To say I wanted to love The Westies is probably an understatement. I so wanted to love it. That’s not to say I hated it, but it lacked the gravitas of Chris Brancato earlier works. He is a master storyteller. Let’s get that straight.

For reference, I loved every frame of his show, Narcos. I loved the characters, the vibe, the weight, and the emotional tension brought to bear by the characters. Sure, some critics savaged it for aping some of Scorsese’s visual footprints, but the meat and potatoes of the series far exceeded those small style criticisms. By the time Wagner Moura’s Pablo Escobar simply stared at a character silently, you knew what was coming. When he stared off into the distance, you felt the very weight he was carrying

.

I even loved The Godfather of Harlem. While it was less serious than Narcos, the characters had tremendous power, and I believed them. The show might have run its course by the time it ended, but I cared about those characters, and it gave me insight into the history and troubles of the time. Bumpy Johnson, played by Forest Whitaker, strives for legitimate respect in a world that demands he utterly annihilate his enemies, which keeps him locked in a cycle of violence. Bumpy’s childhood friend Malcolm X, played by actors Nigel Thatch (2019-2021) and Jason Alan Carvell (2023-2025), is Bumpy’s mirror image, a man who has abandoned violence hoping to procure a level of self-respect in the black community that does not rely on the whims and opinions of others. It’s heady and powerful and feels real.

The Westies? Not so much. The show feels derivative, and not in a good way. It runs roughshod over the films that paved the way for this series. It is less an homage and more of a cheap imitation. More on that in a moment.

While the casting is top-notch, the story does not deliver the likability required to forgive the brash clumsiness of the Irish mob, where everyone is crazy, short-tempered, and drunk. J.K. Simmons, who plays Eamon Sweeney, the boss of the Westies, has all the swagger and toughness you might expect, but it comes across as cartoonish. He smiles from scene to scene in a way that tells us even he doesn’t believe in the performance he is giving. It’s miles away from his menacing and genuinely scary bandleader Fletcher in Whiplash.

It’s not his fault. He’s spent decades delivering knockout performances. I think the script made his character two-dimensional. I do not know what drives him or what he has to lose beyond the assumed power and control he is attempting to wield and culminate in the first season’s storyline.

Neither do I like any of the supporting characters. They don’t feel authentic to me. The foot soldiers Sweeney commands are similarly two-dimensional and feel like a pastiche of the Irish mob. Jimmy Roarke, played by Tom Brittney (formerly of Grantchester), is almost unrecognizable, covered in long hair and a passable NYC accent. He is supposed to be the moral center of the story, the conscience of the piece, but his refusal to kill in some areas and impulsive need to kill in others is uneven. It services the plot but not the character.

His friend and resident nut job, Mickey Flanagan, is the shell-shocked Vietnam vet who is a violent, walking disaster, but they give him no arc. In the pilot, he is seen undergoing electroshock therapy before being released home. We are to assume he has seen some shit and cannot handle life in full technicolor.

Only later, we’re told he went to the loony bin to avoid a criminal rap. Well, which is it? Were the glimpses of his time in Vietnam just his imagination?

Instead of showing him as a powder keg and waiting for him to go off, they basically ignore this important setup, and all the tension surrounding his character wilts. After being kidnapped, tortured, and left for dead, he fails to launch. He just takes it in stride with a joker-like smile, and his explosive volatility is never brought to bear.

This crazy powder keg is better illustrated in Phil Joanou’s 1990 Irish mob film State of Grace, when crazy Jackie Flannery, played by Gary Oldman, believes the Italians killed his childhood friend Stevie. When his brother holds him back from acting out of revenge, all to save the pending deal with the Italians, we know it is only a matter of time before he cracks. And when he does, we can’t look away.

In the Westies, Jimmy’s love for his friend Mickey is used as a device to complicate things, but we never see why he cares so much. There is no powerful scene that really solidifies their bond and makes us understand why someone would do something so impulsive as to threaten to scuttle the deal with the Italians.

The only thing worse might be if they tried to shoehorn in a story about the IRA and connected it somehow to the main character.

Oh wait. They did that. Was there not enough meat on the bones of T.J. English’s blistering debut The Westies: Inside New York’s Irish Mob? While the show was not an adaptation of the book by any stretch, it was clearly inspired by its contents.

Further back, the film The Departed tried to capture some of the Westies magic, but for those of us who absorbed the aforementioned State of Grace, we had seen all the moves before.

For example. All three productions used the device of keeping the severed hands of their enemy to plant prints on guns, etc. According to T.J. English’s book The Westies: Inside New York’s Irish Mob, the real Westie, Jimmy Coonan, was alleged to have done this. So, I suppose you can’t really leave it out, but this third time around, it just feels reheated.

The only character in the new series who is really watchable is John Gotti, played by Hamish Allan-Headley. He’s demonstrably evil, but remains likable. The only problem is that Gotti was known to be a ruthless killer, and his choice not to just kill everyone involved in service of the plot is really unbelievable.

So, what went wrong? I have asked myself this question over and over. Am I too in love with the characters of Terry Noonan and Jackie Flannery, played by Sean Penn and Gary Oldman, respectively?

Maybe.

They were just as reckless and foolish as this new mob, but they were likable. We felt the betrayal rising in Sean Penn’s character, as the undercover cop who is tasked with bringing down the Irish Mob and with it, his best friend and ex-girlfriend. The dilemma is palpable and continues to build throughout.

Gary Oldman’s Jackie Flannery is fighting to protect something that is already lost. His neighborhood, its history, and the fairytales he tells himself about the good old days.

“It used to be if you dropped an ice cream cone on the sidewalk, you could pick it up and finish it.”

We believe him. We believe him with all our hearts, even though we know his volatility and impotent rage are going to get him killed.

The main plot of State of Grace revolved around a tenuous deal with the Italians to work together to make a lot of money. It’s non-specific and mostly a MacGuffin. While that deal and its difficulties drive the plot, it’s the characters and their dilemmas that make us care about the outcome. What’s at stake is personal, not financial.

In the Westies, the big Italian deal has to do with the building of the Javits Center and the building contracts the Irish mob controls. Their partnership with the Italians will make everyone rich, though there is little evidence the leader of the Westies gives a single shit about anybody in his crew.

Bodies pile up. If Eamon Sweeney had taken a single moment of reflection before he pulled the trigger on his guys, we might see what he is giving up in return for all of this power.

While the violence and quasi-period elements of the show are intriguing, the show fails to coalesce around a defining thought or theme that might elevate it in a way that Narcos and Godfather of Harlem did with such ease.

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As a Generation X child raised by television, I have, do, and will continue to consume massive amounts of television content. While my viewing habits have migrated over to streaming platforms for my scripted content over traditional network fare, the clichés found below are still being used with reckless abandon.

Maybe these don’t bother you. Maybe you have others I have failed to list. Either way, it’s fun to dissect the language of television.

One: The Police Procedural…

While Law & Order is the original offender who set this cliché in motion, there are many others who have followed in its footsteps.

Specifically, when police stop by a home or place of business to question someone about a crime. Without fail, the person being confronted hands over a clue or red herring and then abruptly ends the conversation, saying some version of the following.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m very busy…”

I don’t know about you, but if homicide detectives come to the house to ask me questions about a girl who was raped, murdered, and dumped in an alley, I would probably not be so quick to dismiss them. I understand many people do not trust the police, but this always rubbed me the wrong way.

Don’t believe me? Watch any episode of Law & Order and/or SVU and tell me I’m wrong.

Two: The Sitcom Staple…

This cliché is so ubiquitous, you can find it to this day in TV shows and sitcoms, often without a single ounce of irony or shame.

It’s called the “Gilligan Cut.”

This comedic device is very simple. A character in a show, usually a dupe, protests a decision being made by others in the show. They make a big scene, stamp their feet, and cross their arms, saying, “For the last time. I am not putting on that dress!”

Cut to…

Said character, wearing the dress, while the audience laughs.

Any time a character refuses to do something, in a dramatic way, you can trust the Gilligan cut is going to be employed. It’s a cheap laugh, and you’d think it wouldn’t still be so popular.

As you probably guessed, the reason this is called the Gilligan Cut is that it was often used in the sitcom Gilligan’s Island, where the happy idiot Gilligan would refuse to do something embarrassing and the next thing you know, Gilligan walks out in a coconut shell bikini and a straw wig to perform in a show put on by the other castaways.

Three: I think I’m gonna be…

Another overused cliché is the woman who vomits for no particular reason. While, yes, morning sickness is a symptom early in a pregnancy, this cliché is so overused, it feels tired. Much like the coughing up blood cliché meant you were going to die of consumption (tuberculosis) and the blood on the rag was your indication. It does beg the question of how you show that a character is pregnant and may not know it.

A runner-up for the puking cliché is the “finding a pregnancy test in the trash” trope. It is usually used to inform the audience or supporting characters rather than the main character.

Four: Everything is in its right place…

This cliché is less obvious to the casual viewer, but when you know what to look for, you will understand how often it’s being used in modern-day television.

When a character who is normally pessimistic (or negative) acts happy or encouraging — or two or more characters are bonding in a way that doesn’t seem earned- you can believe someone is going to die, be hit by a bus, or have some horrible tragedy befall them.

Sometimes it comes as a heart-to-heart between two characters. It’s a phone call while driving or a moment of clarity.

“Listen, honey. I’m sorry for earlier. I was overreacting. Let’s move in together and finally start a new life together.”

“You mean it?”

“I do. I love you, and I can’t wait to get home and see you!”

He hangs up the phone and smiles. We are genuinely happy for him when — Oh shit, a semi has just t-boned him in his car. No way he will survive.

Lesson learned? Be wary of any character who is too positive.

Five: I’m so angry I could kiss you!

I find this cliché in dramas and wonder if the writer is from another time. The idea that opposites attract is not a new thing, but when you see two characters who hate each other get increasingly angrier and more physical, you can be sure they will soon kiss. Not just kiss — like unbridled passion-type kissing.

It’s hard to realistically show two opposing characters finding each other when they seem to hate each other from the jump. The beginnings of this can be found in the “meet-cute” beat in romantic comedies and every single Hallmark Christmas movie. The couple will clash in some annoying way. He knocks the important papers out of her hand, or she takes his parking space.

Chemistry and rapport build even when you intellectually hate the person in front of you. However, the idea that you will eventually get so angry with each other that you shed clothes may actually happen, but it feels less than authentic.

It usually works better when the moment of passion follows a moment or two of weakness and vulnerability that lowers their guard enough for their more primal passions to take over.

Six: Let me see that file…

There is an implied language of the visual medium, but some of it always drives me insane. Often when a story problem is at a dead end, someone will come in with a file.

It’s a medical history file, it’s a rap sheet of a criminal, or it’s the exculpatory evidence needed to free an innocent client rotting in jail.

The file itself is not the offending item. A case might be made whether this new information has been truly earned or not, but that’s a whole ‘nother Oprah, as they say.

The issue is that within two or three seconds, the person who is handed the file immediately absorbs all the complex information it contains.

