Peter O'Toole and Sid Caesar: Two Fallen Redwoods

But, from a personal perspective, the two iconic performers whose deaths resonated most with me were actor Peter O'Toole and comedy genius Sid Caesar. In differing ways, their lives intersected with mine in a manner that had a profound impact.

Though I've been a licensed psychotherapist for the past 26 years, in my prior career I was a Hollywood screenwriter. One of the scripts I co-wrote was for a film called My Favorite Year, which starred Peter O'Toole and featured a fictional 1950s TV comic named King Kaiser -- who was based on Sid Caesar.

As the character named Alan Swann -- a thinly-disguised Errol Flynn -- O'Toole gave what I and many of his fans consider one of his best performances. He perfectly captured Flynn's exuberance, narcissism and insecurity -- as well as the famous swashbuckler's self-deprecating wit.

In the role of King Kaiser -- host of a weekly comedy series based on Your Show of Shows -- Joseph Bologna replicated Sid Caesar's enormous personal energy, embodying his infamous anger as well as his comedic intensity.

Both O'Toole and Caesar were, in their heyday, larger than life personalities. Famous for their struggles with alcohol, they were willing to live life on their own terms -- even when the consequences of that choice caused them more grief than glory.

Regardless, each, in my opinion, should have been given the opportunity to work much more than they did. Especially when both performers were at the top of their game. That they weren't always afforded that opportunity is our collective loss. In fact, it's unlikely that we'll see many performers of their monumental talent and outsized personalities again.

When each of their deaths were reported in the news, I thought of something a friend of mine had said when film director Stanley Kubrick died. "Well, that's one more fallen redwood in a rapidly dwindling forest."

That forest is now missing two more redwoods.

As a fan, and as a former screenwriter who'd once been professionally connected -- at least tangentially -- with both men, I mourn the passing of Peter O'Toole and Sid Caesar. And offer a posthumous thanks for the richness that each added to my life.

Rest in Peace.

A former Hollywood screenwriter, Dennis Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist and author of Writing From the Inside Out. He also writes the Daniel Rinaldi mystery series.


Reposted From The Huffington Post

Memo to a Successful Writer

Hollywood on the Couch
The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.
by Dennis Palumbo

How to keep making it after you've made it


I’ve heard from a number of my Hollywood writing patients who are new to the business, as well as some successful veterans, ask me to write a column about them. People who are doing well, having their TV scripts and screenplays produced, being offered good deals.
 
So here goes.

It doesn’t suck. When they option your work, when your film is opening or your pilot is picked up, it can be very sweet indeed.

There are still challenges, of course. Like keeping your focus on the writing, and not getting caught up in just having meetings and developing pitches. Not to mention the effort it takes, in the midst of all the business concerns, to remember why you wanted to write in the first place.

Success in the industry can be as terrifying as it is exciting, as complicated as it is gratifying. But it’s worth it. Seeing your words transformed into feature films and TV episodes, getting to communicate what’s in your mind and heart to countless others, is a profound joy.

That said, here are some things to remember to help keep you grounded...and keep you writing.


YOU ARE ENOUGH. You have everything you need—right now—to be the writer you want to be. As Emerson said, “To know that what is true for you in your private heart is true for everyone—that is genius.” Which means each writer has within him or her the entire range of human experience. If you feel it and think it, pretty much everyone else does, too. So keep mining your own particular thoughts and feelings, what excites or worries or intrigues you, and you’ll have an inexhaustible supply of things to write about.

STAY CURIOUS. One of the great gifts that creative people tend to share is a sense of wonder. The best way to keep your writing fresh and your ideas unique is to be open to new experiences, concepts and situations. Moreover, smart writers are always reading new things, discovering new films or innovative TV programs—in other words, keeping their eyes and ears open to what else is going on around them creatively.

BE IN THE WORLD. I don’t mean you have to watch CNN 24/7, but an understanding of the issues and stresses confronting the people around you is crucial to keeping your writing relevant. Whether you write the broadest of comedies or the most sober of dramas, the best writing is informed by the context in which it is created. Our own culture—political, social, economic—is and has always been the well-spring for the most creative story-telling. It’s what makes a narrative or a collection of characters—and their concerns—relatable to the audience.

