We Are All Writers Now

We recently came upon a provocative piece from a professor at Oberlin that is causing quite a stir in the writing world.  Contrary to popular opinion, Trubek believes -- as her title attests -- that we are all writers now.

While the flurry of content portals may bog us down with unnecessary updates from unenlightened folk, it has also created a pressure to formulate succinct prose out of what would otherwise be unarticulated ideas.  Mindless chatter, sitcom watching, and lingering phone calls are a remnant of times past, as we now duly tap away at our keyboards with status updates, tweets, and emails.  After all, brevity is the soul of wit.

- Blog Runner

Shooting for Playboy, Hanging with Kerouac, Celebrating New York: Ghosting Gotham

By D.Z. Stone

(NOTE: This is the latest in a series of articles and commentaries written by Gotham team members.)

My friend Jerry is a ghost and I am his ghostwriter, pulling together his last novel, Gotham, a saga covering fifty years of the city and people he loved. It was his last request to me.

Jerry died in August of 1999. I feel bad admitting Gotham is still not finished.

I was surprised and honored that Jerry had asked me and looked forward to going through his draft and copious notes. Gotham is pulled from his life and those he knew, and the novelist and photographer Jerry Yulsman had led an exciting life during a glamorous time with some very interesting people.

Born in Philadelphia in 1924 and kicked out of high school at sixteen, Jerry lied about his age so he could join the U.S. Army Air Corps. After the war, the former Master Sergeant settled in Manhattan, where he put his Distinguished Flying Cross in a sock drawer, shared an apartment with Wally Cox and Marlon Brando, frequented jazz joints and Greenwich Village cafes, took an iconic photo of Jack Kerouac after a night of heavy drinking, becoming a successful photographer contributing to Collier's, Look and Playboy magazines.

By the time Jerry lost some vision in an eye and turned to serious novel writing in the 1980s, he'd also taught photography at New York's School of Visual Arts, worked as a photographer for Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, authored several books on photography, did the photographs for two books by the comedian and social commentator Dick Gregory, published a Victorian-themed paperback erotica trilogy under a pseudonym that had been popular in Great Britain, and married his fourth (and best) wife, the Associated Press photo editor Barbara Woike.

In 1998, when Jerry was working on Gotham and diagnosed with lung cancer, he had already published two novels, the award-winning Elleander Morning and Last Liberator, a book about his experiences during WWII.

Not long after Jerry learned that his diagnosis was terminal, he asked if I would edit and complete his final novel.

The request did not come out of nowhere. Yes, Jerry had been a good friend, confidante and general advisor, but we had also been writing partners collaborating on a screenplay and we'd often read and critique each other's work. He'd read a novel I was working on while I'd read excerpts from Gotham. Perhaps most importantly, I knew his three possible endings.

I said yes, and said yes again some months later when Jerry repeated the request from his hospital bed (even though he also added that I had the best legs in New York and I wondered how much he could still see, and he asked me to say hello to Frank Sinatra's ghost standing in the corner of his hospital room).

I knew Jerry was serious about the request when his wife Barbara later told me that my bringing Gotham to a publishing conclusion some day was one of the only things she actually remembered talking about to Jerry as he was being wheeled to the ICU on the day his oxygen level dropped to nothing. He told Barbara that he'd asked me and trusted me to do it, if I were willing.

In the first years after Jerry's death, I was consumed by another project, the life story of two Holocaust survivors. Plus, I knew I didn't have all of Jerry's material on my computer. All I had were the chapters he had emailed me and the chats he had asked me to save when we discussed the book.

Jerry wrote in Wordstar, and neither his wife or I knew how to operate his ancient computer. We couldn't read or print out any of the text. Then in 2003, Barbara met a computer wiz who could untangle Jerry's old hard drive and pull Gotham off of it.

It was almost a thousand pages.

I was excited to get the disc with all the material. Then after I opened it I remember thinking that if Jerry weren't already dead I'd probably want to kill him.

He'd saved every version of every chapter he'd ever written and it became clear that towards the end he was editing and re-editing and messing up more than he was fixing. It was a mishmash. Or was it? Sometimes I wasn't sure which version of a chapter was better.

