Listen…you smell something? It’s the end of calendar year 2020, finally slinking into view. I know it’s probably too much to expect that January 1st will bring an instant change to our collective fortunes, but it’s nice to hope for, isn’t it? Change your calendar, change your world?
"NOVEL ADVICE: Practical Wisdom for Your Favorite Literary Characters" has now been out for about a month, and I’m enjoying hearing from readers about their favorite characters and questions. If there’s one that resonated with you I’d love to hear about it!
With the end of the year comes the inevitable retrospectives, and I guess I’m not immune. In the middle of all the chaos, I managed to have one of the most productive writing years of my career. I wrote and published “Novel Advice.” I wrote and produced an interactive digital series that is slated to come out next year (more about that when I’m able to share). I had a lot of fun writing a spec episode of Star Trek: Discovery (and since it’s me, it heavily features Klingons), and I worked on an interactive VR project that’s currently in post production. But if I’m being honest, the most important thing I wrote this year is the one I least wanted to write: an obituary for my father.
My Dad has a lot of jobs and careers over the course of his life: teacher, political organizer, lawyer, health advocate. One thing I never really thought of as part of his identity was “writer.” But he was: back in the 80s, he wrote three volumes of law education books that recapped the highlights of that year’s Supreme Court cases. I was too young to really care about the subject matter, I just thought it was cool that we had colorful books on the shelf with his name on them, and I was fascinated by the enormous word processor in his office - I think it was a Brother WP-25.
Over the last few years of his life (and there’s a sentence I’m still having trouble with), he worked on a memoir, Searching For Bella — an exploration of how the BRCA1 gene mutation led to cancer running riot through our family, and an attempt to uncover all the hidden stories that were never spoken about. He asked me to help him edit the book, and I enthusiastically agreed. In the process, I got to learn a lot of things about him and our family that I hadn’t known. I’m so glad that I got to share that with him, and it’s made even more meaningful since he was taken from us only a few months after it was published.
Did You Say Honey And Nuts?
It’s the week of Christmas, so it seem pretty clear which Novel Advice book entry should be highlighted this week.
I’ll admit, I went through most of my life not knowing exactly what “bah, humbug!” meant, apart from being some kind of ye olde English epithet of displeasure and unhappiness. But every so often I stop myself and actually look up a word, and discover its meaning is slightly different that what I thought it was. To wit: a “humbug” is a person who behaves dishonestly and deceptively, or the content of those deceptions. Scrooge is essentially calling bullshit. Maybe this isn’t a huge difference, but it felt like it changed the character from a crotchety geezer who can’t be bothered into someone who has chosen, from his warped experience, to look at the bonds of family, society and friendship and to call them lies. In a time when so many people believe so much humbug, perhaps we should try to reclaim the word from Scrooge. It’s a fun word to say aloud. Try it. Humbug!
Last year, there was a very interesting “dark” tv adaptation of A Christmas Carol made by Steven Knight of Peaky Blinders fame, starring Guy Pearce as Scrooge, Stephen Graham as Marley, and Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past.
While I would not say this version is particularly faithful, I liked it quite a bit. It does make some, er, bold choices, and it does a lot of work to make Scrooge’s love of money and distrust of feelings grounded in trauma. Or as my friend, tv critic Liz Shannon Miller called it, “This Scrooge Fucks!”
A Christmas Carol is one of those stories done so many times that if you don’t like a particular version, just wait a few minutes and another one will be along. I think if I had to name my favorite of the seemingly eleventy billion versions in existence, it would be Patrick Stewart’s one-man stage adaptation. I was lucky enough to see this on Broadway at some point in the 90s and it was breathtaking. Of course, you can’t go wrong with Scrooged either.
If It’s The End of the Year, It Must Mean It’s Time For Lists
Ranking pieces of art against each other is a ludicrous and impossible task that I have spent way too much time on. So let’s do it again! Here are the 20 tv shows that made my list in 2020, in order of the vague, ineffable, amorphous feelings they inspired in me, which is the only metic that really matters:
1. Ted Lasso
2. The Queen’s Gambit
3. The Vow
4. The Good Lord Bird
5. The Third Day
6. I May Destroy You
7. Better Call Saul
8. Normal People
9. Insecure
10. What We Do In The Shadows
What made your list?
Normally I’d do one of these lists for movies too, but nowadays what is even a movie anyway? So instead, here is the comprehensive list of movies I saw in the theater in 2020:
The Rhythm Section (not good)
Birds of Prey (fun)
Emma (brilliant)
If you remove the year of original release as a criteria, and just look at all the movies I saw for the first time in 2020 regardless of how or where I saw them, then there’s a clear winner for the best film I saw all year:
Gilda is one of those classics that I just never got around to watching. At a certain point earlier in the year, we went thought a Rita Hayworth binge. I, of course, loudly advocated for the baroque charms of The Lady From Shanghai. Pal Joey was a bit of a chore. I think there were a couple of others I can’t recall. And then Gilda came up on the playlist and I thought, “Okay, let’s see if it’s as good as its rep.”
Reader, it was better. Dripping with acid, honed to knife’s edge, the main stem of noir; it was like finally seeing the original print of a photograph you’ve only seen in an excessively-degraded copy. I think I’d seen the iconic hair-flip shot a million times in montages and clip reels, but seeing it for the first time in its original context, it really is one of the most thrilling entrances in a movie I’ve ever seen. If you’ve never had the privilege, get yourself to TCM immediately!
Friends
A couple of years ago, I got the chance to meet Shawn Taylor at a conference, and I was immediately struck by the enormity of the man’s heart. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s also brilliant and insightful and a pleasure to talk with. Shawn’s just launched a wonderful new podcast, Surviving Creativity, and you should add it to your list.
Julie Gray was one of my first L.A. writing compatriots, and even though she decamped for Israel many years ago, we’ve stayed in touch and cheered each other from afar. This year, Julie put out a book: “The True Adventures of Gidon Lev” — she began as the memoir’s editor and ended up becoming a major character in the story. “True Adventures” was just named as one of Kirkus Review’s Best Books of 2020. Congrats Julie!
That’s gonna be it for this episode and this year. The newsletter is going to take a week of two off and return in 2021, when everything will be unicorns and rainbows, right? Right??
Stay decent,
Jay