Pick a Book

To celebrate suspension of a blog that no one reads, I'll send you a pdf book of your choice. Email wolfdevoon@gmail.com (subject line: Pick a Book) and allow a couple weeks for delivery. I have to walk a mile to use a neighbor's wifi, weather permitting. If it's too hot, too cold, raining, or muddy, it might not happen promptly, and if you don't hear from me after a couple months, I probably died. For reasons that I don't fully understand, dead authors sell more books than living ones, so I'm not opposed to it. Let's hope that everything goes swimmingly during a progressively crushing recession and my neighbor doesn't lose power or internet service. One pdf per customer. Social media buzz appreciated. Search Google or Duck Duck Go for book descriptions and reader reviews. Cable & Blount is an anthology of my first three Case Files novels. Finding Flopsie is sold separately and mysteriously difficult to find. All titles include adult ideas, graphic sex, frank language, and bold white heroism. Eventually they'll all disappear in a cloud storage purge of hate speech. Act now before Amazon figures out who I am. Thanks.

 

Google lost my videos. Try https://vimeo.com/user66655576

 

I don't regret all the effort I put into this blog. I could have been more careful with money. My daughter wants a .22 automatic and a holster for her birthday. It took me a long time to learn how to write, and it never paid more than pennies. Friends have been exceedingly kind to me, Tom and Erik in particular.

 

Whether Steam Punk is ever completed, my portrait of an ideal man, I'm satisfied that Escape was worth every hour and month of hot pursuit, every decade of reaching higher creatively.

 

In parting, I'd like to mention two life lessons that proved to be pivotal. As a 5-year-old, I rode a city bus that stopped right outside our house (the bus line was owned by my uncle) and I went to kindergarten in a new brick building funded by my grandfather adjacent to the high school where my dad graduated as president of the senior class, his portrait in the hallway. I liked the kindergarten kids, liked music class, clapping nice wooden sticks together, liked milk and graham crackers and nap time. The memorable life lesson was watching my kindergarten teacher churn cream into butter with a hand crank, which took a long time. Served to us on a saltine, it was really good butter. Learning how to do things was possible. The other pivotal life lesson was renting an office on the 10th floor of a tall modern Max Factor Building opposite the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. I signed a one-page sublease offered by an old character actor who was in partnership with a New York producer to make cheap genre films that were never released. They made money by milking investors. "If you want to get ahead in this business," the washed up B-list actor advised, "you have to learn how to steal."

 

It's so damn sad. My dog is too old to understand verbal commands. He wants to obey and can't. If I call him to Come Here, he doesn't know where I am, walks the wrong way. I have to put water right in front of him, splash it with my fingers, repeat several times as clearly as possible Here, Look, Dog Water. He suffers from skin tumors and fleas. I wash him with dish soap that works better than flea shampoo. If I don't give him cooked vegetables and oil in his food, he can't poop. I have to gently wipe his blind eyes almost hourly. In the middle of the night he was trembling and frantic, insisted on remaining outside. I think his brain is failing, a harbinger of my own fate. I'll end up like Lunch Bucket Joe, unable to frame or finish an intelligent thought, stuck in the mud of misremembered lies written by someone else.

 

Good time to quit.

 

Before I do, I have to say it again. Oil is a highly competitive business, hundreds of producers, refiners, and pipeline companies with trillions of dollars at risk, squeaking by on single digit margins. They pay corporate taxes on profits and pay lease royalties on every barrel they produce. Offshore wells are big investments, drilling down through miles of water and rock, working from billion dollar floaters. Every aspect of work is regulated and public. The price you pay at the pump is 30% inflated by Federal, state, and local taxes. Oil is used to make plastics for hospitals, home improvement, electric cable, plumbing, food packaging, aircraft, cars, buses, schools and playgrounds. Every container ship burns bunker fuel.  Natural gas cooks your food in homes and restaurants and generates a third of all U.S. electric power, 24/7, impervious to rain or snow. Fuel oil heats icy homes in winter. Natural gas is an input in fertilizer. Jet fuel flies every passenger and military plane. Diesel powers every big rig, farm tractor, bulldozer and backhoe. Discovering new oil & gas supplies is an intense scientific and engineering challenge. Drilling is dangerous and costly. The seven million men and women directly employed in U.S. oil & gas exploration and production are highly trained professionals, half of them university grads, without whom you would starve, no power, no transport, no medical testing or sterile surgery, no police or firefighters. "Green" tech is a swindle that would not exist without Chinese slave labor and lavish subsidies that oil companies do not have. We import over 1/3 of the oil we consume in America, because U.S. oil reserves are scarce and Obama made it impossible to drill the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (hundreds of miles away from ANWR). The corrupt oil kleptocracies of the Middle East, Africa, and Russia export most of their oil and natural gas to China, India, Japan, Korea, and Europe, setting the price that U.S. companies have to pay for imports. No one makes a nickel of profit from "nationalized" production except shieks, colonels, and smiling expats from England, France, Spain, and Italy. I've met them. They are incompetent bootlicks. U.S. geologists discovered and developed giant reserves in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Soviet Union, and Venezuela — all of which was expropriated and looted by corrupt kings and communist tyrants.

 

Please note that Mark Levin is a total fool. He thinks that hydraulic fracturing of shale is "clean" and it was invented by Big Oil, a high tech wave of the future. In reality, frackers are penny ante minnows, $100 billion in debt. Their wells cost 3 times more than straight holes, and all of the thick rich "core" plays have been fracked to death. High pressure shale fracturing was pioneered by an elderly drilling contractor who was unable to make a profit doing it. Without high yield debt and 0% Fed funds, there would have been no scramble for shale leases. High flyers like Chesapeake's Aubrey McClendon surfed the fracking wave to disaster, financially and personally. His company had to be bailed out by China's CNOOC. Major U.S. oil companies bought more successful frackers, never made a penny of profit by acquiring "experts" to dispose of millions of gallons of contaminated water to produce a few thousand barrels of oil and natural gas. Fracking became 100% uninteresting to Big Oil. The majors need to find and lift billions of barrels from ultradeep Gulf of Mexico or Alaska or overseas — none of which will be horizontal shale plays spewing toxic waste water, hauled away in big rig tankers to be injected under a shallow aquifer to get rid of it. The frackers are making money at $100 a barrel, but it triggered demand destruction, and if WTI sinks to $60 again (the market clearing equilibrium) frackers are out of business again. If you don't know the facts, Levin, please shut the fuck up.

