For over 30 years, I have been a devout reader of Variety.
Now, I hate the actual printed magazine. It doesn't take long to read, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in a good week. And this quick read comes in the form of an oversize magazine printed on heavy coated white paper. Who wants to go around on the subway holding a heavy, oversized magazine that doesn't take very long to read and which requires lots and lots of page turns? The magazine is as annoying as it is informative.
However, the printed magazine is now only a small portion of the total content Variety offers. Every week there are dozens of articles and reviews and columnists to be found on the magazine's website that aren't to be found in the weekly magazine.
There is no paywall on the website. The owner of Variety has made a business decision not to charge for its content.
I prefer content like this in print. There are week-long stretches when I have plenty of time to sit at my computer or use their iPad app and devour all the content the website has to offer, but there are other times when it would be so much nicer to have a printed publication with more of the content which I can read outside when it is too cold for the iPad, or when I am on cellular data. I spend enough of my life at a computer and it keeps dragging me to spend more of it there.
It's a dilemma.
Maybe less of one, maybe easier to pay, if I just didn't like the magazine. But no. I actively dislike the magazine. It is an annoyance. I dread seeing it arrive in my mailbox each week. There is no way to subscribe to the magazine without casting a vote in its favor, and that isn't a vote I wish to cast. I guess I could get an "online subscription" but why would anyone do that when all the content is there for free? As a result of a conscious business decision by the owner.
It feels kind of like putting money into a tip jar, only in this case it would be the tip jar of the wealthy owner of Penske Media who made a decision not to charge for content, and to develop a magazine I don't want to read.
So why does it still feel wrong not to pay?
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Status - Quo!
So a quick report in on our move, a little less lavishly illustrated than it should be because I don't quite have the time...
After a day of packing on Monday, the movers started loading our Queens office into the truck at around 9:10 on Tuesday morning.
When that task was mostly complete, Eddie and I chaperoned the parade of the Eeyores, as they headed from our office to the new office over the 59th St. Bridge with stops along the way at places like the Magnolia Bakery, Serendipity 3, Bloomingdales, the site of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency offices in Joshua's early years in the business, etc. I will gather many photos on this blog eventually, but for now if you go to twitter.com/awfulagent or twitter.com/eddieschneider you can find.
Now, this was a little silly, but also a lot of fun, and ultimately, what else were Eddie and I going to do? The computers were in boxes, the routers and the servers and the ethernet cables and the track pads and the keyboards were in boxes, and for all our leisure and silliness, the truck beat us to the new office by five or ten minutes. It was a sheer delight, every minute of it, we hope you'll enjoy the pictures, and I expect we gave some lasting memories to people we encountered along the way. Because it's not every day you see a guy holding four Eeyores walking across the 59th St. Bridge, or posing six Eeyores on the bridge, or bring Eeyore into the Magnolia Bakery. I highly recommend that every move have a well-documented March of The Eeyores -- but buy your own, you're not borrowing ours.
I was happy as we started to direct the movers on where to put things. The new office is a tad smaller than our old office, and even though the old office was bigger than we needed it to be, I'd walk around the new office and worry that it wasn't big enough. I don't think we have to worry too much for a while. We have nice nooks for Sam and Joshua, Eddie and Lisa, Krystyna and Christa, and for Brady, and room for more filing cabinets, more bookshelves, three or four more people. Room enough for a while. Not that we need to rush to fill every nook and cranny, but it's nice to know we have the room to in-fill as the space grows out.
By the end of the day on Wednesday, we'd pretty much unpacked everything and pretty much had everything in its place.
Which isn't to say everything is perfect.
Joshua decided to take keys to one of the filing cabinets home with him Tuesday night, because it seemed like a safer place when the office was in disarray. So of course, Wednesday morning, the keys go into Joshua's pocket, and then aren't to be found when he gets to the office. We see a locksmith in our future!
Joshua would feel worse about his stupidity if there weren't contributions from everyone else in the office. In particular, there seem to be some people in the office who have trouble reading the boxes that phones come in. One person goes to buy a base station for the phone system and buys a cordless base extension instead -- everything the base does except without an actual cord to plug in a phone line. Then person #2 goes to buy a basic phone with answering machine and returns with phone without answering machine. The locksmith will probably cost less than the phones.
The phone and internet worked wonderfully until we tried to use them.
But then we realize we need to restart the router because the internet is getting a bit slow within two or three hours of our first full day in the new space. And then we need to restart the router again. And again. And again and again and again and again. If we restart the router every hour, we can probably get fifteen or twenty minutes of functionality before the phone and the internet become theoretical constructs. So Time Warner will be back on Friday afternoon. No idea what we will do on Thursday. It would almost be better for the internet to just not work at all, rather than to have it work just often enough that you think you can use it without ever working long enough that you actually can.
We got food! Elizabeth Moon, Peter V. Brett and Myke Cole have all helped to sustain us, as did John Berlyne at the Zeno Agency.
We got the first buds of the spring royalty season, some Heyne royalties for the second half of 2013. Over the next four weeks, we expect thousands of pages of royalty statements. We like royalty season, and we hate royalty season.
We still need to find our way to the closest Post Office. Which, according to usps.com, keeps very strange hours of 7am to 3pm. We do have a mailbox at the corner.
We are starting to explore local lunch options. Sadly, in LIC we would get delivery from the excellent Sunnyside Pizza. At the new office, we can pretty much step outside our building and step into Little Italy Pizza, but that doesn't compare, not remotely, with the yumminess of Sunnyside Pizza.
If it weren't for the danged internet I'd be super happy at how well the move was going. While we have some work we can do internally, it's distracting to try and do it. It's hard to believe that my career started far enough back in the future that nobody know what an internet was, and now it's hard to run anything without it. But where things were solely in our control, I'd give us an A- for doing things about as smoothly as you can hope for them to go.
After a day of packing on Monday, the movers started loading our Queens office into the truck at around 9:10 on Tuesday morning.
When that task was mostly complete, Eddie and I chaperoned the parade of the Eeyores, as they headed from our office to the new office over the 59th St. Bridge with stops along the way at places like the Magnolia Bakery, Serendipity 3, Bloomingdales, the site of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency offices in Joshua's early years in the business, etc. I will gather many photos on this blog eventually, but for now if you go to twitter.com/awfulagent or twitter.com/eddieschneider you can find.