Then there were Jerry's notes. I'd be reading along a smoothly written section when I'd suddenly come across a note that shook up the entire running narrative, like the one that said that Hypo would be developed and integrated. What? Jerry wants Hypo, a character drawn from the real-life photographer Weegee, threaded throughout the book? Did we really need more Hypo? My first inclination was to ignore notes like these but I knew I couldn't if I were to do Gotham justice. I had to at least think about it.

So I did some reading up on Weegee and gave some serious thought over where I should insert the Hypo material. I haven't decided where and when I'd use more Hypo, but I did enjoy reading and learning about Weegee, a lot.

I also chose not to ignore the emails and many chats Jerry had asked me to save. Here's one from June 2, 1998.

ELEANDER: I have a new character for Gotham
ELEANDER: You wont believe this guy but
ELEANDER: My friend Earl can vouch
DZStone: tell...

He explained that the character was based on a man named Jerry Intrator. Jerry had met Intrator through his friend Earl. Intrator lived on 45th Street just east of Sixth Avenue over a movie art house.

ELEANDER: Intrator was a "hondler"
ELEANDER: Escaped from Germany during WW2
ELEANDER: as a teenager walked to Spain!!
ELEANDER: mother died in Auschwitz
ELEANDER: Father survived
ELEANDER: When I met Intrator--->
ELEANDER: he was exploitation film producer

In those days (50s), Jerry said that foreign films imported to the United States went through two censors, US and NY.

ELEANDER: for instance---
ELEANDER: an "art film" would come in to NY---
ELEANDER: and
ELEANDER: pass US import censorship
ELEANDER: but fail NY censorship

Then the American distributor would contact Intrator. He'd view the film and censored part and then Intrator would reshoot the censored scene.

ELEANDER: example--->
ELEANDER: Bergman's first picture
ELEANDER: had a nude bathing scene
ELEANDER: in a river or lake--- I forget
ELEANDER: Intrator reshot it on Staten Island
ELEANDER: using look alike friends
ELEANDER: (including me LOL)
DZStone: you?
ELEANDER: lots of long shots

Intrator would then match editing and film stock. That meant Customs couldn't censor that part because it was shot in the USA.

ELEANDER: Times review said---
ELEANDER: Only Bergman could shoot a nude bathing scene
ELEANDER: in such good taste
ELEANDER: Intrator did a lot of that
ELEANDER: tired…could u save this chat to a file


I must confess that sifting through Jerry's manuscript draft, notes and chats became a bit overwhelming, so much so that I had to put Gotham down and tend to my own work. Even though Jerry had a good thirty years on me, sometimes I wondered if I would have to find someone to agree to finish Gotham for me after I was dead.

Then Barbara told me she was moving to a new place with her new husband and there were some things of Jerry's she was wondering if I would like, including a paper maché bust he had made of W.C. Fields many years ago when he was sick and stuck inside. I said yes, and took the various photos, manuscripts and W.C. (complete with straw hat) home to haunt me.

I put W.C. on a shelf and every so often I'd look at him and feel guilty that I wasn't so willing to work on Gotham anymore. There were also times I'd look at W.C. and get angry with Jerry for thinking so highly of my own writing, telling myself that I couldn't write at all and Jerry had just been stupid insisting I was brilliant and a much better writer than him. Or I'd get angry with him for asking me to do this—even angrier at myself for thinking I could.

Mr. Fields, it should have been never work with children or animals—or dead authors.

Then a couple of years ago I pulled up some Gotham files and came across this note.

NOTE: Fifth Avenue has grown somehow brighter in the months since the war ended. Pedestrians were more spirited, the women smarter; stylish and crisp in new spring outfits. Skirts were longer, men's trousers were once again pleated and cuffed.

