It was another picture-perfect day, as the below photos will attest. And it was a sad day, as now I have to wait a whole other year before the next Book Fest. Man, these weekends fly by. Two days ago I was ambling around the campus, killing time before the Book Prizes, taking in all the sponsor tents, reading the vendor names, giddy with the prospect of another awesome weekend. Here's the thing about awesome weekends, though, which no one tells you. They end.
Anywho, enough sulking. Here's what I did today.
The Future of News
Moore 100 - 10 a.m.
Cinny Kennard - Managing director and managing editor of NPR West, overseeing the production of two daily programs originating there: News & Notes and Day to Day. Before that, Cinny was a CBS News correspondent and journalism professor at USC.
Russ Stanton - Current editor of the Los Angeles Times. He just nailed that position on Valentine's Day of this year. Before that he worked as the paper's innovation editor, playing a major role in integrating the print newsroom with the online operation.
David Talbot - Founder and former editor-in-chief of Salon. He used to be the editor of the magazine Mother Jones and the San Francisco Examiner and has written for Time, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. He wrote the bestseller Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, which has been optioned by Lionsgate Films.
Moderator: Michael Parks - Editor of Los Angeles Times from 1997-2000, during which time the paper racked up four Pulitzers. Since then he's been director of USC's journalism school.
Cinny Kennard's experience at CBS left a bad taste in her mouth. She wasn't too thrilled with the way they delivered news. Indeed, it sounds like her departure was acrimonious. As the west coast head of NPR, she made no bones about the fact that, in her view, NPR is "the only game in town" in terms of where you can find the best news. She was also hyping up the fact that NPR has gotten a bit interactive with how it acquires its news. As an example, she cited the Virginia Tech massacre last year, during which her staff received cell phone calls and cell phone photos from students who were on campus at the time the massacre was still in progress. She also didn't spare newspapers from her criticism. Russ Stanton was very classy in taking the lion's share of responsibility for his newspaper being a "velvet coffin." He also took positive credit where it was due. Before he became the editor, Russ was the man who spearheaded his newspaper's becoming much more of an online presence. And he still champions that cause in his current role as top dawg. The stats back him up: While hard copy subscriptions have dropped, their online readership has exploded. Atta boy, Russ! And I can vouch for that. Although I do subscribe to the paper's Thursday-Sunday service, I read just as much, if not more of it, online. As a side note, the panel moderator Michael Parks was the guy who hired Russ many an eon ago. Mike was the tenth editor of the paper. Russ is the fourteenth. David Talbot was an interesting cat. Despite all the props people gave him for being a pioneer with the whole online news thing, he said he's tired of it and just wants to move on. A native of San Francisco, he echoed Cinny's bemoaning of the way news is delivered. Or isn't. As an example, he said that in San Francisco you've got neighborhoods that are so God-awful that, when kids in other parts of the city are out playing and what have you during the summer, the kids in those bad neighborhoods are almost literally kept prisoner in their apartments by their parents. For their own safety. Why isn't any of that ever reported?
Mystery: The Murder Book
Dodd 147 - 11:30 a.m.
Stephen J. Cannell - Easily one of TV's most prolific writers ever, having created or co-created more than 40 shows, including The Greatest American Hero, The A-Team, and 21 Jump Street. And yes, he's written a bunch of bestselling mystery novels, the most recent of which is Three Shirt Deal. He's won tons of awards, including the Marlow Lifetime Achievement Award from Mystery Writers of America.
Charlie Huston - The man behind the Joe Pitt novels and the Henry Thompson trilogy, including Six Bad Things, an Edgar Award nominee. He just finished a stand-alone thriller called The Shotgun Rule.
Andrew Klavan - Ever see either the Clint Eastwood film True Crime or the Michael Douglas flick Don't Say a Word? Andrew wrote the novels on which both of those were based. He's won the Edgar twice and been nominated an additional three times. His newest novel is Empire of Lies.