Now, this was a little silly, but also a lot of fun, and ultimately, what else were Eddie and I going to do? The computers were in boxes, the routers and the servers and the ethernet cables and the track pads and the keyboards were in boxes, and for all our leisure and silliness, the truck beat us to the new office by five or ten minutes. It was a sheer delight, every minute of it, we hope you'll enjoy the pictures, and I expect we gave some lasting memories to people we encountered along the way. Because it's not every day you see a guy holding four Eeyores walking across the 59th St. Bridge, or posing six Eeyores on the bridge, or bring Eeyore into the Magnolia Bakery. I highly recommend that every move have a well-documented March of The Eeyores -- but buy your own, you're not borrowing ours.
I was happy as we started to direct the movers on where to put things. The new office is a tad smaller than our old office, and even though the old office was bigger than we needed it to be, I'd walk around the new office and worry that it wasn't big enough. I don't think we have to worry too much for a while. We have nice nooks for Sam and Joshua, Eddie and Lisa, Krystyna and Christa, and for Brady, and room for more filing cabinets, more bookshelves, three or four more people. Room enough for a while. Not that we need to rush to fill every nook and cranny, but it's nice to know we have the room to in-fill as the space grows out.
By the end of the day on Wednesday, we'd pretty much unpacked everything and pretty much had everything in its place.
Which isn't to say everything is perfect.
Joshua decided to take keys to one of the filing cabinets home with him Tuesday night, because it seemed like a safer place when the office was in disarray. So of course, Wednesday morning, the keys go into Joshua's pocket, and then aren't to be found when he gets to the office. We see a locksmith in our future!
Joshua would feel worse about his stupidity if there weren't contributions from everyone else in the office. In particular, there seem to be some people in the office who have trouble reading the boxes that phones come in. One person goes to buy a base station for the phone system and buys a cordless base extension instead -- everything the base does except without an actual cord to plug in a phone line. Then person #2 goes to buy a basic phone with answering machine and returns with phone without answering machine. The locksmith will probably cost less than the phones.
The phone and internet worked wonderfully until we tried to use them.
But then we realize we need to restart the router because the internet is getting a bit slow within two or three hours of our first full day in the new space. And then we need to restart the router again. And again. And again and again and again and again. If we restart the router every hour, we can probably get fifteen or twenty minutes of functionality before the phone and the internet become theoretical constructs. So Time Warner will be back on Friday afternoon. No idea what we will do on Thursday. It would almost be better for the internet to just not work at all, rather than to have it work just often enough that you think you can use it without ever working long enough that you actually can.
We got food! Elizabeth Moon, Peter V. Brett and Myke Cole have all helped to sustain us, as did John Berlyne at the Zeno Agency.
We got the first buds of the spring royalty season, some Heyne royalties for the second half of 2013. Over the next four weeks, we expect thousands of pages of royalty statements. We like royalty season, and we hate royalty season.
We still need to find our way to the closest Post Office. Which, according to usps.com, keeps very strange hours of 7am to 3pm. We do have a mailbox at the corner.
We are starting to explore local lunch options. Sadly, in LIC we would get delivery from the excellent Sunnyside Pizza. At the new office, we can pretty much step outside our building and step into Little Italy Pizza, but that doesn't compare, not remotely, with the yumminess of Sunnyside Pizza.
If it weren't for the danged internet I'd be super happy at how well the move was going. While we have some work we can do internally, it's distracting to try and do it. It's hard to believe that my career started far enough back in the future that nobody know what an internet was, and now it's hard to run anything without it. But where things were solely in our control, I'd give us an A- for doing things about as smoothly as you can hope for them to go.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Changing Times
Kind of hard to believe, but not even two years after decamping from my one-time apartment in Sunnyside Queens to an actual offer a mile-and-some away, we're packed up and ready to move tomorrow to a new office in Manhattan, a very different JABberwocky than we were when we moved the first time.
Scavenging parts of a year-in-review post that I worked on around the New Year and never got around to finishing and posting, let's look at how JABberwocky has changed...
At the start of 2013, we were like an iPhone app running on an iPad. We had grown, but we were fuzzy at the edges. At the end of the year, and heading into our 20th anniversary year in 2014, we are an actual iPad app with the staff and capabilities that are right and comfortable for our size, or at least enough so that I don't look at my business and think it's all fuzzy-ish and not quite going all the way to the edges of the screen.
A lot of that change and improvement is the result of having a much bigger staff. First move: me, Eddie Schneider, Jessie Cammack. Now, it's me and six other people, and this whole "larger staff" thing wants to keep feeding on itself. Hiring Brady McReynolds to head up foreign rights loosened a lot of time for other people in the office. I hadn't even realized until he started having more time how much of Eddie's time was being spent on foreign rights, and then when I saw what could happen when we didn't have to do that, I decided we needed to go further down that path, taking other collateral duties from Eddie as I could so he could focus very strongly on the "agent" part of the literary agency.
And it just kept kind of spiraling out from there. By the time I had Sam as my assistant, and Lisa was helping triple the size of our e-book program while also offering some help to Eddie, it became apparent that I was at risk of no longer being able to do "agent" part of the literary agency myself. Since Brady was really good at managing tasks, we ended up asking him to segue from foreign rights to more of a COO role helping me run the agency, but that meant elevating his assistant Krystyna to broader oversight of the foreign rights desk, and getting Christa on board to help Krystyna. And now we have Martin Cahill helping out a little as well on project and task work that needs to be done. It's been a lot of growth in a very short time, and it's hard for me to comprehend it isn't even two years since Brady joined the time.
By and large, this has been a good thing, we've taken on a lot of new clients in the past two years, and we've been selling books for a lot of them. It's highly unlikely a year or two ago that I'd have made the time to read an F&SF and find my way to Adam Rakunas. I'm reading another ms from an author I found in Asimov's. Took on Walter Jon Williams, Eric Moore.
Some things I haven't been as happy about.
We bit off a bit more than we could chew in late 2012 when we committed to a major expansion of the number of titles in our e-book program, and it's taken us 18 months to digest all those new titles. It's a lot more work publishing e-books than a lot of people seem to appreciate, and I'd include myself in that "a lot of people.". But we have pretty much digested all the added titles, which means Lisa can be a little more involved on the agent side, helping Eddie and looking for her own clients.
We keep finding more stuff we need to do with our IT.
