When Bobcat Goldthwait invaded comedy back in the early 1980s, no one had ever seen anything quite like him and didn't know what to make of him. He would shout and shriek on stage, twitch and squirm, huff and puff and roll his wide, starin’ eyes like a man who’s taken an ill-advised cocktail of drugs that started kicking in about five minutes ago. He was unpredictable, possibly dangerous, and very funny. He’s always made me laugh as a stand-up comic and actor, but over the years, I’ve come to find him even more interesting as a filmmaker.
In 1991, Goldthwait wrote, directed and starred in Shakes the Clown, a coal-black comedy about a self-destructive clown accused of a murder he didn’t commit, set in a world where clowns never take off their makeup and spend their off hours in dark bars complaining into their booze. It was met with a tidal wave of critical vitriol. But I saw a lot to admire. I liked the world Goldthwait had created and, while the movie doesn’t really hold together or go anywhere, it has some hilarious moments. I thought Roger Ebert summed it up well when he wrote, “The movie plays like a series of scene outlines — ideas for how the movie should progress — that needed more writing and revision before the actors were called in.” It didn’t work, but it had some tasty ingredients. It was Goldthwait’s first movie and he was feeling his way along, trying to find his voice, and it was interesting enough for me to look forward to his next movie. But I had to wait a while.
After the disastrous reception of Shakes the Clown, Goldthwait disappeared as a director for about a decade, although he continued acting and doing stand-up. Then, as Bob Goldthwait, he began to show up as the director in the opening credits of TV shows like Crank Yankers and The Man Show. He spent some years working in television, then in 2006, 15 years after his first, he came back with another feature film. Sleeping Dogs Lie is about Amy, a young woman who, in the interest of full disclosure, is trying to muster the courage to tell John, the man she wants to marry, that she once blew her dog. And it’s about what happens after she tells him. In spite of the story's canine element, it’s not the kind of gross-out comedy you might expect from the costar of three Police Academy movies, either. It’s a far better movie than Shakes the Clown in every way. It’s thoughtful, even contemplative, and it doesn’t shy away from its more emotionally difficult ingredients — it is, ironically, a very honest movie. It examines how we really feel about honesty. We say it’s always the best policy, that a successful relationship requires absolute honesty, that honesty is a trait we greatly admire in people. The only thing we don’t seem to like about honesty is having to face it. Sleeping Dogs Lie also takes a look at our priorities and examines the difference between the things we identify as horrifying and unforgivable in others and the things we give a pass to and take in stride. It’s about the stupid things we hold against each other and ourselves. Sleeping Dogs Lie is a serious movie with something on its mind. It’s also funny — it’s the only movie in which you’ll hear a woman say to her mother, “You wrestled another woman in your underwear while Elvis beat off? And you didn’t even get laid?” The business about the girl blowing her dog? That’s Goldthwait’s way of luring you in with what you expect from him. Then he dazzles you with some caustic observations about human beings and the things they do to each other and themselves. I was impressed and pleasantly surprised.
Goldthwait’s next movie was 2009's World’s Greatest Dad. Robin Williams plays Lance Clayton, a high school poetry teacher whose dreams of being a famous writer fade a little more with each rejection his submissions receive. Nothing is going well for Lance. The coworker he’s dating doesn’t want to get serious and doesn’t even want anyone to know they’re dating. His son is a belligerent, morose boy with whom Lance can’t seem to connect. His class is as unpopular with students as his manuscripts are with the publishers to whom he submits them. And then Lance’s son dies. That’s bad enough. But he dies as a result of autoerotic asphyxiation. In trying to cover up that fact, Lance inadvertently — and unethically — stumbles into the life he’s always wanted. But can he live with the way he got it? The World’s Greatest Dad was my favorite movie from 2009. It was made with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. It made me realize Goldthwait was doing in his movies what he’d always done in his stand-up comedy: Making people uncomfortable by talking about things they don’t want to talk about, and then making them laugh about it. And if there’s any doubt about that, you should take a look at his most recent movie, God Bless America
Frank has lost everything — his marriage, his job, his dignity and self respect. And now his doctor tells him his life will be cut short by a brain tumor. He discovers he’s lost something else: his patience. He’s lost patience with everything. Unlike virtually everyone around him, he no longer finds the steady collapse of civilization entertaining or the bad behavior of people who are famous for no reason funny. He’ll be dying soon. What does he have to lose? Frank decides to arm himself and start killing people who deserve to die. Whether or not they deserve it is determined by their behavior. And Frank’s mood. Also, the mood of his unlikely accomplice Roxy, an adorable, perky, fresh-faced teenager who’s actually a smiling psychopath who enjoys all of this way too much.
No, it’s not terribly original. Mickey and Mallory of Natural Born Killers spring immediately to mind. But the similarities are only superficial, and as you watch God Bless America, you’ll find they’re quickly forgotten. Instead of an over-the-top Woody Harrelson, you get Joel Murray playing Frank, a guy who needs no introduction, the guy whose life just didn’t work out; we all know at least one, and we recognize him right away, and not without sympathy. He’s not necessarily a bad guy, as far as we can tell. It’s just that, for whatever reasons, his life sucks right now. Except Frank fantasizes about killing people he doesn’t like. “I know it’s not normal to want to kill people,” he says. “But I’m not normal anymore.” Murray makes you forget he’s acting, or that he’s an actor.
Instead of the drawling craziness of Juliette Lewis, you’ve got Tara Lynne Barr as Roxy, who looks and sounds just like a girl who probably sold you Girl Scout Cookies a few years ago. There’s an old fashioned wholesome sweetness to her, the kind of sweetness that would be right at home putting on a big show in the barn with Mickey Rooney and the gang. But she’s not wholesome or sweet. When she sees Frank take out his first victim, she thinks it’s the coolest thing she’s ever seen.
There’s none of the sadistic gloss you see on Oliver Stone’s movie, no booming soundtrack to distance your emotions from what you’re seeing, no slick camera work or flashy effects. Goldthwait seems to value his stories and characters, because he presents them in a clean and simple way, with nothing to distract from them. God Bless America is no exception.
When Frank channel surfs across television’s vast wasteland, we see the reality shows, the infomercials, the fear-mongering politicians and their talking heads, the screaming teenagers with their outraged sense of entitlement, the cruelty and stupidity and mindless violence and self-destruction and the endless chattering and babbling and maniacal cackling that accompany it all. He sits in front of the television and every flick of the remote is like the lancing of another boil that gushes poison. When you look at all the mind-numbing shit we absorb day after day, the stuff that bludgeons our consciousness during our every waking hour, it’s kind of surprising people don’t snap and act out violently more often. God Bless America takes on a new immediacy in light of the recent events in Colorado and Wisconson. With those massacres so fresh in the memory, some may want to hold off on watching this movie. Wait a few months, or something. There’s a scene that involves a shooting inside a movie theater that made me shudder. I’m not objecting to it, just pointing it out.
Some of it is funny, some of it is horrifying, and that’s exactly the way Goldthwait wants it. He’s talking about things we don’t want to talk about, showing us things we don’t necessarily want to see, then he’s making us laugh at those things even though we might feel guilty about it. Most importantly, he's making us talk about those things I can see the old 1980s Bobcat bouncing around, poking us in the ribs as he shrieks, “Made ya squirm! WAAAHHH!”
After back-to-back mass shootings, I think we need to talk about things like this. But every time it happens, we’re not allowed to discuss it because no matter what we say about it, someone accuses us of politicizing it. So we have to remain silent and respectful and reflective ... until it happens again. Sometimes only a couple of weeks later.
