clarkblog

NOTES ON AN OBSESSION (PART 1)

A long time ago, I took a strange trip to the future.

On a crisp fall afternoon, I found myself walking silently in a surreal post-apocalyptic landscape. It was a rocketship graveyard, filled with towering metal hulks covered in brown rust and grime. Once they had lifted men and machines into space. Now they sat silent, neglected, horribly earthbound. Thick kudzu vines crept across sealed hatches. Rivets and panels were caked in rust. These engines had been forged in giant furnaces and sent aloft on columns of smoke and fire. Now nature sought to reclaim the metals that had been wrenched from her soil. The blazing glory of these spaceships was long gone. They stood like tombstones to a forgotten dream.

(Photo credit: Stephen Lodge)

This was at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, the first Alabama tourist attraction you hit driving south from Tennessee on Interstate 65. Located about an hour east of the town I grew up in, it's actually a nice, clean and endlessly optimistic place. Those historic rockets are very well-kept and power-washed on a regular basis. 

This "rocket garden," as it's known, was at the time lorded over by a gargantuan Saturn V rocket, the kind that lifted Apollo missions to the moon and to this date is the only spacecraft ever to carry humans beyond Earth orbit. The giant Saturn is still there, only it's been moved inside a hangar and hangs suspended on huge brackets. Huntsville has the peculiar honor of hosting this space flight museum because of a rich aerospace history that is the pride of Alabama's high-tech corridor running from Huntsville to, well, Huntsville. These rocketeering roots stretch all the way back to 1945 when former Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun, in a canny post-WWII technology power grab, was transferred to America under the auspices of Operation Paperclip. He spent decades at Huntsville's Redstone Arsenal designing numerous rockets and spacecraft, and even today his name is spoken of fondly by Alabamians, with little reference to his work for Adolf Hitler.

On the day I walked the rocket graveyard, a long ago future the calendar calls 1978, a Hollywood movie was being filmed on the site. Movie crews spent days clambering over these historic rockets, draping plastic vines and spraying them with fake rust stains that would be rinsed off later.

The day following my visit, the cameras rolled as Irish actor Richard Harris, dressed in rags as a survivor of a nuclear holocaust, wandered through this eerie scene, staring up in wonder at the spires glinting in the sun. Inside the facility, he would encounter an insane military man maintaining a dutiful watch over these broken spacecraft...

(Photo credit: Stephen Lodge)

This film is The Ravagers and I am definitely not here to tell you it's a lost gem you should seek out. In fact, I would tell you to avoid it at all costs, but it's been hard to find since its release.  Until recently, the only available version was this foreign-dubbed VHS transfer segmented across YouTube. For those with $15 to throw away, a standard definition letterboxed copy is now available for $14.99 via iTunes.

As a rabid sci-fi fan, one who mowed lawns all summer to finance his own Super 8mm movies, I was desperately hoping a bona fide science-fiction classic was to be filmed near my hometown. This was just one year after the brain-altering pinballl machine called Star Wars changed my life. All I knew about The Ravagers was that it was far-future science-fiction (and 1991 did seem pretty far away at the time). Richard Harris wasn't exactly my idea of a sci-fi action star, but he had been cool in films like The Wild Geese and A Man Called Horse and gosh, that rocket graveyard I'd seen in Huntsville was grimly spectacular.

Maybe you're thinking I was just some corn-pone redneck dazzled by Hollywood bullshit. Not true. A lot of movies were filmed here, most notably Richard Mulligan's adaptation of Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. It was also well-known among Alabamians that Steven Spielberg had filmed most of Close Encounters of the Third Kind at an abandoned Air Force hangar down in Mobile. A native boy named John Badham had gone on to direct a huge hit movie and cultural touchstone called Saturday Night Fever. Plus, hell, we gave the world Gomer and Goober Pyle, fer chrissakes, two impeccable comic actors whose work still makes people laugh their asses off. Maybe we were country but we weren't fucking stupid.

You see, this was the kind of knowledge that certain people in the Deep South -- the geeks and freaks -- latched onto like a lifeline. You knew the majority groupthink in Alabama sucked. You knew there was more to life than Bear Bryant football and deep fried pig turds and rampant racism. You knew you had to get the hell out someday. Having a creative outlet was vital for those dreamers. For some of my best friends, playing music provided the refuge. For others, it was the stage. For me, it was storytelling -- short stories, movies or just plain old back porch bullshittin'.

The following year The Ravagers premiered at a local cinema. The audience was filled with locals who'd served as extras during the sweltering shoot ("You made the poster!" squealed the girlfriend of a biker-looking dude who had indeed made the poster, but then again, so had half a dozen other biker dudes and damned if I could tell 'em apart). I stood in line with friends and family and bought popcorn and felt excitement as the lights went down. It didn't last long.

There's a promising title shot, an evocative panorama of a decayed city. You keep thinking this scene or others like it will appear again, that the producers are announcing they've spent some serious money on visual effects. But no, it turns out this was just a nice Matthew J. Yuricich matte painting recycled from the Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

We encounter Harris foraging for food in a decrepit steel mill called Sloss Furnace in nearby Birmingham. He looks dashing and earnest but is sorta sleepwalking (or maybe sleep drinking) his way through the movie. He's followed by some shady-looking bad guys called Ravagers. Harris and his pretty girlfriend are attacked and she's raped and killed. Soon after Harris kills one of them in revenge and the rest of the gang sets out to take their revenge on his revenge.