For to me, information is the mother's milk of literary representation. We have full bibliographies and review quotes for all of our clients on our website, as an example. Most other literary agencies don't provide near the level of self-service for people who might want this information. But it takes a lot of time to compile all of this information, and then every time you gather more information it becomes some project to do something with the information. Figure out all the books in Germany that have expired licenses, you need to look at whether some of them should be renewed. Figure out there are five countries of twelve where you don't have a royalty report for a foreign edition, you need to go asking for them. Ignorance isn't bliss, but we'd have way fewer projects. And we've been scanning our contracts after re-serializing them, we've been working on using a database to better untangle the spaghetti when we get money from foreign countries coming in from three publishers to go out to six authors. And I think I'll do a separate post about the processing of royalty statements.
Even though our move coincides with a period of growth in the agency with many exciting things happening at the agency, I'm a lot less excited about the move than everyone else seems to be. For me, personally, I've spent 15.5 years working from home, 2 years with a 1.2 mile easy walk, and 2 years with a too easy .3 miles. I haven't had to deal with the commuting thing for a very long time, close to half my life and the biggest chunk of my working life. I'm not all that thrilled that my "reward" for building a successful business is that I now get to spend most likely the rest of my working life commuting into Manhattan. It seems a little "off" to say things like this, but can any of you reading this say that a commute is something you look forward to? The number of people who can do the Peter V. Brett "write novel on smart phone on F train" thing is pretty small. Perhaps once I get back into the routine of it, of the joys of starting each day with a nice three miles over the 59th St. Bridge, I'll feel better about it all.
Even though the office we are leaving is bigger than we need, I worry that the new office is a little smaller. If the business keeps growing, how long with it be until we have the ten or twelve people working out of the new office that we can maximally have there? The previous occupants of the space had over 20 people working in it, but there's no way we can do that.
But ultimately, whether I like it or not, it is what it is. And I can't entirely ignore that the rest of the world seems excited that we're making the move.
I am looking forward to the parade tomorrow, when Eeyore will be heading into Manhattan, with Tigger and Rabbit and Christopher Robin in tow. It will be fun times.
The original version of this post had laundry lists of great things that have happened for our clients, but I kind of hate things like that. If you mention one thing do you have to mention everything?
But to ignore that end of things entirely doesn't sit right with me, either. The big picture at JABberwocky is this, that a few years ago we were making a lot of money, but almost all of it from the success of the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. Now, it's more than that. Peter Brett is our biggest author in Germany. The Lost Fleet books by Jack Campbell are our top books in Japan and also among our top series in the UK. And Brandon Sanderson has joined Charlaine as a #1 bestseller in the United States, in both YA and adult, with Steelheart and Words of Radiance. With those two books, Charlaine's Dead Ever After, and Peter's Daylight War, we've had four books that have been top ten bestsellers in multiple territories. It's much harder making money from multiple authors than to have only one, but it's much more secure having a stool with more than one leg to sit on. And maybe the person who built a business that represents so many major bestselling authors should be a little bit happier that as of tomorrow his new perch is going to be in the corner of a Manhattan office building.
The game is afoot. Now, to fill out my bracket...
Scavenging parts of a year-in-review post that I worked on around the New Year and never got around to finishing and posting, let's look at how JABberwocky has changed...
At the start of 2013, we were like an iPhone app running on an iPad. We had grown, but we were fuzzy at the edges. At the end of the year, and heading into our 20th anniversary year in 2014, we are an actual iPad app with the staff and capabilities that are right and comfortable for our size, or at least enough so that I don't look at my business and think it's all fuzzy-ish and not quite going all the way to the edges of the screen.
A lot of that change and improvement is the result of having a much bigger staff. First move: me, Eddie Schneider, Jessie Cammack. Now, it's me and six other people, and this whole "larger staff" thing wants to keep feeding on itself. Hiring Brady McReynolds to head up foreign rights loosened a lot of time for other people in the office. I hadn't even realized until he started having more time how much of Eddie's time was being spent on foreign rights, and then when I saw what could happen when we didn't have to do that, I decided we needed to go further down that path, taking other collateral duties from Eddie as I could so he could focus very strongly on the "agent" part of the literary agency.
And it just kept kind of spiraling out from there. By the time I had Sam as my assistant, and Lisa was helping triple the size of our e-book program while also offering some help to Eddie, it became apparent that I was at risk of no longer being able to do "agent" part of the literary agency myself. Since Brady was really good at managing tasks, we ended up asking him to segue from foreign rights to more of a COO role helping me run the agency, but that meant elevating his assistant Krystyna to broader oversight of the foreign rights desk, and getting Christa on board to help Krystyna. And now we have Martin Cahill helping out a little as well on project and task work that needs to be done. It's been a lot of growth in a very short time, and it's hard for me to comprehend it isn't even two years since Brady joined the time.
By and large, this has been a good thing, we've taken on a lot of new clients in the past two years, and we've been selling books for a lot of them. It's highly unlikely a year or two ago that I'd have made the time to read an F&SF and find my way to Adam Rakunas. I'm reading another ms from an author I found in Asimov's. Took on Walter Jon Williams, Eric Moore.
Some things I haven't been as happy about.
We bit off a bit more than we could chew in late 2012 when we committed to a major expansion of the number of titles in our e-book program, and it's taken us 18 months to digest all those new titles. It's a lot more work publishing e-books than a lot of people seem to appreciate, and I'd include myself in that "a lot of people.". But we have pretty much digested all the added titles, which means Lisa can be a little more involved on the agent side, helping Eddie and looking for her own clients.
We keep finding more stuff we need to do with our IT.
For to me, information is the mother's milk of literary representation. We have full bibliographies and review quotes for all of our clients on our website, as an example. Most other literary agencies don't provide near the level of self-service for people who might want this information. But it takes a lot of time to compile all of this information, and then every time you gather more information it becomes some project to do something with the information. Figure out all the books in Germany that have expired licenses, you need to look at whether some of them should be renewed. Figure out there are five countries of twelve where you don't have a royalty report for a foreign edition, you need to go asking for them. Ignorance isn't bliss, but we'd have way fewer projects. And we've been scanning our contracts after re-serializing them, we've been working on using a database to better untangle the spaghetti when we get money from foreign countries coming in from three publishers to go out to six authors. And I think I'll do a separate post about the processing of royalty statements.