DON’T PANIC IF YOU GET STUCK. What does it mean if, in the midst of a script or treatment, you get stuck? It means you’re a writer—and that’s all it means. Writing is hard (and good writing is harder!), so getting stuck, or having doubts about which direction to take the narrative, is just part of the job. Writers only get in trouble when they give their writing problems a personal meaning—when they think it’s evidence of some defect or inadequacy in themselves. It isn’t. In my experience, once I help patients challenge the notion that a writing problem indicates something deficient in them, they tend to be better able to grapple with the actual problem itself—and work through it.

TRUST YOURSELF. Your talent, instincts and hard work have gotten you this far, so it’s unlikely that this skill set will abandon you. No matter how things are going, trust yourself. Every writer, regardless of success, has to navigate the ups and downs of the business. This is a lot easier to do if you can trust yourself—creatively, professionally and personally. You’re the one knows best how to tell a story, craft compelling characters, build to a suspenseful moment or the pay-off to a joke. You know best how to thrill an audience, how to make them laugh and cry and think.

Which means, no matter what, remember who you are and what you can do


Reposted from Psychology Today

She’s Your Agent, Not Your Mother

There's an old joke about the relationship between writers and their agents: a veteran writer comes home to find police and fire trucks crowding the street, surrounding the smoking remains of his house.

Stricken, he asks the officer in charge what happened. The cop shakes his head and says, "Well, it looks like your agent came to your house, murdered your entire family, took all your valuables, then burned the place to the ground."

To which the writer responds, with an astonished smile, "My agent came to my house?"

A telling joke. As a published author myself, as well as a psychotherapist who works with creative people, I'm very familiar with the complicated, confusing and sometimes combative connection between writers and their agents.  Yet what makes that relationship so difficult often has nothing to do with the agent, and everything to do with the writer.

Like it or not, here are three sobering facts:

First, your agent is not your parent. It's not the agent's job to encourage, support or validate your creative ambitions, insofar as they reflect your inner need to be loved and cherished. Such needs were your birthright, and, hopefully, were given to you in your childhood. If, however, they were not, it's not your agent's job to pick up the slack.

Second, your agent is in business to make money. This is not a crime against humanity, an affront to the arts, nor a personal repudiation of your aesthetic dreams. It's just a fact.

And, lastly, while your agent may indeed admire your talent, and share with you lofty creative and financial goals, he or she is not obligated to care about them as much as you do. In fact, no one cares about your career as much as you do. Which means the burden of worrying about your artistic aspirations, income, reputation in the field, and level of personal and professional satisfaction rests entirely on your shoulders.

It’s important to remember these facts. Otherwise, a writer can come to expect too much from an agent in terms of esteem-building, validation and empathy. Which means that every unreturned phone call, every less-than-ecstatic response to a new piece of work or proposed project, every real or imagined shift in vocal tonality during a conversation is experienced by the writer as an injury to his or her self-worth.

The wise writer understands this, if only theoretically, and should at least strive to keep his or her relationship with an agent in context. Hopefully it will lessen the blows, whatever they are and whenever they come.

Otherwise, what you’re seeking is not an agent but an approving parent. And, hell, I ought to know. I’ve done it myself. And still do, on occasion.  So, despite what I’ve just said, when you find yourself feeling the same way, give yourself a break. Take a breath, mentally re-group, and get back to writing.  

In the end, nothing---and no one---is more validating.  


Reposted From The Thrill Begins

Write Till You Drop By ANNIE DILLARD

 

Born in Pittsburgh in 1945, Annie Dillard won a Pulitzer Prize at the tender age of 29 for her famous work, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." She has since authored eight more books and works as an Adjunct Professor of English at Wesleyan College in Connecticut

 People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all. Strange seizures beset us. Frank Conroy loves his yo-yo tricks, Emily Dickinson her slant of light; Richard Selzer loves the glistening peritoneum, Faulkner the muddy bottom of a little girl's drawers visible when she's up a pear tree. ''Each student of the ferns,'' I once read, ''will have his own list of plants that for some reason or another stir his emotions.''

