Young adult novelist James Dashner sends Mr. Media in deep with 'The Maze Runner'

Cover via Amazon

By BOB ANDELMAN

Recommendations are worth what you pay for them, so I don’t always accept them at face value.

But the same literary agent who turned me on to young adult novelist Sara Zarr two years ago thought I’d also enjoy James Dashner’s new YA book, The Maze Runner, enough that he sent me a copy without first asking. And Michael—who, in the interests of full disclosure, represents all three of us—even though there is hardly a bit of similarity between the work of these two authors, you read me pretty well so feel free to recommend something else.

The Maze Runner is the kind of book that teens and youthful readers of all ages in search of an appropriate follow-up to the adventures of Harry Potter will no doubt enjoy. It takes place in a fantastical, impossible place, develops a language of its own, and features characters you will instantly love—and hate. (Sorry, Gally.)

This is the first book in a trilogy from Dashner, who you may already know as author of the 13th Reality series.

(James Dashner website)

AUDIO EXCERPT: "The words in The Maze Runner are never used exactly as replacements for swear words. Their main intent was to give their dialogue a futuristic flavor and that they've been isolated and developed some words on their own." 

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Copyright 2010 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Katie McGrath, MERLIN star: Mr. Media Radio Interview

Katie McGrath plays Lady Morgana in the new NBC dramatic import, “Merlin.” The shows airs every Sunday at 8 p.m.

Katie is a relative newcomer to acting, as I understand it, although American audiences may have seen her in an episode of Showtime’s popular drama, “The Tudors,” before she landed a plum role on “Merlin.” Did I say plum? That’s not quite accurate, because she’s more of a peach!

Uh, did I just say that out loud?

Sometimes I embarrass myself.

Anyway, Merlin has a secret—he’s a wizard, a Harry Potter in training. Morgana is on to him… or is she?

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Copyright 2009 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Jim Butcher, THE DRESDEN FILES novelist: Mr. Media Radio Interview

I am NOT the world’s biggest Harry Potter fan. The only book in the series that I’ve read is the first, which my wife and I took turns reading aloud to my daughter when she was just learning to read herself.

Since then, they’ve consumed each and every book in the series and re-read the books and re-watch the movies over and over.

So I wasn’t sure how interested I’d be when I received the graphic novel version of Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files. More magic? Oy.

But let me tell you, this is one cool series. I love the notion of a wizard operating within the almost real world of Chicago, working at arm’s length from both the police and organized crime. If Harry Potter’s continued into adulthood and into the real world of modern London, I’d probably give them another look.

The Dresden Files began and continues as a series of novels. It was also, briefly, a syndicated television series. If you need a jumping on point, try the graphic novel, which is adapted by Mark Powers and drawn by Ardian Syaf. And then you can follow me backward into reading the books.

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Copyright 2009 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Bob Balaban, RECOUNT, BERNARD AND DORIS, actor, director: Mr. Media Audio Interview REWIND

(Mr. Media is on vacation this week, so we're rewinding to some of the podcast's earlier, most popular interviews to catch up new listeners!)

No matter what role he’s in, Bob Balaban always makes an impression, from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind to playing the President of NBC on “Seinfeld.” And the same is now true of his work as a director, in Bernard and Doris, starring Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes, now showing on HBO. He's also in another new HBO film, Recount.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Bob Balaban, "Bernard and Doris" HBO film director: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1

No matter what role he’s in, Bob Balaban always makes an impression, from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind to playing the President of NBC on “Seinfeld.” And the same is now true of his work as a director, which you’ll discover when Bernard and Doris, starring Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes, debuts on HBO on February 9th.

You can LISTEN to this interview by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Tell us a little bit about Bernard and Doris. This is the story of Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress, and her butler, but maybe you can define it a little more.

BOB BALABAN: Doris Duke, as some people may remember, was known most of her life as “the richest little girl in the world.” Her dad had hundreds of millions of dollars. She inherited a lot when it was a lot to have a hundred million dollars, and by the time she died in 1993, she had managed to amass $1.3 billion, which, in those days, was a lot of money. Now it’s pocket change.

Doris was sort of famous for not ever finding a guy who would ever love her for herself. When you have that much money and you’re a lady, it’s not always the easiest thing. I suppose if you’re a man, it’s not all that easy anyway cause everybody wanted something from her.