In less than 15 minutes, I was shifting restlessly in my seat. I felt in my bones this grim low-budget effort was a stale, misguided and very boring movie. Not even the added presences of screen stalwarts like Ernest Borgine, Woody Strode and Art Carney could compensate for the unimaginative script.

I'd seen plenty of bad movies but this was experience was different. I was mad at this movie like I'd never been before. What pissed me off the most was the rocket graveyard scene. It could've been glorious and haunting. I know because I walked the set. You can watch it here on YouTube at about the 11-minute mark. It's sad to see that director Richard Compton lacked the visual instincts to make the most of this creepy set-piece. It's fantastic production value he just pisses away.

For example, he pans past that gigantic Saturn V rocket so quickly there's no real sense of its immense scale. I've walked all around the thing and it's jaw-droppingly huge. It's how scuba divers must feel when they encounter a blue whale. Compton zips the camera past plenty of other nifty spacecraft and a couple of lunar buggy prototypes that are actually pretty cool. None of this neat stuff registers on the retina longer than a second or two. For a movie that plods along like a geriatric coupon-shopper in the Wal-mart discount aisle, this is the one place where Compton should've slowed the pace and lingered on those haunting rocketships. It wouldn't have saved the movie, but at least it would've been a nice scene.

As I watched the movie, an angry and exciting thought dawned on me: I could've shot this better on my Super 8mm! Despite the countless terrible movies I'd endured up to this point in time, that particular subversive thought had never crossed my mind. You see, I'd always been inspired by movies whose magic I knew I'd never be able to match. You could always see the strings on my spaceships. My laser beams were lumpy animated blobs, the best I could do using single-edge razors to scratch emulsion from a series of film frames. But this lost rocket garden opportunity was different.

(An aside: Director Compton had churned out several notable grindhouse movies, notably the hugely profitable 1974 exploitation flick Macon County Line [produced by and starring Max Baer, Jr., better known as hillbilly boy Jethro from The Beverly Hillbillies]. In the 1970s, independent movie distribution was a often regionally-driven system and the right kind of cheap movie could rake in millions of dollars. 1973's Walking Tall, a rowdy serving of deep-fried Southern justice, was one such movie. It played in a local theater for well over a year because each weekend saw sell-out audiences. After The Ravagers, Compton would spend most of his career directing TV, including the pilot movie for the 1990s sci-fi series Babylon 5, a show I admire but whose pilot I advise all but the most forgiving viewers to skip.)

(Another aside: Years later, I would pay another visit to a movie filming at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. The 1986 ABC Motion Pictures production Space Camp lensed there. Several friends served as extras and I was on-set in official capacity from Starlog Magazine, for whom I provided a set report. It's a lightweight family picture, one whose release date was delayed because of the Challenger disaster, but if you want a better look at those same rockets [gleaming and well-washed this time], it's got 'em.)

(Yet one more damn aside: Recently another post-apocalyptic movie was filmed in Huntsville: 20 Years After (titled Like Moles, Like Rats when I saw it screened here in LA). It's an odd and sometimes ponderous film, but visually interesting, especially for its budget. And when compared to dreck like The Ravagers, it comes off like Citizen Kane. The filmmakers are hungry and they're actually chasing something, even if they're not clear on what that is. This film doesn't use the U.S. Space & Rocket Center as a locale, but does make great use of other places you see in The Ravagers, especially the cavernous rock quarry at historic Three Caves.)

(Photo credit: Stephen Lodge)

(Okay, this is the last damn aside, at least until the next one: Apparently the source material for The Ravagers' screenplay is a novel called Path to Savagery by Robert Edmond Alter, a minor pulp fiction writer. I've never been able to locate a copy so I can't comment further. But sometime in the 1980s I read the "Cape Canaveral" cycle of short stories by British sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard. In these tales, he paints a dystopic and pessimistic future where mankind's greatest endeavors are left to rust and crumble in a ruined world. The rocket graveyard I walked was a fully-realized imagining of what Ballard was reaching for. It explained clearly the sense of being haunted I got from walking the set. A future had died here.)

The only piece of notable writing I've been able to find online about The Ravagers is this J.R. Taylor article for a Birmingham-based alt-weekly. It's a witty and informative story. And here's a local news station's lamentable look back at a major motion picture that nobody really remembers.

So why the hell am I writing about an artistically inept piece of shlock like The Ravagers? Because it gave me the chance to walk through a post-apocalyptic landscape. Because it put me, for the first time, but definitely not the last, dead-center on the set of a Hollywood production. Because it taught me that nobody sets out to make bad art on purpose. You plan and hope and work your ass off and pray it turns out well. I'm sure everybody working on this movie had the best of intentions.