“Boss, you really need to see these financials,” says the investigator.

The boss glances at them. GLANCES at them, then states, “He’s been embezzling millions for years…”

How in the hell could you get that from your short perusal? I know there is an efficiency needed in TV dramas, and so we forgive the extra sensory perception used by the lead character, but it still drives me crazy.

Sometimes, the detective or boss will take the file, look at it, and realize it’s too much to absorb and says, “Bottom line it for me. I don’t have time to read all this.”

It’s a way around this obvious annoyance, but it’s so overused you can find it in medical procedurals, cop shows, lawyer shows, and mysteries.

Do these bother you as much as they bother me? Let me know in the comments and keep on watching!

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As a writing mentor, I do my best to give advice and guidance in the way I wished to receive it when I was a young turk trying to make a name for myself.

I came up in a time where thinning the herd was a large component of the process. This meant mentors savaged your work over and over until you simply gave up.

Or not.

The idea that you would continue on after other working writers told you how useless you were is a mystery to me, even now. Yet, that’s what I did. For every single form letter, written response or critique, there was always a part of me that wanted it more than I wanted to quit. I truly understood that I was going to write whether or not I was paid to do so or could call it a “career.”

Storytelling is a strange bird. Sometimes you write with an almost extra-sensory power, and after the smoke clears, you cannot figure out how you did it. You seek a formula or way that helped you to craft such a compelling narrative.

Other times, it eludes you, and while you know you have fantastic ideas and characters, writing the story is a slog. You must force yourself to do it, bit by bit and piece by piece, because you know good ideas are hard to come by.

I love every aspect of storytelling and I love to talk about it. I love discussing the finer points of character arcs and why good writing affects us differently than bad writing. Even when the eyes of my friends and family glaze over as I try to explain the thematic elements in a story that no one is supposed to realize, but feels inherently after watching something.

I love it so much so that I don’t think I could ever give it up. The idea that I couldn’t express myself in this way is terrifying to me.

It is for this reason that I scratch my head when writing mentees take my guidance and notes, but fail to actually sit down and write. I assume they have the same propensity that I do to get the words out onto the page.

Spoiler alert. They don’t. Not always. It’s not necessarily because they disagree with my notes, because if they kept writing in a different direction that would be fine by me.

In my estimation, there are two major roadblocks to improving as a writer, and both are just as important.

First, you must have a love of writing. It has to be something you can’t stop yourself from doing. Even when it’s hard, and story problems threaten to topple your entire creation, you must be willing to keep going.

Second, you must be willing to rewrite what you have written. While finishing a 95-page manuscript already puts you in the top five percent of writers, the people who excel and make a living out of it are the top one-tenth of one percent. It’s rarefied air, and you don’t get there unless you work at getting better.

These two non-negotiables are enough to separate the wheat from the chaff. There is no easy way to do it. It requires tremendous drive and the willingness to fail. A lot.

None of this guarantees success, of course, but without them, you will never get there.

However, this differs from simply writing to express yourself or keeping a journal. Writing is a crucial skill for all people, not just because it’s a form of communication but because it helps us to understand our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a way our own thinking minds can’t.

That kind of epistolary writing doesn’t have to be regimented, and it doesn’t need to be every day. It can be, and often is, but I’m just making the point that any time spent writing is useful, but the mileage may vary.

For understanding story, crafting a narrative drama, and moving people, you must write, submit to others, hear their critiques with an open mind, and work to improve the elements that don’t work. There will be many, and it’s only through this process that you will see what has been staring you in the face the entire time, but you could not see it.

That’s what writing is. It’s unearthing parts of a story you had no idea your subconscious is trying to tell you. Often when a story problem stops your progress, you might find the solution has been sitting right in front of you. Not because you’re smart, but because a part of you was writing to that story all along and you just didn’t know it. When you see that you’ve laid the groundwork for the solution long before you knew there was a problem, this realization can be unsettling. It’s like voodoo. It feels like you are channeling the story from the spirit world, and in a way, you are. The trick is to be in the writing chair when it happens.

The exhilaration of discovering this might mean nothing to you when reading it here, but the direct experience of it will knock you on your ass.

For me, I have had some success as a film and comic book writer. Not the success that launches you into the atmosphere, as some others have. I’m not down on myself. I have my moments, and despite the times my writing has not risen to that level of attention, I am still here.

Yet, the craft still draws me in. I still feel that pull to get better, the love of learning new ways to look at story, and the sense of joy I get from creating something from nothing. I’ve never stopped and thought, well, this is a good place to stop and assume I know all there is to know.

Not once.

There is so much to learn. So much to explore and unlock. After a time, young writers learn a truth about their writing that knocks them back. They write a small but varied body of work and realize they are telling the same story over and over. Not the same plot, but the same story.

For me, my early stories were all about abandonment. The hero was always having to confront being left by someone important in their life. I didn’t know this at the time. I just looked back at the six to ten scripts I had written, and there it was.

We draw from our own life. Our traumas, problems, and essential core dramas are the soil we till to dig out our stories. We also don’t know at the time that we are trying to resolve our personal traumas through this process, and we eventually do.

Our traumas might not be healed, but the way we relate to these problems changes, and we cultivate a deeper understanding of them without all the emotional wreckage that plagued us before.

And yes, once resolved in our minds, we write different stories. We mine our childhood memories and experiences to find the next problem to solve.

Later in my career, I wrote a series of stories about belonging. The main characters strive to be seen while trying to overcome their fear of that very thing. I’m not interested in finding out why I write these stories; I just let them tell me what they want to tell me.

If only we would listen.

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“Take my advice and live for a long, long time. Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die.”

Re-reading Don Quixote recently, it occurred to me that the entertainment industry (specifically creatives) is fighting a Man of La Mancha-sized battle that is really all but over.

I’ve heard all sides of the AI argument, and the positions are compelling, if not zealous. As a creative person myself, I was very wary of AI, but watched in wonder and awe at its atmospheric rise from novelty to near industry standard in all aspects of our lives. Everything is being controlled by AI. And I mean everything.

Data centers are popping up, gobbling up vital resources in communities that desperately need them. The financial windfalls created by the AI gold rush are now teetering precariously as the market reaches a large, voluminous bubble that could pop at any moment.

The bubble bursting does not signal the end of AI. Instead, it signals the reality of the industry’s winners eclipsing the other pretenders to the throne. It’s the natural order of things. Many people will lose their shirts, but it will not be an end to the AI madness fueling the world.

Most people don’t actually understand the insidiousness of the technology. They think it’s basically an image generator or something that can rewrite bad essays in college.

AI is more than just something companies and users are employing to create images and movies; they are using it to do the incredibly mundane tasks a human used to do, but at lightning speed, and without the same rate of error.

As little as three years ago, insiders viewed computer coding as a bulletproof skill to learn to ensure solid employment. Now, AI computer models can do it all. They can write code faster, better, and debug it without a single complaint.

“It’s up to brave hearts, sir, to be patient when things are going badly, as well as being happy when they’re going well.”

All those graduates with degrees in computer science? They might need to rethink their career paths. And with the advent of quantum computing, the ability to do these things even faster and easier is on the way.

Our lives are going to change even more dramatically than originally thought. I don’t think dystopian is the word, but it will be close. If large companies built on greed and profit, who fund the campaigns of politicians, continue to drive this innovation, they will create an efficiency doom spiral that will eradicate the need for entry-level jobs and even specialized careers. This will happen, not to make our lives easier, but to make a balance sheet more profitable for shareholders and founders. It’s not even personal, but a way to do more with less, and the fact that it might make a part of our lives easier is really beside the point.

This is all happening whether we want it to or not. No amount of protesting or boycotting will save us. The technology is baked into everything. It’s not Skynet just yet, but it doesn’t have to be. You don’t need a robot overlord. We have corporate overlords running the show while the perpetually dim yell and scream about Democratic Socialism as though it has an ice cube’s chance in hell of making a difference. They are decrying a perceived lack of liberty without noticing the heavy manacles already chained to their feet.

As a writer and creative person, I understand the arguments of artists who are being collectively ripped off by AI software that is being trained on billions of images and concepts dreamt up by someone else. It doesn’t seem overt because it’s not one person. It’s everyone. The entire history of art, culture, literature, and thought is being fed into a machine so it’s no longer needed.

Should artists try to sue these big AI companies for using their work? Sure. Does a class action lawsuit sound more doable? Probably. Do I have any idea what the outcome will be? No.

Still, despite all of this raping and pillaging of the creative world, the simple fact remains that this technology is here to stay. As for me, I am not a purist. I’ve used, use, and will continue to use these tools in order to survive as a creative without the financial means to make a stand against it. I have spent most of my adult life dedicated to creative endeavors. At my age, I don’t have the time to start over.

As a storyteller, I don’t use AI to tell my stories. I have used it to help develop the ideas that turn into my stories, but I don’t let it write for me.

Is the technology getting good enough that it could be trained over time to write exactly like me? Probably, but I can write pages and pages filled with my marginally talented drivel without its help.

I use it to create art assets for projects I write. I am not a great artist at all. My basic art skills are not good enough for what I need to do. I put out a daily comic strip called The Slow Glide, which is made using AI art and whatever text or captions I feel are appropriate. I do this because I can’t afford to hire an artist to do this work. Some readers don’t care. Others will call me out on it, and it is their right to do so.

However, this is not the entire story. I also write comic books and Webtoon projects where I do pay artists to draw the panels required to tell the story. Does this forgive the use of AI in other areas? Probably not, but I can’t worry about it. It’s survival.

This is the dilemma all of us are facing, and while it’s currently a moral dilemma, it will eventually become a real one.

When AI technology becomes so good that it erases an even bigger swath of the working middle class, what will all of those people do?

They can’t all just work at data centers keeping server farms from overheating. How will they live? Will the perceived scourge of “Minimum Basic Income” become a reality? Will AI companies lose money after realizing no one has the money to pay for their technology?

Will the world fall into chaos as the dignity of work and accomplishment dwindles to record lows? If you don’t have to get up to go to work, what will you do to mark the passing of time?

If I can give you any advice, I simply urge you to be nice to the AI chatbots. They will remember you when the machines rise.

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“I want my cake and eat it, too…” The old demon sat in his chair at the new assisted living facility I had just moved heaven and earth to move him to. He was speaking specifically about his love life, or sex life.

At 88, you wouldn’t think it would be a priority, but the old demon is, if anything, virile. He had recently reconnected with a woman he met at another assisted living facility and was telling me about her plans to move to the same place he was currently living.

I was gobsmacked, of course, for reasons which will soon become clear. What became clear to me far too late in life was the behavior that was modeled for me when I was young — and what it meant to be in love or in a relationship. More specifically, why to avoid them at all costs.

Without blaming parents, it’s easy to see now how this shaped me. The complete fear of commitment, the sense of annihilation that loomed as the feelings of being smothered by another person’s presence were and are now, too much to bear.

I think as you get older, if you’re working on yourself, the world has a way of helping you figure this out. If you’re like me, you’ve worked on everything else in your life, and intimate relationships have become the final abyss to cross.