The red, white, blue and olive drab displays in patriotic shop windows had been replaced by colors once prisoners of war: turquoise, tangerine, mauve, periwinkle, blush. Fashions had changed. The understated woman had replaced the fleshy, big breasted kewpie doll. Leggy, apple pie Betty Grable had given way to slender elegance. The high-fashion mystic was no longer the sole property of the rich. Seventh avenue was now mass marketing it to a burgeoning new middle class. To be “new” was to be chic…The New Woman…The New Look…The New Pointed Roundness…The New You. Lord & Taylors' window featured elegant mannequins in ankle length skirts. They perched, incongruously in the orchid bearing trees of a Congo jungle.

I got lost in this note, and for the first time in a long time, envisioned what Jerry was writing about. His note intrigued me so much that I started reading about old New York—and not simply fashion. I read about New York in the late forties and fifties and had a better idea of the BYOB parties in Greenwich Village that Jerry had written about. The jam sessions in Harlem with Dizzy Gillespie. Dolly, the hooker with a heart. The young woman from New Jersey with intellectual pretensions who joined the Communist party and was going to change the world, one dockworker at a time.

Or how Jordan Axelrod, Jerry's thinly veiled alter ego, felt when he first arrived at the old Penn Station after the war.

Jordan Axelrod had expected instant euphoria. The lack of it had left him with little but the misery of a lousy pair of Cordovan wingtips. They were too tight. He trudged up the long iron staircase from Track 29 with a hundred other guys. They carried barracks bags and cheap suitcases. It was a long staircase.

I considered Jordan Axelrod and how much of Jerry's own life is entwined in Gotham. I now have a clearer sense of what the novel not only reveals about him but of his particular time and place, the men and women who flocked to New York after the War to make the City their own.

There's never been a carrot dangling on a stick for me here, say, like an advance or a guaranteed place in posterity for having piggybacked onto a brand name like the woman who finished Jane Austen's novel. What motivates me to finish Gotham is love of the material. Gotham is seeing New York the way Jerry saw it—with his camera eye and storyteller sensibility—a vision well worth sifting through a thousand pages.

Jerry Yulsman hadn't left me with an uncompleted albatross clunker of a legacy, but a gift. I finally realized that my completing Gotham wasn't a matter of my trying to mimic Jerry, but like the best editing and ghostwriting, this was a collaboration. Working on it part-time, Gotham may well take a few years to pull together. That's okay. Yes Jerry, I'm still willing. Say hi to Frank for me.


D.Z. Stone is a freelance writer who specializes in content for major corporations, financial institutions, newspapers, ad agencies, and radio broadcasters.

Global Pop: Finding Michael Jackson in Albania

By RJ Eskow

(NOTE: This is the latest in a series of articles and commentaries written by Gotham team members that we will be featuring here. This article originally ran in Huffington Post on June 26, 2009.)

Here's a small Michael Jackson story to place upon on the pile, one that illustrates the global reach and power of pop music.

Albania existed in totalitarian isolation from the rest of Europe for four decades. It broke with the Soviet Union during Kruschev's de-Stalinization reforms because its dictator, Enver Hoxha, liked Stalinism. Its only ally from that point forward was Maoist China, but even that relationship was severed after the fall of the Gang of Four and the death of Mao. It was illegal to even own a car there.

Like North Korea today, Albania was a closed country that allowed almost no foreigners in and let even fewer citizens out. Even listening to foreign media broadcasts was a crime. I arrived there in 1991 as one of the first wave of outside consultants sent there to help with reforms. People had already made improvised "cars" by welding windows onto the fronts of tractors. Saudi Arabian Wahhabi evangelists had already installed a loudspeaker and a muezzin at the local mosque, which had been unused for forty years. Although the government sent me to help with health care financing, it quickly became clear that they needed food and medical supplies far more urgently than they needed economic restructuring.

My host and translator was a warm and gracious physician who had learned his English by covertly listening to the BBC. He had been turned in once by a neighbor who heard the sound of English-language radio, and had spent a terrified day at secret police headquarters before being set free with a warning. The day I left for home I asked him what I could send him as a gift.

