Writing About Lives

I’ve always loved Donna Summer. Buried beneath the grinding disco was a brilliant artist……

A Long Way from Wonderland

In 1980, Donna Summer walked away from disco’s strobe-lit boogie wonderland on The Wanderer. Critics embraced her bold statement; audiences less so. Where exactly was Summer going?

by Christian John Wikane

“Alice went to Wonderland but I stayed home instead”.
—Donna Summer, “The Wanderer”, 1980

When Bonnie Raitt, Pat Benatar, and Carly Simon were among the nominees announced for Best Rock Performance, Female, at the 1979 Grammy Awards, few would have guessed that the queen of disco was also a contender. Though Donna Summer was the frontrunner in the pop, R&B, disco, and Album of the Year categories, she ultimately won the prize in the rock category for “Hot Stuff”, an irony that foretold the artistic journey Summer was about to embark on with producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte.

“Donna was hot as a pistol then”, recalls singer-guitarist Bill Champlin, himself a nominee that year in the Best R&B Song category. (He took home the award for co-writing Earth Wind & Fire’s “After the Love Has Gone”) Only days earlier, Champlin had been ensconced at Rusk Sound Studios in Los Angeles recording background vocals for Summer’s new album. What very few of Champlin’s peers at the Grammy ceremony knew was that Donna Summer, who ruled the better half of 1979 with three number-one singles and two number-one albums on the pop charts, was stepping out of disco’s strobe-lit boogie wonderland.

By 1980, Donna Summer had amassed enough currency in her career to take chances. In October, Summer astounded audiences with The Wanderer, a decidedly rock-oriented album that marked Summer’s liberation from the image-making machinations of her previous record company, Casablanca, and from the grueling celebrity lifestyle that sent her to the brink of suicide. (The album also inaugurated David Geffen’s eponymous record label.) Harry Langdon’s album cover photograph for The Wanderer depicts Summer clothed in layers of scarves and leggings, sitting atop a black bench with suitcase nearby, looking very much “the wanderer”. With one hand casually nested in her perfectly coifed hair, Summer’s gaze is direct and provocative. “I dare you to listen” is the implied message.

In the February 1981 Musician, Roy Trakin assessed The Wanderer as “disco diva Donna’s Inferno, a trip that will take us through her cold hell, up against fiendish temptation and out the other side to spiritual redemption”. Using rock as catharsis, Donna Summer issued a bold artistic statement that surprised listeners expecting another Bad Girls (1979). I had an opportunity to discuss this critical career juncture with Summer herself in January 2003 for a research project about black female singers and rock music. Did she lose her way when trading gowns for guitars? A closer listen to The Wanderer suggests that Donna Summer was anything but lost.

The Songs

“I view my singing as an acting piece, so every song is a different character. I approach each song based on the texture and the color and the ideas that are in the song”.
—Donna Summer

As one of popular music’s most bankable figures in the mid-’70s, Donna Summer had worked virtually nonstop for five years by the time she sat down to compose songs for The Wanderer. After relentless touring and averaging two albums a year since 1975, she desperately needed a respite. “I was home. I was actually pregnant at the time, and I had all the time in the world to really conjure new songs”, Summer recalled. What emerged were highly personal stories about spirituality and superstardom.

Emancipation from the shiny shackles of fame is a prominent theme on The Wanderer, particularly on the opening track. In the lyrics to “The Wanderer”, Summer insinuates that she’d tired of assuming the glamorous image propagated by Casablanca. Bad Girls did little to dispel the modern day Aphrodite image she was never entirely comfortable with, but the Donna Summer on “The Wanderer” is not the same Donna Summer who moaned “Love to Love You, Baby” for nearly 17 minutes in 1975. Instead, she warbles lyrics in an uncharacteristically deep voice not unlike 1950s rocker Gene Vincent (“Be-Bop-a-Lula”). The voice affectation is a vanishing act of sorts as Summer distances herself from the sassy, sexy “bad girl” image: “Slip down the back stair / on my toes and out the door / They didn’t hear now / they won’t see me anymore / ‘Cause I can’t take that nine-to-five /life is a bore”

Similarly, the world-weariness Summer projects on “Who Do You Think You’re Foolin’ “ (written by Sylvester Levay, Harold Faltermeyer, and Jerry Rix) reflects five years spent in the heat of a blinding spotlight. Singing in third person Summer cautions, “Fame is only a dream land away”, knowing full well that stardom is a tenuous phenomenon, based on a shaky semblance of reality. Summer and her background singers repeat the phrase “You’re a star” at the end of each chorus not with elation but with abrasive cynicism.

