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April 30, 2011
Page & Screen @ LAT FOB
Duke Vincent: part of Aaron Spelling productions. Wrote The Camelot Conspiracy: A Novel of the Kennedys, Castro, and the CIA
Pamela Ribon: wrote for stage and screen and Why Girls Are Weird?, Why Moms Are Weird?, Going in Circles and blogger
Howard Gordon: wrote Gideon's War: a novel. Started during writer's strike, finished a month after 24 wrapped.
The moderator was Heather Havrilesky, who actually participated in the panel discussion much more than recorded in this blog entry.
Pamela: I wrote a book so I could break into television. I took a lot of meetings where people said "let me know if you have a magazine article or a book you'd like to adapt." Without planes, I would never finish a novel. I finished my first novel on unemployment...right after 9/11, when no one was hiring and no one was interested in comedy. I started an online journal in 98. I was working at IBM at the time and it looked like I was working. ...I lost everything, so I figured I would just moved to Hollywood.
Duke: It was kind of a back door entry. To make a long story short, my partner died. Aaron Spelling and I had been working together for 29 years. I wanted to do something and I didn't want to go to work for Paramount. ...I had a friend who I would tell stories about growing up in Hell's Kitchen. He told me I needed to write it as a novel, and I explained that I don't do novels. My friend was Bob Smith, the owner of a television station in Santa Barbara and he came to me one day and told me had cancer and that he wanted to read my book before he died. He did read it and he did died. If I had any idea how difficult it was, I would have never done it. The camera and soundtrack in film tells you everything about what's going on. In a novel, there's none of that, the writer has to create all of that. It is very, very challenging, at least for me. My first draft read like a screenplay. My editor said normally we don't do it this way - normally we write the novel and then we write the screenplay. ...
moderator: Howard and Duke, you two both wrote about brothers. What about the brother relationship appealed to you?
Howard: I'm one of three brothers, I'm the oldest of three. I've always been fascinated by stories from Cain and Abel to Joseph to The Fighter, a lot of love, a lot of competition.
Duke: I think Howard explained it beautifully. You can't write a scene unless you know what everyone wants. If you don't have conflict, you don't have a scene. And if it's between brothers, that's even better.
I have heard this statement so many times that "it writes itself." Who is this guy who writes itself?
Moderator: you have a book about getting over a divorce. How did you choose the material?
Pamela: I had a lot of people telling me "you look like you're in pain. Are you okay?" My lit agent couldn't believe that I was in roller derby and broke my tail bone. I think I had a lot of problems apologizing for breaking up a marriage.
Moderator: Howard, you have an attraction to characters who are forced by circumstances to compromise their morals.
Howard: How you define yourself at the edges of your life is important and a big part of dilemmas needed for good scenes. ...I'm really glad foreign policy is not my job. I think by my nature I'm a compromiser. I've gained no wisdom from it except how complicated the world is and how many moving parts there are. The thing I would hope for if I was president is to get lucky.
Moderator: Duke, your book shows how convoluted the world was during the Kennedy presidency. Your novel does a great job of dramatizing the scene.
Duke: In 1959, when John F Kennedy was elected president, I happened to be flying with the Blue Angels. He was a former naval officer and a hero. When he got assassinated, it was a real blow. I began to follow the conspiracy theories that were written about it, beginning with his brother Bobby...I read all of that. Having gone through all of the information and all of the different theories, I came up with my own theory of what happened, which begins with the deal that the CIA made with the mob to assassinate Castro. There's no dispute about that. That is a fact.
moderator: Because the word 'conspiracy' is used and it becomes a kook theory. I think it's fascinating that so many aspects of the story are indisputable. Why does it stay in the realm of myth?
Duke: I think John F Kennedy still to this day is larger than life. I was at a party where he walked into a room and the entire party stopped. The smile, the charisma, was unbelievable. ...No less a character than G Robert Blakely who was the lead counsel on the House Select Committee on Assassinations wrote a book that said categorically that there was a conspiracy, Lee Harvey Oswald was involved, there was another shooter behind the grassy knoll, and then he names the three men behind the conspiracy. ...On their death beds two of the three admitted to being part of the conspiracy. Now how it happened is a mystery and is why my book is a novel and not a history.
