Welcome to my take, my slant, on the movie biz, based on my 25 years as a writer of TV and feature films, including the adaptations of two of my own books. Which reminds me of a chapter epigraph from my new book, in which a major through-line is how it went with those adaptations:

My principal feeling about Hollywood is suicide. If I could get out of bed and into the shower, I was all right. Since I never paid the bills, I’d reach for the phone and order the most elaborate breakfast I could think of, and then I’d try to make it to the shower before I hanged myself.
John Cheever

Here’s how the movie deal for my previous memoir, In Search of Captain Zero, went down…

I’m putting a short clip from Jbrother’s movie Longer in two sections, here and in Cowabunga!/The Surfing Life. I do this because Longeris a great little surf movie, and a great little movie, period. I say “little’ only because of its length, about 30 minutes.

If you don’t surf and are not curious about it or about Longer, get a load of this, from none other than Ethan Coen:

"Longer, a new American surf movie is the vision of a masterful new eye. The poignancy of de Sica's The Bicycle Thief echoes in his scoring of the opening segment with Getz/Gilberto's 'Desafinado….'
--A Cahiers du Cinema review

I deliberately chose a sequence with unspectacular waves being ridden, so as not to distract you from the grace and artistry of the collaboration of surfer and filmmaker by wowing you with nature herself.

This is about surfing, and surf filmmaking, as art. It's about ballroom dancing with Big Blue...

Buy a Longer DVD direct from the man who made it. Support the filmmaker!

Like Jbrother’s movie, this offering is going in the Cowabunga!/The Surfing Life section as well. Zen and Zero documents a crew of Austrian surfers (not Australian surfers, Austrian) in their odyssey down the coasts of Mexico and Central America, more or less in search of… me. Trust me that I don’t offer it because of my participation (I’m not in the clip). In fact, seeing myself as a sort of surfy Captain Kurtz at the end of the road in outback Costa Rica made me so uncomfortable that I had to view the flick again to realize how good it is.

Zen and Zero won major awards at four film festivals, including Best Adventure Film at the Tahoe Film Festival (2006).

I think you’ll agree that this four minute chunk stands very well on its own.

Between Longer and Zen and Zero: Surf flicks have come a long way since Gidget, no?

Am I making referral money if you buy Z and Z or Longer ? No, and apart from my Amazon affiliateship, I will never make money by sending you anywhere.

The Amazon links are for your convenience, and to learn more about a book/DVD/whatever, not to make a buck. I would prefer you buy from your neighborhood bookstore -- an independent, owner-operated one if possible.

There will never be outside advertising here, ever. I can’t stand that shit, aesthetically or ethically.

Subscribe to The Bandito Browser and, among all the other wild stuff, we’ll be offering more of my lunatic Banditos screenplay, plus more from my Zero movie deal with Sean Penn (why did he wish me “something that resembles death”?), plus I’ll really hang my ass out there and offer my In Search of Captain Zero screen adaptation for your possible ridicule, plus a we’re putting together a montage of the greatest Bandito Moments in screen history…

Holy shit!

You call this a movie script? Give me a couple $5,000-a-week writers and I’ll write it myself.
Joseph Pasternak, movie producer

• A Brief History of the Huyan Race
• Brokeback Mountain, the Sequel
• Cosmic Banditos: A Screenplay Excerpt
• Excerpt: The Zero Deal
• Sean and Me: An Excerpt From 'Can't You Get Along With Anyone?'

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Aplomb A Brief History of the Huyan Race