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Whew!

That was a close one.  At least it felt like it.

But, given the President's coattails, squashing some of the worst ideologues, partisans,  chauvinists, and intolerants in the process, I can't help but wonder if he didn't intentionally throw that first debate just to keep the dark money invested in a losing Romney campaign instead of many other winnable Senate races.

Like Andrew Sullivan says, "meep meep".

Now, let's get back to work.

Episode VII

George Lucas and Kathleen Kennedy on the Future of Star Wars

My earliest memory from inside a movie theater is watching Princess Leia dissing Luke Skywalker for being too short to convincingly impersonate a stormtrooper.  I always remember the scene differently from how it was actually shot: some how, my 3 year old brain knitted together the stark black and whites from the hallways of the Death Star with this scene, so I always remember what is actually an all-black room as a high contrast black & white.

Weird, I know.  Maybe it was just a bit of information overload for my developing cranium.

Point being, while I'm a much more rabid Trekkie than Star Wars fan, I basically know the dialogue from Episode IV by heart.

I remember when the Star Wars movies were good.  Sadly, there's the kernel of a good story in the most recent trilogy, but the difference, as always, is in the storytelling details - the everyday choices made by a director on dialogue, on performance, on camera position, on edits.  SOMEONE could have made "The Phantom Menace", "Attack of the Clones", and "Revenge of the Sith" into good movies.

There was a time that the film snob in me completely dismissed the idea of someone else making Star Wars movies because they're really George Lucas' magnum opus, but clearly George Lucas doesn't agree with me, and he's probably right.

So, my thoughts?

1. Hire JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof.  Unlike me, they really do froth at the mouth about Star Wars.   And my namesake has gone on record on more than one occasion about why this whole Mitichlorians garbage completely defeats the entire point about The Force.  A great starting place.
2. Do as many things practically and in camera as you can. The CGI is killing the dramatic tension of the action and it's distracting from the drama.
3. Two words: Mark Hammill.

Let's DO THIS.

Why Reviews Matter On Amazon

Admittedly, between work & weddings, I haven't had nearly the time to devote to Macroscope that I used to, and many of my missives have been creeping into Facebook and Twitter more frequently.  But this blog has been my creative, opinionated home for over 10 years now, so it will always occupy a place of reverence for me.

It's also the best way for me to reach people who I know dig my work directly.  So, if you're reading this blog, I'm assuming you're a fan of my writing.  For that, I am eternally grateful.

You also probably know that I've been redirecting my writing energy towards pure fiction over the last year, in the form of my ebook shorts, all of which I'm selling exclusively on Amazon.com for the Kindle, iPhone, iPad, web browsers, etc, including:

• "I'll See You In Hell", about a pair of hitmen who take a blood feud where angels fear to tread.
• "The Worst Place On Earth", about the unspeakable secrets hidden away inside a foreboding old money mansion.
• "The Monster That Ate My Summer Vacation", about a father staring down the face of evil during a rest stop on a family road trip.
• "The Trick-or-Treaters", about a self-centered girl who learns there's really no way to escape Halloween.
• And, most recently, "33 Ways To Kill My Husband", which, I think, is pretty self-explanatory.

I'm sure many of you aren't surprised to hear that, far and away, my best selling short story is "33 Ways To Kill My Husband" - even though it's still, clearly, in a similar vein to my other work, it has a much broader appeal, is not really scary, and, honestly, is probably quite funny (at least, I think it is).

But what I've noticed is that, when we do these free promotions on Amazon, "33 Ways" vastly outsells the other books, and my theory on it is that a big part of it is the reviews.  I have easily 10x the number of reviews for "33 Ways" as for the other books, and I suspect that Amazon's internal recommendations algorithm chooses to suggest it to more viewers because more people have taken the time to write a review (the vast majority of which are positive).

So, again, my theory is that the other books could reach a larger audience if they had more reviews.

With that in mind, I have a request:

I've you've had the chance to read my other books, and you enjoyed them, I would really appreciate it if you took a second to give them reviews.  It could be as simple as "I loved it!" or "It scared the crap out of me!"  One or two sentences is probably enough.  But it could be a huge way to help me reach an even larger audience.

You can find them all online at this link.

Thank you all for sticking with me for the last decade.  And who knows what the next ten years may have in store...

American Made Music to Haunt By

You all know this is my favorite time of the year.  You also know that storytelling and film is my true passion.  But one of the things I always loved to do when writing a screenplay was adding music cues to help tell the story.  As I think I've mentioned before, the band Godsmack played a big role in my Boogieman screenplay, "Nite-Lite", and my love for '90's R&B is everywhere in my original AFI screenplay, "My Own Lily".

