Making the Cut

I have this weakness for entering stupid on-line contests run by agents on their websites. Most famously, an agent who called herself Miss Snark ran a 'crapometer' where she judged your log line; if it was good enough you got to submit the firt 750 words. I passed the first round but then butted up against the fact that I couldn't make the proper impact with my actual first section. So I figured out where I wanted to end up, and started cutting. Here's the original:

For Tom Jaglom, it began on the November afternoon when the Mafia killed Al­fredo Blasi. He didn’t know it, of course -- we often don’t know when things begin until after they’ve ended. The moment when forces that are going to change the world assem­ble and begin moving together is a question for hindsight and historians and college kids playing the if game in late-night dormitories -- if the Arch Duke Ferdinand hadn’t been assassinated in Sarajevo, if Hitler had attacked the British Army before they fled at Dunkirk ... or, in this case, if a reporter named Jim Gramble hadn’t been on the steps of the Criminal Courts Building that day, standing in the raw wind, asking questions -- what might have happened?

The question would have bored Tom Jaglom. He was a practical person. He had no interest in speculation; besides, on the day in question he had something much more important on his mind.

He was falling in love.

He was walking in Central Park with Amy Elwell, holding her hand inside his coat pocket, watching the wind scatter her long red hair, feeling truly happy for the first time in years. He felt too large for his skin. It was almost painful. The park was deserted in the bitter cold and it felt like their private estate.

They had been together all morning. Tom was supposed to have picked her up at ten, but he’d arrived at her apartment two hours early. He had been up since five. By seven he was on the street, buttoning his coat against the cold. The wind run­ning between the grimy buildings felt as clear as stream water. He gulped it as he walked. MacDougal Street was peaceful in the sharp morning light, the shops and cafes closed, litter blowing across the pavement. He saw no one but bums and joggers, a kid on a skateboard, a little man walking five big dogs. The city was at rest, unclenched. It ab­sorbed his energy.

He had started walking without conscious direction; nevertheless, within an hour he was at the front door of Amy’s apartment house. She lived on the fourteenth floor. The elevator was slow, the hallway was silent. He stood in front of her door for a moment, bracing himself. Then he knocked. He heard footsteps, then the cover of the peep-hole sliding. Locks clicked and then the door was open and she was standing in front of him in a bathrobe, her hair wrapped in a towel. She smelled of soap and steam.

“Come in.” she said, smiling, startled but happy to see him. “I just got out of the shower. I didn’t expect you for hours.”

“Sorry -- I couldn’t wait.”

He stepped inside and she hugged him. He could feel the firm length of her naked body loose under the terry cloth. She pulled away an inch or two, kissed him lightly. “Let me just get dressed,” she said. “There’s coffee in the kitchen.”

Tom walked into the cramped, sunny room, and poured two cups of coffee. He sat down at the little table Amy had jammed into a corner by the window. He pulled off his coat and sweater; like most New York apartments, Amy’s was brutally overheated all through the winter.

He sipped his coffee. Intruding on this ordinary part of her day gave him a sudden vision of what life might be like if he lived with her, if he were really at home in this little kitchen, as if he had awakened beside her in the pale sunshine, made coffee while she showered.

These were not fantasies he could have imagined himself inventing even two months ago. But everything was different now. He saw beautiful women and he didn’t care. He saw children and he wanted his own. He hadn’t said all this to Amy yet. He wasn’t sure how to do it. He didn’t want to scare her; and he was a little scared himself.

She came in wearing jeans and a t-shirt, toweling her hair. They chatted while she ironed a shirt. They went downstairs after awhile. The city was waking up. They had a quick breakfast at a Bagel Nosh and then walked -- uptown through the garment district and then across town at forty-second Street, past Grand Central and then north on Lexi­ngton, looking in shop windows, talking about mid-terms and parents, politics, poetry and pizza, long easy threads of conversation unspooling block after block as the city un­packed itself around them.

Eventually they wound up in Central Park, walking in lazy circles towards the West Side and lunch. Amy’s hand was warm inside his pocket, her fingers laced tight with his as she talked.

“I’m just not sure why I even bother at this point,” she was saying. “They like the idea of me being home for Christmas, but it always turns into a nightmare.”

“Why? I mean -- what happens?”

“I don’t know ... everything I do is just a little bit wrong. It’s like there’s some ab­stract version of me in their heads and I don’t measure up.”

Tom smiled. “What’s she like?”

“Well -- for one thing, she accepted that Juilliard scholarship. Music is the whole world to her. She’s not recklessly throwing away her God-given talents.”

“Oh boy.”

