PM - Really liked not just having Eva Marie Saint present an award, but letting her precede with a really classy, historically minded speech. For all the "rich history of Oscar" claims by Oscar producers, a rare instance of actually doing it.<br />
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8:35 PM - <img src="https://avatars.slack-edge.com/2016-07-11/58791435491_b1d83d1e01ef728a7332_48.jpg" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; border-bottom-left-radius: 5px; border-bottom-right-radius: 5px; border-top-left-radius: 5px; border-top-right-radius: 5px; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: middle; width: 45px;" /><br />
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Did not know this: Jordan Peele is the first filmmaker to be nominated for best picture, director and original screenplay for a debut film.</div>
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8:31 PM - It would have been weird for Costume Design not to go to a movie about fashion designer, but some thought it might have gone to something more period, or as part of a Shape of Water sweep.<br />
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8:29 PM - The big "Costume Design" on the envelope -- why didn't they think of that 89 years ago?<br />
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8:27 PM - maybe more of a burgundy tux. The make up award foreordained.<br />
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8:26 PM -- will there be better dressed pair of presenters? Love the red tux, and the silver dress goes well with the crystal theme of the set.<br />
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8:24 PM -- that was a Rolex ad? I've seen movies that are worse, with lower budgets.<br />
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8:18 PM - "Everyome who's ever looked at a billboard." Sam Rockwell's win widely predicted. It is a great performance in a movie I loved, for an actor with a great CV. When I was 8, my parents were taking me to see things like Walking Tall, Godfather, and Deliverance. As Jack,Torrance says in The Shining "perfect for a child."<br />
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8:10 PM - love that Timothee Chalamet has the confidence of youth to be doing the white tux.<br />
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8:08 PM "if we can't trust agents." Trust me😬<br />
8:07 PM - Kimmel is nailing it. Funny, serious, tonally about perfect.<br />
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7:52 PM -- getting ready.The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-3100494332130473122018-03-04T19:13:00.000-05:002018-03-04T19:51:39.214-05:00Oscar Warm-UpMovies are the thing I do that I've done the longest, aside from reading, and aaaahh! Oscar night.<br />
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I saw over 100 movies in 2017, a lot but there are years I've been closer to 120. Around 90 of those new first run films. Most but not all of the Oscar nominations. I'm old enough to know what I'm not likely to like, and if there's a movie like The Florida Project or Mudbound, where every wonderful review screams out "Joshua will not like this," I am happy to listen to that voice, <br />
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Call Me By Your Name was close to being that kind of movie, but the Paris has a nice balcony, and Timothee Chalamet was very pleasant to watch in Lady Bird, and even though I hate Merchant Ivory movies I went to see this movie with a screenplay from James Ivory. And it was about as good as a movie I'm not going to like can be? Did I snooze through the peach scene? Possibly. But I mostry stayed awake. Chalamet was good. The last scene was great. Yeah, could have and should have been ten minutes shorter, but I don't mind the movie having success, or winning an Oscar or two.<br />
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The Shape of Water, however... That one I mind. It isn't very good at all. It's a highly stylized movie like The Artist, but to me stylization isn't a substitute for the real world. Part of why I don't like on the whole the Wes Anderson school of filmmaking. There isn't a true word, a true moment, a true performance, a true anything. It's craft that's about nothing other than its own craft. Not happy, not happy at all, that people talk about this as Best Picture material. Best Director material. If someone wants to give an Oscar to Alexandre Desplat, have at it. Anything else....<br />
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Lady Bird... Frances Ha was an awful dull miserable sit through with not an enjoyable moment to be had, amd the critics swooned over it. Having the star of that in another movie with critics swooning.... I made that the second half of a DIY double feature so I could walk out guilt free when it proved to be another Frances Ha. Which it totally is not. This movie was full of humor and great performances, and wit and reality and an utter delight through and through. My first glimpse of Timothee Chalamet. A true introduction to Sacramento. It isn't my choice for Best Picture, but it is still an amazing movie.<br />
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And like Get Out, Lady Bird captures a moment. And my did Get Out capture a moment. Solid acting, a script that transcends its genre, and so so so of its time. Is Get Out in the Best Picture mix?<br />
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Phantom Thread? Tell me after the Oscars how you like your asparagus and your mushrooms. It's interesting. The Post is too safe, though accomplished. Darkest Hour is safe.<br />
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Ah, Dunkirk. A spectacular achievement for Christopher Nolan, fascinating to watch once, lots of great ingredients. And then seeing it a second time, the icy chill of a movie with barely a human soul to be find left me so utterly cold that I tuned out, and then walked out,<br />
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My clear favorite Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.<br />
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Yes, I get it. The lead character is annoying. Agree. There are great scenes where we see the writer writing, like the lecture to the priest comparing the Catholic church to the Crips and Bloods. There are ridiculous things, like having a cop throw someone out the window with no real consequence, someone else firebomb a police station, and no real consequence. And yet, I was utterly caught up with these characters, not as symbols of our time but as themselves. If we can enjoy the unreality of Get Out because we are caught up with the symbolism of the moment of the movie's exaggerations, can't we be caught up enough in the strength of these characters to let the falseness of individual moments slide on by? With sharp writing, indelible characters, a suite of strong performances, one of the year's best scores, excellent photography -- the moment the movie ended, with sublime perfection with the perfect line at the perfect time, I wanted to see it again. And when I did see it again, I liked every moment and every element every bit as much.<br />
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Almost 8pm. Time to end the warmup and get ready for the live blog.The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-69011262022926523192018-01-18T14:45:00.000-05:002018-01-18T14:45:31.363-05:00Boskone 55 - My SchedulePasting below my full schedule for <a href="http://www.boskone.org/" target="_blank">Boskone 55</a>, which will be taking place at Boston's Westin Waterfront Hotel from 16-18 February. Hope to see you there!<br />
