Best-selling author Michael Connelly has taken his famous detective, Harry Bosch, off the page and onto the screen; Oscar-nominated Short Doc "Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1;" L.A. screenwriters in coffee shops; Paying tribute to the original Carpetbagger of The New York Times, David Carr.
Oscar 2015: Short documentary shows the intensity a veterans' crisis center
Just yesterday President Obama signed legislation in honor of Clay Hunt, one of far too many veterans who have committed suicide after returning from combat. The hope is that the bill will expand support and treatment for those suffering from PTSD.
Veteran counseling is the subject of "Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1," an Oscar-nominated documentary short that goes inside the offices of the only center in the U.S., which fields calls from veterans in crisis.
"Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1" was directed by Ellen Goosenberg Kent and produced by Dana Perry, and when the two joined us at The Frame, we asked them about what they would say were they to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Short, and about the challenging balance between getting great footage and the human consequences of that "great footage."
Interview Highlights:
Dana, as a documentary filmmaker, part of you must always be hoping to get that "great scene," but for this movie that would probably involve somebody having a suicidal thought or actually attempting suicide. So when you're watching the call center as a filmmaker, is part of you hoping that something dramatic happens, even if it could be something horrible in a veteran's life?
In terms of drama, sure, you want a life-or-death situation, but that's not what you want when it comes to humanity. So we looked to balance the relationship between the caller and the responder with how they do their work; how they coax the veteran to put down the gun, to step off the bridge, to put the pills away, et cetera.
Ellen, were there ever any times in the making of the film where people in the call center asked you to turn the cameras off? Or where you recorded a conversation that you decided was too personal to use in the film?
I wouldn't say that anyone ever asked us to turn the camera off, but there definitely were some responders who felt they couldn't concentrate as well if the camera was there. So they asked us not to film them at all. We made decisions that some of the calls that we taped were perhaps not as useful? We wanted to highlight the problem, but we also wanted to highlight how you talk to someone who's in crisis.
This is Dana. I also want to jump in on the fact that you never hear the caller in the film, and that's for privacy reasons. It wouldn't be anonymous if suddenly your phone call to a crisis hotline was aired on HBO or in a theater. So that made it that much more challenging, and we really had to depend on the parroting of the responder saying, "So you have a gun. So are you home alone?" We're picking up the content of the conversation via the responder, but you actually never hear the caller themselves.
Ellen, the audience for a documentary short is not large, but the audience for the Academy Awards is huge. A lot of people think you'll win the Oscar, so if you do get to go up there and make your acceptance speech, what are you going to say about this issue to that audience?
There's no doubt in my mind that I will be expressing gratitude to the responders who gave us access to these very intimate, life-or-death conversations, and to the veterans who were willing to pick up the phone and make those calls. They're the living examples that we wanted to have.
Dana?
I am a survivor of suicide. I lost my adolescent son, who was bipolar, and I actually made a film about it at the time. And what I found is that the best prevention for suicide is a discussion — an open, loud, discussion. Not whispering, not keeping it in the dark, not feeling like it's a shame upon the family or a question of character.
People get sick with cancer, and sometimes they live and sometimes they die; I would compare someone with PTSD, bipolar illness, or whatever else it is, with a serious physical illness. This is real, and for my part, I'll take any opportunity I can to remind people that suicide can and should be talked about. That's the one solid way we know to contribute to prevention.
"Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1" is currently available on HBO GO and HBO ON DEMAND, and it's also playing in theaters around the country as part of the Oscar-nominated shorts program.
Love it or hate it, LA coffee shops are full of screenwriters
Thirty-five miles north of Hollywood in a roomy, modern coffee shop attached to the Real Life mega-church, award winning screenwriter Julie Sherman Wolfe remembers the time a different local establishment tried to almost literally freeze her out.
"They would basically, when too many writers would show up, the ambient air temp would drop 20 degrees," says Wolfe. "So instead of leaving I would bring scarves and sweaters ... it would become a battle of wills."
Julie is a truly nice person, but frankly, she's part of the problem: Screenwriters in coffee shops. If you've ever gone to Starbucks, you know.
Stats are hard to come by, but let's estimate that about a billion people are working on screenplays in this town, and most of them are doing it in public. They are everywhere. And OK, fine, they aren't technically hurting anyone.
But it just feels so pretentious. Certain things you just do in private, at home. Ever see a sculptor chiseling away by the cappuccino machine? Or a ballet dancer stretching her quads by the pastry display?
John August, the guy who wrote "Big Fish" and "Go," co-hosts the podcast Scriptnotes with fellow screenwriter Craig Mazin. They handle screenwriting-related questions and demystify the profession. August said writing in public is nothing new.
Look at Hemingway, he wrote every day in a bar in Pamplona. I think there's something appropriate about writing in public, especially if you're writing about something set out there in the world, if it's deeply internal, maybe that's your time to be off in your cabin at Walden, but if you're writing about the real world maybe it makes sense to be in the real world.
