Sort of Like Howard Hawks

            Yesterday morning I got together with videographer Chip Scheuer and retired Watsonville Police Chief Terry Medina to shoot a video trailer for my second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away. Along the way, photographer Tarmo Hannula of the Register-Pajaronian, who I’ve known for years, showed up to take a picture.

            And somewhere in the process I got to thinking, this must be what Howard Hawks felt like when he shot a western with John Wayne. Let’s get together with some friends, head for the great outdoors, and have some fun making a movie.

            Of course Hawks was paid handsomely to make his movies, whereas I’m paying out-of-pocket for mine and doing it on a budget. I have to because a You Tube video trailer is considered essential to book marketing in the digital age. I will say this for making a video, though. It’s a lot more fun than applying for an ISBN number for the book.

Shooting in the Great Indoors

            Actually, this video was shot in the great indoors, which if you’re talking about Howard Hawks/John Wayne movies calls to mind Rio Bravo. What we were trying to do this morning was recreate the interior of a hunting and fishing lodge in an isolated mountain area of Northern California, which is the setting for the book.

            Had I but funding enough and time, I would have taken a weeklong trip to the mountains to scout for appropriate locations, rented a place for the day, and brought everybody up there to shoot it properly. In the real world, I was reduced to doing it on the cheap near where I live.

            I considered a few places to serve as the background for the interior of the lodge, but it turned out the right place was literally under my nose. My Rotary Club meets each week at the Watsonville Elks Lodge, which has a huge fireplace, with the head of a mammoth elk mounted over it. The bar and its furniture are of the late fifties, early sixties vintage that the lodge in my book contains. We figured we could make it work by shooting carefully and atmospherically.

            Ideally, we would have had a rainy day, like the ones in the book, but no such luck. It was bright and sunny, but Chip got around that by framing shots tightly and focusing on the fireplace and building artifacts.

One-Take Terry Does His Scene

            Having stood up at numerous press conferences as police chief, Terry is a pro when it comes to being filmed. He also did video training for city employees and earned the nickname “One-Take Terry,” because when he stepped in front of a camera, he generally got it right the first time.

            We did more than one take this time in order to provide different options, camera angles and inflections when the film was edited, then Terry was sent on his way. Then we shot the rest of the scenes and some footage to go with voice-over, and we were finished in three hours.

            When Hawks and Wayne made the classic Red River in 1947, they found themselves sitting on their hands for days because of heavy unseasonable rains. My video has the opposite problem. We’re going to be sitting on our hands until Chip can get out and shoot some rainy-day footage to complete the project. In this year of California’s major drought, that’s a stresser, but the Weather Channel is saying there’s a good chance of rain next Tuesday and Wednesday. I certainly hope so; the show must go on.

           

           

           

The Classified Ads: A Remembrance

            If the community newspaper of bygone days could be viewed as an economic engine, its premium-grade fuel was the classified ads. Display advertising fluctuated by the season and with the economy, and subscriptions barely covered the cost of the ink and paper. But classified ads were there day in and day out, a steady stream of dollars that certainly contributed significantly to many of my past paychecks.

            It was a stream of revenue that was almost untouched by economic hard times; after all that was when people might think of selling the second car or the couch sitting in the garage. And they were the people’s ads, affordable to all. The Glendale Independent, a twice-weekly local paper where I grew up used to advertise that it would print three lines three times for $1.09. Five of those ads provided my paycheck for covering a high school football game and left the paper with 45 cents profit.

            They were also the subject of jokes. In Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, Rosalind Russell tells Cary Grant, “So he took the gun and shot him in the classified ads.” You probably get the drift.

Invincible, But Vanquished

            Classified advertising was the one thing that people in the newspaper business always figured that television and radio could never take from us. We were right about TV and radio, but there was this thing called the Internet that we never saw coming.

            (For the record, I also figured the weekly grocery ads would never go away, and I was wrong about that, as well. But that had to do with the decline of the full-time housewife, who had the time to comparison-shop those ads.)