Oily shale frackers produce approximately 1 million barrels per day. Sounds like a lot of oil, right? Hah. We consume 20 million bdp. The OECD industrial democracies consume 50 million bdp. Global demand is 95 million barrels per day. Fracking is 1% of global supply. Watch what happens when junk bond rates rise to 12%. Frackers make more money hedging the market with derivatives instead of oil and gas production. It's all going to die off precipitously because they've already drilled all the thick rich "core" plays. Thinner shale is a fool's errand. Natural gas? Russia has half of all known gas reserves on earth. Qatar, Iran, and Algeria are natural gas giants. America is a pipsqueak gas producer, depleting our gassy shale reserves at a gallop. Two thirds of U.S. natural gas production comes from straight holes in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Colorado, deepwater Gulf of Mexico, and California, much of it derived as an associated byproduct of conventional oil production.

 

Over and out. Oh ... wait a minute. Here's a playlist.

 

The Hollies ("Bus Stop")

Laura Brannigan ("Gloria")

Arrowsmith ("Walking In The Sand")

The Pretenders ("Brass In Pocket")

 Abba ("Take A Chance On Me")

Frank Zappa ("Fifty Fifty")

Bonny Raitt ("Something To Talk About")

Bee Gees ("Nights On Broadway")

The Pretenders ("Don't Get Me Wrong")

Devo ("Whip It")

Los Bravos ("Black Is Black")

Abba ("Money Money Money")

The Eagles ("Wasted Time")

Led Zeppelin ("In The Light")

Blood Sweat & Tears ("Go Down Gambling")

Joan Jett ("Hate Myself for Loving You")

Alice Cooper ("Only Women Bleed")

Led Zeppelin ("Black Dog")

Electric Light Orchestra ("Hold On Tight")

Huey Lewis ("I Want A New Drug")

Heart ("Straight On For You")

The Zombies ("She's Not There")

 

Notable speeches:

John F. Kennedy

Ronald Reagan

Margaret Thatcher

 

Movies:

The Inn Of The Sixth Happiness

Meet John Doe

Twelve O'clock High

Key Largo

It's A Wonderful Life

The Quiet Man

The African Queen

Sink The Bismarck

The Greatest Show On Earth

Charly

Day Of The Jackal

Anatomy Of A Murder

 

White TV:

77 Sunset Strip

The Rockford Files

Columbo

The Muppet Show

Get Smart

Kojak

 

If you're interested in satirical cinematic achievements, consider Theodore Bikel's baritone benediction in Frank Zappa's 1971 feature length movie 200 Motels: "Lord, have mercy on the people in England for the terrible food these people must eat." Highly recommended. Swell song vocals by Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman (The Turtles), gifted rock drummer Ainsley Dunbar, the London Festival Orchestra, and Murakami-Wolf animation. Zappa's musical genius at the height of his vitality. Filmed in just two weeks (!) on super sharp 800-line video with trippy special effects and transferred to 35mm by Image Transform. It pushed me into a lifelong love affair with low budget production.

 

I'm in favor of gun control. Use both hands and practice.

 

 

 

The Goal of My Writing

Ayn Rand wrote an article so titled in 1963, which I discovered ten years later in the dusty upper stacks of the Milwaukee County Public Library at 3 a.m., illegally camped there to study bound volumes of her Objectivist essays. Too little too late to improve my moral stature, because I was well along the path to perdition as a 16mm filmmaker, headed to prison. Objectivists don't go to prison, neither in reality nor in fiction. Young morons often do both. Historical note: Victor Hugo routinely threw his main characters into dungeons. In the early 70s, Tom and I tossed our FM radio personas in jail many times and ended our comedy LP fictionally incarcerated for decades. I was okay with most of our goofy studio courtroom charges (disobeying Father, disobeying Mother, disrespecting women, etc) but I took exception to the accusation of fraud. America was littered with frauds — Federal, state, local, and cultural.

 

Be that as it may, I should discuss the goal of my writing. I make an effort to remain rational at all times, although comedy and psychedelic sex scenes sometimes make themselves embarrassingly brazen with Technicolor impudence. You can take the boy out of Hollywood, but you can't take Hollywood out of the boy. One of the pictures that inspired me was transsexual 'Performance' starring young lascivious Mick Jaggar. It had two pioneering music clips, Memo To Turner sung by Jaggar accompanied by Ry Cooder, and an Afro American poet chanting a ballad in an airport concourse with bongos, a hardnosed call for liberation in the far freer world of the early 70s. We ended the Vietnam War by insurrection. Ayn Rand said we were dirty savages. True enough. War was messy. We had a lot of casualties.

 

My initial purpose in writing was war. After I flopped as a film director, I wrote a sci-fi novel, determined to write my way past the gates at Paramount. In retrospect, it made no sense to invest the next 20 years attempting to gain traction in Tinsel Town. The crossroads of Sodom and Gomorrah relocated from boy meets girl to full blown intersectionality. Blacks, gays, and grievance merchants have a hammerlock on publishing and filmed entertainment today. My heroes and heroines are straight white wildcats.

 

I don't know where stories come from. I've authored 16 novels and novelettes containing 98% fiction. Sometimes I reference personal knowledge of places in the world and dramas I experienced. Truths are good things to have in a story. My heroes are better men than I am. They are stronger, taller, smarter, and far more courageous than yours truly. My heroines are awesome creatures, as many women in fact are. I've encountered real life heroines. I've also had memorable experiences with colorful people on all six continents. Russians are Russian to the bone. I like Chinese people, although they share as little of themselves as possible. I worked with blacks in Hollywood and London. I made every conceivable social mistake privately and professionally. We learn by doing. I learned to stand my ground. I'm an author.

 

All this bubbles and brews while I'm not writing. As previously mentioned, I don't know where stories come from, except an iron rule to never repeat myself, neither in story nor language.

I learned from long experience as an obscure author that making money is not the goal of my writing. What happens is that a story emerges in sufficient clarity to write it. The first word is a hurdle, then a sentence. It goes on like that 10 or 12 hours a day for innumerable weeks and months that don't matter. What matters is to write the whole story, beginning, middle, end. It has to make sense, read easily, and hold the reader spellbound with vivid scenery and compelling characters.

 

For a long time, I regarded Partners as a capstone masterpiece, never to be "topped." I amused myself with lighthearted comedy and satire for a while (Chiseltown, Heaven, A Better World) until Erik prodded me about writing a serious adventure novel, which I had stupidly discussed. At the time, my extent of story development was two and a half words — a space colony. It became a literary tour de force.