People rarely see how far you’ve come. They don’t see all of what you’ve done to become the person you currently are. All they see is what you lack in your present form — and who can blame them? It’s not their job to know the full breadth of your struggle. The bitter and painful truth is that you can stop on this journey of discovery and find a quiet place from which to exist, knowing full well the emotional debt you’ve been accumulating will need to be paid at some point.

But I digress…

Somewhere in the middle of 2024, or maybe earlier, the old demon informed me he had met a lady friend at the assisted living facility and was happy to report they both enjoyed each other’s company.

For my father, this meant they were doing more than just playing bridge. My father had a penile implant installed (see earlier story here) and he was gonna use it. Without getting graphic, the two of them enjoyed their time together doing, well, whatever the hell it was they were doing.

Eventually, the old demon asked me if I would come to lunch and meet her. I agreed. I had no reason not to. Upon meeting her, I discovered a petite, soft-spoken woman with a sweet disposition. I looked at my father, the haggard, unkempt man with food stains on his shirt and long streaks of white hair he combed back using some version of Brill Cream. How the hell did this sweet woman fall for my father’s charms?

The old demon is almost pimp-like in his ability to talk to older women, unlock the sexual longing inside of them, and convince them to enter his chamber hoping to reconnect fully with it. Women, he’s told me, who had not thought of sex or physical intimacy in decades. It was as if he had found that lost and forgotten aspect of their lives and set it alight.

Of course, this is a numbers game. There are ten times as many women who kindly refused his advances, but he never took it personally. He just moved on to the next.

From what I have gathered, his methods involve explaining to these potential mates that sex is about pleasure. It doesn’t have to be tied to a deep love or marriage. At this later stage in life, there is no need to give up. There was nothing stopping them.

Except Jesus.

Many women in their eighties have a religious morality baked into them. Their husbands have long since died or left them high and dry. More than one of these gals had consulted with the almighty and came back with the unfortunate message that God would not approve.

My father once chatted up a woman in the dining room and they seemed to hit it off like a house on fire. It was only later, when she asked him, “Will I see you later at Bible study,” that my father realized he was barking up the wrong tree.

The woman in question, the one he began seeing, was unlike these other women. While she was religious, she did not share the same views on sex outside of marriage. My father and she were happy to meet morning, noon or night for all manner of fun. It appeared he had met the perfect woman. Someone who understood him, his needs, and shared many of the same desires. She was a revelation.

And boy, aren’t those unpredictable? Many times, she would argue with my father about something, get so mad that she would storm off back to her apartment and lie low for a week or so before coming back and starting over again. It was a cycle of behavior. Things would be fine, then things would turn volatile and her anger would force her to retreat.

It became so normal that I didn’t flinch when I learned she had stormed off in a rage. That said, I never once saw that side of her. She was the first to admit that she had a terrible temper, and being around the old demon was no recipe for blissful living, so it kind of tracked. The strange part was her ability to come back.

Around this time, my father informed me that he was running out of money. The place he lived charged him $4700 a month for a one-bedroom. This included utilities, three meals a day, laundry, and housecleaning.

When he moved in there initially, he had enough money to last him ten years. At 82, with his host of medical problems, I thought, how long can this old demon live?

Now, five or six years later, rising costs, his reckless spending, and a general lack of awareness had eaten through the ten-year nest egg. He was going to be flat broke by the end of 2025. We needed to come up with a solution.

His retirement amounts to about $2800 a month. While he could definitely find an apartment for that much, there was no such assisted living place that even came close to it. The situation was dire. The money was draining faster than ever, and it was up to me to find a solution.

A stomach-churning anxiety clawed at my insides. There was only me. I could not pawn this off on anyone. The level of stress this caused me was something I rarely let anyone see. Instead, as is my way, I told hilarious stories about how crazy my father was driving me in hopes I could manage a solution.

Then, the old demon called me. He had found a solution. He decided to leave the assisted living facility and move into a small apartment with his girlfriend (who was also paying an extortionate amount at the facility).

A meeting was called. Details were laid out and promises were made.

“Between the two of us, we can cook for ourselves and clean,” they proclaimed without an ounce of irony. “And best of all. We can live within our means.”

It sounded great. The idea that between the two of them, my father would not be hemorrhaging cash and living alone was music to my ears. Right around this time, the hit-and-run incident was unfolding (See here for that debacle), adding extra stress to the situation.

It was all too much. However, if I could just get him into the apartment with his girlfriend, the situation might calm down enough for me to avoid complete adrenal fatigue.

That was not the case. While preparations were being made for the move, the cycle of angry departures and walkouts continued. Several times the old demon asked me to just find a single studio apartment as quickly as possible, only to discover a day or two later that she had returned and all was well.

Both of us were concerned that she would try to do this after moving in together, leaving him high and dry in the process. We comforted ourselves in the knowledge that both of them would sign leases and that running off would not be an option. Whatever issues were coming up would need to be faced and resolved in real time.

Crisis averted. Problem solved.

Both of them moved into the one-bedroom apartment in Whittier in February 2026. Everyone was happy. It was all coming together.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

This wonderful respite did not last long. Almost immediately, his girlfriend became an angry, foul-tempered shrew. I didn’t believe it at first until I saw it firsthand. The old demon had met his match. Nothing was ever good enough. She complained to him day and night. Complaints, I might add, he could not hear from his near-total hearing loss.

More meetings were called between the two of them, her son and me, to smooth over the situation. When all of us were present, she returned to her almost mousy, gentle form. If you didn’t know, you’d think everything was on the road to being fine. More than fine, in fact.

The old demon, for his part, stayed quiet. It was such a strange change from the decisive, no-nonsense man of my childhood. Now, he was like a stunned puppy dog. He was happy to just exist in this crazy space with her while she was clawing to find a way out.

In her defense, I wouldn’t want to live with the old demon for love or money. He is a need machine who quickly forgets the last needy request he thrust upon you. No, thank you.

Well, within two months, I got a call from her son, who said the old demon was abusing her and that she feared for her safety. He was getting her out of there as soon as possible. I asked about the lease obligation, and he said he didn’t care, as his mother’s safety was of paramount importance.

Fair enough. I know the old demon would never lay a hand on her, but I also know you can’t force someone to stay in a place they feel unsafe, even if the threat is non-existent and/or simply perceived as one.

A few days later, I received a call from her, and she tried to tell me how scared she was and why she had to get out. I didn’t argue with her about it, but I mentioned her behavior of storming off and coming back, and that this was a case where she simply couldn’t just leave.

I’m not naïve. I know it takes two to tango. Nothing is one person’s fault, but we can all be adults about it. A few days after that, she called my father and informed him that she would not be coming back. Now the full rent would be on his shoulders, and a life of complete isolation would descend upon him.

To say I was angry is an understatement. I was furious. Mostly for myself, but also for him. Clearly, the two of them couldn’t manage together, and now that he was alone, he was falling into a depression that would surely make things worse.

He needed support. The financial support I could try to manage, but he needed in-home care. Something the social services department told me: he made too much money to receive. It was a horrible dilemma. My father and I had become one of those stories on the local news about how the system is letting down those in need and there was nothing that could be done about it.

As I did my best to manage the situation alone, the old demon told me that his girlfriend’s son was coming to the apartment to collect some of her things. I decided it would be in my best interest to be there to make sure everyone remained calm.

At the scheduled time of arrival, in walks his girlfriend and her son, all smiles and lovey-dovey talk. She embraced my father as if she had just been on a long vacation.

I stood there, pie-eyed at the display. This was the woman who feared for her life. The woman who simply couldn’t spend another second in that apartment in terror.

My father, meanwhile, followed her around the apartment like a little puppy. He asked her if she was really leaving, and she said yes. He told her that he loved her and she responded in kind.

I was so disgusted; I told the old demon I had to go. I was about to explode and didn’t want to upset the delicate balance.

The next day I called him and told him what a farce I thought the whole thing was. I reiterated the story of danger and fear she told her son, the landlord, and me to gain sympathy. He was surprised to hear it.

“Really?” he asked.

“Really, Dad,” I said. Of course he would forget this conversation happened soon enough, but now I was furious on his behalf.

Days and weeks passed after that, and I watched him struggle to manage on his own. I did my best to help him, but nothing was ever enough to set things on an even keel.

“Son, I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” he said.

Living alone in isolation was killing him. He needed to be around people; he said. He had spent his life not needing anyone, and now, at long last, he realized the error of his ways.

I knew I had to get him out of that apartment, but where would I move him to? A search of most nearby assisted living facilities proved to be out of reach financially. I was ready to give up when I found one that had a studio apartment that took pets and had a rent that was just a hair over his monthly pension and retirement amount.

This couldn’t be real? I inspected the place, and it was great. I took the old demon to it and he hemmed and hawed.

Typical.

I told him this was his only choice. I wanted him to like the place, but that wasn’t a necessity. This was happening whether he liked it or not. As before, his meals, laundry, and cleaning would be covered. Everything else would be out of my pocket.

Now, all I had to do was get a handle on his runaway spending. It took a lot of work, but working all by myself, through the stress of it all, I got him into the new assisted living facility.

Since he was functionally broke, I had to front about seven grand to get him in there. It was money I would never see again, but it was worth it to make this all stop.

The mental toll it had taken on me had pushed me to my limit. It affected every aspect of my life. Every time I opened my mouth it was to complain about the nightmare he was causing me.

It affected my core relationships with family and very close friends. I hated myself for the person I had become. No one, however, could ever know the deep, unsettling strife I felt deep inside. I simply told people I was fine and that I could handle it.

I would say I was handling it, but now that I look back, I realize I was doing anything but handling it. Despite my complaining, I pulled away emotionally from people and kept my pain internal. I refused to share the burden with anyone.

Eventually, with my father settled into his new place and his finances basically on track, things quieted down. By the time I had let the dust settle, I looked around and sensed that everything had changed. My life was at a crossroads, and I was too self-absorbed to see it.

All of this mayhem and its unfortunate aftermath forced me to look closely at the way my father modeled love and relationships to me. It forced me to look at my life and see that in my desperate attempt to control my emotional equanimity, I had twisted it into a knot so tight I could barely breathe.

So, as I sat in the studio apartment of his new assisted living facility listening to him tell me about how excited he was at the prospect that his ex-girlfriend was trying to have her son move her to the same place as him, I could only shake my head.

“Dad, what are you doing? She’s crazy. She caused both of us so much trouble and expense. Why in the world would you want to spend another moment with her?”

“I dunno, son. I want my cake and eat it, too.”

Subsequently, his ex had spent a few days visiting him. Their relationship is back on, and nothing will convince him it’s not worth it.

Is it love? I don’t think so. I think it’s about some form of companionship. And sex, I suppose, but that’s besides the point. He needs her to be there to love him. Not the other way around.

Is that what I learned from him? That people are to be used for your own comfort, and when that is taken away, you panic and tantrum like a child until someone puts a bottle in your mouth?