"Connie Francis records," he said. (Connie Francis, for those of you who don't remember, was a star from the pre-Beatles era whose big hits were "Lipstick On Your Collar" and "Where the Boys Are." )

Pop music's traces were faintly discernible elsewhere in the garrison country, too. When we walked into Tirana's only 'restaurant' - a barely-converted garage filled with card tables, folding chairs, and aid workers from everywhere in the world - Garth Brooks' voice was coming out of a boom box. And at a high-level diplomatic meeting some Albanians spoke of their country's best-known folk singer, saying that public use of English was so heavily forbidden that he had been given two years in prison for singing "Let It Be" at a folk festival.

"The last guy I heard singing it back home," I told them, "should have gotten five." They laughed - fortunately.

And when we went to see some remote medical clinics in the Sar Mountains, our car was stopped in remote villages by crowds curious to see a Westerner face-to-face. On one rock-filled road we were waved down by a gang of slightly-scary teenagers with dirty faces and rocks in their hands. When they saw me, the tallest boy -- evidently the leader -- reached into his pocket, pulled out a single glove, and put it on. He tossed back the lock of hair that fell across his forehead, in a gesture common to tough kids everywhere. There was a moment of silence. Then ...

"Michael Jackson!" they screamed. "Michael Jackson!" They kept talking as the doctor translated. "They want to know if you know Michael," he said. I didn't. They let us pass.

I won't claim that Michael Jackson overthrew Albanian Communism. He never met Enver Hoxha in epic battle, although that picture on the cover of the History album made it look as if he had. I was in Prague when Vaclav Havel tried to make Frank Zappa a minister in his government, but I wouldn't say pop music overthrew Communism there, either. I'll say this, though: it didn't hurt.

Was Michael Jackson the first global pop star? Crowds in India mourned the death of country crooner Jim Reeves in 1964. And it took me a while to realize that the singer on an old African record called "Chimiraja," accompanied only by a loosely tuned guitar and someone banging on a Coke bottle, was actually singing about "Jimmie Rodgers," the "Singing Brakeman" of country music.

Jimmie Rodgers died in 1933.

Popular music has always been global. But Michael Jackson became a worldwide star in the first era to have satellite communications. People didn't just hear his music. They saw him. They experienced him - or at least an aspect of him. Michael Jackson broke barriers of race, language, and nationality. His private behavior had a strong impact on some people. But his music reached billions, and it did some good in the world.

In whatever court he may yet face, even if it's only the court of public opinion, surely that counts for something.

RJ Eskow is president of Health Knowledge Systems in Los Angeles, CA.

Gotham Jokewriters in the News

Our recently launched Jokewriters division received a nice plug from our friend Ellis Henican today in his Newsday column. You can check it out here.

Now I'm Up All Night Without Getting Paid for It

By Laurie Kilmartin

This piece is the first in a series of comedic essays we will be posting on a regular basis from members of our Gotham Jokewriters group. Enjoy.


It was 8:45 PM on a Saturday night and the babysitter was not here. I had to be onstage, telling jokes at a New York City comedy club, at 9:15. I'd already left her a voicemail in my high school Spanish.

"Hola, uh, es la mama de William. Donde?"

I would be late for my spot if I didn't leave immediately. I wrapped my one-year-old son in a blanket and ran for the car. The babysitter and I communicated via Babelfish.com. I would write an email in English and convert it to Spanish. She would do the same, in reverse. I thought we were good for sabado. Damn. Merde?

I had four fifteen-minute sets that night, at three different comedy clubs. My final set ended at about one a.m. In theory, William and I could hang out in the car between spots, but while I was onstage, I'd have to hand him to somebody. I pulled up to the club at 9:12. Five or six comedians were standing out front. Some I knew, some I didn't.

My last show as a non-mom was the night before I delivered. "Hey!" I shouted, flipping on the hazard lights. "Can anyone sit with the baby? I'll pay you twenty-five bucks and I'll be back in twenty minutes." A comic named Maggie slid into the back seat.

"Thanks," I said, handing her the diaper bag. "Now, try not to kidnap him."

"You're no fun," she said. Maggie rode with us for the rest of the night, pocketing about a hundred dollars, which was not much less than me.