I like the fact that Goldthwait makes us talk about things we don’t want to talk about. Stephen King once advised students to find out which books the adults didn’t want them to read, then read all of those books, because it’s likely there’s something in them they should know. I think it’s the same with things we don’t want to talk about. If something makes us so uncomfortable that we don’t want to talk about it, then we should probably talk about it. If nothing else, it’s one step closer to not being uncomfortable with it anymore, and chances are good that whatever the problem is, talking about it will resolve it, or at least move things in that direction.
In God Bless America, Goldthwait offers no solutions. But he does a great job of pointing out that mass shootings are not the problem. They are one of many symptoms. The other symptoms aren’t as shocking and don’t get much attention. They don’t make the news, and they’ve become so normalized that we don’t’ even notice them anymore. But they add up over time.
You might have a bumper sticker that reads “Remember 9/11" or “Support the Troops,” but how do you treat the clerk at the grocery store or the customer service rep on the phone? You might disapprove of mass shootings, but how often do you call your child — or your spouse or lover or anyone else you care about — “stupid” or “useless” or “fat” or a million other casual comments that fall out of our mouths like gumballs out of a gumball machine, but can amount to emotional bullets? We demand respect for our symbols and ideas and institutions and beliefs, but when it comes to the one-on-one stuff — all of us, myself included, everybody — we can sometimes leave a lot to be desired.
“Why have a civilization,” Frank asks, “if we’re no longer interested in being civilized?”
If mass shootings are one of the symptoms of the problem, what is the problem? Goldthwait doesn’t answer that, either. If you find someone who does confidently claim to know the answer to that question, proceed with caution and keep a tight grip on your wallet and your mind, because chances are good that person has something to sell you and is full of shit. But one thing’s for sure — we will never solve problems we can’t talk about. And that’s why we need artists like Bobcat Goldthwait, jesters who poke and prod us and keep bringing up the stuff we don’t want to talk about.
There’ve been others in the past — names like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Bill Hicks come to mind. Most of them come out of comedy, because when talking about things people don’t want to talk about, it’s always a good idea to keep them laughing. It’s also easier to swallow something bitter with a little sugar, just like Mary Poppins said.
As far as I know, though, Bobcat Goldthwait is the first to successfully meld the sensibilities of his abrasive stand-up comedy with movies that are intelligent, frank, funny, thought-provoking and even infuriating, and that absolutely refuse to soften themselves up for a bigger audience. Goldthwait will not become a powerful movie mogul as long as he keeps making the movies he makes, because in order for his movies to achieve that kind of success, they would have to be something other than the movies he makes. It’s a shame, too, because work like this should be generously rewarded. Of course, if we lived in the kind of culture that rewarded quality work instead of cruelty, stupidity and bad behavior, Bobcat Goldthwait probably wouldn’t be making the movies he makes.
Note: This is sort of a companion piece to an article I wrote for the Huffington Post about the bullies and stalkers in a group called Stop the Goodreads Bullies. You might want to read that first here.
No writer enjoys getting a bad review. Writers who say bad reviews have no affect on them probably aren’t being entirely honest.
Most people are unaware of the amount of work that goes into writing a novel—even one you don’t like. The details you have to keep track of as your story unfolds, the story itself, the characters, their backgrounds, personalities and fates, the dialogue, language, voice, tone, pacing—it’s a big job. Once a writer has gone through all that work, it’s no fun to read a review that declares you’ve put all that work into a book that sucks.
But you know what? None of that matters.
In 1986, when I lived in the Los Angeles area, my late friend, publicist and writer Francis Feighan, took me to a Writers Guild screening of an upcoming Eddie Murphy movie called The Golden Child. I thought it was terrible, and I reached that conclusion very early on in the movie. Nothing that happened subsequently changed my mind. (All these years later, I still think it stinks on ice.)
As we left, Francis asked me what I thought of the movie, and I told him. He shook his head and clicked his tongue as we walked back to the car.
“What?” I said, wondering if I’d said something wrong.
“You have no idea how much work goes into making a movie.”
“But that was a bad movie. I really thought it sucked.”
“The same amount of blood and sweat and fear that went into the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or Casablanca, or Lawrence of Arabia went into The Golden Child. People think a movie they don’t like was slapped together quickly, or somehow not enough work and love went into it, and that’s simply not true. Filmmakers always work hard on a movie and they believe it’s going to be a good work. That’s why they work so hard!”
“I understand that,” I said, “but in the end...should that make any difference?”
“Oh, hell, no. I just like pointing it out because most people don’t understand that about movies. You’re right. Doesn’t make any difference. The people who made The Golden Child did a lot of hard work, took a shot, and for you, they failed. For me, too. I thought it was a disaster. But somebody out there—several somebodies—will think it’s the best movie they ever saw. For them, it worked. Look how many fans a movie like Plan 9 from Outer Space has. Or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. These are criminally bad movies on every level. But a lot of people find them entertaining and love them. That’s the way it always is. With everything. You can never please everyone, but you’ll always please someone. Probably a lot of someones, even if you never know it. But the real reason creative people do what they do is not to please everybody but because they have to. Because they love it. Even if others don’t.”
Damn, I miss Francis. I learned a lot from him.
What he said about movies applies to books, as well. Yes, we writers pour our hearts and guts into our work. It’s a gargantuan task to write a novel. But then it’s finished and published...and our children go out into the world to fend for themselves. We hate to see them maligned or despised. But it happens.
Writer Steve Rasnic Tem, author of Deadfall Hotel, made a great point in the comments under my Huffington Post article. He wrote, “If someone really feels bad about the negative review they've received on Goodreads, they should check out the detailed GR ratings for To Kill A Mockingbird—over 20,000 one star reviews. How could that many people who actually read give that magnificent novel only one star?”
Harper Lee’s novel is beloved. Many list it as their favorite book, an influential work they were fortunate enough to read early in life and that became a part of them. And yet on Goodreads, more than 20,000 people gave it only one star. There are complaints that it’s not subversive enough, that the kids are too good, the characters too thin, that it’s a story about conflict between good people and bad people rather than a conflict between races, and that it embraces and lauds the racism of its story’s time.
Orson Welles’s 1941 classic film Citizen Kane is widely regarded as perhaps the greatest American movie of all time. But when it was initially released, critics were unaware of the movie’s future reputation and not all of them were impressed.
Silent film director-tyrant Erich von Stroheim weighed in with a review that found nothing to praise. He criticized the movie for being unoriginal, unrealistic, and confusing. He even accused it of being too different. He hated the fact that the movie begins with the end, then bounces around through time, then lands at the end again. He wrote:
“To be truthful, during the first twenty minutes of viewing the film, I, who have been thirty years in this business of making films, did not know what it was all about. I may be dumb, but I have asked at least fifty people who in more or less articulate form described the same experience. I may be hyper-conservative or just plain old fashioned, but I believe in all sincerity that the form of telling the story of Citizen Kane is not the desired or successful form in which to tell a screen story. All of us have been accustomed to hear or to see a story start at the beginning. Welles's way of telling the story may have its place in a novel or on the stage, but I am convinced that in the cinema it is entirely out of place.”
Who the hell did this Welles upstart think he was, telling a story out of order? Nobody wants to see a movie like that! But in spite of Stroheim’s objections, it’s become a fairly common method of storytelling in cinema. The tyrannical Austrian director once known as “the man you love to hate” was off the mark in that respect.
My point is that even great works are not universally loved. All of the books and movies and works of art that we now consider immortal have had—and will continue to have—their critics and detractors. No one is immune from them. Absolutely no one.
But was Erich Von Stroheim’s review of Citizen Kane wrong? It was his opinion. Nothing more. That’s all any review is—an opinion—and in any field, those are always in abundance.
