Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Story Merchant E-Book Deal - Sell Your Story to Hollywood $.99
Through the expanding influence of the Internet and the corporatization of both publishing and entertainment, the process of getting your book to the big screen has gotten more complicated, more eccentric, and more exciting.
The Power of How Stories Change The World with Ken Atchity
The Write Mindset | Thomas J. Bellezza
With fifty years’ experience in the publishing world and thirty-five years in entertainment, Dr. Ken Atchity is a self-labeled “Story Merchant” author, professor, producer, career coach, teacher, and literary manager, responsible for launching dozens of books and films.
Performentor Shorts: Dr. Ken Atchity on Rejection as an Illusion
Well-known writers throughout history have shared their perspectives on the inevitable rejection that comes with the profession. Their insights often emphasize the importance of persistence, self-belief, and finding a valuable lesson in every "no."
Listen to Dr. Ken Atchity reframe rejection as an illusion we can see past, instead of an unmovable barrier. It matters. Find out why.
via @peopleenergyprinciples
Most Important Lesson Every Screenwriter Should Learn: Don't Wait
Every project has its own clock!
~ Ken Atchity
How to Design Your Novel For Film Adaptation
Mid-career novelists seeking representation complain that none of their books have been made into films. At any given moment, we in Los Angeles have literally stacks of novels from New York publishers on our desks. Going through them to find the ones that might make motion pictures or television movies, we—and other producers, managers, and agents—are constantly running into the same problems.If you regard your writing career as a business, you should be planning your novel at the drawing board to make it appealing to filmmakers. Here's how.
Common Problems in Novel-To-Film Adaptation
- “There’s no third act…it just trickles out.”
- “There are way too many characters and it’s not clear till page 200 who the protagonist is.”
- “I can’t relate to anyone in the book.”
- “At the end, the antagonist lays out the entire plot to the protagonist.”
- “There’s not enough action.” Not just action but dramatic action.
- “There’s nothing new here. This concept has been used to death.”/“We don’t know who to root for.”
- “The whole thing is overly contrived.”
- “There’s no dialogue, so we don’t know what the character sounds like.”
- “There’s no high concept here or a new way into a familiar concept. How do we pitch this?”
- “There’s no real pacing.”
- “The protagonist is reactive instead of proactive.”
- “At the end of the day, I have no idea what this story is ”
- “The main character is 80, and speaks only Latvian.”
- “There are no set pieces.”
Of course anyone with the mind of a researcher can list a film or two that got made despite one of these objections. But for novelists who are frustrated at not getting their books made into films that should be small consolation and is, practically speaking, a futile observation. Yes, you might get lucky and find a famous Bulgarian director, who’s fascinated with the angst of octogenarians, studied pacing with John Sales or Jim Jarmusch, and loves ambiguous endings.
But if you regard your career as a business instead of a quixotic crusade, you should be planning your novel at the drawing board to make it appealing to filmmakers.
Characters
Characters are the most important element of the story and should generate the action, the setting, and the point of view. Your job as a writer is to give us insight into each and every character in your story, no matter how evil or virtuous his or her actions may be. Characters are the heart of the drama.
- Give us a strong protagonist whose motivation and mission shape the action and who, good or bad, is eminently relatable—and who’s in the “star age range” of 35-50 (where at any given moment twenty male stars reside, and maybe ten female stars; a star being a name that can set up the film by his attachment to it).
- Make sure a dramatist looking at your book will clearly see three well-defined acts: act one (the setup), act two (rhythmic development, rising and falling action), and act three (climax leading to conclusive ending).
- Express your character’s personality in dialogue that distinguishes him, and makes him a role a star would die to play.
- Make sure your story has a clear-cut dramatic premise, e.g., unbridled ambition leads to self-destruction or you can’t go home again.
Have someone in the film industry read your synopsis or treatment before you commit to writing the novel.
Revise accordingly.
Though I’ve observed the phenomena for several decades now, it still surprises me that even bestselling novelists, even the ones who complain that no one has made a film from their books yet, don’t write novels dramatic enough to lend themselves easily to mainstream film. It’s a well-known, but lamentable, phenomenon in publishing that, with very few exceptions, the more books a novelist sells the less critical his publisher’s editors are of his work. So time and again we read novels that start out well, roar along to the halfway point, then peter off into the bogs of continuous character development or action resolution.