 

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/wolf-devoon/escape/paperback/product-974wyy.html

 

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Adventures

The first adventure book I read as a little kid was Tom Swift And His Electric Flying Machine, about which I remember very little, except that it was exciting, part of a series written in the 1930s, collected on a small town library shelf. Later on, I discovered Robert Louis Stevenson, read and reread Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and his lesser works. It was a disappointment to discover that Ian Fleming was a klutzy author, compared to the excitement of 007 movies. I read some vile thriller bestsellers, steered clear of the entire category. Then the glory of Raymond Chandler, goofy plots and splendid first person resolve in pursuit of a solution that made sense. His mature work had humor, romance, and tired professional investigation. I liked the screen version of The Maltese Falcon more than Hammett's cynical fiction.

 

It's important to consider that Ayn Rand was a novelist who penned exciting stories, especially that of an independent, un-socialized architectural innovator in The Fountainhead. Atlas Shrugged threw me in the path of numerous real life adventures that took several decades to digest. Her ideas became the basis of intellectual work that I felt I had to contribute as a cure to the filthy sewage of constitutional law. In my spare time I made TV product and pitched screenplays. When my career as a showman died in a Disney cubicle, I decided to write a first novel. Flash forward to today. I just completed an adventure novel that I regard as a mature masterpiece. I don't care what others think about it. I'm accustomed to obscurity, ridicule, and hardship. Escape! was worth every hour, day, week, and month of intense dedication.

 

Bottom line, life is an adventure. We learn by exploration, gambling, wading through consequences that test men's souls. If you can retain and cherish a sense of ambition no matter what, good things happen.

 

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Plenty of other books

No one has to read me. Millions of books in libraries, no joke, no exaggeration. My wife and daughter have at least three hundred at home, and we abandoned a couple hundred more in Costa Rica. I can't guess how many they've read over the years. Perhaps a thousand or two. I visited big public libraries in Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, and London. Every day of the week, NPR and Fox monotonously plug more Jewish and black authors. There could be 100,000 self published goyim on Amazon, a million preachers, dreamers, and woo-woo mystics in America. I can't estimate how many keystrokes and cat videos were posted on Facebook. Lawyers and legislators dump trillions of words on paper. Every year, there's a library book sale in upscale Jefferson County, Colorado, tens of thousands of old encyclopedias, novels, children's books, mysteries, and dusty nonfiction retired from a dozen suburban county branch libraries to make room on their shelves for new socially correct rubbish. In 1980, I was offered a job at Lucasfilm to write Star Wars paperbacks. God knows how many westerns and romance novels were sold in the past, certainly thousands of titles. Every TV show has writers, every movie, every newscast, every commercial. In 1965, I tore bulletins from a teletype to be broadcast on a 250-watt AM radio station to retirees and housewives. We read a weekly newspaper full of gossip, school lunch menus, high school sports, death notices, and smiling VFW fish fry eaters. People subscribed to Time, Good Housekeeping, National Geographic, Reader's Digest, and Sports Illustrated.

 

The world does not need me. It may be illegal nowadays to read or discuss my signature style of straight white obscenities and preposterous adventures. I've invested more decades than I can remember, to be completely ignored. I deeply appreciate the half dozen friends who encouraged me to continue. Without them I would have quit long ago. Maybe I improved over the years. Perhaps Escape! is my finest work to date. I don't know. Certainly my most stridently idiosyncratic, full of frankly adult content. That's how I understand the truth of life past, present, and future. Boy meets girls.

 

My friend Tom has been posting splendid videos on early American history. In the space of a mere 70 years, colonial population increased tenfold, about a third of which resulted from additional migration from Europe. Where did the other 2/3 of colonists come from? They fucked a lot. That's also why there are 200 million Nigerians, all Bible thumping, bandits, and crime notwithstanding, fucking day and night. The same thing happened in China and India. Three billion people didn't suddenly appear by magic. Communists and Hindus fucked all day and night, young and old, rich and poor. It's sort of a lost art in woke America, but it persists in our country music, classic rock, and motels from coast to coast.

 

I estimate that I successfully wooed 75 babes. Your mileage may vary.

 

Of course, there's more to life than sexuality. Literature, science, medicine, politics, crime, corrections, salesmanship, mining, manufacturing, farming, food service, cartoons, and clog dancing. I would include banking and finance, but they don't exist anymore except as camp followers of government, pushing paper assets to paper over unpayable public debt. Ask yourself how much fun would it be to date a black female Morgan Stanley manager or a mentally challenged public servant like AOC? I had several interesting experiences with black girls, but you couldn't pay me enough to bed an angry diversity hire or horse faced Occasional Cortex, unless it involved handcuffs and a horsewhip. Call me picky.

 

I admit to reading other people's books, everything written by Rand, Kipling, C.S. Forester, Ray Chandler, James Madison, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, RLS, Aristotle, and Machiavelli. I've read more Gene Rhodes than most people have and all five of Hammett's novels. I regret reading some authors, particularly Hemingway and Chesterton. Sort of ambivalent about Victor Hugo. Too many bad guys and helpless victims. Salinger was contemptible, Vonnegut, Heller, and Adams idiotic. I was amused by Gurdjieff and O. Henry, bored by Jules Verne, and infuriated by Wall Street Journal editorials. Joyce, Kafka, and Lawrence are unreadable trash. I much admire and respect Erik's short stories.

 

The other day at the country store, there were a dozen strangers on the front porch, sitting and standing in an array of paraplegic gear, severely disabled Iraq War vets. I went outside to chat with them, always glad to meet brave men. They have courageous tales to tell, plenty of grisly war stories in hardcover.

 

No reason to read my novels. "Old fashioned," Cass remarked.

 

I'll be honest with you. The final chapter of Escape! is so daunting that I doubt any other living author could wrangle it with penetrating truths, sizzling tension, and suspension of disbelief. Victor Hugo achieved it in Notre Dame de Paris, a very thick medieval French tragedy. I'm 1/4 French. I don't care about ancestry or a melodrama of fake marriage in the Court of Miracles to save a nitwit. I'm not Victor Hugo, nor a cog in his shadow. I'm individual, marginalized, and about to be canceled by a horde of savages who despise white men. That doesn't matter. I have to fashion an alchemy no one else would attempt — challenging Hugo with dueling pixels point blank, one of us to be slain and forgotten.

 

This post never seems finished. I'm dragging my feet, letting hours and days escape, no pun intended. Don't want to write anything written before by anyone on earth. The outline is set. Outlines are not writing. The crisis is simple. Literature is not simple. I would rather lose this laptop to barn rot, rather than draft and mess around with the climax. People talk about editing and emending. I've done it with See Spot Run situations and dialogue typed too rapidly. Not now. The ending is not negotiable.