We might not like bad reviews, but some of them hold treasures for writers. You won’t learn a damned thing from praise. It’s a wonderful thing to receive, but it doesn’t make you a better writer. The only thing that’ll do that is acknowledging our weaknesses, and then working to strengthen them. The only way we can do that is to become aware of them, and it’s very rare for a writer to see those weaknesses himself. A good negative review can help a writer do that.
There is such a thing as constructive criticism. A review that points out a book’s weaknesses can be a great learning experience for a writer, as long as it’s a writer who realizes that not all criticism is a personal attack, and that he or she can always improve as a writer.
These days, of course, the erudite professional critic no longer has a corner on criticism. The internet has left it open to anyone and everyone—just like publishing. Now, a person can read a book in the privacy of his own home, then go online and post a review to the world. But if anyone can post a review, that means there’s no telling how a reviewer might choose to convey his or her opinion. Just as there are those who will write a negative but respectful review, there are also those who will write whatever pops into their heads simply because they can.
If the reviewer doesn’t like a book, he might take it out on the author. He might choose to question the legality of the author’s parents’ marriage. He might wish the author’s children lifelong careers in the fast food service industry. He might suggest that the author engage in a variety of sex acts with a pet. He might even wish upon the author all manner of serious illnesses, like flesh-eating bacteria or butt cancer.
There’s no shortage of reviews like that online. And there’s no shortage of people who are willing to write them. I can spot one at a quick glance, and I do not read them. There’s no point. They are a waste of time. There is nothing constructive in them, nothing for the writer to learn. Reading them is like gouging the palm of your hand with a knife. They really aren’t book reviews so much as episodes of self-indulgent venom-spewing.
Don’t read them. Most importantly, never take them personally. The authors of such reviews don’t deserve that kind of attention. They deserve to be ignored.
Which brings me to writers who seem incapable of ignoring them. They’re out there. They walk among us. And just as the internet has opened the floodgates to immature reviewers who are more interested in acting out than reviewing a book, it also has opened the floodgates to people who think they’re writers, but have no idea what it means to be a writer.
Being a writer involves more than being able to write.
Until the digital explosion, getting published wasn’t easy. You had to submit your work to publishers, usually through an agent—which means you had to find an agent to represent you. That process could be quite humbling. It involved something we used to call “rejection.” And even when you weren’t rejected, your book still had to go through an editing process, which meant an editor would tell you what he or she thought was wrong with the book, or with your writing in certain areas, and how it might be improved.
By the time your book was published, you’d gone through an experience in which it had been rejected, accepted, and edited, and at some point in this process, you had made a significant discovery.
You are not William fucking Faulkner.
It should be noted that even William Faulkner wasn’t William fucking Faulkner. He received rejection letters from editors that included lines like, “My chief objection is that you don’t have any story to tell,” and, “Good god, I can’t publish this!”
That process has a tendency to toughen up a writer even before he’s published.
Today, anyone can write anything they want and publish it themselves. No screening process at all. No rejections, no editing, no rewriting, no carving a better book out of the one you’ve written, nothing to thicken the writer’s skin. Just write it and publish it. Then sit back and wait for the waves of love to pour in from the world. Right?
Wrong.
Many of these writers have had no experience with rejection and have never been told what’s wrong with their work. And you know what? Something is wrong with their work. Nobody turns out a perfect book at the first crack. Every writer, without exception, needs a good editor and some healthy criticism before he becomes published. It improves the work, and as the grownups used to tell us when we were kids, it builds character.
There are a lot of people out there today who are writing and publishing without the benefit of that experience. When they get a bad review—particularly of the variety that can be found on the internet, the kind that suggests the author climb into an operating woodchipper—their heads explode. They respond in kind.
This is always a colossally bad idea. There is no time when this is not a bad idea. Writers who do this make embarrassing spectacles of themselves. It’s unprofessional and not only will no good come of it, but bad things will come of it—like a bad reputation, for example.
These days, however, we seem to take things to extremes. That includes people who have no business writing. A group calling itself Stop the Goodreads Bullies is a perfect example of such behavior—and of people who have no business writing.
Stop the Goodreads Bullies goes so far as to see bad reviews as some kind of persecution. They’re so phenomenally untethered from reality that they have done some investigating and learned personal details about the authors of those reviews and posted that information online. You know, stuff like home addresses, places of employment, where the reviewer’s children go to school, and even where the reviewer likes to go out to eat. This has resulted in Goodreads reviewers being harassed and threatened.
This group has taken whiny narcissism to psychotic extremes. It has put the authors of these negative reviews into possible danger. Whoever makes up this group, they should not be writing. They should do something else entirely—like finding a good therapist. They also should thank their lucky stars that their insane fuckery hasn’t resulted in getting someone hurt or killed.
Members of this group have been bouncing from one comment thread to another, throwing tantrums and shrieking about “rights.” Their rights, the rights of reviewers, the rights of readers. They’ve been doing this because, in addition to being out-of-control babies who behave psychotically, they are hypocritical idiots. They claim the reviewers are “bullying” them, and that their free speech rights give them the right to bully them right back. To make their point, they pop up online in a variety of sock-puppet identities and tell everyone who disagrees with them to shut up. Repeatedly. In other words, the only free speech they care about is their own. They want everyone else’s revoked.
They’re crazier than a bag of wet cats. But they’re not alone when it comes to lashing out at critics. In 2009, writer Candace Sams responded angrily to readers on Amazon when they criticized her romance novel Electra Galaxy’s Mr. Interstellar Feller, going so far as threatening to report them to the FBI.
This behavior isn’t confined to new, inexperienced writers, either. In 2004, Anne Rice responded to readers on Amazon: “Your stupid, arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander.” In 2009, Alice Walker used her Twitter account to call a Boston Globe book critic a “moron.” These writers are not only enormously talented and respected but hugely successful. They're pros who should know better.
There is a long and colorful history of writers who lash out at critics. Some writers have become more known for that than their writing. And as far as I can tell, that’s not a good thing. No writer is immune from the desire to lash out, but it’s always a mistake. When I start feeling it, I get the hell off the computer, which provides countless opportunities to make an ass of oneself. Let's not forget that on the internet, most book reviewers are hobbyists, readers who go online to discuss the books they've read.
Whether you respond to a bad review in a comment thread or by deliberately sabotaging the personal life of the reviewer, you’re in the wrong. The two differ only in extremes—the result is the same. You will be seen by readers and other writers as unprofessional, a person who wants to write but never receive criticism, whether it’s reasonable criticism or some online monkey flinging its own poo. Raging about bad reviews is like raging against the weather. It doesn't change anything and it makes you look silly.
The only people who get positive reviews all the time are dictators in police states, and that’s only because criticism could result in the critic’s face getting shot off.
If you write, you will get bad reviews. And there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it. The sooner you embrace that, the happier you will be. If you have the self-discipline to accomplish the task of writing a book, then you should be able to whip up the self-discipline to resist the urge to lash out at critics.
If you can’t draw a straight line, don’t become an architect. If you hate driving, don’t become a trucker. If animals make you nervous, don’t become a veterinarian. And if you can’t take criticism without throwing a tantrum, do us all a favor and stay away from writing, because you’re not going to like it. Not even a little.
If you’re going to write, don’t do it for praise. Do it because you have to do it, because you love it so much that you can’t not write. Take my word for it, being able to do something you love, something that’s a part of you, and actually make a little money from it is tremendously rewarding.
If all you want is praise, go get a country and become a dictator. You’ll probably enjoy it a lot more.
I’m often asked about my writing process. I wish I weren’t. I don’t mind being asked, but answering honestly is kind of ... well, embarrassing. It’s not at all what people expect it to be and I hate to disappoint them.
