March Madness

This is my favorite time of year sports-wise. (And it'd be even better if my team every gave it more than a one game appearance in the conference tournament and made a run for once. FOR ONCE!)

The best thing about March Madness is the madness. Tons of games, tons of teams, players you've never heard of. Teams down and out getting up off the mat to win. Huge upsets. Back and forth battle.

It's like a great thriller.

I mean, isn't that what we want in our crime fiction? You want the wild unpredictability. You want the hero and the villain. You want a wicked twist in the second half that puts everything in doubt. Even if you're a seasoned reader, you want to be surprised.

My favorite moments in a thriller are usually the craziest moments in a game. I love when the hero is down and out. Beaten, emotionally shattered, about to lose his grip on sanity. The villain has his hands on the timer and is going to end the world, or kill their target, or steal all the money and escape to Virginia.

And the hero gets up. Fights back one more time.

It reminds me of March Madness. Your team (or whatever team I choose to root for that year because my team is never in it. NEVER IN IT.) is down ten points late in the second half. They could just roll over and go on spring break.

But they hit a three. They get some life and they crawl back.

Nuts, isn't it? Gets your blood pumping.

Thrills are great.

What's your favorite part of a thriller?

Getting to Know You

by
John McFetridge

When my Entertainment Weekly magazine arrived this week hailing The Good Wife as the best show on TV, I thought, “Ha, I was right,” (hey, I’m shocked, too) and then I wondered about the way TV shows now build an audience the way movies once did.



Nowadays sometimes a movie plays in a few theatres in New York and LA just before the end of the year if the producers are trying to get Academy Awards nominations. Once in a while an art film might get a limited release, or a documentary, but for the most part these days movies open wide, thousands of screens at once. They’ve usually been running ads for weeks so everyone knows about the movie long before it’s in theatres.

Opening weekend is everything and box office usually goes down every week after that.

I remember when there was a huge build up to the new TV season, when all the new shows – on all three networks – started the same week. Some we were looking forward to, some we were going to avoid, but we knew about all of them. The key for new show was to keep its opening night ratings through the whole season.

Now it seems like a show can start with low ratings and see them grow over a season.

It seems like movies and TV shows have switched positions on this.

Then yesterday I saw an article in Variety about crime novels being adapted into movies (or rather, not adapted) that said, “A powerful lit agent suggests that the very qualities that help make these novels so popular may work against them in film adaptations. Relatable everyman or woman characters appeal to readers but may not be considered sexy or mysterious enough to carry a film. The modern day equivalents of Agatha Christie whodunits and Dashiell Hammett detective stories tend to appear on the smallscreen these days.”

I’m not sure it’s so much, “Relatable everyman or everywoman characters,” as much as it is simply character-driven stories.

Then the article quoted Janet Evanovich about the trouble getting her Stephanie Plum series made into a movie, "It seems like a no brainer -- there have been all these shows about bounty hunters -- but my poor little project just has never gotten off the ground," and again I thought, yeah, TV show, not movie.

And her comment about the bounty hunter shows made me think of a recent blog by a Canadian TV writer, Denis McGrath, who said when pitching a TV show imagine it as a reality show. He says, “Desperate Housewives spawned the Real Housewives of... The O.C. gave us The Hills...” and he could have said, “Cop shows gave us Cops...”

So, what’s this got to do with writing crime fiction novels?

Characters.

It seems to me that these days people are all talking about writing ‘stand-alones’ that are very plot-driven, they’re trying to write movies.

But for me, series is where it’s at – TV series and book series. Big complicated plots and lots of characters that take some time to develop. Not necessarily the same main character everytime, but a real developed universe.

A place where you can really get to know the characters.

Sometimes it seems like the series is the unwanted child of publishing. Everyone seems to be looking for the big score, the great hook, the single sentence that can sell the book.

But the steady sales of the series seems to be the foundation everything else stands on, the support that allows the stand-alone risks.

The best shows on TV are the long-arc, complicated, lots of character shows - shows tht take some time to develop.

So maybe it’s not a bad idea to try and create some characters you could imagine spending a few books with – maybe you’ll never get a movie deal, but you might get a TV deal and that might even be better.

Payback Time

By Jay Stringer

I'll be taking a couple of weeks off. Look out for the DSD debut of 'terrible mind' and freelance penmonkey Chuck Wendig next week. Before i go, i wanted to drop off something of a tribute to our very own Russel D Mclean. This little review is based on one that first appeared elsewhere a few years ago. Russel has an event this coming monday at Kirkaldy Central Library. You could go along and ask him about this, one of his favourite films. Or, you could ask him about his movie deal. Either way, go along and enjoy.