The elusive nature of fame and its soul-sucking power preoccupies the somewhat indecipherable “Grand Illusion”. Giorgio Moroder’s spacey, heavily synthesized sonic landscape creates a hypnotic mood for Summer’s otherworldly voice. She sings in what can only be described as a sped-up falsetto:

Oh grand illusion, likes to fade away
take my love and go out to play
It’s no intrusion, it’s like a rainy day
comes to wash the clouds away
and this pain of mine

The words are sung in a chantlike cadence, as if Summer wrote the lyrics in a meditative state. During the bridge, Moroder’s swirling synthesizer patterns make it seem Summer is being circled by a benevolent celestial force that will wash away her pain. Imbued with its munificence, her voice takes on an operatic, seraphimlike vibrato: “Find the melody / that puts our hearts in tune / Simple symphony/that makes us feel brand new”.
She addresses spiritual rebirth more directly on three other songs: “Looking Up”, “Running for Cover”, and “I Believe in Jesus”. The latter is Summer’s resounding declaration of redemption. Summer had become a born-again Christian only months before recording The Wanderer and “I Believe in Jesus” was the most explicit expression of her renewed faith.

Less overtly spiritual, but more musically compelling, is “Looking Up”, which sounds like the single that never was. For one, Summer sings in her trademark, full-bodied voice rather than the camouflaged tones on the title track. Summer’s lyrics, co-written with Pete Bellotte, take flight with Moroder’s propulsive dance-rock arrangement. Building on its fervor of guitars, drums, and keyboards, “Looking Up” contains a bracing chorus-to-bridge transition. Just before the second chorus ends, Summer swoops up in her falsetto to sing an angelic “oooh” that fades in an echo to the sole beat of Keith Forsey’s drum. It’s merely seconds long, but the sudden suspension of the rhythm section, save the drumbeat, creates an energizing anticipation. The keyboards and guitars quietly return and Summer self-harmonizes a type of prayer in a soft, sung-spoken voice:

And since that rainy day
the clouds just stay away
You chase them with your love
the greatest love I know
‘Cause in the darkest hour
you’ll come with sunny showers
My life is yours today
don’t ever go away

Of the songs about spirituality, “Running for Cover” captures Summer and her musicians in all-out rock mode. She explained its inspiration to me in 2003: “That was right at the time when I got converted, and I think that I was looking for a way to say what had happened without being obvious. I was trying to explain it in a metaphor that I was running for cover, for protection”. It stands as one the most dramatic songs Summer ever wrote.

From the unnerving, high-pitched keyboard tones that open the song, “Running for Cover” is steeped in an eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere. Summer, who composed the lyrics and music, sings about “running scared” in the city over a sparse bass and drum background. Hers is a nefarious urban space, replete with unsavory temptations, from which she seeks both refuge and salvation. “I was always alone and afraid, such a pity / little girls just don’t know what comes out of the dark / But the devil waits in heat/ and I’m on that dead-end street.” Her narrow escape from the “devil” is documented musically. As the beat quickens, so does the urgency of her singing until she bellows “The devil’s in the park and it’s already after dark”. Guitarist Steve Lukather unleashes a manic solo that perfectly conveys Summer’s fear and escape.

The rock edge of “Running for Cover” is repurposed with a pop feel on “Cold Love”, where Summer nurses the wounds of unrequited love in a the tune that illustrates Summer’s character-driven approach to singing. Like the title track, it’s not readily apparent who is singing the song. Critic Dave Marsh noted in his review Rolling Stone review that Summer “punches across” the tune like the “ultimate Anglo-rock singer”. Summer says, “I just approached it like a rock and roll singer. I didn’t think that I’m black or white. I just thought ‘How does rock and roll get sung?’ “
Summer convincingly inhabits each story on The Wanderer to the point where her voice is virtually unrecognizable from one cut to the next. The falsetto on “Breakdown” reflects the fragility of romantic love, while the nursery rhyme about nocturnal dwellers on “Nightlife” is sung with a throaty sneer. “Stop Me” is altogether different with Summer hollering “But if you’ve heard this all before / don’t let me carry on no more” to a scorned lover over a new wave cum hard rock arrangement. Critic Stephen Holden singled out the cast of characters that so typify Summer’s singing on the album in his review for The Village Voice, “Not since I Remember Yesterday has Summer adopted so many different voices. There’s the caterwauling street kitten, the breathless little girl, the tough rocker, and the stagey diva” (1981).

The “supporting cast” for Summer’s characters on The Wanderer is a trio of male background singers who give a distinct shape to each song. Bill Champlin brought session vocalists Carmen Grillo and Tom Kelley to the project, and their voltaic vocalizations broadened Summer’s sound from the disco diva-isms that mark her earlier work. As Grillo recalls, “We would do these pyramid types of things. We thought, Why don’t we all hit the same note and then it will sound more people-y? We would all sing the low note, then we would all sing middle note, then we would all sing the high note”.

“Last Dance” this certainly was not.

The Reaction

“I think that they were kind of taken aback because they were expecting a big dance record and I didn’t go there. I specifically didn’t go there so that they would not continually pigeonhole me, not because I didn’t like dance music—I love dance music—but I wasn’t in dance mode. I was in ‘writing something else’ mode”.
—Donna Summer (2003)

Here are the statistics: The Wanderer earned Summer a gold album, two Grammy nominations, a top-five single in the title track, and nearly unanimous praise among critics. Writing for Billboard, Ed Harrison remarked, “The singer has chosen to experiment…veering gradually in new directions and in doing so has progressed as a performer and a writer” (1981). Robert Christgau wrote in his Consumer Guide, “Personally, I delight in the synthetic perfection of the thing” (1980). In Rolling Stone, Dave Marsh commented, “It’s Summer who pulls everything together with such intense purposefulness that the album is finally a complete and convincing statement of innocence, faith, joy, terror and the ability to deal with life head-on” (1981).