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If you're spending all of your time hanging out at big comic book and media conventions, and you have any ambition to be a published writer, I'd strongly suggest you do a re-think some, and look a lot more closely at attending some of the conventions like Boskone that have been part of the science fiction and fantasy community for several decades. In a convention center full of tens of thousands of people, I'm awfully hard to find. At Boskone, it's a great opportunity to find and spend quality time with the editors, agents and most especially the authors that can help you to achieve your dreams. In 2018, Boskone will have half a dozen of our clients attending, and some of them clients as a direct result of my meeting with them at Boskone or another sf/fantasy convention like it.</div>
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clients in attendance:</div>
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<a href="https://dmoren.com/" target="_blank">Dan Moren</a> - author of The Caledonian Gambit. First met him at Boskone.</div>
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<a href="https://aahabershaw.com/" target="_blank">Auston Habershaw</a> - series with Harper Voyager Impulse. First met him in Boston, and the Boskone trip forced me to get his letter out of my in-box.</div>
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<a href="http://www.zanzjan.net/" target="_blank">Suzanne Palmer</a> - author of Finder, forthcoming from DAW, and first met her at a convention in Boston.</div>
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<a href="http://gregorykatsoulis.com/" target="_blank">Gregory Scott Katsoulis</a> - author of All Rights Reserved.</div>
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<a href="https://emunderwood.com/" target="_blank">Erin Underwood</a> - have a proposal from her on submission, first met her at Boskone.</div>
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<a href="http://leighperryauthor.com/" target="_blank">Toni L. P. Kelner a/k/a Leigh Perry</a> - author of the Family Skeleton mysteries.</div>
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Most of them will have their own schedules for Boskone available on their individual websites, and you can find a text view of the entire schedule <a href="http://www.boskone.org/program-event/schedule-text-view/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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And as I type this, I'm on submission with a debut fantasy by <a href="https://twitter.com/macmartell" target="_blank">Nick Martell</a>, whom I saw in 2017 at both Boskone and Balticon. Without my having met him at two conventions last year, his amazing novel might still be hiding away on my iPad.</div>
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You'll get to see me on a few panels at Boskone, including one that also includes literary agent <a href="http://www.bgliterary.com/" target="_blank">Barry Goldblatt</a>, who is especially well known for his great list of YA authors. I'll often be hanging out in the hotel lobby or in the dealer's room. And for some real quality time, sign up for my Kaffeeklatsch, which will be just me and no more than ten or twelve people for an hour of conversation.<br />
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Can't wait to be at Boskone. See you soon!</div>
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<h2>
What Good Is an Agent?</h2>
Format: Panel<br />
17 Feb 2018, Saturday 18:00 - 19:00, Marina 3 (Westin)<br />
Everybody wants an agent — but why? What's the big deal? Sure they can help you make contacts with publishers, but is that their only purpose? What else can or should an agent do for you? How do you know when your agent isn't really working out? How do you transition between agents without burning bridges?<br />
Erin M. Hartshorn (M), Joshua Bilmes, Barry Goldblatt, Richard Shealy, Hillary Monahan</div>
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<h2>
Soup to Nuts: The Life Cycle of a Book</h2>
Format: Panel<br />
17 Feb 2018, Saturday 21:00 - 22:00, Marina 3 (Westin)<br />
What is the life cycle of a book, from completion to publication? Our panel of agents, editors, and authors share advice on everything from querying an agent or an editor to dealing with revision requests, reviewing the contract, maintaining the relationship between editor and agent, and more.<br />
Joshua Bilmes, Richard Shealy, Pete Hollmer, Susan Jane Bigelow, J. Kathleen Cheney</div>
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Kaffeeklatsch: Joshua Bilmes</h2>
Format: Kaffeeklatsch<br />
18 Feb 2018, Sunday 10:00 - 11:00, Galleria - Con Suite (Westin)<br />
Joshua Bilmes</div>
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Marketing Uphill</h2>
Format: Panel<br />
18 Feb 2018, Sunday 11:00 - 12:00, Harbor II (Westin)<br />
Sometimes marketing for writers feels like walking uphill to school barefoot in the snow. Does it ever get easier? At what point is enough <i>enough</i> for you and your social network? What about live events? How much should you invest, and how do you measure the return? Our panelists share their experiences and tips for managing your marketing.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier"; font-size: 12px;">Alexander Jablokov (M), Melanie Meadors, Suzanne Reynolds-Alpert, Joshua Bilmes, Craig Miller</span> </div>
The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-15932247025944867842017-07-14T16:02:00.001-04:002017-07-17T13:00:27.761-04:00Jumping at the ChanceWhen we’re interviewing for new staff, we’re often talking to people who are currently working at a publishing company, and we’ll often ask why they’re looking to move to an agency. The most common response is a variation of: “I realized that I want to work on the books I like, and at the publishing company, I’m having to work on books the publisher can publish.”<br />
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And for me, I don’t think that’s ever been truer than in our work on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073X74BG7/?tag=awfulagent-20" target="_blank">Gil Griffin’s JUMPING AT THE CHANCE</a>, a wonderful fish-out-of-water story about fish swimming very very far from America’s coastal waters.<br />
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Twenty years ago, I was like many Americans. Australian Rules Football was this weird thing you heard about, mostly as a strange joke about the strange things you’ll find watching TV in the middle of the night. Then, in 1999, I went to Australia for the first time, and I went to see this strange thing for myself.<br />
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Well, let’s just say I was mesmerized. I sat in the Melbourne Cricket Ground and watched a Kangaroos game, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.<br />