Anyone who doesn't know the story, catch up quick;
PAYBACK was written and directed by the guy who wrote the screenplay for L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. It’s based on the novel THE HUNTER, which was also adapted into the stone classic POINT BLANK starring Lee Marvin.

Brian Helgeland, the writer/director, set out to make a film that paid homage to a
different era of crime film. The hero is a bastard who kills in cold blood, and there is violence to women and unarmed men. Because the world is violent to women and unarmed men. There was a dog in it, and unfortunately for lassie fans everywhere, the dog wasn't going to survive.

It was written, cast, filmed and edited as a tribute to Richard Starks book. And Mel Gibson played against type as a relentless, cold eyed killer.

After seeing the finished version, Gibson and the studio baulked. It seems that when they set out to fund a dark and violent crime film, they had actually hoped it would turn out to be Sesame Street. It was decided, perhaps correctly, that the public didn't want that version of Mel Gibson anymore than they wanted him to be drunken or anti semitic. They’d had a decade of seeing him in palatable action adventures, of being the 'loveable rogue' and, as Russel has said, the schoolboys idea of a tough guy. There was also the feeling that cinema should reflect its time, and you couldn’t release a 70’s crime film in the late 90’s. I don’t agree, but I wasn’t the demographic the studio was chasing.

The director was removed, a hip blue colour filter was added on and a comedic voiceover was crammed on. Most crucially, the film was given new first and third acts, and a whole new antagonist was created. The new third act included such bullshit Hollywood ideas as an 'ending'.

The released version wasn't awful. It doesn't belong up there with Transformers 2 or Bram Stoker's Dracula. But the problem was, it wasn't very good, either. It was that odd hollywood enigma; a property that has been brought and filmed to not resemble the source material at all. It aimed at 'wacky' and failed by some margin. It was just another processed cheese crime movie, with a beginning, middle and end (all in the right order.) It belongs on the shelf with all the other 'quirky crime films' that quickly vanish from the mind and never need to be re-watched.

The directors’ cut was made available on DVD a few years back, though i think it's vanishing pretty quickly. And it wasn't just a simple case of throwing in a few deleted scenes, this was a blank slate process. The avid tapes no longer existed, which is a technical term for "oooops." Because of this, the new version was even more of a homage to a bygone era; it was edited direct from the film prints. Yes from film. That crazy substance that most filmmakers wouldn't even know to look at anymore, let alone edit with.

The film has no real beginning and no real ending. Just lots of middle.

It starts with Gibson’s PORTER walking into the city across a bridge. Nothing to his name, we see him stealing money from a blind man (in the ‘Gibson cut’ the blind man was only pretending to be blind, here he is the real deal). He steals a wallet, gets some clothes and a meal, and starts his revenge spree. Pretty soon we see him beating the shit out of his wife. It’s a brutal scene, with no attempt to show any context or to justify the scene. It just is. Later on, through flashback, we do see why he’s doing it. And on the documentary, both of the actors involved (Gibson and Deborah Unger) talk about it in good detail.

-Gibson; “If he didn’t care about her, he wouldn’t have visited.’
-Unger; "She deserved the beating."

Porter’s moral code in the new cut is far more believable than any attempt to sanitize the character. He may beat the crap out of his wife for crossing him, but he also kills an unarmed man for insulting a woman. Not exactly a date film, eh?

The plot is lifted play by play from the book. His wife and his best friend stole seventy grand off him and left him for dead, full of bullets. He wants his money back. Now, funnily enough, the money wasn’t really his to begin with. But that is beside the point. When he finds out that the mob now has the money? Well, he’ll just have to take on the mob and ask for it back. Nicely, of course.

One nice exchange;
-“What is this, some kind of principle?”
-“No, I just want my money back”

A dog gets killed, did i mention that? Lots of people die with little warning and no romance. Violence is shown for what it is. When people complain about these films, complain that they glorify violence and crime, they’ve clearly never watched them. These are the most responsible films; they show that violence and crime happen. They show that neither are pretty. They give both of them consequences.

The final third of the film, one of the many things the studio refused to accept a decade ago, is wonderful. A lot happens, and nothing happens, all at once. It's over in a flash, with no heroism. The film ends in a deliberate nod to the opening. Just as we came into the story partway through, we leave before the end.

History can't be rewritten. PAYBACK is always going to be a strange failed comedy with Mel Gibson and a blue filter. But sitting beside that version on the shelf is a lean, grubby, faithful adaptation of Stark's novel. I really like this forgotten version, and I think a few other would too.