New issue of PLOTS WITH GUNS

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Pulling the plug on the bullshit (before somebody puts an eye out)

Over at the Emerson LaSalle entry at wikipedia.org there has been a lot of discussion about whether or not LaSalle is a hoax and if the entry should be deleted. They claim Emerson LaSalle might not be real.

Uh ... duh.

Really, wasn't it sort of obvious? Did anyone think this was a serious attempt to fool anyone? I mean, maybe for a second until people think, "No way." I've gotten dozens of e-mails asking something like, "Hey, you're just screwing with us, right?" And I always write back and say, "yeah it's just a goof" or words to that effect. A number of people have also noticed that photos of LaSalle have really been pictures of Irish author James Joyce. Most people enjoyed playing along and totally "got it."

I appreciate all of the people who have been in on the joke. Believe it or not, I didn't create the LaSalle wikipedia entry or the entries on GoodReads.com, nor did I write all of the "scholarship" and "tributes" that appears on other blogs and web pages. I'm only responsible for what's appeared on this blog. Basically this started with a lot of people having fun and pretending. But now this hoax business is apparently endangering our American way of life. It's time to stop the madness.

More to the point, I don't want the fun goof of a fake LaSalle to distract from the very real news that Jake Dickey at Explosive Entertainment Motion Pictures has optioned PULP BOY, the screenplay I've co-written with Anthony Neil Smith. This news, at least, is very very real, and Neil and I are very happy that Mr. Dickey gets the character, story and style of humor. I'll post further film news as things happen. (And it's real. I mentioned that, right?)

So, just to be very clear, Emerson LaSalle is not any more real than Big Foot or Santa Clause or James Patterson. (But the film news is real.)

Pony up for SAFER

My pal Sean Doolittle has a new novel out today called SAFER, a helluva thriller. Sean's back in hardcover, and deservedly so. Buy this book or you will go to hell. That's straight from the Pope, people. Safer or hell. Your choice.

The story behind the Emerson LaSalle screenplay PULP BOY

It was back in grad school at the University of Southern Mississippi that I co-wrote my first serious attempt at a screenplay with author and pal Anthony Neil Smith . It was called Crescent City Smackdown, a zealously violent and darkly humorous tale about wannabe criminals and corrupt New Orleans cops. We would split a six-pack of cheap beer, sitting side by side at Neil's computer, trying to iron out exactly what was funny and entertaining and what wasn't. We finished the screenplay, showed it to people. Many complimentary notes from a number of quarters, but nobody was coming close to optioning this thing or making it. It was hard to get it in front of the right people. We didn't have agents then or novels or anything at all and might as well have tossed the thing into the street as send it to producers. The script became just another random stack of papers in my desk drawer. So as you might imagine, it was a while before I decided another screenplay might be worth the time and effort.

Eventually, I approached Neil with the idea of Emerson LaSalle. Neil and I were living our after grad school lives now, so we couldn't collaborate as we had before, but we spent some time on the phone, getting a battle plan together, deciding on the tone of the screenplay, the characters etc. You see, we felt strongly we couldn't approach this like a standard bio pic. There was too much and it was too disorganized. Emerson had sent me boxes and boxes of false starts and ragged attempts at a memoir, some of it on floppy disks and much more on yellowing typed pages. He'd start off on his time in the Sudan and three pages later he was off on some story about some girl who'd given him a handjob at a sci-fi convention in 1971. There were long rants against people I'd never heard of, and just when I was about to give up and quit reading, Emerson would ease into an eloquent string of self reflections which were nearly poetic and always insightful. So it was a mess. Boxes and boxes of mess. But there was gold down in the mine if one were willing to dig for it.

So I decided, and Neil agreed, that we should approach it like a story and make Emerson LaSalle the protagonist. Treat it like any other tale.

Almost as if LaSalle were fictional.

So we updated everything, took events from LaSalle's life which transpired here and there over fifty years and compacted them into a plot. We combined characters. We played fast and loose with timelines. But what we accomplished, in my humble opinion, was a fair depiction of the man himself and the themes that cropped up again and again in his life. The result was a screenplay called Pulp Boy.

It has been said that Philip K. Dick is the poor man's Kurt Vonnegut. If so, then Emerson LaSalle is the poor man's Philp K. Dick. LaSalle always seemed one or two (or ten?) steps removed from the limelight he so richly deserved. I'm just glad that Jake Dickey and Exlposive Entertainment Motion Pictures is going to take a crack at this. Fingers crossed that it all comes together.

Emerson LaSalle for the Big Screen?

I've been waiting a while for the folks over at the LaSalle website to finally break THIS NEWS so I could talk about it. Seems there was quite a bit of litigation over intellectual property rights, but that's all been settled now. I'll be back soon with a post full of details and juicy anecdotes.

Legends of the Smith Corona #00

"In 1950, I wrote an epic space opera called To Swallow the Sun in eleven hours. The book was 600,000 words long. To be fair, I passed off a number of short chapters as 'cloud person' talk which basically consisted of random groupings of the letter F. So a typical cloud person conversation might go like this:

'Fffff ff f fffffffff fffff f ff fffff.'

'Ffff?'

'F.'

And so on. It was a pretty damn long novel, so I would often take chapters from the beginning and copy them over again at the end. Nobody seemed to notice. The last three hours I snorted lines of Ovaltine to keep awake. I could not afford milk then and lived mostly on army surplus k rations and Brill Cream."

-- Emerson LaSalle in an interview with Hugh Downs, 1970.

The perfect nightly snack