Fine, but the guy with decaf Chai tea while silently sounding out his characters ironic dialogue, he's no Hemingway, and the only thing he's absorbing is the band PHISH blaring from his earbuds. Want to know how "through the looking glass" we are? There's an app called Highland that makes your screenplay not look like a screenplay on your computer screen so you can not look like all the other coffee-shop barnacles.
People, if you are embarrassed by what you’re doing in public, that is a sign.
I tracked down Josh Olson, who was nominated for a best screenplay Oscar for "A History of Violence" and, perhaps more importantly, wrote that article for the Village Voice called “I will not read your f’ing Script” – only he didn’t say F-ing. In the piece, he ranted about acquaintances asking him to read their screenplays, the point that there’s a difference between typing and writing most people miss. If he couldn’t share my outrage, who could?
“I’ll cop to it,’ he told me, “there’s still a little part of me that goes, 'What a jackass…”
Sadly, I didn’t end the interview there.
I was looking at all these nitwit wannabes banging away at their poems and screenplays, and thinking they just want to be seen, and my friend goes, how do you know they don’t get work done? And I had no clue … so I got up the next day and went down and set up my laptop and what I found was there’s this degree of people looking at you … but you are aware of being judged by everyone who comes in, and for me it would feel even worse if I weren’t working, so there’s this real pressure to actually be working instead of goofing off like you’d be at home.
But, to make matters worse, studies seem to back the coffee-shop types ... or typers. Researchers have found a moderate noise level, between 50 and 70 dbs, can increase creative output.
There's even an app called Coffitivity that lets you listen to coffee shop chatter when you're too lazy/drunk/high to put on those sweatpants and haul your Mac to the nearest caffeine dispensary.
Coffitivity claims it is “conducive to creative cognition.”
Wow. Well, who am I, also someone who gets paid by the word, to … not want that?
If you can’t beat them, fake join them, I almost never say.
But I’ll be sure to let you know what happens, and whether or not I inexplicably just keep rewriting old "Friends" episodes.
This piece was produced for The Frame by Collin Friesen.
Why it took Michael Connelly 20 years to bring Harry Bosch to TV
Best-selling crime novelist and former L.A. Times reporter Michael Connelly has spent 20 years crafting the life story of veteran LAPD detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch.
Beginning with the 1992 novel, "The Black Echo," Connelly has written 19 books about Detective Bosch with a 20th to be released November 2015. But he was never able to adapt his series for film or TV due to a studio deal he made early in his writing career. Until now, that is.
With the rights to his Harry Bosch novels now back in his hands, Connelly has chosen Amazon as the home of "Bosch," the first on-screen adaptation of his best-selling book series.
The series stars Titus Welliver in the titular role, and takes characters, plots and scenes from three of his books: "Echo Park," "City of Bones" and "The Concrete Blond."
Connelly recently stopped by The Frame to talk about why it took so long to get the rights back to the series, his role in its adaptation for TV and what it was like to finally see Harry Bosch on screen.
Interview Highlights:
I've been covering Hollywood for a long time, and I think I remember back in the Truman presidency, you sold the rights to at least the character or some of the books to Paramount. What happened?
To me it feels like the first Roosevelt era. Early on I sold the first three books to Paramount and their plan was to make a movie or possibly a series of movies, and they certainly tried. Several scripts were commissioned and written, but ultimately the project got shelved. I kept writing about the character, so the good thing was when I got the books back I had, I think at that time, 15 books about this one character. It ended up being that they had control of these properties for about 16 years.
But you were determined to get them back, because you knew in that intervening period that the character had become much more popular and that you could do something with it. You weren't going to abandon it.
Part of it is creative as well, I am a child of great movies and television. They easily have influenced me as much as great literature. I would like to see my stories told a different way, told in this dimension of visual. What you're saying is correct. When I sold these books back in the early '90s, no one knew who I was. Or no one knew who Harry Bosch was is a better way of saying it. Then when I got him back, a lot of people around the world knew who Harry Bosch was and I thought there'd be an audience out there that could support this.
Los Angeles itself factors prominently in the series. It feels as if in creating the show with your collaborators, you decided very specifically to include certain neighborhoods, certain landmarks. What were the conversations you had about how Los Angeles would be represented in the series?
There were two simple goals, or primary goals when I went to Hollywood with this for the second time. That was that we are loyal to the character of Harry Bosch, and we depict a realistic Los Angeles ... My heart can swell, actually, in the first minute of the show because on black screen before we open up picture we hear the voice of Vin Scully, and what is more Los Angeles than that? Then we open up on this guy that at least I've been waiting 20 years to see on screen, Titus Welliver playing Harry Bosch. And we see, I think, a very iconic view of Los Angeles and that is they're watching a guy in a semi-marginal neighborhood he comes out of a house with bars on the windows and he gets in a car and as he pulls out into the street you see this marvelous, fantastic view of the city. That is just one of the little contradictions about this city that I love and that we want to try to communicate in this type of storytelling.
We should talk a little bit about casting Titus Welliver. How involved were you in his casting?