People have very specific ideas about what it is writers do and how they do it. It’s important to know that all of them are wrong. It’s not that what writers do is so mysterious, it’s just that there are as many different ways to write as there are writers. Ask ten different writers about their process and you’ll get ten different answers — hell, maybe more! There may be some overlap, but the answers will be different. But chances are, they won’t meet the expectations of those who have a romantic, soft-focus image of what writers do.
I don’t have what I would call a writing routine, a schedule I follow, a time to do this and a time to do that. That would be like having a breathing routine, or a water-drinking routine. Writing has always been a part of my life; it’s never been something I’ve had to make myself do because it’s such a major part of my makeup. If I go for any length of time without writing, I get irritable, agitated, restless. For me, writing is one of the things I do without giving it a lot of thought, not unlike eating or going to the bathroom (there are some critics who will tell you that my writing bears a striking resemblance to the latter). So when I’m asked about my writing routine, I always experience a moment of confusion, followed by a second or two of panic as I think to myself, Oh, shit, I’m supposed to have a ROUTINE?
In fact, I don’t give a lot of thought to any aspect of what I do unless I’m asked about it, and then I have to articulate it — and oddly, I find that difficult to do. I suspect part of the reason may be fear. I think deep down inside, I’m worried that if I examine this stuff too closely, it’ll fall apart and I won’t be able to do it anymore, it just won’t work. I’m afraid that, as with a magic trick, once the “how” is uncovered, nothing will be left — and there I’ll be, standing on stage in a tuxedo and top hat with my thumb up my ass.
The whole thing starts out innocently enough. I’ll get an idea. It can come from anywhere — a news story, a dream, an overheard conversation, a personal experience, or maybe it just dropped into my head out of nowhere (it happens). I might jot down a line or two to remind myself of the idea later, but chances are, if I have to be reminded of the idea, it’s not good enough to pursue, because if it were, it would not leave my head. The ideas that end up getting written are those that lodge in my brain like a fish bone in your throat — and, let’s be honest, those that I can sell.
I don’t do anything that could accurately be called “outlining.” I’ve tried. For years, I was told by other writers that I couldn’t possibly be writing novels without outlining them first because that was, they said, impossible. I heard this so often that I became convinced I was doing it wrong. So I took a shot at outlining. Big mistake. For me, anyway.
I attempted to outline an entire book from beginning to end and nearly ruptured my brain. Then I tried to follow and stick to the outline as I wrote the book. It was like trying to write while being chewed on by a bunch of ferrets. I could not get the book to adhere to the outline, not even for a little while. The characters rebelled and tried to take the book in a different direction. As I wrote, I discovered new ideas that made the story better, but that drew it even further away from the outline that did not include them. I simply. Could. Not. Do it. But it was a valuable experience because, for the first time, it forced me to look at how I do what I do. It made me see why I had never outlined in the past and what I did instead of outlining. It made me more aware of how I work — more importantly, of what works for me.
I have to write in order to discover what I’m writing about. That means that to write a book, I have to sit down and actually start writing. Planning ahead with something like an outline, trying to work out the plot and characters before I start actually writing the book, simply doesn’t work for me. I have to be engaged in the act of writing — not writing about what I’m planning to write, but writing what I’m actually writing. Does that make sense? That’s how I learned to write, and that’s how I’ve always written. And it works. For me, anyway. Is it more efficient than writing an outline? Hell, no!
This is where the chaos and confusion come in. While I don’t outline, I do jot down notes on character and plot so I can keep track of things, but my notes can be read only by me. Anyone trying to make sense of them without my help most likely would conclude that I’d been drinking, taking drugs, or was having a stroke when I wrote them down.
It’s often said that writing is rewriting, and that’s true. But when someone asks me how many drafts I go through on a book, I don’t know how to answer, because I don’t keep track of that. All the editing and rewriting I do is done while I’m writing. I might be on page 319 of a manuscript when I write something that refers back to an earlier scene that starts on page 94. I’ll go back to that scene to read it again and discover something wrong with it. I’ll start to fix it, but I might end up rewriting the whole scene before going back to page 319 and continuing. Hell, I might end up rewriting the whole chapter before I resume. And I might do that three or four times. But it’s not something I do after I’ve finished the first draft — I do it while writing the first draft, which is never really the first draft, because by the time I’m done with it, I’ve rewritten it, chunk by chunk, several times. Then when it’s all done, I go through it and work on it some more. If someone were to ask me of my work in progress, “What draft are you on?” my head would probably explode if I tried to answer accurately, because I never know.
I have a home office where I do my work. It’s a mess. It’s mostly books. Just a big explosion of books all over the place. It looks like the office collided at high speed with a public library. There are so many books on shelves and on my desk and stacked on the floor that it would be perfectly fitting to find a black-and-white Burgess Meredith in my office whimpering over his broken glasses, “That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was all the time I needed!”
I used to be able to write no matter what was going on around me. No matter where I was or what was happening, I could totally immerse myself in my work almost instantly. As a boy, writing was an escape for me. It was a way to escape my home life, which was rather dark, and even myself, which seemed necessary at the time because back then, I loathed myself. Writing was a hermetically sealed, soundproof refuge in which I could lock myself anytime. That’s no longer the case. I enjoy my life now and I’m quite happy with who I am — I have no need to escape either. These days, I’m much more easily distracted. It’s harder now to quickly burrow deep into the story I’m writing and forget everything else. I have to work harder than I used to at avoiding or resisting distractions.
Getting into the work isn’t the quick, easy thing it used to be. I kind of have to sneak up on it. I always start the day by checking the news online. Did anything blow up while I was asleep? Are we at war again? Which celebrity’s hacked naked cell phone pics have been posted online and is it anyone I want to see? I’ll read a news story, then open my manuscript and start taking a look at what I wrote the night before. Then I’ll read another story online, or watch a video. Maybe I’ll post it on Facebook. Then back to last night’s work. I’ll go back and forth for a while and sort of ease myself into the work a bit at a time, like an old man slowly lowering himself into the tub, until I lose interest in all the other stuff.
When I’m writing, the TV is usually on, sometimes I run a movie, or there’s music playing. You might think that would be a distraction, but it’s not. It’s all part of the bubble. In order to write and remove from my awareness any distractions, I have to build a bubble around myself and stay inside it. Within the bubble, I might be working on a book while a movie is playing. It’s probably a movie I’ve seen many times, something I love and with which I’m very familiar (playing something I haven’t seen while I’m trying to work would be distracting). Sometimes, I will look up at the TV and maybe spend a few minutes watching. That’s always because I’ve hit a bump in the story that needs smoothing out. The movie gives me a diversion, something to turn to while the bump in the story is addressed in a back room of my brain. It’s discussed, taken apart, put back together, rearranged, rewritten, argued about, and finally decided upon while I’m watching a scene from Blue Velvet or Some Like it Hot. When the problem has been hammered out, I start writing again and put the solution on the page.
I’ve always done this. The only thing that changes is the diversion. When I first began to work on a computer, for example, it was Solitaire. Sometimes it’s a movie or TV show. Maybe it’s a piece of music or a talk show on the radio. These days, it’s often Facebook. I’ll post something on my wall or comment on someone else’s post or contribute to a discussion while the story problem is being tackled in that back room. None of this disrupts the work being done on the problem. The guys in the back room don’t even know it’s going on. I can even have an exchange with someone online without the bubble being popped, because that online exchange (which is silent, by the way — that’s important) is within the bubble. All is well in the bubble until —
— someone talks to me and expects a sensible response. If it’s just a remark that doesn’t involve responses or discussion, the bubble remains intact. But if it’s anything more than that, if it’s a phone call and I have to talk to someone, if it requires me to engage my mind and listen to something that’s being said, process and respond to it, the bubble pops. That pulls me out of the work. Actually, it ejects me from it. Then the bubble has to be rebuilt. In other words, I have to start over and get myself back down there in whatever world I was working on, and that takes time. I really hate it when my bubble gets popped.