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It was, yes, a little bit strange, but it was strange in the way of some wonderful Baskin Robbins flavor, taking a chunk of this sport and a ribbon of that sport and a base of a third, and then it all comes together and it tastes wonderful. It was kind of like soccer, because people couldn't throw the ball but rather had to dribble, pass like a volleyball dig, or kick, which is kind of being like three sports act once. It was kind of like US football with big goalposts to kick through. It was kind of like a clean-skated game of hockey because it was free-flowing and free-form. I could hardly pick up every little quirk of the rules, but the basics emerged easily enough, even from well up in the stands with no native guide. <br />
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And like a Baskin Robbins flavor you really like, and which goes away at the end of the month, I was eager for some future opportunity to taste footy. When I got that opportunity on my second trip to Australia in 2010, it was just as enjoyable to go to the MCG and take in a footy game.<br />
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Subsequent to my 2010 trip to Australia, I discovered you could still find the occasional footy game on ESPN 2 (and now on Fox Sports networks) As I got to watch more and learn more about the game and the teams and the history… Soon enough I’m DVRing whatever game is on my cable package, watching all of them, hanging out at The Australian at 1am on a September Saturday to watch the Grand Final, as the AFL’s Super Bowl is known.<br />
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Twenty years ago, it was this strange thing, and now it and tennis are my two favorite sports.<br />
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Stranger than Australian Rules Football is the fact that Brandon Sanderson’s Tor editor, Moshe Feder, is also an AFL fan, a bigger one, one for longer, much more passionate than I, and one day, two-and-a-half years ago, knowing of my kindred interest in AFL, he sent me a link to <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/longform/2015/1/7/7468913/aussie-rules-football-american-basketball-players-profile" target="_blank">this wonderful article by Gil Griffin</a> on US NCAA basketball players looking to make their way into the AFL.<br />
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And after I read the article, I knew this needed to be a book. I had no idea where or how I would sell such a book, because major publishers in the US prefer to buy books about baseball and football, golf and tennis, and other sports better known in the US. But that wasn’t going to stop me. Because I’m an agent, and I get to work with the books I want to work with.<br />
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So I reached out to Gil Griffin. He was game to give it a try. We worked up a full proposal, and we sent it out to all the sports publishers in the US, and of course, we came up snake eyes. But as Australia is part of the British Commonwealth, we also reached out to our friends at the Zeno Agency in London. Maybe a British publisher that better knew the Australian markets would end up buying the book. And that didn’t happen.<br />
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But John Wordsworth, who had just come over to the Zeno Agency from working at the British publishing house Headline, somehow knew the right person who knew somebody, hooked up the proposal with Nero Publishing in Australia, and by some magical process I still can’t quite believe happened, this passion project that I was never sure would find a home managed to find a pretty much perfect one. In Australia, the book came out at just the right time in 2016, with a couple players featured in JUMPING AT THE CHANCE making their marks in the AFL.<br />
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And this year, JABberwocky is delighted to bring you the first US publication of JUMPING AT THE CHANCE, updated from last year’s Australian edition. <br />
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I am pleased as punch. I’m still not sure what success it’s destined for in the US. But it’s a great story that has only gotten better since I first came across it in 2015. Players from a country that knows virtually nothing about the AFL are making an impact on footy in Australia, not conjecture or hypothetically but by taking marks and kicking goals and scoring points.<br />
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And deep in my heart, I am sure that the right person is going to stumble across JUMPING AT THE CHANCE on the right day and realize what a great story this is. It’s a story we’ve seen five or fifteen times in the movies that I never, ever tire of, the story about the baseball pitchers from India pitching in the show, the story about the kids from a poor school beating the kids from the rich school, the story about the coach from another planet having the winning team with students nothing like himself. Oh, sure, it’s set against the background of Australian Rules Football, but if Adam McKay can find a way to make complicated financial stuff understandable in “The Big Short,” we can make a movie where people understand enough about the AFL to revel in the triumphs of Jason Holmes and Mason Cox as some of the first players to emerge from the AFL’s American Experiment. And when that happens, I’ll be happy not just because more people will buy JUMPING AT THE CHANCE, but because I’ll have succesfully shared my love and passion for footy with the world at large.<br />
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C’mon, Mate! Take the first step with me. Click on over and check out Gil Griffin’s JUMPING AT THE CHANCE. Here's an <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073X74BG7/?tag=awfulagent-20" target="_blank">Amazon buy link</a>, which has just gone live, and more to come as the metadata spreads.The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-89061466304278818532017-02-26T20:12:00.003-05:002017-02-27T00:24:52.967-05:00Oscars: Made in America12:23 AM: Actually, I do know what to say. For a movie full of shots of people slowly coming into focus, it's only fitting that the Moonlight win for Best Picture was initially so cloudy. Totally, 100% fitting. It summarizes the aesthetic of the film itself. And, I still can't stop laughing.<br />
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12:13 AM: I have nothing more to say. I look forward to reading about the final ten minutes of tonight's ceremony. I don't know what to say.<br />
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12:04 AM: And Dunaway looks spectacular.<br />
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12:03 AM: Beatty and Dunaway. A nice touch. Drunaway also appeared twice in the ill-timed Rolex ad, in her role in Network.<br />
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12:01 AM: The most special Oscars are the ones when I get to start typing an "AM" in for the live blog.<br />
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11:58 PM: If wishes were fishes. But while I enjoyed La La Land, I just don't really see this, even if everyone kind of said it's what would happen.<br />
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11:57 PM: I don't want Emma Stone to win.<br />
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11:50 PM: The Best Actor field was originally considered to be Affleck's to lose, then looked like maybe he would lose it to Denzel. I am very happy with this win. http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2017/02/ready-set-oscar.html. Very humble speech. Bottom line, I'd love to be twenty again, just so I could go to college and go to grad school and do a dissertation on Manchester by the Sea, awful use of music included. It's a special film in so many small and wonderful ways.<br />
