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How to Write A Lifetime Network Murder Movie of the Week

In my work as a Script Doctor, I take dramatic stories for television, the movies, and the stage, and I make them structurally better. That sort of work isn’t formulaic, but there are common touchstones that must always be considered and then incorporated — what I remember the great Joseph Campbell loosely calling, “the natural rhythms of human storytelling shared with the reliability of a heartbeat” — and that’s what I do; I provide an unpacked redirection of the concentric condition that we are all innately accustomed to sending and receiving in a performance communication dyad, in the acknowledgement of, and in the often unwitting acceptance of, “The Holy Triad.” The Creator, The Object and The Observer.

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Seven Seconds in Jersey City is a Lifetime Too Long

My ophthalmologist is always excitable. She enjoys life. She’s an excellent MD. She knows I’m a writer, and a Script Doctor, and she makes bumping into her at her office to pick up my contact lens order, a real delight!

My doctor is also a Jersey City girl, born-and-bred, and she’s tough, and smart, and she knows the city well; and my doctor implored me to watch the new Netflix Seven Seconds cable series because it was about the city in which we spin.

She told me Seven Seconds was dark, and ugly, and that “bad people live here in Jersey City” — but my doctor loved the series, and she binge-watched all 10 one-hour episodes in a single sitting! She went on to tell me I had to watch it too, and that she would be testing me on what happened in the story the next time I sat with her for my annual eye examination. I took her up on her offer — and challenge! — because I had no other choice!

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When Homicide Hunter Lt. Joe Kenda Follows You, You Stay Followed!

Lt. Joe Kenda is one of the most interesting, and important, people on television and — just as love and fate would have it — he’s also one of the kindest guys you’d ever want to meet… when he isn’t chasing down killers and murderers and putting them in jail.

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Jersey City Salutes Police Officer Melvin Santiago

Rookie Jersey City Police Office Melvin Santiago was assassinated on Sunday responding to a call at a local Walgreens.  Yesterday, over a 1,000 people lined up outside a funeral home to salute an officer who gave his life in service to a city in the hard, urban core.  Officer Santiago was 23 and — during his wake — was promoted to the rank of Detective and given the Medal of Honor in death by the Mayor of Jersey City.

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Superman, Batman and Spider-Man: How Murdering Loss Creates Comic Book Character

Over the holiday break, I decided to watch the newest Superman movie and I was certainly disappointed in the silly story, the rebooting of the franchise, and the awful acting of the lead character.  Superman should be wily, and funny, and tough.  He never preens.

It’s always boring when movie production houses feel they have to re-start a story that’s been never-endingly told for generations.  We pretty much know the backstory of Superman and we don’t need to re-live, over and over again, every 10 years or so, just how the star child becomes the Superman on earth.

In my short life, I think I’ve lived through at least a dozen iterations of Superman in film and on television and I would be perfectly fine to have a new Superman just appear in media res.  We get it he’s special and Superhuman, so just drop him in and let the story start with no explanation necessary!

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The Modern Fairway Carny: Itinerant Street Vendors

Growing up in the Midwest, there was a yearly visit to the State Fair that — during my childhood, at least — was always tempered with a tremendous terror.

For many months, there was a story in the newspaper about a young boy who visited the Nebraska State Fair in Lincoln and then disappeared.  He was continuously searched for on the Fairgrounds and communities in the area would get together and search other pockets of the city so the boy might be found.

A long while later, the boy’s decomposing body was discovered stuffed inside an empty train tank car in a faraway town.  The thinking at the time was that the boy had run into a carnival worker — a Carny — and something horrible happened and the boy was killed and stuffed, and sealed, into the tank out of convenience since the railroad ran straight through the Fairgrounds.

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As Oscar Pistorius Stumbles Down Murder Row

I am dumbfounded by news today from South Africa that legless Olympian runner Oscar Pistorius has been charged with murdering Reeva Steenkamp, his longtime girlfriend, with four gunshots.  Why would a man like Oscar ever raise a gun in fear or anger?  Hasn’t his life taught him that obstacles are to be overcome and never under-gunned?

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