I haven’t been a fan of the Bond franchise since… well, I remember hating “Moonraker.” That was in 1979.

“Moonraker” typifies what disinterested me in Bond: the detached gimmickry of an outerspace conflict. It was an extraterrestrial epic in which nothing was grounded.

Much has happened in the series since then, not much of it good. Until now.

It is not just that the new Bond himself is a rehumanized model, although that goes a long way. The gadgets are gone. (This Bond’s most essential spyware? A defibrilator.) Minus the fantastic, something closer to reality reappears. That’s a good thing. While I don’t want my secret agents settling down in the suburbs, I do like to know that they can get cut and bleed and feel betrayed and heartbroken and be driven by ego and rage.
Best Bond yet? It sure felt that way today.

This is not as bad as some stage directions I’ve seen.

Thanks to Mark Chaet for sending this.

At this point, having seen probably 10 productions of “Waiting for Godot,” having read the play several times, thought about it, weighed the various merits of differing performances, and having gone so far as to give my son the middle name Beckett, I think I’m qualified to discourse on the play.

The acclaimed Gate Theatre production currently at UCLA Live! is no good.

I say this with no glee, mirrored only by my absence in glee seeing it.

Although the play is many things, one thing it is not or should not be is ponderous. But that’s what we have here. In fact, here’s how ponderous: It started around 8:10, and wrapped up just shy of 11 p.m., with a 20-minute intermission. Given that Act Two was 55 minutes (I clocked it), that puts Act One at about an hour and a half. Tooooo… slowwww….

My companion, the fiercely smart playwright and performer Trey Nichols, said that it was lacking in existential dread. Absolutely true. It was also lacking in comic rhythm. Beckett modeled the characters of Gogo and Didi after Laurel and Hardy; while I don’t expect Laurel and Hardy, I expect the comic spirit necessary to the parts. I also expect something to be at stake. Several years ago at The Matrix theatre in Hollywood, the late David Dukes, in addition to being a wonderful clown alongside co-star Robin Gammell, closed Act Two with a wrenching depiction of a man desperate to understand his place in the universe. The current Didi, played by Barry McGovern, seemed more like a man learning he might have to wait for the next bus.

Whom do I fault? Oddly enough, the memory of Samuel Beckett. Evidently his determination of how this play must be performed has been cast in stone at the Gate Theatre and with this director and at least two of the actors, all of whom he had personally worked with. This situation sounded hauntingly familiar, so when I got home I dug out my edition of Kenneth Tynan’s Letters , and there it was. (At the time, Tynan was the literary manager of the National Theatre.)

31 March 1964

To George Devine, copies to Laurence Olivier and William Gaskill, The Naitonal Theatre

Dear George:

Forgive me for writing, but I feel I must try to explain more clearly to you and Larry what is worrying me about “Play.” I wouldn’t do so if I didn’t feel that many of my qualms were shared by others.

To recap: before Sam B[eckett] arrived at rehearsals, “Play” was recognizably the work we all liked and were eager to do. The delivery of the lines was (rightly) puppet-like and mechanical, but not wholly dehumanized and stripped of all emphasis and inflections. On the strength of last weekend, it seems that Beckett’s advice on the production has changed all that — the lines are chanted in a breakneck monotone with no inflections, and I’m not alone in fearing that many of them will be simply inaudible. I suspect that Beckett is trying to treat English as if it were French — where that kind of rapid-fire monotony is customary.

The point is that we are not putting on “Play” to satisfy Beckett alone. It may not matter to him that lines are lost in laughs; or that essential bits of exposition are blurred; but it surely matters to us. As we know, Beckett has never sat through any of his plays in the presence of an audience: but we have to live with that audience night after night!”

Please understand me: I trust the play completely, and I trust your production of it, — up to the advent of the author. What I don’t especially trust is Beckett as co-director. If you could see your way to re-humanizing the text a little, I’ll bet that the actors and the audience will thank you — even if Beckett doesn’t!

Why have I seen “Godot” so many times? Because done well, it is an astonishing experience. The first time I saw it was as an undergrad, in a college production featuring my friend Joe Stafford as an imperious Pozzo. That was 20 years ago, but the performance has stuck with me — Joe embodied the comic boorishness of the role. And at the end, when the moon has risen and Godot has yet again not come, the lights drew down and pinlights of white emerged in the flies, signifying stars, and for a moment I lost my place in the universe. That’s an effect I’ve been swiping ever since, as with “Two Men Losing Their Minds” at Moving Arts in 2000.

