Author: Craig Fehrman

Craig Fehrman is the author of Author in Chief (February 11, 2020). Find out more at his website http://craigfehrman.com.

Novelists and cable television

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, TV and Movies

[The New York Times]

In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I’ve got an essay about how more and more novelists are selling the rights to their work to cable networks — and in many cases, even helping adapt that work, as well. Since many of the projects I mentioned remain in the pilot stage (and since the odds that a pilot makes it to air remain terrible), it was tough to get interviews. But I did talk at length with Jonathan Ames, a novelist who’s already adapted his work into a show, Bored to Death, that just finished its third season. Ames made for a great interview — a metaphor machine who balanced deep knowledge with deep-ish pessimism. Below are some interesting quotations I couldn’t fit into the essay.”

On a TV show’s financial benefits: “I got paid much more for the show’s pilot script, which took me six days to write, than I’d ever gotten for any of my novels. The economy of scale is just absurd.”

On a TV show’s collaboration: “HBO was very kind to me — they gave me a learner’s permit. . . . I don’t have much time to sit on a script before I turn it over to other people. It’s a very vulnerable moment. It forces you to be imperfect in front of other people. I need all these people to be, in a sense, editors. Sometimes it’s difficult. But most of the time everyone makes it better.”

On the value of TV versus literature: “In all the media, my goal is to entertain and amuse — to, for a moment, give someone some relief, perhaps, and to make someone feel less alone. . . . There are certain things I smuggle into the show,  things that you might not find in a typical comedy. I want there to be some gravitas, some sorrow and despair — for a moment, it’s not clearly just a joke, and that feels more in the realm of what I can do in my novels and my nonfiction. But prose makes it much easier to toggle back and forth from lightness and darkness.”

On returning to writing: “Over the course of writing the show, I’ve written a handful of essays. I’ve kept my hand in prose. But I’d like to return to books, if I’m lucky enough to be able to. I can imagine a future critic saying, ‘Ames has clearly been writing for TV.'”

What everyone’s missing about baseball’s new CBA

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Sports

[Slate]

In Slate today, I’ve got a story about Major League Baseball’s new CBA — and about its changes in how teams can acquire (and compensate) amateur talent. Among baseball pundits, a sturdy consensus has formed: these changes will make it even harder for small-market teams to compete. I try to show how this analysis overlooks a few key ideas, including the lessons of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball.

The gist of my argument is that spending tons of money on amateur players does give small-market teams an advantage — but that it’s such a big advantage everyone else will catch on and catch up, leaving the draft as stratified as every other element in baseball’s economy. It’s the classic Moneyball narrative: team exploits undervalued asset until it becomes properly (even overly) valued. One of the funny things here  is that Billy Beane and the A’s themselves undervalued draft picks. After all, a big part of Moneyball centers on the 2002 draft in which the A’s had a whopping seven first-round picks (and 35 picks overall). Instead of loading up on high-ceiling, high-cost amateurs — the kind of players you have to pay “over slot” — the A’s looked for players who would sign under slot. Now, as Lewis tells it, the A’s didn’t have much choice since their owner had allocated only $9.4 million for draft bonuses. But that was a terrible move. Bargain-hunting makes sense with big-league players, not with amateurs.

In the last few years, other teams — and, crucially, other owners — have wised up. The Royals provide the best example. But even now you’re starting to see big-market teams invest more and more money in amateur players, players they can keep or trade. The Tigers used two “over slot” prospects to trade for Miguel Cabrera; the Red Sox used two more to get Adrian Gonzalez. And if baseball’s new CBA hadn’t better regulated the draft, this trend would have only increased.

*  *  *

N.B. If you’re a baseball-slash-economics fan, you might enjoy a long feature I wrote this summer on the Cincinnati Reds and their fans. In it, I erroneously predicted that baseball “has too many people making too much money for anything major to change [in the new CBA].” But there’s lots more I did get right about small-market teams and how they can (and can’t) compete. A .pdf of the story is here.