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11:42 PM: No complaints here. Damien Chazelle directed Whiplash, which was quite a fine piece of work, and followed it up with another quite a fine piece of work. La La Land isn't my favorite of this year's movies, but it's every bit a director's vision and passion and hard work as any of the other films it was contending with. And, yes, Whiplash was also a damn fine piece of work. It's quite rare for a young director to start out with films like this that are critically acclaimed and genuinely accessible to a wide swath of moviegoers, that don't put me to sleep or thrive only in the rarified atmosphere of Park City. So I'm happy.<br />
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11:38 PM: Oh yay! Another Verizon ad. More to the point, poor Cameron Crowe. His Jerry Maguire is kind of like my autobiography; I screened it for my 50th birthday party, in fact. So to see his pleasant We Built a Zoo turned into fodder for the Matt Kimmel show tonight. Sigh. And it is a pleasant movie. Not a great one, but a very pleasant one.<br />
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11:30 PM: Yay! Manchester by the Sea wins for Original Screenplay. Matt Damon will now happily eat all the McRibs he's gotten over the course of the evening. Lonergan is an excellent playwright and screenwriter, and plays like Lobby Hero are as worth seeing as Manchester by the Sea is. He's had "History" in Hollywood, which is a little too long to discuss here (I'll add a link later), but taking home an Oscar tonight after the odyssey of Lonergan's last movie has to be sweet. And it is such a good screenplay,<br />
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11:19 PM: Nice to have a shout out to the teaching of arts in public schools, which has been losing ground for years due to budget cuts and teaching to tests. But. Really. Someone's mother let someone leave the soccer team to appear in a school musical. The horror. The horror.<br />
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11:17 PM: If you weren't pegging La La Land in the Score and Song categories, you should never get to fill out an Oscar pool ballot again. Ever, ever again. <br />
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11:15 PM: http://variety.com/2017/film/news/fantastic-beast-first-harry-potter-oscar-1201997179/. So this was the first time that any Harry Potter movie won an Oscar for anything. I'm not the biggest fan of the series; Azkaban is the only of the movies that I've actually liked. But still, you think of all the technical resources poured into the movies, often by top talents in the industry like Production Designer Stuart Craig, or music for some of the film's from John Williams, and the visual effects, and etc. etc., and it's hard to believe there's always been something better every single time, until tonight.<br />
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11:08 PM: Spoke to soon. The purple prose of unnecessary clutter in an Oscar musical # hath returned.<br />
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11:06 PM: Here we go again. The #s from La La Land would be perfectly fine if it was just John Legend singing and playing piano, and instead we've got all sorts of unnecessary stuff going on in the background. At least they appear to have exited the stage without hitting John Legend in the head, like one of the flags did in the Moana number earlier.<br />
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10:57 PM: Because we all think of Bridges of Madison County as first choice of Meryl Streep's excellence. But it's a surprisingly good movie, and it has Clint Eastwood, whose Sully deserved more love from Oscar than it received.<br />
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10:54 PM: One of the best ever presentations about the Sci/Tech Oscar presentation. And are we looking at a midnight EST closing time for the Oscar ceremony?<br />
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10:42 PM: Great Google ad.<br />
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10:41 PM: If we do get to vote for the best Walmart short, the Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg is far and away my top choice. It was fun.<br />
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10:38 PM: One of the biggest changes from when I was growing up -- it's so much less likely for a Best Picture to also vacuum up wins in the technical categories. Film editing is often a very tough category with lots of worthwhile nominees, and I'm kind of pleased with Hacksaw Ridge winning in this category. And of course, we'd all expected two hours into the ceremony that Hacksaw Ridge would have twice as many Oscars to its name as La La Land. Mel Gibson has been a good sport about the ribbing he's taken from Kümmel, and why not. If I could get a little ribbing in exchange for two Oscars for my movie, yeah, probably me too. It remains to be seen if Matt Damon will feel like he's gotten any return on his investment in ribs.<br />
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10:25 PM: So I'd have pegged Production Design for Fantastic Beasts, rather than Costumes. That's why we play the game. It is "most likely correct" that I would not have done well in an Oscar pool. "Most likely correct."<br />
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10:18 PM: "This is Ryan Gosling. He's very handsome. Don't look into his eyes."<br />
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10:01 PM: Around and about the halfway mark, and the Sting number is a great place for a bathroom break, and for Lady Gaga. Except it was probably too short for a bathroom break.<br />
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9:58 PM: On Bill Paxton: https://twitter.com/ecoevoevoeco/status/835990351278112768<br />
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9:50 PM: And, yes, Viola Davis did win for Supporting Actress, while I was telling you about Lynn Stalmaster. If Verizon should be calling AT&T's add, I'd like to suggest that Apple go after Samsung's. Apple's approach to ads can use an updating, and maybe that can be a column idea for Dan Moren. Final thought on this set of ads: will there be some kind of toll free # or something, so that after the Best Picture, we can give an award for the Best Walmart Receipt Picture? Even better, can they get Jeff Bezos to come up on stage to present that award?<br />
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9:44 PM: While we head to the coronation of Viola Davis, some notes on the excellent group of honorary Oscar recipients. Anne Coates may be best known for the "match cut" in Lawrence of Arabia and has decades of achievement as a film editor. Same for Lynn Stalmaster, who was one of the leading casting directors, a category that has a branch in the Academy but not an Oscar to award -- making his receipt of an honorary award the only way of honoring. For whatever reason, the first film that popped to my mind as being cast by Lynn Stalmaster was "Tootsie," and I surfed over to IMDB to see if that was in fact a correct recollection. It was. But I could just as easily have associated Stalmaster's name with the casting of Superman: The Movie or dozens upon dozens of other films. And casting is so very important. Who cast Hidden Figures? Whomever it is, that's a hidden figure behind the success of a movie that relies heavily on the quality of its cast. Frederick Wiseman is one of the leading documentarians of our time. As his time has gone on, it's gotten harder and harder to love his movies if you aren't a critic because nobody's able to tell him to cut, and he distributes his own movies. Better to go looking at a movie from decades ago like Titticut Follies than his most recent In Jackson Heights, with all due respect to the fact that I know several of the people who appear in the most recent. But at his best, and even sometimes at his longest, he'd shed light on US institutions from hospitals to fashion to the military to prisons to schools to more. It's hard to say you're a movie lover or cineaste of any sort whatsoever if you haven't seen something that Wiseman has directed. Do you need me to tell you about Jackie Chan?<br />
