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DARK CORRIDORS Volume 1, No. 9 |
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interviews James Schmerer |
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By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
As the work in Hollywood continues to dry up for even the best
veteran film and television writers -- the result of the youth
obsession at the networks and studios -- some of the more ambitious
"senior" writers are trying new literary careers.
Take the case of James "Jim" Schmerer, who just published his first novel at age 60 -- a competent police thriller called "Twisted Shadows" (Writers' Club, $14.95), featuring, as you might have guessed, a disillusioned ex-cop who's deep in his 50s and missing the fast pace of his old life like nobody's business.
Schmerer knew he wasn't going to get filthy rich off a soft cover crime novel, but money wasn't the motivation anyway. After writing virtually every kind of film and TV episode in every genre, Schmerer just wanted to know if he could write a novel, too.
"I must tell you," he said by phone from his Los Angeles home, "this was really just about me wondering if I could do it. One day I finished a project and wasn't prepared to start another, so I just said, 'hey, why not?'"
That was three years ago. The first thing Schmerer learned about the new game was how long everything takes -- and how frustrating the process can be. First he wrote the book, then he sent out a 30-page excerpt to prospective agents in New York. Everybody who read it asked to see the rest of the novel. Weeks went by, then months.
"I was coming out of the television business where you turn in a script and the response is instantaneous," he said. "After six or seven weeks, I began to hear back from the agents. One wanted me to change the locale to another city. Others wanted to charge me money for editing it. About half a dozen actually wanted to represent the book, so I picked one and they sent it out."
More months went by without any word on the book he called "Twisted Shadows." Finally, he received a couple of rejections, then some "hang on" messages about the book being among the final contenders for some publisher's fall list. When 18 months had gone by without a deal, Schmerer gave up and "put the book away."
It was a frustrating time for the veteran writer. Even though he really loved the process of writing a novel, he decided, "If something can be worse than the motion picture business, it must be the publishing business."
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If Schmerer expected to score a success with his first book, who could really blame him? After all, here's a man who has written literally hundreds of screenplays and teleplays. He had been an executive story consultant for TV shows from NBC's "Daniel Boone" (1964-70) through ABC's "MacGyver" (1985-92). He had written for daytime soaps ("Another World," "General Hospital"), prime-time dramas "("Eight is Enough") and even Saturday morning animated kid shows.
In his 30s and 40s, Schmerer even reached the exalted position of producer on three network shows: "The High Chaparral," the 1967-71 NBC western starring Leif Erickson and Cameron Mitchell; "The Delphi Bureau," a 1972-73 ABC spy drama starring Larry Luckinbill, and Jack Webb's "Chase," a 1973-74 NBC police show starring Mitch Ryan.
What's more, Schmerer's book was familiar territory for him: Police drama. Originally a specialist in westerns, he had switched over to mystery and police shows when the cowboy shows started to fade, becoming a very reliable writer for those shows, including such hits as "Mannix" with Mike Connors.
"I became fascinated with the genre and eventually wrote for just about every mystery show that was on the air," said Schmerer.
So, he didn't really have the stomach to wait endlessly for somebody to publish his first novel, particularly when he already had finished an outline for a sequel and even had a third novel with the same characters well in mind. But then he read an article in the Los Angeles Times about "print on demand" publishers, who are now occupying a niche between the self-publishing "vanity" press and regular publishers. For a small fee, these companies give your book a cover design and commit the text to computer disk. Then it's listed on the publishing industry's primary database for new books and with the online booksellers like Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com. He decided to go with a Barnes & Noble subsidiary, iUniverse.com, and suddenly "Twisted Shadows" was out there, getting reviewed and read.
Among the many bewildering new worlds of cyber-publishing, "print on demand" is starting to appeal to professional writers like Schmerer, who are well aware that the mergers and takeovers have severely restricted the conventional publishing world and made them start looking for "home run" books that might sell millions of copies. That means many "B-list" writers who might sell 20-25,000 copies of each new book now realize they're not going to get any big promotional effort from their publishers and must get out and sell their own books. If they have to sell them without help, why not publish them without help and keep all the profits?
"Under this system, the books are printed as the orders come in," said Schmerer. "Some conventional publishers will print 2,000 copies of a new book and never print anymore. Bookstores may order two copies and sell them both, but never order anymore."
That whole system is predicated upon the best seller. If the book doesn't take off like a house on fire, it doesn't get any publicity and can't hope to sell its way into multiple printings. With "print on demand," the overhead is negligible and the publisher can print out five copies to fill an order instead of waiting for the demand to reach a thousand or more orders, which it usually never does.
