Q&A Explosion

The writer of this episode, Albert Kim, had his wife Jennie visiting that day, and she got some amazing shots of the explosion down on Long Beach. This is the second time we detonated a massive fireball in the nation's busiest port. That should not alarm you at all.

I'm going to play catchup on some Q&A on my 12-minute break from writing the season finale. Let's see what odds and ends we have ...

Mike Cane: Still patiently awaiting my fix of Parker pr0n. How many eps are in the can now, btw? And is the debut now DEC instead of OCT?!

You got Parker aplenty coming up, particularly in this episode. Parker fight scene! In the meantime, Parker's character profile is up on TNT. At some point I will bully them into putting these things on YouTube.

If we go by the normal numbering system with the pilot being #101, we are currently shooting #110. Funnily enough, Jonathan Frakes is directing, and Brent Spiner is our guest star. I'm hauling Wheaton down for lunch on set so we can have a mini-reunion. And then I will make them wear the uniforms. And call me "Captain."

#111 was co-written by Chris Downey and Amy Berg. I'm hacking out the two-part season finale now, with Chris probably coming back in in to split the last few scenes. There's only three of us now, so we're spread very ... efficiently over our time writing and being on set.

The December debut has been in the works for a while. When all your other TV shows are ontheir hiatus, there will be shiny new episodes of crime and heist action on TNT.

Stefan: How about a millionaire CEO on the run series? He has a grip with a change of clothes and a wallet full of ATM cards to accounts containing a total of fifty million dollars. In each episode he meets up with people in screwed-up circumstances, from whom he learns valuable life lessons and helps with a carefully applied pile of cash.

The timing of our "vengeance against fat cats" show does seem to be fortuitous. We joked the other day that our promos should just be 15 seconds of Chris Kane beating the shit out of the CEO of Lehman.

The downside, of course, is that many of our cons depend on financial institutions that only exist before an utter financi-pocalypse and societal meltdown. By the time we air in December, we may have to bang out some ADR dubbing.

"Okay, roll the scene."

"... we can transfer the stocks into the fake corporations's name, and then trade them back for title to the land."

"Good, let's redub."

"... we can transfer the [potable water] into the [tribe's compound] and then trade them back for [pointy sticks] to [fight the cannibal homeless]."

emong: Who's the DP on the show?

Dave Connell. Unflappable Aussie.

kevin: Hey Jon, KidCthulhu and I are cable-tv-free. You know if Leverage is going to be available on iTunes?

It will be downloadable, and we are cutting the deal right now. Considering you can now get your television from XBOX marketplace, Amazon unbox, Netflix streaming (which will itself soon be available through XBOX), streaming on the network website and Hulu, and iTunes -- the bosses are hacking out a lot of complicated numbers even as we speak.


richard Jensen: Say, John. Not to rush you or anything. I know you've got hours of TV to get finished but I was curious about your thoughts about the Large Hadron Collider that's suppose to go online this week. Considering that I've heard people screaming about the possibility of micro black holes crushing the world into the size of a proton, I kind of curious to see what your take is. My feeling is if there was any cause for alarm, you'd be the one blowing the horn.

Well, I look at it this way. If we're perceiving the Earth around us at this very moment, then we're looking at a couple options.

a.) Earth was not destroyed.
b.) Based on variations in the experiment, the Earth was destroyed in certain timelines, but we're living in one where it didn't happen -- or were living in one where it happened, but are now only perceiving the timeline where it didn't because when it did, those versions of us died.
c.) The Collider destroyed the Earth, the universe spun down Earthless, and then reformed to spawn our slightly variant Earth, where we then -- following the natural evolution of scientific inquiry -- rebuilt it, but this time it didn't destroy us. This may have already happened nigh-infinite times.


imjohngalt: Oh dear God, how can this disaster that is the Republican VP nomination not wrench you away from your writing table? I would've at least expected a short conversation you've recently had with Tyrone.

Tyrone just keeps pointing and laughing, occasionally choking out a strangled "Fucking white people". The thing I find fascinating is that Sarah Palin was originally popular because people could relate to her as someone they knew from their everyday lives: the bubbly, over-achiever hockey mom who really gets involved in the community. Why she's fallen, hard, is that people realized she was in fact another person they knew from their everyday lives: that crazy mom who turns even the PTA into an insane obsessive power-play and forms weird hostile rivalries she executes through byzantine yet childish plots, seasoned with a dash of Fear of Anything Different.

