by Edward Champion

Amateur Hour at Studio 360

Kurt Andersen has offered the uncut version of his conversation with Harlan Ellison. But what is particularly astonishing is just how much of an ignoramus Andersen comes across as. He constantly interrupts Ellison. At around the 26:30 mark, Andersen cannot get Dreams with Sharp Teeth director Erik Nelson’s name right and must utter the intro again. An embarrassing suggestion that Ellison wrote “Paladin of the Lost Hour” for the original Twilight Zone is there. In short, Studio 360 is a program that is made almost entirely in the editing room and certainly not from the conversation itself. And if this uncut interview serves as a representative rough version of what the editors have to play with, then I wonder just how much Andersen is relying on his editors to salvage the show and make it sound “professional.”

For the record, while there is some editing on The Bat Segundo Show (mostly to boost levels, remove coughs and popped plosives, make people sound a bit sexier, and the like), what you hear on these shows is 98% of the conversation. If I make a referential mistake, I leave it in. If there’s a strange tangent, I leave it in. If a guest and I get kicked out or something strange happens because of a third party, I leave it in. But I compensate for these fallacies by actually knowing the material: reading the book in full, wading through other interviews to ensure that I don’t ask the same questions, making sure I pronounce the author’s name, the book’s title, and the book’s characters correctly (although there have been a few minor slip-ups; nobody’s perfect). I’m determined to get as much of this right in my conversation because it means less editing time for me. And I only have so much time to commit. Perhaps this “one take” sensibility comes from my theatrical background. But apparently Andersen (or his writers) cannot do this.

Just think of all the man-hours that have been expended towards correct Andersen’s mistakes. Consider the labor costs that might have been avoided had Andersen actually bothered to pay attention to his goddam subject.

But what do I know? I’m just some hapless podcaster.

(Incidentally, at the 30 minute mark, it’s also quite funny to hear Harlan Ellison skewer Andersen’s stereotypical remarks about Los Angeles.)

by Edward Champion

Adieu Apartment

And so we come to the final blog post I shall write in this apartment. As others nimbly perambulate through airport security gates, their rucksacks and tote bags brimming with books to read on the six hour flight to Los Angeles for the annual cacophony to score galleys and gratis cocktails, I shall be driving a van in New York, negotiating the BQE and doing my best to remember that you can’t make a right turn on red. The desk is half-disassembled. Twenty boxes of stuff reside in the other room. You can wander through the apartment and experience a slight reverb colliding against the barren walls whenever you recite half-remembered lines from Shakespeare or sing pop song lyrics you hoped would snap and crackle out of your brain.

I read 117 books while living in this apartment, but I may be missing a few. My hairline receded quite wonderfully! I shall be a full-fledged chromedome by 35! I grew many beards. I shaved my hair off six times. I negotiated the celerity and terrain of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and offered a dear goodbye (with the promise of a return visit) to the folks at my neighborhood cafe, where I often holed up with my laptop. Last night, I purchased my last beer at the bodega run by a friendly racist. I battled cockroaches and a few mice and lived to tell the tale. I lost weight. Whether it was the walking, the frugal living, or the freelancing, I cannot say. I became more cheerful and got a little crazier. I survived the chilly winter and the humid summer. I put up 90 installments of The Bat Segundo Show. I made friends and became closer to acquaintances. I sent 10,032 emails on the main account. I banged out around 80,000 words (not counting the blog) for fictional and professional endeavors.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad run. I don’t know how much the topographical and spatial dimensions of this apartment factored into these activities. This is a strange but serviceable apartment that I hope will offer similar feats for the next tenant, whoever s/he may be.

by Edward Champion

Joseph Minion Plagiarized Joe Frank

After Hours is perhaps my favorite Scorsese film. I am also a big Joe Frank fan. So it was considerably astonishing to learn that screenwriter Joseph Minion appears to have pilfered a Frank monologue for the first 30 minutes of the film. The details are, in many cases, taken astonishingly verbatim. In a March 2000 interview, Frank was apparently “paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won’t name) that plagiarized his dialogue.” (via Fimoculous)

[ALSO: Minion also plagiarized “Before the Law” from Kafka’s The Castle for this scene. Kafka, however, was not in the position to settle out of court.]