LOS ANGELES, August 22 – The movie thing, it’s designed to make people mad.

I mean mad in the anglophile Britishy way of nutty, as opposed to the stalwart American way of just pissed off. Although both senses of the term apply.

Personally, I don’t feel mad about the movie thing at all just now. Either kind of mad. I feel rather peaceful and at ease. I, after all, have no reason to feel mad. My interactions within the realm of the movie thing have been passing, brief and, for the most part pleasant.

Not so for others.

I know some folks who have ample reason to feel greatly mad. Though I’ve seen no indication that they actually do. The folks in question are the kind people at Crossroads Films.

To wit:
After several years of diligent effort, and the expenditure of significant sums of $$$, they have been forced to give up their film option on CAUGHT STEALING. This is disappointing. But no so much for the obvious reasons.

Well, not for me anyway.

I’m disappointed because these folks had been putting their back into it for a few years now, come close on several occasions to having their financing in place, and never been able to get that boulder quite to the top of the mountain before it rolled back down on them. In the meantime, in order to continue this reenactment of Sisyphus, they had to dole out periodic checks to me and a few other people as well. I can only imagine the frustration of working literally for years on a project, investing some real capital in it, and seeing it come to nothing in the end. I can only imagine this because I have been, for all intents and purposes, a well paid spectator at the event.

Lucky me. Again.

The sick part, the really sick part, is that, having already made a nice piece of change off this effort, the option right to CAUGHT STEALING will now return to me. And I can sell them again. And again. And again. This can, and does, go on for a very long time.

Silly, yes?

Of course, as blasé as I may be able to play this, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to see a movie get made from one of my books, or all of them for that matter. There’s gold in them there hills after all. But it’s nice solace knowing (should I be lucky enough to have this continue) that folks will have to pay for the pleasure of trying to crack that nut whether they are successful or not.

Pity them.

Something is driving them. And clichés of Hollywood greed aside (and those are plenty real themselves), most of the people driven in this particular way seem to have as their greatest aspiration, the desire to make good movies. Go figure.

So, good folks at Crossroads, folks with a real desire to make a good movie, run into a self serving, money grubbing novelist like me and end up spending sweat and treasure on a fruitless venture while I happily whistle down the street with a slightly fatter wallet.

Right bastard that I am.

And I’m gonna try to do it again!

I’m gonna hang CAUGHT STEALING at the end of a line of piano wire and drag it through the heavy water, dumping chum all the while, and hope for a big motherfucker to come along and swallow the bait. Should this happen, it will be followed, inevitably, with a long and frustrating period of negotiation that will make me wish I’d simply thrown some dynamite in the water, but should I land the beast, I can cut it’s belly open and scrape out the roe.

Not to batter a metaphor or anything.

Tying a fly,
Charlie

Cap and the Falcon Hit the Road!

Tomorrow, Wednesday, August 23rd is the scheduled release date for The Ultimates 2 Annual #2.

How do I know? I wrote it.

Fuck you, Huston, you fucking hack! Who drew the damn thing?

Well, since you asked nicely, pencil duties were shared by Mike Deodato and Ryan Sook.

For the uninitiated, that being the folks who have better things to do than read books with lots of pictures in them, the Ultimates are an updated version of Marvel Comics’ Avengers. For those of you who don’t know who the Avengers are, I have no time to explain the concept of The Earth’s Mightiest Heroes!

The story told may require the slightest bit of setup: America was conquered by a force of foreign super villains. The Ultimates kicked their asses. Stuff got broken. Stuff is being put back together.

Go buy the bastard and read it. Pretty pretty pictures.