Later in her life in 1987, an Irish butler named Bernard Lafferty came to work for Doris Duke. He had worked for Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Lee and was thrilled to come and work for this sort of famous, exotic creature, Doris Duke, who was known for being rather eccentric and generous in many ways, certainly with her foundation. And the two of them bonded. When Doris Duke died in 1993, she left this young, alcoholic, itinerant Irish butler guy, fairly uneducated, basically in charge of her $1.3 billion fortune.

We made a movie, starring the brilliant Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes, in which we imagined what might have transpired behind closed doors during the six years that Bernard came to work for Doris Duke that would enable this very unlikely fellow to get to that trusted point in Doris’ heart where she would entrust him with so much of her beloved fortune. We have made a story of how this relationship came to be. It’s kind of a quirky love story between two unlikely people.





ANDELMAN: I’m very interested to know how you were sold on a biographical film in which, right up front as we watch it, we’re told, “Some of the following is based on fact.” I just love that.

BALABAN: Well, thank you. First of all, the legal department of HBO was thrilled that I wanted to put that in the front of the movie. It helps, somebody thinks. But truthfully, they’re two real people, and we did attempt to, more or less in a broad sense, place these two characters in a real context. Doris Duke did have a house in New Jersey. Bernard did come to work for her. In a general sense, many of the things biographically that we say about the two of them are true based on my non-extensive knowledge of the two of them, which is mostly headlines in newspapers and public record. But this is an internal journey of an emotional relationship between two people, so we wanted to be very clear that, as we made that journey, this was something we posited. This was something we invented. Something did happen between the two of them, but we made it up as to what really happened.

ANDELMAN: As I watched, I kept thinking of this line, and I think it’s from an Elvis Costello song – “Some of my lies are true.”

BALABAN: I love that you thought of that. And that may very well be true in this case.

ANDELMAN: Now, with something like this, I’m thinking that Doris Duke would be considered a public figure -- and so she would be in play -- but what about Lafferty? He was hired by a public figure. He never asked to be a public figure, and, of course, he’s passed away now.

BALABAN: Yes, and he has no relatives. You’re talking about legal issues possibly with somebody who was a real character?

ANDELMAN: A little bit, yeah.

BALABAN: Basically, there’s nothing that we say about him that you wouldn’t have learned from going to the library and looking up a lot of newspaper headlines. And there’s also nothing libelous or scandalous about the way we present it.






ANDELMAN: I have to say it’s a very entertaining film.

BALABAN: I like that. You didn’t have to say that as you were saying that.

ANDELMAN: I just gotta call it like I see it. It’s funny. It’s the kind of thing where, if my wife had described it to me Saturday and said okay, I want to go out and see this movie tonight, I would say, “Naah, isn’t there like a Jackie Chan comedy or something?” But I watched it, and I was very entertained. And I think one of the things that really struck me about it, your lead actors, of course, Susan Sarandon, Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes, this is not the guy from Schindler’s List. This is certainly not the guy from the Harry Potter movies.

BALABAN: One of the things I love so much about Ralph in this movie is he’s utterly unexpected, does nothing in it that you’ve ever seen him do before, and manages to make the most complex character, who’s sort of simultaneously very, very creepy and sort of adorable and vulnerable and strange. I agree with you. I haven’t seen him do anything like this. I haven’t seen anybody really do anything like this.

ANDELMAN: It was very interesting to see him, eyes down, for so much of the, at least for the first half of the movie. He’s in that butler, servant type of mode, and I just keep thinking, “Okay, when is he going to burst out?” And appropriately, he did not. That’s the whole thing. That’s what makes it such an amazing performance, I think.






BALABAN: His character kind of blossoms. This is a journey that these two people make is basically a journey to opening up to each other, which did in our movie takes a couple of years for this to happen. Fortunately, the movie is only 106 minutes long so you won’t have to watch it for several years. But the journey that they make is not an Indiana Jones journey where they travel by bus, truck, and camel to get to an exotic location. The exotic location to which both characters are journeying is each other’s hearts. And it’s a twisted path, and it’s a difficult one, but it had to be very measured on both of the actors’ parts, for Susan as well. She just barely pays attention to this fellow for about the first 12 or 14 minutes of the movie so that when she finally looks at him, you realize that she’s had hundreds of servants in her long and exotic and rich life, but there’s something about this guy that is causing her to pay attention in a way that she hasn’t done before. And that’s the beginning of her journey. And in Ralph’s case, you point it out very accurately. He can barely look at the woman. When he starts being able to say a direct sentence to her and look her in the face, you can sense something flowing back and forth between the two of them because they’re great actors, and they’re very good at telling an emotional story.