How good a book is "Twisted Shadows"? Aside from a large number of distracting typographical errors, which Schmerer concedes are as much his fault as the publisher's, this is a very entertaining novel, which, not surprisingly, moves as briskly as a TV episode. The central character is retired NYPD cop Lou Parker, who's living alone on his boat in Florida, drinking himself into an early grave, when he learns that his only son, a New York cop, has been killed in what appears to be a drug deal gone bad.
Unwilling to accept the idea that his son was a dirty cop, Lou storms back to his old precinct and starts his own highly unorthodox investigation, trying to find out why his son was shotgunned to death, why he had millions stashed in a Swiss bank account and why the department seems to have taken steps to cover the whole thing up. Once Lou learns his son had been in bed with an unidentified woman when the killers came calling, he really aches to know the truth.
Offering her help is the son's former girl friend, a female cop named Chris, who Lou resents from the very start of their stormy relationship. Ironically, though, Chris is drawn to the tough and hostile older man and Lou, much against his own better judgment, is drawn to her.
Schmerer plays around a great deal with the psychological underpinnings of his two lead characters. He builds Chris up as a work-obsessed young woman with a trunkload of complexes. One of them is that she's as addicted to adrenalin rush as Lou is and really gets off on taking risks. Lou fights his growing attraction to her because he can't get by the fact that Chris used to sleep with his son and is young enough to be his own daughter. Chris has no such problem. After being with the younger version of Lou, she quickly realizes the ruined old ex-cop is "the real article."
Schmerer says the one thing that appealed to him most about writing "Twisted Shadows" as a book rather than a screenplay is that he was able to go inside the characters and tell us what they're thinking.
"Put something like that in a screenplay and the first thing the actor's going to do is cross it out," he said. "They want to make the character their own. They don't want somebody like the writer telling them what he's thinking."
Lou Parker is very impolitic when it comes to dealing with his former police supervisors and one gets the impression he was that way when he was on duty, too. Schmerer admits that may be something of his own personality seeping in.
"Through the years, I constantly was going up against the networks and the studios when they wanted me to do something I knew wasn't right," he said.
Schmerer recalls one example when he was producing "The High Chaparral." The network was under siege from groups protesting the way Native Americans were portrayed on TV, so an edict was handed down to the producers of all NBC's westerns: No more Indians could be killed on TV.
"But this was in 1880s Arizona and there were hostile Indians out there," Schmerer said to no avail.
So, he finessed the situation. The next day he was shooting a sequence in which some of the regular cast members were attacked by a band of Indians. Schmerer took all the stuntmen aside and told them he wanted them to go ahead and fall off their horses when "killed," to lay still on the ground for one "beat," then jump up and run out of camera range. When the footage was cut together, the network screened it for the sponsors, who loved it, but complained about the absurdity of all the Indians surviving the gunfire and scampering out into the countryside.
"Do you think you could cut those parts and just let the Indians lie there?" the network guys asked Schmerer afterward.
He said he thought he could probably find a way to leave all the Indians lying there as if they were dead. And so he did.
Schmerer says the climate is very bad for veteran writers in Hollywood these days because "my whole generation has been affected. You just hit a wall as soon as you reach 40."
The reason is the Madison Avenue passion for selling products to younger viewers with youth-oriented TV ads and the studios' belief that only the repeat visits of million of young people to the same youth-oriented movies will produce the big box office hits they now need to survive. That's why they're now hiring writers in their 20s, figuring the odler writers can't connect with the younger audiences.
"What they usually find out is that the young writers can't do the job," says Schmerer, "so they wind up calling us in to fix their shows late in the season."
Still, that isn't enough to give veteran writers the income and creative satisfaction they crave. Schmerer says there's something else, too: Even if you still can make a good living by writing for weekly television, it wears thin after doing it for 30 years.
"For me, it just became boring," he said. "All the characters are set and you can't change their psychology, their flaws, their goals. They have to remain the same, week after week. And the audience really wants them that way."
That's a major reason why Schmerer wants to make "Twisted Shadows" work for him as a novel, propelling him into a new career where he'll have more control over his work product than he ever had as a Hollywood writer-producer.
"But you have to do it on your own," he said. "I come from the studio system, where you could just call publicity or some other department to get things done. Now I have no one to call."
© 2000 by Ron Miller.
TO ORDER A COPY OF "TWISTED SHADOWS," JUST LOG ONTO ONLINE BOOKSELLERS AMAZON.COM OR BARNES&NOBLE.COM AND DO A SEARCH FOR THE TITLE. OR ASK YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE TO ORDER IT FOR YOU.
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