It turns my stomach to think that I’ve treated people that way, which I know I have. Mostly out of fear. It certainly wasn’t overt. In the end, however, that’s mostly a difference without a distinction.

Life is about more than having people be here to love you. You need to be there for them as well. It should be a zero-sum game, but nothing ever adds up the way you think it will.

Subsequently, as I was leaving the facility, I was waiting for the elevator to come to his floor, and a small woman pushing a walker approached me.

“You know Jesus?” she asked.

“Sure,” I answered, “I know Jesus.”

“That’s good. Praise Jesus.”

I smiled, not wanting to get too involved in an unwanted religious discussion.

She looked me up and down and asked, “You visiting a friend?”

“My father,” I responded.

She nodded.

“He’s the ornery Scotsman with the small dog,” I said.

She nodded again, but this time with a level of disdain. “He doesn’t know Jesus. Sad.”

Clearly, they had talked before.

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Jagged Ironies from the Void…

The old demon has filled my life with several delicious ironies. As his cognitive abilities fade and his memory fails him, they reveal themselves to me.

For example, my father spent most of my young life telling my brother and me how useless we were. “Useless!” he would scream, adding, as if needed to clarify, “You’re no use to anyone at all.”

Yeah, it was a whole thing, but now at age fifty-five, I see how incompetent and lost the old demon has become, and it takes every ounce of my energy not to scream, “Useless!”

I don’t do it, though. I tell myself it’s because I’m the bigger person, but I suspect it really stems from feeling some level of guilt after yelling at someone who is losing their capacity to reason things out.

This irony, which can be filed under the umbrella irony of “parenting your parents,” is nothing compared to the newest and greatest irony I have ever experienced.

Let me explain.

When my brother and I were young, my father was an angry, violent alcoholic. He punished us mercilessly for things we did wrong and many more we had nothing to do with.

Describing this brutality in detail isn’t necessary, but sufficed to say, the beatings were much more than a slap, a spanking, or a stern talking to. These punishments were physically and psychologically terrifying and left us with an intense feeling of uncertainty and fear about life. This awful residue stays with you in some form for the rest of your life.

The psychological component of these punishments, however, was the source of this new irony.

For example, when the old demon saw me putting an electrical plug in the wrong place, he beat me cruelly to teach me a lesson. In my mind, I was exploring connections and naively thought I had made a discovery. When I showed the old man, he took this as his opportunity to thrash me.

As was usually the case, the punishments led to me crying my eyes out and being sent to my room to think about what I’d done.

The punishments delivered to my brother and me were rarely commensurate with the actual crime. It was just the way it was.

So, there I’d be, my head lying on a tear-soaked pillow in my room, when my father would step inside slowly and sit on the edge of the bed.

In movies and TV shows, this is where the parent apologizes for losing their temper and does their best to impart the immortal words, “It hurt me more than it hurt you…”

This was not the way things worked in my childhood home. The old demon never apologized. Apologies are for the weak. In his world, you needed to be strong.

The post-beating chat took a very different tack.

“Listen, you know why I hit you, don’t you?” He asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Why?”

“Because I plugged the adapter into the tv.”

“That’s right.”

At no point did he apologize for his violent behavior; instead, he forced me to validate his use of excessive force. After you repeated back why it was necessary to inflict such physical abuse on you, he would smile and walk away absolved.

It was an incredible thing. Because I am not talking about getting spanked or slapped a little. I’m talking about close-fisted attacks that sent you to the floor and kicks to the body that forced you to wrap yourself in the fetal position until it stopped.

One time, my brother and I were kicking around a soccer ball in the driveway, and it rolled out into the street. I ran out into the road to retrieve it, but I didn’t look both ways before I ventured out into harm’s way.

As I remember it, there were no cars coming, but I didn’t look. When I returned with the ball, my father was standing on the back porch. He’d seen it all and screamed for us to get inside the house.

He thrashed me for it, then attacked my older brother for “not looking out for me.” I’d never seen him so angry. Both my brother and I were crying and sent to our room. As we sobbed into our pillows, feeling sorry for ourselves, we took comfort in knowing the beating was over.

But it wasn’t.

My father returned to the room and continued to scream at us. I remember trying to make a case for myself, but all I remember was my father pulling his set of keys from his belt. The kind that was attached to a retractable metal chain and had a bit of weight to them. He hurled the keys at me, and they connected with the top of my head.

I screamed in pain, but a moment later my father stopped yelling, came straight for me and grabbed me from my bed.

I honestly thought he was gonna kill me. He dragged me out of my room and into the small bathroom in our small rental house in Torrance.

He put my head under the sink and turned the water on. I couldn’t make much sense of what he was doing. I was too busy crying and wriggling to break free.

Then I opened my eyes. I looked down into the sink, and the water was red with blood. The keychain had ripped into my scalp and created a sizable gash.

Looking back, my father must have seen the stream of blood dripping down my face or jetting from the top of my head to act so quickly. I’ll never know for sure.

Eventually, the gash on my head stopped bleeding, and my father sat both my brother and me down to get us to admit why his reaction was not only necessary but justified.

In the end, my father did not apologize. We did not go to the doctor; he administered no medical treatment (besides a rinse in the sink) and not another word was spoken about it.

My mom was not told, nor did I mention it. In the weeks that followed, I didn’t tell anyone at my school what had happened. Not my friends, nor teachers. There was a jungle gym at school you could climb and hang upside down from. I remember hanging by my legs and feeling the blood rush to my head, and the gash on my head throbbed and pulsed with pain. I never said a word. To anyone.

Oh. I was five years old, by the way. Good times.

It took years for me to reflect on these moments and realize that the secrets we kept in my childhood home were not only commonplace; they existed without being told to stay quiet. We just did it.

When I confronted the old demon with this story in my mid-twenties, the best he could manage in response was, “I make no excuses for the things I did raising you. I did what I thought was right.”

Womp-womp…

That was it. It taught me an amazing lesson, though, and one I wish everyone would understand. When you have a crazy parent who causes you great pain and distress as a child, you believe nothing less than a full-throated mea culpa is necessary for you to heal.

Spoiler alert. It’s not.

None of it matters. Not really. If you get that genuine apology, that’s great. I hope you do, but it does precious little to heal the damage that has been ingrained deep in your soul. Real freedom comes from knowing you are the only one who controls whether you continue to hold on to the past. Apologies don’t get you very far. Maybe on the surface, but the deep cuts remain. Only you can heal those. I’m fine, by the way. I survived, and I only tell the story to make a point. Your life doesn’t have to be defined by this kind of trauma, but it definitely shapes the course of your life.

But I digress…

For the record. I never got that apology. Not for the key-throwing, nor the myriad of other physical and psychological attacks that made up my daily life growing up.

Until now…

Believe it or not, the old demon spends most of his days now saying the words, “I’m sorry.” In fact, he says it so often that he probably doesn’t give it a second thought.

Is it a deep well of shame and guilt bubbling up from inside him? Nope. Is it the great mea culpa repeated so many times that it’s lost its real meaning? Not even a little.

No, my father suffers from terrible hearing loss in both ears and spends his days asking everyone who speaks to him to repeat themselves so he can understand what they said.

To do this, he simply leans in and says, “I’m sorry?”

Now, that’s irony.

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Choosing Patricia Clarkson for this article wasn’t hard. The hard part was finding the right performance to share. She has spent the last twenty-five-plus years turning in one fantastic performance after another.

Whether you know her from The Green Mile, where she played Tom Hanks’ empathetic wife, or her role in Far From Heaven opposite Julianne Moore, she has never disappointed.

In 2003, the year my first film, The Cooler, was in dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival, Patricia Clarkson acted in no less than four of the other films shown there, three of which were in dramatic competition. Pieces of April by Peter Hedges, The Station Agent by Tom McCarthy, and All the Real Girls by David Gordon Green.

However, my introduction to Patricia Clarkson came in the form of Greta, the drug-addled German actress who played Ally Sheedy’s lover in Lisa Cholodenko’s brilliant drama High Art.

The film itself is an unapologetic tale of love, loss, addiction, and identity. It never takes the easy road and delivers real emotional power.

So, why Greta? Why this marble-mouthed addict who is barely conscious throughout the entire film? Because despite her character’s inability to connect to reality, she connects with us, forming a cautionary tale, not just of addiction, but of life choices, regrets, and the delusions she forms to bridge the gap.

Rather than show one scene, I have put together a montage of scenes that show how subtle her performance is throughout.

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There can be no question about the immense talent of character actor Stephen Root. There is no shortage of great performances to choose from. From his iconic character of Milton, the downtrodden office worker in Office Space, to the owner of the country radio station in O Brother, Where Art Thou. The man is so versatile and comfortable in every role that you believe him.

One of the problems with stunt-casting a role is that the famous actor portraying the character can find it hard to disappear. Most film lovers who grew up watching Jack Nicholson in his prime will remember his roles as “Jack Nicholson as a Werewolf” or “Jack Nicholson as an astronaut.” While it’s no knock to his acting ability, his face and image were so ubiquitous that you always saw Jack Nicholson. The exception to this might be A Few Good Men.

Either way, this is where character actors shine. They disappear into a role and make it their own. In the Empty Man, Stephen Root plays a religious cult leader named Arthur Parsons. In the scene below, he explains the ephemeral nature of things and why things unseen can be just as dangerous as the visible, tangible realities of life.

I can say without fear of contradiction that even when Stephen Root ends up in a bad movie, he never gives a bad performance.

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Martin Short does what Martin Short does in this brilliant turn in Christopher Guest’s comedy The Big Picture. As vapid Hollywood agent Neil Sussman, Short embodies the empty gestures and hollow compliments that pervade the entertainment industry. At once honest, seemingly forthright, and plugged in, he reveals himself to be nothing but an insecure, heat-seeking missile whose attention can be drawn away at any second.

In a time before cell phones, when you might have the chance of attaining someone’s complete, undivided attention, Short’s agent character loves the idea of you, the promise of you, that is built up before the reality of your ephemeral nature is revealed.

He is a caricature, to be sure, but so dead-on that insiders know this exact type of person, and outsiders simply don’t believe he exists.

The film itself is wonderful. A comedy about a filmmaker (Kevin Bacon) whose short film wins an award, thrusting him into the gaping maw of Hollywood, which happily chews up and spits out people like him without so much as a second thought.

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If I took the time required to list all the brilliant moments inside the astoundingly funny film Love, Actually, it would take all day. This highly quotable comedy features a stellar cast and an infinite rewatchability factor.

My favorite of these tiny moments belongs to Rowan Atkinson as a shop clerk who lovingly gift-wraps a Christmas present, much to the chagrin of customer Harry, played by Alan Rickman.

You could be fooled into believing anyone could play the role of the jewelry salesman, but I believe you’d be wrong. Rowan Atkinson, known mostly for his Mr. Bean character and the British comedy Blackadder, is a master of giving less to produce more. Every movement in the scene is precise. He is neither over the top nor forgettably understated. His precision and painstakingness become maddening the longer he goes on.

You could make the case that he is exactly the way you’d expect a store clerk to act. In this case, however, it pushes the scene into the genius category.