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote ''Huckleberry Finn'' in Hartford. Recently scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

The writer studies literature, not the world. She lives in the world; she cannot miss it. If she has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, she spares her readers a report of her experience. She is careful of what she reads, for that is what she will write. She is careful of what she learns, because that is what she will know.

The writer knows her field - what has been done, what could be done, the limits - the way a tennis player knows the court. And like that expert, she, too, plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. She hits up the line. In writing, she can push the edges. Beyond this limit, here, the reader must recoil. Reason balks, poetry snaps; some madness enters, or strain. Now gingerly, can she enlarge it, can she nudge the bounds? And enclose what wild power?

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, ''Do you think I could be a writer?''

''Well,'' the writer said, ''I don't know. . . . Do you like sentences?''

The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ''I liked the smell of the paint.''

Hemingway studied, as models, the novels of Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev. Isaac Bashevis Singer, as it happened, also chose Hamsun and Turgenev as models. Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer; Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce; E. M. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By contrast, if you ask a 21-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, ''Nobody's.'' He has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat. Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Bohr and Gauguin, possessed powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The work's possibilities excited them; the field's complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world harassed them with some sort of wretched hat, which, if they were still living, they knocked away as well as they could, to keep at their tasks.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn. A project that takes five years will accumulate those years' inventions and richnesses. Much of those years' reading will feed the work. Further, writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in ''Moby-Dick.'' So you might as well write ''Moby-Dick.'' Similarly, since every original work requires a unique form, it is more prudent to struggle with the outcome of only one form - that of a long work - than to struggle with the many forms of a collection.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book. Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem, too - the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes it in spite of that. He finds ways to minimize the difficulty; he strengthens other virtues; he cantilevers the whole narrative out into thin air and it holds. Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hopes for literary forms? Why are we reading, if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness, and press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and which reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. If we are reading for these things, why would anyone read books with advertising slogans and brand names in them? Why would anyone write such books? We should mass half-dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.

No manipulation is possible in a work of art, but every miracle is. Those artists who dabble in eternity, or who aim never to manipulate but only to lay out hard truths, grow accustomed to miracles. Their sureness is hard won. ''Given a large canvas,'' said Veronese, ''I enriched it as I saw fit.''

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then - and only then -it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk's.

One line of a poem, the poet said - only one line, but thank God for that one line - drops from the ceiling. Thornton Wilder cited this unnamed writer of sonnets: one line of a sonnet falls from the ceiling, and you tap in the others around it with a jeweler's hammer. Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down as if with tongs, restraining your strength, and wait suspended and fierce until the next one finds you: yes, this; and yes, praise be, then this.

Einstein likened the generation of a new idea to a chicken's laying an egg: ''Kieks - auf einmal ist es da.'' Cheep - and all at once there it is. Of course, Einstein was not above playing to the crowd.

Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art; do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength. Giacometti's drawings and paintings show his bewilderment and persistence. If he had not acknowledged his bewilderment, he would not have persisted. A master of drawing, Rico Lebrun, discovered that ''the draftsman must aggress; only by persistent assault will the live image capitulate and give up its secret to an unrelenting line.'' Who but an artist fierce to know - not fierce to seem to know - would suppose that a live image possessed a secret? The artist is willing to give all his or her strength and life to probing with blunt instruments those same secrets no one can describe any way but with the instruments' faint tracks.

Admire the world for never ending on you as you would admire an opponent, without taking your eyes off him, or walking away.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age: ''Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.''

Reposted From The New York Times

NIGHT TERRORS ESSAY IN THE SPRING ISSUE OF MYSTERY SCENE

                

In my latest Daniel Rinaldi mystery, NIGHT TERRORS, the Pittsburgh psychologist and trauma expert is asked by the FBI to treat one of their recently-retired profilers. After a twenty year career inside the minds of the most infamous serial killers, Special Agent Lyle Barnes can no longer sleep through the night. He’s tormented by a cascade of horrifying though indistinct images, along with intense feelings of dread and imminent danger. Until, sweat-soaked, heart pounding, he wakes up screaming.
 