And even though, these days, all of my creative energy is going into by ebooks (for now), I can still hear the guitars playing in my head.  So, this time, I thought I'd share it.

As you know, this week, in anticipation of Halloween, I'm offering my horror short, "The Trick-or-Treaters", for free, exclusively on Amazon.com.  But, for a little extra something to take your reading experience to the next level, here's my semi-unofficial Trick-or-Treaters soundtrack, featuring the likes of Rob Zombie, Type O Negative, Outkast, Korn, DMX, and Diana Ross.

Yes, Diana Ross.

Kick back, relax, and let it scare the Hell out of you.

Trick or treat. Or else.

They're back.  And, this time, they're free.  Check out "The Trick-or-Treaters" for free all week long, exclusively at Amazon.com.

 

Maniacal Laughter, or why I wrote "33 Ways To Kill My Husband"

Years ago I saw an interview with one of my artistic heroes, the great filmmaker John Carpenter, where he was asked what did he think of the "Saw" series.  "I think they're tremendously funny," he replied with a completely straight face.

It's hard to explain what makes me laugh.

When I think of my favorite comedies, movies like "The Naked Gun" and "Monty Python and The Holy Grail" immediately leap to mind.  I love "Airplane" and "Top Secret" and "Real Genius" and "Revenge of the Nerds" and "There's Something About Mary" and "Dumb and Dumber" and "Zoolander".

On the stage, I love Christopher Durang and on the page I bow at the feet of Douglas Adams.

I could go on and on about the stories that everyone else thinks are funny that I also think are funny.

But then there are the other stories.

Like Mary Harron and Christian Bale's version of "American Psycho".

Like the Paul Verhoeven trifecta: "RoboCop", "Total Recall", and "Starship Troopers".

Or "Re-Animator" or "Creepshow II" or parts of "John Carpenter's The Thing" or even "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre".

And let's not even get into the local news.

There's absurdity and irony and excess all around us every day.   While most people would shake their heads and turn their eyes away, I honestly cannot help but laugh.  It's almost involuntary.  The bigger the crazy, the more over the top, the louder I laugh.  And the more serious the people in these situations take their absurdity, the funnier it is.

What's even funnier is that most people are so hyper-aware of the circumstances, but so incredibly unaware of the very irony they create.

I'm reminded of a joke from Bill Maher about the proctologist who complains that he has to look at asses all day.

But even as I write these things, I feel like they could be coming out of Heath Ledger's mouth in "The Dark Knight".

Maybe, in the end, the biggest joke is on me, after all.

Wouldn't that be funny?

I guess my own lack of self-awareness is part of the genesis of my protagonist in "33 Ways To Kill My Husband ".  But the honest truth is I owe a big debt on this story to my fiance.  I just hope she doesn't take it to heart.  :-)

For Trayvon

A while ago I had a conversation with my fiance about this screenplay I wanted to write about some super secret geopolitical thing that I thought wasn't widely known and didn't get the attention it deserved, and she just looked at me, incredulous.

"Of course no one's written about it!  Do you think you're the first person who thought of this?  How do you think they keep it secret?"

Sometimes, I can be really stupid.

But the point she made was that I'm becoming a family man now.  I had to start considering how my actions effect my family.

Family.

For most of my life before now, that equation equalled "Mom+Dad+Brother+Nana+Me", or some broader combination of aunts, uncles, cousins, and the like.  But now, the most important version of that term, the one for which I'm directly responsible for, is the one I'm building personally with my better half right now.  Children are very important to both of us.

And the idea that a grown man could look at my child, literally walking down the street minding his own business, and KILL them, and then walk away without even an arrest, let alone a trial to even determine if  a crime has been committed just terrifies and infuriates me.

I think of Emmett Till.

I think of Ennis Cosby.

I think of the legions of Black boys who have their lives stolen from them every day because of someone else's irrational fear and hatred.

It's a delicate balance, because I don't want my future children to live in fear, or to expect any less from their home, their community, or their country than any of their white classmates.  Yet I also don't want them to be blind to what I perceive to be the realities of race in America.  I'm struggling to see past the years of learned behavior to find the appropriate level of paranoia and mistrust in a world where most people are good and decent and honest but there are still people out there who will take your life just because you're Black and male.