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9:33 PM: After having to endure two Verizon ads in just the first hour, I may cancel my FIOS service the moment the ceremony is over. Also, I have no plans to be Disney's guest on March 17. Maybe I will go look for a VCR tape of the animated version that I can hold up to the light because I can't play it on a VCR.<br />
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9:30 PM: The bummer about that Arrival win -- Sully was also nominated, and Sully was a really good movie that deserved more Oscar love and which I really wish I'd gone back to see a second time, and it doesn't even get a consolation prize. I really, really, really liked Sully. It would be on my Ten Best for 2016, hands down.<br />
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9:28 PM: In honor of Arrival winning, I will doze off for most of the acceptance speech, wake up near the end, and decide I woke up too soon.<br />
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9:23 PM: That was a nice Walmart ad, which doesn't make it any less soul deadening for me to walk into a Walmart. Also, maybe Verizon should hire a good advertising agency, like the one AT&T is using.<br />
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9:19 PM: Lesson to writers: do not clutter up your movie with unnecessary flourishes the way the Oscar performance of "How Far I'll Go" had those people with blue flags going back and forth in the background for not particular purpose.<br />
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9:14 PM: Was Caroline Waterlow tearing up in the background during Ezra Klein's acceptance speech for OJ: Made in America? And an excellent speech; dispensed with the laundry list to focus on the actual crime that underlying the movie.<br />
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9:11 PM: As noted in my pre-Oscar blog post, I consider OJ: Made in America to be the Best Picture, the real Best Picture. Not just the best long form documentary. It's worth seeing. All eight hours of it. <br />
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9:11 PM: One of the NY Times reporters live chatting is with me -- quietly pulling for Hidden Figures to surprise us at the end of the night.<br />
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9:05 PM: Unintended relevance. Bill Paxton shows up in a Titanic clip in a Rolex ad.<br />
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9:03 PM: SInce I have never wanted to buy a car, I don't understand why there are so many ads for them.<br />
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9:02 PM: I wonder how many Oscar pool ballots have been wrecked by having Fantastic Beasts win for Costume Design? Was that going to be a thing? Also, we can now say with reasonable assurance that La La Land will not be tying any records for Oscars actually won.<br />
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8:53 PM: I said to myself before the ceremony, "please, no Verizon ads with the guy holding the mic." Anything can win the awards now, it won't be more disappointing than seeing one of these crappy Verizon ads.<br />
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8:50 PM: I'll consider this to be the award for his role in Hidden Figures. Because when it comes to Moonlight, there were four other performances which the clips reminded me how much I enjoyed relative to the winning one. <br />
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8:45 PM: Not bad, unless you're Matt Damon. Working to the host's particular strengths, and doesn't seem like a monologue four other people could have given.<br />
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8:41 PM: "We didn't see Elle, but we absolutely loved it.". Well, see it!<br />
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8:40 PM: Jeff Bezos and I are each "JB" yet he is at the Oscars, and I am just watching it.<br />
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8:38 PM: "Remember last year when it seemed like the Oscars were racist."<br />
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8:37 PM: Sadly, the 230 countries that hate us is most likely correct.<br />
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8:35 PM: Honestly, it can only go downhill from here.<br />
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8:33 PM: Um, no idea what this has to do with the business at hand, but I will never complain if someone wants to bring Justin Timberlake into my living room. Maybe he could host the Oscars some year. And the people in the audience seems to be enjoying it.<br />
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8:20 PM: I got a devil's food cheesecake and chocolate cupcake from Juniors, a German chocolate slice from Amy's Bread, and a couple cookies from Empire Cake. Even though I've been 2:20 on the bike and elliptical today, I should maybe try not to eat all of them?<br />
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8:12 PM: 18 minutes to go. Oscar live blog!!The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-67507291896071786652017-02-26T20:10:00.001-05:002017-02-26T20:10:31.665-05:00Ready, Set, Oscar!The Oscars are a little over an hour away, and I reckon I shall do that old-fashioned live blog things again, so that my thoughts do not need to be burped out 140 words at a time.<br />
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Last year, I was passionate about the MIA Oscar for Straight Outta Compton, which was a great movie that was left looking for stray drops of wine in the discarded bottles from the Oscar party. This year the feeling's a bit different, because I'm not a big fan of Moonlight, or at least the half of it that I endured before walking out. And Moonlight is considered a lock to win the Adapted Screenplay award, and near to a lock for Supporting Actor. And the movie didn't do it for me. My one lasting impression is of repeated overly artsy shots of people emerging in the frame out of focus and then, belatedly, does the focus puller decide to actually start pulling the people into focus. I wasn't engaged by the story.<br />
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Moonlight isn't along in being a critical darling that I didn't cozy up to. I wasn't engaged by Arrival. I wasn't engaged by Silence. I wasn't engaged by 20th Century Woman. I wasn't engaged by Rogue One. There are lots and lots of nominations for movies that didn't engage me. Which isn't anything new, I guess. Remember all the nominations for Sideways? Mostly slept through that.<br />