A publisher invests between $25,000 and $100,000 or more in publishing your novel. A low-budget feature film from a major Hollywood studio today costs at least $50 million. There is, from a business point of view, no comparison. Risking $50 million means the critical factor is raised as high as can be imagined when your book hits the “story department”—much higher than the critical factor of even the biggest publishers. Hollywood studies what audiences want by keeping track, in box office dollars, cents, and surveys–what they respond best to.
If you want to add film to your profit centers as a novelist, it would behoove you to study what makes films work. Disdaining Hollywood may be a fashionable defense for writers who haven’t gotten either rich or famous from it, but it’s not productive in furthering your cinematic career or building your retirement fund.
via Writer's Digest
Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift bookOh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.
Follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianKlems
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WHAT IS A STORY?
Writing, though driven by intuition and passion, is first and foremost a craft that demands discipline.
Collaborate with Ken Atchity for one-on-one coaching.
Don’t put a deadline on your dreams!
Persistence is showing up for your writing—even when no one’s reading yet.
With one-on-one coaching, you’ll get the support, structure, and belief to keep going until your voice breaks through.
WRITE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE!
What kind of impact do you want to make on an audience with your writing?
Let's go ahead and answer that question.
Let's go ahead and answer that question.
Write with Purpose!
Kenneth Atchity's Writer's Lifeline: Turning Writers into Bestsellers, and Bestsellers into Blockbusters for 25 years!
One-on-one professional assistance and interaction goes a very long way toward making your writing and publishing dreams a reality.
Sometimes writers, when they begin their careers, think that if they write, they can write about anything, but the truth is they need to write from their heart about things that matter to everyone, and if they do that, you can hardly go wrong. Because stories are really not about words or word choice or anything like that. They’re about conveying the power of a character facing a dilemma that you have no idea how he or she will resolve, and when you do that, you’ve got everyone’s attention.
Sometimes writers, when they begin their careers, think that if they write, they can write about anything, but the truth is they need to write from their heart about things that matter to everyone, and if they do that, you can hardly go wrong. Because stories are really not about words or word choice or anything like that. They’re about conveying the power of a character facing a dilemma that you have no idea how he or she will resolve, and when you do that, you’ve got everyone’s attention.
Visit: https://thewriterslifeline.com or
Contact Ken: atchity@storymerchant.com
Why Aren’t You Writing?
Kenneth Atchity's Writer's Lifeline: Turning Writers into Bestsellers, and Bestsellers into Blockbusters for 25 years!
One-on-one professional assistance and interaction goes a very long way toward making your writing and publishing dreams a reality.
FILM COURAGE: Sell Your Story To Hollywood: Writer's Guide To Show Business - Dr. Ken Atchity [FULL INTERVIEW]
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| Available on Amazon |
The #1 Writer's Pocket Guide to the Business of Show Business by Kenneth Atchity.
Through the expanding influence of the Internet and the corporatization of both publishing and entertainment, the process of getting your book to the big screen has gotten more complicated, more eccentric, and more exciting.
This little book aims to help you figure out how to get your story told on big screens or small.
Work 1 on 1 with Story Merchant CEO, Hollywood producer, and author Dr. Ken Atchity.
Sign up Today at Writers Lifeline
Story Merchant E-Book Deal Ken Atchity's Sell Your Story to Hollywood $.99!
|
| Available on Amazon |
Through the expanding influence of the Internet and the corporatization of both publishing and entertainment, the process of getting your book to the big screen has gotten more complicated, more eccentric, and more exciting.
This little book aims to help you figure out how to get your story told on big screens or small.
Maren R, ReviewerFull of information but still easy to read! If you want to start screen writing -even if it snot the rather lofty goal of becoming a Hollywood writer- this book will tell you how you could actually manage it!
Cristie U, Reviewer
This is a helpful and honest guide as to how to get your book made into a movie or tv show. It seems like it would be easier now because of the internet, but the author points out how difficult it still is and how to ensure your book gets into the right hands.
