Gambling With an Edge - guest Max Shapiro

Our guest today is Max Shapiro, longtime CardPlayer columnist of "Read 'Em and Laugh," and one of the best poker humorists of all time. But first we go back to the mail bag to answer listener questions.

podcast
click to listen - alt click to download

Becoming Bobby by Michael Konik

Becoming Bobby

When I was 13 I worked for a summer in my Father's law office in downtown Chicago. I would take the Chicago & Northwestern train down to the city. When you exited the back of the Northwestern station you were faced with the Chicago River. People streamed to the left, and right to walk across the bridges which fed them into The Loop. I remember standing outside the station watching thousands of men and women in their business suits, carrying briefcases, marching like ants across those bridges, and thinking, "I am never going to end up like these people."

The main character in Becoming Bobby never had that epiphany. We find him in his late 50s, working at a job he calls his prison, with an eight hour sentence each day. He's in an awful job, and a loveless marriage, and he dreams of becoming Bobby. Bobby is his manifestation of the guy every man wants to be, and every woman wants to screw. There is not much plot here. Perhaps our main character (his name is never given) is descending into madness, but as he becomes more like Bobby he goes in to see his boss, and demands that his salary be doubled. This is a salesman that hasn't added any new accounts in years. Bobby gets fired, leaves his wife, and heads off to Vegas.

Konik uses some odd writing conventions in this book. First of all the main character is never named, and neither is anything else. He doesn't go to Las Vegas, he goes to "the desert." There are no names of anything you would recognize. He doesn't drink a Coke or 7 Up, he drinks a "Fizz." Movies, TV shows, actors, everything is unrecognizable. This seemed odd to me and constantly pulled me out of the story. The story is told in a first person, stream of consciousness that made me feel like a psychiatrist listening to the ramblings of a stoned patient.

Everyone I know who has read this book agrees about one thing. The book really picks up steam when Bobby gets to Las Vegas. We recognize the craziness of both the casinos, and the "ploppies" like Bobby who thinks he is an expert slot player. I wish the first part of the book, the part about his boring awful life, was half as long, and the Vegas section were doubled. Make no mistake, Konik can really write. I have been a big fan of his non-fiction work for years. Fiction is a very subjective thing, and the satire on mid-life crisis really isn't my thing. On the other hand, satire on Las Vegas is. I give it...

2 1/2 aces

You can buy the book here. Becoming Bobby

Gambling With an Edge - guest Michael Konik

The guest this week is Michael Konik, on to talk about his new novel, Becoming Bobby.

podcast

Click to listen - Alt click to download

Gambling With an Edge - guest Arnold Snyder

This week's guest is Arnold Snyder talking about his new novel Risk of Ruin.

podcast

Click to listen - Alt click to download

Hack Writing

Arnold Snyder is one of blackjack's best known, and most prolific writers.  He has a new blog called Write-aholic, which is not about gambling, but is about writing and book reviews.  I read a post today on his early days of hack writing.  You can read it here - Hack Writing. This brought back many memories of my own hack writing, although my writing was not in the trenches of porn; it was the low budget world of action, and martial arts movies.

My friend Joe owned a low-budget film company called PM Entertainment. I went to his office one day, we sit, he says,

"Kickboxing"

"Kickboxing?"

"Kickboxing.  It's very hot right now.  Have you seen Kickboxer with Jean-Claude Van Damme?"

"Uhm, no havn't seen that yet."

"I want you to do a movie for us. Kickboxing. We start shooting in February."

Wow, this was December so there were only 2 months to prepare. "I'd really like to do it, but that isn't a lot of time. Can I read the script?"

"Right, you have two months.  You better start writing."

Two months is not a lot of time to write a script, let alone, write it, cast it, and do everything necessary for preproduction. I called my brother Jake in Chicago, and told him I would be home in a week. He should rent every kickboxing movie he could find, and we had two weeks to write a script. I said, "With only two weeks we need a story that works. We'll steal from the best. Romeo and Juliet... with kickboxing!"

In writing porn, Arnold talks about the "flip strength." The flip strength means that a buyer has to pick up the book and flip to any page and find sex. Film producer Joel Silver had the equivalent for action films. "You have to have a whammo every 10 minutes. An explosion, a car chase, a fight scene, to keep the audience interested." At PM Entertainment we thought 10 minutes was far too long to wait. More fighting, less talk.

Some day I'll write much more about Ring of Fire, but we did write it in two weeks, shoot it in February, and screen it in June of that year. My favorite review was from a smart-ass critic who wrote, "What foot through yonder window breaks."

What happens next in the film world is the owners take their films to market. Film markets are just like fish markets. You tell the buyers how fresh yours is, they say they want a bigger fish or a different kind, you tell them why yours is better, and eventually you haggle out a price. Joe and George (the head of marketing) went to the big market in Milan, Italy where the buyers are there to buy the rights to films for their country.   These buyers offer helpful advice for your future films.

The French: More sex, less violence.
The Japanese: More violence, less sex.
The Korean buyer: Dreams are very important to my people. Especially the dream of Dragons.
The Scandinavian buyer: Many people die from bullets. Maybe you could kill someone with a harpoon, or bicycle pump.

Joe and George come back from the market, and now we have a meeting that is like entering the Twilight zone.

JOE: We have to rewrite the script.  It needs more sex and less violence.
GEORGE: Yes, and much more action, but not too much sex.
JOE: We're going to do it in Las Vegas and have a big stunt in the beginning like LETHAL WEAPON.
GEORGE: Yes, yes, and maybe our star could kill somebody by taping his mouth to his exhaust pipe and the guy fills with gas and his body explodes.
JOE: Right, but the fumes from the gas make him have a dream about a dragon.

Like porn - no jokes allowed. What is funny to us is not funny in Korea or Germany. It's only the meetings that are funny. But when you watch a low budget movie in the future, and you say to yourself, "Why does that cab driver have a scuba tank and spear gun in his taxi?" You can bet that some bad guy is getting shot through the eye with the spear gun, and someone's cab will explode when that scuba tank gets hit.