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On Directors.
Funny Thing About Homage.
What’s wrong with this picture? I was an unproduced screenwriter standing at the threshold to my antique, valley domicile. It was my tiny, first-timer bungalow measuring barely eleven hundred square feet. Across from me, standing on my front stoop, was none other than movie director, John Frankenheimer. You don’t know his name? Maybe you’ve heard [...]
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What Goes Around…
Back before The War Department was The War Department, she worked those long tedious hours as a production dog. First as an assistant to the producer, followed by working in commercials as a production assistant and an assistant production coordinator.
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Turning Japanese, Part 5.
Hideo Nakata wasn’t returning my call. This was a first. After more than a year of working together, developing and prepping the filmed version of my novel, True Believers, I’d come to depend on Hideo and he on me. There had to be a reason Hideo didn’t want to speak with me. My instinct was [...]
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Turning Japanese, Part 3.
We’d battled and beat MGM’s lousy, last-minute notes. And after four months in a bunch of unnecessary language lessons at UCLA, Japanese scare-master Hideo Nakata had graduated magna cum laude in Shove-Your-English-Classes-Up-That-Lion’s-Ass. Then we got word that MGM was looking to Lakeshore Entertainment, a mini-studio with hits like Million Dollar Baby under their belt, for [...]
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Turning Japanese, Part 2.
“Just calm the fuck down,” said Arnold Rifkin in his usual, bulldog tone. Rifkin was the producer for the picture we’d planned to make based on my novel, True Believers. To describe Arnold as sometimes abrasive is akin to describing road tar as black and sticky. He did, though, have knack for treating his projects [...]
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Turning Japanese, Part 1
“We’ve been traded,” said David Wally, producer, friend, and at that point in the mess, a co-survivor. “What do you mean “traded?” I asked. “A trade,” said David flatly. “Like in baseball. MGM traded us to Dimension.” Just when I thought I’d seen most of it. Done some of it. But heard all it all. [...]
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The Might to Remain Silent, Part 1.
Picture this. I’m on the fourteenth floor of a Century City high-rise, anxiously rocking in place before a bank of elevators, hoping to hell the lift arrives before I lose my temper. Behind me, I hear two familiar voices. One is a producer I’ll call Big Daddy. The other belongs to a former A-List movie [...]
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Back in Black.
While in the midst of a publicity tour for my second novel, True Believers (available today as an e-book), I was scheduled for a radio interview in New York City. The station was uptown near Columbia University so it was conveniently following a guest lecture I was to give a gaggle of over-educated Ivy League [...]
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A Slow Motion Minute with Sam Peckinpah.
I can recall only three times in my life when I’ve felt weak in the knees. One was on my wedding day. I’d made my walk to the front of the church. Then, as I turned and gazed back across all those over-dressed guests stacked in the pews of Boston’s Old South Church, I saw [...]
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Auteur, Auteur!
I’ve nothing against directors. The men and women who make magic with movie cameras have much to offer the civilized world. Skill, talent, vision. Some have an uncanny knack with those sometimes prickly artists we like to call actors. Others are technical wizards who find their primal purpose standing at the center of production chaos. [...]
Read More »"Doug Richardson never disappoints. BLOOD MONEY is fast and intense and compulsively readable, populated by an unforgettable cast of characters and a plot that twists so many times you'll get dizzy. A great story from a veteran tale teller." J.T. Ellison
"Richardson delivers the goods in BLOOD MONEY with his uncanny ability to glimpse into the brutality and instability not only of the criminal mind, but also a darkness in the heroes." Maya Fleischmann for IndieReader
Doug’s Blog.
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A Bitter Pill, Part 2.
June 17, 2013“Did he offer you the franchise?” asked megabucks writer Charlie A-List. As you read last week in (A Bitter Pill, Part 1) I’d just landed in Charlie’s office after a meeting with a Paramount executive who’d offered me the plum gig of writing the next installment of its blockbuster franchise based on a series of [...]
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A Bitter Pill, Part 1.
June 10, 2013Here we go again. The names have been changed for the most obvious of reasons. I met Charlie A-List just inside the threshold of his Paramount office. He was riding high on his mega-hit, which he’d adapted from one of a series of bestselling books penned by Mr. Superstar Novelist. For that and other work, [...]
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Truth, Terrorists, and Turnaround.
June 04, 2013This isn’t a sequel as much as it is a companion piece to last week’s A Funny Thing About Homage, where I recalled the late great John Frankenheimer’s brief attachment to a screenplay I’d developed with producer, Gary Foster. The script was initially titled Jackals. But maybe I should add a little context first. Gary [...]
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Funny Thing About Homage.
May 27, 2013What’s wrong with this picture? I was an unproduced screenwriter standing at the threshold to my antique, valley domicile. It was my tiny, first-timer bungalow measuring barely eleven hundred square feet. Across from me, standing on my front stoop, was none other than movie director, John Frankenheimer. You don’t know his name? Maybe you’ve heard [...]
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Big Bad Bruce.
May 20, 2013It was our first morning at the location. The set, a neo-modern house the art department had dressed up into looking more like a comfortable fortress, would serve as central focus for the next four weeks, most of which would be long and cold nights. The geography was pretty steep, a hillside high above Malibu, [...]
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