It also got me thinking that despite our desire to imagine futures, these sci-fi visions don't really predict anything. It's not a failing, mind you, they just don't work that way. You might as well blame a hammer for not being a telephone. At best, these imagined futures act like mirrors that reveal interesting things we're experiencing at that very moment. In the 1970s, America had plenty of bleak moments: the oil crisis, Watergate, the sour hangover from 1960s idealism that didn't exactly pan out. There was lots of ugly urban violence (New York City, Detroit, etc.) and people generally felt afraid. They had shit-all hopes for the human race.

That's why this particular decade produced films like The Ravagers. And The Omega Man and Soylent Green and Logan's Run and A Boy and His Dog and and Peter Fonda's little-seen Idaho Transfer and Walter Hill's The Warriors and ...

Oh hell, that gets depressing quickly, doesn't it? Let's just look at another picture of post-apocalyptic sexpot (and soon to be Harris' ex-wife) Ann Turkel ...

There. Now my palate's cleansed somewhat. (God, she even looks like she's plotting the divorce here, doesn't she?)

When pulling together my scattered memories of The Ravagers, it was the image of that damned beautiful and haunting rocket graveyard that beckoned me. They couldn't fly anymore but something specific and tangible launched from my imagination that day: the knowledge that I could pick up a camera or a pencil and create something just as real, as visionary, as far-fetched as anything I was seeing in pop culture. With my home-brewed comic books, my first fledgling short stories and plays, with the Super 8mm movies I was making, I was already doing that. But when I saws The Ravagers, the end result was such an absolute failure that I found myself motivated for the first time not by awe and wonder but by anger and frustration. Dude, your music fucking sucks! Gimme that damn guitar!

That's a wonderful and terrifying power, and it's got to be central for anybody who's ever tried to create. You have to believe you can do better than what's out there. Otherwise, why even try? It's an ethos that forms the molten core of punk rock. It's cocky and undisciplined and its best creations will never be refined, just explosive. The most useful tools are those you teach yourself how to use.

Something else was happening in 1979 that would resonate hugely with all these frustrated yet inspired creative vibes ringing through my body. On the other side of the globe in a faraway land called Russia, another celluloid vision was being unspooled on movie screens. Like The Ravagers, it featured grimy, rag-clad figures walking through a post-apocalyptic landscape, searching for a paradise they'd never find.

That film is called Stalker. And it would turn out to haunt me just as much, if not more, than those dead rockets ever did.

That's what I'll talk about in the second and final part of this post.

(I promise, all of this is leading somewhere. I think.)

CRAZY AMERICANS

Now rotating through my headspace:

No Man Knows My History:
The Life of Joseph Smith
by Fawn M. Brodie

Americana
by Neil Young and Crazy Horse

Marjoe
by Sarah Kernochan and Howard Smith
(watch here)

NINE YEARS ON

Nine years ago today, I was in a state of panic and fear and the Twin Towers hadn't even been attacked yet.

I had just quit a safe and secure full-time job to return to graduate school to see if I could be a writer. I've always made my living as a writer, but often the work was anything but creative. I'd lost touch with the spark that had driven me as a child to write stories and draw comics and pass them around to my friends. Maybe I was simply meant to be a journalist, an ad man or a technical writer -- and there's nothing wrong with any of those jobs. But storytelling had once been my passion. I'd lost that and I wanted to find it again.

Less than two weeks into an esteemed writing program at the nation's oldest drama school, I found the pace, workload and creative demands so intense and challenging that my failure seemed all but inevitable. I wasn't hacking it. My hardest efforts resulted in work so poor I felt certain I was going to be kicked out of the program.

So reading was not just a big part of my curriculum, but a thankful solace. Whenever I couldn't sleep, I had a shelf of new theater texts to reach for. The assignment for September 11, 2001, was Aeschylus' incredible play The Persians, written circa 472 BC. And this is what we were discussing in a History of Drama seminar at the exact moment the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil took place.

The play is told from the point of view of the Persians, whom the Greeks had defeated years earlier. I believe this to be the only surviving Greek play based on an actual historical event. It's remarkable because it asks the audience to feel pity for the invading army seeking to topple the Greek empire.

The play asks: Why did the Persians lose the war? They were a great army led by Xerxes, a powerful leader, and they believed the gods were on their side. They fell, we learn, because of their unmitigated pride. Hubris. This is a play about wars and the fools who lose them. Aeschylus served up this tragic and chilling cautionary tale to an audience that would've felt freshly the wounds of this conflict.

When this play was first performed, it wasn't long after the Greeks had defeated the invading Persian army, maybe just a generation or less. As my wonderful professor Brian Johnson pointed out, the audience was probably filled with war veterans, some of them horribly scarred and maimed, as well as families mourning lost loved ones. In fact, there's a very good chance the audience was still sitting amidst blood-stained rubble, their very own Ground Zero.

Aeschylus sought to dramatize this defeat from the Persian perspective, but he didn't want his fellow countrymen to gloat or revel in superiority. He believed such things were fatal flaws. So he portrayed the Persians as being defeated not so much by the might and valor of the Greek army, but by their own corrupt values.

The play's theme -- warning against hubris, against the foolishness of believing one's nation is invincible and divined by supernatural higher powers -- has, sadly, become more relevant with each passing year.

Whenever anyone invokes a higher power in the name of war, you have reason to be very afraid, no matter what their religion.

