Fastest Christmas Yet

Hard to say what made it so fast. Maybe losing a week after Thanksgiving. Maybe it is just everything is getting faster in a cyber world. But it was fast. Boom. Here and there and over. Not even enough time to see Macys windows and the lights in Lincoln Park or Its A Wonderful Life at the Music Box Theatre. Like a lot of people we have been backfilling after Christmas but of course it is not the same.

The Xmas blues comes a few days later when you face the winter. Could it be we are really in the countdown toward spring? And what does it say when we are continually looking from one date to the next. Ok Easter. Ok Fourth of July. Ok Thanksgiving. Ok Christmas. Ok New Years. That's right we do still have New Years.

But New Years didn't even live up to its reputation when I was still in the city and doing all the twenty something things. People were just sort of spent and the bad parties were legendary. But what the heck. We still have a few days to play Xmas tunes and stare at the tree. And you know what. NEXT YEAR we will get it all in.

After all there are only 361 days until next Christmas. Not so many.

Real Santa...how far would you go for your kids?
MOVIE RIGHTS SOLD!      
  Vicki Rocco of Modern Family optioned the movie rights of William Hazelgrove's Real Santa for her production company Small But Mighty Productions with an eye to a feature or a made for television movie. Ms. Rocco has to her credits, Modern Family, Arrested Development, Stand and Deliver, U23D, Empire Dreams, Heather, Britany Spears Live, and sees Real Santa as a classic that will pull in people hungry for a new take on the Christmas movie. "No one has done this. No one has taken on the physics of being Santa Claus. It is funny and heartwarming and has all the things we look for in any great Christmas movie."
                                           
STARRED REVIEW BOOKLIST

"If somebody doesn't make a movie out of this book, there's something wrong with the world.                                                                               
                                                                                                 David Pitts Booklist


"The author marries the everyday dramas found in the novels of Tom Perrotta and Nick Hornby to the high camp of Carl Hiaasen or Dave Barry. Adults looking for a funny holiday-themed tale that doesn't lose its sense of wonder in the face of realism will find a treat here. A lovingly crafted comedy about the madness that fatherhood inspires."
                                                                                              Kirkus Reviews


 

Why Watching the Oscars Is Hard

Watching the Oscars is hard. Take Chris Rock. He had to let everyone know that he got a million bucks for just doing his lines in an animated movie. Must be rough. At a time when most writers are eating beans or not eating at all the Oscars is a night of those at the very tippy top of the very tippy top. They are people who through luck, talent, ingenuity, the fates, have hit the mother lode and we can all watch them accept these awards thanking everyone from God to mom.

And you have to wonder if there is a chance to hit that mountain through hard work. Maybe so. Maybe hard work and talent could put you there. Maybe it is something else, something people don't like to think about and that is the odds. Lets take a hundred thousand writers. Fifty thousand of them are good. Twenty five thousand are very good. Five thousand are extraordinary. One thousand are genius level. One hundred of those one thousand produce screenplays or novels.  Ten of those left over get a movie made. One gets to the Oscars.

Now take that pool and double it. Now you are talking about a group of people who are good  but there are only so many slots. So now you roll the dice. Luck. You need luck. Maybe luck is not yours to be had no matter how many times you try. It is just not your lot. The cards didn't fall your way and that's even worse than not having the talent to be up there.

So you watch the Oscars. You watch the people who have passed. You are on a clock that will only run so long. You watch those people thank everyone they know. Hell yes. Wouldn't you?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Help Needs help

Watched half hour of The Help and turned it off. I committed the cardinal sin of watching a movie that I READ THE BOOK. The movie was just so over the top and so obviously slanted toward women and so Mad Men esq and so Southern The View/Devil Wears Prada/Dont We Look Great in sixties garb that it was nauseating with the overplayed saccharine accents that woman in Jackie Kennedy garb just cant help themselves doing and  beating us over the head with AREN'T WE THE PRETTIEST RACIST WOMEN YOU HAVE EVER SEEN. They needed some homely women at least to balance it out.

But it really was Hollywood. Hollywood ruined their own movie. Mary Steamburgen(sic) was ridiculous in her portrayal of the Jewish Editor sitting on her desk talking to someone who had never published anything like she had all the time in the world for budding writers who want to write radical books about racial relations in Mississippi. Sissy Spacek should have just kept drinking or playing bridge or whatever she was doing. Hattie McDaniels was rolling in her grave at the short distance Hollywood has traveled for black actresses. Mammy was more authentic in every way than the maids.

It turned into a Nora Ephron vehicle about Skeeters empowerment. Skeeter who screeched along under her mothers fierce eye and finally blows the whistle. She was about as believable as my left foot. So wide eyed so surprised, so obtuse at the revelations of racial mores in the society she had grown up in as a privileged white girl provided. The book did not suffer this way because the book could float into the readers mind and we could edit out the fluff and the dribble that did not pertain. Hollywood lives in fluff and drivel.

