Meet the Producer

Above: Mark Kilbane, Producer, at the press conference

for The Man Who Never Missed, Capclave 2010

(from Facebook)

I get my best jokes about a particular profession from those in that profession -- lawyers always have the funniest lawyer jokes, doctors, doctor jokes, people in the media biz, etc. 

Some years ago, a producer on one of the animated shows upon which I worked told me this one, and since this is a post about a producer ...

It helps if you know anything about movies in LaLaLand, but it isn't necessary:

A writer, a director, and a producer are lost in the desert. The sun broils them,  terrain is bleak. Things are getting dire. 

The writer finds a stick and starts to dig near the base of a scrubby plant.

What are you doing? The director asks.

I'm digging a hole. Go deep enough, I'll hit water, and we'll be saved.

The director nods. Great idea. He points. Why don't you dig over there?

There? Why?

Trust me.

The writer frowns, but, okay. He starts digging where the director points.

He labors for hours. Finally, when he is exhausted and down about three feet, water begins to well at the bottom of the hole. Water! he yells. We're saved!

Great job! the director says. 

The producer walks over, unzips his fly, and pisses into the water.

The writer and director stare at him, aghast. What the fuck did you do that for?!

And the producer says ...

It needed something ...

Here it is germane to say that Mark Kilbane is also working on the script as the writer, and that I wouldn't be awfully surprised if he wound up being the director, come the funding.

But it is funny ...

Sherlock

Just saw the new Masterpiece/Mystery series opening, Sherlock. (First image, above.) As a long-time fan of the great detective and Dr. Watson, I was much prepared to not-like it. (For my money, Jeremy Brett owned the role, nobody fore or aft who could touch him. Second image.) 


This new one? Contemporary London setting? Young bucks? No, I was ready for it to suck big-time and off with its head after ten minutes.


I was surprised. I rather enjoyed it. It had some nice touches -- Watson back from Afghanistan, and wounded, as was the original Watson. A bit more steely in his resolve, and while not in Holmes's class as an observer, not a dullard.


Holmes played as  a high-functioning personality disorder type right on the edge of sociopathic. 


Even Inspector Lastrade wasn't altogether stupid.


The nicotine patches instead of a pipe? A three-patch problem? I loved that. 


The villain was really creepy and way too much fun. 


Mycroft was thinner than I had envisioned him, but all in all, a promising start. Still not going to erase Brett's turn, but definitely worth watching, and an interesting reboot, much better than the Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law version. 

White Death

My recent medical checkup included a lipid panel, i.e., fats in the blood, and the triglycerides part of it came in high. (Lower than it was the first time I had it checked a few years back, and not enough so they thought I should take medication, but enough to advise me that I should alter my diet to get them down, but still ...) 


Cholesterol, by the by, is not a fat itself, but a waxy metabolite produced by the body from fat, mostly animal in origin.


There is some contention in the health field as to how much high triglycerides affect things such as heart attack and stroke, though the mainstream thought is they increase the risk of both. 


Likewise, there is contention as how best to treat the elevation, with two primary views holding sway: One faction allows that fats should be the first to go; the other view says to stop eating sugar. I could get into the theory behind each -- there is a lot of it -- but basically my view is it's a combination: The too-much-sugar notion makes sense. Plus avoiding saturated fats -- basically anything that is solid at room temperature -- butter, lard, sour cream, cheese, like that. You know, the good stuff. 


Simple sugars spike your glucose levels, and that requires that your body produce insulin, and that whole pancreatic process is complicated and prone to cause problems. Lot more Type II diabetics than there used to be, because, let's face it, as a nation, we over-indulge out the wazoo when it comes to junk food.


Me, too, I confess.


I work out enough to keep my weight where I want it, but there's only so much that exercise can do, and I admit to a sweet tooth. I have a jones for pies, cookies, cakes, ice cream, and candy. All of which are great for gumming up your motor. And we all know this, but do it anyway.


Most obese people aren't that way because they consume too much fat; it's because they eat too much sugar, and more calories in than out equals weight gain. Simple equation, and no way around it. We've had that discussion before, and I won't belabor it. The 3% of folks who have major metabolic problems notwithstanding, the other 97% of us who are fat are that way because we eat too much and don't burn it off. Period. 