Terri D, Reviewer
Sell Your Story to Hollywood is a quick guide to getting your story into the hands of those who make things happen in Hollywood. The author Kenneth Atchity speaks from experience with decades working in Hollywood to get stories from the page to the screen. Although every guide about breaking into Hollywood should be viewed through the lens of how small the odds really are, this book starts out a bit discouraging for those who are truly interested in learning what they can do to move from a novel to a produced screenplay. The first step in getting this done, according to this book? Have an international bestseller. Okay. Not everyone can do that. Step 2: get reviewed by the NYT or other prestigious publication. Um... if a writer had that, they probably wouldn't need this book. While some of these initial steps are not quite what you would consider actionable advice for getting your screenplay produced, the book does move toward more actionable steps that you can take, though the guide does assume that you have a great story to tell with either an impeccably written novel or screenplay. As a writer with scripts but no connections to the industry, the parts of this book that I found most helpful were actual Appendix B and Appendix C. Writers at any stage can probably find something useful to take away from this guide to use in pursuing their own Hollywood career.
Reviewer 428382
Informative and well written, this is a guide that ever writer should read. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.
pamula f, Reviewer
Hollywood buys stories all of the time. Sometimes they buy a story that started out as a small article in a hometown newspaper. This book will show you how to get your writing out there for the world to see.
Steven M, Reviewer
I’ve recently completed a screen writing course and was delighted to have been approved for this ARC. The author clearly knows his stuff and offers an insight into the world of scriptwriting for movies. A perfect introduction to a world that some of us can only dream of.
Librarian 121315
Have you ever watched a movie and thought to yourself that you can come up with a better story? Or have you ever been inspired by a movie to tell a story of you own? For either of those cases, this is one of the books that you must read. I said one of the books because there are other books that can also stir you in the right direction; nevertheless, this book will certainly give you a good start. I loved that the author offers real life examples of movies that we have heard or watched before making the book’s contents more relatable to the readers. This is a great introduction to the business of movie making and readers should feel more comfortable with this subject after studying this book.
I’ve recently completed a screen writing course and was delighted to have been approved for this ARC. The author clearly knows his stuff and offers an insight into the world of scriptwriting for movies. A perfect introduction to a world that some of us can only dream of.
Librarian 121315
Have you ever watched a movie and thought to yourself that you can come up with a better story? Or have you ever been inspired by a movie to tell a story of you own? For either of those cases, this is one of the books that you must read. I said one of the books because there are other books that can also stir you in the right direction; nevertheless, this book will certainly give you a good start. I loved that the author offers real life examples of movies that we have heard or watched before making the book’s contents more relatable to the readers. This is a great introduction to the business of movie making and readers should feel more comfortable with this subject after studying this book.
ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE Features Dennis Palumbo's Fail Better
“Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.”
-Louise Nevelson
I have always been struck by this line from Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett’s 1983 novella: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
As a therapist and writer, I believe the wording sums up accurately both the clinician’s and the artist’s experience. It captures the struggles, uncertainty, and much-needed indefatigability of both professions.
Perhaps, more prosaically, this same sentiment was expressed by Albert Einstein. Once, when asked how he worked, he replied, “I grope.”
As I acknowledged in my book, Writing From the Inside Out, “Not an attractive word, grope. Sounds too much like lope, or dope, or mope. As an image, groping has associations with unpleasant activities like stumbling around in the dark, feeling blindly with your fingers, or enduring a series of false starts and wrong turns. It sounds unprofessional, almost haphazard, and too susceptible to the whims of luck and circumstance.”
I have taken the liberty of quoting from a book of mine, as well as from Einstein and Beckett, to preface my discussion of an issue that sometimes confronts clinicians treating a creative patient. Ensnared by anxiety while working on a difficult project, the patient often asks their clinician—sometimes only implicitly—for guidelines or a technique for addressing the new work’s problems, and so quelling the doubts and fears it has birthed. In my experience, such patients are not only looking for pragmatic suggestions for alleviating their concerns but need help coping with the shame they associate with having such difficulties.
In other words, and in the minds of many creative patients, real artists do not grope. They plan, reflect, ponder, conceptualize, synthesize, outline, embellish… create. Their work is the result of craft, inspiration, thought, and insight. To be blunt, a real artist knows what the hell they are doing.
This gnawing belief holds true for many creatives, whether writers, painters, musicians, or designers. It also holds true for many clinicians, whether therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, or social workers.
In a previous column, I suggested that 1 of the root causes of procrastination is a fear of shameful self-exposure. In my view, a creative patient’s difficulties with a project, and their belief that there is some technique that offers a solution, evokes a similar shame. There must be a way to solve these problems, they think, and if I were a true artist, a real professional, I would know what that way is.
So much for, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
I recall a session some years back with a writer patient struggling with the plot details of his first novel. He had published a few essays and a number of short stories, but working out the narrative issues of this complicated novel was seemingly beyond him.