Even though our move coincides with a period of growth in the agency with many exciting things happening at the agency, I'm a lot less excited about the move than everyone else seems to be. For me, personally, I've spent 15.5 years working from home, 2 years with a 1.2 mile easy walk, and 2 years with a too easy .3 miles. I haven't had to deal with the commuting thing for a very long time, close to half my life and the biggest chunk of my working life. I'm not all that thrilled that my "reward" for building a successful business is that I now get to spend most likely the rest of my working life commuting into Manhattan. It seems a little "off" to say things like this, but can any of you reading this say that a commute is something you look forward to? The number of people who can do the Peter V. Brett "write novel on smart phone on F train" thing is pretty small. Perhaps once I get back into the routine of it, of the joys of starting each day with a nice three miles over the 59th St. Bridge, I'll feel better about it all.
Even though the office we are leaving is bigger than we need, I worry that the new office is a little smaller. If the business keeps growing, how long with it be until we have the ten or twelve people working out of the new office that we can maximally have there? The previous occupants of the space had over 20 people working in it, but there's no way we can do that.
But ultimately, whether I like it or not, it is what it is. And I can't entirely ignore that the rest of the world seems excited that we're making the move.
I am looking forward to the parade tomorrow, when Eeyore will be heading into Manhattan, with Tigger and Rabbit and Christopher Robin in tow. It will be fun times.
The original version of this post had laundry lists of great things that have happened for our clients, but I kind of hate things like that. If you mention one thing do you have to mention everything?
But to ignore that end of things entirely doesn't sit right with me, either. The big picture at JABberwocky is this, that a few years ago we were making a lot of money, but almost all of it from the success of the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. Now, it's more than that. Peter Brett is our biggest author in Germany. The Lost Fleet books by Jack Campbell are our top books in Japan and also among our top series in the UK. And Brandon Sanderson has joined Charlaine as a #1 bestseller in the United States, in both YA and adult, with Steelheart and Words of Radiance. With those two books, Charlaine's Dead Ever After, and Peter's Daylight War, we've had four books that have been top ten bestsellers in multiple territories. It's much harder making money from multiple authors than to have only one, but it's much more secure having a stool with more than one leg to sit on. And maybe the person who built a business that represents so many major bestselling authors should be a little bit happier that as of tomorrow his new perch is going to be in the corner of a Manhattan office building.
The game is afoot. Now, to fill out my bracket...
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Die Muppets en Die Raid
It's been an eclectic and unusually fertile week of preview screenings at The Museum of the Moving Image. After showing Bad Words earlier in the week, there was an unusual double feature today of Muppet Most Wanted and The Raid 2, both quite enjoyable in their own different ways.
The best thing, and perhaps the only thing, that one needs to say about Muppet Most Wanted is that it's undoubtedly and undeniably a film Jim Henson could have made.
I'm not sure any Muppet movie will ever equal the consistent delight of the memorable tunes from the original Muppet movie, but there's no denying the quality of work that Bret McKenzie is doing for the current Muppet films. This movie starts with a production number where the Muppets celebrate the fact that they are getting to do a sequel (yes, Bunsen Honeydew does quite scientifically interrupt the song to point out that this is in fact the 7th Muppet movie), which features lots and lots of Muppets, happily breaks the third wall, goes big in the style of The Magic Store from the original Muppet movie or even big in the style of a big number from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life or Mel Brooks' History of the World Part One. There are other solid original numbers sprinkled throughout. And the movie's plot lends itself to paying tribute to the use of music in the original Muppet Show, so we get little gems like Miss Piggy doing her best Celine Dion with a number from The Muppet Movie. Of course, we later get Celine Dion herself. And the movie ends with a rendition of the song "Together Again" that seems like an homage to the Monty Python film Life of Brian. Yes, Jim Henson would have gotten this.
The movie is sprinkled with celebrity co-stars and celebrity cameos. I don't like Ricky Gervais, but I liked him here. He has a twinkle in his eye throughout and seems to clearly be enjoying playing second fiddle to The Muppets. And then there's Ray Liotta, and Tina Fey, and Usher, and Frank Langella, and many many more. I didn't recognize everyone; I'm getting to be an old man. But the cameos here should resonate with a mix of thirteen year olds and 53-year-olds, because the sheer abundance of them allows the film to cover all bases.
And the jokes cover all age bases. There's a lot of just plain silly for kids to enjoy. Then there's a quick reference to David Lean. Or to David Niven, while we're at it. Jim Henson would understand where the creators are coming from.
So three cheers to director James Bobin, who co-wrote with Nicholas Stoller. Almost 35 years after the release of the original Muppet Movie, they have the Muppets feeling fresh and new again.
The strange thing to me: Jason Segel, who did so much to help spearhead the return of the Muppets to movie theatres isn't here in any way, shape, or form, not even in the form of a no-show producer credit hiding somewhere.
A few years back there was a martial arts movie called The Raid which I didn't get around to seeing. It got some nice reviews, kind of wanted to, but it just never happened, I think in part because I have an informal quota on the number of martial arts movies I want to see and that might have been released in proximity to another one. But suffice to say when I saw that Moving Image was hosting a screening of The Raid 2, I wasn't going to miss out twice.
Glad I didn't. The Raid 2 is excellent.
Martial arts movies don't need a plot, necessarily, but this one has one Shakespeare would recognize, which centers around a father/son struggle over the future of an Indonesian crime family. The son thinks his dad has gone soft, and doesn't buy into the idea expressed to him at one point in the movie that the father now has enough respect that he doesn't still need to have fear going for him. Into the midst of this father/son struggle is thrown an undercover cop, the actual lead of the movie, played by Iko Uwais. He appeared at a Q&A afterwards along with writer/director/editor Gareth Evans, and Julie Estelle who is by default the female lead, because there aren't any females hanging around in this movie.
While it's nice to have a powerful primal central plot in the film, people don't go to martial arts movies for the plots. They go for the martial arts. And there are a number of incredible sequences using a variety or weapons and fighting styles. What's your favorite? The prison yard? The subway car? The hotel ballroom? The guy with the baseball bat? Kinetic fighting inside a four-seater?
Nothing's predictable. At the halfway point, after some great sequences in large rooms, I was thinking the director liked doing action on a big canvas. But that was until he started doing great fights in halls and alleys. By the time he gets to doing vibrant martial arts inside of a not-that-big moving car, you realize he'll do his action anywhere he can.
