In celebration of my upcoming Tiferet Talk with William Kenower next Monday, 6/3/13, at 7 PM EST, I'd like to share a recent blog post of his. But first, allow me to introduce him to those of you who may not already be familiar with his work. Kenower is the author of Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion and Editor-in-Chief of Author magazine, an online magazine for writers and dedicated readers. He writes a popular daily blog for the magazine about the intersection of writing and our daily lives, and has interviewed hundreds of writers of every genre. He also hosts the online radio program Author2Author where every week he and a different guest discuss the books we write and the lives we lead.
Write Within Yourself is getting great reviews! Two of my favorites blurbs are below:
"This is a book you'll want to keep on your nightstand or desk, always available, ready to inspire you."
-- Erica Bauermeister
"These stories and essays can't help but land in the heart of the reader."
-- Laura Munson
And, now, for the post:
What Isn’t There
by William Kenower
During my brief tenure at Concord Films, B
Movie King Roger Corman’s small but profitable film company, I had one
opportunity to get close to the great one himself. His personal assistant
needed two hours for a doctor’s appointment, and I was recruited to man the
desk. It was my Big Chance. Corman and I would fall to chatting, and being an
insightful, streetwise Hollywood mogul, he would spot my intelligence and
moxie—and the rest would be history.
It turns out my job was to
sit at a desk ten feet from his closed door and answer the phone. The assistant
whose job I was filling explained to me that unless the person on the other end
of the line was one of Mr. Corman’s children, I was to apologetically inform
the caller that Mr. Corman was “in a meeting.”
For two hours I answered
call after call, apologized for Mr. Corman’s indisposedness, and recorded the
callers’ names and numbers in a kind of ledger I suspected would never be read.
I felt as if I had been recruited into the role of soulless gatekeeper in a
Kafkaesque drama. The assistant returned from the doctor and reclaimed her
chair. Corman’s door remained closed.
Years later I was flipping
through my son’s copy of Top 100 Horror
Movies, whose forward, lo and behold, had been written by Corman, who waxed
nostalgic for the days when filmmakers were forced to frighten their audiences
with what wasn’t there. “It’s [the
audience’s] imagination that does the heavy-lifting,” he wrote, “not some
digital effects house in Hollywood.”
I have to agree with my old
boss. We always frighten ourselves in this way—filling in the details of an unwritten
future with nightmares we dream today. When the nightmares don’t come true, we
usually forget we ever dreamed them.
I can’t think of Corman
without seeing that closed door. Like so many executives, editors, and agents,
he can easily become one of those monsters hiding in the shadows of his early
films, a cold closed door of a soul, uninterested in the aspirations of new
talent—not a busy man, hoping for a call from his children.