“There must be some technique that every novelist knows,” he said plaintively. “Some rule. I guess I just don’t know what it is.”
Based on what we had explored previously about his childhood experience with a demanding and pedantic father, knowing (and the rules, facts, andexperience this knowledge was built on)was acore value in defining one’s worth—and thus one’s worthiness to be loved. (Reminding me of something I had heard during my years as a Hollywood screenwriter, concerning the actor Steve McQueen’s description of the only type of character he would play: “I’m not the guy that learns; I’m the guy that knows.”)
Given the similar ethos fueling my patient’s shame, my mentioning Einstein’s quote about groping did not do much to allay his concerns. So I tried to elaborate.
“I think what the quote suggests is that a professional person’s view of their work include in it the reality that all artistic effort, in a sense, is a groping toward something.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Let me put it this way: A writer like yourself, a real craftsperson, should know that the tools of creative preparation—plot construction, reflection on theme and content, an understanding of how to devise realistic characters—these tools have been developed for one reason only: to enable them to grope.”
I spread my hands, in an attempt to come off as less pedantic myself. “It’s only logical, right? The higher your skill level and experience, the more likely you are to break away from the known way of doing things. That kind of exploration has uncertainty built into it.”
My patient nodded. “That reminds me of something I read. What the cellist Pablo Casals said. ‘Learn the notes and forget about them.’ Are you talking about something like that?”
“Pretty much. It’s only when you reach a high level of competence that you’re finally able to grope. Like where you are with your novel. Given your past experience and talent, a new project like that only gets harder, not easier. You find that you’re demanding even more of yourself.”
“Lucky me.” He gave me a wry grin. “Well, shit, if it was good enough for Einstein…”
Sessions like these reveal how often creative patients fear Beckett’s notion of “failing better,” and yearn for models or guidelines, not merely to quell their anxiety but to counter the shame underlying it. Even veteran artists need the validation that confirms they “know what they are doing,” though the wisest among them know that is not the sole prerequisite for doing good work. That happy outcome requires risk, accident. As an actor patient once explained it to me, “Rehearse like crazy, then wait for the mistakes.”
In my 30+ years of practice, I have come to believe that what is true for my creative patients is true for clinicians. Too often we adhere to conventional dogma when it comes to treating patients, relying too readily on the dictums of diagnostic categories or the claims of personality theory. Knowledge of these things is crucial, of course, but since I feel that therapeutic work is both a science and an art, we have to be careful not to rely so much on the profession’s orthodoxy that we are blinded to the wisdom of our own instincts, the potential for our own unique approach to a patient’s issues. Which inevitably entails risk.
A book that had a profound influence on my thinking in this regard, written many years ago by philosopher William Barrett, was The Illusion of Technique. As the title infers, it is a ringing defense of creativity as a spontaneous reaction against the false sense of security promised by reliance on rigid structures, belief systems, and techniques.
In other words, a closed system of thought is a dead system. Equally true, I believe, for both creative patients and their therapists.
Again, an anecdote from Einstein’s life: when a student complained about his difficulties with math, Einstein replied, “Don’t worry about your troubles with mathematics. I can assure you mine are far worse.”
Another allusion, no doubt, to the reality of struggle, uncertainty—groping, if you will—as the price of any worthy creative endeavor. After all, as my author patient said, if it was good enough for Einstein…
“Art Informs Life and Life Informs Art”: Dennis Palumbo on Art, Life, and Psychotherapy – Part II
SECOND THOUGHTS
By Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, FCAHS, DLFAPA, DFCPA
Dennis Palumbo, MA, MFT
Introducing Dennis Palumbo – Psychotherapist and Writer
It is a pleasure to introduce Dennis Palumbo, MA, MFT, to the readers of Psychiatric Times. Dennis is a licensed psychotherapist in Los Angeles, CA, where he specializes in treating individuals in the creative arts community of Hollywood. He is uniquely well-suited for this specialized work given his double, even triple, skill sets as a former Hollywood scriptwriter and current detective fiction novelist,1 teacher of creative writing,2 and his work with Robert Stolorow, MD, incorporating intersubjectivity theory in his psychotherapeutic work. Dennis will soon be addressing readers of Psychiatric Times in a monthly column of his own, “Creative Minds: Psychotherapeutic Approaches and Insights.” His latest essay is about his role as Consulting Producer on the recent Hulu TV series, “The Patient.”3
We have had an enriching exchange about art, life, and psychotherapy for several years. Dennis was our invited guest for the inaugural meeting of American Psychiatric Association Caucus on Medical Humanities in Psychiatry in New Orleans, LA, in 2022. Dennis’ uniquely diverse and specialized skill sets allow me to explore the question of the relationship between the psy disciplines and detective fiction. More generally, I wanted to explore the roots of creativity and empathy in creative writing and clinical work and connect it to therapy.