And it will sweep the Oscars. No doubt about it. I could see that in the twenty minutes I watched. Take women and put them in a racist time and give them kicking dresses and have them pee every five minutes (it seemed everyone was on the toilet) then you have a winner. I dunno. Maybe I'm jaded against Magnolia and lace and urine.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

That Taunting Screenplay

When the novels start to drag and they seem kind of dinasourial I always fall back onto writing a screenplay. Why not? They are shorter and the form seems more up todate for our twittering short attention span getting every shorter society. Why not write a movie and while I'm at it why don't I win an Oscar? Hey I see those authors coming down the aisle to claim their Oscar. I can do that. Just let me get up there and trundle on down and I even have my speech ready.

I would just like to thank everyone who supported me through my years of struggle, my wife, kids, friends, and I would just like to tell whoever out there who is thinking about being a writer...go for it! And then I would leave the stage after walking the wrong way, corrected by the beautiful woman. I mean there is a lot of precedent here. Fitzgerald and Faulkner wrote for the movies. Do I need better company than that? And you know what...they pay!

So...all I have to do is download a template and start rolling. Yeah. That's what I'll do. Write that screenplay and just pitch away to the powers that be. Now. I need a plot. Hmmm. I know I'll just use my own books. Perfect. Now...now....fade in...yeah, fade in to a... man. Maybe a woman. Ha. No problem....just fade in to something and then fade out. Yeah....maybe I'll do that. Yeah...write a screenplay. Cecil B Demills of the literary world. Sure.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...."The funniest serious novel since Richard Russo's Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike." Chicago Sun Times

The Relevancy of It's A Wonderful Life

Watched It's a Wonderful Life in an old theatre in Chicago last night. Do it every year, but this year was different. The audience always participates which is something we digital creatures don't really get. But the participation this year had the resonance of our time. When Potter would appear on the screen everyone would hiss and boo. And when Clarence appeared everyone jingled their bells. But it was the scenes with George Bailey that were different this year. This year, people listened like their houses depended on it.

Take the scene after George's fathers death. George tells the board of the The Building and Loan to do what they want but they should keep it open so people don't have to crawl to Potter. And then Potter insults Georges father and this brings the heart if not the speech of the movie....iis it too much to ask for people to have a few walls and a roof over their head, well my father didn't think so, but to you people are a cattle... The audience was so silent you could hear a pin drop and at the end of his speech people stood up and cheered!

Then there were the scenes during The Great Depression. George struggles to keep The Building and Loan open and uses his own money. An eerie silence came into the theatre, people watching people from sixty years before struggling with the fear they were going to lose everything. When the Building and Loan didn't close and George mades his famous papa dollar and mama dollar proclamation, again, people cheered and clapped.

And then of course at the end when George is going to kill himself and is rescued by his friends. Frank Capras view of life comes through and George is toasted by his friends as the richest man in town, the people in the audience cried and sang along to Auld Lang Syne. And then we filed out and I watched people emerge with smiles on thier faces. Good Cheer and Christmas of course. But maybe hope...that  somewhere there still is  a place where we can be saved by the people who love us.

 http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Why Do We Watch Those Old Christmas Movies?

Bing and Fred dancing around on the screen with beautiful women in long gowns while other people sit around in tuxedos and laugh it up. Could anything be further from our world now? But of course around Christmas those old movies sneak out and suddenly we are watching Holiday Inn, White Christmas, It's A Wonderful Life, The Bishops Wife, Christmas in Connecticut. And those people from the forties come out in their black and white persona's and give us a glimpse of a time gone by. The question is why do we watch these old grainy films from sixty years ago?

Comfort. Continuity. Ritual. A curiosity about what people called happiness over half a century ago. Maybe it is all of these or maybe it is because in our own world we have no sense of time anymore and it seemed those people from the forties and fifties had all the time in the world. No cellphones. No texts. No Internet. They were squarely in the moment and even though they rushed around there seemed to be more symmetry to their lives. Even if it was all a fantasy.

And we cannot discount nostalgia. Very powerful emotion. A yearning for times that were simpler and in many ways better. A lot of these movies took place during World War II. Could the time have been any clearer? We were the good guys and everyone else was the bad guys. American culture was at it's zenith squarely in the American century. True there were no minorities but that is part of the American fantasy also, everyone just looks like us and acts like us.

And then there is the one thing about these movies that is probably the strongest reason we watch these black and white shadow plays. They go back to when we were children. These movies played out when we waited for Santa. They played when our uncles fell asleep in their chairs and snoozed the day away. They played when we came in from a snowball fight and drank hot chocolate. They played when we were young.

And that is what Christmas is all about really. The ghosts of the past come back once a year and dance around before we pack it all back up again. And so Bing and Fred and Cary Grant and Babara Stanwyck all come alive again and they are young again too. Just like we were.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/