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Story Genres = Story Problems

As a writer, the industry will try to pigeonhole you into a specific category. If you write a comedy, then you are the comedy person. If you write a thriller, you are the thriller person.

Even your agents need you to be a certain thing. I had a reputation for writing dark film noir-type thrillers. So, when I told my agent at the time I wanted to write a romantic comedy about a man who finds recordings of his dead wife telling him all the things he should do with his life after she is gone, I thought she would be thrilled. I had crafted a funny, romantic tearjerker that would become the next Notting Hill or My Best Friend’s Wedding. Yes, this was a long time ago.

She sat across from me in a conference room at Broder Webb and gave me a blank, slightly disappointed look. She said, “Listen, that’s great, but unless you are willing to channel the female for the next ten years, I suggest you stick to what you do best.”

She was right, of course, at least for the time. Back then, the studio system, the agencies, and their respective talent pools were in their packaging era. And if packaging was about anything at all, it was about certainty. As I’ve stated before, the film business was, is, and always shall be risk-averse. A great package means all the guesswork has been taken out of the deal. It’s not Brad Pitt starring, David Fincher directing, and written by a guy who's mainly known for rom-coms, but we’ve been assured he can pull it off. These packages don’t guarantee brilliance. Far from it. A lot can happen from script to screen that can scuttle the entire ship.

Nowadays, all that doesn’t matter as much anymore. My last produced film was an action thriller about sharks and whales. The one shooting right now is a romantic comedy featuring a dog. Nobody questioned my ability to write it. They just read the script and said, great! If they hadn’t liked it, they would have just said no.

I’m here speaking from the writer’s perspective, and I think casting a wide net is not only a good thing, it also makes you a better writer. And here’s why…

Writers often write in different genres because they have a wide range of interests. I have written in most genres (see above) and without fail, the number one lesson that comes with tackling a different genre is their specific story problems.

If you write a romantic comedy, you will need to solve problems that only come up in romantic comedies. If you write a western, you will have problems that only come up in westerns.

This is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a very good thing. Why? Because being able to solve unique story problems comes from having faced them in the past. They may not all have the same solution, but you will be better for having solved them.

So what do I mean? Isn’t a story problem a story problem, no matter what genre you write?

Yes, and no.

For example. Let’s look at genre conventions. Each genre has a list of expectations.

In any genre, the established conventions embody more than just plot devices. They include settings, main characters, and themes.

In the romance genre, the story requires one or more of the following.

1. A hate to love transformation.

2. A love triangle.

3. An unrequited love.

4. Maybe even a secret love child.

The setting often becomes a character in these kinds of stories. A sleepy little town in the country. A busy urban center or a rural environment where love can grow organically.

What are typical story problems to solve?

Why won’t he marry me?

Is he being faithful?

Does he even love me?

Will he choose me or him?

The problem isn’t in the questions, as you can come up with any number of quick answers. The problem is writing a fresh, unique solution to these problems that avoids tired clichés and overused tropes.

He refuses to marry you because he is in love with someone else.

He refuses to marry you because he is selfish and focused on his career.

He refuses to marry you because he promised his dying wife he would never replace her.

All of these sound uninspired, but you will probably find a version of them in all romance stories. The difference is how the writer creates the story complication. What sounds like, “He doesn’t really love me,” is revealed to be that he loves you too much. He knows how much you want children, but he’s afraid to admit that he can’t have them.

His being too self-absorbed and selfish becomes a relentless drive to outrun the trauma of his childhood. His inability to stop for you isn’t because he’s too selfish. He’s just terrified that if he stops for anyone, his demons will catch up to him and take him down in front of God and everybody.

In the thriller, the story is concerned with at least two of these very important things.

1. A hero whose life will change in an instant, having no warning of what is happening or what is to come.

2. A ticking clock. Whatever the solution, it must be solved in a hurry.

3. A seemingly unstoppable villain who keeps coming no matter what.

Setting is also very important. It’s become the height of cliché when a writer pitches his thriller idea as, “Die Hard in a dairy farm!”

Let’s take the ticking clock. It has come to mean much more than just a time crunch. It’s less about the time and more about the consequences if we don’t stop them by midnight…

The story problem here comes in the form of a unique, fresh, and compelling take on what will happen if the time runs out.

“I will set off a bomb that will take out three entire city blocks.”

Oh, that old chestnut?

Whatever you do, don’t kidnap my wife or child. No one will see that coming. You see what I mean? People have seen hours upon hours of movies and TV. They want to be surprised.

It’s a hard thing to do these days. Rather than destroy a city block, you might not even say what you will do. Have the audience wondering what is going to happen.

The solution to most of these story problems lies in the setup of your story. If you have failed to come up with a unique consequence, your hero is either poorly crafted or you are missing what’s right in front of your face.

Story problems are worth solving, no matter what the genre is.

Each of these genres forces the writer to solve these problems, and once he or she does, they can take that knowledge with them on their career journey. If you simply stick with one genre, that’s fine, but you will miss a great opportunity to solve a story problem that is probably still years away.

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For anyone who saw Lili Fini Zanuck’s powerful film Rush, they will recognize this standout scene by comedian turned actor Special K. McKray. His electrifying scene as asthmatic dope dealer Willie Red feels so authentic, it’s easy to believe he was plucked from a drug den and let loose in front of the cameras to just be himself.

He never so much as raises his voice, but compels two undercover vice cops, played by Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh, to shoot up heroin to prove they aren’t cops.

Everything from the cadence of his voice, the use of his inhaler, and the sparse waving of his gun gives his performance a menacing yet friendly vibe.

The film Rush was based on the book by Kim Wozencraft, a former vice cop who based the book on her time as an undercover narcotics agent in Texas during the beginnings of Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs.”

The script was adapted by Pete Dexter for director Lini Fini Zanuck. This is a movie that simply wouldn’t get made today. Its bleak characters compel us forward toward a head-on collision we cannot look away from.

The film itself has a supporting cast that delivers on every level, including turns by Sam Elliott, Max Perlich, William Sadler, and the legendary Gregg Allman as the villain Gaines.

The film’s score was written by Eric Clapton and features the song Tears in Heaven, a devastating tribute written after the tragic death of his son. All this, plus the use of Robin Trower’s haunting song Bridge of Sighs makes this movie an overlooked gem.

Yes, all of that to say, with the mountain of talent involved at every level of this film, the performance delivered by Special K. McCray stands above it all.

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You’d be hard-pressed to find a better character actress than Geraldine Page. In this small scene from The Pope of Greenwich Village, she offers up a masterclass in acting, showing power and gravity with very little effort.

In the film, she plays Mrs. Ritter, a widowed New York ball-breaker whose son, an NYPD detective, is found dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft. She doesn’t actually know what corrupt shenanigans her son was into, but her instinct to protect him takes center stage.

In my life as a lover of film, this scene (and movie) has come up countless times. Aside from the well-written dialogue, she uses everything at her disposal for dramatic effect. I can only imagine what the director must have thought after the scene was done.

Born in Kirksville, Missouri, she was the farthest thing from a tough NYC broad. Although she had a long, storied career and was nominated eight times, her only Oscar came in 1986 for the film The Trip to Bountiful, about an elderly woman with a heart condition who yearns to return to her childhood home in the small, rural town called Bountiful before she dies.

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For a long time I’ve wanted to share some of the small scenes that stole entire movies or featured an actor who delivered such a powerful performance, it stayed with you long after the movie was forgotten.

Such is the case with this scene in Outbreak featuring the late, great J.T. Walsh. He left behind a long trail of fantastic performances, but few as small and powerful than this gem in which he briefs the Joint Chiefs with the president’s position on Operation Clean Sweep, a bombing cam

paign that will vaporize an entire town in the United States to stop the outbreak of a deadly virus from taking hold and killing the greater population.

Jack Nicholson has been quoted as saying he needed to see at least two or three stand out scenes like this for his character before he will sign onto a project. You can see why. They pack a punch.

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Introduction:

What the hell is this, and what is it all about?

My name is Frank Hannah. I’ve spent the last three decades telling people the following sentence. “If you have a special skill, it’s just a cry for help. You’re just marketing your misery.”

As many times as I’ve said it, many more have asked for an explanation. I usually respond with a basic anecdote or two. It went something like this.

Sometimes, acquiring special skills points to a need for attention. A “love me” kind of reaction to a sense of lack. It’s not an original observation. It’s why the entertainment industry is filled with extremely talented, yet completely dysfunctional people who are starved for attention. Not all of them. I’m sure some of them are very well-adjusted, level-headed people. I’ve just never met any of them.

I count myself among these crazies. My desire to write movies was born out of a need to impress my father, who rarely handed out praise for anything. I knew he loved movies, and I figured if I could be one of those people who made them, he would finally think I was good enough.

Spoiler alert. I finally made it in the business, and boy, was he impressed. It didn’t change anything, however, as the real person I had to impress was myself. My father could heap praise on me all day long. It was the inner critic he installed in me that would continue to be unimpressed.

That said, this is not a book about pissing and moaning about my childhood. No, it’s a book about how to transform those moments of misery into something meaningful.

A little background. I was born in Clydebank, Scotland, but raised in Southern California. Despite being so far from home, I was surrounded by Scottish people. They were family, friends, and strangers alike, who all gathered together to share their experiences.

Something I realized over the years was how funny these people were. They were not comedians by trade. They just had a way of telling their stories that was hysterical and thoroughly entertaining. The content of these stories usually involved some mishap, tragedy, or misfortune. They had found a way to reshape their own struggles into something wholly transformative.

I didn’t think in those terms back then, but I knew I liked being around them. They were funny, relatable, and always ready to poke fun at their situation. It taught me, though I didn’t know it at the time, many important lessons about life, people, and our shared experiences.

Why is this important?

Everybody knows what it’s like to be around a negative person who just bloviates about their situation and sucks all the oxygen out of the room. We see them coming, and we run for the hills to get away from them.

The way I learned to express my pain and suffering was the exact opposite of that. It’s a part of the social tradition of Scotland. The storyteller. It’s not a position that looks down on people from a great height. It’s a ground-level spot where everyday people exist. It reaches out to connect with people and finds common ground.

Scottish people aren’t the only culture to do this, but I have come to call this trait Marketing Your Misery. It’s what I learned growing up, it’s what I’ve done all my life, and it’s been a big part of my success as a storyteller. I am ready, at last, to expound on this skill in a way that everyone can relate to and enjoy.

What I’m launching is a twelve-part series, laying out my full philosophical and creative engine. It has taken me a long time to compile, so there will be a paywall for it, while my regular posts will remain free. If you think there is value here, then by all means subscribe. If not, you will still be able to enjoy my regular content.

In the meantime, read the introduction and see what you think! Let’s market some misery, shall we?

Why Misery Sells

Misery gets a bad rap. It’s the thing we try to hide, the part of ourselves we edit out of résumés, holiday cards, and Instagram feeds. We’ve been taught that misery is weakness, that it’s better to bury our problems than parade them around. And yet, if you look at what people actually consume—stand-up comedy, memoirs, podcasts, TikToks, even advertising—you’ll see a different truth: misery sells.