Di Nicola: A friend of mine, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, PhD, was asked by Stephen Colbert on his show to describe cognitive neuroscience in 5 words. Without skipping a beat, Steve said, “Brain cells fire in patterns.” That echoed our teacher Don Hebb’s discovery of “cell assemblies” at McGill University. As a social psychiatrist and philosopher, my answer would be that “Meaning emerges in social context.” What would your 5 words be? Either about writing or about therapy?
Palumbo: For writing: “Communicating inner worlds in narrative.”
For therapy: “Therapy explores subjectivity in context.”
Di Nicola: We grew up on opposite sides of the US-Canada border in steel towns with large immigrant working class populations. I am a first-generation Italian immigrant who grew up in Hamilton, ON, while you are a third generation Italian-American from Pittsburgh, PA. What does your Italian heritage mean to you generally and as a writer and therapist?
Palumbo: I take great pride in being an Italian-American. Growing up in Pittsburgh, I learned a lot about the Italian craftsmen, painters, and contractors who built much of the city. I think I have inherited the Italian love of good food, pride in hard work, and talking with your hands! I also value our long legacy as visual artists and performers.
As a therapist, I think my background as a child of Italian-American blue-collar workers informs, consciously or not, my prejudice in favor of hard work, consistency, and passionate emotions. Not that I trumpet these values in session with patients, but I must admit that I am drawn to patients who exhibit them.
I also relate to struggle itself, having grown up hearing of my grandparents’ struggles against ethnic stereotyping and all-out discrimination. So the career struggles of my creative patients, especially in such brutal marketplaces as Hollywood and publishing, affect me deeply, and supporting them comes naturally.
I can only think of 1 or 2 clinical colleagues who share my Italian-American heritage, both of whom take their work seriously and passionately. The rest of my colleagues are primarily Jewish, though one Gentile has snuck in.
In my Hollywood career, most of my fellow writers and producers were Jewish. There are a good number of Italian-American creatives in the entertainment industry, but most felt the need to anglicize their names (best-known example is David Chase—originally DeCesare—creator of “The Sopranos”). This was particularly true for performers, like Tony Bennett (Antonio Dominick Benedetto), Pat Cooper (Pasquale Vito Caputo), and Dean Martin (Dino Paul Crocetti).
As a writer, particularly in my fiction, my Italian-American heritage is front-and-center. The protagonist of my Daniel Rinaldi mystery series is a proud Italian-American, and this aspect of his character, background, and opinions is highlighted throughout the books. (In one of the books, reference is made to a very reticent public figure with a rock-ribbed Republican background. As described to Rinaldi by an acquaintance: “He’s a WASP, Danny. All he cares about is Scotch and quiet.”) Which reveals some prejudice on my part!
Other Italian-American characters show up throughout the series, as well as in some of my short stories. Sometimes, their being Italian-American is an important aspect of their characterization; sometimes it is just incidental.
Di Nicola: Psychiatry and the Cinema explores film from the dual perspectives of the Gabbard brothers: Krin, who teaches comparative literature, and Glenn, who is a well-known psychotherapist.4 What are the implications of transferring insights from the page to the screen for you as an author?
Palumbo: Since the beginning of my writing career, prose and screenwriting have been intertwined. I started writing short stories while still in high school and received some very nice rejection notes from many of our finest magazines. I continued writing stories when I arrived in Los Angeles to try to break into TV and film writing. Interestingly enough, the same week my then-writing partner and I were hired as staff writers on the ABC sitcom, “Welcome Back, Kotter,” I sold my first mystery short story to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. And it was while I worked on that popular sitcom that I sold my first novel, a science fiction thriller called City Wars, to Bantam Books. Throughout my Hollywood career I continued to write Op-Eds, reviews, essays, and short stories.