He’s not alone. Once considered primarily a pediatric diagnosis, more and more adults are currently being treated for Night Terrors. And, researchers suspect, many more are suffering from the condition but are either too ashamed to report it or underestimate its long-term negative effects. A nightly experience of disturbed sleep can result in chronic fatigue, emotional fragility, a weakened immune system and reduced concentration.

Why the upsurge in Night Terrors in adults? Most clinicians—-including therapists like myself--are blaming the increased uncertainty of contemporary life. The economy, terrorism. Even natural disasters, like tsunamis, earthquakes, and super-storms. The daily anxiety suppressed by adults during waking life, now invading their sleep.

However, since science isn’t exactly sure what causes Night Terrors, developing approaches to dealing with it has been difficult.

Most experts believe the condition is caused by a sudden disruption in the central nervous system, usually triggered by stress, sleep deprivation, or substance abuse. With such a broad range of potential causes, treatment options are limited to medication, hypnotherapy, stress management techniques, and good old talk therapy. That is, as long as you have something to talk about.

And there’s the problem. Patients suffering from garden-variety nightmares can usually recount the content of their dreams, which perhaps leads to interpretation. Often, once the meaning of a patient’s dream becomes clear, the therapist can aid the patient in working through its various themes. The patient may find support in leavening the anxiety and dread left in the nightmare’s wake.

Unfortunately, people with Night Terrors can’t find the same solace, for the simple reason that, unlike nightmares, they don’t occur during REM sleep. Typically, Night Terrors erupt during Stage Four of the sleep cycle. Which means the sufferer doesn’t remember the dream images, giving both patient and therapist very little to work with.

In my novel, Rinaldi’s approach is to get the retired FBI agent to open up about his years as a profiler. His thousands of hours of contact with the most heinous and notorius serial killers. Since Barnes’ work was his life, Rinaldi believes that the best way to address his nocturnal demons is to get him to open up about the real-life demons with whom he spent most of his career. 

Not an easy task, since Lyle Barnes is also the target of an unknown assassin who’s already killed three others on a seemingly-random hit-list.

    A fictional reminder that in crime novels--as in life
--the real terrors occur when we’re awake. 


   
http://mysteryscenemag.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3091:spring-2013-issue-129-contents&catid=63:table-of-contents&Itemid=191                       

“Psycho” Killers Are People Too ... For Criminal Element.com

 

Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley: Who wouldn't trust him?

From Edward Hyde to Hannibal Lecter, to the serial killer in practically every James Patterson novel, what would the world of mystery thrillers be without the psychopathic, criminally disturbed villain?  It’s practically a sub-genre in itself.

Yet, as a therapist as well as a mystery writer, I can’t tell you how often I’ve read thrillers in which the author’s depiction of a “psycho” killer is pure boilerplate: unconvincing, unmotivated, without psychological depth or realism. But why is this? Especially when the writer’s other characters seem much more rounded, realistic, subject to the usual panoply of feelings and motives? 

I think it’s because some crime writers see their monstrous, unstoppable killer as being “out there” somewhere, beyond the realm of normal human behavior. A caricature of evil out of a child’s nightmare. Or, even worse, they often conjure a conveniently “crazy” killer who commits the crime merely because he’s crazy. Merely to horrify the reader. Merely as an excuse for gratuitous and graphic depictions of unspeakable acts. Merely as a bad guy heinous enough to have us rooting for the hero to finally stop him. In other words, the boogie-man.

Not that this is always the case. In Michael Connelly’s The Poet, serial child molester and murderer William Gladden is terrifyingly real because, in many ways, he seems so ordinary, so matter-of-fact. In Patricia Highsmith’s novels about Ripley, her antihero is so chillingly clear-headed that his atavism seems purely natural. And in Robert Bloch’s Psycho, Norman Bates is the veritable Poster Child for the dangers inherent in severe mother-son enmeshment. Though, on the surface, he seems like such a nice, thoughtful young man… 

Here’s my point: In my twenty-five years in private practice, I’ve come to realize that people—common, everyday people—have operatic passions. That stoic guy bagging groceries at your local supermarket, that helpful lady at the pharmacy, the janitor at your kid’s school—all of them, if given the opportunity to relate their life stories, would stun you with the personal dramas each has endured. The heartbreaks and triumphs, the yearnings and dashed hopes. The hurts and shame and missed opportunities they’ve obsessed about since high school. The deaths and financial losses and mental illnesses with which their families have struggled.