 

One last thing to append. You should definitely boycott my books, all of them. I'm not to be trusted. In the past, I've lost my temper hundreds of times, destroyed a heavy Selectric typewriter by upending a table, physically ripped a 25-pair office telephone from the wall in anger (not easy to do) and tore up several marriages by firing wives who make life difficult. What the fuck did they expect from a writer? I've walked off numerous jobs, snorted at coworkers, and been fired more times than I can count. I am not a reasonable person. My life was a lost struggle for recognition.

 

Older now, isolated and impoverished, I yell at the dog to get out of my line of sight when I write. The work I do is impossibly difficult. I fight with wasps, ticks, broiling summer heat and icy winter. None of that stops me. Either I'll write the final chapter of Escape! or choke to death in the war of words. My future is canceled. Escape! will be self-published and die, like Partners did, another masterpiece of war and death. I'm too worn and ugly for a new girlfriend, however much I crave feminine caress.

 

Somehow, it was all worth it, every blunder, every crime, every cigarette, every obscenity, every folly, temper tantrum, and broken promise. I blew through millions of dollars belonging to others. I suffered the most pitiful disasters, always my own fault. And worse — I wrote about it, as if my misery was worth discussing in detail, a completely foolish enterprise in the name of transparency. Salinger was far more clever. He never made a public statement, kept quiet, became mysterious. Familiarity breeds contempt and ridicule. I should change my middle name to Chump. Nothing but ridicule, coast to coast and in five foreign countries, humiliated by judges and juries in every profession I assaulted.

 

Hell is worth it, if I can pen the last chapter and climax of Escape!

If I had to go to prison again to achieve it, I'd pay that price.

 

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Bizarre things I've done

Umpired a baseball game in prison, two teams of violent felons.

Gate crashed Stanley Kubrick's mansion at night in a black taxi.

Bought country & western radio spots to elect a liberal Democrat.

Told Boris that his new machine gun was nice, but leave it in the car.

Introduced to a Sicilian, who offered: "I'll call you Count Al, okay?"

A restaurant plate of brains that a bald audiologist insisted I try.

Two faces have I

This is a frame grab from Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon Part Two, a spontaneous video close-up. Note that the ears are about the same size, not drastically out of scale or tilted. Perhaps I was leading with my right eye, characteristic of thoughtful discourse.

On a previous occasion in correspondence with a profoundly wonderful female FBI agent, I created a pair of psychographic photos, two lefts mirrored and two rights mirrored, to show her that she was two people cohabiting one skull. Her femininity and innocence was obvious in one picture, and her dark ruthlessness equally obvious in the other.

Well, having little to do, except to noodle on curiosities, I repeated the experiment utilizing the frame grab from Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon Part Two. Splitting the image and mirroring two left sides and two right sides of my face produced an amazing revelation. Intellectually, Wolf DeVoon is a square shouldered champion prize fighter. Emotionally, I'm a nerdy 90 lb weakling. Very strange that my two noses are completely different.

Scroll down.

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How humiliating. Puts me in mind of something Rex said in conversation, that his security chief thought I was a weakling. I replied: "I might be a weakling, but I'm not a chicken."

Good thing that creative writing is a highly focused intellectual literary challenge. A dollop of sensitivity helps from time to time, but it's totally debilitating when, months later, I re-read something I wrote and burst into tears. The Executive Branch is all knuckles and know how, except the family scenes, little Millie in her highchair, 9 year old Peter scolded for talking with his mouth full at dinner, and Cathy worried about her husband dressing late at night in his uniform, summoned to the base unexpectedly. Women and children choke me up. I write love stories and pay for it in spades. Much easier to fictionally kill people and break things, keep emotion at arm's length, something I can't seem to do.

Huge laugh. "I'm half a man," I said in Tin Barn Philosopher, p. 78

I think what happened is that my emotional life was battered and disowned many decades, starved and crippled. I need to be embraced and loved and honored, need to laugh and play, which seems distant and vague. Courage isn't enough. I've been sufficiently courageous to risk life and limb and humiliation repeatedly. I'm not unhappy about that, but the loneliness hurts. "You're on your way into hell, Howard," Rand warned. Were there two Ayn Rands?



A brainy anorexic wrapped in a sturdy Russian thrill seeker in 1948, after she snaggered a handsome actor (stuck her foot out and tripped him on a movie set) to become a U.S. citizen by marriage, launched The Fountainhead, buttered up C.B. DeMille, monkeywrenched two publishers, finished the novel and sold the screenplay for six fat figures in today's money.

Girls have an unfair advantage, damn it.

I have a lot of respect for Ayn Rand, did my level best to honor her repeatedly (and skewer her legendary emotional trainwrecks in Heaven). Rand's debut novel We The Living was a truth soaked truckload of dynamite, so graphic and tragic that I didn't want to read it twice. Atlas Shrugged changed my life, recounted in First Feature. The Fountainhead sent me to prison, and in the years that followed I read nearly every word she wrote. I met four of her least respectable looters -- Nathaniel Branden, John Hospers, Alan Greenspan, and Tibor Machan -- and at a NATO summit I witnessed the unshakeable power of courage that Rand bequeathed to Margaret Thatcher. "There is no such thing as society," Mrs. Thatcher said in recognition of reality, which instantly ended her political career.

That puts me in mind of today's brainless chatter, everyone talking about reviving the U.S. economy, as if "the Economy" was an anonymous animal that has to be fed and spanked by political whim. There is no economy in a totalitarian state, which is precisely what the United States has become, fulfilling the dystopia of Atlas Shrugged, a moratorium on brains, power centralized in bureaucrats and media morale conditioners, farmers dumping milk and killing livestock, unable to sell or store them. The people transported by aircraft are government officials and tame "essential" journalists forbidden to criticize psychotic Democrats.

Fortunately, I didn't have the tragic karma of Ayn Rand. I was drawn to the hard boiled tales of Raymond Chandler, a private eye investigating buried secrets. Pretty funny that Miss Rand read Mickey Spillane for relaxation, praised his literary style, and she liked James Bond. My kind of stories, with a red hot, unapologetic sexuality that Ayn Rand lived in reality, as I did likewise. A photo of Rand at age 70 would reveal the emotional price she paid, like me.

No comparison of stature intended. All I did was defend liberty and plumb the philosophy of law, a minor technical matter that the Russian and her phony acolytes never explored.

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Wolf DeVoon was

I gasped in shock, $11 a barrel. Cushing is full, every available Suez supertanker full, floating storage going nowhere. Frackers are bankrupt and majors are bleeding red ink. Thousands of Mom and Pop stripper fields with "nodding donkey" pump jacks don't justify the electricity it takes to produce 10 bbls a day. 90% of global transport is idle, tens of thousands of passenger jets parked at maintenance fields, tens of millions of cars parked at home. Auto plants shut. Car repair shops, dealers, and rental companies dead broke and choking financially.