Audiences and radio programmers, however, were a bit confused. The woman who only a year earlier playfully chanted “toot toot, beep beep” was earnestly proclaiming her devotion to Jesus. Whereas Summer’s first two singles on Bad Girls were chart-topping smashes, the follow-up singles to “The Wanderer”— “Cold Love” and “Who Do You Think You’re Foolin’ “—scraped the bottom of the Top 40. How did someone so ubiquitous one year become so difficult to program the next? Quick to defend the first artist he signed, David Geffen explained the struggles of promoting a rock record by a black female artist to the Los Angeles Times:

The problem with Donna’s album is that it’s a rock record, but rock stations aren’t playing it because of a prejudice against black artists and female artists. When you look at a rock station playlist and can’t find a single black act, I think there’s something radically wrong, and it has nothing to do with Donna Summer. And Donna has the misfortune in terms of rock radio to be both black and a woman.

Tom Hadges, the program director at KLOS FM, hypothesized, “It’s a difficult thing to try to reverse an image. The people who bought her albums before aren’t buying the new one and rock audiences aren’t willing to put their money down on a Donna Summer album right now”. The compartmentalization of radio formats and audience’s resistance toward Summer’s change in style clearly hindered the record. Not wishing to gamble further, Geffen hired Quincy Jones to direct Summer towards a more conventional R&B sound for her subsequent album (Donna Summer, 1982)

About the reception of The Wanderer, Summer remains philosophical: “If you’re an artist, you have to do your artistry. Sometimes there’s a conflict and people don’t want your artistry to be what it is and so you make the adjustment to try to please them. At that point I wasn’t trying to please anyone but myself. That’s not my best selling record but at the same time, I think it certainly was one I felt that I was being true to myself. I was not allowing myself to be pigeonholed where people were trying to put me, but I was taking them with me on this journey. We were going to ‘wander’ around and we were going to go to places that they hadn’t been with me. That’s what The Wanderer meant to me”. Listeners who accompanied her on the journey heard an artist who simply refused to stagnate. Summer may have left “wonderland”, but she found her soul.

The angels overlooking Central Park must be slightly deafened after German DJ Paul van Dyk delivered a four-hour ear popping set from 6 to 10 p.m last night. A superb mixer, van Dyk kept the crowd throbbing without a break, despite torrential downpours of rain for the first two hours. As the rain came down, the crowd got more enlivened, digging it’s heels in the mud to stick with the show. For about a minute, van Dyk’s master board short circuited. In a flash of lightning, it came back, and the crowd of mostly teens and early 20-somethings roared and started pulsing again. It was a sight to behold.

Between 8 and 10, the spectacular light show made the stage look like a scene from from another galaxy or dimension. And as if to reward those who stayed until the very end, in the last hour, one singer after another featured on “In Between,” van Dyk’s newest disk, appeared and sang, or should I say, appeared with mikes in hand while their gigantic images were featured on scenes in the background. A definite high point was “New York City,” featuring Ashley Tomberlin. The low point was never anything about the show, but the imbeciles near the front of the stage where I was. Drunk, pushing, shoving and fighting over their spots, they behaved abominably – all overcome by van Dyk’s supreme artistry.

This city, once known as a capital of vice and self-destruction, is now a capital of longevity. What happened?

By Clive Thompson
New York Magazine

Last winter, the New York City Department of Health released figures that told a surprising story: New Yorkers are living longer than ever, and longer than most people in the country. A New Yorker born in 2004 can now expect to live 78.6 years, nine months longer than the average American will. What’s more, our life expectancy is increasing at a rate faster than that of most of the rest of the country. Since 1990, the average American has added only about two and a half years to his life, while we in New York have added 6.2 years to ours. In the year 2004 alone, our life expectancy shot up by five months—a stunning leap, because American life spans normally increase by only a month or two each year. When these figures came out, urban-health experts were impressed and slightly dazed. It turns out the conventional wisdom is wrong: The city, it seems, won’t kill you. Quite the opposite. Not only are we the safest big city in America, but we are, by this measure at least, the healthiest.

The “average life expectancy” of a city is a statistically curious number. It’s not really a prediction about how long you’re going to live. It’s an average of how long everyone here lives—and thus it forms a good barometer of the overall health of the city. In particular, a city’s average life span is sensitive to the rates at which people die too young. Since the average New York life expectancy is now 78.6 years, anytime someone dies younger than that, it drags the city’s overall average down slightly.

The math works like this. Imagine that one man dies of AIDS at age 25. Since he was statistically supposed to live to 78.6 years, he’s died about 50 years too early, so he shaves 50 years off the city’s overall pool of life. If one Wall Street guy collapses of a heart attack at age 65, he shaves only ten years off. You’d have to have five Wall Streeters die at that age to equal the impact of one AIDS victim. By the same logic, one infant’s dying during childbirth—77.8 years too early—is equal to ten people’s succumbing to lung cancer at age 70. It is a very weird form of horse trading. The more you’re able to prevent young people—folks in their twenties and thirties—from dying, the more rapidly you boost a city’s overall life expectancy.