When my classmates and I emerged from class that morning, we instantly knew something was wrong with the world. People everywhere on campus were hugging each other and crying in disbelief. As we learned of the attacks, each of us began to wonder: what the hell good is freakin' theater on a planet where something this catastrophic can happen? Like everyone in the days following the attacks, my fellow storytellers-in-training (actors, directors, designers, etc.) questioned the paths our lives had chosen. We wondered if we were wasting valuable time.

It took me a while but I finally realized that, when catastrophe reared its ugly head, I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing. The poetry and vision of The Persians informed and validated that feeling like nothing else. Even today, whenever I need motivation to write (or even just to get out of bed each morning), I think of Aeschylus and how his words speak to us across the centuries. This is why I write. To speak. To communicate. To  let others in the world know that we share the same dreams and blessings and curses, no matter who -- or when -- we are.

Storytelling binds us as a species. It is one of the most hopeful things we have. Sometimes I dwell on the thousands of Greek plays that are forever lost to us and it's enough to drive me to tears. All those writers and the stories they hoped to pass down to us -- gone. Just gone. We are incredibly fortunate that this particular play has survived the ravages of time. It is a warning, an admonition, a plea for peace and humility in the face of violence. I hope that one day we will truly hear its message.

(Above: bust of Aeschylus; photos from production of "The Persians" mounted in 2006 by the National Greek Theater; bottom photo from 2005 production by Washington, DC's Scena Theatre)

REGENERATION

As of last month, the 2010 Warner Bros. TV Writers' Workshop has come to a close. It was six months of the most ass-kicking writing instruction I've had since grad school. I am exhausted and thankful and humbled and pumped the fuck up.

I am hoping in the days to come to give you an overview of the workshop, as well as a recounting of everything that's happened since then: meetings with agents, managers, showrunners, etc. But all that's still happening and, as I predicted, this blog has fallen way down my list of priorities

As I posted earlier, you can read about our class here. I love each and every one of these people. I learned so much from all of them. We feel as if we've survived boot camp together, and now we're all headed to the front lines. Semper fi, gang.

And if you're looking to apply to this incredible opportunity, get going. The month-long window for submissions starts May 1.

I also told you earlier about the best book I've ever read on writing for TV: The Writer's Tale, by Russell Davies (showrunner of the BBC's Doctor Who) and journalist Benjamin Cook.

Well, guess what? That's old news! We got another champion that flat-out KO's that book. It's the expanded edition of The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter.

What's new? About 300+ pages of detailed info & insights from Davies on how he writes for TV, and how he scripted the episodes leading up to the departure of award-winning actor David Tennant from the title role. Yes, it's well worth another sawbuck to get that extra chunk of book. Hell, I'd pay twice that for the gold in this mine.

I'd like to say that you don't have to know Doctor Who to really appreciate this book ... but I'm afraid you probably do. But in my opinion that's more than okay. Spend some time getting to know the longest-running and most inventive sci-fi TV show in history, and you'll reap ample rewards when you pick up the book.

I've been earmarking choice quotes from Davies, little bursts of wisdom that stand out. Here's a sampling:

Action might be a bastard to write but at the same time, if you follow it, it solves a lot of problems. Plainly and suddenly, there are things that must happen. Keep control of them, and you've got a rope to pull you through, I think.

I've spent my career reading documents upside-down on people's desks and it's got me an awful long way, let me tell you.

The only way to write is to write. For all my banging on about what to do if you're really stuck on something, there's nothing dumber than sitting there writing nothing at all. Stupid bastard job.

I love a good note because it's like someone has articulated that voice at the back of your head.

Every new writer, every single one of them, describes at least one character with the phrase, "He doesn't suffer fools gladly." That seems to to be the Number One Character Type. I'm so fed up of reading it. I mentally delete it.

New scriptwriters often give you these long paragraphs of (character) description, and while it's each to his own and all that, I really would stick to three adjectives. It's brief, concise and accurate.

Cutting doesn't simply mean drawing a line through speeches. That's the easy bit. It means being ruthless and concise in your approach to every line, every scene, every character. You have to keep your mind as tight as a vice. Because a commission is lucky. If you get asked to write an hour's worth of TV, you're the luckiest bastard in the world, and you shouldn't waste a single eighth of a page with ping-pong, or flim-flam, or ornate curlicues, or lengthy descriptions of a man's jumper. You must make every word count.

Most writers sitting in pubs saying, "They've destroyed my work," caused the problem themselves, because they weren't vigorous enough, because their scripts invited changes. Producers are trying to build something tangible out of something that's simply an act of the imagination, and very often a flawed act. Of course idiots can do damage, but most of them are trying to help. Everyone's happy if the script works. Everyone's life is easier.

I read an interview with Alan Moore recently, in which he said -- I'm paraphrasing -- "When you're young, you plan everything. As you get more experienced, you fly on instinct. This means putting things in scripts that you've got no idea why they're there, but as you work at it, as you write, they rise up, they assert themselves, they become more and more vital, like they were always meant to be there." Less mystically, what he means is, you use ideas once you've created them, you work at them and bind them in.