My finance buddy joked ten years ago: "A gallon of gold and a barrel of silver" as a portfolio hedge. A gallon of gold was about $100,000 back then, has doubled in price since, and might double again. Printing trillions of dollars of helicopter money ignited a fire under precious metals. They can't print gold. Global production of gold peaked in 2013. Domestic production peaked in 1998 and has been declining ever since. I remember buying gold at $400 an ounce, then $800 an ounce. $2000 an ounce looms on the horizon, maybe as soon as August. This is not good news. It means a wave of inflation at the grocery store. Weeks ago, I warned about distribution fragility, big rig drivers overworked, road service and tire shops shut.

The socialists on NPR think that a conspiracy of right wing DC nonprofits prompted people to protest at state capitals, honking car horns in Operation Gridlock. They ain't seen nothing yet. As the weather warms, there will be disorganized riots and looting, unstoppable by police forces laid low by viral infection. The uptick in suicide and mass shootings will be mild in comparison to the agony brewing in Chicago, Baltimore/DC, New York.

You wanted big government, you finally got it.

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Greatest Hits Vol.3

Flibbet
(written a long time ago, in Scotland, I think?
reprinted in Rock And Roll Rest Home, 2016)


It was approximately 2:38 pm Thursday when suspicion began to swirl innocently, like a wisp of lazy gray stink from an old fire. Then it exploded suddenly and shook the streets of Poughkeepsie with determination because CBS News had been deceived. You can get away with a lot of stuff nowadays, including murder and self-mutilation, but you can't lie to CBS.

The unlikely eye of this storm was a shy man named Mollusk P. Molever, whose life (until Thursday) was so ordinary and predictable that neighboring Poughkeepseans were never in doubt as to the dependable progress of Thursdays, Fridays and alternate Tuesdays when Molever parked his car at the 3rd Street Municipal Garage, put 50 cents in the parking meter, looked both ways before crossing Ormand Lejun Exit and walked to a canopied entrance to join a regular foursome for dribbles and snorks upstairs at the old Oki-Doke. Molever told himself that he enjoyed snorks and rolled a fairly firm dribble. Alternatively, he supposed that these were sociable games that helped to advance his visibility in Greater Poughkeepsie Chamber and were good for business in the long run. The Oak-Dawn Hotel was a passable backdrop for this latter supposition, although its brick and marble lobby had seen happier days and fatter calves three decades ago and was currently in violation of several fire regulations. No matter. The men who played snorks and shouted too loudly upstairs in the Main Parlour gave no thought to their personal safety. When men dribble, something in our primitive hunter-gatherer DNA impels us to scoff at municipal building codes.

In truth, Molever was neither snork shark nor chamber whore. These thrice-weekly outings were an ill-conceived, shameful sacrifice, all the more corrupt because Molever’s intended victim was primarily himself. For an hour and a half every Thursday, Friday and alternate Tuesday afternoons, he led a double life of misery and deceit, trading his dignity for crumbs of false affection because Molever’s pals had been led to believe that his name was Bertram something. “Hi, Bert!” they chimed in unison upon his arrival and “See ya, Bert!” echoed across the carpeted lobby of the Oki-Doke when it was time to go home.

During their first match, nearly three years ago, Litton mistakenly got the idea that his new partner’s name was Bert. He used it in its formal entirety whenever Molever muffed a simple dribble. “Good God, Bertram!” Litton would shout on such occasions, because his partner should play better than that, for heaven’s sake. A child could have slid that shot! -- and by an eternal tradition of male hierarchy there was no way to change partners. Molever and Litton were bonded irrevocably by virtue of Adolph Potmer’s heart attack in 1992, and in Litton’s mind an inexcusably weak dribble was reprehensible no matter who replaced whom. Their evil opponents Thummwugger and Klack merely sniggered, thinking Bert What’s His Name tragic and laughing at Litton’s exasperated discomfiture, an imagined laurel of greatness shunning his dribble puck for the millionth time thanks to Bert.

Of course, Molever always burned with shame, loathing his poor play and loss of dignity. “Sorry, Neville...” he would mutter, unconsciously accomplishing a nickel’s worth of justice, because Litton’s christian name was almost certainly Newell.

At home, Molever lied to his wife and said that he dribbled well. “Oh, fine, fine...” Molever fibbed, no matter how closely she inquired. “It’s only a game, dear,” he certified. But at the dinner table his food went cold from inattention, so busily was Molever’s brain bubbling and gurgling over the problem of snorks. He used to be a fairly good dribbler, for heaven’s sake. What on earth happened? And behind his white plaster facade of wondering, there was the unspeakable treason of pretending to be Bertram Something.

“Are you all right, Mollie --?” his wife asked, shaking Molever from chronic puzzlement at dinner, which sometimes intruded a little too forcefully on her razor-sharp intuition: “-- or is my cooking just boring? We can always go back to eating microwave popcorn and sliced peaches, you know.”

So close to being found out, so vulnerable to snorkers and loved ones, Molever’s world shrank and darkened a little more each day. Little lies turned into bigger ones and soon he felt as if there was no one he could trust to hear the truth. As recently as 1997, he answered the phone with enthusiasm: “Good morning, Mollusk Molever speaking!” -- but now he was fast becoming the spent shell of a kakistocratic experiment in self-government, grunting fewer and terser monosyllables, incapable of enjoying cellular telephony. Cut from the sticky web of human agreement, Molever drifted tragically to violent crime.

An elderly neighbor lady later told CBS News: “I knew it all along. He was too normal.”

The initial flash of anger was ominous indeed. On the morning of Molever’s semi-annual sales management assessment at Mostly Modern Paper, he was irresistibly drawn to the food displayed in Deloon’s big front window -- a row of fat silver flounders and even fatter, silverer salmon, whole, giant, healthy (albeit murdered by asphixiation and disemboweled) fresh fish proudly marching on a field of crushed white ice. Call it fate. Irresistible impulse. Molever dashed inside and purchased the biggest, fattest flounder of them all. “$13.75,” the clerk warned him from the scale. “I’ll take it!” Mollie blurt with delight and, without waiting to have the muscular sea varmint wrapped more than twice, dashed upstairs to a plain brown hallway that ended at a frosted door which completely concealed the showrooms of Mostly Modern Paper, A Fortunate 500 Forward-Looking Firm.

“You’re late,” Mr. Nubbles observed.