If I were one of those reviewers or critics who reviews multiple things and feels that requires finding some way to link them all together in the hook to that week's review colum, I guess I'd be talking about the shared love of film history that one sees in both this and Muppet Most Wanted. I saw lots of Kubrick in The Raid 2. The classical tune "Sarabande," which plays for an entire reel in Barry Lyndon gets a decent workout here. There's a hotel ballroom that could be considered the heir to the Gold Room at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, complete with a bathroom attendant, a decent facsimile of the bar itself, and a resplendent color scheme that goes well with the color of the blood that will be nicely spilled before the movie's 2.5 hours are over. Attached to the hotel ballroom is a nicely sized hotel kitchen that Dick Halloran would probably have enjoyed cooking in. At one point a car stops in the middle of a group of burnt-out buildings that would have done nicely for the major urban battle set piece in Full Metal Jacket. I was a little disappointed that we didn't get a full-on martial arts sequence in the space.
The movie's long at 2.5 hours, but it moves. If you see one martial arts movie in 2014, there's an excellent chance you'll wish it to be this one.
The best thing, and perhaps the only thing, that one needs to say about Muppet Most Wanted is that it's undoubtedly and undeniably a film Jim Henson could have made.
I'm not sure any Muppet movie will ever equal the consistent delight of the memorable tunes from the original Muppet movie, but there's no denying the quality of work that Bret McKenzie is doing for the current Muppet films. This movie starts with a production number where the Muppets celebrate the fact that they are getting to do a sequel (yes, Bunsen Honeydew does quite scientifically interrupt the song to point out that this is in fact the 7th Muppet movie), which features lots and lots of Muppets, happily breaks the third wall, goes big in the style of The Magic Store from the original Muppet movie or even big in the style of a big number from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life or Mel Brooks' History of the World Part One. There are other solid original numbers sprinkled throughout. And the movie's plot lends itself to paying tribute to the use of music in the original Muppet Show, so we get little gems like Miss Piggy doing her best Celine Dion with a number from The Muppet Movie. Of course, we later get Celine Dion herself. And the movie ends with a rendition of the song "Together Again" that seems like an homage to the Monty Python film Life of Brian. Yes, Jim Henson would have gotten this.
The movie is sprinkled with celebrity co-stars and celebrity cameos. I don't like Ricky Gervais, but I liked him here. He has a twinkle in his eye throughout and seems to clearly be enjoying playing second fiddle to The Muppets. And then there's Ray Liotta, and Tina Fey, and Usher, and Frank Langella, and many many more. I didn't recognize everyone; I'm getting to be an old man. But the cameos here should resonate with a mix of thirteen year olds and 53-year-olds, because the sheer abundance of them allows the film to cover all bases.
And the jokes cover all age bases. There's a lot of just plain silly for kids to enjoy. Then there's a quick reference to David Lean. Or to David Niven, while we're at it. Jim Henson would understand where the creators are coming from.
So three cheers to director James Bobin, who co-wrote with Nicholas Stoller. Almost 35 years after the release of the original Muppet Movie, they have the Muppets feeling fresh and new again.
The strange thing to me: Jason Segel, who did so much to help spearhead the return of the Muppets to movie theatres isn't here in any way, shape, or form, not even in the form of a no-show producer credit hiding somewhere.
A few years back there was a martial arts movie called The Raid which I didn't get around to seeing. It got some nice reviews, kind of wanted to, but it just never happened, I think in part because I have an informal quota on the number of martial arts movies I want to see and that might have been released in proximity to another one. But suffice to say when I saw that Moving Image was hosting a screening of The Raid 2, I wasn't going to miss out twice.
Glad I didn't. The Raid 2 is excellent.
Martial arts movies don't need a plot, necessarily, but this one has one Shakespeare would recognize, which centers around a father/son struggle over the future of an Indonesian crime family. The son thinks his dad has gone soft, and doesn't buy into the idea expressed to him at one point in the movie that the father now has enough respect that he doesn't still need to have fear going for him. Into the midst of this father/son struggle is thrown an undercover cop, the actual lead of the movie, played by Iko Uwais. He appeared at a Q&A afterwards along with writer/director/editor Gareth Evans, and Julie Estelle who is by default the female lead, because there aren't any females hanging around in this movie.
While it's nice to have a powerful primal central plot in the film, people don't go to martial arts movies for the plots. They go for the martial arts. And there are a number of incredible sequences using a variety or weapons and fighting styles. What's your favorite? The prison yard? The subway car? The hotel ballroom? The guy with the baseball bat? Kinetic fighting inside a four-seater?
Nothing's predictable. At the halfway point, after some great sequences in large rooms, I was thinking the director liked doing action on a big canvas. But that was until he started doing great fights in halls and alleys. By the time he gets to doing vibrant martial arts inside of a not-that-big moving car, you realize he'll do his action anywhere he can.
If I were one of those reviewers or critics who reviews multiple things and feels that requires finding some way to link them all together in the hook to that week's review colum, I guess I'd be talking about the shared love of film history that one sees in both this and Muppet Most Wanted. I saw lots of Kubrick in The Raid 2. The classical tune "Sarabande," which plays for an entire reel in Barry Lyndon gets a decent workout here. There's a hotel ballroom that could be considered the heir to the Gold Room at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, complete with a bathroom attendant, a decent facsimile of the bar itself, and a resplendent color scheme that goes well with the color of the blood that will be nicely spilled before the movie's 2.5 hours are over. Attached to the hotel ballroom is a nicely sized hotel kitchen that Dick Halloran would probably have enjoyed cooking in. At one point a car stops in the middle of a group of burnt-out buildings that would have done nicely for the major urban battle set piece in Full Metal Jacket. I was a little disappointed that we didn't get a full-on martial arts sequence in the space.
The movie's long at 2.5 hours, but it moves. If you see one martial arts movie in 2014, there's an excellent chance you'll wish it to be this one.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Bad Words
The Museum of the Moving Image hosted a preview screening of Bad Words, a film soon to open directed by and starring Jason Bateman, of Arrested Development and other such things. Regrettably, the bad isn't good.
Bateman plays a 40-something man who decides to participate in a spelling bee for children. He never finished 8th grade, so under the rules (can't have finished 8th grade before a certain date) he gets to play.