This wasn't supposed to be my life. I wasn't going to have kids. When I got pregnant by accident, I was forty and single. But also bored. I took a "Hey, why not?" approach to motherhood. My belly became a prop that I took on the road. We had a good time, the fetus and me. Indiana, Texas, Montreal. We flew to Alaska in my fourth month and L.A. in my eighth. My last show as a non-mom was the night before I delivered. When the baby came, I lost fifteen minutes of material.

And my lifestyle.

Comedians have the best lives. I used to stay up until four a.m. and sleep until whenever. Now, most mornings I wake up like the amnesiac from Memento. I have no idea where I am, or whose child is crying. Next to my bed is a helpful Polaroid of my son, captioned with the words: "You are his mother and his diaper needs to be changed."

William's dad is also a comedian. We took the baby on the road when he was six months old. My boyfriend would do his set, then run back to the green room, where I was waiting to pass him the swaddled baton. The emcee would kill a few minutes onstage until I arrived. It worked because there were two of us.

Now the baby is older, and there's often just one of us.

The boyfriend and I usually work alternate road weeks, but recently we each booked separate gigs during the same week. Neither of us could afford to cancel. We figured it would cost less for me to take William to Michigan than for my boyfriend to take him to North Dakota. I found a sitter online. She came to the hotel at seven p.m. I debriefed her on her mission as I saw it, which was to keep my son awake for as long as possible so I could sleep in the next morning.

"He's gonna start yawning in an hour. Don't buy into it." "He's gonna start yawning in an hour. Don't buy into it. If you cave and put him to bed, he's gonna wake up at six a.m. And that can't happen because I will be dead by Sunday. I need you to keep him talking until eleven or so."

"Like, sleep deprivation? For a two-year-old?"

From the tone of her voice, I could tell she was not completely on board.

"Of course not! That's a torture technique. Jeez. All I'm saying is, when his eyes start rolling back into his head, point out the window and yell, 'plane!' That's it. Now, if he happens to spend the next thirty minutes looking for a plane that isn't there, well, that's his choice, isn't it?"

"Uh huh."

"Five or six times over the course of the evening should do the trick. And you don't have to say 'plane' each time. 'Firetruck' works. If you really want to keep him hopping, try 'Daddy.'"

I returned to the hotel at 1 a.m. I'd done two fifty-minute shows. I was tired.

"What time did he go to bed?" I asked.

"A little before eight."

Being home is hard, in a different way. After William was born, I cut back on the road work and took a day job writing for a now-defunct website. We had health insurance and the basic bills were paid. But I was in a frustrating position as a comic.

After William was born, I cut back on the road work and took a day job writing. Sunday-Thursday spots in New York City don't pay much, or at all. But they are the best shows to try out new material. There is no pressure to kill. And new jokes get fine-tuned for the weekend shows, which do pay. That system worked great before I had a kid. Now, I had to hire a sitter for those nights. And all of a sudden I was out $10-$50 dollars every time I did a set. I went from eight to fifteen development sets a week to about two.

My growth slowed, despite the fact that I had so much more to talk about. The problem was solved for me in January, when the day job ended. Now I'm back on the road, doing long sets where I have plenty of opportunity to sneak in new stuff. The corporate benefits are gone, but so is the stagnation.

And the boyfriend and I have settled into a groove. When we're both in NYC, we perform on alternate weeknights, or one of us will do an early set, and race home so the other can make a late set. We spring for a sitter on weekends and the occasional miercoles o domingo. My schedule's not the same as it was during the non-mom days, but is anything?

Laurie Kilmartin performs on top daytime and late-night television shows, and previously served as a staff writer for Comedy Central’s Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn and CBS’s The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. This piece originally ran on Babble.com on June 18, 2009.

Was JFK's Ted Sorensen The Greatest Presidential Ghostwriter?

By Richard Korman

Peggy Noonan scripted Ronald Reagan; Louis Howe fed words to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the annals of presidential ghostwriting, you could make the case that Ted Sorensen is the greatest ever. He penned some of the signature rhetoric of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and served as a key writer and advisor during Kennedy’s senate and presidential terms. Imagine helping Kennedy craft his bestselling Profiles in Courage, drafting JFK’s memorable inaugural speech and writing a critical memo to Krushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The recently released paperback version of Sorensen’s memoir, Counselor: A Life Lived at the Edge of History, has much to admire and amuse, including instances where Sorensen says Kennedy’s speeches bombed and quotes from Jackie Kennedy on the ways she asked Sorensen to revise the draft of his post-assassination biography of JFK.