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And talking about movies that didn't engage me, there's also Birth of a Nation. I wonder what would have happened if Nate Parker hadn't had trouble digging out of the imbroglio over his acquittal on rape charges many years ago. There's a long, long history of movies that everyone loves amidst the snowy slopes of Park City that aren't near as beloved by the time they finally make their way to movie theatres. There's an excellent chance that a Birth of a Nation might have been another Happy Texas, a Sundance darling from some twenty years ago with a 54% viewer score on Rotten Tomatoes. There's been so many movies on the subject that have been so much better than Birth of a Nation, including the quite recent Twelve Years a Slave. And Roots. What would my Twitter feed have looked like if Birth of a Nation had come and gone and faded without Nate Parker helping it along?<br />
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Also caught up in the Birth of a Nation imbroglio: Casey Affleck, the Best Actor nominee for Manchester by the Sea, who settled civil suits about workplace sexual harrassment. Have read articles in LA Times and elsewhere speculating if the two deserve to be treated differently. So much about the movies to unpack that has nothing to do with the movies themselves, but hasn't it always been thus.<br />
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With the exception of Captain Fantastic, I've seen pretty much every nominated everything. There was Moonlight, which I made a point of seeing as part of a multiplex double features, but there were few movies making it to the final ballot which I avoided seeing at all because I just knew what I'd be getting myself into.<br />
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I guess La La Land will win Best Picture. Which I guess I won't complain about. But sitting here thinking on it, I'd love to see Hidden Figures surprise all of us. I liked it more than most of the other Best Picture contenders, maybe even more than La La Land. I didn't like it as much as Manchester by the Sea, but I can't support Manchester because the use of music in the movie is appallingly bad. And Hidden Figures is so quietly good. So it's not 100% true, because the Kevin Costner character didn't actually exist, and there weren't segregated bathrooms for one of the lead characters in the movie to use. But it's so quietly good that you can miss how well it's made. Start with good casting. Add one under-appreciated director because he gets out of the way of his good cast. This is so totally NOT what Barry Jenkins was doing in Moonlight. If I have to take sides in today's political climate, I'd rather root on Hidden Figures as a good movie and rebuttal to the current regime. <br />
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Best Actor is supposed to come down to Denzel Washington for Fences or Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea. I am unreservedly in Team Affleck for this. I like Denzel Washington a lot, but the quiet unshowy control of Affleck's performance in every frame of Manchester by the Sea, the layers upon layers of hidden story, did more for me. Fences doesn't give enough for Denzel Washington to work with. Everything is anticipated. The infidelity can be seen from 1:45 away when the character is praised for being so faithful. <br />
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Isabelle Huppert? Her performance in Elle is an acting class that can be dissected and debated and admired for many more hours than the movie itself. The movie doesn't exist without her performance.<br />
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How do you give La La Land a dozen Oscars when even a bad movie like Silence has stunning cinematography, when there's a Jackie to contend with in Costume Design, a Fantastic Beasts for Production Design, a film like Hell or High Water that relies on editing to find its own rhythm?<br />
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I keep meaning to sit down and memorialize my own Ten Best list for 2016, but there's just the one Oscar day when I actually sit down to talk about movies. But it's reasonably safe to say that Hacksaw Ridge, He'll or High Water, Hidden Figures, La La Land and Manchester by the Sea would have pretty good odds of making the list.<br />
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But of course, it's a typical Oscar year, and the Best Picture of the year may well be one that isn't in the running.<br />
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And that's OJ: Made in America.<br />
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Which I hope will win for Best Documentary.<br />
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But I think is, far and away, the best, most urgent, most relevant piece of filmmaking to come out in 2016.<br />
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So there's this really famous guy, and there are a lot of people who are going to stand by their man no matter what. Donald Trump said, likely correctly, that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters. OJ probably did worse than shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue. OJ: Made in Amerca makes sure we know that. Gruesome, bloody, hard-to-view pictures of the crime scene, of the blood and gore, are not lacking. If you're trying to understand Donald J. Trump, it may not be possible to do so without understanding Orenthal J. Simpson. And if you're trying to understand Simpson, I don't think it's possible to do better than Made in America.<br />
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I could go on for such a long time talking about OJ: Made in America viewer end through the prism of a 2016 election that could never have been anticipated when Ezra Klein started in on his documentary. But the "shoot someone in middle of 5th Avenue/brutally killed two people in Brentwood" is such a distillation that I'm not sure another 3800 words in my blog post could add to what the one comparison does to start the gears turning. And however your gears start to turn, this brilliant near-to-eight hours of documentary filmmaking will probably anticipate and react to. <br />
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In an ideal world, perhaps there could be a tie between the Made in America and the flawed but powerful 13th from Ana DuVernay, which is kind of like the essential appendix or exhibit attached by hyperlink to Ezra Klein's movie. <br />
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So 20 minutes until the festivities begin. Catch you at the Oscars.The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-16972637783742746632017-01-20T13:02:00.000-05:002017-01-20T13:02:41.025-05:00The Boston Me Party!I'm always excited to be at <a href="http://www.boskone.org/" target="_blank">Boskone</a>. I wouldn't have my current life if not for getting sample copies of OMNI Magazine in the Boskone Dealers Room in the late 1970s, which got me hooked on sf/f and ultimate led to the current version of me.<br />
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This year is even double extra super special with a <a href="http://www.rubysnap.com/menu.html" target="_blank">Ruby Snap cookie</a> on top, because my client Brandon Sanderson is the Guest of Honor, and we will be doing some program items together.<br />
