THE RIGHT TIME FOR "RIGHT"

 

The first portion of this blog is adapted from the Afterword to Right: A Portrait of Controversy

 

In the early 1970s, I sold major appliances at a discount department store in Southern California called Zodys. I am not kidding about this store’s name; it was indeed called Zodys. 

Why? I don’t think I ever knew. Nor did it matter as long as the paycheck cleared. In any case, there was a chain of Zodys Discount Department stores throughout the Southwest United States. And Michigan, for some aberrant reason.
Occasionally, my duties took me to another nearby Zodys to pick up some items not in stock at the location where I toiled. It was always a surreal experience. The interior of each Zodys was laid out in the exact same way, with each department in the exact same location in each store. But each store, of course, had its particular way of displaying goods and decorating departments, not to mention a different staff than the ones I knew running around in their awful little blue vests serving customers.

So, I would walk into this store, so familiar yet so strange, and my head would spin for a moment, my equilibrium would be thrown off, and the theme music from The Twilight Zone would trickle through my mind. 

As I said, it was surreal, disconcerting, and, at least momentarily, discombobulating.

I hope this is how people feel when they start reading my latest novel, Right: A Portrait of Controversy, which takes place in a 1980s that never happened, even if the landscape seems familiar. And the controversy that I endeavor to portray certainly never happened, nor could it have happened. And it will certainly never happen today or in the future. I hope.

Why have I discombobulated the reader with this ahistorical novel? Outside of the fact that I love the word discombobulate. 

The clue is in the novel’s subtitle: A Portrait of Controversy, not: Portrait of A Controversy.

If I had decided to portray an actual controversy from the 1980s or thereabout, or a current controversy, then readers would come to the novel with, in most cases, their minds already made up, their positions set, their absolute faith that they have chosen the right side of the controversy. 

Therefore, it would not be a portrait but a Rorschach test.

Creating a controversy that didn’t exist then and doesn’t now and yet does have certain familiar elements was the only way I could attempt to portray Controversy as a thing itself and not the questions the controversy is about. 

I must leave it up to the reader how lifelike—or abstractly revealing—the portrait is.

Right: A Portrait of Controversy publishes February 20^th via my imprint Magpie Press. It will be available in eBook and trade paperback on Amazon. 
 
Right: A Portrait of Controversy is the thirteenth (thank goodness I’m not superstitious!) book I have published since 2005. But it is not the thirteenth book I have written. Indeed, it is the first book and novel I wrote. I started it in 1980, writing in longhand on yellow legal pads in my single apartment, usually most days from midnight to two or three. During the day I worked at my one-man publicity shop in Hollywood with mainly small animation studios as clients. At this time, I was also transitioning from publicity to producing, having just sold to Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz the idea of making an animated feature film based on Will Eisner’s The Spirit comic book. 

It was a project conceived of by a young Brad Bird, a recent grad of the Cal Arts animation program and an escapee from Disney Animation. I made a deal with Gary for Brad to write the screenplay and direct the film. Brad, Gary, I, and animator Jerry Rees formed a company, Visions Animation + Filmworks to produce the film. Gary set me the task of negotiating with Eisner for the rights, which we concluded successfully. All of which was very exciting. Unfortunately, we could never get the powers-that-be in the major studios to see what a revolutionary film this would be, and so it never became. Incredible(s), right? Well, that’s show biz!
 
I finished Right, I believe, around mid to late 1981. By that time Gary had hired me to be his Director of Animation Development for his company Kinetographs, and to be the associate producer on an animated film adaptation of Winsor McCay’s classic early 20^th-century comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. 

As work on this was more than full time, and took me to Tokyo for a year, the large file of yellow legal pad pages of Right was stuffed in a file cabinet. And then later packed in my bags when I moved to Tokyo. 

I did not move alone. My assistant and fiancée Amanda Martin moved with me. During the traditional Japanese New Year’s celebration shōgatsu, TMS, the Japanese studio we were producing Nemo with, shut down for several weeks, and Amanda and I took the opportunity to travel to Hawaii where her father lived and tie the knot (or lei, as the case may be). 