And this is precisely what the city has done, through a combination of smart public policy and sheer luck. All the boons of the nineties—the aggressive policing, the dramatic drop in crime, the renaissance of the city’s parks and street life, the freakish infusion of boom-time wealth—played a part. Take the miraculous evaporation of the homicide rate. In 1990, a stunning 2,272 New Yorkers were murdered; in 2005, that number dropped to 579. Since a majority of those being killed were younger men, the reduced murder rate alone added tens of thousands of years to New York’s life-expectancy pool. Another big drop was in HIV mortality rates. In 1994, deaths from AIDS peaked at over 7,100, but the arrival of better drugs and health care began to whittle that number by 80 percent—so in 2005, only 1,419 died of AIDS. Again, the majority of the lives saved here were those of younger men, resulting in a disproportionately big upward leap in our city’s life span. In 1989, the infant-mortality rate was 13.3 babies per 1,000, and by 2004, it had been halved, to 6.1, both because medical treatment improved and because alcohol and drug addictions eased. To top it off, drug-related deaths, another arena with disproportionately younger victims, tapered off, too.

Homicide, AIDS, and drugs are characteristically New York ways to die young, of course, so it’s no surprise that when we sharply decreased the fatalities they caused, we caught up with the rest of the country. But here’s the thing: It’s not just that we’ve conquered these urban blights. Cancer and cardiac arrest are down, too. The number of people in the city dying from heart disease has dropped by a third in the last twenty years, and cancer rates have slid by nearly a fifth. And again in these cases, New York is getting healthier faster than the rest of the U.S.

In essence, there is a health gap emerging between our massive metropolis and the rest of the country—some X factor that’s improving our health in subtle, everyday ways. In fact, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that once you take out those uniquely New York ways to die—AIDS, homicide, etc.—we’ve still added at least 200,000 extra years onto the city’s life-expectancy tables since 1980, making crucial advances in the same health areas the rest of the country struggles with. Like many New Yorkers, I’d moved here with some trepidation—always figuring that the stress, pollution, and 60-hour workweeks would knock about five years off my life. I was wrong—precisely wrong. But where, exactly, is our excess life coming from?

for the rest go to http://nymag.com/news/features/35815/

I’m an interesting, talented artist but I can’t take the rejection!

I know it’s part of the game, but it’s beginning to defeat me.

By Cary Tennis
Salon Magazine

Aug. 13, 2007 | Dear Cary,

I’m an artist — it’s the thing I’ve had since childhood, the thing I took for granted.

So I took it for granted and followed other paths — writing fiction and filmmaking.

I went to grad school, I published some books and many articles (nonfiction). I wrote (and sold) some screenplays. I directed some films and produced some TV shows.

So I’m sorta successful, but I still feel that “artist” is my life’s calling. It’s what I’m best at and what I love. And yes, I go through all the crap too — the stress, the inaction, the procrastination and so on, but I really feel it’s what I was born to do. People like it — smart people, the people I’d hoped would like it, and they like it for the right reasons. I sell enough out of my studio to counter my expenses (not huge but significant nonetheless). I’ve been selected for juried shows by curators of major museums and been waitlisted on grants and residencies that are awarded to emerging contemporary artists — exactly where I’d hope my artwork would fall within the giant spectrum of the art world.

But it has yet to pay off with true success: representation by a gallery, which is the equivalent of getting an agent and all that that would hopefully bring.

In the meantime I have to work as a producer (lucrative, challenging, creative but I sublimate my own interests to be “mainstream” enough to be functional in this world) and then, while I’m working on freelance producing jobs, I have to get the rejection letters from things I’ve applied to. I realize I can’t get accepted to everything I apply to, but each time I get rejected, it takes me down a notch, if only for that day. And then I recover (or forget) and go back to making art, and I’ve realized that this whole creation/rejection dichotomy actually creates the sort of manic-depressive (or bipolar) worldview that artists are known for: You get all excited about some idea and work in a creative frenzy and then you get a rejection notice and feel like “What the fuck am I doing anyways?”

My problem right now is that I don’t get the “manic” highs of creation because I’m doing a freelance producing job which is very, very time-consuming (and creativity-consuming), so I can’t make my own art at the moment and yet I am getting the “depressive” rejection letters that send me into a downward spiral for which there is no “manic” corrective. And I start to think, maybe “producer” is all I get to be; after all, I worked hard to get to be that too!

I don’t think that I should give up on the artwork (I don’t think I can, literally. I think I’d be miserable. It’s pretty much my higher purpose in life). But how do I deal with the rejection during these periods where I can’t make up for it with creative zeal? Because it’s so fucking easy to get a rejection notice in the middle of the day at work on the cheesy TV show and think, “Who the fuck am I to think I am an artist?”

- S.

Dear S,

I’m glad you wrote this letter. The problem you describe is important. The best way I can respond to it is by talking about my own experience.

I am a very critical person. This is a problem in my life. I have high expectations. If you are doing something and I am watching, I will have a different idea how you should do it, and I will take you apart and not even realize I am doing it until I have ruined your experience. Then I will apologize. I will say I was just trying to help. Then I will go deeper and admit I am a destructively critical person. So I have this. I am critical of you and I am also critical of me.