SOUL FOOD

DOCTOR WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE WHY

I've been reading Russell T. Davies The Writer's Tale, which is hands-down not only the best book on TV writing I've ever read, it's a great book on writing period.

The Writer's Tale is mostly a series of emails Davies traded with journalist Benjamin Cook, who wanted to document what it's like to create a show like Doctor Who. That's an ambitious goal because there is literally no other show like Doctor Who. It's the longest-running sci-fi TV program in history, about an adventerous alien being who travels space and time and has a strong liking for us Earthlings. The Doctor is a striking and singular main character who can regenerate new bodies for himself (nicely solving the problem of actor recasting by not making it a problem at all). And, capitalistic intentions aside, the show is produced with public funding from the BBC.

Cook got what he was after and then some. These discussions with Davies encompassed more than just one script. Their conversation lasted almost an entire season of Doctor Who (mostly the fourth) and this book provides the most in-depth glimpse into serial TV production since J. Michael Straczynski took online fans into the world of Babylon 5 as it shot.

The price tag may seem steep to some readers, but you're getting a huge, thick, handsome book chock full of scripts and great behind-the-scenes photos.

Davies was no stranger to TV when he was charged with revamping this character. he'd created the hit TV show Queer as Folk, written for the long-running British soap Coronation Street, and scripted many other TV shows and mini-series. He was also, thankfully, a Doctor Who fan from childhood onward, and he wanted to bring the Doctor to a new audience.

I could pick and choose from his emails all day long. That's because Davies is wonderfully candid and honest about his writing process, even when it embarrasses him.

Davies talks about the big Maybe, his idea space where story elements gestate, take form, collide and interact. He likes to leave it alone and not probe its workings too much. Hell, he doesn't even like to call it the Maybe -- that's too much thinking about it right there. It's his mental cauldron of infinite choices, an endless web where things can go from any given point. Davies keeps those paths open as long as he can and quickly confesses to the guilt of procrastination, always waiting till the last minute to "put ass to chair in front of typewriter," as writer Joe Lansdale calls it.

"It all exists in my head, but in this soup. It's like the ideas are fluctuating in this great big quantum state of Maybe. The choices look easy when recounted later, but that's hindsight. When nothing is real and nothing is fixed, it can go anywhere. The Maybe is a hell of a place to live. As well as being the best place in the world.

"I filter through all those thoughts, but that's rarely sitting at my desk, if ever. It's all done walking about, going to town, having tea and watching telly. The rest of your life becomes just the surface, chattering away on top of the Maybe...and the doubts. That's where this job is knackering and debilitating. Everything - and I mean every story ever written anywhere - is underscored by the constant murmur of: this is rubbish, I am rubbish, and this is due in on Tuesday! The hardest part of writing is the writing."

So how does Davies know when to start writing?

"I leave it till the last minute. And then I leave it some more. Eventually, I leave it till I'm desperate. That's really the word, desperate. I always think, I'm not ready to write it, I don't know what I'm doing, it's just a jumble of thoughts in a state of flux, there's no story, I don't know how A connects to B, I don't know anything! I get myself into a genuine state of panic. Except panic sounds exciting. It sounds all running-around and adrenalised. This is more like a black cloud of fear and failure."

You get the sense that Davies' idea-space is a sort of big stew, a boiling pot filled with big meaty chunks of stuff but sorta dark and murky and always being stirred. Sometimes images and scenes and bits of dialogue surface with a crystal clarity. Davies grabs these and hangs onto them for dear life. If something bubbles up and doesn't melt back into the Maybe, he knows it's important.

It may be a three-second bit of story that won't factor that large into the overall script. It may be a killer image like Rose Tyler, brave and bawling and hearbroken, in the cold winds of Bad Wolf Bay. Davies doesn't question anything's importance or lack thereof. He simply acknowledges that it's a keeper, and goes on from there.

It's funny: while I deeply value Davies' insights into his process, I don't really know how much of it is applicable to my habits. Or yours. Writing is deeply and intensely personal, and what works for one doesn't work for all. The best writing advice I ever heard? "This is how I work, not how you will work. Everybody does it their own way."

I totally get Davies' concept of the Maybe -- I have a boiling cauldron, too -- but I always reach a stage where I have to start outlining and storyboarding. Davies' well-honed instincts let him make these calls in his head, but I have to get things down on paper before I decide whether to keep or discard them.

As for learning about showrunning itself, I appreciate the detailed glimpse into the workings of the BBC, but I know that very little of it applies here in Hollywood. There is no Doctor Who writers room, for example. Davies meets with writers one-on-one while keeping the big season arc firmly in his head. The BBC's funding structure and chain of command resembles nothing you'd see from American networks. But for its revelations about telling stories and producing a show under any circumstances, this book is a must-read for anybody looking to tell stories in serialized format. Journalist Cook has an insightful way of getting Davies to open up about almost any topic.

Davies deserves major kudos for jump-starting Doctor Who for a new audience, but I don't think he was Who's best writer. That title goes hands-down to Stephen Moffat, who Davies was smart enough to bring aboard in the first place. Moffat takes over the show's reigns when actor David Tennant departs this year and a new Doctor is regenerated. Moffat wrote some of the smartest, most inventive episodes of Doctor Who. I think his third-season episode, "Blink," is one of the best hour-long dramas ever. Period. I'd love reading Moffat's description of his creative process.