Moderator: Dick Lochte - Crime novelist whose works include Sleeping Dog, which won the Nero Wolfe award. He used to write a crime fiction column that ran for nearly a decade in the Los Angeles Times.
Okay, I should admit right now that I almost never read murder mysteries. So why would I attend this panel then? Stephen J. Cannell, that's why. One of the first TV shows I can ever remember liking was his The Greatest American Hero. Since last summer I've been rediscovering it on DVD. That show was just the tip of his professional iceberg. Go ahead and look the man up on IMDb. He's the brain behind literally dozens of TV shows and has written literally hundreds of teleplays. As for his mystery novels, the title of his newest is Three Shirt Deal, slang for triple murder. He's also an avid mystery reader. He couldn't stop gushing like a bug-eyed fan over his fellow panel member Andrew Klavan. Andy's books were apparently Steve's salvation while he was in Germany acting in a bad Steven Segal movie. Yeah, Steve dabbles in acting now and again as well. At the very end of the panel someone from the audience asked him what movie he was talking about. At first Steve was really reluctant to spill it, but I guess we'd look it up on IMDb anyway, so he told us: Half Past Dead. During the panel he also told us how he got into writing. As a youngster, Steve had severe dyslexia. He was so bad at reading comprehension that he flunked first, fourth, and tenth grades. He did get into college, though, and it was there that his life changed. During his sophomore year at the University of Oregon, he took a creative writing class with a professor named Ralph. At some point during the semester, Ralph took Steve into his office and told him he had a gift for storytelling. After an adolescence full of teachers who couldn't tolerate his learning disability, Ralph's compliment blew Steve away so much that he went outside after the meeting and sat on the campus grounds for a half-hour or so, digesting his prof's encouragement. As we see today, he didn't let that gift go to waste. His first writing gig was with Mission: Impossible. That led to his eventually getting a staff job at Warners, where he got to park next to Clint Eastwood. Here's the funny thing, though: He and Clint never met. The only evidence Steve had of Clint's comings and goings were little nicks and dents on the side of his car. Apparently Clint can't park for shit. But Steve was cool with that. At house parties he'd show people the damage on his car as proof that he and Clint had the same employer. To this day he still hasn't met him. When asked about his prolific output, Steve said he always writes for five hours a day, seven days a week. No matter what. He never takes a day off. "I never stop" is the way he put it.
Fiction: Alternative Visions
Korn Convocation - 1 p.m.
Steve Erickson - Author of eight novels, the most recent of which is Zeroville. He reviews films for Los Angeles magazine and edits Black Clock, published by CalArts, where he teaches creative writing.
Shelley Jackson - Author of the Tiptree Award-winning novel Half Life as well as The Melancholy of Anatomy and a bunch of children's books, including The Old Woman and The Alchemist's Dog.
Zachary Lazar - A Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and winner of the James Michener/Copernicus Society Prize from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His newest work is Sway: A Novel.
Nina Revoyr - L.A. writer who just finished her third novel, The Age of Dreaming. Southland, her second novel, was named one of the best books of 2003 by the L.A. Times and scored a Lamda literary award.
Moderator: David Ulin - L.A. Times book editor. He's also written stuff like The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and The Fault Line Between Reason and Faith. He was also the editor for Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which scored a California Book Award in 2002.
