 Red Room Writer Profile
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J.P. Smith's Blog
November 21, 2009
- As I get older I find that I read less and less contemporary fiction and either go to older works I’d overlooked or had simply put off reading, or return to books I’d read years ago. Doing the latter is always enlightening, I think. The person we were when we first read the book is not the same person we are today. It engages us on another level, and our understanding of it is that much ...
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October 9, 2009
- So a month has nearly passed, and since that time I’ve received and signed a contract to write the script. In fact, I’ve already written a first draft. In a way, this is my second assignment, my first—a much more difficult one—being to adapt my first novel The Man from Marseille as a screenplay; a process that took nearly a year and ended up not being made, of course. Such is the nature ...
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September 12, 2009
- I haven’t blogged lately because, frankly, I haven’t had a great deal to say. I notice in reading other people’s blogs elsewhere than on Red Room, that there’s an awful lot of blogging about things such as What I Ate for Breakfast and What Band I like at the Moment. I suppose I could touch upon both, but they each can be summed up in a sentence: Trader Joe Maple Cereal and the quartet put ...
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August 6, 2009
- I had no sooner finished my little indie screenplay—written solely for my own amusement, really, and a script I’ll one day offer to small production companies, as it’s one of those quirky little low-budget projects that, if—big if—actually produced, sometimes even does quite well. “The Squid and the Whale," for instance, or “Sideways." Not to mention all the countless ...
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June 16, 2009
- We live in a world where our encounters with celebrity are becoming more and more commonplace, or at least where we believe we’ve seen someone, as in China Miéville’s novel The City & the City, where one sees and then unsees, for fear of trespassing on a forbidden second city occupying the same physical space. I have had emails from friends in L.A. such as “Today I was in a 7-11 and ...
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June 3, 2009
- When I was a boy I was put on a train and shipped off to my first summer camp for eight weeks. This was not such an unusual occurrence back then; in fact one had no choice: it was either two months or nothing. Considering my sisters had willingly and happily done this since they were very young was considered a kind of precedent. It killed two birds: it kept me occupied and out of the house for ...
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May 9, 2009
- A good friend of mine, an Englishman based in Vienna and a damned good screenwriter, has been urging me to take the material from my last blog ("Fly Me to the Moon") and turn it into a script. Over the years when I've told that same story, others have also urged me to do something more with it. Because I'm sensitive to the feelings of those mentioned in the piece--The Mystic Barber, Ed ...
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April 25, 2009
- In my early teens, perhaps as a means of escaping a distinctly wacky homelife, I joined an organization devoted to the study of UFOs. While other boys were studying baseball statistics or even, god forbid, doing schoolwork, I was reading accounts of sightings, visitations and--though these were fairly rare back then--outright snatch-and-grab jobs by little green men. I now see that this was a ...
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April 6, 2009
- The story goes something like this:Around 1911 my grandfather (and namesake) left what was then known as White Russia (now Belarus, more or less) for New York City. Though he'd contemplated taking his family to Paris, which, had history been otherwise, would have been great fun (and now I'd be sitting on the métro chewing on a baguette instead of being on the Massachusetts coast writing this), ...
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April 2, 2009
- As long as I've been writing I've always disliked it when a writer, whether for the printed page or the screen, falls back on suddenly introducing a dream into the story, whether to explain an absurd turn of plot, or because, frankly, he or she has run out of inspiration. It's like what's known as magical realism, which has always struck me as a weak option--when in doubt as to what to do with ...
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February 21, 2009
- A few days ago I completed the first draft of what, should life operate according to plan (which of course it never does), my seventh novel. As with most books that I finish, it came without fanfare or celebration, and of course I immediately began revising from the first page onwards. But this isn't by any stretch of the imagination my seventh novel. Having lost count over the years, I would put ...
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January 28, 2009
- In a previous blog entry, "The Endless Rewrite", I related how my writing partner--the estimable--indeed inestimable--Julie Gray, proprietor of thescriptdepartment.com--and I saw our project brought out of the grave with the fresh interest of a producer in Hollywood. I thought I'd update this, as time has passed since then.Hollywood time, in any event: a wholly unknown property of ...
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January 10, 2009
- Years ago, in fact in 1977, in my first weeks of expatriation in London (when, had things been otherwise, I would have been standing before my English classes giving my usual opening talk of the year that I'm sure my former students can still recite by rote), I contacted the NY Times Book Review and asked if they would consider printing an interview with the respected English novelist Beryl ...
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December 29, 2008
- Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn't carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr Tench's heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly towards them. One rose and flapped across the town: over ...
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December 25, 2008
- I just heard, on this Christmas morning, that Harold Pinter died in London yesterday. I first encountered his work when, on a trip to London in the early Seventies, my wife and I saw his play "No Man's Land" performed by Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. Apart from having the great opportunity to watch two of the foremost actors in the world working together on stage, I was hugely ...
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