And it's the callous disregard for that life that horrifies me even more.  Who gives a drug test to a corpse?  Who takes the word of the man with the smoking gun in his hand that the dead guy had it coming as "evidence"?


Even if Trayvon Martin struck first (which I think is a ridiculous claim), doesn't the evidence show that he, too, could have legitimately claimed self-defense under the "Stand Your Ground" law?

Discretion is the better part of valor, people.
 

I'm trying not to get off on a rant about law enforcement and Black Americans, so let me just say two things: paraphrasing Ice-T, your authority is not a license to kill.

And God is watching.

The New Space Race

Like all good writers, I love convergence.

As I hinted in a previous post, I'm getting a bit obsessed about Ridley Scott's new movie, Prometheus.


Simultaneously, I've also been on a bit of a NASA binge, thanks to the rantings of Astrophysics Brother Neil DeGrasse Tyson.


But there's something else that just clicked for me this morning.

Consider this fake TEDTalk by the character Peter Weyland (nee Guy Pierce), the founder of the fictional Weyland Corporation that's funding the ill-fated exploration in "Prometheus" and will ultimately become Weyland-Yutani in time to employ Sigourney Weaver and her shipmates in the original "Alien".
 

Then consider this interview 60 Minutes did with Elon Musk.  Musk was one of the original founders of PayPal, then he founded the electric sports car company Tesla, and now he's created a company that's building commercial vehicles for space exploration.


As I'm being a fanboy and looking at the fake history of the Weyland Corporation online, is it really that much of a leap between Weyland and SpaceX?

And he's not the only one.  Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, is secretly financing his own private space vehicle company called Blue Origin.

Other net billionaires are also investing their money in similar projects.  And we can't forget Virgin Galactic.

I'm reminded of a quote I'd heard was from William Gibson, that it's getting harder and harder to write sci-fi because, essentially, we now live in a sci-fi world.

Where am I going with this?  Nowhere, I guess.

Except to Mars, of course, assuming my fiance let's me buy a ticket.  :-)

Or build my own.  :-)

On Jeremy Lin

Hmm. Ivy League graduate who becomes an NBA superstar playing for the Knicks? Reminds me of Bill Bradley. Am I crazy to think that some 20 years down the line, Lin could be the first Asian American President of these United States?

Martin Luther King, Jr., in his own words, on his day

Nothing I can write could match what King says himself.

Listen to the WHOLE speech.  His last speech, the night before he was assassinated.
Martin Luther King, Jr: "Mountaintop" speech full length from Filip Goc on Vimeo. It wasn't just about race, or class, or labor. It was about keeping the promise of America for everyone. Forever.

Go See "Red Tails", the Tuskegee Airmen movie, next Friday, 1/20

First of all, let's start with the movie itself.  Here's the trailer for "Red Tails", George Lucas' big budget action movie about the Tuskegee Airmen.



Looks pretty awesome, right?  Action, history, social drama, good clean fun.

Also looks pretty expensive, too.

And to that point: here's an interview George Lucas did with The Daily Show where he broke down in really stark terms how no one in Hollywood wanted to finance this movie because it has all Black actors in the lead roles.


So, you all have heard me railing against the evils of Tyler Perry movies for a long time.  But, as the Emperor of Star Wars points out, the studios are happy to make more Medea movies because they're dirt cheap, so they can always turn a nice little profit from the niche audience of people who like to watch 6 ft. tall Black men disgrace themselves, our mothers, and our grandmothers all in one single performance.

But the Tuskegee Airmen are real heroes: men who risked their lives to save the lives of others.  Literally.  Black men who stood up to be counted.  Americans who embodied the very best of all of us.

Real role models.

And the movie looks like it will be very, very good.

I'm tired of only seeing Black actors in movies that are either about crime or relationship drama.  We have SO many more stories to tell.

Why do you think I love "Event Horizon" so much?  :-)

I feel like I see these sorts of pleas all the time, but this one is pretty serious, because if this movie, from one of the few untouchable filmmakers in the world, bombs, it's going to be extremely hard to get some more diversity in Black cinema.

In short, get all of your friends, and all of your friends' friends, and go out on opening night next Friday, January 20th, and actually BUY A TICKET for "Red Tails".

This one is important, folks.

Resolutions

About a year ago, I made a resolution to be the best version of myself that I could be this year.  As 2011 winds down, I realize that, while I am far short of that mythical, optimal me, that I am so much stronger, better, wiser, and productive today than I was in 2011. 