I never fail to reach a point in the book — any book, every book — when I become convinced that it was a terrible mistake, that I never should have written the first word, that it’s going to end my career. After I’ve gotten through it, I can look back on it and see that it was just like all the other times I became convinced I was working on a disaster. But at the time that I’m going through it, that’s never obvious. I think that’s because each time, it’s triggered by something different, something unique to that particular book. I never panic for the same reason twice, so it always feels new, like this time I’m right, it really will ruin me.
Then comes the time to wrap it up. That’s not always easy to do. This is one of the many ways that writing resembles masturbation — you have to know when to stop! Sometimes I get lucky and the end of the book comes early; on a couple of occasions, it has come first. Knowing how a book is going to end well in advance can be helpful in knowing when to stop writing it. But I don’t always know when or how it’s going to end and I have to find that ending the same way I find everything else — gropingly, messily.
The whole process is messy, and the entire time, I feel like I’m up to my elbows in it, physically struggling with it, trying to mold it, pound it into shape. As a full time writer, I’m usually working against a deadline, which adds some pressure to the process. For me, writing is messy work that’s not at all romantic. It’s a little like working in a MASH unit, except all the lives at stake are imaginary. It can be extremely frustrating, infuriating and exhausting. But at the same time, it’s exhilarating and exciting and never, ever, ever boring.
When I’m asked how I deal with writer’s block, I sometimes dance around the question because I just don’t want to get into it. But the honest answer is that I don’t believe in writer’s block, and I wouldn’t have time for it if I did. Writer’s block does not exist. It is not an ailment or condition or syndrome, although you’d never know it from the way some writer’s refer to it. “I’m struggling with writer’s block.” No, you’re not. You’re not writing, that’s what you’re doing. But saying you’re struggling with writer’s block sounds sexier than, “I don’t feel like writing.”
No one feels like working all the time, no matter what they do, but they do it, anyway. We all do it. Writing is no different. You won’t feel like doing it every day. Maybe you didn't get enough sleep the night before, or you're distracted by family problems or financial problems or health problems, or any number of things. Whatever it is that's keeping you from writing, it's not writer's block! If there's something in you that's getting in the way of your work, find out what it is and fix it. Sometimes you can do that in your writing, sometimes you need help to do it, but be honest with yourself about it. Writers have to be honest with themselves about their work because if they're not, sooner or later they will make fools of themselves. But you have to keep writing — even when you don't feel like it or don't want to — because that’s what writers do. You just have to get comfortable with the fact that not everything you write will be great, or good, or even passable. On those days when you don’t feel like writing, you’ll probably write a lot of crap. But writing crap is often what gets you to the good stuff. That’s why you have to write. If you keep writing, you’ll write something good. If you don’t write, you won’t write anything. Writer’s block is a lie writers tell themselves.
Now, if you were to try to mimic my writing process — the train wreck outlined above — I would be flabbergasted if it worked for you. That’s why I always caution aspiring writers not to believe everything they hear or read about writing, even if it’s said or written by a writer. No one can tell you how to write. Don’t get me wrong — that won’t stop them, and plenty will try to tell you how to write. The writers who told me I couldn’t possibly write a novel without an outline were telling the truth at the time because outlines worked for them. They couldn’t write a novel without an outline, and they shouldn’t try, because that’s what works. Over the years, I’ve met a lot of writers who, like me, don’t outline and prefer to discover their stories and characters as they write. That’s what works for them. Neither is right, neither is wrong. The right thing for any writer to do is whatever works.
It’s a good idea to find out how other writers work because you may find bits and pieces you can use or perhaps just some sensible advice. Read their books, listen to their lectures. But keep in mind that what they’re telling you works for them and not necessarily for anyone else. Ultimately, your process, your technique, your routine — everything about the way you write will be yours alone. And the only way you’ll figure out what your process, technique and routine are is to develop them. With all things connected to writing, the only way you can accomplish that is to do it. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it. Do it. Figure it out by process of elimination. In other words, do the one and only thing that will get you where you want to go as a writer — WRITE.
I love stumbling onto movies I somehow missed during their original release, or that received so little distribution and promotion that I’ve never heard of them before, and that turn out to be fantastic. About a year ago, I discovered Jennifer Lynch’s 2008 film Surveillance at the video store and rented it. I knew nothing about it except that it was Lynch’s return to directing after the fifteen-year absence that followed her troubled debut, Boxing Helena, a movie that was savaged by everyone from movie critics to the National Organization for Women. I didn't think it was a very good movie, but I thought it was a very interesting movie that showed great promise. I was eager to see what she was up to all these years later, and Surveillance took the top of my head off.
I recently watched it again and discovered that I was right the first time. It's the kind of movie I expected not to hold up on a second viewing, but it surprised me. It seems like a simple enough plot. To solve some gruesome murders in a remote and desolate area, two FBI agents and some police officers question witnesses. I know — sounds dull as dirt. But this is one of those movies that can be seriously deflated with too much information, so I will leave you to discover the story as it unfolds.
The cast couldn’t be better, with outstanding performances by everyone. In the starring roles are Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond, with support from Michael Ironside, Caroline Aaron, Pell James, Hugh Dillon, Ryan Simpkin, Saturday Night Live veteran Cheri Oteri and others. Pullman’s work is especially startling, but I didn’t see that until the second viewing. Bill Pullman has never gotten the credit he deserves as an actor and it’s his own damned fault — he makes us forget he’s acting.
Jennifer Lynch did not fall far from the tree. She shares her father’s knack for showing us the ugly reality just under the surface of perception, and sometimes the ugly reality that's right in front of our faces but being ignored. She shows much more confidence here than in her first movie, as well as an admiral determination to mess up her audience.
Lynch has said that the movie started as a script about witches by Kent Harper. I wish I could observe that transformation as it occurred over time. There is nothing supernatural in the draft of Surveillance that made it to the screen, but I think it is most definitely a horror movie. It does all the things a great horror movie should do — it makes the familiar menacing and makes us look with some dread at ourselves and the world around us — and it is very much a movie of its paranoid, nervous, angry, confused time. I would advise anyone who wants to write horror fiction or films to pay close attention to this movie and take notes. If the horror genre is going to retain any life at all, it’s going to have to leave behind the dusty old vampires, slashers, zombies and inbred hillbilly families and start focusing on the scarier-than-shit fears that make up real life on planet earth today. In Surveillance, Lynch manages to do that in a way that makes the movie disturbing on all kinds of levels.
The movie was, of course, attacked by most critics. It’s too brutal, they said, too ugly. One critic called it “a reprehensible film” and most criticized it for being sadistic and upsetting. That’s like criticizing a musical for having songs. They aren’t reviewing the movie, they’re reviewing the kind of movie it is, and most of them wish it were another kind of movie. That's not honest criticism, that's whining. (Have I mentioned how little attention I pay to movie critics these days?) One critic, though — the San Francisco Examiner’s Rossiter Drake — hits the mark with this paragraph: “There are those who will be unable to appreciate Surveillance’s unrelenting savagery on any level. Still others will find it affecting and largely uncompromising, the kind of movie that plunges you into a nightmare and skillfully ratchets up the intensity until you’re grateful for a moment’s respite.”
That’s exactly what Surveillance does — it plunges you into a nightmare. The problem is that the nightmare doesn’t differ all that much from the world in which we’re living, where it is sometimes too easy to believe there are no longer any “good guys.”