A Review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead: Essays

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books

[San Francisco Chronicle]

In yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, I’ve got a review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s terrific new book. It collects a bunch of Sullivan’s magazine pieces (hence its title, Pulphead), and pretty much all of them, whether a review or a profile or a topical feature, need and deserve the essay– prefix. The writing and thinking are that good.

Oh, here’s a fascinating snippet from from an interview Sullivan did where he talks about his nonfiction persona:

One aspect of coming out of the magazine world is that fact-checking is always there, hovering, waiting to take away your favorite sentences. But your “self” they don’t get to touch, they don’t get to mess with. That’s your fiefdom. So I like to take that as a liberty, and I try to run with it. That’s what you mean by persona.I never feel like the “I” that’s speaking in a piece of mine has any real duty to sync up with whatever Me is on a given day, in terms of sensibility. If I can create an entity on the page, a being with a voice, who’s able to look at things in a way that gets me closer to what’s true about them, then I embrace him, even if he ends up saying things I don’t say. You can’t do it with other people, of course. If you didn’t actually say the heat was miserable when we were riding the bus together, I can’t quote you as saying that in my piece. But the creature who writes under my byline gets to feel hot and miserable and tell you about it, and the fact-checkers have no way to check it, except to verify that it was 98 degrees in El Paso that day.I’m saying it’s one thing we get as nonfiction writers. You know, fiction writers get a lot. They can do anything. We can’t do that much, but we can play with masks, and they can’t take that away.

Wouldn’t it be great if the book industry had its own Oscars?

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, The Media

[The New York Times]

In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I’ve got an essay on the short and inglorious history of the American Book Awards. Actually, it’s also a history of the short and inglorious rebranding of the National Book Awards, for the two were one in the same: in the 1980s, the publishing industry tried to turn its awards into a media-friendly Oscars for books, with predictably disastrous results. My essay details many of those disasters. But I came out of this pretty sympathetic to the publishers’ goals — or at least more sympathetic to them than to the way the National Book Awards are currently handled.

Since authors (and especially literary authors) were the ones who fouled things up for the American Book Awards (or the TABAs, as they were called), it seems only fair to spend some time quoting the authors who did make it to the first ceremony. TABA winners didn’t give speeches — this was one of several admittedly baffling choices by the event’s organizers — but co-hosts William F. Buckley and John Chancellor, along with a number of celebrity presenters, indulged in some painfully scripted banter. And thanks to the Hoover Institution’s archive of Buckley’s Firing Line (the only TV coverage the Awards got was a rebroadcast on this show), you can read the Awards’ full transcript here.

  • Erica Jong, presenting the first novel award: “It was said by some 19th century wag that a publisher would rather see a burglar in his office than a poet. This istrue, alas, of first novelists. The world never needs another first novelist. Every first novel is the triumph of hope over despair, a desperate leap in the dark.”
  • John Towland, presenting the history (hardcover) award: “And the TABA award goes to Henry Kissinger. (applause) And now the nominees for History Paperback.” (Actually, Kissinger got lustily booed by the 1600 or so in attendance.)
  • Lauren Baccall, presenting the biography award: “I think I might die right here, I’m so nervous. I have really no jokes at all to tell, except that I can only say that the fact that I’m even included in the evening is quite sufficient for me, and that anyone should call me an author is more than I ever thought would happen to me in my life.” (Bacall won the autobiography [hardcover] award — the closest the TABAs got to the rampant commercialism predicted by the literary community.)
  • Buckley, presenting presenter Isaac Asimov: “The award for science will be given by Issac Asimov, whose own achievements make him a legitimate object of scientific curiosity.”

Asimov, who appeared to be more comfortable with the award show format than the other author-presenters, shared a good-natured account of his first publication. (“It was on October 21st, 1938 — 41years, six months and 10 days ago, which will probably strike you dumb with amazement in view of the incredibly youthful appearanceI present.”) But Buckley got the best line of the night — an ad lib after his Stained Glass won best mystery (paperback). “I’m pleased,” he quipped, “by this documentary evidence of the incorruptibility of the [Awards].”