"Yes, sir, I’m sorry, I really am, but I saw this flounder,” Molever explained, excitedly opening his package to share the wonder of God’s bounty with his District Sales Manager, because Nubbles was an enthusiastic eater (he weighed almost 400 lbs) and Molever knew for a fact that Modern Paper men as a rule were nuts about fresh fish, the fresher the better. It was the perfect way to begin a semi-annual assessment, with male bonding visual aids, since no one sang the company song any more. And a fine song it was, Molever thought: “Mostly Modern Uber Alles, Weyerhauser Eat Our Dust! Cotton Rag or Duplex Coated, Mostly Modern Won’t Go Bust! O-ooo-oh, Never Charge Deliv’ry, O-ooo-oh, Open Box No Problem. Mostly Modern Your Good Buddy! Ty-y-y-vek Gussets Only Ten Percent!”

Big Gene Nubbles frowned and scratched the side of his flabby neck, uninterested in whatever threatened to emerge from Molever’s shopping bag. “Siddown, Mollie, the fish’d better wait,” Big Gene foreshadowed.

You can guess the rest. Molever’s semi-annual assessment did not go well at all, partly because Mollie hadn’t actually sold anything for five months and partly because their parent company, Fortunate 500, elected to restructure Mostly Modern by closing its Poughkeepsie branch office. Accordingly, young Molever’s draw was being -- er -- downsized, to zero.

“WHAT ??” Mollie screamed.

“Now, now,” the boss flubbled helpfully, “I know how you feel.”

And it was too easy, too natural in the heat of anger, released like the explosion of a volcano, just grab the nearest thing and lash out. Seconds later, Nubbles was unconscious and dotted with triangular gray and silver scales, flailed by a flounder, flank after flank, until there was nothing but slippery shame in Molever’s right hand, where once he cherished an oversized blue Mont Blimp that swam proudly in a Mostly Modern order book and gaily proclaimed Molever’s life was synonymous with paper. Nevermore. All Mollusk had to show for nine and a half years of smiles and shoeleather was a stinging gash across his palm.

“Fins leave a mark!” the most senior and grumpiest detective observed at Boilerton General. But the dazed victim couldn’t remember what happened. Nubbles had been heavily sedated. A team of doctors and dieticians were working feverishly to descale and hopefully save the top of his head. It was starting to smell bad and once something smells like fish, it just never goes away, does it?

“Don’t worry, pal,” said the dour chief dick, patting Big Gene’s belly in snuffly consolation. “We’ll find the bastard who did this. He won’t get far with flounder cuts.”

* * *

Only the bold succeed. Yuck. Lateral thinking, it pays to use it. Sure. Let’s take care of our customers or somebody else will. True but trite, so -- plop -- in it went, or tried to went, but slipped from a Matterhorn of last month’s Mostly Modern motivational mailshot and sailed to the floor, landing slightly to the left of Attitude makes the difference.

Cretin Molever was cleaning, her weekly effort to bring order and reason to Mollie’s desk area in the garage. Like most intergenderal kindnesses, it was usually repaid with scorn and humiliation, because her husband was unable to find anything after she “straightened up.” But it was best for everybody in the long run. After an hour of yelling, Mollie forgot that his domain had been invaded and Cretin achieved her strategic objective of fire safety. Glossy six-color rotogravure stock was a dangerous combustible, Mollie told her nine and a half years ago when they were newlyweds, an ironic zany quip that Cretin had misunderstood as a specific warning of danger in Mollie’s line of work. She often thought of him heroically risking his life in the commercial paper trade, going in and out of deathtrap print shops to put bread on the table and keep a roof over their heads. “God bless him,” Cretin whispered as she threw her weight behind a galvanized shovel and pushed another ton of promotional Post-It pads and nudie calendars to the furnace, praying for Mollie’s occupational safety.

So that it always seems unkind and unfair that chance picks on the pure of heart when they least deserve it. Just as Cretin kicked shut the iron grate and heard a gratifying wump of ignition emanate from their Flame Hog Deluxe Compact Home Incinerator, at that precise moment her husband who was not expected to arrive until 6 p.m. some three hours later entered the garage like a beaten dog dragging his tail between his legs, mumbling a sound which Cretin did not hear because it was completely masked by the emphatic rush of gases through the stack of the aforementioned domestic crematory. Her husband therefore materialized at her shoulder out of thin air and Cretin greeted him by leaping four and a half feet vertically in apoplectic terror.

“A-A-J-!” she screamed at the incredible phantasm who had no business being there and suddenly materialized without warning, causing Cretin's resting heart rate to attempt an impromptu Olympic record for acceleration. Although they had never actually trained for competition, Cretin Molever was particularly disposed to afternoon reveries and, given the frequency and severity of being scared half to death by her husband suddenly popping into existential reality, if there were such a sport no doubt Mollie’s noiseless tread and Cretin’s hair-trigger startle reflex could have trumped the Mixed Doubles Meditation Zen Calamity Biathlon.

“MOLLIE !” she screamed at him angrily, “How many times have I told you?!”

“I said ‘ding’ -- honest!” he pleaded pathetically.

“Well, I didn’t hear you!” she shouted at him, hands clasped over her heaving breast, head dizzy with high blood pressure, elbow flopped against the Flame Hog for support, telling herself for the thousandth time it’s all right, relax, just breathe, one of these days he’s going to give me a heart attack, sneaking up on me like that!

In the first month of their marriage, upon perceiving Cretin’s susceptibility to self-hypnosis, Mollusk resolved to say “ding” every time he entered a room like a cat wearing a bell to warn an unsuspecting mouse, in case Cretin was lost in thought, thereby minimizing the risk of scaring the shit out of her. Among all husbands throughout all of History engaged in the recitation of ding, Mollusk was extremely diligent every hour, day and night, whether Cretin was actually in the room he entered or not. Better safe than sorry, he presumed. So that a quiet evening at the Molever residence normally consisted of Cretin watching TV in her bedroom, while Mollusk sauntered in and out of the kitchen, bathroom, living room and garage mumbling ding everywhere. The fault in this arrangement was tragically typical of best laid plans. Mollie had exceptionally sharp hearing and was softspoken as a consequence. His wife was a little deaf and never once heard him say “ding” during nine years of dinging.

“I’m sorry, Cretin. Are you okay?” he worried.

“What are you doing home? You’re supposed to be at work!” Cretin barked indignantly. “And what’s the matter with your hand? Don’t tell me ‘nothing,’ Mollusk Molever -- show me that hand this minute. Oh, my God! What the hell did you do to your hand?”

“Uh...” he waffled.

But Cretin knew. She saw jagged edges and dark red bolts of dry blood. “It’s a paper cut, isn’t it? Don’t lie to me, Mollie. You’ve been handling paper again!” she accused.