            The deal that the Internet has given to newspapers is about as one-sided as the deal the robber barons gave their factory workers before unions came along. The newspapers bear the cost of hiring people to gather, write and edit the news, then the Internet puts it out for nothing and uses it to attract customers and sell advertising. But the unkindest cut of all was when Craig’s List and similar websites did what TV and radio couldn’t — undercut and destroy the classified ad section. This morning’s local paper had a scant quarter-page of classifieds; 20 years ago it was six pages, minimum.

When the Unimaginable Happened

            Technological advance is notoriously unkind to the status quo, and classified ads are now as obsolete as a buggy-whip factory. Posting an ad online has so many advantages over print: It costs nothing, reaches a wider audience, and when the item in question is sold, the ad can be taken down right away, rather than showing up in the paper the next couple of days and generating numerous annoying phone calls.

            Two years ago, when my son Nick decided to leave college and work for a while, we used Craig’s List to find a cheap car from him. It eventually led us to Raul in Fremont, who had a nice little 1990 Ford Ranger he was willing to part with for my roll of $100 bills. It has served Nick (and us, since we’ve used the truck for some hauling) very well.

            Early next month Nick will be going into the Army, and we’ll be putting the truck up for sale again. My inner newspaperman would like to shell out the $1.09 (or whatever it is now) to run an ad in the paper, but the businessman in me knows we’ll be advertising on Craig’s list instead because that’s where we have the best chance of making a quick sale. Sorry, newspapers. Nothing personal; it’s just business.

The Lost Virtue of Brevity

            In his excellent mystery My Late Wives (1946), John Dickson Carr, writing as Carter Dickson, tells the story of serial killer Roger Bewlay. With a wittily observant eye, Carr shows how Bewlay targets vulnerable virgins of a certain age (early thirties, considered past marriage in those days) and woos each according to her ruling passions. One he takes to the symphony; another for long walks along the beach promenade at Brighton, and so forth.

            The result, in each instance, is the same. The lady in question falls head over heels in love, marries him quickly, signs over all her property to him, and they go off on an idyllic honeymoon, from which only Bewlay and the lady’s property emerge. A chance occurrence leads police to become suspicious and another allows them to close the net on Bewlay. But at the end, he slips away and vanishes into the vastness of metropolitan London.

            And that’s just the first 12 pages. The rest of the book takes place 15 years later, when it appears that Bewlay has returned to his old ways, and the detective, Sir Henry Merrivale, attempts to catch him once and for all.

Telling the Story Succinctly

            Carr, a master storyteller if ever there was one, was able to cram enough material for an entire book into a fairly short chapter. In today’s world of mysteries and thrillers, the opposite seems to be happening. More and more books seem to be taking 250 pages of story and stretching it into 350-400 pages.

            How and when this happened is a mystery to me, but I can trace some examples. One successful author began writing about 30 years ago and originally wrote brisk 250-page books. Then she started adding characters, and in subsequent books, each character had to be brought in, often to the detriment of the narrative. On the other hand, she sells way more books than I do, so either the readers don’t care, or they like her enough to put up with it.

            The bloat in book size affects even older books. I have in hand a recently published copy of Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? In this version, the spacing between lines is generous to a fault, as are the margins. That makes what was probably a 225-page book originally come out at 279 pages.

            When I wrote my mystery, The McHenryInheritance, I deliberately tried to keep it to 200-225 pages so it could be read on a cross-country plane flight or on a rainy afternoon. It came in at 200, but I wonder if anyone appreciates the brevity.

Longer Movies, Too

            Movies, like books, seem to be getting longer as well. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot, writing about her father, the actor Lyle Talbot, noted that a number of the films he made for Warner Brothers in the 1930s were an hour and ten minutes long. These days, it’s hard to find any movie that comes in at less than two hours. It seems as if fewer directors today know how to move a story along, the way directors like William Wellman, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks used to do.

            In 1935, MGM made a movie of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, starring Greta Garbo and Frederic March. The book is more than 800 pages, but after some competent scriptwriters got through with it, and it was turned over to veteran director Clarence Brown, he was able to get Anna under the train in a brisk hour and 35 minutes. If they tried to make it today, they would sink so much into stars, costumes, props and locations, it would turn into a three-hour epic and probably be less entertaining than Brown’s version. Less is often more.