Oh, yeah, and alcohol messes up the normal metabolic process -- the liver clears booze first,  an ounce or so an hour, and while it is busy doing that, the rest of the stuff floating around has to wait its turn. A beer now and then, a glass of wine, fine. Past that? 


So once again, the eat-your-veggies-and-skip-the-empty-calories advice rears its ugly head. Hold down the booze consumption. Consume good fats -- olive oil is better for you than butter. Ease up on the cheese. Leafy, bunny food. Yadda, yadda, yadda.


To test my theory, I'm going to see if  cutting back on saturated fats and simple sugars -- and that includes white death, honey, fructose and sucrose and all like that -- plus doubling my fish oil consumption is enough to do the trick. I'll dig out my handy-dandy blood test kit in three or four months and see what's what. 


And with a big bowl of Hallowe'en candy sitting in the kitchen for the trick-or-treaters, there's my first challenge ...


Stay tuned.

Rock and Roll May Never Die But It Can Be Wounded ...

Odd rock history came up on a site I visit today. Regarding Pat Boone.


Those of you old enough probably know who Pat Boone is. If you don't, a quick recap: He was the whitest of whitebread pop singers, and in the late 1950's, second only to Elvis in production of hit records. I think all-time he's only a handful of slots behind the Beatles.


The fifties have a lot to answer for. 


Boone was and is deeply religious, and circumspect in his choice of music and movies. He once refused an onscreen kiss because the actress was married, and elected not to be in a movie with Marilyn Monroe because, well ... you know ... 


On the plus side, while something of a joke among rock fans -- his version of Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" comes immediately to mind -- his covers of black R&B singers did a lot to get them noticed. White people heard Boone doing covers of songs by folks they didn't listen to in most parts of the country, and never had a clue said music was done by Neegros. Certainly not from how Pat sang 'em.  


He's also Debby Boone's father. ("You Light Up My Life.")


About fifteen years ago, he did an album of heavy metal covers. The YouTube video embed code is disabled, but if you click here, you can hear it over a montage of Pat ...


 Enjoy. Or ... not ...

New eBook from Rory Miller

Rory Miller has a new ebook on violence out, at Smashwords. You can download a preview here.

Worth checking out -- the man knows the subject.

Milestone

For the past thirteen years, my wife has worked for the Lower Columbia River Ports, as the project manager for the Columbia River Channel Deepening. The river, long-dredged to forty feet for ship traffic, needed to be three feet deeper for the increasingly-bigger vessels coming to call, to stay competitive.


Dianne took over, based at the Port of Portland.


Not really much of a change, to dig the channel a yardstick deeper, but, oh, what a can of logistical and environmental worms! Every i had to be dotted, every t crossed, and about the time they though they had all the proper permits in place, something would pop up and they'd have to start over. 


By the time they managed to meet all the requirements to crank the dredges, the paperwork was, if you stacked it, thirty feet tall. Literally. And it had to be paid for, so federal funding had to be secured. 


These days, if you want to mow your lawn, you have to file an environmental impact statement, and Oregon and Washington are the greenest places in the country, so the obstacles were legion. Salmon, nuclear waste, disposal sites, crab fishermen, all kinds of stuff. 


It's a big deal in the Pacific Northwest, worth thousands of jobs and billions of dollars, and it took everything our elected officials could do, plus uncounted man and woman-hours to get it accomplished.


Dianne and her counterpart at the Army Corps of Engineers, Laura Hicks, worked like sled dogs on this for more than a decade, and without them, it simply would not have gotten done. (The joke at the Corps in Portland is, All our best men are women ...) They did studies, attended public meetings that ran until midnight, wrangled with property owners, got into the depths of mitigation and wetland restoration, very technical material and way beyond my ability to lay it out. Lot of folks helped; a lot of folks got in the way. 


Um. Anyway, Dianne wanted to stay the course and get this finished before she retired, and the last bit of digging isn't far off. It'll be finished when she goes, and she gets to walk away a winner.


Yesterday, there was a big to-do for the folks involved in this monster, awards and recognition, first for the people who worked the project, then in a more public venue, with Governors, Senators, Congressmen and -women and assorted bigwigs. A victory lap, as it were, and I was both pleased and proud to see Dianne and Laura get a bit of the credit they so deserve.

The Man Who Never Missed - The Movie Website

You need to go check this out -- the official website for TMWNM. (And there is a toggle control for the music, upper left hand corner of the image, if you are at work, but I liked listening to it.)