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Happy 20th Anniversary

Twenty years ago, Lt. Janet DiMarco and her partner Sgt. Cynthia Rice debuted in The Good Walk Alone. They kicked ass and shot armed men if they had to. They bent the law and made life hell for Capt. Audrey Russell and Chief Forensic Scientist Julie Levine. City Police LLC was staffed exclusively by women, checked by skeptical female judges and a plutocratic female Supreme Court. I argued intellectually for female justice and law enforcement in a series of essays and videos. The Freeman's Constitution provides for female jurors in family law.

I'm having a celebratory cup of coffee. Janet DiMarco falls in love with the Chief Executive, a Cary Grant type with vast resources and enough courage for five or six men rolled together as hereditary monarch ordered by the Supreme Court to pick a woman, marry her, and produce a prince. He picked DiMarco. Romantic comedy ensues. Heroic men are not naturally willing to be completely docile or honest, sharing every micron of their privacy and power. I tried to illustrate male responsibility and discretion in a dozen novels. We naturally out-rank women in multiple respects. If it weren't for strong men, women would never experience love and willingly agree to create children by irresistible heart-pounding intimacy.

For fun, it's also 33rd anniversary of my first fictional female cop, Lt. Laura Oak, awarded the Medal of Valor on Mars in 2157. She falls in love with an Earthman sent to do justice. Mars Shall Thunder was my first longform action adventure novel, to be topped decades later by a husband and wife team of private eye wildcats, Chris Cable and Mary Blount, Ph.D. It doesn't matter what other people write, or created in the long history of literature. I write about men and women, indestructibly bonded couples who form families and raise their children, tens of millions of moms and dads like my parents were, some of them uniquely tasked in life as heroes. Peaceful civilian life cannot exist without heroism by an elite minority of lovers. All the real life heroes I encountered were married men and women. Criminals were single and unlovable. It ain't rocket science. Strong, courageous folks are drawn to love and marriage.

We never do this perfectly. It's not perfection that men and women want from each other. If the standard of romance was perfection, it would never happen. Heroic people make more mistakes and face infinitely worse challenges than ordinary couples. That's the whole point of literature as I see it, to test the limits of what people can do in difficult circumstances. It was a specific failing of the noir genre, always a lonely p.i., destined to push away the babes, unable to love anyone, which I endeavored to fix. There's no drama without a loved one.

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New World Order

Revised bucket list

Video frame grabs from 18 months ago, when I recorded the Vimeo lectures and did a comic reading of Rock and Roll Rest Home. Glad I did both.

There are a trio of new titles I want to proof and distribute on Amazon, books that old friends rubbished. Old friends no longer matter. Chiseltown is 128 pages, Heaven a short 54, and Four Strange Stories 170 pp., a total of 120,000 words written before I became weak and mentally vacant. Sleep is elusive. Shakes and sudden jolts. Flaky, itchy lesions head to toe, hands and feet incurably scarred. Parts of my face are numb with creeping paralysis.

I saw my daughter. Wonderfully pretty. Deeply intelligent.

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Loneliness

Self inflicted and -- fixable?

I could join a church, read the Bible.
I could memorize who's who in sports.
I could triangulate a market, use another pen name.
I could worry about global warming.
I could plead for forgiveness.
In short, learn to lie.

click to enlarge

I look at this stuff with a combination of pride and boredom. My experience of working for others was uniformly grim. Nothing was right except wandering  alone, however myopic, stupid, immoral, and penalized. The worst penalty of all is boredom, unable to savor a story written yesterday or 20 years ago that exploded in a volatile cloud of creative fuel. That's why I pushed forward, seeking another horizon to be attacked. Like all military conquests, it was necessary to kill people and break things. I killed my life, invested every dime that crossed my palm, burned credit cards, ignored flak from friends and family, subsisted on cold coffee, cigarettes and terrible food I despised, like a renegade, a filthy revolutionary in rags.

I bitched about it, far too often. I lost faith routinely, empty and beaten. The big wide world of prosperity and comfort mocked me. Decades stole my youth. Poverty is a badge of shame. No book sales. No movie sales. Crushing isolation.

I did, however, tell the truth. This is me.

"A third rate Romanticist has nothing." -- Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto
Go the hell away and bother somebody else. You're dead!

Actually, less lonely than I was a month ago. Neighbors stopped by often. They been extremely kind to me, took time to talk, helped me through a rough patch. Nice people.

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Film rights for sale

With my back to the wall financially and an 18 year old to send to college, I need to sell the film & TV rights for a series of private eye novels called The Case Files of Cable & Blount, a modern Nick and Nora Charles, equals in life, a tough ex-Marine paired with a brainy Silicon Valley heiress. Four novels cover multiple adventures, fighting mobsters and serial killers, covert ops overseas, and a global chase to find each other when separated in unexplained circumstances, 640 pages total, suitable for episodic TV or a feature film project.

Five star Amazon reviews: "The combination of courage, tenderness, integrity, and brains is way out of the ordinary. Alternately growls, whimpers, and seduces." (Erik Svehaug) "A master of sly observations, of the truths hidden in words. A big dose of literary fun, that even if played out in today's world, echoes to the time when men were men and writers weren't afraid to tell a story." (L.B. Johnson) "One part grit, a dash of over the top machismo, a pinch of womanly intuition, add heartfelt devotion, murder, and heat over a flame of erotic pleasure." (Librarian)

The text is frankly adult. It could be adapted for a general audience. The high concept is an update of 77 Sunset Strip, a pair of wealthy L.A. detectives with high tech communications, luxury cars, aircraft, a black female ex-cop sidekick, and family NSC and CIA contacts.

There have been numerous genre retreads with a husband and wife team, but Chris Cable and Mary Blount are action adventure wildcats, drawn into tense life and death operations that sidestep stern FBI bombast and LAPD's mulish, molasses slow cops.

A multi-year option is offered, email wolfdevoon@gmail.com

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Tough little predator

Seven days a week I'm as pliable as clay, easily chumped, a softy who cries if I see something innocent, e.g., Ingrid Bergman in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, especially the third act when she leads 150 orphans through Japanese lines across the mountains to safety, or when Jane says to Michael: "It's her, it's the person!" in Mary Poppins. Break out the Kleenex. It happens when I feel my way through a page of my own writing, when he loves her and she loves him. I'm a sucker for love and lovers, Jimmy Stewart nervously rotating his hat in his hands while talking to a girlfriend's mom (a terrific Capra insert in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) or Greer Garson holding a wounded Nazi pilot at gunpoint, and allowing him to eat, in Mrs. Miniver.