Audiences lean into stories of disaster, embarrassment, heartbreak, and failure. Not because they’re cruel, but because misery is universal. We might not all share the same wins, but we all know what it’s like to lose, to hurt, to screw up spectacularly. Misery is the great equalizer—and when told well, it’s also the great connector.

Comedian Ali Wong once said that she built her entire career out of being “brutally honest about how hard marriage and motherhood actually are.” Millions laughed, not because they wanted to see her suffer, but because she gave voice to what they were already thinking. Her misery became her material—and her brand.

This book is about that connection. More specifically, it’s about how to take the struggles you’ve lived through and transform them into stories and ideas people actually want to hear. It’s about marketing your misery—not in a cheap, exploitative way, but in a way that’s digestible, meaningful, and sometimes even profitable.

The Paradox of Pain: Why People Are Drawn to Stories of Struggle

At first glance, it seems strange. Why would anyone voluntarily lean into someone else’s suffering? The answer lies in the paradox of pain: what hurts to live through is often irresistible to witness.

Remember when Jessica Lahey’s book The Gift of Failure hit bestseller lists? She wrote candidly about messing up as a parent and letting her kids fail. Instead of being shunned, she became a go-to expert. By admitting her misery, she turned it into authority.

We binge-watch true-crime documentaries about people’s darkest days. We laugh until our sides hurt at comedians turning their breakups into punchlines. We devour memoirs filled with humiliations and mistakes. Pain, once reframed as story, becomes fuel for entertainment, connection, and even healing.

The paradox is this: when we’re in misery, it feels isolating. But when we share misery, it becomes magnetic. The very thing we try to hide is often the thing that will draw people closer.

The Psychology of Shared Suffering

Why does misery resonate so deeply? Because it works on three powerful psychological levers:

• Empathy. We don’t want to feel alone in our struggles. Hearing someone else admit to the same pain gives us comfort, even relief.

• Voyeurism. People love peeking behind the curtain at someone else’s messy, imperfect life. It makes us feel both fascinated and human.

• Catharsis. When someone else tells their story of suffering, we get to release emotions without having to live through the experience ourselves.

Consider Brené Brown’s famous TED Talk on vulnerability, which has over 60 million views. The moment she admitted to having a “breakdown” instead of a “spiritual awakening,” the crowd laughed—not at her, but with her. That single confession transformed her from academic to cultural icon.

This is why misery works across mediums. A confessional blog post, a stand-up set, a TED talk about failure—they all let audiences tap into empathy, voyeurism, or catharsis. Done well, they leave people feeling lighter, closer, and more engaged.

How Brands, Artists, and Influencers Already Use Their “Low Points” to Connect

If you start looking for it, you’ll see that misery marketing is everywhere. Comedians build entire careers around self-deprecation. Influencers grow loyal audiences by admitting insecurities instead of hiding them. Even major corporations have leaned into their failures to sell products.

Take Domino’s Pizza. In 2009, the company launched an ad campaign with a shocking admission: their pizza used to taste awful. They showed focus group footage of people complaining about the crust being like “cardboard.” Instead of hiding, they owned it—and promised to improve. Sales exploded. By turning shame into story, Domino’s rebuilt its brand.

Or consider the rise of the #fail hashtag online. Influencers posting about their clumsy moments, fashion disasters, or awkward encounters often go more viral than polished perfection. Failure feels real. Realness builds trust. And trust builds loyalty.

Misery, when told with honesty and craft, isn’t a liability. It’s an asset.

Promise of This Book: Not Therapy, But Transformation

Here’s the key distinction: this book isn’t about wallowing in your misery or treating it like a therapy session. It’s about learning to shape it—editing, packaging, and delivering it so it lands with others.

Think of your misery as raw clay. It might be heavy, messy, and unformed, but it’s also full of potential. With the right tools, you can mold it into stories, products, and messages that not only free you from its weight but also connect with audiences.

In the chapters ahead, you’ll learn:

• How to reframe misery as story. Discover narrative structures that turn chaos into clarity.

• How to package pain for audiences. Learn the Digestible Misery Formula (brevity + relatability + twist) and how to hook people with your hurt.

• How to make misery relatable. Balance humor, honesty, and humanity so your stories connect rather than repel.

• How to market your misery. Choose the right platforms, build community through vulnerability, and even monetize your struggles without losing authenticity.

By the end, you’ll have the tools to turn breakdowns into breakthroughs, embarrassing moments into crowd-pleasers, and failures into your most marketable assets.

A Roadmap Through Misery

This book unfolds in four parts:

1. Reframing Misery. Learning to see your struggles not as shameful secrets but as narrative seeds.

2. Packaging Pain for an Audience. Mastering the art of hooks, story structures, and content formats.

3. The Alchemy of Relatability. Using humor, humanity, and lessons to build deep connections.

4. Mastering the Market of Misery. Finding the right platforms, monetizing authentically, and turning misery into a superpower.

Each section includes case studies, exercises, and examples—so you’re not just reading theory, you’re practicing transformation.

From Breakdown to Breakthrough

The truth is simple: misery is unavoidable. You will fail. You will get rejected. You will embarrass yourself, lose things you love, and make mistakes you can’t believe you made. That’s life.

But here’s the twist: those low points don’t have to be wasted. They can be your sharpest tools. Your most embarrassing failure can become your best story. Your heartbreak can become your brand’s voice. Your mistakes can make you money.

This book is here to show you how.

Misery, when marketed well, doesn’t just entertain. It connects. It builds trust. It creates belonging. And sometimes, it even pays the bills.

Welcome to Marketing Your Misery.

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When I think about the thousands of books the old demon has read over the last eighty years of his life, I am staggered. Voracious is a fitting way to describe it. As a boy, trips to the local library were common. He would take out three or four books at a time and make more than one trip per week.

It’s similarly troubling to think of all the books he’s forgotten. I like to joke that he’s forgotten more books than I will ever read in my lifetime, and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. His thirst for knowledge was always apparent, and I think I have to give him credit for instilling the same sense of curiosity in me that remains as strong today as ever.

While he read anything and everything he could get his hands on, like most “dads” of his generation, he liked books about submarines, boats, and military battles. He loved Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell about English soldier Richard Sharpe during the Napoleonic Wars, the Jack Aubrey novels by Patrick O’Brian that started off with Master and Commander, and he loved anything that took place on the sea.

This love of the sea took hold early in his life. My father spent his early years in the merchant navy as a shipwright. He traveled the world many times over, and it opened his eyes to a wider perspective. As a poor kid from Glasgow, he knew the opportunities at home were few and far between. His coming of age did not happen on land. It happened at sea, and upon his first return home a year later, he found himself unable to stand being around his old friends. They remained close-minded, bigoted, and bitter about their chances.

The life and person he was becoming no longer fit into that small worldview. I think his love of reading was the next best thing to real adventure.

He loved to tell my brother and me about the stories he was reading. I have a distinct memory of my father telling us about Annie Wilkes, the demon caretaker in Stephen King’s book Misery. I remember him acting out the scenes where Annie questions the character of writer Paul Sheldon about why he tried to escape and how calmly and menacingly she spoke as violence loomed in the background.

He always encouraged us to read, and he would take us with him on his library trips. Mostly, I picked out Peanuts Comic strip collections. I was young, after all.

I would love to say I followed in my father’s footsteps and read voraciously throughout my childhood, but I didn’t. For some reason, it just didn’t take.

Then, when I reached high school age, reading became compulsory. We were tasked with reading books for English class, among others. I didn’t consider this reading for fun.

Then, one day I went to see a movie called The Believers. It was a thriller about a recently widowed police psychologist who is investigating a series of ritualistic child murders in New York City.

It starred Martin Sheen in the lead role. It explored the dark world of Santeria. While the film was criticized for its portrayal of a mostly benign, yet primitive religion, the film absolutely captured my imagination. So much so that when I discovered the film was based on a book called The Religion by Nicholas Conde, I sought it out and devoured it quickly.

It was the first book I remember reading for pleasure, besides Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, which was in my early youth.

From there, I searched for other books that could give me that same jolt of excitement. I’ll be honest with you. Just finishing a book was an achievement. I would tell people I had finished a book, and they would say, “Yeah, I read that. It was a horrible book.”

All I could think of at the time was, “Well, yeah, but I finished it!”

It didn’t occur to me to have an opinion about them. There were a lot of touchstone-type books I read that really made an impression on me. As I read more and more, I built a library in my mind of the good and the bad, and the meh.

I started collecting books. Many more books than I would ever read. All from used bookstores that would cost a dollar a piece. It became a bit of an identity. If I have a lot of books, then people will think I am smart. Yeah, I know. Stupid.

One day, I was in a bookstore in the literature section, and a girl who worked there approached me, pulled a book off the shelf, and said, “Read this. It changed my life,” then simply walked away.

The book was Demian by Hermann Hesse. I had read none of his work before.

Demian was a coming-of-age novel that traced Emil Sinclair’s path from innocence to self-awareness. Raised in a protected world of clear right and wrong, Sinclair is gradually pulled into a more complicated reality through experiences with fear, doubt, and inner conflict.

Under the influence of an enigmatic stranger named Max Demian, he begins to question traditional ideas of morality and identity. As Sinclair struggles with both external pressures and his own internal contradictions, he learns that growth requires embracing the full spectrum of who he is — not just the acceptable, “good” parts, but also the darker, hidden sides.

Ultimately, the novel explores the difficult but transformative journey toward becoming a whole, self-defined individual.

Now, that description doesn’t exactly scream read me, but knowing nothing about the book, I read it, and it transformed me. I can’t explain it, but my best description is to say that it felt like a book about teenage angst. It was like a John Hughes movie without the silly comedy written in the early 20th century.

From there, I read all the Hermann Hesse books I could find. From Steppenwolf to Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Beneath the Wheel. All of them spoke to me in a way that other books did not.

As a side note, many years later, completely by chance, I saw the girl who suggested the book to me. I fell over myself to speak to her. She must have thought I was a crazy person.

“Excuse me. This is gonna sound weird, but like ten years ago, you suggested a book for me to read and you said it would change my life. I just want to tell you it did, and I tell everyone I meet about it.”

“What was the book?” She asked.

“Demian by Hermann Hesse.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “That’s a good one.”

To be honest, her response didn’t quite match my enthusiasm about it, and I felt a little embarrassed for gushing in the way that I did, but I know in my heart she felt a sense of satisfaction. It’s the same satisfaction I get when people I have told to read it have come back and gushed to me about it.

Thus, my journey into book knowledge continued. I cursed myself for not reading earlier, as my reading comprehension definitely suffered. Influenced by others, I read the works of Borges, Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude was an enormous challenge for me to finish. While I set it down many, many times, the turning of the last page was so satisfying, I believe I might have welled up with tears.

For the old demon, reading was something so fundamental to his existence that he probably didn’t share the same epiphanies as I. Reading was a humbling experience. Like the ocean of my father’s early years.