I think the site is way cool myself. No, the movie won't look like this, this is concept art, to stir somebody into opening their purse. But it does have a great dramatic opening.

Site is still in progress, of course, but here is a great tidbit I loved and I think fans will also enjoy: Mark is going to have a contest for artists to come up with a look for Juete. He hasn't worked out the details yet, but if that doesn't get fanboy attention, nothing will. Sure got mine. 

Doctah, Doctah, What You Say?

Had my physical this morning, bright and coffee-less. I believe I've pointed this out before, but if you are worried about your blood pressure showing up high when you visit the doc, skip the coffee. Caffeine, being a stimulant, will spike BP in some folks. If you are the kind of person who gets nervous at the clinic, that kicks it up, as well, so adding coffee -- which you'll have to drink black if you get a fasting blood sugar test -- is a no-no. 



If you are a crack-smoker, pass on that one, too ...


I needn't have worried this time. My BP was 126/64, which is better than it's been as long as I've been keeping track. (First reading I remember was in high school biology class: 120/80.)  Pulse at 68, and that's after moving around. Down three pounds from my usual.


Physical exam was unremarkable, no new lumps or bumps about which to worry. Manly organs okay. Blood work will take a few days, but any surprises there withstanding, I seem to be in pretty good shape --


All together now:


-- for a man my age ...

Peace Symbol

I needed a new sticker on my guitar case, so I took the illo from Windowpane the ebook, printed it onto a sticker, and, well, stuck it on ...

Heart Attack

Van Damme just had a heart attack. Survived it, apparently, they say it's "minor," but the guy is what -- fifty? 


Gladys must not be keeping him in shape -- Jean Claude married Gladys Portugues, a former champion bodybuilder. She still looks to be in pretty good shape. 

Johnny Sheffield

Johnny Sheffield (Second from left)

1931-2010

Boy has died -- of a heart-attack. He was 79. (Apparently, he fell off a ladder while pruning a tree in his yard and the MI happened a bit after that.)

Sheffield was a child actor, the son of an actor, who beat out a bunch of other kids for the role of "Boy," in the Weissmuller/Maureen O'Sullivan Tarzan movies. He played that role in eight pictures, then went on to star as Bomba, the Jungle Boy, in a dozen more movies. Even did a pilot, Bantu, the Zebra Boy for television, but it was never picked up.

Subsequently, he left the biz in the mid-fifties, got a degree, and worked in farming, real estate, and even the seafood industry. Got married, had kids, retired to SoCal, where he sold copies of the Bantu pilot.

Adiós, Johnny.


Addendum: There were several chimps who played the role of Cheeta(h) in those movies, and apparently, the one in the picture is still alive, somewhere around 80 -- they aren't sure when he was born. Weissmuller also died at 79, and O'Sullivan made it to 87. Kind of interesting that the chimpanzee outlived them all ...


While he couldn't swim when he got the role, Weissmuller covered for Sheffield and taught him how. Being taught by a guy with five Olympic gold medals probably made that easier.


The kid was something of a jock by then -- he'd been sickly and his father had started training him before he got the role. In the clip from Bantu, you can see he stayed in shape at least until he was in his mid-twenties, and obviously did some work with weights along the way. 





For a guy with twenty-some movies to his credit, I didn't see an Oscar in his future based on this ...

New CPR Revision

Been made official -- the new way to begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation -- CPR -- is to skip the first two loading breaths and go right into the chest compressions. The theory is that the blood probably has enough oxy in it to start, and getting it pumping is more effective than trying to breath for the victim first.


Gonna play hell with the old ABC acronym -- Airway, Breathing, Compression -- but they say it's better. Plus there are folks who might not be willing to do mouth-to-mouth who would pump the chest. 


Not so hard to remember: Guy not breathing? Get him a CAB!


So, it's thirty compressions first, then two breaths. Repeat until medical help arrives or the victim sits up and wonders why you are trying to break his ribs ... 


Story here.

Movietone News - The Man Who Never Missed

Got a note from my producer on the in-the-works movie project, TMWNM. I can now officially note that he is Mark Kilbane, and while he is still in the early stages of the hustle needed to get this thing off the ground and into the galaxy, he has already done some cool stuff, with more on the way. 


The picture, from FB, is just a concept. 