Back to writing. I'll backtrack through the posts for more questions, but toss up anything you find interesting in the Comments here.

LEVERAGE Ep 108: Why Yes, We Are Having Fun.

Some people think there's too much mindless explode-y eye candy on TV.



Those people would be wrong.

Bail-Out Overview

Let us be perfectly clear: somewhere between $700 billion and &1.8 trillion of your tax dollars are going to bail out companies that are in trouble because the rich smart men who ran them made bad decisions. Bad decisions they could make because they were not regulated -- there was no oversight. There was no oversight because they insisted oversight would hurt the economy.

I'm betting it wouldn't have hurt it $700 billion worth.

Those rich smart men will now retire with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses, while you pay for their mess. For bonus points, the text of the bailout act states that there is no oversight over the funds being distributed. Which, as we've seen, works out so well.

In the past, capitalism punished bad decisions. No longer. So, we can socialize the national banking system, but not health care. Aces.

For some historical context (admittedly partisan in analysis, but the facts of record are all accurate).

For the Very Simple Explanation of what exactly happened in a way you can explain to your Grandma, Ezra has this.

For an alternate reasonable solution, you can read Ezra's discussion of this fella.

Do economists like this plan? Noooooooooo.

Whoops, props meeting. Enjoy the New Century!

LEVERAGE Facebook page is live.

Maintained by the Charming Network Overlords, will be the source of LEVERAGE-y goodness. Photos on the site are primarily from the first shot episode, but mid-season air date: "The Bank Shot Job". Written by stalker-boy favorite Amy Berg.

Pictures of Ike

(AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

The Doomed Pulp Novel is post-apocalyptic/flooded city in nature, so I've collected a fair number of these type of photos. Worth a spin, if only to be reminded of some scale issues. That is, Nature has us in both weight class and reach, and we had best smarten up. (h/t Oliver Willis)

Caligula For President

Ugh. I can actually hear gears grinding in my head as I change writing styles. Well, some recommendations should ease us into it.

Our friends at Boing Boing point out that Cintra Wilson has a new book forthcoming -- Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny. Caligula has returned to lead us into the new century. An excerpt:

You are going to need me, because on the subject of nepotism and dynasty, I must issue a dire warning. I prophesy that young George Prescott Bush III could present a direct threat to my divine authority in 2016.

Jeb Bush should have eaten George Prescott while he was still small enough to swallow whole. This boy is very handsome; he has thick black hair and speaks Spanish. He looks like Enrique Iglesias in a Turnbull & Asser suit. It is my opinion that he will be groomed to emotionally manipulate stadium crowds of fearful, lower-class young Jesus- lovers into a weeping, Elvis-worthy sexual panic, in concert with an organized, psychological operation of relentless global PR carpet bombing of a price and magnitude ordinarily associated with Exxon. The full weight of the Bush legacy's war chest will finally buy the love and total complicity of the cool youth vote: early- adopters, the extreme-sports community, and/or what ever the godforsaken future of Facebook- and MySpace-style social networking holds. A brave new frontier of image-making will mold young George Prescott into one part Che Guevara, one part young Ronald Reagan, and six parts Napoleon.

Combined with his family's patented banana-republic- style tilting of electronic voting machines, George Prescott will be unstoppable.

So, here's a little trick I picked up over the centuries: Take pains to ensure that he becomes addicted to hookers, OxyContin or anonymous gay sex in public men's rooms.

I believe this is the duty of all Americans who do not wish to hand over their children at birth to be trained as bullet- polishers for Halliburton.

Go get him, all you hot, hot, American whores, drug fiends and daring young homosexual men. Go get George Prescott.

I've given out more copies than I care to admit of her book of essays, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations. I consider it one of the essential primers on moving to Hollywood. I was't a huge fan of her novel Colors Insulting to Nature, as it's basically exploring the same themes but through the lens of some very spun characters. The reviews are all solid, however, and my lack of enthusiasm is plainly biased by my fondness for essay-length writing.

In the Comments: your favorite essay-style book. Non-fiction, no short story collections. Does David Sedaris-style memorium count? I don't know. You hash it out in the Comments.

Serbian speaker?

Anybody who is or knows a Serbian speaker -- have them ding me at kfmonkey@gmail.com.