This was a so-so panel. I'm still not sure why it was called Alternative Visions. It basically had a bunch of fiction writers talking about the hows and whys of their novels' subject matter. The main reason I chose to attend was Nina Revoyr. I first saw her on a panel last year that was about holding down a day job while you write. It was right after that panel that I went to the signing tent and met her and got to chat with her for a few minutes. I told her I was just starting that whole process of querying agents. She told me that the way she found an agent was cold calling them until she found one who requested her writing. That's interesting. Everyone says cold calling agents, especially if you're unpublished, is a no-no. She told me that her agent also handles Barack Obama. While there, I got her second novel (at the time still her newest), 2003's Southland. I enjoyed talking to her enough that I thought I'd catch her again. I figured the way to get to talk to her up close and personal was to head out right after the panel and scoop up not only her first novel but also her just-released third piece: The Age of Dreaming. As for the panel itself, Shelley Jackson was interesting in a quirky way. She's mostly blonde but has chosen to dye her bangs a sort of lime green. She writes children's stuff. The main thing she talked about was this sort of interactive story where kids get to write stuff on certain sections of this giant human body. I have no idea if this is online or what, but ultimately you'd have a story crafted across a person. Now that I think about it, Shelley might be the main reason this panel was called Alternative Visions. I can't think of a more alternative way of telling a story than that. Zachary Lazar was a dark-haired guy in his thirties. His new novel Sway is about the Rolling Stones. He talked about how surprised people are when they see how articulate the Stones are during interviews. Zach said if you see photos of them and where they live, you'll usually see bookcases in the background. Steve Erickson was a fiftyish guy with an uncooperative main of pure white hair. His new novel Zeroville takes place in Hollywood. He wanted to emphasize, though, that it's not a Hollywood novel. A Hollywood novel is what you call a novel that is set in the behind-the-scenes world of movie making. Zeroville, instead, is mainly about the pure love of going to the movies. Nina piped in at that point and said maybe she should have been clearer about what Southland was about when it came out five years ago. It's described as a murder mystery, which it is, but it also has a lot more going on. She said she got feedback from readers who claimed she had tricked them on the novel's dust jacket. When the panel was over, I didn't have time to get Nina's books signed, as I knew the line for Julie Andrews was going to be out to Pluto. Sure enough it was, but that was fine. Thanks to the program, I knew Nina would be making an appearance at the Book Soup tent later that day. Book Soup, by the way, is a book shop in West Hollywood that never fails to number among the Book Fest sponsors. When I explained to Nina later on that I had to run off to see Julie Andrews, she said that was a pretty good reason not to make the post-panel signing. Like last year, she was fun to talk to. She asked for my feedback on the Alternative Visions panel and also wanted to know what other panels I had attended. She has a website (don't they all?): ninarevoyr.com. I wish I could've stayed and chatted more, but I had to run off to see John Landis and Tim Curry. Before I get to that, though, let's talk about Julie.
Julie Andrews in Conversation with Patt Morrison
Royce Hall - 2:30 p.m.
Julie Andrews!
Interviewer: Patt Morrison - Writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. TV and radio host on KCET (L.A.'s PBS affiliate) and NPR. She wrote a book called Rio LA, Tales from the Los Angeles River. She's scored two shared Pulitzers and six Emmys.
The first time I can remember attending anything at Royce Hall was at the 2000 Book Fest to see Michael Crichton. In 2002 I saw Gore Vidal there on Saturday followed by Steve Martin on Sunday. In 2003 it was Ray Bradbury. 2004, Eric Idle. 2005, Joan Didion. And in 2006, at the end of the second day, it was a panel featuring writers from This American Life. No, Ira Glass wasn't there, but Sarah Vowell was. Anyway, as you can see, Royce Hall is the venue where they have the brightest star wattage. Yeah, they have panels too. They have stuff there all day both days of the Book Fest. Royce is by far the biggest venue. This is where they have the Book Prizes every year, the Friday night before the Book Fest. Every year I'm guaranteed to go there at least once because of the Prizes, but I'm usually here for at least one thing during the weekend. And this year, that one thing was to see none other than Julie frickin' Andrews, man. Yeah, you know it. Mary Poppins. Maria Von Trapp. And a million other things. Julie Andrews! I've caught glimpses of her at past Book Fests. She and her daughter write children's books together, so I've seen her at those outdoor stages, like the Target Children's Stage, reading from some of her stuff. As far as I know, though, this is the first time she's been part of a ticketed event in