As far as Titus goes, I'm very proud that I'm the one who threw his name out. The very first day of casting we had a couple pages of actors names and his name wasn't on the list. I'm not a TV guy, I kind of very timidly say, what do we think about Titus Welliver? They immediately said we love Titus Welliver, but he's in Hong Kong making a movie. We had a small 3-month window to find Harry Bosch. But they said we'll see if he's going to come home for a weekend or something and maybe we can get him to come in and talk to you. It was almost two months later that we were able to talk to him and he talked to us about the character Harry Bosch and he nailed it, so he got the job right there.
Your books have been adapted into two feature films, "Blood Work" and "The Lincoln Lawyer." How did those experiences change the way you wanted to approach or have creative control over this series?
I had very little to do with both of those films, and that's fine. That's a long running way of Hollywood doing business. It is a different form of storytelling. It's not like just because you write a good book means you can write a good screenplay, or know anything about how to make a film ... When it came to Harry Bosch, I was so invested in him, my entire adult life as a fiction writer is wrapped around him. I started with him, and I hope the last book I write is about him. So I just had a different approach. I wasn't going to do it that way, it was like you want Harry Bosch, I'm coming with him. I want to have a say. I don't know whether it was luck or tenaciousness or whatever, but I ended up with people that agreed with that idea. It does sound like common sense, but it's not often employed in these kinds of situations.
Your Harry Bosch books have been best sellers. If people have read your books, they know Harry Bosch, who he is, they know about all of his cases. What could they learn about him or about some of his investigations by watching the show that they don't already know?
I know we're risking something here, or I'm playing with something. The act of reading a story is sacred and people build images and all that stuff. Now we're going to take that creative impulse away and say this is actually what he looks like. This is that location. This what the bar at Musso & Franks is like. Some people are not going to be into that, but I think some, if they just risk it, and take a look at this, they'll realize this is fully realized as a television show, but you can always go back to a Harry Bosch book.
Oscars 2015: 'Everything is Awesome' for songwriter Shawn Patterson
When "The Lego Movie" was announced, people reacted with a decent amount of skepticism. And, given recent toy-based movies like "Battleship" or "Ouija," that skepticism feels pretty valid.
But "The Lego Movie" went on to receive universal acclaim, and while it didn't receive an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, its theme song "Everything is Awesome" is competing against musicians like Common, John Legend and Diane Warren.
Shawn Patterson is the songwriter behind "Everything is Awesome," and he said it was so surreal to have been nominated for an Oscar that he thought it was a mistake. But the song's success speaks for itself.
When Patterson stopped by The Frame studios recently, we asked him about the song's complicated irony, picking the "awesome things" that made the final cut, and what it feels like to have written one of the most obnoxiously catchy songs in recent memory.
Interview Highlights:
At our morning meeting today, somebody said, "Don't start singing 'Everything is Awesome,' because I won't be able to get it out of my head. When you hear things like that, are you proud or sorry?
Both, and I say, "You're the first person today that's said that to me. Thank you." [laughs] I'm a little bit of both, but it depends on the tone. I've had parents at movie theaters come up to me and go, "No, not a fan," but then their kids run up and shout, "Yay!"
How did you get this gig? Did you pitch something?
I had worked with the animation director, Chris McKay, on a full season of "Robot Chicken" and we had worked together on another stop-motion show prior to that. Towards the end of Chris' time at "Robot Chicken," he said, "I'm leaving to go do 'The Lego Movie.'" And everybody was like, "Wait, what?"
I think everybody thought it was just going to be a gigantic toy commercial, but from working with Chris I knew he was going to bring something pretty incredible to it. And I had already known Chris Miller and Phil Lord's work from "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," and I loved their writing style and their timing.
Chris was cutting their film, just doing a ton of stuff for the film, and he called me and said that the guys had written in the script a song called "Everything is Awesome." They had a title in, but that was all, and they wanted something to fit the narrative and the tone of the world that Emmet resided in: something incredibly optimistic and catchy. Chris and I talked a lot about things like losing your identity, communism, and being a bee in a hive, all while still being a central character that wants to be loved and admired by everyone.
Which makes "Everything is Awesome" a very ironic song, because it's directed at the brainless masses. And so by loving it we're accepting that we're part of a brainless mass, which means we should be insulted because it's brainless. The math of the song is incredibly complicated.
I think you're the first person to point that out in detail like that, and that's exactly what it became when it was put into that world with somebody who wants to be loved yet is being told to be a robot with no identity. There are a lot of contrasting psychological elements to it.
And so what was the songwriting process like? How did you approach writing a song titled "Everything is Awesome?"
One of the things that Chris said to me specifically was that we shouldn't talk down to kids, so I was writing it from the perspective of a very vanilla world. Like, what would the most vanilla human being love? You know, someone who rides scooters, plays kazoo, and wears capri pants and a sweater vest. Phil and Chris got involved in the first few drafts and they were throwing really funny things around, like "drinking skim milk" or "eating white bread," things like that, and it just became more and more goofy.