What story beats in your heart when you're not even listening?

I write alone in my office, either with the tv on as background noise, or I'm listening to Fistful of Soundtracks on iTunes Radio.  It's a great way to get inspired, to feel the words pound though your fingers into the keyboard.

Tonight, two of the three Bourne movies are on.  And I've watched the first two Bournes -- or parts of them -- while I've been writing The Enigma Club.  Many years ago, I tried to read a couple of Robert Ludlum novels and found them boring as shit.  But the Bourne movies, at least the first, ostensibly based on his novel, are pretty good.  I still haven't seen a whole movie from start to finish, and right now the third is on, Bourne Ultimatum, and it's slower and much different from the first two. 

Slow enough for me to stop caring.

Don't get me wrong.  I love slow movies -- if being slow is an intrinsic part of the storytelling.  The original version of Close Encounters is, to me, far better than the later Expanded edition.  Because it is slower, more deliberate, and more serious.  I love the first two Godfathers and All the President's Men and Andromeda Strain because they are both thoughtful and slow AND, of course, dramatic.

This type of storytelling and music -- slow, sweeping, dramatic -- helps me write.  Stephen King writes while listening to rock and roll.  I love the blues, but I can't listen to it and write -- I get too involved in the music, not the writing.

And so The Bourne Ultimatum is slow -- but it is also unengaging and dull, as opposed to the other slow films that, conversely, thrill me.

I will give Ludlum another chance, 30 years later, and get the Bourne books (the ones that he wrote, not the ones written since he died) from a used bookstore.  But I won't give Bourne Movie #3 a chance.  They already screwed it up -- stretching a decent idea way too far and filling it with meaningless words and a padded story.

And maybe I'll be writing soon and something else will come on that will give me a drumbeat, a thrill, deep in my soul.  The Avengers.  Dark Shadows.  Star Trek.  Hammer's Dracula movies.  Night Stalker.  Rich Man, Poor Man.  Hill Street Blues.  St. Elsewhere.  Twin Peaks.  Something to work as the soundtrack in my heart.

We all need background noise.

Sometimes it helps define us.

Straight from the Silver Screen

I was no older than six when I saw Mary Poppins at a long-gone theater in downtown Hampton, the Langley.  It's also where I saw Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster.  I remember both imperfectly, but I do remember that Ghidrah scared the living shit out of me, and that Dick Van Dyke was the most magical man in Hollywood.

I do clearly remember two moments of discovery during that first showing of Mary Poppins in 1964.  I was a kid, and slightly bored during the bird-feeding scene.  Yet I knew even then that that segment was incredibly beautiful and incredibly good, and the scene and the song remain some of my very favorite movie moments.  The second moment of discovery is during a banking scene.  The elderly bank president has a few lines, and I saw behind the make-up that it was Dick Van Dyke.  What struck me is that one actor was allowed to play more than one part in the same vehicle, and I remember thinking this forty-six years ago in my kid-sized PF Fliers, striped t-shirt and shorts.  Maybe that explains part of the appeal the Eddie Murphy/Klump movies have had in recent years -- this generation is charmed that one actor can do so much in one movie.

It also says a lot about Dick Van Dyke, who, along with Robert Preston and Patrick Macnee, as far as I'm concerned, could simply never do wrong.

Mary Poppins is now being performed on stage in L.A.  And guess who made a cameo appearance as the bank president.  Here's the story, and thanks to Mark Evanier and his incredible blog for the heads up.

The Really, Final, Last Call at the Adventurers Club...

I knew Jim Hill, a nice guy and a true blue Disney aficionado, very briefly when Disney's Adventurers Club was at its heyday (imho, the early 1990s).  Although the Club closed in fall 2008 to the general public, it remained open for private parties well into 2009 . . . and this account of the very last night of the best place on Disney property is a fine, yet sad reminder of the Adventurers Club's glory days.