one of the venues. And of course, with her stature, the only venue suitable for her would be Royce Hall. What makes this year different is that she's just published (and therefore has to plug) a memoir called Home. The interviewer, Patt Morrison from L.A.'s PBS station, had already interviewed Julie on PBS a few days before this event. So today was basically a live repeat of that interview. Amazing, seeing Julie Andrews. She turns 73 this year but could easily pass for a good decade or so younger. She was wearing a very conservative outfit, a blouse, coat, and slacks. Very eloquent and graceful and classy, Julie always seemed ready to smile. I know it sounds trite, but yes, her smile could light up a room as gargantuan as Royce. Jules had a lot of interesting stuff to talk about. First off, the reason her memoir is called Home, which only covers the early part of her life (gotta leave room for the sequel!), is because that was her first word. Right off the bat Julie admitted that she didn't even know she had mom issues until she started writing this thing. That didn't mean she had to go to therapy or anything, but it was the process of writing about her childhood that brought some long-buried anger and abandonment issues to the fore, although Mom never outright abandoned Julie. Poor Jules grew up poor in Surrey, but she wasn't as poor as her grandparents had been. In terms of social status, she said her family took huge strides from her grandparents to her parents and then, of course, to her. The way she tells it, she's been blessed with more good fortune than her grandmother could've ever imagined. It didn't take long before her vocal talents came to the fore. At twelve she starred in a musical that led to a local critic calling her a prodigy with pigtails. The work became steady from there on, which is why she didn't have much time for school. She only had two years of high school and then had private tutors the rest of the time. She never went to college. The break that put her career on the map was the play My Fair Lady. By this time she was married to a chap called Walton, Tony Walton. They eventually got divorced, but Julie still speaks of him fondly. Today Tony is the most in-demand production designer on Broadway. Anyway, Jules had this hilarious anecdote to relate about My Fair Lady. Her leading man Rex Harrison was, er, a bit gassy. Well, actually, a lot gassy. Even on stage. Especially on stage! Julie said she'd be in the middle of a line, and Rex would peel off a long skipping fart that sounded like a machine gun. Right there in front of a packed house! One time he did it just before Julie was supposed to address him as the "reverberating one." Fucking hilarious. But wait, this story gets even better (if less gastrointestinal). After a performance one night, Julie and Tony went backstage to her dressing room where they got to meet none other than Walt Disney. Walt invited them to California, which of course they accepted. Now get this. Julie and her man got to go to Disneyland...with Walt Disney! Walt took them himself and drove them around the joint in his frickin' golf cart or whatever. Julie said that parents would see him and say stuff to him like "Bless you!" They'd try to touch his shoulder or his arm, as if he were the Messiah. The main point of Walt's inviting her out there was to offer her the role of Mary Poppins. As incentive, he even said her husband Tony could be the film's production designer. This is why Jules wasn't in the movie version of My Fair Lady. She had to choose between that and Mary Poppins, so she went with Walt. Her husband's production design career obviously benefited greatly from this. As for her writing children's books, she says all the credit for that goes to her daughter. In the wake of her 1999 throat surgery, Julie was in a deep funk. Her singing career was over. She would literally stay in bed all day. Her daughter saved her life when she suggested they write little kiddy books together. A couple of them are being adapted into musicals. The way Julie gives props to her daughter and ex-husband is indicative of how she treats people in general: with a lot of class. At one point this guy came out on stage to give Julie a bunch of questions that had been submitted by the audience. So Julie took a timeout to put this guy in the spotlight. His name was Steve Sauer. Steve is one of three assistants who travel with Julie wherever she goes. She called Steve one of her three bad boys and told the audience to give the man a hand. In addition to her humility, you've gotta love her optimism. Julie firmly believes that good luck comes everyone's way at some point. Being lucky doesn't make anyone special. What sets people apart is how ready they are to grab that luck and take full advantage. You can't rush it, so while you're biding your time, do your homework. Bust your ass at whatever it is you want to accomplish, so that when opportunity knocks, you'll be more than prepared to answer.
Here are some photos I took while waiting in line to get into Royce. And then there's one I took from my seat with Julie and Patt on stage. A video camera was trained on Julie with the image blown up on a big screen. That way, people like me, way up in the nosebleeds, could get decent views of her awesome smile.
