The Sunday Memory Drawer - Eight Years Ago...

I have no clue what this movie is, but I want to see it because it was shot in....Sin-ascope.

This is my obtuse way of opening up the ninth year of this blog.   Eight years ago yesterday, I began this virtual journey.  March 15, 2007.   With a rather stupid little piece about...well...starting a daily blog.  I've reposted that piece here on past anniversaries, so I will spare you this year.  It talks about my plans for Len Speaks.   As if I really had any at the time.

Oddly enough, there was a very bizarre literal reason for me to start waxing here on this site every day.  Gee, at the time, I didn't even realize I would be posting something new for eight straight years.   When I started this nonsense,
my goal was to have a place where I could post snarky comments about...wait for it...American Idol.

Wow, remember when that show was relevant?  I think I stopped watching that a year later.

Well, American Idol is still on and so am I.  Frankly, I think this blog is much more entertaining.   Regardless, on this semi-momentous occasion, I always take a little time to look back at what I have done here.  And how the main person to benefit from all this daily caterwauling has been...me.

Other than the American Idol sniping I had planned, there was some more subliminal reasons why I set up this site.   Look at the mere title of it all.  Len Speaks.  I have something to say.

Unfortunately, in the usual public forums, I don't speak up as frequently as I should.  In business, I am fine.   But, with friends, any group over four people is strangely intimidating to me.  Even with less than four, I find myself holding back and letting the others control the conversation.   Why?   I don't know.  I harken back to parental guidance from decades ago.

"Speak when spoken to."

Okay, thanks.

So, in a very indirect way, this blog is my way to get my word out there.   About the movie I just saw.  About the play I just hated.  About some minor triviality I just experienced in my life.

Eight years ago, my writing had gotten stale.   I went through a period where I couldn't put the right words together on paper.  It's sort of like an exercise program.   When you feel like your waistline is expanding, you hit the gym.  When you're a writer and you feel like it's not flowing as freely as usual, you hit the keyboard.  I wanted to make this blog a daily writing exercise for yours truly.   The more you do it, the better you get at.

Of course, in the true essence of a writer, you find ways to trick the system.  For the first two weeks or so back in 2007, I simply wrote and posted when I had something to say.  In short order, I realized that this would work better if people knew there was something new there everyday.   Just like Blondie or Peanuts.  So, I pledged to update daily.  And have not missed a day yet.

Oh, sure, I don't really write every single day.  That's the system tricking.  I devote two days a week to simply posting a video.  Thank you, Tube of You.  On Fridays,  I try to make it visual.  Funny photos.  Except for that one Friday every month when I outline the movies out there for us to see.  

But, despite the cheating of days, I am looking back and realizing the volume of prose that has gone through this sausage maker.  True, I don't really write every day.  Most of the week's blog is written on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.  I got into the habit of writing a review of every movie I go out to see.   Those I try to write as soon as I get home so the pain or exhilaration is still fresh in my mind.

The Wednesday historical comedy piece is written way in advance.   At this writing, I have Wednesdays in the can through the middle of May.  At any given moment, I have an average of about 25 drafts in my blog back room waiting for post.  There is always one piece there that I call "evergreen."  It's there to run on a day when I have nothing to post.  Of course, that doesn't happen a lot so even evergreen isn't really forever.  

I'm not sure why I feel I have to cheat.  I love to write.  A good friend of mine just asked me if I was always that way.  The answer is a resounding yes.

I go back to single digit years when I was the odd duck who actually liked to write a book report.  Plus I was a major by-product of the television generation.  At the age of ten, I actually opened up a composition book and started to write dialogue for a "Mothers-In-Law" spec script.  My mother saw what I was doing.  And didn't understand.

Parents rarely did.

When we were assigned in English class to write an original short story, kids came in with the oddest and frequently darkest slices of their imagination.  One was about a boy being beaten by his dad.  Hello, Social Services.  As for me, my original short story featured secret agents Maxwell Smart and 99.  Complete with "sorry about that" and "would you believe."  The snarly Miss Dennis gave me a C+.  I guess she wasn't a fan of the show.

I was a writer, but I was weird.

In college, I dove into writing in a very large way.  I've written here extensively before about my own situation comedy on Fordham University's WFUV-FM.   Ninety episodes produced over three years.   I wrote 87 of the 90 scripts.   The three I didn't pen were edited by me.  It all ran through my Smith Corona.  Along with going to class once in a while, I had to crank out a half-hour script by Monday every week.  It was my deadline, but one I strove to meet.  Heck, we taped on Tuesdays.   There were some Monday nights where I wrote a 35 page radio script from start to finish.   Sometimes, I even had a good idea.

Also at Fordham, my writing tendencies guided me to a dramatic writing class shepherded by some old gentleman named Philip Freund.  Just typing his name prompted me to do a Google search.  This well-respected professor of the theater actually died in 2007.  Eight years ago.  Hmm.  He had lived to the age of 98.  Here's the New York Times obit that I found on-line.   I had no idea what a big deal he was when I was 19.
 
Philip Freund was a true polymath, but perhaps his greatest interest was the theatre. After the Second World War, given a fellowship by the US Theater Guild to write three plays, he began to travel all over the world in search of new theatrical experience. A Shakespeare performance by Inuits was as worthy of his consideration as Laurence Olivier's Richard III. It was no surprise, therefore, when he informed his friends that he was embarking on a history of the theatre.
 