The guy who is working on the video game and I spoke this very day, and he's rolling up his sleeves, too. Given that he is family, that wasn't so hard. The fun part is that if one of these gets rolling, it will almost certainly help the other one. 


So, a favor: If you are a fan of these books, you can help: Go to the Facebook page and sign the petition to re-publish the first three novels as an omnibus.


Actually, the direct petition link is here. The one above takes to the the "like it" Facebook page for TMWNM, and there's a URL there to the petition. But it won't hurt to look at the page anyhow. 



You have friends who would click on it if you asked them?  Viral would be good -- I mean, the sooner I get rich from all this, the sooner I can spend full-time working on the next Matador novel ...


How's that for blackmail?


If you are a twitter kind of person, you can see stuff there by clicking here.


You have time and energy to get involved in this project? Contact Mark, here: kilbanem1@gmail.com 


Not likely to be any money, but maybe some glory and a ticket to the premiere if it goes down. Bragging rights -- Hey, I helped do that movie ...



Mark is working on a web page for TMWNM as we speak, and soon as he has it loaded and ready, I'll post the link here. 


Stay tuned ...

RED

Just saw RED with my son -- an action movie starring a bunch of old pros playing old retired secret agents. 


Lightweight, waaay silly, but it was everything that the Stallone movie The Expendables was not -- witty, clever, well-acted, and I had a fine ole time. Great action sequences, and watching Willis and Freeman and Malkovich and Mirren breeze through this was a treat.


Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 70%, but I'm guessing that viewers my age rated it a lot higher. 


Worth seeing for the actors' facial expressions alone. There's one shot of Helen Mirren with her back to a locked gate that was a testament to great acting chops -- an expression that lasted maybe three-quarters of a second. I went "Whoa!" when I saw that. Wonderful stuff. 


Speaking as a guy who wrote a novel about a couple of retired ops dragged back into the biz, I was entertained. There was even a line so close to one I used in my book I would have thought they swiped it if the movie hadn't been mostly shot before my novel was published.


"You made a mistake, Grandpa."


Followed by a room-destroying fight, in the middle of which was this:


 "Was so-and-so your teacher?" 


"Yeah." 


"I was his teacher ..."


You old guys will love it. Some of you younger folk might like it, too. 

Want Black Steel?

Go here.

But hurry -- they don't last long.

Levels

My nephew and niece-in-law have come for a visit, here a few days. Yesterday we got out the guitars and played a bit. He's much better at it than I -- even though he's getting into the blues, he used to be a jazz guitarist, and that tells you something. (The old joke: A rock guitarist plays three chords for a thousand people; a jazz guitarist plays a thousand chords for three people.)

But he's not satisfied with where he is -- he wants to be Buddy Guy.

And don't we all? Musically, anyway ...

If I can keep the rhythm, however, he can do some nice solo lead over it, and it doesn't sound bad.

Tracking Down Old Songs

One of the pieces the group was playing last night was by Walter Donaldson, who had a slew of hits in his writing career. He died in 1947. The piece was "If I Can't Have You (I Want to be Lonesome, I Want to be Blue.)


So I decided, I'll just zip onto the net and collect those lyrics -- the chords are simple and  I can work those out. 


Ah, but here's the rub: Google "If I Can't Have You" lyrics, and you get a slew of stuff by such folks as Yvonne Elliman, Kelly Clarkson, Adam Lambert, and the Bee Gees. 


Seems the title was coöpted by others, and these songs have nothing to do with the Donaldson version. And getting specific doesn't much help. The lyrics per se? Couldn't find 'em.


So after some poking around, I came across a cut from a 1929 Vitaphone film, with Gus Arnheim and his Ambassadors, who did a kinda jazzy ragtime 20's version of it, and from that, I was able to collect the lyrics. 


Amazing thing, the web ...

Blind Whitebread Perry

Had another session with the jam group. They play mostly blues and roots stuff, with some standards from the 20's and 30's and 40's. I introduced them to "Little Egypt," the 1950's Coasters version, and I'll bring along some stuff next time -- Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," the versions of "Stagolee" and "St. James Infirmary" that I know, and The Blind Boys of Alabama doing Tom Waits "Way Down in the Hole," those should fit in.


Last night, there was, in addition to the pianist, mandolinist, and guitar/harp player, a banjo picker and a singer who would have done tambourine, had we sung anything that needed one.


There's a washboard player who couldn't make it, but who usually shows up. I had fun, and as I had learned a couple of songs from the first session, actually was able to keep up in places ...