John Landis and Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan Interviewed by Tim Curry
Los Angeles Times Stage - 4 p.m.
John Landis - Director of a lot of your favorite flicks: Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, Spies Like Us, Three Amigos, Coming to America, and An American Werewolf in London.
Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan - Italian blonde who works both as a film journalist and as director of the Torino Film Festival. Her new book John Landis is the first biography of the filmmaker.
Moderator: Tim Curry - Probably best known as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He was also brilliant in Clue and has starred in a bunch of stuff for TV, film, and stage. Recently he was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for playing King Arthur in Spamalot.
I hadn't planned on going to this one. It's not a ticketed panel, and it's the ticketed panels that I usually focus on. The Los Angeles Times Stage is one of six outdoor stages scattered around the campus, and the events that take place on them are not ticketed. It's up to you to look at the program and keep track of what's scheduled on each one. If anything catches your fancy, just show up and grab a seat. Despite this being my ninth Book Fest, I had never attended anything at any of the outdoor stages until today. Hey, cut me some slack. I max out at eight panel tickets every year. My poor brain is only human, after all. Truth be told, I barely had any energy left at this point. I loved Julie Andrews, and I loved chatting up Nina Revoyr at the Book Soup tent. But it was, like, after four in the afternoon at this point. I'd been here all day both days. Then again, you've gotta understand one more thing: Without John Landis, my childhood would've been oh so deprived. Ol' John churned out so much awesome stuff in the eighties (my favorite decade!) that I can't imagine what that decade would've been like without him. Don't believe me? Just go back up there and look at the man's credits. Go to IMDb if you want to see more. All that goes without mentioning Tim Curry. Speaking of the eighties, you ever catch Clue? 'Nuf said. By the time I got to the tent, about a quarter past four, all the seats were taken. So I stood behind the last row just as other late comers were starting to congregate. By this point, John Landis was full steam ahead. It pains me to say it, but both Tim Curry and Giulia Vallan were practically redundant. John is such a great, gregarious talker, so boisterous and chockfull of energy despite his almost sixty years. He's still got all his hair, although it's graying a bit on the fringes, as is his beard. And he wears big square glasses that were already out of style by the time I was born. Some young buck from the audience, almost pubescent, told John that he was such a huge fan of The Blues Brothers and had seen it, and especially that big chase scene at the end, "one hundred million times." The kid wanted to know how many hours it took John to shoot the big chase. Hours?! It took the guy weeks! Well, it took him several Sundays. John said that they actually did shoot that whole sequence in Chicago, where it takes place in the film. But the best he could do was get permission to shoot on Sundays only. It took him on the order of three to four months' worth of Sundays to shoot all that stuff. So if he shot that on consecutive days, what would that be? Something like a dozen or more days? Say, two weeks? And this kid was asking about hours. Talk about a wake-up call. If he didn't know diddly about filmmaking before, I sure's hell hope he does now. The Blues Brothers was supposed to have been John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd's second time working together. Their first time was supposed to have been Animal House, but Saturday Night Live honcho Lorne Michaels wouldn't let Dan go. John said he was positively livid with Lorne. The way he talked about it, you'd've thought Lorne just snubbed him yesterday. And speaking of Animal House, John was quick to give Harold Ramis (Egon from Ghostbusters) credit for taking the script and making it much better. The earlier drafts of Animal House apparently didn't have one single redeemable character. Harold Ramis stepped in and was like, "Hey, why don't we make a character who's actually sympathetic?" Here's some background on John. He's a native of Chicago. His first showbiz job was working as a mail boy for Fox in the late sixties when he was a teenager. He grew up a huge fan of campy sci-fi and horror flicks. Ed Wood was among the filmmakers he admired, so what does that tell you? Valley of the Dolls was another film he cited. That's when Tim Curry piped in and said he'd watched Valley of the Dolls as research for Rocky Horror. Anyway, John said that one of the films he wants to remake is the one about the body