It took him more than 30 years to produce 9,000 pages of memorable text (reduced after editing to a more accessible 3,000 pages), and the fourth and final volume of his magnum opus Stage by Stage will be published later this year. Its author, who was working right to the end of his long life, passed the proofs only weeks before his death. This monumental work may come to be regarded as among the most important and original studies of theatre history ever published.
 
Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1909, Freund started writing at an early age and was only 16 when he won a story contest in Cornell University's literary magazine. In due course he became the magazine's editor, graduating with an MA from Cornell in 1932.
 
This was the time of the Great Depression, but he and friends managed to start a small company that published four books, including Freund's own collection The Snow and Other Stories (1935). It got such good reviews that he was able to find himself an agent, who sold his next book to a regular publisher. A small financial windfall came his way when he was approached by one of the Starrett brothers who had built the Empire State Building to write the story of how the world's tallest skyscraper was erected in less than a year between 1930 and 1931.
 
Thereafter Freund's literary output was prolific. He published novels, short stories, essays, plays, works of literary criticism and, most remarkably, Myths of Creation (1963), a work of anthropology that ranks alongside the classics in its field. When asked recently why he wrote in so many genres, he replied "I never wanted to repeat myself."
 
He was also a teacher. He lectured at Cornell and taught theatre history at Hunter College in New York and at Fordham University, where he retired as Professor Emeritus ("I had to retire from teaching at 70 – not my choice."). Freund was a shrewd investor and became a wealthy man. He left a substantial sum to Cornell University.

Wow.
 

FREUND--Philip, author and educator, Fordham University Professor Emeritus, died on December 20 at 98, after a short illness. He was born in Vancouver, Canada. He sent prize-winning stories and poems to the Detroit News before he was ten, began college at 16 and almost immediately began to write for the Cornell University literary magazine of which he became editor. While pursuing his long academic career, initially at Cornell, from which he graduated in 1929 and Fordham University where he taught courses in creative writing, film, and entertainment and the arts, he published eight novels, thirteen plays, nine short-story collections, as well as poetry, essays, literary criticism, and other nonfiction. The last thirty years of his long life were devoted to researching and writing a massive history of the theater, "Stage by Stage," published in four volumes the last of which will be available in 2008. The series has been reviewed as one of the most important studies of theater in the 20th century. Amazingly, he was fully productive up to the last few weeks of a life that spanned nearly a century. Philip Freund was a polymath and wide-ranging cosmopolitan but mainly a consummate human being. His many friends will miss his dry wit and his erudite, wise and always gracious counsel. - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=philip-freund&pid=100680812#sthash.xqhHKZ3l.dpuf

FREUND--Philip, author and educator, Fordham University Professor Emeritus, died on December 20 at 98, after a short illness. He was born in Vancouver, Canada. He sent prize-winning stories and poems to the Detroit News before he was ten, began college at 16 and almost immediately began to write for the Cornell University literary magazine of which he became editor. While pursuing his long academic career, initially at Cornell, from which he graduated in 1929 and Fordham University where he taught courses in creative writing, film, and entertainment and the arts, he published eight novels, thirteen plays, nine short-story collections, as well as poetry, essays, literary criticism, and other nonfiction. The last thirty years of his long life were devoted to researching and writing a massive history of the theater, "Stage by Stage," published in four volumes the last of which will be available in 2008. The series has been reviewed as one of the most important studies of theater in the 20th century. Amazingly, he was fully productive up to the last few weeks of a life that spanned nearly a century. Philip Freund was a polymath and wide-ranging cosmopolitan but mainly a consummate human being. His many friends will miss his dry wit and his erudite, wise and always gracious counsel. - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=philip-freund&pid=100680812#sthash.xqhHKZ3l.dpuf

Well, the task in Professor Freund's class was to write a one act play.  What did I do?  I wrote about a TV comedy writer who was having a nervous breakdown.  I didn't think another Get Smart tale was going to fly.  I essentially had gravitated to Rob Petrie going clinically nuts.  Probably not the best idea in my mental woodshed.  But everybody got their slip of paper from Freund with his concise review.  I still have it.

"You do excellent dialogue, Leonard.  You just need to work a bit on your story.  But you will be a very successful writer."

Yes, sir.  And I did.   I think back now to a strange irony when I contemplate this professor.   Much later, I was engaged to be an adjunct professor in just that subject at Fordham University.   I never got to teach a class when I had to move to Los Angeles instead.

Still, there was always a word or sentence forming in my head.  From spec scripts to essays to magazine articles to a pilot for a children's sitcom to more original ideas to screenplay notes for a movie that will be based on these Sunday Memory Drawers.   I have never really stopped.

There was one day last summer where I sat at my computer and finished a blog movie review, the tag for a pilot script, and a treatment for a documentary.  Plus I had to update this blog by telling you what I had for dinner last night.  All this and I still had to do my work as an independent media research consultant.

So, it never really ends.   

In about five weeks or so, the number of blog entries on Len Speaks will hit 3000 and I'll probably celebrate that, too.  Boy, that's a awful lot of writing.  A writer friend told me that's an awful lot of work when you're not always getting paid for it.

I wouldn't have it any other way.  Obviously.

See you here tomorrow.

Dinner last night:  Reuben sandwich at Cafe 50s.