As I say, operatic passions. Great loves and hates. Maybe buried now beneath years of quiet, conventional living. Beneath years of daily toil, paying the bills, driving the kids to school. But those passions are undeniably there. Otherwise soap operas wouldn’t be a staple of broadcasting in every corner of the world, in every culture. Otherwise viewers wouldn’t be transfixed (often as a guilty secret) with reality TV, with true crime series on cable networks, with gossip in all its forms.

Which is why I believe that deep inside each mystery writer lies the seeds of every kind of human. From a nun to a serial killer, a corporate tycoon to a migrant worker, a life-giver to a life-taker. All the writer has to do is look within.

And the best of them do. Here’s an example, crude but illustrative. Let’s say your favorite mystery writer (call him Bob) has always had a secret yearning to be respected, admired. Perhaps this yearning began in childhood, when his siblings or classmates got all the glory in school or on the athletic field, and he felt ignored. Discounted. Invisible.

Now, as an adult and seasoned crime writer, Bob creates a villain—a terrifying serial killer, a sociopath who murders without remorse—who’s felt similarly discounted and invisible all his life. Rejected. Ignored. And who intends to do something about it.

Well, if you’re this particular bad guy, one thing that definitely gets you some attention is leaving a swath of mutilated bodies in your wake. And if you’re clever enough to continually elude the police, you probably feel a sense of pride. Of gratification. Of vindication. Now the world’s respecting you, even if it’s a respect based on fear. You’re certainly not invisible any more. At long last, you’re getting the attention you deserve!

Upstanding citizen on the outside; psycho within.

 (And, if Bob is any good at his craft, so is he…)

Luckily, regardless of how we were treated in childhood, most of us still grow up to be sane, rational citizens. Maybe our feelings are easily hurt, or we succumb too easily to envy or jealousy, but we’re probably not going to do much about it. Certainly nothing violent or criminal.

But in the fiction we read, we get to see these feelings acted out. We get to follow villainous characters who do all sorts of bad things—and, I submit, the more relatable their motives, the more terrifying we’re apt to find them. Because the cold fact is, in real life, even a psychopath has his or her reasons. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, believed his neighbor was a demon, ordering him to kill through communicating via his pet dog. Mary Martin Speck, a nurse who killed twenty-three patients, claimed to be doing the Lord’s work. Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, felt a need to prove his superiority over those lesser beings trying to catch him.

As I say, the reasons may be irrational, based on delusional beliefs or unfounded grandiosity, but they’re reasons nonetheless. At least in the killer’s mind.

Which means the brave writer has to visit that mind occasionally. Has to figure out some way to relate to that mind’s desires, fears, beliefs, pain, ego. So that we, his readers, can, too.

I recall a group therapy session years ago, when I was an intern in clinical training, in which one of the members got furious at another. Over some real or imagined slight.

Regardless, she got to her feet and verbally attacked this second person.

After ten minutes of vituperative rage and name-calling, the woman finally calmed herself. Then, turning to the therapist leading the group, she said, sheepishly, “Wow, all that anger and rage...all that ugly hate...I’m so sorry. That wasn’t me.”

To which the therapist responded, “Yes it was. It isn’t the whole truth of who you are, of course, but those dark feelings are in there. They’re in everybody. They’re as real in you as are your other feelings—your compassion, your generosity, your joy.”

And he was right. As John Fowles once wrote, in his novel, Daniel Martin, “Whole sight...or all the rest is desolation.”

By which he meant that the totality of the human condition, the entire truth of our experience as people, has to be acknowledged if we’re to live authentically. Just as, I believe, the totality of the human condition has to be explored and utilized by any crime writer seeking to create vivid, compelling, seriously terrifying villains.

At least if he or she wants us to believe in them…