“All she wants to do is practice. It’s great -- she makes them so proud. She’s going to be the first woman Concert Master of the New York Philharmonic some day.”

“She sounds like a bore.”

Amy laughed, and at that precise moment, Tom realized they were being fol­lowed. Under normal conditions he would have figured it out much more quickly. But he was distracted. Amy kept talking, but he was counting pairs of footsteps now, estimating weight from foot falls -- three, four, five altogether. Jumbos. And they were speeding up. Amy finally sensed that something was wrong and started moving faster herself. This was the worst possible response. Tom tugged on her arm, pulled her back into a casual stroll.

“Don’t hurry,” he whispered. “Don’t turn around. Just keep talking.” There was still a chance that this whole absurd circus could be avoided. But Tom had been trained well, by his father and others, and he knew it wasn’t likely. The group was dividing be­hind them. At the moment he knew the gang was going to attack, all he felt was embarrassment —— this kind of situation made him feel like a freak.

Two gang members trotted ahead of them, blocking the path while the others caught up.

This was it. Tom sighed.

“What’s your hurry. pal?” the leader asked conversationally. Tom had made a point of not hurrying, but he decided against pointing this out. The gang ranged in age from about fifteen to twenty, big heavy white guys wearing bulky coats and packing guns un­der them.

“He don’t wanta get robbed,” one of the others suggested.

“Yeah,” a third one agreed. “You gotta be careful around here. This is a high crime area.”

“Let’s kill ‘em both!” the youngest one burst out suddenly, unable to control his enthusiasm.

“No,” said the leader. “That would be a waste. We’ll kill him -- the girl we take with us. We can have some fun with her. He pulled out a switch knife and let the eight-inch blade snap out dramatically.

Tom cleared his throat.

“Hold on a second,’ he said. “You’re making a big mistake here. No -- really. Look, this may seem a little bit hard to believe, but … I’m the son of the President of the United States. It’s true. And wherever I go, these Secret Service guys follow me. Big guys. With guns. They shoot first and ask questions later.”

The leader thought this was hilarious. He barked out a short laugh. “Oh yeah?” he said.

Tom shrugged. “Well -- no, actually. They don’t really ask questions later. Except for stuff like, ‘Where are the body bags?’ and ‘Who’s going to get the brains off this wallpaper?’”

“Cut the crap, buddy -- “

He never finished the sentence; Ira Heller’s Secret Service crew finally made their appearance. Three men in gray trench coats carrying AK-47 attack rifles. The gang bur­rowed into its jackets, and in a moment they were armed the same way. Heller, a jowly, graying man in his fifties who looked like the ex-cop he was, spoke in a tired voice with a faint Brooklyn accent.

“Okay,” he said. “Put the guns down.”

That's 1,414 words. For the crapometer finals I cut it down to 750:

For Tom Jaglom, it began on the November afternoon when the Mafia killed Al­fredo Blasi. He didn’t know it, of course -- we often don’t know when things begin until after they’ve ended. Besides, the question would have bored Tom Jaglom. He was a practical person. He had no interest in speculation; besides, on the day in question he had something much more important on his mind.

He was falling in love.

He was walking in Central Park with Amy Elwell, holding her hand inside his coat pocket, watching the wind scatter her long red hair, feeling truly happy for the first time in years. He felt too large for his skin. It was almost painful. The park was deserted in the bitter cold and it felt like their private estate.

He had gotten to her apartment early, and sat in the kitchen sipping coffee while she changed. Intruding on this ordinary part of her day gave him a sudden vision of what life might be like if he lived with her, if he were really at home in this little kitchen, as if he had awakened beside her in the pale sunshine, made coffee while she showered.

“I’m just not sure why I even bother at this point,” she was saying now, as they strolled through the Ramble, under the bare branches of the sycamore trees, between miniature cliffs of jagged granite. “My parents like the idea of me being home for Christmas, but it always turns into a nightmare.”

At that moment, Tom realized they were being fol­lowed. Under normal conditions he would have figured it out much more quickly. But he was distracted.

He half-listened as Amy chatted away about her music and her parents. He was counting pairs of footsteps now, estimating weight from foot falls -- five altogether, jumbos. She hadn't sensed anything yet. That was good. If she panicked there might be real trouble. The steps behind them were speeding up. Tom sighed. These situations always made him feel like a freak.

Amy kept chatting away, but she finally sensed that something was wrong and started moving faster herself. This was the worst possible response. Tom tugged on her arm, pulled her back into a casual stroll.