ANDELMAN: I think I read that Susan described the film also as a love story, which is certainly what I thought while I was watching it. But it’s not, in any way, a love story where these two fall in love, and they live happily ever after. It’s not so much a romantic love -- more of a devotional one.

BALABAN: Yes. I would say, if we were playing at your local multiplex, it would say, “A different kind of love story, the love that dare not speak its name.”

ANDELMAN: I don’t know if we should go that far!

BALABAN: Well, we would if we wanted to get more people into the audience.

ANDELMAN: At what point in the process did you sign on? I think I read it was before Susan and Ralph…

BALABAN: I shuttle about between being an actor, a director, a writer, and a trash collector. My friend Ilene Maisel, who is an executive at New Line Cinema, a brilliant producer person in her own right, sent me the script. She knew the person who wrote it, I believe, had come across it, and just sent it. She was in London, and she said, I think you might find this thing interesting,” which I did. The script has gone through many incarnations since that point. We chose to make the movie on the East Coast so the movie can’t begin the way it used to begin, which is Bernard Lafferty arrived in a Tour of the Stars bus as they were saying, “… and on the left is where Doris Duke, the billionaire heiress, lives…” And we got to explain Doris’ background through the loudspeaker of the tour bus. We couldn’t do that cause we made the movie as if it were in her estate in New Jersey.

I was, from the beginning, struck by the compelling nature of this needy, needy woman who could never find anybody to love her and this butler, who himself felt unworthy and unlovable, and yet their stations in life were so different. Sexually they were so different, and yet something happened between the two of them to drive them together. And I thought even if she had never been a real character, this would have been a very interesting story.



I gave the movie to Susan Sarandon. She loved the idea of playing this kind of character. We discussed literally making sure that the movie we would eventually make was much more an internal journey and much more about an emotional ride between these two characters and therefore, focusing much more on the two of them and their path to, as you and I are talking about it, falling in a kind of love. And then we decided that Ralph Fiennes would be the only person we’d like to make the movie with, and Ralph felt the same way about us.

I went around and found $500,000, and these two “A”-tier actors decided to make this very brave decision to come and be in a movie with nothing to support it except two wonderful performances. We had no money. We barely had a location. We couldn’t find shoes. And yet we had a very wonderful working experience making this thing. Maybe that’s why. It was so pared down. It was so essential about the two of them and their two characters.

ANDELMAN: Let’s talk a little bit about the budget on the film. I want to point out that this was not commissioned by HBO. It was acquired by HBO after it had been made, right?

BALABAN: HBO does that occasionally. Yes, we made an independent movie with Kevin Spacey’s company, Trigger Street Independent, that had raised $2 or $3 million to make a certain amount of $500,000 movies. This, they decided to make one of them. We were on our way to the Toronto Film Festival to look for a buyer at which point Colin Calendar from HBO saw the movie, loved it, said, “I’d love to take you off the market,” and we paused. We went, “Well, gee we could get bought up by Spinning Films Independent if we go to Toronto.” I sat down at that point and discussed this with Susan and Ralph and all of our people and said, “I think this is an opportunity to have two fantastic performances seen by a number of millions of people as opposed to in a little theater on the Upper East Side with 65 people a day seeing it for about three weeks. And we could also pay back the wonderful people who had come and helped us make this movie for no money. I thought that’s kind of a winning combination. Let’s do it,” and we did, and HBO bought it, and here we are.

ANDELMAN: I think we need to talk more about that budget. It’s $500,000, I think you said.

BALABAN: Yes. It ended up, if we were being exactly exact, a few dollars more but substantially less than a million.

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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Jim Melvin, "The Death Wizard Chronicles" author: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

Jim Melvin has been a friend of mine for more than twenty years and, for as long as I’ve known him, his driving interest has been writing an epic fantasy series, something that might find shelf space alongside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

But life kept getting in the way.

