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Category Archives: Fiction

1977 Redux

This year marks the 30th anniversaries of the films Star Wars and Annie Hall, both cultural milestones in their right, which affected at least one member of a certain generation. Once upon a time in a galaxy, far, far, away – 1977 specifically – girls wore jeans that had to be zipped with pliers and undulated [...]
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Blake Replies

Read yesterday’s to follow today’s… FROM BLAKE: Attn. Daedalus (if that indeed is your real name) – Poor sir, you’re a fool. This search for yourself in the eyes of women is dull and ordinary. Moreover, the identity motif in your slipshod reportage is not only trite but telling. No wonder you haven’t made any satisfactory gains [...]
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Her Many Lovers

Blake, man – Forgive the lapse, chap. Been waylaid conducting important research: indeed, the search for a unified field theory of women continues. At least ex post facto. And no thanks to the Lumaville Daily Echo, by the way. It’s with some relish that I admit to having spent a week on the clock, wine-soaked and [...]
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Under Coverage

In the screen trade, Readers are the proverbial guardians at the gate, the first line of defense the industry has against the teeming horde of wannabes, sycophants and otherwise undiscovered geniuses prostrate before the gaping maw of the great bitch goddess of Hollywood. These literate worker-bees are the oily cogs of the dream machine. They produce [...]
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Scene One

FADE IN: EXT. DESERT – DAY A wind-swept desert plain. Dervishes of dust dance over the cracked earth and lead to an army-issue tent, which is tiny on the horizon. Close on the tent — a hand-painted sign reads “Lumaville Daily Echo: K—istan Bureau.” Below it, seated at a makeshift desk is a weatherbeaten young man. He has [...]
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Prelude to Drinks at Dawn

It was late when we started drinking. And hours since our host had abandoned us in his kitchen with a blithe “Help yourselves” before trundling out to the still waters of the River Lumaville and the boathouse astride its banks. The carelessness of the nouveau riche, I thought. His guests comprised the press club after all [...]
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When Blake Speaks of Love

For Rigby, our paper’s theater critic, every evening was Opening Night, every meal jug wine and cubed cheddar, and every aspiring actress a Sarah Bernhardt — so long as there was a dressing room door to lock. That the dressing rooms were locked to keep Rigby out of them only caused him mild consternation like [...]
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The Bird

I’d heard it before ? clink, clunk, clink, clunk ? like some nervous junior exec sifting pocket change in his chinos. Everyone on the Backlot claimed to have heard it at least once and reported, variously, that it was “like an alarm clock being wound,” or “thimbles on a washboard,” and perhaps most lyrically, from [...]
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Paint By Numbers

My fashionably faux-bearded partner Cary Carpe and I just rescued our latest script, “Painting By Numbers,” a commercial spec of the proverbial “high concept” variety eleven drafts in, from being recycled by the studio as a coffee cup insulator composed of 33% post consumer waste. This is ironic seeing as the screenplay itself is already [...]
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Future Tense

All this future-baiting (see below) reminds me of a moment that occurred last week at the Directors Guild of America, where my writing partner Cary Carpe and I screened our new spot for the 7th Annual Filmmakers Alliance Screening. The event served, in part, as a tribute to “Sideways” director Alexander Payne who was on [...]
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