Partly blind from a stroke suffered several years ago, Sorensen deserves a prize just for getting this final book finished and into print. He is what he always was: a brainy public servant, a complex Midwestern liberal, a loyal member of the Kennedy family court. By his own admission he never tires of talking about JFK. His book contains several chapters on writing, including his suggestion that ghostwriters maintain a “passion for anonymity.” Although much ghostwriting these days takes place under short-term financial arrangements, such transactions never bear as much literary or political fruit as the longer relationships of trust and respect such as Sorensen shared with JFK. As my ghostwriting friend David Kohn has said, “bad chemistry produces bad books.” The opposite is also true.

Sorensen has said that JFK’s assassination cut short his career as a top public servant. Afterwards, Sorensen chose to live the rest of his life in the half-light of JFK’s unfinished term. In doing so, he almost trivializes accomplishments that would spill off the page of anyone else’s resume, such as hundreds of top writing credits, decades as an international attorney and advisor to foreign heads of state. By choosing to see himself always as JFK’s man, Sorensen’s descriptions of his non-Kennedy endeavors take on a kind of poignant irrelevance. No matter. This book’s behind-the-scene accounts will interest anyone in writing or politics.

Richard Korman is the editorial manager for ENR.com.

Introducing Gotham Jokewriters

New York’s premier practitioners of funny business

We at Gotham Ghostwriters are proud today to announce the launch of Gotham’s jokewriting division, New York’s only business-focused comedy writing group. GOTHAM JOKEWRITERS will offer premium, custom-tailored comedic writing and coaching for executives, politicians, and other thought leaders.

We decided to make humor writing our firm’s first dedicated practice area because, well, you asked for it. In fact, ever since Gotham Ghostwriters went into business, one of the first questions we get from the elite clientele we deal with — after we break the news that we don’t draft Batman’s speeches — is whether we know folks who write great jokes.

These business, political, and cultural leaders are out to get more than just a few laughs. They know that in today’s cutthroat competition for mindshare, true wit can be a powerful way to break through — to go beyond merely gaining attention to get traction with discriminating audiences. In particular, our clients know that humor, when done right and used well, can enlighten as well as entertain — crystallizing important issues, exposing common fallacies, and even revealing essential truths.

The problem is, most serious public speakers don’t know where to look for sophisticated comedic writing. Try finding a listing for that on Google or Craigslist. Seriously, even most top PR firms don’t know where to turn. They may know someone who knows someone who writes for a late-night talk show. But do they know how to write for you — or your audience?

GOTHAM JOKEWRITERS was formed to fill the funny gap in the knowledge marketplace. To that end, we have recruited a stable of elite comedic writers who specialize in the high art of funny smart. We have considerable experience working with serious people in serious forums and a deep understanding of how to use humor as a means to a larger end — be it making a point, making a pile of money … or just making your colleagues wet their pants.

Our team has written for just about every big name in American comedy — including Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and Chris Rock. We have also helped a wide range of influential public figures in business, politics, and culture funny up and stand out — such as Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Donald Trump, and Katie Couric.

Beyond writing jokes, our team will focus heavily on helping clients with their delivery. We know better than anyone, after decades of stage experience, that the key to connecting with an audience is confidence. If you trust that you have great stuff, that it’s true to your voice, and that you can deliver it comfortably, you’re 90 percent of the way home. To reach that level of confidence, you can try the traditional approach and stock up on peach schnapps. Or, if you’re smart, you’ll hire us.

We encourage you to learn more about our stable of writers and our services on our new Jokewriters page:
www.GothamJokewriters.com

We’re confident you will see the value of what we do and how we can help companies and organizations like yours stand out, sink in, and enhance your brand. As we like to say, listen to us, and they’ll remember you.