We're supposed to guess, I suppose, how a man who never finished 8th grade can spell so many obscure words so precisely. According to the Q&A afterwards, cue cards were very important. But that helps the actor, not the character.
Just like we're supposed to guess why a reporter for a magazine is following the guy around for a story. Really?
No guessing on this: Bateman's character isn't content to leave things to change. While on stage, he'll talk to his fellow contestants and persuade one that he just slept with the kid's mother, or a young girl that she's just had her flowering with the evidence quite visible for all to see while she walks down a few steps to the microphone for her next word
Does this sound funny? It is, as played out, but it's also kind of creepy.
We don't want a creepy character, so there is plentiful voiceover narration to explain the character's regret and remorse at allowing himself to be so childish in his actions.
But that's about the only internal life that the character shows. All the voiceover narration in the world doesn't compensate for a script that gives its characters either no motivations or stock motivations. A script that trots out old tropes like the "at first, I was just pretending to be your friend, but then it became real." A script that has Philip Baker Hall as the head of the spelling bee announcing, a role that used to belong to Fred Willard in the other movies that had this character. It's hard to believe a script like this was on the "Black List" of best unproduced screenplays.
And I don't go to the movies to look at people who look ugly. Bateman has a haircut that reminded me of bad '70s haircuts in the small town New York I grew up in, like my little league coach the one year I "played," or every adult man who seemed to be around for a mid-'70s 4th of July fireworks on a summer camp outing to Dover Plains. The reporter played by Kathryn Hahn looks ugly. Allison Janney looks like she's wearing a wig she plucked from a dumpster.
The saving grace of the movie was Rohan Chand as one of the children in the spelling bee who brightens every scene he's in, plays off Bateman beautifully, acts with assurance, has a captivating smile. If we're lucky, maybe this young man of real talent can be the Mathew McConaughey of the 2020s and 2030s, but may end up in a few years embarking on a life of spandex playing some new mutant in the 7th thru 12th X-Men movies because that's what Hollywood wants all the good young actors to do.
Bateman plays a 40-something man who decides to participate in a spelling bee for children. He never finished 8th grade, so under the rules (can't have finished 8th grade before a certain date) he gets to play.
We're supposed to guess, I suppose, how a man who never finished 8th grade can spell so many obscure words so precisely. According to the Q&A afterwards, cue cards were very important. But that helps the actor, not the character.
Just like we're supposed to guess why a reporter for a magazine is following the guy around for a story. Really?
No guessing on this: Bateman's character isn't content to leave things to change. While on stage, he'll talk to his fellow contestants and persuade one that he just slept with the kid's mother, or a young girl that she's just had her flowering with the evidence quite visible for all to see while she walks down a few steps to the microphone for her next word
Does this sound funny? It is, as played out, but it's also kind of creepy.
We don't want a creepy character, so there is plentiful voiceover narration to explain the character's regret and remorse at allowing himself to be so childish in his actions.
But that's about the only internal life that the character shows. All the voiceover narration in the world doesn't compensate for a script that gives its characters either no motivations or stock motivations. A script that trots out old tropes like the "at first, I was just pretending to be your friend, but then it became real." A script that has Philip Baker Hall as the head of the spelling bee announcing, a role that used to belong to Fred Willard in the other movies that had this character. It's hard to believe a script like this was on the "Black List" of best unproduced screenplays.
And I don't go to the movies to look at people who look ugly. Bateman has a haircut that reminded me of bad '70s haircuts in the small town New York I grew up in, like my little league coach the one year I "played," or every adult man who seemed to be around for a mid-'70s 4th of July fireworks on a summer camp outing to Dover Plains. The reporter played by Kathryn Hahn looks ugly. Allison Janney looks like she's wearing a wig she plucked from a dumpster.
The saving grace of the movie was Rohan Chand as one of the children in the spelling bee who brightens every scene he's in, plays off Bateman beautifully, acts with assurance, has a captivating smile. If we're lucky, maybe this young man of real talent can be the Mathew McConaughey of the 2020s and 2030s, but may end up in a few years embarking on a life of spandex playing some new mutant in the 7th thru 12th X-Men movies because that's what Hollywood wants all the good young actors to do.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Omar and The Lunchbox go to Bethlehem
I did indeed manage to get to Omar in the week following the Oscars, if just barely, catching a 10:45 show on the Sunday morning a week following.
This was one of the nominees for Best Foreign Language movie. It's a Palestinian film about the business relationship between a young man named Omar (would you believe! in a movie called Omar!!) played quite fetchingly by Adam Bakri, and his Israeli handler, equally fetchingly played by Waleed F. Zuaiter. It's tempting to look at every film that comes out of the Israeli conflict as a political statement of some or another sort, but this well made film by writer/director Hany Abu-Assad manages to make its points without every becoming polemical. If we see the routine humiliations that Omar endures as a young Palestinian man, it's only what we do or don't bring from our other experiences that allows us to understand or not his involvement in a shooting of an Israeli soldier at a garrison, and the film can be enjoyed for how the story plays out thereafter or the quality of its performances no matter what justification you're willing to ascribe (or not) to the primary incident. Taken in by Israeli security forces afterwards, Omar is forced to become collaborator. It helps that saying "I will never confess" is, according to the film, considered a confession in and of itself by the Israeli military courts that govern. Torn between his Israeli handler, his love interest, his friend and competitor for his girlfriend's hand in marriage, and some of the internal politics in the occupied territories, Omar has some soul-searching and growing up to do. It's quite a good film, and worth seeking out.
Interestingly, an Israeli film called Bethlehem opens almost simultaneously, and is playing along with Omar at the Angelika in New York, and takes a different but parallel path that reaches virtually the same place at the end. Bethlehem starts a little slowly. Adam Bakri's performance as Omar hits its target with the audience from pretty much the first close-up shot of the film, and carries us from there. Bethlehem is a little broader in its approach. The politics between different Palestinian factions that lurk in the background of Omar are in the foreground, which presents a broader canvas, and more jumping around from place to place and person to person, before ultimately settling on a similar relationship between a Palestinian and a handler in the Israeli intelligence forces. Here, the Palestinian is the brother of a much-wanted terrorist who may be taking money and/or orders from both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Omar has a lot of little chase scenes, Bethlehem one extended set piece. I liked both differently, and similarly.