I've come to feel a kind of connection with Tim Burton because he keeps reviving my childhood. He directed the first big Batman movie, which I loved. He remade Planet of the Apes, which I didn't like, but still. He directed The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which was my favorite Disney cartoon as a boy. And now, he's resurrected another childhood touchstone, Dark Shadows. We're in the same age group and seem to have grown up being shaped by the same things.
Dawn and I seldom go to the movies these days, but saw Dark Shadows to celebrate our anniversary, and it was an enjoyable two hours. But it sure has stirred up a shitstorm of Burton-bashing. Reading the reviews, you'd think Burton was guilty of some kind of crime.
One review after another attacked Burton for repeating himself, for being a purveyor of style over substance, for wearing out his whole gothy schtick, for putting Johnny Depp in too many of his movies — essentially, they have attacked Tim Burton for ... being Tim Burton.
In his review for ABC News, David Blaustein writes, "It’s no surprise that Johnny Depp is fantastic as the anachronistic
Barnabas, and much of the film’s fun comes from his struggle to relate
to 1972 America." Then, in the next paragraph, he writes, "Depp and Tim Burton once were like that fantastic young couple who
couldn’t keep their hands off each other. We looked at them and
thought, 'Wow, those two are amazing together.' After a while, though,
their PDA grows predictable and unimpressive, to the point that you wish
they’d just break up already."
Beth Accamando writes in a review for KPBS, "The film continues a run of disappointing Burton-Depp collaborations ... They have gotten so bad that I actually look to each of their new films
together with a sense of dread rather than eager anticipation.
Many other reviews say basically the same things. Is it time for us to turn on Burton now? I guess I haven't been paying attention to the schedule. I'll sit this celebrity take-down out, if you don't mind. I still find Burton to be one of the most interesting directors working today. I like some of his movies more than others — like I said, I didn't like Planet of the Apes, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory left me a little cold — but Burton's misses are usually more interesting these days than most of the directors out there at the top of their game. I know that even if the new Burton movie turns out to be one of his lesser works, it's still going to be worth seeing simply because it's Burton and I like what he does, I enjoy his sensibilities. It all comes down to personal taste, of course. But it certainly does seem that a memo went out to movie critics notifying them that it's open season on Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, because most of the reviews of Dark Shadows are not really reviews of the movie but of Burton and Depp and their body of work together.
Dark Shadows is not Tim Burton's best movie, but it manages to gently spoof the beloved old '60s soap opera without disrespecting it, and most of all, the movie is rendered in Burton's distinctive visual style, which I always enjoy. As I've said before, it would be next to impossible to make a serious adaptation of Dark Shadows these days because vampires and witches are ... well, come on, let's face it, they're a little silly. A spoof was the only way to go, and I think Burton pulled it off delightfully.
It could not have a better cast. Chloe Grace Moretz is hilarious as bratty teenager Carolyn Stoddard — she is a master of the disapproving sneer. Helena Bonham Carter plays Dr. Julia Hoffman as a prickly drunk for whom nearly everything in life is an imposition. Michelle Pfeiffer doesn't have a lot to do, but she looks great doing it. Jackie Earl Haley gets some laughs as handyman Willie Loomis. But it's Eva Green as the witch Angelique Bouchard and Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins who remain the focus of the film and they eat the movie up with abandon.
For my money, Tim Burton is one of very few directors who are able to capture those nonexistent worlds that lurk only in our dreams, nightmares and fantasies and put them on the screen in a way that looks — and, more importantly, feels — right, that makes us nod and say, "Yep, that's it! He's got it!" Also in that category are Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro. So I'll keep seeing Burton's movies, even if he's passed his expiration date with the critics.
One of my favorite things about Dark Shadows is that at no point in the film do vehicles turn into giant, deafening robots. No aliens blow up a city and no one dons a superhero costume and flies away to make the world safe for corporate America. I did not have to take Dramamine before seeing the movie because there were no spastic hand-held cameras trying to convince me that the movie was made by amateurs under stressful conditions. Given all that, the movie is almost subversive.
Dark Shadows is an amusing, silly trifle designed to entertain and make you smile, and that's all it's meant to be. As far as I'm concerned, that's reason enough to recommend it.
Decades ago, when I was a still dreaming about being a professional writer, a man came to the Seventh-day Adventist college I’d attended — Pacific Union College in Angwin, California — and spoke about writing. Not just any man, but an actual writer. A pro! A NOVELIST! I wasn’t attending the college at the time and missed the guest speaker but heard about his appearance later from a friend. I found it hard to believe.
A novelist had spoken at a Sadventist college? A writer of fiction — the stuff that Sadventist founder and “prophet” Ellen G. White had claimed god had shown her to be so bad for people? The stuff that made people “go through life with a diseased imagination, magnifying every little grievance?” The stuff that did so much damage to the human mind that it caused people to be “afflicted with paralysis from no other cause than excess in reading?” The stuff that turned people into “mental inebriates?” (I’m not making this shit up — it comes from Ellen G. White’s book Messages to Young People.)
Even more interesting was the fact that this man, like me, had been raised a Sadventist — and he was a writer anyway! I knew that meant he’d been told by many people throughout his life that his writing talent was really Satan working through him to harm others, so I knew that his accomplishment was one that had required not only real ability, but a lot of courage, as well. I made a note of his name: Steven Spruill. I found some of his work and read it, and my mind was further blown. He wrote science fiction! He wrote thrillers! He even wrote horror! It’s like this guy was some kind of future me! At least, I hoped so.
Some years later, I attended a convention in Tucson shortly after the publication of my first novel, Seductions, and he was there. I met him in a hotel corridor where he was chatting with F. Paul Wilson. It was an inauspicious meeting — we talked for a while, then moved on. But it hit me hard. Steven Spruill was, to me, a pioneer. He had managed to hack his way out of the Seventh-day Adventist jungle of fear and paranoia, of self-loathing and repression, and do with his life the very thing I wanted to do with mine. He’d cut a trail that I could follow.
That was about 28 years ago. During the intervening years, having met in person only that one time, Steve and I have become more than the best of friends — we refer to one another as “my brother from another mother.” Our lives paralleled each other in ways that would be creepy if it weren’t for the fact that such parallels are common between people raised in the Sadventist cult. We both had attended Sadventist schools and engaged in the same kinds of activities growing up; we both had instilled in us the great gifts of Sadventism — fear, paranoia, and a sense of no self worth, a dirty feeling of self-loathing that, according to our parents and friends, could be addressed only by the teachings of the Sadventist cult, along with the thoroughly insane (and mostly plagiarized) writings of the cult’s alcoholic, masturbation obsessed, and — according to the cult — absolutely infallible Victorian-era prophet Ellen White. And yet, he had managed to navigate his way through all that and become something that, according to the cult, he was not supposed to become: A novelist.
If you’re raised in Sadventism and attend its schools, if you live the beginning years of your life in that cult, abiding by its rules, having your head filled with its teachings, you find later that your childhood and teen years were very, very different from those of other people — different to the point of being weird, even creepy. When you try to tell others about it, they express shock and say things like, “They really taught you that? And you believed it?” The only other people who can truly understand it are those who’ve gone through it themselves. This is not limited to Sadventism. I’ve heard the same thing from ex-Mormons and people raised in other sects that are even more restrictive and dominating than mainstream Christianity. When you find someone who shares those experiences, you can speak in a kind of shorthand and be clearly and instantly understood. They start nodding knowingly before you’re even done with the sentence you’re speaking. They’ve been through it. They’ve been damaged by it. They know what you’re talking about.
