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January 24, 2010:

ROLLER COASTER

Bruce Kimmel Photograph bk's notes

Well, dear readers, what a roller coaster ride this new book is. Yes, you heard it here, dear readers, this new book is a roller coaster ride. It’s like taking a time machine back to a different world, a different era and revisiting the good, the bad, and the ugly. So many razor-sharp images come flooding back into my head, so many details come into focus, it’s just dizzying. Obviously, the good and fun stuff is fun to revisit, and the occasional hiccup is sometimes not so easy to revisit. Yesterday, I reprinted the Hollywood Reporter review of Nudie Musical. I was shooting my final day on Tabitha when it came out. I read it on the set. I wanted to shoot myself. It was one of the meanest, most vicious reviews you’ve ever seen, and in a very personal way. It made me want to quit show business right then and there. Lucky for me, the film had opened on the day around the country and received pretty much across the board raves, so those helped get over the awfulness of that Arthur Knight review. Of course, later we found out that Paramount had shown it to Mr. Knight and the Variety reviewer at nine in the morning in a screening room, with only them in attendance. And it was also “suggested” to them that Paramount was feeling embarrassed about the film (all of which had to do with Cindy’s recent TV stardom in Laverne and Shirley). In other words, they did everything they needed to do to insure that we’d be panned. I wonder if anyone who has not been subjected to having something so awful written about them in a big publication really knows what it feels like. The lesson I learned was to stay away from reviews, good and bad. But I’d forgotten just how bad that review had been (I had not looked at it again since the day I’d read it, until now), and how good the good ones were. What an interesting time it was. In fact, I went to storage yesterday and got the Nudie box o’ memorabilia and brought it home. There were some amazing things in there, and it enabled me to be very specific about dates and events. And that’s what most of yesterday was about – I wrote about fourteen pages, maybe more, ate some breakfast, did some errands and whatnot, and then attended a dinner partay. The partay was fun, with very interesting guests, and the food was yummilicious.

I also watched a little of a motion picture on Blu and Ray, an import from Canada entitled The Faculty. Shockingly, the film only had one DVD release, which was not anamorphic and which looked terrible. This Blu-Ray looks and sounds terrific. I haven’t seen the film since its premiere. David Wechter and I attended that celebrity event. As some might know, we wrote the original screenplay, which was then bought by Miramax/Dimension, and subsequently completely re-written by Kevin Williamson. However, the basic ideas remained ours, as did the setting, and a couple of characters. I don’t think one line of our dialogue was retained. David and I thought the film was fine, but we thought there was a better film that could have been made if they’d kept even a little of our version – several of our scenes were really clever and quite gruesome. We were both a little annoyed at the drug use, because it was so unnecessary and just there to show how “hip” Mr. Williamson was. Watching it now, it’s still sort of fun, but too much of it is just too stupid and unbelievable. We went to great pains to make everything believable in our version. Williamson’s rewrite just goes everywhere and it’s not clean and succinct and it just gets too silly too often. Some of the cast is quite good. I’ll finish watching it this evening.

Well, why don’t we all click on the Unseemly Button below, because I need my beauty sleep for tomorrow shall be more on the roller coaster that is my new book.

Today, I shall Xerox over 100 pages and take them to muse Margaret for her mental delectation. I’ll then get something to eat, do a few errands and whatnot, and then try to write five pages or so. I wrote twenty extra pages last week, so five would be more than fine.

This week I will write, I have two lunch meetings, I have to do new liner notes, prep our next announcement, and get the packaging done and off to the printers. It’s going to be a very busy week.

Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, Xerox pages, deliver pages, do errands, eat, and write, and hopefully hear from muse Margaret. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I get ready for more roller coaster rides.

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