He was married, raised two wonderful daughters, had a full-time job as an editor at the St. Petersburg Times, and did all the other good stuff that eats up time and interferes with achieving those very personal dreams we all entertain.

But that’s life, right?

Well, a few years ago, Jim decided it was now or never. He retired from the newspaper, took his family and savings, and moved to North Carolina. He put everything else aside to fulfill what he believed to be his destiny and nearly two- thousand pages that became The Death Wizard Chronicles.

The first book in the six-book epic fantasy was released in September by Rain Publishing, and a new installment will be delivered to bookstores every thirty days until the entire series is available in February 2008.

It’s a hell of a story, a hell of a series, and Jim Melvin is a hell of a guy.

Death Wizard Chronicles Web Site

Book Excerpt

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Jim, for everyone who knows you personally and your story, let me ask this as plainly as possible. What the hell were you thinking? You gambled an awful lot on your imagination.

JIM MELVIN: Well, Bob, I think it was sort of something that built up over 25 years. When I would get in the shower, when I’d drive in the car, when I would fall asleep at night, I would think about this series, and, to me, it felt like this is what Jim Melvin was supposed to do, to create this series. And so many people have dreams in their lives that they’re never able to achieve because of the reality of living and working and raising families and mowing the yard and maybe taking a break at night to watch a little TV that their dreams are set aside. I had an opportunity to live off savings for a couple years and to take this risk and, rather than bank the savings and retire at age 62 and write the book then, I wanted to do it in my late 40s when I had at least a little bit of youth left. I want to be able to look in the mirror and tell myself, “You gave it your best shot.”




ANDELMAN: Now, you can affirm to people that I did not exaggerate here. This has been living inside of you for years. And pretty much everyone who’s known you, family, friends, co-workers has been aware of this, right?

MELVIN: It’s actually been living inside of me probably since I was a little boy. I grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I lived on a little island called Coquina Key. I was lucky to live on a street that had quite a few boys my age. And, like a lot of boys, we played football and baseball, and we ran around all day long, especially during the summer. One thing we did was we played a lot of imaginary games, and we would get together, five, ten of us and play for hours. And a lot of it was based on things like shows of that time period back in the late sixties, early seventies like “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “Lost in Space.” And my imagination was almost as tantalized by fantasy and superheroes and magical powers, and so The Death Wizard Chronicles really were born then.

ANDELMAN: Had you written any of this as a teen, in college, any of that kind of stuff, or did it all come after you retired?

MELVIN: Well, when I was a teenager, about the age, say, of a junior in high school when you’re really finally starting to try to take seriously what you’re gonna do with your life, it just hit me really hard that I wanted to become a best-selling novelist. I remember even back then when I was what, 16, 17 years old, I was going around and telling people that I was going to be a best-selling novelist, and I was gonna make $75 million. And that’s in the mid-1970s, so that’s probably $300 million of today’s dollars.

Then I thought, well, I’m not a rich person now. I need to make a living at least until the first novel hits big. What should I do? Well, I decided then to become a journalist because journalists write. I’ll learn the craft of writing even though, at that point, when I was young, I was so arrogant I really didn’t think I needed to learn the craft of writing.

I actually wrote a novel. It was a horror story, kind of a Stephen King-type thing. Stephen King was just coming out at that point. I shopped it around some, and it came actually relatively close to being published. But, at the time, and all writers hear this, that it’s usually not the first book that hits it big. It’s the second or third book that hits it big. So I wasn’t really concerned that the first book didn’t get published. I knew the second one would, only then I began working 50-hour weeks and six-day weeks. And I got married, and I had kids, and I had a house to take care of, and there never was a second book. But for 25 years, The Death Wizard Chronicles were in my mind, and I did try to attempt to write it several times. I would get 30 or 40 or 50 pages into it, and then just it would stop. I would either lose momentum, or I didn’t like what I was doing. As it turned out, the real reason I didn’t write it wasn’t the excuse of working too hard or having a family, it was that I really, as a writer and as a person, wasn’t ready for it. And journalism and living my life, you meet a lot of people, and you have a lot of experiences, and you learn a lot of things. You do learn the craft of writing. And over the years, I became a more worldly, more mature person, more capable of this. And so actually, in the long run, it really turned out for the best because now is my time.

ANDELMAN: I’m recalling, as you’re saying that, that a couple years before you retired from the newspaper that -- correct me if I’m wrong -- you had taken kind of an interest in Eastern philosophy and things like that. Am I on the right track here?