“Don’t hurry,” he whispered. “Don’t turn around. Just keep talking.” There was still a chance that this whole absurd circus could be avoided. But Tom had been trained well, by his father and others, and he knew it wasn’t likely. The group was dividing be­hind them. Two of the gang members trotted ahead, blocking the path while the others caught up. This was it. Tom sighed.

“What’s your hurry. pal?” the leader asked conversationally. Tom had made a point of not hurrying, but he decided against pointing this out. The gang ranged in age from about fifteen to twenty, big heavy white guys wearing bulky coats and packing guns un­der them.

“He don’t wanta get robbed,” one of the others suggested.

“Yeah,” a third one agreed. “You gotta be careful around here. This is a high crime area.”

“Let’s kill ‘em both!” the youngest one burst out suddenly, unable to control his enthusiasm.

“No,” said the leader. “That would be a waste. We’ll kill him -- the girl we take with us. We can have some fun with her. He pulled out a switch knife and let the eight-inch blade snap out dramatically.

Tom cleared his throat.

“Hold on a second,’ he said. “You’re making a big mistake here. No -- really. Look, this may seem a little bit hard to believe, but … I’m the son of the President of the United States. It’s true. And wherever I go, these Secret Service guys follow me. Big guys. With guns. They shoot first and ask questions later.”

The leader thought this was hilarious. He barked out a short laugh. “Oh yeah?” he said.

Tom shrugged. “Well -- no, actually. They don’t really ask questions later. Except for stuff like, ‘Where are the body bags?’ and ‘Who’s going to get the brains off this wallpaper?’”

And at that moment Ira Heller’s Secret Service crew finally made their appearance. Three men in gray trench coats carrying compact tech nine assault rifles. The gang bur­rowed into its jackets, and in a moment they were armed the same way.

Heller, a jowly, graying man in his fifties who looked like the ex-cop he was, spoke in a tired voice with a faint Brooklyn accent.

“Okay,” he said. “Put the guns down.”

Here's the question -- do I lreally lose that much in this edit? I mean, I cut the thing almost in half. And I don't feel the absent material nagging at me. Anyway ... I just entered a new contest, at Bookends LLC. They want just the first 100 words, so I had to cut even more out of the opening. Now it looks like this:

For Tom Jaglom, it began on the November afternoon when the Mafia killed Al­fredo Blasi. He didn’t know it, of course -- we often don’t know when things begin until after they’ve ended. Besides, on the day in question he had something much more important on his mind.

He was falling in love.

He was walking in Central Park with Amy Elwell, feeling truly happy for the first time in years. He felt too large for his skin. It was almost painful. The park was deserted in the bitter cold and it felt like their private estate.

It's bizarre ... how much further could I go with this? Reduce a whole book to a haiku? Or just a very dense short story -- that's the technique Borges preferred. Could I make these same relatively painless editorial corrections on everything I've ever written? It's a daunting thought. I'm sure some of my friends would be cheering, though, especially the one who said that reading my 900-page manuscript felt like being pelted by rhinestones -- she knew some of them had to be diamonds, but the barage was too painful for her to pick and choose.

My Dad made even more extensive cuts at the behest of my (then) agent -- this was in the late nineties -- and it seemed to me that his edits rendered the whole thing generic. My cuts keep the feeling of the original (I think) ... but story moves much faster to that confrontation in the park. And agents seem so impatient these days. One of them suggested an opening like the one below -- right into the inciting incident. It seems rather abrupt, but this is supposedly what people want now: plunge them into the action and don't give them time to breathe:

The gang had been following them for five minutes. It wouldn't be long now. Tom Jaglom half-listened as Amy chatted away about her music and her parents. She hadn't sensed anything yet. That was good. If she panicked there might be real trouble. The steps behind them were speeding up. Tom sighed. These situations always made him feel like a freak.
Amy kept talking, but he was counting pairs of footsteps now, estimating weight from foot falls -- three, four, five altogether. Jumbos. And they were speeding up. Amy finally sensed that something was wrong and started moving faster herself. This was the worst possible response. Tom tugged on her arm, pulled her back into a casual stroll.

I guess this is okay, but personally, I like breathing from time to time.

Anyway,I doubt I'll win this new contest, but it doesn't matter. The cutting is what counts. It's an interesting experiment; and a humbling one.

Twilight Zone -- the Movie

I recently purchased the complete Twilight Zone on DVD and discovered that one season featured hour-long episodes. They were uniformly bad, and I began to feel that Rod Serling’s story-telling style required a half-hour format. I didn’t see those sixty minute stories as a kid, because they went on too long and aired too late at night. I could barely keep my eyes open for the half hour episodes, with my mother’s bland but merciless “Of course you can watch it, if you can stay up that late” ringing in my ears like a call to battle. Far too often I didn’t make it, so it felt good to catch up on the shows I missed.