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List of items below, with rooms, times, descriptions, and fellow panelists. And hopefully not the email addresses for the fellow panelists. I have one item with my client <a href="http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/" target="_blank">Walter Jon Williams</a>, will be doing a demo for the Crafty Games <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/182626/mistborn-house-war" target="_blank">Mistborn: House War board game</a>, and of particular interest, will be part of the rare opportunity to hear an author, agent and editor discuss together what makes a successful writing career, as I'm joined by Brandon Sanderson and editor Moshe Feder, who made the decision to push Tor to offer on Elantris.<br />
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The Death Star<br />
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Friday 16:00 - 17:00, Marina 2 (Westin)<br />
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*Spoiler Alert!* Destroying the Death Star, in one of the most iconic battle scenes in film history, was the Rebel Alliance's main goal, and gave our story its happy ending. A single point of weakness brought down this architectural and technological giant. Join us as we discuss the Battle of Yavin, and ultimately the defeat of the Death Star. We might even weave in a little Rogue One!<br />
40th Anniversary: Star Wars: A New Hope<br />
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Mary Kay Kare, Deirdre Crimmins, Joshua Bilmes, Julie Holderman (M) , Brendan DuBois<br />
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Indie Pub Your Backlist<br />
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Saturday 10:00 - 11:00, Marina 2 (Westin)<br />
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Do you have old stories that were published ages ago, now lingering in drawers, gathering dust — not getting read? Independent publishers can be a great resource for letting your stories see the light of day again, and drumming up interest from new readers. We'll discuss ideas on revitalizing your backlist and finding indie publishers for your unpublished early gems.<br />
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Walter Jon Williams, Joshua Bilmes (M), Richard Shealy, Juliana Spink Mills , Craig Shaw Gardner<br />
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_Mistborn: House War_ Game Demo<br />
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Saturday 11:00 - 12:00, Harbor I - Gaming (Westin)<br />
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Game on! A semi-cooperative resource-management game, Mistborn: House War is set during the events of Mistborn: The Final Empire, the first novel in the bestselling fantasy series by Boskone Guest of Honor Brandon Sanderson. Join agent Joshua Bilmes for an early look at this exciting new board game — launching this spring!<br />
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Joshua Bilmes, Brandon Sanderson<br />
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Guest of Honor Brandon Sanderson: Building a Career<br />
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Saturday 13:00 - 14:00, Harbor III (Westin)<br />
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Even a prodigiously talented author doesn't become a success alone, or overnight. Boskone 54's Guest of Honor, Brandon Sanderson; his agent, Joshua Bilmes; and his editor, Moshe Feder, discuss how they have worked together to sculpt and craft the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author, "Brandon Sanderson," that we know today. All three luminaries share their stories of navigating the shoals of the publishing world as they built friendships and careers within the speculative fiction industry.<br />
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Brandon Sanderson, Joshua Bilmes, Moshe Feder<br />
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Contracts and Talking Terms<br />
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Sunday 10:00 - 11:00, Burroughs (Westin)<br />
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Literary contracts can be tricky to navigate. We'll reveal what's behind those mysterious clauses and terms hidden in plain sight. When is a deal too good to pass up — or too good to be true? Discover what's okay to publish, learn to avoid legal landmines, and ask questions about what you most want to know.<br />
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Joshua Bilmes, Victoria Sandbrook, Kenneth Schneyer, E. C. Ambrose (M), Michael StearnsThe Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-20055638960070694572016-11-05T19:07:00.003-04:002016-11-05T19:07:41.973-04:00Barcelona<span style="color: #454545; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px; text-decoration: -webkit-letterpress;">I haven't blogged in a while, but I thought I would do a post about my Barcelona trip, rather than 58 tweets.</span><br />
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Why Barcelona?</div>
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I discovered two years ago when I did the Eurocon in Dublin the week after LonCon that Eurocon isn't a great professional convention. In Dublin, so much so that I decided to just put the bill for the whole stay as a personal expense so I could enjoy Dublin guilt free. But, Barcelona is the heart of the Spanish publishing business, so when I saw the next Eurocon would be in Barcelona, I eyed it as a chance to see Spanish publishers on their home turf with more time to talk and learn than in the 30 minute appointments that we have in endless succession at London Book Fair. And to visit Spanish bookstores, and with our agents for the Spanish market. Any bar-con or schmoozing that Eurocon presented would be an add-on. And then it turned out that Eurocon dovetailed nicely with a European tour that Brandon Sanderson had on his schedule, so we worked the itinerary that Brandon could be in Barcdlona for Eurocon, an opportunity that the convention and his publishers, Ediciones B, we're happy to take advantage of. It all worked out very nicely.</div>
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Now that I have employees and an iPad, I do a lot less personal preparation for a trip like this than I used to. Krystyna Lopez, the head of foreign rights for the agency, was joining me, so she and her assistant Rebecca took care of slotting the publishers and arranging the schedule. I just kind of show up and go where I'm told. I ended up buying a couple guide books a few days before the trip, but hardly looked at them.</div>
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So Krystyna and I get to Barcelona at 6:30 AM, and...</div>
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For one, the US is not a very welcoming country. Getting into the US is an ordeal even for citizens with forms and lines and a general belief everyone is a criminal. Getting into Spain, Italy, the U.K -- much smoother. They put out a welcome mat, we put out a "Beware of Dog" sign. </div>
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We decided to aim for the Aerobus. It was waiting and ready, and it wasn't yet 7AM, so why pay for a cab. Good call. The bus runs often, gets into town quickly, had good free WiFi. In a bit, the subway will also go out to the airport, but for now, the bus is a good choice if you've packed light and aren't too far from where the bus stops downtown.</div>
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And the four days I've had in Barcelona? I had no idea what to expect, and the first four of our seven days in the city have been amazing.</div>