I've been blessed with so may gifts this year: an absolutely fantastic lady and the great home we're building together; lots of outstanding great new products, both professionally and creatively; a renewal of my faith; and, most important of all, the resolve to do what is necessary to get even better. 

The year has been challenging, but each hurdle has been a gift to show both how high I can jump, and who's there to catch me when I fall.

Thank you, 2011.

And, with all due respect to the Mayans, 2012 is not the end.  It's the beginning.

Happy New Year, gentle readers.

The Return of Stories About Stuff

Yesterday we were blessed with previews and interviews about two very high profile film projects for next year: Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises and Ridley Scott's Prometheus, and I could not help but notice something a bit different from these two films.

There's a moment in The Dark Knight Rises trailer where Selina Kyle whispers into Bruce Wayne's ear:

"Did you think this would last?  There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne, and you and your friends had better batten down hatches, cause when it hits you're all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."

Boy, that sounds very 99%-ish, doesn't it?


Meanwhile, over in the Prometheus world, Ridley Scott talks about how this is a movie about the origins of humanity itself, where one of the main characters, played by Michael Fassbender, is an android observing the human's reaction to the horror.

In other words, it's a true sci-fi movie.



Big ideas for, ostensibly, big summer popcorn movies.

Directors who actually have something to say about our world around us, and are not just interested in driving you into an seizure from 3-D effects.

Young storytellers, take note.

Now that the Iraq War is over...

I'm not interested in debating the success of the mission: goodness knows I did a ton of that back in 2003.  And I know there are a lot of people, particularly servicemen for whom I have the utmost respect & admiration, who feel very passionately about its importance.

I will just say this:

Think of what else we could have done with $800 BILLION (with a B) dollars over the last ten years.

We could have bought a year's worth of good American-sized groceries for 86 million families.

We could have paid four years worth of tuition & expenses at Princeton for 4 million kids.

We could have bought Exxon Mobile.  Twice.

We could have bought the entire population of Dakar, Senegal a single family home in the suburbs of Santa Cruz, CA.

I'm just sayin'.

Glad it's finally over.

One war down.  One more to go.

A thought on Occupy Wall Street

A few weeks ago I was playing Monopoly with my better half and some friends.  I usually play with my family back in Baltimore, and I usually make a respectable showing but typically lose to the sharks like my brother and my cousin. 

But this time, I was the shark. 

I got super-lucky, landing on Free Parking, Park Place, and Boardwalk.  I had other properties, but I quickly realized that, as long as I didn't trade with anyone else, I could keep them all from building houses while I just bled them dry.

So I did.  And I won.  It took a while, but I ended up with over $12,000 in cash.

It was pretty obvious I was going to win, but I choose to really pour on the gas.  Which made for a really rotten game for everyone else but me.

Somewhere along the way, I had the thought: "Is this what it's like to be in the 1%?"

Luckily, it was only a game.

for Christopher Hitchens, or Requiem for a Contrarian

I did my research, and the first time I referenced Christopher Hitchens here on Macroscope was way back in 2002, in a post called "The Shadow King" on the absurdity of naming Henry Kissinger, of all people, to investigate how badly the government botched the prevention of 9/11.  Around that time, Hitch had written a book about how a very convincing case could be made that Kissinger should be prosecuted in The Hague for war crimes, given the campaign he and Nixon conducted in Cambodia and the way they sabotaged LBJ's negotiations with the North Vietnamese by secretly telling them to wait until Nixon won the '68 election to get a better deal.

I feel like I'd been aware of Hitchens for a long time, and while I bounced back and forth between agreeing with him wholeheartedly and thinking he was completely off-base, what I loved about him was that he was one of the few people in public life who took the time to argue eloquently.  Yes, he was a chain smoking jerk, but he never backed away from a fight and he always did it with the very best lyrical flourishes.

He reminds me of a political pundit version of George Sanders, and felt like he faced his own impending demise the same way he confronted all of his adversaries: with the ongoing power of his words.

Cannot think of anyone who more definitively owns the classification "rapier wit".  A quintessential man of letters in the vein of a William F. Buckley.  Hitch was often more conservative and reactionary for my tastes, but at least I always knew what he was thinking.  At least I always knew THAT he was thinking.

The political discourse could use far more voices with the style, guile, passion, and care that Christopher Hitchens possessed.  The world is poorer for his passing, but much richer from his presence.

Rest in peace, Christopher.