But I’ve come to realize that there are a number of superb Twilight Zone episodes in the form of full length films. Foreign movies like The Seventh Seal, old Hollywood science fiction like The Time Machine, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Incredible Shrinking Man; recent films like Gattaca, The Sixth Sense and The Truman Show also fit the mold. Time shifters like Sliding Doors and Peggy Sue Got Married would make good episodes. But I have a private list of the top five potential two-hour Twilight Zones. They have to be a little corny, they have to have some kind of twist or trick; there has to be a moral or some heartwarming lesson at the heart of the story.

Most of all, you have to be able to imagine Rod Serling doing the intro.

In reverse order:

#5: Big
The best of all the little kid in a grownup body movies, complete with creepy amusement park vending machine genie and the realization that childhood is too precious to waste on being a successful 30-year old ad man. Who can forget Elizabeth Perkins’ classic “He’s a grown up!”

#4: Terminator
The first one, not any of the others, which were either too slick, too complex or too stupid to make the grade. The first movie has everything a good Twilight Zone needs: scary stuff – being chased by a machine from the future with nuclear apocalypse looming (There was lots of nuclear apocalypse in the Twilight Zone); and a time bending love story where the soldier sent back in time to save the mother of humanity’s last hope in the war with the machines winds up making love with her and becoming the father himself. You can almost hear Rod doing the intro: “Scientists tell us that time travel is impossible. The events you go back in time to stop happen anyway. In fact, it’s your actions that set everything in motion. Case in point: one Sarah Connor, an ordinary waitress in the city of Los Angeles, about to receive some unexpected visitors … from the Twilight Zone.”

#3: It’s a Wonderful Life
A classic Serling fantasy, the perfect Christmas episode, especially the dark section where George Bailey gets to see how badly the world would have turned out if he had never been born. Serling always had a soft spot for this kind of sentimental fantasy. “To my brother George – the richest man in town!”

#2: Planet of the Apes
The cheesy twist ending for the ages: the planet of the apes is really Earth! We destroyed our civilization and now apes rule the world. You can hear the eerie dee-de, dee-de music swelling as Charlton Heston pounds the sand in front of the ruined Statue of Liberty at the low-tide line. How the Statue of Liberty survived a nuclear holocaust, or wound up on what looks suspiciously like Zuma beach, are questions for a more mature audience. Those discerning souls might also wonder how the apes speak perfect English. But none of that matters. The final jolting image, with its freight of moral censure, is all a classic Twilight Zone ever needed.

#1: Field of Dreams
This may be the greatest Twilight Zone episode ever filmed. It’s got everything – the supernatural element of ghostly baseball players emerging from the green stalks, the reunion with the estranged dead father, (“If you build it, he will come") the American iconography (A baseball diamond in a corn field), family values, cynics converted to belief and innocence, and most of all, Moonlight Graham, played by Burt Lancaster, getting his dream to pitch in the big leagues and giving it up to do his duty as a doctor. Who can forget Graham’s lovely speech about playing a single inning as the whole of his career. “It was like coming this close to your dreams, and having them brush past you, like a stranger in a crowd.”

And I hear Rod’s voice, resonant and wise: “Submitted for your approval: one Ray Kinsella, Kansas farmer and family man, about to risk everything for a few innings of baseball …in the Twilight Zone.”

That one would have been worth staying up for.

UPDATED

Fittingly enough, I come back to the blog again, it's still the same day and I have to revise it over and over, until I get it right.

I'll let Mr. Serling do the talking for me, standing in his dark suit and thin black tie, heavy eyebrows bunched together, hands clasped in front of his crotch, as always:

"It's February 2nd in Puxatawney, Pennsylvania, and weatherman Phil Connors is walking through another soft news feed, waiting for a groundhog to predict the end of winter and hoping to beat the next blizzard home. He's bored and he's cranky and he's going through the motions one more time. Or so he thinks. In fact, Phil Connors strayed off course today, far off course. He doesn't know it yet, but Phil is going to be broadacsting this particular Groundhog Day report ... from the Twilight Zone."

Groundhog Day -- that was an inexcusable omission. It bumps Big off the top five (to fill out the top ten with The Dead Zone, Miracle on 34th Street, E.T. and The Birds) and jumps to the #2 spot. It's a great movie, actually it's a better movie than Field of Dreams, but as an episode it loses by a nose.