MELVIN: That’s correct, actually. The Death Wizard Chronicles actually were based on Eastern philosophy even before I knew much about Eastern philosophy. It’s just sort of a coincidence. I got divorced and remarried, and my second wife was a long-time Buddhist, and she introduced me to Buddhism. It was a religion that I really embraced. I embraced the religion in a philosophical sense. It really spoke to me in terms of the tools it offers to live your life. And once that happened, I think all the pieces fell into place.




ANDELMAN: It’s in the very first book, The Pit -- there’s a reference to karma.

MELVIN: Right. Karma, in the Buddhist sense, is the philosophy that all of your actions, whether it good, bad, or neutral, have effects. Good actions create happiness. Bad actions create unhappiness. And neutral actions basically don’t do anything. What you are is an accumulation of your karma.

One of the other aspects of Buddhism that most attracts Westerners to Buddhism is meditation. Through meditation, you’re able to relax, slow your heart-rate, and also begin to see certain truths that are all intertwined in Buddhism. My main character is called a “Death Wizard” because he’s able to meditate so deeply that he literally stops his heart and temporarily dies. And there’ve been studies with Tibetan monks that have shown that when they’re through long stretches of meditation, they can slow their heart rate to like under 10 beats per minute or even less. Well, my character can take that to the extreme, and when he dies, he temporarily enters the realm of death and enriches himself with magical powers.

ANDELMAN: Since you mention the Death Wizard, this might be a good time to tell people listening and reading a little something about the series, six books. And you can’t use the whole half-hour for the synopsis.

MELVIN: Well, it’s difficult to do a fantasy synopsis, and I’ll tell you why. But imagine giving a synopsis for Lord of the Rings. You would say very short people with hairy feet save the world from monsters. That doesn’t sound that interesting. But I’ll give it a shot.

My series is, as you said, it’s six books. It’s about 700,000 words, which sounds like a ton, and I guess is, but there’s a lot of fantasy, very popular fantasy, written now-a-days that is quite a bit longer. For instance, there’s someone named Steven Erikson who’s doing a ten-book series called The Malazan Book of the Fallen, and each one of his books are about 300,000 words. So 700,000 words now-a-days is pretty average in the fantasy world.

But, at any rate, my series involves a character who is called a Death Wizard, and actually throughout the series, he’s actually more accurately called a “Death-Knower.” And he’s called a Death-Knower because he literally dies and returns. He has seen what happens when you die, and none of us, of course, have ever done that. And the crux of being a human being is being aware of our own mortality.

The evil character that he combats throughout the series is called a “Sun God.” And he’s called that because he derives his power from sunlight. If you get into the world of Carl Sagan, suns and stars are the creators of life in the universe. Our bodies are made of things that come from the stars. So this creates a paradox in my series in that the good character is based on death, which human beings traditionally see as being a bad thing, and the evil character is based on life, which human beings traditionally see as a good thing. The entire series revolves around that paradox with a lot going on between the lines.




ANDELMAN: And folks, as I said, he’s been thinking about this for a long time. So, Jim, are any of these characters, are they based on real life? Is there anybody that you want dead?

MELVIN: Well, Torg, my main character is seven feet tall and weighs 300 pounds and is really good-looking so I based him on me. I would say that none of the characters are really based on anyone I know. Obviously, all of your life experiences create characters that you write, but they’re not based on people that I know. But they are characters that, very intensely, I’m sure this happens to most writers, but very intensely, I’ve grown to love them. And in fact, right now, I’m in the editing process of Book Six, and when that completes, I’m gonna feel kind of sad. I’m gonna feel like I’ve lost some family.

The series, for the most part, takes place over a thousand years, but the vast majority of the series really only takes place over about a four-month period. Anytime in fantasy, when you write fantasy, you have to try your best to interweave backstory because backstory creates context that gives your characters meaning. Once I’ve gotten most of the backstory out of the way, it’s really just a rollercoaster ride to the finish of good versus evil, wars, fortresses, castles, monsters, vast amounts of magical power, and it’s kind of sexy too and R-rated. So this is not Harry Potter. This is not recommended for kids or even young adults. This is an adult, R-rated series, which again, a lot of the most popular fantasy now-a-days is.

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©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.