I would say the biggest takeaway from my scriptwriting experiences, both in TV and film, was a sharpening of my skill at dialogue, which I feel enhances my fiction immensely. Writing for Hollywood also teaches you to “cut to the chase”—as they say in the entertainment business—in that your work in prose becomes more streamlined, less flabby and overwritten. On the other hand, sometimes when adapting a prose work—a novel or short story—for the screen, it is actually better to expand on a scene (or even a sentence) in the work to maximize its dramatic effect. For example, I was once hired to write a screenplay based on a novella by Jim Harrison. At one point in the narrative, the main character goes to a bordello where, as Harrison wrote, “it cost him $300 not to get a hard-on.” A vivid, explanatory sentence, and another rueful reminder of the character’s mid-life crisis. In my script adaptation, that 1 line became the basis for a 3-page scene. It was an event in his life that, while perfectly described as an ironic single sentence in the novella, needed to be dramatized to work onscreen.
In transferring material from the page to the screen, as in much in life, there is no “one-size-fits-all” model. Which, by the way, is exactly how I feel about psychotherapeutic treatment.
Di Nicola: David Gilmour was a delightful film critic for CBC television. When his 16-year-old son Jesse dropped out of school for a year, his father made a deal with him: he had to watch 3 films a week of his father’s choosing. His charming memoir, The Film Club,5 tells the story of that year and what happened to their father-son relationship. What are the implications of transferring insights from the arts (novels, screen) to “real life” and to therapy?
Palumbo: When it comes to this question, the usual answer is that art informs life and life informs art. The latter position is much more easily grasped: things happen to people in life (marriage, divorce, childbirth, job loss, chronic illness, etc) and artists transform these experiences into either a narrative, musical, plastic or visual form. Books, plays, films, TV series, poems, musicals, etc, derive their expressive power by reflecting or transforming or questioning or validating the assumptions associated with the whole range of the human experience. So that part is easy to understand; ie, the phrase “art imitates life.”
Where it gets interesting is when we consider how readily and powerfully the arts inform life. To take a cliched example, after the hundreds of romantic stories produced by Hollywood over the past 100 years, couples have some particular ideas of what their relationship “should” be like. Certainly they are aware that whatever is going on their relationship, it surely does not seem or feel like what has been seen by them onscreen. Case in point: years ago, there was a popular TV series called “Hart to Hart,” in which Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers played a rich, beautiful, breezily-romantic couple who solved crimes (of course they did). While the series was on the air, the wife in a couple I was seeing explained that her goal for therapy was: “To be like the couple on ‘Hart to Hart’.” Of course, a nearly impossible model to emulate.
None of us are immune. When I was a kid, reading about the witty writers dining regularly at the Algonquin table, I just assumed that when I grew up and became a famous writer, that was how I would spend my evenings: breaking bread and drinking cocktails with smart, sardonic, and well-dressed fellow celebrities. Despite my screenwriting success, the sobering fact that working in Hollywood was not actually like that was pretty dispiriting.
Di Nicola: No, we are not immune, Dennis. The Italian film, Cinema Paradiso by Giuseppe Tornatore, tells the poignant story of Totò, a boy without a father, and Alfredo, a gruff childless film projector who befriends him in their Sicilian town. There are hilarious scenes where the young boy sneaks a peak at the town priest censoring the love scenes from the movies that Alfredo cuts out. Years later, when Totò has become a filmmaker in Rome, he finally returns home for Alfredo’s funeral who has left him a special legacy: a reel of all the “outtakes” from the films of his childhood and youth, representing the love that is absent from his life. When I met my father for the first time in Brazil as an adult, many images and metaphors flooded my imagination but none captured my experience better than those “outtakes” as a concrete metaphor for the missing pieces of my life.6,7
Palumbo: Our models for sexual attraction, courage, success, popularity, and even parenting are being portrayed constantly now online, as well as on film and television, plays and musicals, books and graphic novels. And often these artistic representations of “real life” are so impactful that some people are stirred emotionally more by portrayals they see than by events in their own lives.I had a patient recently who detailed all the effort he was putting into a Valentine’s Day dinner with his girlfriend. “Nowadays,” he told me, “it’s all about the optics.”
Isn’t everything nowadays? Even politics is frequently described as “show business for ugly people.” The implication being that it is all show business.
So what does that mean for therapy? Not only does the clinician have to explore and untangle a patient’s early childhood, the familial dynamics and patterns, but to see this in the context of a media/image-drenched culture in which the patient is embedded. A culture that gives birth to assumptions, prejudices, prescribed desires, and shifting personality models. This means the clinician has to have a significant familiarity with these cultural touchstones and explore their meanings—for him- or herself as well as with the patient.