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General impressions</div>
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Walking: it's both a great walking city and an awful one. The awful last -- by the time you get the yellow signal as a pedestrian, you're already dead. New York, it means most people can start at the yellow and have time to cross the street. Here, three quick flashes, time to cross one lane, and the cars are ready to bear down. Almost all the intersections, the crosswalk is set back from the corner, which is fine if you're going on a diagonal route and awful if going in a straight line because every corner means adding time. Street signs are often hard to find, like London usually on the buildings, but with less consistency and visibility. And because most of the corners are rounded and the buildings set back in a circle, it's harder to see what's at any given corner, including the street sign. Also, very few of the buildings have numbers on them. And traffic moves. You can't jaywalk because it's rare to have cars backed up and not going anywhere. So you detour to the crosswalk, and patiently wait for the light. Amd yet, it's also a city with lots of wide thoroughfares with pedestrian promenades and benches and bikeways.</div>
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Dining: Most restaurants have lunch hours that may not start before 13:00 and dinner hours that may begin at 20:00. But there are also all sorts of cafes and patisseries and convenience stores and the like that are open. Meal hours are regimented, but you will rarely need to go far in the downtown areas to find someplace to get something to eat. And there is a variety of food today. This is the biggest thing for me in comparing with Paris. There, after a late movie in bustling Montparnasse, actual dining options were about non-existent, bistros that were open only for drinks after 9:30. My late night dining was from a train station vending machine. And all the bistros had similar menus, the patisseries the same baked goods. Barcelona, coming back from movie after midnight, I could find a few places still serving food and some 24 hour stores, even though I wasn't walking through the central part of downtown. There are some ubiquitous food items, but variety as well. And while there is no lack of paella, I can go not too far afield from my hotel and find Indian, Thai, Asian, Russian, Italian, and more. Bottom line, I've had many dishes that I've never had at the fancy meals required by the business engagements, but also gone to a burger place, Indian, and had grab and go pizza. I chose to come to Barcelona, which didn't require having one type of food for an entire week.</div>
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Activities:</div>
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Day one, I walked down to the inner harbor area and Las Ramblas, the major tourist shopping thoroughfare, and then up to Parc Gaudie with views down on the city. Wonderful dinner hosted by Ediciones B, the Spanish publishers for Brandon Sanderson.</div>
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Day two, publisher meetings during the day, and Brandon Sanderson signing at Gigamesh, a giant specialty shop for all things nerd, with 350+ people on line to meet Brandon. I stayed til 9:30, then went to see a British film, Ken Loach's I Daniel Blake, on the large screen of an art house. I don't consider any trip complete without seeing a movie!</div>
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Day three, another wonderful meal at lunch time, with the agent I've worked with in Spain for thirty years, dating to the start of my career at Scott Meredith. Preceded by publisher meetings, followed by a Brandon Sanderson signing at the major FNAC downtown, and then our taking Brandon out for dinner. Another excellent meal, location recommended by the editor of Planeta's Minotauro imprint. That signing had an attendance cap, and was lower key than the event at Gigamesh.</div>
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Day four, I took advantage of a free morning to walk around the parks near parliament, then along the actual beach, before heading inland for lunch with Aliette de Bodard, whose work we have in our ebook program via John Berlyne and Zeno Agency. Another nice meal. Then over to Eurocon to see two Q&A sessions with Brandon Sanderson. </div>
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More I could say, but an early wake up call to day trip to Valencia to see our client Mark Hodder.</div>
The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3001434439078518468.post-20629171791032928682016-07-27T17:43:00.000-04:002016-07-27T17:43:03.471-04:00Reserve, Rinse, RepeatHere is a letter which I am sending today to the CEO of one of the major publishing conglomerates. All authors and agents should feel free to copy and paste, put in appropriate specific details, and do the same. <br />
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Once upon a time, the reserve against returns was kind of necessary. Books only sold in print. All those print books were fully returnable. Sometimes 70% of the copies were returned. <br />
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But now, books sell digitally, with very few returns on ebooks and downloadable audio. Printed books are still fully returnable, but for a great many books, sales through channels that lend themselves to especially high return rates have dwindled. I'm not saying reserves are entirely unnecessary. I'm saying it's time to push back on doing things this way because they've always been done this way, accepting reserves in any quantity when they no longer serve their original and intended purpose.<br />
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There are too many business practices tilting against authors, and we can't continue to accept all of them.<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Dear CEO:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I hate arguing about pennies, but I also don’t understand why publishers want to keep pennies from my authors for no reason, holding reserves on titles where none is necessary.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’m attaching the summary page of the just-received royalty statement for [book by my client] by [client name], as the quintessential example of this.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Please notice the book earned $1750 in ebook royalties.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So how can you justify the 92 copy reserve on the trade paperback?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The trade paperback royalty per US copy is $1.20. If the ebook royalties were to drop by half on [book by my client], [you] would still have $875 to credit to the author’s royalty account on the next royalty report. That is a sufficient reserve to cover the return of 730 trade paperback copies. The actual returns on the trade paperback were 46 copies. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This isn’t reasonable. It’s time for your contracts to acknowledge that, and to renounce the right to hold reserves against returns when ebook income can reasonably be expected to cover print returns, as is clearly and abundantly the case on this royalty report, and on so many others.</span></div>
The Brillig Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07886394602447693115noreply@blogger.com0