That's right kiddos, the long-promised book version of this blog is done ... sort of. Put it this way: the first draft is done, which is some distance from a paperback you can leaf through at the airport while waiting for a plane, then forget and leave somewhere, after which a janitor will eventually pick it up, look at the title, and with a weary shrug of his shoulders, toss in the trash.
I have no illusions about publishing this thing. Truth be told, I have precious few illusions left about anything in life -- getting old does that to you -- but the plan is to find a printer/publisher who can do a decent job, pay for a run of 1500 copies or so, then see what happens. Maybe fifty will sell, maybe a hundred ... or maybe I'll just end up driving around the country leaving a copy in every gas station bathroom and roadside rest. I dunno, and right now I really don't care. I'm just playing it by ear and trying to finally get this thing done.
Still, after all these years of promising that "the book is coming," this feels like a big step. The next step is the second draft, of course, which is now underway: going through the manuscript line by line, page by page, cutting what I can, then sanding, polishing, and painting as I go. It's a tedious, painstaking process that's a little more than half done at this point. Once complete, I'll send the manuscript to a friend (who shall hereafter be referred to as The Reader) to plow through and offer her educated opinion as to how it flows, what needs to stay, and what -- if anything -- needs to go. The oldest and perhaps most valuable advice given to everybody who writes is "Kill your babies," which means being ruthless in the quest to slim and simplify every manuscript. Sometimes the parts you fell in love with in the early going turn out to be anchors that slow the forward progress of a reader ... and when that happens, boredom sets in and the book is likely to be set aside in favor of a snappier, more engaging tome. Regardless of what I hear back from The Reader, most of what's in it now will remain. I'm not trying to craft a sexy best-seller here, but just want a book that offers something to industry veterans and civilians alike -- two wildly disparate audiences -- which is a tricky tightrope to walk. As someone much smarter than I once said, "You can't please all of the people all of the time," so it's fine if future readers skip past parts they find slow to get to the juicier bits, and I'm reasonably confident they'll find something more to their liking if they keep going.
Although I've already cut close to thirty pages in following Strunk and White's timeless advice to "Omit needless words," I've no doubt it'll still be too long once I'm done cutting -- but that's okay. As the saying goes, "It what it is" ... or maybe "Que será, será is a more appropriate cinematic cliché.
We shall see.
The title is a modest change from the blog pointing to the underlying theme of the book: learning. As I rewrote and assembled the posts into chapters, I was continually reminded that every day in Hollywood marked another step in my film industry education, a process that will never be complete. Nobody hands you a degree when you "graduate" from Hollywood, and even in retirement, I keep trying to understand what's going on in the film/television business, a particularly confusing task these days.
On that subject, a guy I used to work with at CBS Radford recently posted this on our union's FB page, an eye-opening dissection of what Hollywood is up against in the struggle to keep film and television production from following fat financial incentives elsewhere. It's not a pretty picture. Although I keep reading and hearing that shows of one sort or another are coming, there hasn't been much production going on in Hollywood thus far -- certainly nothing like it should be at this time of year or was in the not-so-distant past. Are those days gone forever, or will the buffalo return? I think they will, in time, but in what numbers, who knows? All I know for sure is that a lot of people who work below the line are suffering terribly these days, which is not a humane or sustainable situation.
My fingers are crossed for all of you there suffering this dearth of work -- I hope it picks up soon for you all.
Meanwhile, enjoy what's left of Summer as it slides inexorably into Fall ... and remember, Winter is coming.