Done right, with verve and with stakes, featuring characters who yearn for answers, “Waiting for Godot” is a transformational experience. Performed as a museum piece pregnant with significance, it’s a crashing bore.

…Or the most aggravating chick on the internet? You decide.

Just because playwrights are sometimes asked to participate in “talkback” sessions after a developmental reading doesn’t mean they should heed any of the suggestions.

The other night I went to the staged reading of a friend’s play. Good play, good reading. It’s amazing what you can learn about a play when you see it on its feet, performed in its entirety, and by good actors under the capable guidance of a good director.

In this case, all of the strengths of the play became clear: an arresting subject matter, strong characters, deft transitions, sparkling dialogue. It also became clear to me (as well as to the audience, it later turned out) that we need a little more insight into why one character committed the heinous act that catalyzes the play. I’m confident that that additional bit of clarity will complete the play.

I was impressed by the feedback from this audience; this is a developmental theatre, and most of the people speaking are playwrights with productions under their belt and actors used to working on new plays. By and large, when it comes to what makes a play work or not, they seemed to know what they’re talking about.

This hasn’t always been my experience, either as the playwright or as a member of the audience. I go into these things figuring that if they could have written the play better, they already would have done so. More than 10 years ago I decided that my personal mission in these instances was to be funny and entertaining, so that the theatre was glad it had invited me and so that no matter what anyone thought of the play they would at least see that I could be fun to work with. (Because, by and large, who comes to such readings? Actors, directors, producers, writers — people somehow or other connected with producing plays.)

This particular play deals with a court case — although, as one astute attendant noted, refreshingly, it does not take place in a courtroom and thereby avoids the procedural scenes we’ve seen cooked up on television six nights a week. My least favorite idea from the house the other night was this one: to remove all question of guilt or innocence, begin the play with a declamation of guilt, and work backward to investigate motive, a la “Equus.” An intriguing idea — but not for this play, not at this stage. This play is finished (almost).

When I was a teenager I remember reading a thick collection of Isaac Asimov’s stories, each with an introduction by Asimov (modeled perhaps after the Dangerous Visions series edited and interminably introduced by Harlan Ellison). Asimov said that after he had written a story, while he might do light revisions, that story was done — and to rework it and rework it would be like chewing second-day gum. It was an image that stuck with me.

Rewrites are necessary. Almost always. In every first production I’ve had, I’ve wound up doing at least minor rewrites because in working with good actors and a good director I’ve found new things — things that work, things that don’t, and sometimes opportunities that were missed. Twice, I’ve found new and better endings, but I went into each of those productions knowing that each play needed a new grace note to truly finish it.

To rewrite is good. To get stuck in rewrite and restructuring would mean not only not completing your present project — it also means not working on your next one.

Restructuring an entire play, one that already works? That sounds like chewing second-day gum.

For me the most thrilling part of Prime Suspect 7 last night was not Helen Mirren, although for quite some time she has figured mightily in various fantasties of mine. No, it was the reappearance of the actor Tom Bell as Detective Sgt. Bill Otley.

In the series’ launch back in 1991, Otley was the sort who blocks the way of anyone trying to get something done, in this case Jane Tennison (Mirren), newly promoted to being his boss. Otley undermined her at every turn until two things happened: Tennison confronted him (which I recall as “Well, I’m not going to have it,” or something like that), and Tennison began to get results. Both the threat and the effectiveness gained his respect, and the character began to change.

In last night’s episode the character returned after a 10-year absence, far worse for wear. Jane Tennison may be a drunk, but she looks relatively well-tended; Bill Otley looks like he was set afire with lighter fluid and a blowtorch. His hair is badly dyed and plastered to one side, his face mottled, his appearance skeletal, his voice a light wind from the grave. (The photo at top is not recent.) It appears that Bell was ill at the time of filming — he died shortly thereafter — so were it not for the impression his earlier performances made on me, my first assumption would be that it’s easy to be a sick and dying man playing sick and dying. Every indication is that in this case life informed art and vice versa.

In the show, Otley makes a point of breaking through the crowd at an AA meeting to grab Tennison and buy her a coffee. He apologizes for his earlier actions. He hadn’t forgotten them and had wanted for a long time to own up and apologize. Tennison is quite moved by his confession and later calls on him when she finds herself in need and with no one else to turn to. It’s a remarkable and heartfelt journey for both characters. And it reminded me of the determined efforts of a former friend years ago to make her way through the amends demanded of her by AA.