Just as the arts can provide us with insights into our own issues and concerns, and why certain films or books or poems can “change one’s life,” good therapeutic treatment enjoins with the patient to see what patterns (or narrative, if you like) underlie his or her particular engagement with life. Which means drawing as much from everything the patient has seen, read and listened to as from the real-life events in his or her experience.
Di Nicola: How do you think philosophy informs your work and how does your work reciprocally affect your philosophy?
Palumbo: Good question. I will try to keep my answers short, though it deserves a longer one.
There are certain philosophical books (for example, William Barrett’s The Illusion of Technique and Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus) that have had a profound impact on my theoretical thinking in terms of my work with patients. Though I have a pretty good grounding in both Gestalt and intersubjectivity theory as guidelines in my work, I have moved away from adherence to any concrete orthodoxy. As a therapist, I do not subscribe to the “one-size-fits-all” model of clinical treatment, and this allows me a certain freedom of approach in my work with patients.
At the same time, my clinical work over these 30 years has informed and given perspective to any philosophical ideas that I too easily embraced. Simply put, my patients and their issues, beliefs, and unique histories are a continual source of surprise and wonder to me. As St. John of the Cross put it (though in a markedly different context), “I came into the Unknown, beyond all science.”
I must admit, I respond more favorably to philosophical writers whose literary skill predominates (Camus, Schopenhauer, de Beauvoir, some Nietzsche) or else whose intellectual reach excites me (Kant, Wittgenstein, Spinoza), whether I agree with them or not. But I do find that these categories of thought provide an intellectual base for my clinical thinking, whereas most conventional “personality theories” tend to restrict it.
Di Nicola: In the middle of the 20th century, Hollywood experienced an entertainment industry blacklist as part of a moral panic called the “Red Scare.”8 Does the Hollywood blacklist have any relevance today?
Palumbo: It has no relevance as such today, though its spirit lives on in “cancel culture.” Both are examples of Hollywood’s timidity and unwillingness to buck social/authoritative forces in fear of diminished profits. I feel similarly about the old Hays office and its code for movies.
These kinds of investigations or codes, whether originating in Congress or self-generated by the industries involved, speak to the single goal of profits, which in turn is based on getting the greatest number of viewers, which really means offending the least number of viewers. To do that, content providers (today’s term, which I loathe) need to conform to and in fact reinforce the conventional beliefs of the audience. Which was the genesis of the Hays Office and its crusade against overt sexuality (straight or gay), substance use (except alcohol, which was permitted as comedy), satiric views of religion, or any plot that hinted at a crime going unpunished. The blacklist occurred as a result of an anti-Communist paranoia, famously spearheaded by Joseph McCarthy. Today’s cancel culture, derived initially from the (long overdue!) #MeToo Movement, has now become merely another way for commercial content providers to insulate themselves from criticism (much of it warranted) that they are insensitive to the experiences of non-white, non-male, and non-straight individuals.
As the culture changes and the pendulum of what is acceptable swings back and forth, it is important for the artist to stay true to his/her creative vision. Certainly, no easy task in a brutal, demanding, and still quite conventional marketplace. For the therapist, often justly accused of being an agent of the dominant culture, it is important to stay attuned to the subjective experience of the patient, in the lived context of the patient’s world.
Di Nicola: How do you feel as a psychotherapist about the level of violence in the culture generally and more specifically in the portrayals of the entertainment industry in which you have been intimately involved in various roles?
Palumbo: That is a complicated question, as most of yours are! It deserves more space than an interview allows. Caveat aside, I have strong feelings about gun violence in the US and think our inadequate gun laws lead to more domestic shootings, road rage events, and gunfire outbreaks in public places like bars or parties. As a psychotherapist, I have seen how the level of violence has increased an overall unease in some patients. In addition, the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim violence has been particularly disturbing, both to me and to my patients.