But even more bonding was the fact that our reactions to that upbringing — our thoughts about the things we were taught, the way we processed that information and the way it was integrated into our lives and personalities, and the way we’d turned out — were startlingly similar, nearly identical in most ways. We had sustained the same damages and harbored the same insecurities and self-hatreds that were so common among Sadventists. But we had something a lot of ex-Sadventists didn’t — each other. And we shared a passion for writing.
I’ve learned a lot from Steve’s smooth writing, from his mastery of character, pacing, and suspense. I’m in awe of his range. He’s written science fiction novels like The Psychopath Plague, The Imperator Plot, and The Paradox Planet. He’s written horror novels like the hemophage trilogy Rulers of Darkness (nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the novel that coined the term “hemophage”), Daughters of Darkness and Lords of Light, and a favorite of mine, The Genesis Shield. The trilogy deals with vampires, and that fourth title is a zombie novel — but they are unlike any other vampire or zombie fiction you’ve ever read and take a scientific and medical approach to those traditional genre creatures. His medical thrillers — Painkiller, Before I Wake, My Soul to Take — are unnerving. He’s written about other monsters, as well — the Loch Ness monster in Hellstone (the first Spruill book I read) and a creature at large in the Pentagon in Sleeper, another favorite of mine and a book that smacks with authenticity (Steve’s wife Nancy is Director of Acquisition, Resources, and Analysis at the Pentagon). In his most recent novel, Ice Men, Steve has used all the skills he’s exhibited in his long career to capture the filth and blood and screams of the nearly forgotten Korean War and plunges the reader into it thoroughly and helplessly. At the moment, he’s finishing up a new thriller that sounds like it’s going to kick some serious ass, and I can’t wait to read it.
In recent years, the publishing industry has experienced some tectonic shifts that have created a lot of upheaval. A business once dominated by New York publishers has been fractured by print-on-demand, electronic publishing and self-publishing, creating confusion and a lot of frantic scrambling. Through no fault of their own, a lot of great, established writers have kind of been lost in the shuffle. But Steve has not stopped telling the stories he must tell and writing the things he has to write — like any writer, he has no choice in the matter. Steve walked away from a career as a clinical psychologist to write — and that was after being raised to believe that fiction is a wicked thing that does real physical harm to people. So a little fuss in the publishing business isn’t going to stop him.
But it’s a bit disheartening to know that the author of 16 novels and a nonfiction book — Absorbing Sponge Bob: Ten Ways to Squeeze More Happiness Out of Life — a writer who’s received starred reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, whose novels have sold in more than 20 foreign countries and have been condensed by Good Housekeeping magazine and Reader’s Digest Books, whose novels have been selections of the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club, and who received Catholic University of America's award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Literature can be buried in the rubble of the quakes that have been shaking the publishing business.
That’s why I’m writing this — to let you know that if you haven’t read Steven Spruill, you should. If you’re a writer or want to be a writer, you should be reading his blog at his website, where he discusses the details of writing and offers valuable advice, encouragement, and support to those of us who’ve been bitten by this tenacious bug.
I’m not writing this simply because he’s my brother from another mother. I’m writing it because good writing is good writing and it deserves to be read. Steven Spruill has created a lot of worlds, and he has plenty more in him. While he’s finishing up that new thriller, get to know his work. By the time it’s done, you’ll be dying to read it.
Someone recently told me that he’d attended a screening of Tim Burton’s new film Dark Shadows, which revives the popular supernatural daytime soap opera from the late 1960s. When he told me it was a parody, that Burton has played the whole thing for laughs, my heart sank. I had been looking forward to this movie with great anticipation. The TV series helped introduce me to the horror genre as a little boy and I was kind of fanatical about it back then. It used to scare the piss out of me. Over forty years later, I still vividly remember specific scenes from the show and how I used to cover my eyes in terror. Surely Tim Burton wouldn’t turn the terror of my childhood into a joke ... would he? Then I saw the trailer and knew it was true. But after giving it a little thought, I began to realize that my disappointment wasn’t very logical and that Burton’s decision to make a comedy was not only sensible but the only viable option. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the arc of the old soap opera mirrors the arc of the horror genre in which I’ve worked for the better part of three decades.
Created and produced by Dan Curtis, the show aired weekday afternoons from 1966 to 1971. That’s not a terribly long run, but still, it racked up an impressive 1,225 episodes, more than any other English language genre series in history, including the long-running Dr. Who. Dark Shadows is one of the very few classic soaps that managed to keep all of its episodes intact except one. It went into syndication in 1975 and reruns were airing on the SyFy Channel as late as 2003. It got off to a slow start as a gothic soap, with no supernatural elements at all. Critics dubbed it a plodding bore. But that changed as things in Collinwood began to get weird, and when the vampire Barnabas Collins, played by Shakespearean actor Jonathan Frid, was introduced a year into the series, its popularity skyrocketed.
When I think of Dark Shadows, I remember those bright childhood afternoons when merely hearing Robert Cobert’s creepy opening theme music would make me tense up with a happy kind of dread. It came on immediately after General Hospital, which my mother watched faithfully in those days. She did not like the fact that I watched Dark Shadows because it involved ghosts, witches, warlocks, werewolves, zombies, and, most famously, Barnabas the vampire, and Mom knew that Jesus approved of none of those things. But she let me watch it out of guilt, I think, because she knew Jesus wouldn’t approve of General Hospital, either, what with so many doctors fucking so many nurses (off screen, of course), so she allowed me to have my guilty pleasure because she had hers. It was a kind of mutual sin agreement, I guess. I felt no guilt about watching Dark Shadows, though. I felt excitement and thrills and suspense, and thanks to Angelique the witch, played by the wickedly beautiful Lara Parker, I also felt some things in my shorts that I did not yet understand.
When I think of Dark Shadows, I think of the spooky seances, the curses, the time travel, the creepy music — the soundtrack album still ranks as one of the biggest selling TV soundtrack albums of all time, and the song “Quentin’s Theme,” which was first heard in Dan Curtis’s 1968 TV movie The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, peaked at number 13 on the Billboard Top 100 chart, number three on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart, and earned Cobert a Grammy nomination.
I had the complete collection of Dark Shadows bubblegum cards (which I valued almost as much as my collection of Batman bubblegum cards). I kept them in a graham cracker box and pored over them frequently. They always carried the pink smell of those rectangles of bubblegum with which they’d been packaged and were always slightly gritty with the corn starch that came off that gum. My mother expressed to our pastor her fear that both Dark Shadows and Batman were endangering my eternal soul, so he came over to the house one day, had a long talk with me about the importance of going to heaven, and scared me into burning all of them, along with an assortment of comic books.
It’s difficult to overstate how popular Dark Shadows was back then, especially with kids and teenagers. Well, let's be honest — primarily with kids and teenagers. Mention it in any group of people of a particular age, and they will immediately tell you how fast they rushed home from school to watch the show every afternoon. Jonathan Frid and Lara Parker were rock stars and sex symbols. When Frid made a guest appearance on The Merv Griffin Show in 1969, Griffin said in his introduction, “It has caught on so incredibly that there are the ‘Frid girls’ — I know the whole front of our theater is lined with girls who couldn’t get in tonight and they’re out there screaming and yelling.” Merchandising was rampant — there was even a Barnabas Collins board game, for crying out loud! Dark Shadows remains the only daytime soap opera to spawn two major motion pictures, 1970's House of Dark Shadows (“Come and see how the vampires do it!”) and 1971's Night of Dark Shadows (“Just another night of terror!”). I wasn’t allowed to go to movie theaters (Jesus didn’t approve of those, either), but the TV trailers alone were enough to give me nightmares.
When I think of Dark Shadows, I remember how it used to set my imagination on fire. I would write Dark Shadows stories for my own amusement (long before I knew what fan fiction was) and carefully, meticulously draw picture after picture of the characters with colored pencils. I remember being genuinely terrified in the middle of the afternoon, in broad daylight.