Now, I also have high expectations. I have experienced literature that opened the skies for me, that made the earth tremble, that proved the existence of a world right alongside ours, so far superior to ours that one might as well commit suicide. I have had these experiences with literature. So I expect a lot when I read. I have high expectations.

But that means I have high expectations for myself as well when I write. Every time I write I think I am required to make the skies open. I think I have to make the earth tremble. I think I have to reveal the existence of a dazzling universe quietly superseding our own, right next to us in another dimension.

That is of course impossible — as well as being destructive. Realistically speaking, maybe once in my life I’ll write something pretty good. Maybe twice.

So I have unrealistic expectations of myself and of other people.

So naturally I fail every day. And so does everyone else in my eyes. That is not a very comfortable world to live in, where I am failing every day, and everyone around me is failing every day too.

It became clear to me a while ago that if I went on writing in this kind of hell I would not last. If you have a voice in your head that is telling you every day that you suck and you can’t write, because the heavens are not splitting open and the earth is not trembling, you’re not going to last long. You’re going to find yourself depressed. You’re going to be paralyzed, unable to send out manuscripts.

You need constant encouragement and reinforcement in order to keep going. It’s not even about feeling good so much. It’s just about keeping going.

I began to think about athletes. I thought, what do athletes do? Are they rejected every time they perform? A batter gets a hit maybe every four or five at bats. So that’s pretty tough.

How would an athlete deal with all that rejection?

In sports there is rejection and pain. But there is also joy and encouragement. There are coaches. There are teammates.

Those of us who work alone trying to make the heavens open up and the earth tremble, we need regular encouragement. We need coaches to say, Hey, good game. We need hand slaps and high-fives. Without support we will stop sending out our work. (Most of us, anyway. There are some who are like diamonds inside, brilliant and hard and unreachable. But most of us, we’re sensitive.)

So, having never been, by temperament or upbringing or cultural leaning, a workshop person, and having had only the worst experiences in graduate school workshops, I nevertheless began looking for some organic forms of support. The only thing I knew in terms of groups was support groups for addiction and alcohol. I thought something along that line might work, but I had no idea what. I just knew that the unconscious needs to be cradled and encouraged.

So browsing in Borders last fall before a long plane ride, I saw that book “Writing Alone and With Others.” I liked the title. It was sufficiently descriptive and exact. It did not promise me that I could write a novel in 30 days. It did not address problems of self-esteem that I did not have. It spoke to me.

So I read it and became convinced that the workshop method it outlines could help me and others improve our relationships with our own creative selves and with each other as creative people. So last week I completed a weeklong workshop with the author of that book, Pat Schneider, and was reinforced in my belief that this is the way to go.

We critical types are hard on ourselves. I have been very hard on others but I have believed it was OK because I was also very hard on myself. Others have been hard on me as well, and I have sort of invited that. I have said, That’s OK, give it to me straight, I can take it. Actually, I couldn’t take it. But I would say I could. I believed in the interest of telling it like it is that everybody had to be hard on everybody else and on themselves. That would ensure that we were all aesthetically honest and pure.

Well, so now I am thinking, what good does that do if we become so embittered and afraid of rejection that we can’t continue our work? I think what we need is more acceptance and more love. But how do I become more accepting of myself? Well, if being hard on others and being hard on myself are so closely linked, perhaps being accepting of others and accepting of myself are also linked. So what if I were start being easier on others, and then eventually perhaps easier on myself? That is what happened in this workshop. We sat around and talked only about what we liked and what we remembered. We didn’t tear each other up. Dangerous things were allowed to be said, and were said. They were said well. It was an atmosphere in which the dangerous and difficult things could be said. I was pretty amazed. It produced good work, to my mind, because the good work is the difficult work. It is the work that says things on the edge of acceptable.

So to you, fellow sufferer, I would say that you must build into your life some support systems. You may say that you know you are good. That is fine. I know I am good too. Still, I need to hear it every day. You may know that you are loved as well. You still need to hear it every day. You need to be told. And you need to tell others.

Another thought that prevented me from participating in workshops was this: Well, I’m a professional. I’m different. I’m better.

What I found was that as a professional I had certain things I could contribute. But it did not make me any better than anyone else. Rather, I stood in surprised awe. I said, What, you are not publishing? My God! It was astonishing.

So now in spite of my long-cultivated anti-workshop bias and my pride and my ego and my defensiveness and my well-suppressed desire to crush all other artists, in spite of my debilitating expectation that every word ought to split the sky or make the earth tremble or hint at the existence of a fantastic other world, in spite of my fear and my anger and my feeling of hopelessness and despair, I believe in the workshop.

It’s what you have to do. Something inside you needs it.

There is much more to be said about this, but I think that is enough for now. There are cultural and political implications. There are spiritual implications. But that is enough for now. It’s about the workshop. It’s about finding structured support. It’s what you have to do.