Scary Christmas

Now, Macroscope fans, as a special holiday gift from Amazon.com, if you have an Amazon Prime membership, which already gives you unlimited free 2-day shipping and a huge cache of free streaming videos, you can now get all four of my horror short e-books for FREE.  That includes:

• "I'll See You in Hell", where not even death can put an end to the vicious feud between two rival hitmen.
• "The Worst Place On Earth", about the terror unleashed with a secretive, "old money" family are forced to open the doors of their mansion to the public.
• "The Monster That Ate My Summer Vacation", something abominable that is slowly, deliberately stalking a family driving home through the post-Las Vegas desert.
• and, "The Trick-or-Treaters", who come knocking on the door of a working girl who hates Halloween.  As you can imagine, the Trick-or-Treaters are not amused.

 Not your every day stocking stuffers, but definitely good for huddling around the open fire.

Enjoy!

2 More Days 'Til Halloween. Read Four for $4.

Now that I've taken you through all four of my current short stories, my Halloween gift to your Macroscope readers is a Four for $4 deal.

Get all four short horror stories, including "I'll See You In Hell", "The Worst Place On Earth", "The Monster That Ate My Summer Vacation", and the very latest, "The Trick-or-Treaters", for $0.99 each. Just check out my Author Page on Amazon and you can score them all.

Enjoy, and don't stay out TOO late this weekend.

3 More Days 'til Halloween, but "The Trick-or-Treaters" are already here.

I used to live in a working class neighborhood in a not-so-great area of Los Angeles.  If you looked at the crime maps on the internet, the area was a virtual collage of color-coded crimes and misdemeanors, but it was also an area with mostly houses for blocks & blocks.  The population was less transient than streets lined with apartment buildings, and, as a result, there were more children.

And more children mean trick-or-treaters on Halloween evening.

It all sounds great - little kids in cute costumes with their mock attempts at candy blackmail.  I was in to it, ready to play along with my buckets of Hershey's kisses.

But once the sun had completely set, I figured it would only be another hour or two before the parents packed the kiddies away and off the mean streets.

Imagine my surprise when I settled in to watch John Carpenter's Halloween for the billionth time when, at around 9:30, there was a knock on my door.

There was no peep hole and my lights were already on, so I couldn't peek through the window in secret.  There was, however, a pretty solid screen door, so I opened the main door to take a look.

It was a person, at least as tall as me, but clearly heavier, wearing saggy jeans, a dark hoodie, and wearing a plain white hockey mask and holding a sack full of.... who knows.

He didn't make a move.  He didn't make a sound.

He just stood there.

And I just shook my head and laughed, saying "No, dude.  Not tonight", before closing the door and waiting for him to leave.

He was probably just some teenager who wanted in on the fun.

Probably.

But what if...

My latest horror short is called "The Trick-or-Treaters."

It starts from that idea and runs with it into some pretty crazy and surprising places.  I can honestly say that how I imagined this story would end is no where close to how it actually concludes.  And there are definitely some moments where I had an idea to write something where I thought, "wow, that's really, really wrong."

I'm reminded of a term Marlon Brando uses in "Apocalypse Now":

Moral terror.

It's brand new and available in the Amazon Kindle store today.  And definitely pay attention to my Macroscope post on Halloween proper.  I've got a little special something cooked up.

8 More Days 'til Halloween. Read "The Monster That Ate My Summer Vacation"

A little over a week left before the day, and I'm sure most of you will do most of your celebrations over the weekend, so let's call it a week.

Which brings us to my next scary project.

This one had been percolating in my brain in a variety of forms for years. And it comes from a couple of different places.

So much of horror is about dark, closed-in spaces, which, as you can imagine, makes me think about flipping the proverbial script to see what we can do in big open spaces in broad daylight. Which, as a California resident, can't help but lead me to the desert.

My mind wanders to the long drives out to Las Vegas and all of the nothing in between.

Or is it nothing?

When I fly over that same land, I think of all of the mountains and rock that goes for miles on end. It's literally a no man's land.

But just because there are no men, that doesn't mean that there's nothing else out there.

And that leads me to one of my other thoughts, as a genre writer: I'm SO much more interested in new monsters. I've had my fill of vampires and werewolves and zombies. These things have been done to death.

But something new...

You could literally be sitting right next to something horrible, and not know it until it's too late.

The original title was "Sidewinder". But it was August, and the process of finishing this story was literally consuming me.

Hence, "The Monster That Ate My Summer Vacation."

I'm pretty sure you've never seen or read anything like it. Check it out.



Now that we've finished our trips down memory lane, I think the next time I'll have to share with you something fresh.

 And awful.