But while Moffat's work strikes me as more accomplished and assured than Davies', can the man match his predecessor's showrunning prowess? We're about to find out. I'm looking forward to it. Maybe we'll even get another awesome book out of the process.

Note: BBC Books has just announced a revised and expanded edition of this book that will include Davies and Cook discussing how David Tennant's reign as the Doctor was brought to a close with four Doctor Who special TV movies. I already sprang forty bucks for the first edition, but I think it's such a vital book I'll be first in line to get the new edition.

MY INTERVIEW WITH JIM CARROLL

Here's an interview I did with Jim Carroll back in 1992 or 1993. It ran in Creative Loafing's Atlanta and Tampa editions. Wish I could find the photos I shot of him for this piece, but they're buried in storage somewhere.

The influential punk poet rocker, best known for his cult classic memoir The Basketball Diaries, died last week of a heart attack.

*   *   *

Almost twenty years since the last spike went into his arm, former junkie Jim Carroll looks like he's still kicking his heroin habit. Quivering against a chill no one else in the room can feel, he shifts endlessly in his chair and slurps lukewarm coffee between endless ruminations, musings and dirty jokes. His pale skin is highlighted by the black garb he's chosen for tonight's reading, a wardrobe that hides his body in the weak spotlight and gives the illusion of a disembodied head floating around the stage, spewing words and images of loneliness and rebellion.

Carroll's on a promotional tour for his new CD, Praying Mantis (Giant Records). And while this spoken-word effort does not mark the poet's eagerly-awaited return to the surprising rock and roll career that started with Catholic Boy, it should serve to remind fans of Carroll's respected literary roots.

Carroll became a cult figure with the publication of The Basketball Diaries (1978), a compelling memoir that details his years as a heroin-addicted trick-turning teenager in the early 1960s. Laced with dry humor and a surprising sexual frankness, The Basketball Diaries is an underground classic that firmly established him as a writer to watch.

"I consider The Basketball Diaries to be a great tool against illiteracy, man, because you know, so many kids have told me that it's the first book they ever read, or the older kids tell me it's like the first book they read since Ivanhoe in the fifth grade for a book report," Carroll says in his breathless, twitchy manner of speaking. "And it gets people into reading books again. Because you just pick it up at someone's house and read a couple of entries, and each one's like a short story, so then you wanna keep reading it. When it was out with Bantam, they did a survey and they found out that for every copy that was sold, about seven or eight people read it. I think it's a book that a lot of people go out and read on their own. And it's in the curriculum of a lot of colleges now."

Colleges teaching Carroll?  Like it or not, he's now been acknowledged, however begrudgingly, by mainstream academia. That's a far cry from the treatment he received in the 1970s when he was kicking the junk habit and hanging out with Patti Smith, whose foray into rock would later inspire Carroll's own musical ventures. Though Carroll's work appeared in respected publications such as The Paris Review, Poetry and Transatlantic Review, his counter-culture image was something that always held mainstream acceptance at bay.

Carroll's recent reading at Florida State University, for example, was packed with students, mostly from the alternative scene. Yet the college's esteemed writing faculty, many of whom pride themselves on their regular appearances at Tallahassee readings, were nowhere to be found. Nor was the event even sponsored by the writing department. Many claim that the last-minute scheduling was something only the student government had the resources to move on, but there's still the sense of academics gathered elsewhere, drinking cheap beer and arguing literary theories, purposely not mentioning tonight's reading.

That's fine with Carroll, 41, who feels more of a kinship with younger people: their worries, their dreams, and especially their music. Carroll's first album, Catholic Boy (1980), spawned a monster college hit, "People Who Died," whose shocking lyrics describe the true stories of people in Carroll's life meeting their ends in various and sundry ways -- everything from drug overdose to suicide is described in graphic detail. The lyrics are thrown irreverently over a happy, driving rock beat, and it's a true jaw-dropper when heard for the first time -- which, apparently, happens over and over, as the song is perennially resurrected for up-and-coming generations.

But Catholic Boy offers much more for those who listen past the most popular track. It's a strong mix of punk-flavored influences marked by Carroll's precision-tuned lyrics about urban alienation and Catholic guilt (or distinct lack thereof). Two more albums followed, Dry Dreams and I Write Your Name, and while both have their strong moments, Carroll's first remains his best and is easily ranked as one of the best rock records of the 1980s.

But writing pulled him away from jamming, and produced some interesting results. Carroll's books, Forced Entries, Living at the Movies and The Book of Nods, all display steady maturation and an increasing depth in the subject matter of Carroll's prose and poetry.

Praying Mantis is a CD that captures some of Carroll's best work, recorded live during various readings. It's an intimate glimpse of Carroll, whose off-kilter, unassuming personality comes through clearly in his rapport with the audience. It's also the perfect antidote for people who can't break through a poem as it sits on the printed page. Praying Mantis lets you listen to the words for what they are, which is the true litmus test for any writing.