...Bobby Kennedy got the call from J Edgar Hoover, his arch-enemy. Bobby thought that Hoover told him with glee that his brother had died...He called John McComb and asked him point blank, "Did the CIA kill my brother?" and he denied it. The lower levels of the organization was involved, along with the anti-Castro Cubans in Miami.
moderator: Pamela, in your most recent blog post you write about a television writer who said you're all set because you're a mid-level female comedy writer. ...Do you have a general assessment of writer's rooms for women?
Pamela: I've been on shows where I've been the only woman in the room, where half the room was women...I hear it's lovely on an hour-long show, not as cut throat as a half-hour comedy room. ...I'm not saying that there is a glass ceiling. I have heard stories from women who have hard times in some rooms. The more frustrating thing is when you get the call "they're looking for a woman." And then they ask "do you have kids?" No, darn, another job lost. ...I hope the woman got the job because she deserved it and wasn't just easy to get along with. ...you guys don't have to take as long to make a human as a woman.
Duke: ...I loved working with directors, that was not Aaron's strong suit. The 80s was the era when there were three networks, and that was all you got to see. 97-98% was watching the three networks, and the rest was local shows. If you got less than 30% that was it, you were off the air. I remember when we started Vegas, it got a 47% share.
Howard: I started in the 80s at Spencer for Hire. ...There was a scene in The September Issue where Anna Wintour's father left Parliament because he couldn't take the fools anymore and the older you get, the harder it gets to live with....I've been at Fox now for 20 years, but I think if I could make a generalization, it's gotten a lot more corporate and a lot more managing up. TV is great, it's still great, I'm very bullish on the medium, and I think a very relevant one and where some of the greatest work is still being done.
Anecdotally, people are still aspiring for cable. But it isn't where the money is.
Moderator: next novel?
Howard: the time frame of this novel was very compressed and it was a conceit that allowed to create a narrative that was a little easier to bite off and chew. If I had a complaint about this book, it was a little easier and I hope to tackle something more complex next time. It was meant to be very pulpy and not aspiring to be a Pulitzer.
Duke: I actually only had a partnership early on. My partnership with Aaron Spelling was a business partnership. We shared some writing chores. Aaron very seldom did any rewriting. I did a lot of rewriting on the shows. He was a very good writer, don't misunderstand me. Aaron Spelling was a Jew who was born in Dallas, Texas on the wrong side of the railroad tracks whose father was a tailor. He never flew in an airplane. He loved to work with the networks. He loved to sell. He enjoyed working with writers, but didn't particularly enjoy working with directors. I grew up in Hell's Kitchen, my father was connected to the Mob. I flew with the Blue Angels. We were very, very different but we worked together very well. Our egos never clashed. We each had a primary show that we handled - I had the primary responsibility for action/adventure shows. We would split show duties also.
Howard: I came out to LA with a writing partner. We were partners for our first 9 years in LA. We split up in the first year of the X-Files. I know a husband/wife writing/directing team. It's a very special and very intimate relationship. ...You always wonder what you bring to the partnership and what you could do on your own.
Pamela: When you're writing in a room, you're coming up with a concept. Someone does go off and does the page work. It depends on how involved your editor and agent are, but they can tear up a novel too. I think now I'm ruined, I have to work collaboratively.
Duke: When the mob made the deal with the CIA to assassinate Castro, it was before the Bay of Pigs. When the 2506 brigade invaded Cuba, the US would bring in the Marines if it was failing. Kennedy didn't order that and the CIA and the anti-Castro Cubans felt betrayed. ...During Cuba Missile Crisis, he guaranteed Khrushchev that he wouldn't invade Cuba again if they removed the missiles from Cuba and the anti-Castro Cubans felt betrayed a second time. ...in the meantime, Castro threw all of the mob-backed casinos in Cuba. Bobby Kennedy went after Jimmy Hoffa, who controlled the Teamster's pension fund, which was used to fund the building of casinos in Vegas. They determined that the only thing to do was to get rid of Bobby. They got rid of John because if they had killed Bobby, Kennedy would have just replaced him with a similar attorney general. The first thing LBJ did was get rid of Bobby because he hated Bobby.
Posted by cj at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)