Unfortunately, the twain between the American and Japanese artists on our production did not meet, and I decided to leave the production when my contract was up. But Amanda and I were fortunate that we were allowed a month’s grace before leaving Japan to relax and travel a bit in Japan, a country we retain a love for. Also, during this month, I pulled out the yellow legal pad pages of Right and typed it up into a nice, neat manuscript.

Returning to Los Angeles, the first order of business was to settle into a new residence and look for work in the film industry. This was done and over the years I worked for several companies as an executive, including as president of Chuck Jones Productions— 

—And later a partner with Rees in a production company. 

Our first project was to produce for Richard Zanuck and MGM an animated feature based on Betty Boop. Although we opened a studio and started pre-production, three months in when Alan Ladd, Jr., the CEO of MGM was fired, the production was canceled. Hollywood is often not just the business of show but the business of disappointment.

Having a pay-or-play deal with MGM, I had some nice downtime while Rees and I worked towards another gig, co-writing a screenplay, which we eventually sold to Columbia Pictures. This also turned out to be a disappointment as it was never made. BUT, one day, in a flash, I got an idea for a novel. This became Blood is Pretty, a satiric Hollywood thriller, if you can imagine such a thing. 

But then you don’t have to imagine it, because I wrote it, and you can get it on Amazon!

The day after I finished writing Blood is Pretty, we got a call from our agent that he had set up a meeting with producer-director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters and the like). Reitman was producing a live-action/animation Michael Jordan/Bugs Bunny feature that was sort of based on the popular Nike Air Jordan commercials. And he was having a hard time finding an animation team. This, of course, was Space Jam.

 

After Space Jam I got an idea for another novel, which I titled Hollywood is an All-Volunteer Army, something I used to often say to complaining people in the industry. Not that I didn’t have my complaints.

Blood is Pretty and Hollywood is an All-Volunteer Army feature as the hero The Fixxer, a character inspired, you might not be surprised to learn, by The Saint, James Bond, and even Bulldog Drummond. Having suffered more than my share of Hollywood disappointments in both situations and people, the writing of my Fixxer novels was wonderfully cathartic. And damn fun. And reminded me that the writing of prose fiction is what I set out to do as a young man and was what I most loved. I’ve been doing it ever since.

But what happened to Right? Well, Blood is Pretty was published. Then I was contracted to write a novelization of an indie family movie, The 12 Dogs of Christmas, that I wrote the original screen story for.

Then Traveling in Space (which I started writing during the three months of pre-production on Betty Boop) was published, and the ball was rolling from there. 

Eventually, I took back my novels that had been published by others and, for total control over my work, I decided to publish all my work under my own imprint, Magpie Press. 

Which meant, besides publishing new novels, re-proofing and polishing all my past novels. Time-consuming, to say the least. My champion in all this was and is author Jean Rabe who made the same decision for her own work, including her great Piper Blackwell Mysteries series.

I was down to just one more of my previously published novels to prepare for Magpie Press when I suddenly got curious about the long-shelved Right. Should I read it after thirty-four years to see if I should publish it? Jean said, YES! Do it! So, I did and decided it was worth doing so, after proofing and polishing. I changed nothing in the plot or characters but did smooth out the prose. 

And so here it is. First to be written, thirteenth to be published. 

It was quite an adventure to commune with the me that was in my thirties. I could see where much of what I wrote was inspired by personal experiences growing up in the 1960s, a time of many controversies. And especially by a certain incident in college when I was rushed from campus by the police as I column I wrote in the college newspaper had inflamed a segment of the student body, who then inflamed stacks of the paper in the campus firepit and called for my blood.

Yes, that incident made it into Right: A Portrait of Controversy.
 
You can check out and purchase Right: A Portrait of Controversy on Amazon as either an eBook or a trade paperback HERE.
 
You can check out all my books on my Amazon page HERE or on the MY BOOK page on this blog HERE
 
Cheers to all!