These movies I'd heard some buzz on for some months ahead of their release. Between the two of them on a kind of triple feature, I saw an Indian movie called The Lunchbox that came to my attention on the basis of some good reviews in the NY papers when it opened this weekend. Really? This is the story of an Indian woman who uses the famed lunch delivery system in Mumbai to send her husband a hot meal every day, but somehow or other her meals end up getting cross-shipped. She and the "other man" start exchanging notes back-and-forth in the lunches. There are an awful lot of shots of him, sitting at his desk, reading her notes. Her, opening up the lunch-box at the end of the day to see if there is a return note hiding in an empty container. Lots of shots of people riding the trains to work. Subplots. She yells upstairs to her auntie to share confidences, and auntie yells back with advice and gives recipe ideas. He is asked to train his replacement, a particularly annoying person. One dissenting review I read from Richard Brody in the New Yorker, sadly after I saw the movie, called it twenty minutes of story in a much longer film, and that's about the long -- and short! -- of it. During Omar, when I was feeling bleary-eyed after losing the hour to the Daylight Savings switch the night before, I resisted sleep. During The Lunchbox, there was plenty of time to sleep off the meal.
This was one of the nominees for Best Foreign Language movie. It's a Palestinian film about the business relationship between a young man named Omar (would you believe! in a movie called Omar!!) played quite fetchingly by Adam Bakri, and his Israeli handler, equally fetchingly played by Waleed F. Zuaiter. It's tempting to look at every film that comes out of the Israeli conflict as a political statement of some or another sort, but this well made film by writer/director Hany Abu-Assad manages to make its points without every becoming polemical. If we see the routine humiliations that Omar endures as a young Palestinian man, it's only what we do or don't bring from our other experiences that allows us to understand or not his involvement in a shooting of an Israeli soldier at a garrison, and the film can be enjoyed for how the story plays out thereafter or the quality of its performances no matter what justification you're willing to ascribe (or not) to the primary incident. Taken in by Israeli security forces afterwards, Omar is forced to become collaborator. It helps that saying "I will never confess" is, according to the film, considered a confession in and of itself by the Israeli military courts that govern. Torn between his Israeli handler, his love interest, his friend and competitor for his girlfriend's hand in marriage, and some of the internal politics in the occupied territories, Omar has some soul-searching and growing up to do. It's quite a good film, and worth seeking out.
Interestingly, an Israeli film called Bethlehem opens almost simultaneously, and is playing along with Omar at the Angelika in New York, and takes a different but parallel path that reaches virtually the same place at the end. Bethlehem starts a little slowly. Adam Bakri's performance as Omar hits its target with the audience from pretty much the first close-up shot of the film, and carries us from there. Bethlehem is a little broader in its approach. The politics between different Palestinian factions that lurk in the background of Omar are in the foreground, which presents a broader canvas, and more jumping around from place to place and person to person, before ultimately settling on a similar relationship between a Palestinian and a handler in the Israeli intelligence forces. Here, the Palestinian is the brother of a much-wanted terrorist who may be taking money and/or orders from both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Omar has a lot of little chase scenes, Bethlehem one extended set piece. I liked both differently, and similarly.
These movies I'd heard some buzz on for some months ahead of their release. Between the two of them on a kind of triple feature, I saw an Indian movie called The Lunchbox that came to my attention on the basis of some good reviews in the NY papers when it opened this weekend. Really? This is the story of an Indian woman who uses the famed lunch delivery system in Mumbai to send her husband a hot meal every day, but somehow or other her meals end up getting cross-shipped. She and the "other man" start exchanging notes back-and-forth in the lunches. There are an awful lot of shots of him, sitting at his desk, reading her notes. Her, opening up the lunch-box at the end of the day to see if there is a return note hiding in an empty container. Lots of shots of people riding the trains to work. Subplots. She yells upstairs to her auntie to share confidences, and auntie yells back with advice and gives recipe ideas. He is asked to train his replacement, a particularly annoying person. One dissenting review I read from Richard Brody in the New Yorker, sadly after I saw the movie, called it twenty minutes of story in a much longer film, and that's about the long -- and short! -- of it. During Omar, when I was feeling bleary-eyed after losing the hour to the Daylight Savings switch the night before, I resisted sleep. During The Lunchbox, there was plenty of time to sleep off the meal.
The Carl and I
So while the rest of the world is having this Carl Sagan moment with the debut of the new Cosmos TV series, inspired by Sagan's original series from 35 years ago, let me tell you what Carl taught me. It's something different from what everyone else is saying...
When I started work at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in February 1986, I got to be Carl's literary agent. Well, not really, or not exactly, but each desk at the agency had certain clients assigned to it, and Carl was assigned to my desk. For Carl, this didn't mean very much. It meant that I was the person in the office who got to type out a transmittal letter for each check. Yes, this was the 1980s. This was done by hand on a typewriter, that we had gotten $568.76 for French royalties to Cosmos, and after our commission and 2% to Alan Lomax and some percent to the ex, here is your check for $352.32.
This was a pain in the neck, but it was still a thrill to be even that close to someone like Carl Sagan. Cosmos was still a big deal and still selling lots of copies along with Broca's Brain and The Dragons of Eden. His novel Contact had come out the year before and was a very very big deal.
But there was just one thing. Carl hardly published a word during the entire eight years I was at Scott Meredith. One collaboration about nuclear winter, A Path Where No Man Thought, and one with his wife, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. But by and large, Carl spend those eight years allowing himself to become forgotten.
So here's the first group of lessons that Carl taught me.
Writers might write at their own pace. And rather frustratingly, neither the writers nor their publishers may know exactly what that pace is until their careers are underway. First novels are never written on deadline. Second novels usually are. And eventually we all find our way to realizing that this author can write two novels a year, that one three novels every two years, this one a book every 14 months.
Celebrity isn't good for writers. Even the best-intentioned writers realize that you can't tour, be invited to be GoH at four conventions a year, do guest blog posts and interviews, to to WorldCon and World Fantasy, and keep up the writing pace you had before all of those things were part of your routine.
But tied in with that...
If, as Neil Gaiman put it memorably some five years ago, "George R. R. Martin is not your bitch," and George doesn't owe it to anyone to have his next Song of Ice and Fire sung, the reader isn't GRRM's bitch. Some things we choose to wait for. Others we choose to forget. There are enough authors that we choose to forget that even publishers sometimes seem to be long on the uptake when they're publishing an author like GRRM or Patrick Rothfuss or Peter V. Brett whom the readers are willing to wait a little bit extra for.