You just can't beat Burt Lancaster saying --"You know, we just don't recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they're happening. Back then I thought, 'well, there'll be other days. I didn't realize, that was the only day."

--no matter how many times you repeat it.

The True Story

In the new spate of memoir scandals – one just broke this morning – the newspapers are full of recriminations and finger pointing. Everyone feels that everyone else should have made the one phone call to L.A. County Child Services (for instance) that would have brought Margaret Seltzer’s crudely assembled deceit tumbling down like a cheap condo in an earthquake. Normally staid editors an agents talk about the author as a crazed psychopath bent on destroying the system of trust that holds the publishing world together. But the driving force behind this fraud was not really one woman’s pathology or the dunderheaded Panglossian naivete of the publishers. That would be kind of appealing, actually … a throwback to the old days of tweed jackets with leather patches; pipe smoking editors parsing sentences and drinking whiskey out of silver flasks.

In fact the publishers are cynical operators who understand and are expert at gaming a tragic fact of the modern era: the novel is so commercially stigmatized as an art form that any story’s value is now directly related only to how much of it you can say is true. The invented has been devalued; imagination is suspect. Fiction is a lie. The ad copy reads: “It’s a true story!” Or:“Based on a true story” Even in movies you see that wan claim. “Inspired by a true story” is one of my favorites. How about: “Vaguely related to someone’s version of a true story”, or: “Sharing some names and locations with a true story.”

More to the point: willing to exploit the idea of a ‘true story’ to sell tickets.

James Frey wrote a novel about drug addiction and recovery. It was a good novel, and people bought thousands of copies and made it a hit. They did so under the false impression that the story was true. Their hunger for a true story was so great that they could ignore the obvious exaggerations (He really extracted a tooth himself without anesthetic? Come on): after all, truth is stranger than fiction. “You couldn’t make this stuff up!” is a phrase I hear all the time, when some mundane coincidence disarranges someone’s routine. But you could make it up. People make it up all the time. They’ve being making up since they were illustrating the stories with cave paintings. James Frey made it up. That’s not a bad thing.

It’s a good thing.

The bad thing is that he was pressured by his venal, mercenary publishers to call it a memoir … because they knew it would be a best-seller if was wrapped in the shiny gold foil of ‘truth’. They got caught in the lie and paid the price, with recalled books and tearful mea culpas. But it would be wrong to confuse their lie with James Frey’s. Frey took the materials of his life and shaped them into a powerful narrative. It touched people and moved people and inspired them. That’s what good fiction is supposed to do. He deserves praise, not opprobrium. If I had been the publisher I would have simply re-issued A Million Little Pieces as a novel, and proudly used it to make a case for the novel against the cheap, unearned legitimacy of the memoir.

Most true stories are boring. That’s why we read books. Life doesn’t shape itself; writers do that.

I remember an old girlfriend of mine finished reading James Dickey’s Deliverance many years ago. She said something like, “It’s so fantastic he was able to write about this stuff. Just surviving it must have been so hard.” I pointed out that the events of the book were imaginary. James Dickey had never been raped by toothless red-necks on an ill-fated white water rafting trip. He made it all up. But I couldn't convince her. In fact, she acted like I was insulting her -- and James Dickey: accusing this lovely Southern gentleman of lying.

For me that was a deal-breaker. I knew I could never marry someone like that, who found the work I cared about most to be some kind of mendacious con-game.

But she was ahead of her time. I’m sure she was cheering the egregious Oprah Winfrey as she chastised Frey for convincing her of a reality that existed only in his head. I felt like screaming at the TV: “That’s his job, you self-righteous pedestrian power-junkie! You're supposed to understand that! You have your own book club!"

Frey’s only real mistake was capitulating to the greedy corporate parasites. Maybe he's learned his lesson: I notice his next book is unashamedly marked ‘fiction’.

I suppose we should be grateful that this trend is such a recent one. Can you imagine Melville on Oprah, tearfully admitting there was no white whale and and Ahab was actually a family friend who lost a leg in a gardening accident? Or Daniel Defoe confessing he’d never been shipwrecked?

If The Great Gatsby had been published as a memoir, would Fitzgerald have been excoriated by the press when it was revealed that Jay Gatsby was a figment of his imagination? “There’s not even a town called West Egg,” Oprah might have snarled. “There’s no Daisy Buchannon in the phone book! None of these people are real!.”

But they are, Oprah. At least to me they are. Much more real than you.

And they will be around – Tom and Daisy and Ahab and Queequeg and Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday – long after you and all your flash-in-the-pan ‘true stories’ are gone and forgotten.