without a head. I'm not sure which flick he was talking about, but someone in the audience told him it had already been remade. John didn't care. Other movies have been remade more than once. Speaking of F/X, he says that he only does storyboarding for F/X scenes. You have to plan those things meticulously because they take so long to shoot. His prime example was the first transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London. His make-up guy for that was Rick Baker. Ever hear of him? If not, I guarantee you've seen some of his handiwork. He scored an Oscar for An American Werewolf in London. And he's scored another five since, for Harry and the Hendersons, Ed Wood, the Eddie Murphy remake of The Nutty Professor, Men in Black, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. And he's been nominated for a bunch of other stuff, stuff you wouldn't otherwise be bothered with, like the recent Eddie Murphy vehicle Norbit. Funny thing is, John wasn't supposed to have worked with Rick Baker on An American Werewolf in London. Rick was already committed to doing The Howling. But somehow John snagged him, and Rick's assistant became the head make-up guy on The Howling. Currently Rick is working on a remake of 1941's The Wolf Man, with Benecio del Toro playing the title character, which Lon Chaney played in the original. Anthony Hopkins'll play the Claude Rains character. According to John, Rick said that Benecio doesn't need much in the way of make-up and prostheses to become the hairy man-beast. A lot of folks in the audience asked John about his F/X work. This one young buck, for instance, came up to one of the mics and identified himself as having played Agent Scully's last corpse on the final episode of The X-Files. That sort of caught my attention, The X-Files being my favorite show of all time 'n all. Let's see, what else did John talk about? For The Three Amigos, he got to film in Arizona, where most of his extras were Native Americans. He had fond memories of working with them. Then came the topic of Bob Woodward. Yes, that Bob Woodward. Apparently Bob wrote a book where he said a lot of stuff about John that wasn't so flattering. Entitled Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, it was published back in the mid eighties. Apparently in it Bob quoted John Landis as having said a lot of stuff. Well at the Book Fest today John said unequivocally that none of it was true, that Bob Woodward never spoke to him and so those quotes couldn't possibly be accurate. Bob never approached him at all. Speaking of Belushi, John told us about how he got him to be in Animal House. John was scheduled to interview him in a hotel room. Belushi came in and ordered tons of room service. He asked John a few curt questions about the part and then said he'd do it. A few minutes after he left, a ton of food arrived. Another thing John said that struck me was how directors should go out of their way not to talk about their films. Most directors who try to be serious and analytical about their own material end up sounding like "schmucks," according to him. The only exception to that rule, in his opinion, is David Cronenberg. Guilia said that Dave was interviewed in the book, among many, many other big showbiz names.
Here are a couple photos I snapped of John, Tim, and Giulia. Unfortunately I couldn't get closer.
Here's a photo of the USC creative writing tent. As an alum of the program, I thought it'd be nice to drop by. And wouldn't you know, one of the alums signing her books there was a student in the program at the same time I was. Indeed, she was the very first person I met at my very first class in September of 1998. With two novels published so far, Gabrielle Pina is a prof in USC's writing program and also teaches creative writing at Pasadena City College. I'm a bit envious, but I'm mostly encouraged. Even with cold querying, it is possible to land in print!
Now check this out. I got to campus this morning with some time to kill and thought I'd grab a cup of organic coffee. While waiting in line, I vaguely recognized these two cats right in front of me. And then I was like, "I know who they are! It's Dan Smail and Christine Kenneally! Two of the writers from my first panel yesterday as well as two of the finalists at Friday night's Book Prizes." No, I didn't say anything to them. While they (as well as I) were standing around waiting for our coffees to be made, I snapped this little furtive shot of them while they were engrossed in deep conversation. They weren't scheduled to sit on any panels today. I suppose they just wanted to enjoy the Book Fest as book lovers themselves.
Here's a full shot of Royce Hall.
And this is the library (Royce is behind me). I've yet to go inside that joint. Can you believe it?
Here are some more shots courtesy of the ol' Blackjack II.
And now a word from some sponsors.