Blue Beetle, BOOM! and Genius

MINOR SPOILERS

While I wait for my script co-ordinator to process the new draft, some quick comic business. OH, and I'll be totally abusing the Amazon links, because I'm learning how they work.

BLUE BEETLE #29 with MATT STURGESS

... is a goddam home run.

Don't get me wrong, Will Pfiefer did an excellent job, and I'm always a fan of Baldeon's work. But damn, Matt Sturgess has written the book I dreamed of doing once we finished the origin story.

The strength of the book has always been the nuts and bolts of superheroing. Matt's now exploring what it's like to be a 16 year old Hispanic superhero with a secret identity in El Paso. He's managed to pull in the Minutemen, illegals, and the media all in a non-preachy way. Characters have specific viewpoints, but they're not always what you expect, and all very credible. Matt's seemlessly taken over the book, but improved it with his mad plotting/structure skills.

Not to mention, he brings the funny. I'm kind of giddy that I get to watch the Paco/Brenda train wreck from the outside now, like a fanboy. He gets all the characters, their voices, their tone. I can't wait to see what he does with La Dama.

I cannot accentuate this enough -- I read BB #29 three times in a row.

An interview here has Matt discussing his plans for his run, which I hope is at least as long as mine. Rafael is continuing on the book, of course, and somehow manages to top himself every issue.

BLUE BEETLE POST-GAME

I would have loved to do a proper wrap-up when issue #25 dropped. But, you know -- dead-zone. You want to write the long article, the whole "running a TV show" thing gets in the way -- and you realize a short note was probably smarter in the first place.

Kieth taught me ten years of comic writing in one. Cully's character design is iconic, and that includes all the non-costumed side characters. Rafael made me look better than I am (Issue #17, kids). Joan Hilty talked me out of three bad ideas and into two good ones, for a net +5 on the Editing Score and therefore a big win.

We wanted to establish a new superhero for younger readers, and add a different viewpoint to the DCU. Something you could give your 12 year old nephew to read without first forcing him to complete a degree in DC Continuity.

A lot of people hated us, then some of them liked us, and then some of them loved us ... while a lot of people still hated us. Those people can go pound sand and collect Final Crisis variant covers. The BB fans were supportive, enthusiastic, and it felt good to see all the positive reviews roll in by the middle of the run. And I genuinely like the BB fans. They are the good-natured, "Comics Should Be Fun" folks. (Hell, even the Goons liked it by the end of the run.)

Special thanks to the Comicbloc humans for a safe forum haven.

End of day, Jaime Reyes is going to be every young kid's Blue Beetle, much like the Green Lantern of my nephew is John Stewart. And Jaime's a damn fine Blue Beetle to have.




BOOM! goes online

Although the Farscape news is pretty great -- yeah, yeah, I was on that train pretty hard -- what's fascinating right now is that BOOM! has put a bunch of their back-issue anthologies online for free reading. They're uploading a page a day. They all have RSS feeds, too, very progressive, even if still bound to the hated portrait layout. I've got stories in most of these, somewhere ...

Ninja Tales, "Desert Sun" starts here.
Zombie Tales, "Memento Mori" is here.

GENIUS

I wrote a blurb for Marc Bernardin's Monster Attack Network, and have always been a fan.



Well, he's stepped up with a new book that's... fine, I'm not going to do it justice. Here's the one-liner:

"What if the greatest military mind of our generation was born an angry 17-year-old girl in South Central L.A.? And what if she decided to secede a few blocks of her 'hood...through force?"

This earns the best possible compliment one writer can give another.

Fuck you, Marc.

Shocking, adult, conflicted, and all off an inspired high concept. Read about it here, read the amazing reviews, and go vote for the damn thing so I don't have to finance it myself so I can read the entire arc.

All right, time to proof some dialogue. Product links below, if you're interested, for the whole 25-issue BB arc

Oof

So, this whole "simultaneously prepping one movie, shooting another and editing a third for 16 weeks in a row" thing is precisely as life-eating as previously described. Aces. The entire goddam point of my career was to avoid a day job ...

Not dead, and now that I've written my second ep of the season, fairly caught up. Blogging to resume normally this weekend, if only because the American Carol stuff has gotten so idiotic I can no longer ignore it.

Readability Test

BB 17 part(2) - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: BB 17 part(2)