Like Mirren, Bell is utterly watchable. Charisma isn’t for sale at any shops I know of; one has it or one doesn’t. Bell had said, “If you act you need to have threat. Without threat, nobody notices you.” Mirren certainly has that quality. I don’t think that is the quality Steven Rea or Reg E. Cathey bring to their roles, but there’s something — something — that they do that makes them stand out as well. Cathey made an enormous impression on me in his initial run on “Oz,” so much so that I never forgot him. The same with Bell in the first “Prime Suspect.”

Who are the other actors playing characters in the police station? I have no idea. Is it because they’ve been given little to do, or is it because they’ve done little with it?

When the movie “Howards End” came out, my response to the question “How’s ‘Howards End?'” was this:

“Howards End is fine. It’s Howards beginning and middle I didn’t like.”

That may have been clever for the time (you be the judge). But having just seen it again on DVD, I now find that I don’t like the end, either.

Not having read it, I have no idea of the quality of the novel. I will say that if the film intends to deal with the irreconcilability of class differences, it doesn’t do a very good job of it.

The beginning: Vanessa Redgrave dragging the train of her dress through the wet grasses surrounding Howards End. I kept wondering, “What is she dragging along with her into the house, and who will clean it up?” Although I could guess. To the untrained eye, it may have looked romantic. As someone who when growing up had to mow acres of that dewy lawnage, I know it’s filled with bugs and chaff. Oh, those uppercrust people!

The middle: Much comings and goings, not all of it clear. Anthony Hopkins starring in one of his two overall Anthony Hopkins roles, this time remounting his diffident English gentleman in the form of Mr. Wilcox. I suppose we’re supposed to think he’s hiding his feelings; I just think he hasn’t any. Helena Bonham Carter playing someone who is or isn’t irresponsible or daft: She swipes umbrellas and she frets about the lower class, but I simply have no idea what she does the rest of the time, except, it turns out, get knocked up during a fateful rowboat voyage. Nor do I know what her sister, played by Emma Thompson, does before she lands upon the emotionally stranded Mr. Wilcox. There is a lot of tea drinking.

The end: A bookcase falls upon the lower class in an accident that to me looks eminently survivable, but which in this case is deadly. It misses Mr. Bast’s head — in fact, said head is strategically safely to the side — and yet he perishes. We see the perpetrator, who had the temerity to chase Mr. Bast into said bookcase, being led into a carriage in a gauzy slow-motion, which I believe signifies a long prison term. No more is spoken of it. Given the bookcase incident, the prison term, and such forth, Ms. Thompson will now have nothing to do with Mr. Hopkins, although once he agrees to deed over Howards End to her, she kisses him twice, so I’m not altogether sure where the film leaves them. And Ms. Carter’s character has now had an illegitimate son by the unfortunate bookcase victim.

So… what is one to make of this? Class differences, or just plain bad luck? Is it clever plotting, as when Mr. Wilcox discovers that the drunken low-class woman at his son’s wedding is not only Mr. Bast’s wife but also his own former mistress — or is it ridiculous coincidence that doesn’t survive the light of reason? I think in each case the filmmakers intend it to be the former; to me, it’s clearly the latter.

Two things I did enjoy:

1. The radiant Emma Thompson, who goes from light and gabby to crestfallen and dreary while remaining completely enchanting

2. Her hat, which Napoleon would only wish he had found first.

Let’s never forget: Just because it looks like quality, doesn’t mean it is. Just because it says, for example, “Merchant/Ivory,” doesn’t mean it’s any good.

Re the Paul McCartney divorce saga:

If you had assets worth $1.5 billion and you wanted to marry a model, couldn’t you find one with two legs? And couldn’t you get her to sign a prenup limiting her to, say, $50 million in benefits for her three years of hard work?

I guess John was “the smart Beatle.”

See? This is what I’m talking about!

The other night my son Lex and I went to see “The Prestige,” which we enjoyed greatly. On the way to the movie, I said to him, “It was written by Christopher Priest, a comic-book writer.” I recounted for him some of Priest’s comic books, most notably Black Panther.

When the credits rolled on the movie, I was surprised to see that Priest had not in fact written the script; rather, the film is based on the novel by Christopher Priest. Hm. I didn’t know that he was a novelist, but he most certainly was a scriptwriter, so why hadn’t he scripted it? And when had he become a novelist?