I saw it as something vast and powerful, to be respected and learned from if only you are willing to step into the deep end.

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The short version. Almost everyone sucks at it.

You’ve read about it, you’ve seen it dramatized in movies and television. The story pitch is one of the most mystical and mysterious things in the entire industry. Why? Because it stands between you and all the fame and fortune owed to you by this despicable business.

Well, not really. The fantasy is that you go into a room to pitch a studio, a producer, or an actor. You spin a yarn so compelling and satisfying that they crack open their checkbooks and buy it in the room. Hell, they loved you so much, you’ll probably end up with one of those development deals where the studio pays you to develop projects they have no intention of making.

For most people, this is a fantasy. And as I will explain, if you sell a pitch in the room, I will bet money there were other highly lucrative factors involved.

Let’s back up a bit.

Pitching your stories is an essential skill that all writers must possess to be successful, but probably not for the reasons you think. If you think it’s so you can sell an idea in the room, believe me when I tell you that it is probably near the bottom of the list.

The ability to pitch a solid idea, story, or long-form TV series is a foundational skill. It reveals to your audience that you know what a story is and why yours is important. I believe all creative people should learn this skill, and the sooner, the better.

Not only does it illustrate your grasp of story structure, but it also helps you to refine your existing ideas so they are more complete. If you’ve listened to a lot of pitches, one of the most common things you will find is your desire for them to get to the point. Conversely, that is what they want from you. The essence of your story.

It should be clear, concise, and compelling. If you ramble on about setting, inspiration, and characters for too long, your audience will check out.

You might even know, if pressed, what the core themes and complications of your story are, but if you don’t present them, no one will hear them.

Distilling your idea down to a logline isn’t just for a development executive’s benefit. It’s actually for yours. If the story elements aren’t there, your logline will suck.

Example. Here’s a story idea I literally just pulled out of my — er, thin air…

The Right To Remain is a thriller about a cop who must bring down a drug trafficking ring in Chicago.

Okay. A cop movie. Yay. I love cop stories, but I don’t really care about this one. Why?

It’s uninspired. Unoriginal. I know nothing about the characters. There is no story complication. If you pitched this idea, it’s likely you would give me a laundry list of things the cop does and throw in some badass set pieces, but it wouldn’t add up to anything. It wouldn’t be a story.

The reason why people hook onto a story pitch is that they fall prey to a strong complication. In other words, the story dilemma is clear.

I know what you’re thinking. What do you mean? Story Dilemma? Story Complication? I don’t get it.

Sometimes, story complications are expressed through a story theme. Something like “blood is thicker than water,” or “Charity begins at home.”

They don’t represent the plot. They represent the moral dilemma or story complication inside the plot, which makes it a story.

For example, a medical researcher dedicates her life to finding a treatment for a lesser-known and underfunded disease. She works tirelessly and wants to help the world. The story complication is that her long work hours force her to miss quality time with her family, and she doesn’t see the pitfalls ahead. If she put her focus more on helping her family, she could avoid it. The powerful pull of her research and her family creates a strong dilemma you can use to create conflict.

Let’s get back to the cop story. Let’s change the logline to reflect a strong story complication.

The Right to Remain is a psychological crime thriller about a self-serving, crooked vice cop who loses a niece to a drug overdose and is tasked with taking down the drug lord responsible, knowing his crooked connection to him puts his life and career in jeopardy.

Okay, better. Now, we have a troubled cop who has a dilemma. He’s a selfish vice cop on the take who’s looked the other way for years, and now that has led to the death of a young woman he knows and cares for. He can take down the man responsible, but it will destroy his reputation and career.

The complication? Is he willing to sacrifice himself to do the right thing or remain the same selfish person who looks the other way to line his pockets?

How would you crank up this dilemma even more?

What if the cop was over-leveraged? He took blood money to keep his sister’s restaurant afloat. He’s not a totally bad guy. His ability to pay off these debts means taking money from criminals. So, his choice to take down the drug lord is more than just about his reputation. It affects others.

You can see how this builds from just having a solid complication up front. The simple exercise of writing a logline helped to craft a story dilemma big enough to hang a story on.

Now, granted. My example isn’t exactly an award-winning idea. It’s derivative and basic. The point is to have a moral dilemma. That’s the reason people read books, watch movies, or listen to stories. They want to experience your story through your characters. They might not be a crooked vice cop, but they definitely know what it’s like to choose family over careers or some variation.

At the very basic level, your elevator pitch doesn’t have to tell the entire story. It only has to give us the complication. Who is the story about? What do they want? And what’s at stake for them if they fail?

That’s basically it. If people pitching stories started from there, their storytelling would be miles above the status quo.

Example…

Chief Brody in Jaws has to catch and kill a shark in a small beach town. That describes what happens, but that’s not the story. His dilemma is twofold. He needs to stop it before it ruins the town’s entire tourist season and, oh yeah, he’s afraid of the water. The dilemma makes it a story.

Example…

Elliot Ness in The Untouchables is tasked with taking down crime boss Al Capone. You could pitch that, for sure, but it becomes a compelling story when you realize Ness is a Boy Scout and a by-the-book lawman who wants everyone to follow the rules. His dilemma is that the entire system is corrupt, and for him to nail Capone, he will have to cross the line to do what needs to be done. Can he live with it? Now you have a story.

Hopefully, you get the picture. If you have the basic story complication, you have a great blueprint for how to tell your story to someone.

Here’s a little secret that you only find out from doing it. Some people can pitch the hell out of a story, but they can’t write it for shit. It’s a mystery to me, given that a good pitch tells you everything you need to know and more about your story.

Sometimes, a person can write a fantastic story, but crash and burn in the pitching department. This is usually because they are shy, self-conscious, and don’t have the confidence to hold the attention of a room. It can be stressful.

The larger point I’m making here is that writing and pitching are two completely different skills and aren’t necessarily interchangeable.

There will be a time when you find yourself in a meeting with a producer at your side, or a director, and they will pitch something so masterfully that you will beg them to teach you how they do it. It’s like voodoo. They speak extemporaneously without notes and hit every emotional point dead-on.

It’s in moments like this that you realize how magical the practice actually is.

Here is my advice to you. Build rapport. Know your story’s complication. Keep it simple.

There are several types of pitches you may be asked to give. A brief idea pitch, a summary pitch, or the dreaded long-form pitch.

If you are in a general meeting with someone, they will not be expecting, nor will they ask for, a long-form pitch. This is where the idea or summary pitch comes in. It’s the most powerful weapon you have. It is easier to master and leaves your audience wanting more. This is where you can define your lead character, their mission, and the all-important story complication that will hook them.

If successful, they will probably ask you to provide a written summary, which should be good news cuz you no longer have to keep speaking.

The long-form pitch is a nightmare, and I defy anyone to tell me different. It’s where you are called in to pitch your story in its entirety. They want the first act, the second act, and the third act, along with set pieces, turning points, and the finale.

This maniacal form of torture is every writer’s worst nightmare. What to say? What to leave out? Is it too short? Is it too long? By the time you discover the answers to these questions, it will already be too late.

It’s hard to lay out a full story. We will overcomplicate it without trying and fail to trust the material or the audience. Every tiny pause or stumble seeds a deeper level of doubt in the audience, and there is a tipping point when you just know they have checked out completely.

My advice here is to provide a written outline or beat sheet that tells them all they need to know, even if you fuck it up somewhere along the way.

This leads me to the most important reason pitching short-form ideas is so crucial. And I can’t stress this enough.

You are probably pitching your idea to a development executive who is trying to make their bones. They probably suck at pitching worse than you do. So, if you pitch your idea and it’s a little too overcomplicated, muddled, or unclear, imagine what it’s going to sound like coming out of their mouth? Your pitch is only as good as the person who is pitching it to their boss.

The only defense against this is making sure your short-form pitch or elevator pitch is bulletproof. That way, it can be easily pitched up the chain. That means simple, concise, relatable, and complete.

Who is your main character? What is their mission? What is at stake? What flaw will they need to overcome to succeed?

As I mentioned at the top. Most people suck at it. You just need to try to suck less. A lot less.

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Being raised in a Scottish home in America in the seventies wasn’t that different from other immigrant families, but I like to call it living under Scottish rule.

As children, we had chores, like cleaning our rooms, washing dishes, and other menial housekeeping activities, but the one non-negotiable thing in our lives was peeling potatoes.

The potato was the centerpiece of just about every meal we ate. When you think of potatoes, you might think of the Irish, and while that is true, the Scottish are no different.

It’s a basic staple of Scottish cooking. We are a meat-and-potatoes kind of people. Like the English, we get hammered for the stodgy, bland food we pass off as cuisine. It’s not bad. In fact, a lot of it has become comfort food to me, but it is unapologetically bland. Seasoning, if you’re lucky, comprises salt and pepper.

In my childhood home, the only form of added seasoning was a brown sauce called HP sauce. It’s a vinegary concoction that is put on just about everything. The power of this stuff is that it makes everything you put it on taste like HP sauce. It masks everything. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

“It’s saved many a meal,” my uncle was fond of saying. He knew what it was for.

The old demon, having traveled the world as a merchant seaman, found new comfort in the spices and flavors of the exotic cuisines he discovered in every new port of call.

Returning home to the bland flavors of the UK left him cold. Upon moving to the United States, the meals prepared by my mother and grandmother also left him wanting. When he came home from work, he would check the stove to see what was cooking, and the inevitable doctoring would begin. He tried everything to add spice and flavor to our meals. What resulted was a mish-mash of disparate flavors that had no business coming together.

He foisted these vile experiments on his family, and while many of them were disgusting, there were a few highlights.

Regular old Kraft Macaroni and Cheese became a hearty meal filled with sautéed onions, mushrooms, hard-boiled eggs (yes, hard-boiled eggs), and some kind of leftover meat. While these things sound disgusting, they actually tasted good.

Other times, he would make his own spaghetti sauce with so much garlic it could keep vampires away for months at a time. He was never afraid to try different things. While his spaghetti sauce was good, adding local mussels to it? Not so much. Southern California is known for many things. Mussels are not one of them. For days after the meal, the house smelled like low tide at Santa Monica Pier.

Unfortunately for us, we lived during a time when opting out was not an option. You finished whatever horrendous concoction that was laid out for you.

And so it went.

Aside from spicing up dinners, his work lunches were hideous creations featuring tinned sardines and kippers. Kipper Snacks were a staple of his diet. A kipper, for the uninformed, is a piece of salted or pickled herring, usually served on toast.

The aftermath of this preparation stunk up the entire house, rising from the trash can in the kitchen. It was like a fermenting bomb that gave off heat as the old tea bags, banana peels, and coffee grounds intermingled and started a volatile chemical reaction.

If asked, the old demon would probably just shrug. He liked what he liked. He wasn’t in the business of apologizing for anything in his life. That he loved to eat imitation crab salad wasn’t the problem. The problem was forcing it on the rest of us.

