There’s a book to be written whose message would be simply, “Don’t ever write a book.” It would tell the tale of many an author who devoted years to the writing, squandered more years seeking a publisher, and if and when the book was finally printed watched the nation ignore it. No doubt the book I describe would serve as its own excellent example.
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I asked Kleinfeld the other day how many screenplays he’s written by now. “About six or seven I’ve been paid for,” he said. “Half a dozen more than didn’t sell, including the two best. One was optioned a couple of times and never made.” He rewrote somebody else’s adaptation of a comic strip he’d rather not name. And he and Gordon pitched an idea a producer was so wild about that Kleinfeld wrote three drafts before he figured out it was dead. “I wrote screenplays every imaginable way you can write a screenplay,” he says.
And?
Seven years ago he decided to write a novel. It was an exhilarating change. “There are simply so many more words in a book than there are in a screenplay,” he says. But there were no producers dictating to him and no budgets to care about. Wherever Kleinfeld’s characters went and whatever they did, he didn’t have to ask himself, Can we afford this?
A unique voice very much in the style of Carl Hiassen, I’d say. It’s like Hiassen without Hiassen’s righteous anger over what crooked pols and developers are doing to his beloved Florida. It’s not that Kleinfeld has nothing to be angry about, but this isn’t his Hollywood novel. Shooters & Chasers is a whodunit that begins with a famous architect being capped in Chicago and wends its way to LA, where the various moneyed suspects lurk.
“Then at the last major, the only one we hadn’t heard back from, the editor loved the book—and so did the publisher. Lucy was stoked; she and the publisher thought Shooters might be 2005’s big beach book. Then a day later she calls and tells me she has bad news. The publisher has been overruled by… the marketing director.”
The one on the front cover is from NPR’s Jacki Lyden.