And Carl Sagan ... well, he was one of the authors that the world was clearly willing to forget. And I never saw any sign that Scott Meredith was willing to have that discussion with Carl, even though it seemed pretty evident to me kind of quietly observing in the background.
And the world was willing to forget other Scott Meredith clients. Norman Mailer spent my several years at Scott Meredith making that transition, and getting monthly checks from Random House all the while.
Getting back to A Path Where No Man Thought, my name appears nowhere in the acknowledgments, but I had an important task for this book Carl wrote with Richard Turco. I had to clear all of the permissions for his epigraphs and other extended quotations.
This annoyed me.
Maybe it was just that it was a pain in the neck to do all this work, and as someone still in his mid-20s, it's safe to say that I wasn't enamored of this sort of work.
But I also couldn't figure out why the Scott Meredith Agency was doing this work for Carl, and not getting paid a dime for doing it. Carl had his office at Cornell. He had secretaries, he probably had a team of work-study students at his disposal.
So agents do things for their clients sometimes. But even today, I'd still argue pretty strongly that this shouldn't have been one of those things, that this was someplace where the agent needed to say "no."
I don't think Scott's hands-off and indulgent attitude toward authors who were falling out of the conversation was helpful to anyone. Nobody reads Carl Sagan any more. This might seem hard to believe for all the hosannas showing down on him as this new Cosmos series comes on the air, but it is true. His Bookscan sales are essentially non-existent. And Norman Mailer's most enduring works were all published by the time I started at Scott Meredith in 1986. Maybe nothing Scott said would have changed any of this, or maybe not. Going just by age, Sagan was in his fifties and Mailer his sixties during the time I was at Scott Meredith, and it's hardly pre-ordained that a writer's best work is by then in the past. Nor do I think it entirely coincidence that Carl Sagan managed to deliver A Pale Blue Dot to fulfill a contract obligation to Random House after Scott's death in 1993, and not before.
Carl was also one of the only authors who tried to escape paying commission on existing contracts for existing books to the Scott Meredith Agency after Scott died.
So that's my Carl Sagan story. It's different than most of the others going around this weekend, but I will say that he's certainly had a lasting influence on me.
When I started work at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in February 1986, I got to be Carl's literary agent. Well, not really, or not exactly, but each desk at the agency had certain clients assigned to it, and Carl was assigned to my desk. For Carl, this didn't mean very much. It meant that I was the person in the office who got to type out a transmittal letter for each check. Yes, this was the 1980s. This was done by hand on a typewriter, that we had gotten $568.76 for French royalties to Cosmos, and after our commission and 2% to Alan Lomax and some percent to the ex, here is your check for $352.32.
This was a pain in the neck, but it was still a thrill to be even that close to someone like Carl Sagan. Cosmos was still a big deal and still selling lots of copies along with Broca's Brain and The Dragons of Eden. His novel Contact had come out the year before and was a very very big deal.
But there was just one thing. Carl hardly published a word during the entire eight years I was at Scott Meredith. One collaboration about nuclear winter, A Path Where No Man Thought, and one with his wife, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. But by and large, Carl spend those eight years allowing himself to become forgotten.
So here's the first group of lessons that Carl taught me.
Writers might write at their own pace. And rather frustratingly, neither the writers nor their publishers may know exactly what that pace is until their careers are underway. First novels are never written on deadline. Second novels usually are. And eventually we all find our way to realizing that this author can write two novels a year, that one three novels every two years, this one a book every 14 months.
Celebrity isn't good for writers. Even the best-intentioned writers realize that you can't tour, be invited to be GoH at four conventions a year, do guest blog posts and interviews, to to WorldCon and World Fantasy, and keep up the writing pace you had before all of those things were part of your routine.
But tied in with that...
If, as Neil Gaiman put it memorably some five years ago, "George R. R. Martin is not your bitch," and George doesn't owe it to anyone to have his next Song of Ice and Fire sung, the reader isn't GRRM's bitch. Some things we choose to wait for. Others we choose to forget. There are enough authors that we choose to forget that even publishers sometimes seem to be long on the uptake when they're publishing an author like GRRM or Patrick Rothfuss or Peter V. Brett whom the readers are willing to wait a little bit extra for.
And Carl Sagan ... well, he was one of the authors that the world was clearly willing to forget. And I never saw any sign that Scott Meredith was willing to have that discussion with Carl, even though it seemed pretty evident to me kind of quietly observing in the background.
And the world was willing to forget other Scott Meredith clients. Norman Mailer spent my several years at Scott Meredith making that transition, and getting monthly checks from Random House all the while.
Getting back to A Path Where No Man Thought, my name appears nowhere in the acknowledgments, but I had an important task for this book Carl wrote with Richard Turco. I had to clear all of the permissions for his epigraphs and other extended quotations.
This annoyed me.
Maybe it was just that it was a pain in the neck to do all this work, and as someone still in his mid-20s, it's safe to say that I wasn't enamored of this sort of work.
But I also couldn't figure out why the Scott Meredith Agency was doing this work for Carl, and not getting paid a dime for doing it. Carl had his office at Cornell. He had secretaries, he probably had a team of work-study students at his disposal.
So agents do things for their clients sometimes. But even today, I'd still argue pretty strongly that this shouldn't have been one of those things, that this was someplace where the agent needed to say "no."
I don't think Scott's hands-off and indulgent attitude toward authors who were falling out of the conversation was helpful to anyone. Nobody reads Carl Sagan any more. This might seem hard to believe for all the hosannas showing down on him as this new Cosmos series comes on the air, but it is true. His Bookscan sales are essentially non-existent. And Norman Mailer's most enduring works were all published by the time I started at Scott Meredith in 1986. Maybe nothing Scott said would have changed any of this, or maybe not. Going just by age, Sagan was in his fifties and Mailer his sixties during the time I was at Scott Meredith, and it's hardly pre-ordained that a writer's best work is by then in the past. Nor do I think it entirely coincidence that Carl Sagan managed to deliver A Pale Blue Dot to fulfill a contract obligation to Random House after Scott's death in 1993, and not before.
Carl was also one of the only authors who tried to escape paying commission on existing contracts for existing books to the Scott Meredith Agency after Scott died.
So that's my Carl Sagan story. It's different than most of the others going around this weekend, but I will say that he's certainly had a lasting influence on me.
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