At home, still puzzling this over, I jumped on the internet and found Priest’s website. The site seems equally devoted to three areas: comic books, beautiful nude black women, and a religion he has joined. I share his interest in two of these things and, because my tastes are catholic I am completely nondenominational. It doesn’t matter if you’re focusing on Marvel or DC, or Asian or caucasian or Latino, etc. They all have their place.

(And I’m sure that right now every friend I have is clicking through to that website.)

In reading Priest’s lengthy bio, which stretches back into the 1970’s at Marvel, I started to feel that something was odd. After all, who was Christopher Priest? In my mind he was a guy who had started writing comics just over 10 years ago — that’s when I first noticed him anyway, and I’ve been reading Marvel comics since Stan Lee was personally writing them. How could he have been writing all these Marvel comics without my having noticed?

Then I come to this paragraph: “It was about this time Jim Owsley became Christopher Priest. He never discusses the true reasons behind his name change, but insists every story you may have heard about it is absolutely true.”

Then, after Googling “Owsley changes name to Priest,” I discovered that there was another Christopher Priest, also a writer, and also a writer in genre (science fiction). I read a bit about the controversy, then found this, from a guest-of-honor speech to WorldCon in August, 2005, written by the “original” Christopher Priest:

A few years ago I discovered that a young comics writer called James Owsley had changed his name to mine. It was a deliberate act, and he knew of my existence. The only reason he’s ever given in public for this irrational act is his belief that the name “Christopher Priest” is cool. In fact, he said “co-o-ol.” At first I thought it was a joke, then I thought it must be an error, and then at last I thought it was time for me to do something. When I contacted his publisher, an Owsley enthusiast called Brian Augustyn, I was told that the decision was made. It wouldn’t now be reversed, and it was “Chris”‘s inalienable right to call himself anything he liked. I should, in fact, praise the Lord for the good fortune of being born with such a co-o-ol name. When I pointed out, with good reason, that the worlds of science fiction and comics are perilously close to each other, and often confused with each other in the minds of certain people, I was told that the sheer excellence of Chris’s writing would permanently set him apart from everyone else. Including, presumably, me.

Since then, “Chris” and I have been regularly and routinely muddled up with each other. Enter my name in Amazon.com and you’ll see what I mean. A search in Google, or any other search engine, produces the same result. I often receive e-mails intended for him — I assume he often receives mine.

So without much effort this impostor has been not only irritating but seriously annoying. For several years I tried to take a tolerant, amused line on the problem, thinking that he’d get tired of the gag after a bit, but he shows no sign of it. Now, twice in the last twelve months, I have heard comments that publishers have had unpleasant experiences working with “Christopher Priest” and don’t want to work with “me” again. So as well as him being irritating and annoying, his professional incompetence is damaging me.

I’m not amused any more. My message is this. If you hear my name mentioned in any context, please remember what I’ve said and ask yourself if you’re sure which one of us it is. Beyond that, if anyone here has the least influence on him, please use it.

I don’t bear him any ill-will. All I want him to do is change his name back. He’s done it once, so there’s no great difficulty in doing it again. In fact, I suggested this during my conversation with his publisher. I even proposed a new by-line for him. I said, “Why doesn’t he call himself … ‘Harlan Ellison’?”

Mr Augustyn said, “That’s not a co-o-ol name.”

Then I went to bed.

In the morning, wanting to learn a bit more about “The Prestige,” I dropped “Christopher Priest” into Google again and found this site. And as soon as the photo of a blue-eyed white man came up, I finally discovered that “The Prestige” was written not by the comic-book writer but was based upon a novel by the British author — and that said British author is entirely correct: People are going to confuse the two of them. I had — for days.

The photo on the left of the comic-book writer Christopher Priest is the only one I can find on the web. The photo on the right of the rather haunted-looking Christopher Priest is liberally applied — perhaps in an effort to distinguish himself from the other Christopher Priest.

If you were a somewhat unknown writer who had struggled all his life to make a name for himself and had lately seen it coming to fruition, gaining guest of honor status at the world’s foremost science fiction convention, having your novel turned into a film as good as “The Prestige,” how would it feel to find yourself being confused with another genre writer who had taken the same name as you, and seemingly while knowing of your existence?

Years ago I discovered another Lee Wochner on the web. This Lee Wochner was Leland P. Wochner, he lived in Illinois, he was 70 years old — and he was a plumber. Not a writer. I remember the relief in discovering this.