In "A Child Growing Up With the Sun," Carroll writes:  "I spent my youth's desires like a peculiar currency." When his raspy, strained voice delivers such a line, there's a direct line linking the emotion to the poet, especially to anyone who has the faintest clue as to the dark desires of Carroll's youth.

"For Elizabeth," a haunting ode to a deceased friend, finds Carroll circling familiar subject matter as it offers a hallucinatory vision of children in the hereafter. Elizabeth was one of many immortalized in Carroll's song "People Who Died," and here he returns to her death with a startling, angry image:

This place where I have put you now,
It is a cursed season, an awkward
line, a flawed circle.  A snake on fire
devouring what, tomorrow, it will itself become.

Often, as in the new poem "To the National Endowment of the Arts," Carroll's attraction towards the humorous and the sexually explicit find itself matched evenly with current events. In this morally threatening poem, Carrol declares:

It's a fact that before his death
Robert Mapplethorpe placed thirty-six custom cameras
with automatic timers set to last up to nine years
discreetly in various bedrooms
of your board members
of your congressmen
of your senators
of your cabinet
of your fantasies
your well-kept hidden lust and impotence.

Delivered matter-of-factly, this short rant works with the effectiveness of a wry witch's curse upon the conservative establishment it so eloquently targets. Like all curses and spells, the veiled implications are easy to shrug off at first, but the possibility lingers -- quite nicely -- that the "heat lightning from his grave" will illuminate the hypocrisy so abhorred by Carroll (who, incidentally, has never bothered to apply for an NEA grant).

There's a fatalistic edge to be found in Carroll's work. Thankfully, it's tempered with some wickedly funny barbs at every established social and political institution, including those with which Carroll sometimes finds himself aligned. "Tiny Tortures," a prose selection from Forced Entries, relates how Carroll filled his allotted three-minute time slot at a silly, pretentious performance-art gathering. "I had already dismissed the idea of boiling a three-minute egg," he notes with absolute deadpan. "It just didn't seem to have the necessary edge." A captured cockroach and can of Raid, however, floors some of the patrons.

Then there's a selection called "The Loss of American Innocence," an ad-libbed 14-minute excerpt from a novel-in-progress, where Carroll tells his responsive audience about a somewhat true story involving John F. Kennedy and certain masturbatory rites of passage straight out of Philip Roth's notorious novel, Portnoy's Complaint. It's lewd, crude and pretty funny.

Carroll's reading style counts for a lot here. Many listeners may feel uncomfortable with his voice at first, which sounds strained and forced. But Carroll uses these qualities to absolute effect, and they afford his words an urgency, a paranoid energy that draws one into his work.

Praying Mantis is also worth noting because this is the first of two efforts Carroll has signed to do with Giant Records. And he says the label wants some music for the second one, much to Carroll's half-hearted chagrin. "Once every three months I think about doing a record," he says, "and then I watch MTV for five minutes and it's, 'Aw, fuck this!'"

But now, having signed the dotted line, Carroll twists in his chair and admits he's looking forward to getting back into the studio with collaborator/producer Lenny Kaye, who since the I Write Your Name album has since produced Suzanne Vega, among others. He's even been working on some song lyrics that will hopefully match up with some of the arrangements Kaye has reportedly been laying down.

Indeed, Carroll seems to be picking up a second wind of sorts, juggling so many different projects that he can hardly keep track of them all. Does it help that he's off drugs now? Obviously so, he says. Consider this ramble: "I can't even smoke grass anymore. I haven't had a joint in seven years, and I miss it, I think grass is a good drug. I don't include it in any anti-drug thing. But I can't smoke it in New York, it's too paranoid, it's too fast there. When I was [kicking] in California, it was great, it was so slow, I was in the country with my dog. The only thing was, sometimes I'd get earthquake paranoia."

Also in the works: a screenplay about Irish-Catholics in New York City, written in collaboration with Matt Dillon, who for years toyed with the idea of starring in a film version of The Basketball Diaries that, sadly, never came to fruition. "His manager was a little squeamish about him doing too unseemly a movie," Carroll explains, grinning, "and then he does Drugstore Cowboy."

Carroll acted as Dillon's unofficial consultant for the Cowboy role, answering the actor's late-night phone calls concerning the behavior and slang of needle users. "He had another friend who was still on junk, and he was actually going copping [buying drugs] with the guy, going through all that, which I thought was stupid," Carroll says. "And he was shooting up water during the filming. He never did consumate the final...you know."

Carroll falls silent for a while, staring into his brown coffee. Then suddenly he snorts with laughter  "Method acting," Carroll sighs, rocking back and forth and shaking his head. "DeNiro woulda been strung out, totally."

EIGHT YEARS ON

Eight years ago today, I was in a state of panic and fear and the sun hadn't even risen yet.

I had just quit a safe and secure full-time job to return to graduate school. Less than two weeks into this esteemed writing program, I found the pace and workload and creative demands so intense and challenging that failure seemed all but inevitable.

Reading was not just an assignment, but a solace. Whenever I couldn't sleep, I had a shelf of new theater texts to reach for. That day's assignment was Aeschylus' incredible play The Persians, written circa 472 BC. And this is what we were discussing later that morning in a History of Drama seminar at the exact moment the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil took place.