By the way, one practical way to avoid the crushing futility of never-ending rejection is to have a friend send out your work for you. This little tip came to me from Pat Schneider. The trick is to work with a friend. You send out your friend’s work, and your friend sends out yours. Your friend gets the rejections but doesn’t tell you. You don’t need to know. When something encouraging happens, then your friend gives you the news.

Bloodthirsty New Book Incites a Bidding War

By ROBERT ITO of the New York Times

Published: August 11, 2007

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 10 — The item up for bidding was, at first blush, unremarkable. It was an unfinished manuscript, 397 pages long, less than half of the planned book, as well as an outline detailing story arcs and plot points to come. The writer? Someone named Jordan Ainsley, whom no one had ever heard of — not readers, not book editors, certainly not anyone in Hollywood. Yet the biggest movie studios were being asked to pony up seven figures for the privilege of committing the book, sight half-unseen, to film.

For five days Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox battled over the film rights to Mr. Ainsley’s novel “The Passage,” the first book of a planned trilogy about vampires born not of bat bites, but of medical experiments gone awry. The winning bid, made last month by Fox 2000 and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions, was $1.75 million.

The auction is just the latest indicator of the lengths that studios will go to in search of their next franchise, at a time when it seems that all the biggest projects have already been done or spoken for.

“Fantasy has always been popular in Hollywood,” said Elizabeth Gabler, president of Fox 2000 Pictures. “And between the ‘Lord of the Rings’ films and the upcoming end of the Harry Potter series, everybody’s looking for what the next version of those movies will be.”

Recent fantasy book-to-film projects include “Stardust,” the years-in-the-offing Paramount release based on a Neil Gaiman mini-series for DC Comics, which opened yesterday, and “The Golden Compass,” a $150 million New Line film based on the first novel in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, which opens in December.

While Fox’s bid was high for an unestablished, unpublished entity, it was hardly out of line, given other recent purchases. In May Warner Brothers — Harry Potter’s home studio — reportedly paid more than $1 million for the film rights to “Skulduggery Pleasant,” a children’s book about a skeleton who is a detective. Two years ago the Walt Disney Company and Jerry Bruckheimer Films spent $1.5 million for an unpublished fantasy novel by Ahmet Zappa.

All of this makes you downright nostalgic for 1998, when J. K. Rowling sold the film rights to both of the then-existing Potter books — the movies have since grossed more than $3.5 billion internationally — for a sum in the low seven figures.

Of course, banking on a fantasy franchise is not without its risks; the roster of bombs is enough to chill even the bravest of producer’s hearts. For every “Lord of the Rings” there’s a “Treasure Planet” — an animated Disney film that cost an estimated $140 million and sold less than $40 million of tickets domestically — with the potential losses magnified by often hyper-inflated budgets for special effects.

“The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” Terry Gilliam’s 1988 comedy-adventure movie about a world-traveling aristocrat, brought in just $8 million domestically. And 2001’s “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” based on the video game about an alien invasion, made back less than a quarter of its $137 million budget in the United States, and $85 million over all.

The frenzy for the “Passage” film rights was unleashed even before the first pitch went out to the studios. Two weeks before the studio deal, Ellen Levine, a literary agent at Trident Media Group, had taken the manuscript to the country’s biggest publishing houses, including Random House and the Penguin Group. Ms. Levine chose to send out the book under the pseudonym Jordan Ainsley because the author, Justin Cronin, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for his 2001 short-story collection, “Mary and O’Neil,” was known more for midsize family dramas than for Stephen King-size thrillers.

“We weren’t trying to hide who he was, but I didn’t want him to be typecast as one kind of author, and I thought this had vast commercial potential,” Ms. Levine said.

The story, a futuristic fable about death row inmates transformed into vampires by a government-spawned virus, hit a nerve with publishers. A number tried to block their competitors with pre-emptive offers, some in the millions. The offers were summarily rejected, and the manuscript was put on the block at a “best bids” auction between four houses on July 3.

The winner for the United States rights to the trilogy was Ballantine Books, which New York magazine reported had paid $3.75 million, a figure that Mark Tavani, the book’s editor, said was “not correct, but in the ballpark.”

When the author’s identity was revealed to Libby McGuire, Ballantine’s publisher, she said that the company would publish the book under Mr. Cronin’s name. The first novel in the trilogy is to be released in the summer of 2009, with the others to be published in 2011 and 2013.

By the time Ms. Levine began shopping the manuscript to the studios two weeks later, much of Hollywood had already seen it. Scouts working for the studios, as is their wont with all similarly talked-about books, had gotten copies of Mr. Cronin’s work into the hands of producers at most of the major studios.

The auction for film rights was a shock for Mr. Cronin. “I’ve written several novels, never once thinking they could or should be movies,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Which doesn’t mean it isn’t nice, now that it’s happened.”

As the studios and their partners (Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment, with Universal; Scott Rudin and Sam Raimi with Sony; and the screenwriter Akiva Goldsman with Warner Brothers) found out about the competition for the material, prices climbed.

Unlike the three-book deal signed by Ballantine, the fee paid by Fox is only for the first book of the planned trilogy. “There were reports that there was a certain amount of money, and that was for three books, but that is not true,” said Ms. Levine, who is currently shopping the trilogy to foreign publishers. (She said she had already sealed deals in seven other countries.)

