 Red Room Writer Profile
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J.P. Smith's Blog
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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December 18, 2008
- As the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño well knew, with Hepatitis C you are either counting your days, stacking them like coins found in a drawer or under the cushions, or spending them like a drunk man with too much loose change; just as your viral count—whether 750,000 or a few million—could be viewed as either a weight on your soul or the hoped-for advance for your next novel. In any ...
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December 6, 2008
- Four years ago an L.A.-based screenwriter and now a respected screenwriting consultant approached me with a story for a script. Until then she had been primarily writing comedies, but knew that I'd done a few thriller scripts and that a political thriller of mine had placed in the Nicholl Fellowship competition, sponsored by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. She asked if I'd like ...
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November 9, 2008
- You may find it strange that I find it strange that after some thirty-odd years of writing I’ve finally found that I can write out of my own life. It didn’t happen on purpose, it wasn’t something I’d planned, but when I began working on a new project—a novel based on an unproduced screenplay I’d written a few years ago, a script that found its origins in a small event from my wayward ...
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September 24, 2008
- Years ago, when I returned from several years in England writing scripts and novels, I was invited, for minimal monetary and spiritual reward, to fill in for a professor at my old college who was going on sabbatical in China. For one year I would be an “adjunct lecturer”, after which I could pack my bags and go away. The fact that I was a alumnus of the place allowed me nothing more than a ...
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