The play is told from the point of view of the Persians, whom the Greeks had defeated years earlier. I believe this to be the only surviving Greek play based on an actual historical event. It's remarkable because it asks the audience to feel pity for the invading army seeking to topple the Greek empire.

The play asks: Why did the Persians lose the war? They were a great army led by Xerxes, a powerful leader, and they believed the gods were on their side. They fell, we learn, because of their unmitigated pride. Hubris. This is a play about wars and the fools who lose them. Aeschylus served up this tragic and chilling cautionary tale to an audience that would've felt freshly the wounds of this conflict.

When this play was first performed, it wasn't long after the Greeks had defeated the invading Persian army, maybe just a generation or less. As my wonderful professor Brian Johnson pointed out, the audience was probably filled with war veterans, some of them horribly scarred and maimed, as well as families mourning lost loved ones. In fact, there's a very good chance the audience was still sitting amidst blood-stained rubble, their very own Ground Zero.

Aeschylus sought to dramatize this defeat from the Persian perspective, but he didn't want his fellow countrymen to gloat or revel in superiority. He believed such things were fatal flaws. So he portrayed the Persians as being defeated not so much by the might and valor of the Greek army, but by their own corrupt values.

The play's theme -- warning against hubris, against the foolishness of believing one's nation is invincible and divined by supernatural higher powers -- has, sadly, become more relevant with each passing year.

Whenever anyone invokes a higher power in the name of war, you have reason to be very afraid.

When my classmates and I emerged from class that morning, we instantly knew something was wrong with the world. People everywhere on campus were hugging each other and crying in disbelief. As we learned of the attacks, each of us began to wonder: what the hell good is freakin' drama on a planet where this can happen? Like everyone in the days following the attacks, we questioned the paths our lives had chosen and wondered if we were wasting valuable time.

It took me a while but I finally realized that, when catastrophe reared its ugly head, I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing. The poetry and vision of The Persians informed and validated that feeling like nothing else. Even today, whenever I need motivation to write (or even just to get out of bed each morning), I think of Aeschylus and how his words speak to us across the centuries. This is why I write. To speak. To communicate. To  let others in the world know that we share the same dreams and blessings and curses, no matter who -- or when -- we are.

We are incredibly fortunate that this play has survived the ravages of time. I hope that one day we will truly hear its message.

(Above: bust of Aeschylus; photos from production of "The Persians" mounted in 2006 by the National Greek Theater; bottom photo from 2005 production by Washington, DC's Scena Theatre)

RECENT TAKES

Theater: FARRAGUT NORTH
Geffen Playhouse
Beau Willimon's script is strictly West Wing lite, but Chris Pine (Star Trek's new Captain Kirk) commands with a solid stage presence. Girls (and hey, some guys) go for Pine's early underwear scene but stick around for his manic exploration of a sordid and soulless political machinator.

Movie: MOON
Direced by Duncan Jones
Sturdy little sci-fi movie starring Sam Rockwell. No explosions or ray guns or bug-eyed aliens, just a quiet study of human isolation in the vein of 70s films like Silent Running. In an age of increasingly desperate special effects and hyperkinetic editing, Moon is like a little breath of fresh air in an airless void.

Book: COLUMBINE
by Dave Cullen
Do you remember Columbine? If you're like me, you think you do -- and you're deeply mistaken. Almost everything we were told about this school massacre was wrong. This is hands-down the most disturbing book I've read in years. It's a work of true crime that rises above the generally sordid genre to stand alongisde works of art as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song.

Music: 25 O'CLOCK & PSONIC PSUNSPOT
The Dukes of Stratosphear
In the mid-1980s, members of Brit-pop band XTC found themselves between projects so they ducked into the studio and pretended to be the Dukes, a long-lost psychedelic-rock band from the 1960s. Aided by legendary producer John Leckie (Pink Floyd, Stone Roses), what began as a lark eventually produced some incredibly fun and authentic music. It's sometimes laden with irony and cynicism (this is XTC, after all) but underneath it all is a heartfelt enthusiasm for the trippier side of The Beatles, Beach Boys, Animals, and many other 60s musical legends. These two albums have been freshly remastered with extras such as demo tracks, extensive liner notes & video clips. I'll be blasting this catchy LSD-tinged goodness all summer long.

Movie: THE HURT LOCKER
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
A tense and well-crafted movie about a bomb squad in Iraq and the daily dangers they face, with stunning breakout performances from actors Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie. Despite its Baghdad setting, I wouldn't call this a war film. Mark Boal has written a taut thriller showing us the dangerous if admirable soul of a man who is psychologically addicted to the risks that could one day kill him. Director Bigelow proves (once again) her fierce action chops.

You can watch the opening 8-minute sequence here on Hulu.

DESIGNING ROOM 101

"In 1946 Observer editor David Astor lent George Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to write his new book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It became one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. Here, Robert McCrum tells the compelling story of Orwell's torturous stay on the island where the author, close to death and beset by creative demons, was engaged in a feverish race to finish the book."

Fascinating, inspiring and heartbreaking stuff from the UK Guardian: "The Masterpiece That Killed George Orwell."