Yet paying nearly $2 million for an unfinished book that nobody will see for another couple of years is not all that odd, at least not in Hollywood. For the studios, big payouts for properties based on outlines and concepts rather than on finished books or fully formed screenplays is not uncommon; many of the superhero movies of late have been sold on little more than a few comic books and the broadest of plot ideas.

And if the movie bombs?

“I’m sure in some year-end meetings, someone has to account for them, and someone loses a job,” said Amy Schiffman, vice president of books and literary properties at the Gersh Agency. “But every year the studios keep clamoring for more, now more than ever. There are a lot of Harry Potter wannabes in development, trying to get to be movies. The conventional wisdom of the studios now is, you risk more, you make more.”

While I understand the sentiment behind this article, the image of the vultures standing outside the court room seizing upon the accused, what the public fails to understand is that reporters play a Constitutionally sanctioned role in this democratic republic. Aside from the legal system, reporters play a key role in bringing swift justice and a sense of accountability to our elected officials. Keeping them in line is worth the criticism I suppose.

Reporters are invaluable to citizenry and this story doesn’t even get at that. ~~~ Samuel

From the ASSOCIATED PRESS

More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don’t care about the people they report on, a poll published Thursday showed.

And poll respondents who use the Internet as their main source of news — roughly one quarter of all Americans — were even harsher with their criticism, the poll conducted by the Pew Research Center said.

More than two-thirds of the Internet users said they felt that news organizations don’t care about the people they report on; 59 percent said their reporting was inaccurate; and 64 percent they were politically biased.

More than half — 53 percent — of Internet users also faulted the news organizations for “failing to stand up for America”.

Among those who get their news from newspapers and television, criticism of the news organizations was up to 20 percentage points lower than among Internet news audiences, who tend to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole, according to Pew.

The poll indicates an across the board fall in the public’s opinion on the news media since 1985, when a similar survey was conducted by Times Mirror, Pew Research said.

“Two decades ago, public attitudes about how news organizations do their job were less negative. Most people believed that news organizations stood up for America… a majority believed that news organizations got the facts straight,” Pew said in a report.

The Washington-based Pew Research Center describes itself as a nonpartisan “fact tank” that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.

THIS WAS THE NEWSPAPER TO WHICH I WAS MOST EMOTIONALLY ATTACHED

McCartheys to settle long court battle for Tribune ownership

By Paul Beebe
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 08/09/2007 07:28:42 AM MDT

A bitter seven-year legal fight over ownership of The Salt Lake Tribune ended Wednesday with a settlement that averts a September trial.

The McCarthey family, which owned the paper for almost a century, agreed to end all lawsuits against Tribune owner MediaNews Group and other defendants in return for an undisclosed amount, according to a statement released by MediaNews. The payment will be made from a settlement fund that some but not all of the defendants will contribute to.

The McCartheys will relinquish an option the family received in 1997 to buy back the paper after they sold its parent company, Kearns-Tribune, to Telecommunications Inc. (TCI). The $731 million deal was arranged to obtain the profits from a hefty appreciation of TCI stock owned by Kearns-Tribune.

TCI was later bought by AT&T, which briefly flirted with the idea of selling the paper to the Deseret Morning News. When that sale went nowhere, AT&T sold The Tribune to MediaNews in 2001 for $200 million. The family and their company, Salt Lake Tribune Publishing Co., filed a lawsuit to block the sale – touching off a long series of legal maneuvers that would ultimately lead nowhere for the McCartheys.

“We are appreciative that the McCarthey family, the Deseret Morning News, Management Planning and others were willing to come together to resolve this seven-year dispute over ownership of The Salt Lake Tribune,” MediaNews CEO and Tribune publisher Dean Singleton said Wednesday.

“The McCarthey family has a passionate love of The Tribune and what it means to Utah. We pledge to do our best to make all who love The Tribune proud as we strive to edit an outstanding newspaper for all who live in Utah.”

Phil McCarthey, spokesman for the heirs of Sen. Thomas Kearns, who bought the paper in 1901, said the family settled the dispute because they did not wish to face more years of legal skirmishes.

“After nearly seven years of litigation and a number of changes at the The Tribune, we have accepted a substantial settlement and are ready to move on,” McCarthey said.

“The nearly seven-year fight demonstrated our love and commitment to The Salt Lake Tribune.”

Tribune Editor Nancy Conway said the settlement begins a new chapter for Utah’s largest newspaper.

“I think it’s good for the community, it’s good for the paper and it’s good for the employees,” Conway said. “It’s just good to have this settled so we can leave all that behind and move forward and serve readers the way we need to.”

Jim Wall, president and publisher of the News was not immediately available for contact Wednesday. The McCartheys had accused the News in their lawsuit of conspiring to thwart their efforts to buy back the newspaper.

The agreement came less than a month before a trial was set to begin in a U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, where lawyers planned to ask a jury to overturn an appraisal that was used to set $355.5 million as the price the McCartheys would have to pay to buy back the paper, even though they said earlier this year they no longer wanted it.

The McCartheys refused to pay that amount, saying the paper’s value was closer to their own appraiser’s estimate of $218 million.