Yet, while the level of violence is unacceptable, its depiction on the news and social media has an effect on consumers that is somewhat unwarranted. History shows us that violence has been an aspect of our lives as a species and as nations since time began, so it is probably untrue that the level it is at now is somehow unique. As Neil Postman pointed out, in the past, before world-wide communication, “bad news” was learning that your neighbor’s farm had burned down, and so you and everybody else in town could go help rebuild it. Nowadays, with global communication’s unprecedented reach, we learn of wars, famines, and violent revolutions occurring all over the world, about which we can do very little. This adds to our feeling that “things are getting worse,” and yet this may or may not be empirically true. So addressing my patients’ concerns about how dangerous and violent the world seems has become more and more front-and-center in our clinical work. Especially when it affirms old childhood messages about the patient's vulnerability about external events, how treacherous and dangerous others can be, how incompatible ethnic and religious differences are.
The second part of your question is more problematic. For one thing, I am the author of a series of psychological thrillers which often depict implied or even graphic violence in some scenes. My defense of this aspect of my novels is that these scenes lend authenticity and suspense to the narrative, and are to be expected in the genre. I must admit, too, that I derive a reasonable catharsis from writing these types of stories. My joke is that it is better for my violent urges to be on the page than out in the real world! Parenthetically, most research on the effect of violence in entertainment (primarily visual representations on film and television) is contradictory. There are certainly isolated incidents of a particular violent act depicted in a film replicated in real life by someone who claims to have been inspired by what they saw onscreen, but these are outlier events. Violence in drama has been a staple of narrative since the Greeks, if not before. From Oedipus and Medea to Punch and Judy, from Shakespeare to pulp magazines, violence and popular narrative have been hand-in-hand.
Moreover, in my practice, I treat writers, directors and actors who routinely work in genres whose narratives are often quite violent. My sense is that, since most artists understand that drama demands conflict, and that violence in some cases is both appropriate and expected (based on the genre), the use of it is merely grist for the mill. Though in my own case, I will never forget being a guest on a PBS interview show after the release of my fifth Daniel Rinaldi novel, Head Wounds, which featured several pretty harrowing scenes. The first question the host asked was, “Dennis, are you all right?”
Stillness, Quietude, Equanimity
One of the chapters of Dennis’ book on writing quotes Saul Bellow, a Nobel prize-winning writer born here in Montreal, who said that writing possesses a “stillness that characterizes prayer.”2 In that chapter, Dennis recommends quietude: “A hushed, private space, to which a writer is granted access by the act of writing itself.” It brings to mind a quality that another Canadian, the great physician William Osler, MD called aequanimitas—equanimity. Stillness, quietude, equanimity.
And let me add one last word. I have always been inspired by the first word I learned in ancient Greek, σωφροσύνη, sophrosyne—“soundness of mind,” which I interpret as a judicious balance. Dennis Palumbo has that, in spades.
Resources
- For a superb, reassuring and therapeutic guide to writing, consult Dennis Palumbo’s Writing from the Inside Out. John Wiley & Sons; 2000.
- For his latest Daniel Rinaldi thriller, read Deniss Palumbo’s Panic Attack. Poisoned Pen Press; 2021.
Dr Di Nicola is a child psychiatrist, family psychotherapist, and philosopher in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he is professor of psychiatry & addiction medicine at the University of Montreal and President of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP). He has been recognized with numerous national and international awards, honorary professorships, and fellowships, and was recently elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and given the Distinguished Service Award of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr Di Nicola’s work straddles psychiatry and psychotherapy on one side and philosophy and poetry on the other. Dr Di Nicola’s writing includes: A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families and Therapy (WW Norton, 1997), Letters to a Young Therapist (Atropos Press, 2011, winner of a prize from the Quebec Psychiatric Association), and Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience (with D. Stoyanov; Springer Nature, 2021); and, in the arts, his “Slow Thought Manifesto” (Aeon Magazine, 2018) and Two Kinds of People: Poems from Mile End (Delere Press, 2023, nominated for The Pushcart Prize).
Dennis Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in working with creative patients. His award-winning series of mystery thrillers—the latest is Panic Attack—feature psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi. He is also the author of Writing From the Inside Out, as well as a collection of mystery short stories, From Crime to Crime. Recently, he served as Consulting Producer on the Hulu limited series “The Patient.” Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter, Palumbo’s credits include the feature film “My Favorite Year,” for which he was nominated for a Writers Guild Award for Best Screenplay. He was also a writer for the ABC-TV series “Welcome Back, Kotter,” among numerous other series. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Strand, Mystery Weekly, and elsewhere. His work helping writers has been profiled in The New York Times, Premiere Magazine, GQ, The Los Angeles Times and other publications, as well as on NPR and CNN.
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