One episode frightened me so much that I hid behind the rocking chair in our living room, and for a while, my mother stopped letting me watch the show. When my grandmother learned about this, she saw a chance to create conflict in our family, which was a hobby she cherished. She lived in a small trailer in our yard and informed me that I was welcome to come to her place to watch Dark Shadows with her every afternoon if my mother wasn’t going to let me watch it. My maternal grandmother was far scarier than Barnabas Collins ever came close to being and more evil than Angelique on her worst day, but because it meant I could watch the show, I got past that. When Mom learned that I was going to Grandma’s to watch Dark Shadows, much animosity ensued. She informed me that I would be watching Satan’s favorite soap opera in our living room from then on, not at Grandma’s.
But when I think of Dark Shadows, I remember the show I watched as a child. I remember how deeply immersed I would become in that world for thirty minutes every weekday afternoon, how emotionally involved I was in the lives of the Collins family. I remember Barnabas baring his fangs and the haunting tune played by Josette’s music box and the severed hand of the mysterious Count Petofi, which was supposed to cure Quentin of his lycanthropy, and so many other things. And I remember how delightfully, deliciously terrifying it all was. I seldom think of Dark Shadows as the adult I was when I watched reruns of the show decades later.
That’s a different memory. Very different.
Sets that wobbled or collapsed, props that broke or wouldn’t work, botched lines, flies buzzing around the actors’ faces, cameras and boom mics coming into view, stagehands creeping around in the background — those are the things I remember seeing in the reruns as an adult. Watching Dark Shadows now, my reaction is quite different than it was back in the late 1960s. Now I cringe and wonder how I ever could have been frightened by it.
None of those screw-ups happened because of incompetence. It was a daily show shot live-to-tape, meaning there were no retakes. The schedule was extremely tight and they had no time to do it over or polish it up. Everything was done once and then the production moved on to the next scene.
Now, it’s not scary ... it’s hilarious. But that did not matter to the show’s young audience at the time. They were hooked. It had the youngest audience of any daytime soap opera, and sadly, that helped kill the show. With the economy plunging, networks began to cut costs. The viewers of Dark Shadows were not appealing enough to advertisers at the time — they were too young to make household purchasing decisions. That, combined with dropping ratings, led ABC to pull the plug on the show and replace it with a new version of Password. Letters poured into the network and some viewers were so angry, they threatened to disrupt the taping of the game show that replaced their favorite soap opera, although that threat was never carried out.
In 1991, Dan Curtis tried to catch lightning in a bottle again with a much more polished version of Dark Shadows that aired in prime time on NBC. This time, the budget was big and the production was glossy. It attracted a large audience initially, but then the network repeatedly preempted the show to cover the Gulf War and ratings declined rapidly. It was cancelled after one season. Another attempt was made to revive the series in 2004 when a pilot was shot for the WB network, but it was never picked up.
And now it’s back. Tim Burton has directed what appears to be a lavish film starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas, but the tone has changed. Now, Barnabas has been revived in 1972 and is a comical fish out of water. It’s funny, but this time, it’s intentionally funny.
I think chances are good that had Burton decided to do Dark Shadows with a straight face, it still would have been funny, because let’s face it, folks, it’s really hard to take vampires seriously these days. Or witches, or werewolves, or just about any of those old traditional horror icons.
When Boris Karloff appeared on movie screens in Jack Pierce’s groundbreaking makeup in the 1931 classic Frankenstein, people screamed. And they meant it! They were horrified. 35 years later, that same makeup was used on Fred Gwynne in the sitcom The Munsters. In that same sitcom, Al Lewis, who played Grandpa, was a vampire who was dressed much like Bela Lugosi in 1931's Dracula, a movie that had women fainting in theaters.
In the years since then, a lot has happened to the vampire. Anne Rice romanticized him starting in 1976, and even more in the years that followed as her Vampire Chronicles became more and more popular. And then in 2005, Stephenie Meyer infantilized and Mormonized the vampire — and, for that matter, the werewolf — in Twilight and the books and movies that followed.
How could we possibly be expected to take Barnabas Collins seriously at this point?
The vampire no longer works in the horror genre because he has been co-opted by the romance genre — along with the werewolf and the zombie and an assortment of other once frightening creatures. There was a time when the vampire was undead. Now, as far as the horror genre is concerned, he’s just dead. But he’s not alone.
A used bookstore I patronize recently removed its entire horror section. Remember, this is a used bookstore. This decision was made because no one was buying the books in the horror section. They were just sitting there collecting dust. The store’s owner decided to make room for books that would sell. You can still find books about vampires and werewolves in that store, but you’ll have to look in the romance section.
I don’t think there is a better example of the state of horror fiction than that.
But if you take a peek inside the small and insular community of horror writers and fans, you’ll see something different. Zombies are still looking for a snack, vampires are still baring their fangs and attempts are still being made to breathe life into the werewolf. While you’re there, cock an ear and listen. You’ll hear people wondering why horror doesn’t sell, why publishers aren’t interested in the genre and why nobody but those inside that small, insular community cares anymore. There are very good answers to those questions, but you won’t hear them in the horror community, where people are still taking seriously creatures and ideas that people have been laughing at for years now.
More than anything else, it was probably the success of Stephen King that launched the horror boom of the 1980s. King wrote about vampires in ‘Salem’s Lot and ghosts in The Shining, and he dealt with other traditional horror creatures and ideas, too. But contrary to what a lot of horror fans and even horror writers believe, they were not what made King’s work so popular. What made his novels work so well was everything else in them — the characters and their lives, their problems, their real-world fears. These were people dealing with real problems like domestic abuse and poverty and mental illness. And then, as if those problems and fears weren’t enough, he threw vampires and ghosts and other supernatural threats into their lives. Those supernatural threats worked because the people they threatened were recognizable people living familiar lives with problems that were real and timely. King’s books touched people and spoke to them because he reflected their lives, but with the added excitement of supernatural horror.
At some point, horror fiction stopped touching and speaking to people. It is not reflecting the world in which we live. In 2012, it’s hard to be threatened by vampires and zombies when you’re losing your job, or your home, or you have cancer but have no medical coverage, or when you turn on the news and hear some guy who wants to be president — and may very well succeed — say that things like contraception and abortion and certain sexual acts should be illegal or that people should be jailed for their sexuality alone. Right now, a glance at the skyrocketing price of groceries and gas is scarier than any werewolf. Zombies seem pretty lame when you’re wondering if your son or daughter will be shipped off to yet another war in the Middle East ... and whether or not that son or daughter will be coming home again.
So it’s not too surprising that Tim Burton decided to go for laughs with Dark Shadows, because he probably would have gotten them, anyway. A centuries-old vampire who’s revived in 1972? That’s not even a little creepy anymore. And setting it in 1972 was a good idea, too, because a centuries-old vampire who’s revived in 2012 probably would end up with his own reality TV show.
We live in a time when serial killers have become heroes, for Christ’s sake! Don’t get me wrong, I think Dexter is a fine series, but has anyone stopped to think that we have a hit show with a protagonist who’s a serial killer? NBC just greenlit a weekly primetime series about Hannibal Lecter! Hell, he was scary only 20 years ago, now we’re going to follow his exploits in a primetime series? What's next? Pedophile Crossing Guard on Fox? The Real Rapists of Beverly Hills on Bravo? Vampires don’t stand a chance of being menacing anymore!
My initial reaction to a Dark Shadows parody was wrong. Comedy was the only way it could go. Because it’s not horror anymore. Very few of the things we once considered horror hold any threat these days. The world has changed. The horror genre has a lot of catching up to do. But don't hold your breath.
