March 2008 -
Big news is that I'm a co-founder of a new Los Angeles theater group called
Fierce Backbone. The name is derived from a comment by Virginia Woolf that "the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea."
Check out the link, which has lots to read and is still developing.
Aiming to submit my novel of connected stories, titled
STRANGE ARMOR, to publishers. The book portrays its protagonist, Brad MacIntyre, from age 4 to 44, from the 1950s to the 1990s.
PICKMAN'S MODEL is for sale on DVD. Based on an H.P. Lovecraft short story, I co-wrote the screenplay for this half-hour 16mm film back in 1981 with Kelly Greene (director of the acclaimed
ATTACK OF THE BAT MONSTERS!) and director Cathy Welch. Cut to the present. Decades later Cathy has finally got the short distributed. Let's hear it for the internet.
The
PICKMAN'S MODEL DVD boasts several versions of the same short story, with the 60-minute Chilean version being the feature. The disk is nicely packaged and the transfers are excellent.
"Cathy Welch’s adaptation of
Pickman’s Model... essentially tells the same story as the other versions, but there are some notable differences. The cast is exceptionally good here, and of the three versions this one definitely features the best acting. Welch ups the gore factor a fair bit and ties Pickman’s interests into some pretty twisted stuff and as such it’s a little more frightening than the other films – which is a good thing. Set design is strong, the ending is freakishly interesting, and this one works really, really well." —DVDManiacs.net
Available through
Lurker Films.
Ulysses Grant in Texas
1845
Portrayed in the new novel
Grant's Horses
Meanwhile, I'm supposed to be sending out queries to publishers in an effort to interest them in my novel, which used to be titled JESUS PAINE McBEAN: THE TEXIAN, but which I have retitled (actually, have gone back to an earlier title): GRANT'S HORSES. Grant's Horses reveals the unheralded events leading up to the war against Mexico, when a frontier boy’s friendship with an untried officer alters the course of history.
August, 1845. The passions that will one day pit brother against brother in the Civil War are already churning. War against Mexico looms when the U.S. Army garrisons Kinney’s Rancho, a coastal smuggler’s cove south of the disputed Texas-Mexican border. Twelve-year-old Jesus Paine (J.P.) McBean, the daydreaming, bookish son of the settlement’s preacher, befriends handsome 2d Lt. Ulysses Grant, 23. This doesn’t sit well with Chance, J.P.’s big brother, who is one of “Colonel” Kinney’s ranging company of gunmen.
J.P. is “as stuffed as poor old Don Quixote's with marvelous notions of derring-do and legends of noble battles and romance” gleaned from books and Chance’s tall tales. In "Ulyss" J.P. sees his martial beau idéal.
But Grant isn’t who J.P. expects: nicknamed “Beauty” by his fellow officers, he’s untested in battle, a reluctant soldier who paints watercolor landscapes, yearns for his fiancée, and can’t bear to hunt game. Worst of all, the West Pointer appears to be a hypocrite -- he speaks against slavery, yet has the French-speaking Negro youth Valère as a "body servant." Furthermore, he confesses that he believes the coming war against Mexico is unjust, and he plans to resign his commission to become a math professor.
Written in first person, GRANT'S HORSES portrays a boy steeped in the ballyhoo of war and heroism. Torn between his love for his heroic but pro-slavery brother, Chance, and an abiding affinity for the perplexing Grant, J.P. struggles to reconcile with his moral upbringing and sense of honor the jingoism, slavery and hatred of Mexicans he sees around him.
He learns the motives for war are not always as advertised and that emotionally he has more in common with Ulysses than with his racist brother. As the seaside trading post mushrooms into a rollicking boom town named Corpus Christi, J.P. gets a job as an apprentice at a Daguerreotype photography studio. There, his encounters with a colorful cross-section of humanity, including the murderous Texas Ranger “Mustang” Gray, and the baseball playing businesswoman and bowling alley owner known as “The Great Western,” open his eyes to a range of human folly, including his own.
______
• The February issue of Handball magazine, "the Official Voice fo the United States Handball Association," features an interview I did with Ben Agajanian. Agajanian, in addition to being a pro-football kicker and coach, was an avid handball player into his 80s. In the interview he recalls playing handball with baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, football great Mike Ditka, and the Apollo I astronauts.
______
• I've completed BOOTIN' BEN, a feature screenplay about the life of Ben Agajanian, who had his toes crushed off in a work accident during college, but overcame the injury to become pro football's first kicking specialist, booting field goals 14 different professional teams in the the 1940s, 50s and 60s, including the 1956 World Champion New York Giants. After retiring from the field, he was the Dallas Cowboys kicking coach for 20 years. The script is being written for Bow Tie Productions.
• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences selected me as a Semifinalist in its prestigious Nicholl Fellowship Screenwriting Competition. My feature script, THE ROCK OF ABANDON, placed in the top 2.25% out of 4,889 entries from all over the world. THE ROCK OF ABANDON is an edgy murder mystery set in ancient Athens as the "Cradle of Democracy" prepares to launch a pre-emptive war against Syracuse on the island of Sicily. The notorious playwright Euripides hunts the killer of a courtesan he once loved.
The Nicholl version is a rewrite and polish of the same story with which I won top honors in the 11th Annual Fade In magazine Writers Network Screenplay and Fiction Competition.
Biography
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Stephen Blackburn grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas. He graduated as a Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas at Austin, earning his MA in Radio-TV-Film. He was an endowed James Michener Fellow in screenwriting and fiction 1995-1997, earning an MFA — yet again from the University of Texas.
He has worked in Kansas City, Missouri, as a staff feature writer and movie columnist ("Notes From the Flyover") for Pitch, a weekly now owned by New Times. AlterNet syndicated his articles about the near impossibility of living on minimum wage and about male contraceptives, both of which were reprinted nationally by several publications. The Utne Reader republished the minimum wage article. Blackburn's commentary contrasting George W. Bush to the heroic president in the television series 24 was published on AlterNet.org in May 2003.
From interviews and collaboration with noted national homeless organizer and activist Ron Casanova, Blackburn wrote Each One Teach One: Up and Out of Poverty — Memoirs of a Street Activist (Curbstone Press, 1996), which Kirkus Reviews lauded as “A valuable firsthand account of a street survivor’s harrowing experiences.”
On January 15, 2002, Blackburn was the featured author of PEN International's winter lecture series in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He read from his book The Extinction of Rhinos in Mexico: 9 Tales of Life and Death (Xlibris, 2001).
In 2004, his original feature script FATTY & BUSTER was a Semifinalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s second annual American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest. The story chronicles the enduring friendship between silent film comedians Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton after Arbuckle is unjustly banished from making movies.
Blackburn lives in the Thai Town/Little Armenia section of Hollywood, Bukowski's old neighborhood.