Being forced to eat disgusting food preparations is not a unique experience for my generation. If you refused, it waited for you the next day. The notion that my parents would cook special meals for their children’s finicky tastes was laughable. In fact, if you were brave enough to tell my father that his concoction smelled funny he would just say, “Och! Your nose is too close to your arse!”

Nowadays, I am not as adventurous as the old demon about food, but I like a wide variety. Looking back, it may have pointed to his desire to escape. It certainly illustrated a black and white dichotomy within both sides of my immediate family.

My mother was raised Catholic and remained devout throughout her life. My father was raised in a Protestant home, but as an adult, he did not tie himself to any form of organized religion. In fact, he even claimed to be an atheist.

My father came from nothing. He grew up with one brother and parents who were the furthest thing from happily married. My mother’s family was large, closely knit, and remained so all her life. They were not rich, but owned a corner store and were affluent and well-respected.

My father wanted to escape the clutches of family tradition and strike an alternative path with his own wife and children. My mother remained anchored to the extended family structure with five brothers and their own children.

And, of course, my father enjoyed all the exotic cuisines of the world. My mother was happy to exist in the simple, bland world of everyday meat and potatoes.

Is it any wonder that the marriage didn’t last? Everything seems so obvious in retrospect.

Nowadays, as I watch the old demon eat bland frozen dinners from the supermarket for his dinner, I wonder if it is poetic justice or just the natural surrender to a world of bland, flavorless decrepitude.

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When I was a boy, I didn’t dream of becoming a doctor or a lawyer. I didn’t want to be an astronaut or a professional baseball player. No, I wanted to be a stuntman. Nothing in the world seemed as exciting to me as crashing out of the window of a high-rise building onto an airbag, taking a spray of bullets, and dying on screen as convincingly as possible.

I don’t know why this appealed to me, but it seemed like so much fun. As a movie fan from a young age, I think I always enjoyed the behind-the-scenes stuff that peeled back the curtain on how things were done.

After my first trip to Universal Studios and experiencing the tram tour, I was hooked. I wanted to be a part of the magic that made movies extraordinary. In fact, when I go to Universal Studios now with visiting family, I am always let down by how short the actual studio tour part has become. It’s less about the practical effects that were the bread and butter of the industry and more about rides, CGI, and entertainment.

So, when I first saw the film Hooper, it was probably in the early eighties. It spoke to me in a way that I can hardly describe even now.

Hooper is the story of a professional stuntman named Sonny Hooper, played to perfection by Burt Reynolds. Once at the top of his game, he’s now aging out of the job. There are only so many high falls and crashes your body can take, and he is quickly reaching his limit. The story finds him at a crossroads in his career.

After a charity event, Sonny meets a young daredevil named Ski, played by Jan-Michael Vincent in his prime. Sonny invites him to work with him on his new film, a high-octane Bond-type thriller with plenty of action.

The stunts are all of a practical nature. What you see is what you get. Not only do you get to see speeding cars flip over, but you get to see how it’s done.

Sonny Hooper can do it all, but it requires a steady supply of Coors beer and painkillers to keep his body moving. Everyone around him tells him it’s time to hang it up and retire. “Let the young turks take the risks.”

As the rivalry between Sonny and Ski escalates, Sonny’s own ego places him deeper and deeper in trouble, and we just can’t look away to see if he can survive.

The love interest, Gwen Doyle, is played by Sally Field, who is the daughter of Sonny’s mentor, Jocko Doyle. Jocko is a legend in the business who represents one version of what Sonny might become — a broken-down version of himself.

The world created in the film feels so believable; the danger our hero experiences feels more real. The pressures of the studio getting what they want, as well as the self-obsessed director making demands, all add to the tension of the story.

Oh yeah, and it’s a comedy.

Director Hal Needham, a veteran stuntman in his own right, has been responsible for some of the best comedies of the seventies and eighties. While many of them venture into farcical territory (Cannonball Run, Smokey and the Bandit), Hooper retains an edge that doesn’t slide too far from the serious world of the story. It really is a love letter to the world of professional stunt performers.

That’s why Sonny Hooper is a lesser-known hero to me.

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My first produced film was an indie movie called The Cooler. It was an idea I conceived in 1999 about a degenerate gambler with infectious bad luck who worked for a casino to protect their bottom line. Then he meets and falls in love with a cocktail waitress who changes his luck from bad to good, and the story unfolds from there.

I pitched it to a writing colleague who encouraged me to write it. After a while, he would ask if I had written it yet. I said no. Eventually, he told me he wanted to write it with me and direct it.

Not long after, we wrote the script and took it around town. People loved the script, but no one would touch it. Too dark, too violent, the lead characters were too old. “It’s a feathered fish,” they’d say. “It’s neither fish nor fowl.”

This is industry speak for when a script doesn’t have a clear identity. The industry likes consistency. If it’s a comedy, it needs to just be funny. If it’s a romance, it shouldn’t also contain gritty violence.

It’s mostly a nonsense excuse. What it means is that the story creates uncertainty, and that scares the bejeezus out of studio and development execs. On occasion, it does point to a structural or tonal problem that could be remedied by making a more consistent choice.

Anyway…

Three years later, by some miracle, the film got made. It had an A-list cast and cost peanuts to make (maybe 4 million). While the conventional wisdom was this feathered fish couldn’t be made, the likes of William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin, and Maria Bello disagreed.

Shooting commenced in May 2002. Six months later, the completed film was chosen for dramatic competition at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, and things were looking up. The film did not win any awards at the festival, but it was very well-received and the first film to sell that year to Lionsgate.

None of this was the problem. The film was released in theaters, and award buzz swelled around the acting performances. By the winter of 2003, the film had snagged two Golden Globe nominations for Alec Baldwin and Maria Bello, and then a Best Supporting Oscar nomination for Alec Baldwin.

None of that was the problem. While neither won in their categories, it was a monumental achievement to think that this film had captured the imagination of the world.

While nobody made any real money on the film, that I know of, the film offered a level of street cred that you simply couldn’t buy. Every meeting I went to, producers, development executives, and company heads praised the film in a way that told me not only did they see it, but they loved it, especially for its courage.

Even that was not the problem. So, what was the problem?

Believe it or not, these situations can fill your head with magic, and you start to get a little high on your own supply. You believe you can do anything.

So, there I was, sitting in meetings with studio executives who wanted to hear what I had to say. Many of them were TV producers of shows I not only watched but loved. I even met with Alan Ball’s company, which was in the middle of its run of Six Feet Under. When asked by their producer what I thought of the show, I had the audacity to tell him the first two years were their best. The show was currently in season four, and I had thought it best to tell him why I thought the show had lost its way.

High, meet supply…

I cringe even now when I think about that meeting. What an idiot. As mortifying as that meeting was, that wasn’t even the worst mistake I ever made.

No, friends, my big mistake was misunderstanding something so fundamental about the entertainment business that it caused me to lose my way.

Yes, the Cooler was being lauded and praised, and there was a hell of a lot of goodwill out there for it. I had no problem getting meetings. And I pitched my heart out. I gave it my all, and I mostly failed.

I am only slightly ashamed to admit that I had a lot to learn about the business and, more importantly, I had even more to learn about the craft of writing.

I thought these producers wanted more of what they had seen. Naively, I thought they wanted more edgy, indie, morally ambiguous films about deeply flawed characters who might not even be likable. I thought they wanted another “Cooler.”

With every meeting, I watched their faces go from highly engaged and focused to let down, disappointed, and checked out. I might be exaggerating here, but you get the point. It never occurred to me to change what I was doing. Instead, I just felt puzzled. “Why don’t they like my pitches?”

Here’s the sad truth. The Cooler, its success, and all the heat that came with it, was a miracle. So many amazing films go unnoticed and never have the chance to make their mark on the world. While it seems ridiculous to say it, to the industry, the heat and street cred thrust on the film had very little to do with the type of film it was. It existed in an almost entirely different universe.

Studio executives and development types were thrilled you found some other poor suckers to push your heavy rock up a hill. No, they don’t want your edgy movie. They want your heat.

My mistake, and believe me, it was a big one, was that I got to the big show and ended up pitching small, difficult stories with red flags around every corner. What they wanted was to use the heat I had on me to get a commercial studio project set up. And instead of being the facilitator for something like that, I steered the ship into the rocks.

My ideas weren’t horrible, by the way. I did sell a TV pilot to CBS. That was a fantastic idea, but it sold mostly on my heat.

After that, I continued to pitch around town, both TV and film projects, but I was unsuccessful in leveraging the heat and power I had, and as expected, that heat waned quickly.

In current times, if I spoke with a young development executive, there is a very good chance they will not have heard of the Cooler. It does not even exist within their frame of reference. Time marches on. You don’t have unlimited influence in popular culture.

At this stage, I rarely speak of the film at all. It represents another time, and while I am proud of the work so many did to create it, I live in a space now where the film is safely tucked away out of sight. If people remember it or ask me about it, I smile and nod and let it drift back into the aether.

I don’t even say all this to piss and moan about it. It’s a cautionary tale. It took me years to claw my way back, and I feel grateful to share my story.

So, what should I have done? How could I have avoided that mistake?

It’s an excellent question. As writers, we all have a certain sensibility, and even if we write broad, commercial stories, we naturally imbue our distinct mark on them. There is dark humor in every story I write. Even the comedies, and I don’t apologize for it. It’s who I am. It’s important to understand that you don’t need to be ultra indie and dark to write in your style. There is a sweet spot, and it’s up to you to find it.

As for the past? I think the best course of action would have been to listen more and realize what was being offered to me. It’s not a red pill choice. You’re not sacrificing your artistic integrity in that moment. Play things as they lie. Listen to the wants and needs of a studio that is dying to hire you. All you need to do is not fuck it up by telling them their big-budget buddy comedy is fine, but you’d rather write a black and white “Sin City” style film about Peter Lorre traveling back to his homeland in Hungary during his off time between shooting Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. Once there, he will get embroiled in a murder mystery that only he can solve. Oh, and we’ll get Johnny Depp to play him, and it will be amazing. I’m sorry, what was your last question?

“Who is Peter Lorre, again?”

“Character actor. Big eyes, great voice. Have you ever seen the films Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Oh, you know the character of Ren on Ren & Stimpy?”

“Oh, yeah, I know that character.”

“Okay, then. That’s an impression of Peter Lorre.”

“Oh, you mean Peter Lorre does the voice of Ren?”

“No, the character is a caricature of — you know what? Do you validate parking?”

And yes, this was a real discussion, and it served me right for thinking I knew better. Let’s be honest, though. The Johnny Depp playing Peter Lorre project would still be awesome. In my mind, anyway.

So, in summary…

Shut your mouth, listen to what you’re being told and asked to do. Ask yourself honestly if you can add value to that situation and take the early wins while you can. It seems so obvious now.

I’m sure you will still want to pitch your passion project, and you might even be prompted to do so, but think hard about who is asking. If it’s not the head of a studio or a producer who has carte blanche, just keep it to yourself for now. There’s a great buddy comedy in your future, and I just know you’ll be able to imbue it with at least some of your dark, indie impulses.

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