Yee-haw!

Killah

Had occasion to cause my bad guy in the current book-in-progress to murder somebody today. Darted him with a paralysis needle, hooked a weight to his ankle and shoved him out the door of a hovering vehicle twenty meters to the ocean below, and AMF.


The interesting part for me, was getting the research right. 


Now, as I've explained more than once, the truth isn't nearly as important in fiction writing as making the reader go with what you've said in the context of the story. It doesn't have to be true, it has to sound true.


Remember the loon in England some years back who went to visit the Queen? True story: He hopped the fence at the palace, walked right in, went up and down halls until he found her bedroom, then went in and sat on the foot of her bed to have a little chat. He was crazy, but harmless, and eventually somebody came along and noticed him there and had him hauled away. 


But: At every turn where he should have been seen and stopped, something happened. I disremember the fine details, but the essence of it was, it was a long run of coincidences, along these lines:


When he hopped the fence, the camera watching that stretch was down.


The palace door that was supposed to be locked and guarded was unlocked and the guard had gone to take a leak. 


The interior security somehow didn't see the guy for however long it took him to locate the Queen's bedroom. 


When he got there, the Queen, alone in her room, buzzed for help, but her call button malfunctioned or whoever was listening was on break.


So there were like five coincidences that happened to allow the guy to get to his long chat with Elizabeth Regina, any one of which should have been enough to stop him. 


If you wrote that scenario in a fiction story, nobody would buy it. C'mon. One coincidence, I'll give you. Maybe, if you are clever, two. Five? Nope, sorry. Even if it happened that way, I won't buy it. 


Because truth is no defense in fiction. Say it again with me: Truth is no defense in fiction.


And yet, when you write the stuff, you want to get as much of it right as you can, just in case somebody decides to check, because sometimes they will. If you just toss something off and it's wrong and you get caught out? That reader or readers won't trust you from then on. You don't want that. You want to gull them so that if they check nine things and they are spot-on, they might not check the tenth one that you did get wrong. 


Before I could have my villain shove his poorly-performing henchman out the flying car's door, I had to find a deep hole in the ocean's floor, so that when I offered that there was one in the vicinity, there, in fact, is. 


Then there was the amount of weight tied to the guy to pull him under. Doesn't take much if the guy is unconscious or dead. Soon as the air leaves his lungs, he sinks; however, after a certain amount of ... fermenting goes on in the corpse, it is possible that the gases produced will be enough, some days later, to lift the body to the surface even with a weight tied to it. 


Or the leg could rot off and the rest of it eventually bob right on up ...


Too much information? Well, I didn't put it all in, but I needed to know it so my villain could address the notion, to show that he was a careful killer. 


It's the little things that sell a story sometimes, and if you get those right, you probably will get the big things right. 

Let the Heart Attack Special Shine on Me

Since we stopped going to the gym, we pretty much stopped going to Baja Fresh, a Mexican-style place that features fresh food. Since we started going back to the gym, we stopped back by, and lo! there is a new item I hadn't seen earlier, a Diablo shrimp burrito.


Well, boy, howdy, how can you not try that, Steve? Big ole shrimp burrito?


So I tried it. And it was really good. My new favorite Baja meal. Had to have less fat than the chicken Ultimo version, right?


Um. well. Two whole grams less, but ... there's a reason they named it after the devil ...


Some numbers:


A thousand calories. 34-grams of fat. 56-grams of protein. 275 mg. of cholesterol. 2930 mg. of sodium ...

But wait! If you get it enchilado style, that is, smothered in molé sauce with two kinds of cheese, pico de gallo and sour cream? Add another 600 calories, and forty -- that's 40 -- grams of fat, for a total of seventy-four grams of fat and sixteen hundred calories in a single meal.


Not so bad if that's all you eat in one day, though that's still more fat than is recommended in a 2000-calorie diet ...


Got enough salt to preserve a herd of cows for the winter, and enough cholesterol to lube a fleet of Mac trucks. The term "healthy Mexican food" is, in this instance, less than accurate.


Oh, my friends, this burrito? It leaves a Double Whopper with Cheese and Bacon in the "diet-meal" dust, relatively speaking.

Maybe if I skip the enchilado sauce ... ?

Oh, but it does taste good. Maybe I can remember that when I am lying in the hospital hoping to survive my MI ...