Difficult Men

I enjoyed this book.  (A sequel about Amy Sherman-Palladino etc.?)  Here are a few items of interest.

David Chase talking about what he learned from Stephen J. Cannell:

“Cannell taught me that your hero can do a lot of bad things, he can make all kinds of mistakes, can be lazy and look like a fool, as long as he’s the smartest guy in the room and he’s good at his job.  That’s what we ask of our heroes.”

Cannell:

“I’m not a mogul, I’m a writer.  I write every day for five hours.  If that doesn’t make me a writer, what does?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7vo9cJhsXQ

And here’s a good tidbit:

The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood [the book] was finished three years after the project began.  (“Simon was very heavy into fantasy baseball one of the years,” Burns said by way of explaining why it took so long to write.)

There’s some great stuff about how cool Clarke Peters is.

Peters was an erudite, fifty-year-old native New Yorker.  He had left the United States as a teenager for Paris, where there were still the remnants of a great African American expat community.  Within weeks of arriving, he’d met James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and the blues pianist Memphis Slim, among others.

While Peters was running basically a salon in Baltimore, Herc and Carver were playing video games all day and going to strip clubs.

David Milch does not disappoint:

The actor Garret Dillahunt, who first played Wild Bill’s killer and then the character Francis Wolcott, was given and asked to study 190 pages of biographical material about a sixteenth-century heretic named Paracelsus.

(Paracelsus:

Later, talking about John From Cincinnati:

“My understanding of the way the mechanism of storytelling works is [that] any story is constantly appending specific values to the meanings of words, and of the actions of characters.  And the fact that story uses as its building blocks words or character that the audience believes it has some prior recognition or understanding of, is really simply the beginning of the story, but not its end.”

Um, yeah no shit duh. 

Say what you will: for my money, the opening sequence to JfC is the best ever in TV history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrWZlh7DnBE