In a hearing held July 19, Judge Paul Cassell urged the parties to attempt a settlement before the trial began. Discussions began a week later.

“The settlement happily ends a very long stretch of litigation. It’s disappointing that the objective of the family of regaining ownership of the newspaper was not achieved, but there has been a substantial payment to the McCartheys and their company that does vindicate their contractual rights,” said Patrick Carome, a lawyer representing the family.

Joel Campbell, a journalism professor at Brigham Young University, said he was disappointed that the payment to the McCartheys was kept secret.

“It seems ironic that a corporation that prides itself in open government, and certainly The Tribune has been active in preserving open government laws in Utah, would agree to keep this settlement under wraps and not allow the public to see what’s happened,” Campbell said.

Management Planning Inc., which performed the contested appraisal, will receive a payment from Kearns-Tribune. The amount wasn’t revealed.

A second trial had been tentatively set for February. In that trial, the family hoped to get a verdict that MediaNews and the News interfered with their right to buy back the paper.

From LA Observed

Giving the finger *
Kevin Roderick

Anyone who has watched the regular KOCE reports from the Register newsroom in Orange County knows it’s hard enough to get print schlubs to give good television. It’s even more challenging to do a quality show when one of the newspaper’s editors all but moons the camera in the background. Now, it’s been a difficult week at the Register’s “content center,” with running layoffs hacking at morale. But the news director of KOCE doesn’t see the humor in some guy picking his nose on camera. His memo fingering the perp as a repeat offender, and warning the Register of consequences, is below:

Dear Colleagues,
We had an incident occur with a Register employee that is frankly inappropriate and unacceptable.

During an interview, which will air tonight, with Register reporter John Gittelsohn another Register employee walked over to the interview area, intentionally stood behind John, faced the camera, picked his nose, and wiped it on his shirt.

Unfortunately, this was part of our live-to-tape 30 minute broadcast which airs tonight at 6:30 for all to see. It is also scheduled to be posted on the Register website after it airs on Real Orange. I have attached a video still image for you to see right now.

I’ve spoken with Register Broadcast Engineer Don Nebel about this individual. Don has stated that when the lights for the camera go on and we begin interview segments, this individual makes it a point to be loud, disruptive, and perform antics for the camera. Don has “waived him off” on numerous occasions, however he continues to disrupt our segments and has now escalated his attempts to embarrass both KOCE and the Register.

We cannot continue to conduct interviews from the Register newsroom, with this employee present. I do not want to cancel the next 4 segments we have scheduled this week at the Register, nor do I want to ask Register reporters to take valuable time out of their day to travel to our studio to avoid this disruptive employee. But I will have to do one or the other, until I can be assured that this employee is no longer going to be a problem.

Michael Taylor
News Director, KOCE-TV

I don’t know the picker, but my Register sources say his name is C.P. Smith — and that he has offered to take one of the buyouts. (And had been accepted.) * Update: Smith is the Register’s page one editor, its former rock critic, and the husband of L.A. Times deputy editor Sherry Stern.

If you really want a laugh go to the link

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2007/08/giving_the_finger.php

Pam Houston: Not Making It Up As She Goes Along?

So Pam Houston was conducting a writer’s workshop in the Vail, Colorado, area over the weekend, and a local reporter listened in on her words of wisdom for aspiring writers, including the revelation that she basically just reprocesses her own life experiences into her fiction. “Houston says the lawyers at [W. W. Norton], her publishing company, tell her to get up in front of the audience and say she made everything up, that her books, categorized as fiction, are not her own life,” the article says. “But she never has.” Instead, Houston told the crowd with a smile, “I just lie to the lawyers.” This winning, winking strategy is, perhaps, why Houston is beloved by the same middle-aged women, from one end of the country to the other, who feel personally betrayed by James Frey. (Also, cowboys and Irish wolfhounds are so much cuter than drug addicts.)

In an earlier interview with Powells.com, Houston clarified that “what becomes nonfiction are events or stories where the metaphors are in alignment with each other and I’m not too afraid of what’s going to happen if I look closely at them.” And if life doesn’t make her happy? “If I know that I’m opening a can of worms that’s going to take me somewhere I don’t understand, and it’s probably darker than I would care to go on any given day and is going to reveal truths that are going to surprise me, probably not all in a good way, then it’s fiction.”

This ran in the latest edition of Time Out New York.

Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch shows he knows how to handle inappropriate reporters and how to be discreet.

1. You’re on a panel to discuss the 30th anniversary of the Son of Sam, but wouldn’t you rather talk current events? Which do you care more about, the Lohan debacle or the Spitzer debacle?

I care more about and I’m more interested in the Spitzer debacle.

2. How’m I doing?

You personally? Since I’ve never met you it would be difficult to respond, but people say that to me all the time and my general response is, “You’re doing terrific, how bout me?”

3. Awesome! Are you gay?

When was the last time you performed oral sex on your boyfriend?

4. Well, I’m single now so it was a long time ago.

See, I don’t think you should answer that question. It’s an improper question, and so is yours. My sexual orientation is none of your business and whether or not you performed oral sex on your boyfriend is none of my business – Alison Rosen.