I like writing comedy, and I might be pretty good at it. I laugh easily. I shot G-rated comedy and goofball satire. I laughed on the set, silly unscripted improv that cracked me up. I talk to dogs and cats and cows, little birds nesting in the barn, neighbors and strangers, cops and crazy Vietnam vets. I'm a good listener and a good audience, happy as heck when I hear my daughter sing. I loved a thousand musicians and vocalists and dancers and actors in England and Australia and Holland and two dozen U.S. cities and villages, coast to coast.

So, who is that evil-looking character in the photo? Hard as nails. Armed and dangerous in a previous life, a daredevil who challenged pirates and prosecutors. I was an umpire who called balls and strikes in a prison baseball game played by killers and bank robbers, because no one else wanted to. That hard face is adamant about justice. It's impersonal, and it doesn't matter that I've been ignored and ridiculed and threatened. Justice matters.

That's all well and good, no regrets, but I have a problem. I've written everything I know and every story I could imagine. Something happened with my last novel, Chiseltown, the story of a fictional filmmaker and a low-budget movie. He has six weeks to organize it, six weeks to shoot everything, and six weeks for post production, working at lightning speed, no room for error, and every conceivable obstacle thrown in his way. It was a fun project for me, a goofy situation comedy with enough drama and verisimilitude to make it real.

I doubt that Chiseltown will earn two cents in royalties. My third wife slammed it, said it was beneath me to write about a B movie. It was published at Lulu because I didn't have $5 in the bank to buy a proof copy, a precondition for global distribution via Amazon.

That, in itself, doesn't bother me. None of my books sold more than a handful of copies, and I'm more obscure than ever as an intellectual or storyteller. Perhaps that's how it should be. The difficult problem I have is nothing further to say.

In a couple of days I will be 69 years old. I can take a lot of punishment, if there's a story to tell, but I'm empty, nothing left to explore or express. Poor old warrior, toothless and sick, kaput creatively. When I look at that photo, taken a year ago, I see a hard old midget inured to hardship. No mortal can do that perpetually. I should take up golf or ping pong.

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Four Best Books by Wolf DeVoon

These four books are certainly representative, three novels and a volume of short stories, written during the past few years. There are many more that I care about, but these four in particular were mature and deliberate, as if each might be the last.

Chiseltown is my most recent, the story of a fictional filmmaker and a feature film. There's quite a lot of humor, some mildly adult intimacy, and an accessible narrative of how a "low budget" movie is created and completed, almost always a question of Who Knows Who.

Charity was part of a series (The Case Files of Cable & Blount) told in first person, a parable of privilege, discovery, black ops, and a cryptocurrency caper that destabilizes global banking. I like it because it deals with an important truth, that love is unchosen destiny.

Partners is set in 1975, an icy Wisconsin winter, an intimate struggle of triangles and tragedy. Men are killed. The stakes are as high as humanly imaginable in a war of innocent romance and steely determination.

Four Strange Stories is a collection of dreams, truths, seduction, and a complex portrait of a free society in the future, the widest possible mirror of what I think and feel as a man.

It cost quite a lot to create those works, plus twenty other self-published books, a half dozen screenplays, and thirty or forty miles of film and video. I started as a teenage filmmaker, learned to write along the way. My first job in Hollywood was an original screenplay. The last one was a cubicle at Disney, spending six figures of Mickey's money. I felt it was time to quit the "fillum" business. There are a couple recent video lectures, if you care to see what I look and sound like at age 69.

It stuns me when I apprehend that there's another story to tell, doubting my ability to write another full length novel -- however I am certain of this much: I cannot disown my literary legacy, nor the ideas that I endeavored to communicate, right wrong or purple. Like Popeye the Sailor, I am what I am and that's all what I am.

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Just so you know

'Chiseltown' is completed. It is an intensely personal story, although it has nothing to do with me personally, as odd as that may sound. It's about a fictional filmmaker and a movie, from the first phone call to the last. That's how movies are made. I suppose it's not so different in other walks of life. Somebody calls, you do something, there's another phone call to find out if they liked whatever it was that you did. A producer calls, a movie is made, and then there's another phone call from a preview screening to report average Jane and John Doe audience response, in Fresno traditionally. Audience cards don't matter. What matters is whether the movie made them laugh and gasp and cry real tears, because movies should do that.

Along the way, 'Chiseltown' presents a detailed, accessible education in filmmaking, how a script is written and funded and translated into actors and location shoots and sound stages with forced perspective to create a convincing night exterior scene, or an apartment, or a repair shop. Bruno Heckmeier is making a low-budget movie. There are severe obstacles to overcome. He has an unusual home life. There's an enormous amount of comedy for light entertainment purposes. Some of the story is serious literature. Some is slightly adult.

I found that I cared very deeply about the 7 or 8 principal players in this story. There are many more bit players, and if it seems unusual to have so many characters, please consider that the movie Bruno makes involves a production company of fifty skilled professionals, stunt men, two very capable stars, and an unusual supporting cast. It's a very short schedule, six weeks to organize it, six weeks to shoot everything, and six weeks of post production. Trust me, that's working at lightning speed.

It's a personal story in two respects. I had to write the movie for Bruno to make. And I had to live in Bruno's shoes (and those of all the other characters) with honesty, humor, drama, and a deep understanding of the men and women who call themselves "show people," no matter what their specialty or contribution to a motion picture is. Camera grip, driver, bookkeeper, electrician, set decorator, or seamstress -- they are people who sacrifice much to work a few weeks on a movie, a collaborative art that cannot be created without them. I've done many "below the line" production jobs for an hourly wage, in addition to "above the line" writing, producing, and directing.  You have to take my word for it. Directing is a high privilege.

It's done by lots of different men and women. 'Chiseltown' is directed by a talented, goofy, warmhearted, intelligent middle aged guy who got stuck on Poverty Row doing low-budget movies, while others did studio pictures with an average budget of $75 million. Bruno has to conceive and execute a feature film on 1/5 as much money, and he wants it to succeed, not only at the box office, but critically as well. Being an "indie" confers a great deal of freedom. No studio moguls, Teamsters, or IATSE work rules. The whole of Los Angeles as a locale, in a "period" setting that's fun to shoot.

I always experience emotional awe when I've finished a story. 'Chiseltown' is in a class of its own, among all the stories I've written, among all the fictional characters that I loved and still love, of course. The story of making a movie is a personal confession of my lifelong passion.  'Chiseltown' is a movie I didn't get to make, and it's deeply gratifying to have directed its fictional creation. Many of the characters are based on people who I knew and worked with and loved.

Please buy a copy (less than $5 at Lulu) and review it. Thanks.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/wolf-devoon/chiseltown/paperback/product-24225665.html