At the 2022 Academy Awards Show camera meeting, Glenn Weiss the director asked the assembled camera operators how many had read my book “ATTABOY”. Many had, and the comments were positive. The news thrilled me. Although I had never done an Olympics or the Oscars, at least my little book had reached the hallowed precincts of one of those iconic broadcasts.
Thank you for taking the time to search out my website. This is a new world for me, an experience I could never have realized or attained without the guidance, help, and assistance of my generous friend Graham Jones.
On this website, I intend to post career updates and information about what shows I am doing. Not every job that I worked on merits an individual chapter in a book. I chose to write about what I had experienced and not simply that I did this, then that. Neither “ATTABOY” nor its soon-to-be-published sequel “CLOSING CREDITS” is written in sequential order. I tried to balance the books by subject rather than chronology. Each chapter is a story and should be read as such. I am hoping that a reader will take pleasure from each of the stories, independent of any other. The only link between the installments is that of my experience. I lived them, worked and sweated through them. Some productions were milestones in my career while others were simply last week or this past Tuesday. Not every one changed me in any fundamental way, but each show I chose to write about contained some element of interest, something to remember. Like the kid on Christmas morning who throws away the gift but plays with the box, what might have been least important to the show was what remained most memorable to me.
“ATTABOY” contains stories about shows primarily shot in studios. “CLOSING CREDITS” has more material relating to locations. From two days with “Good Morning America” in Berlin to soap operas shot in St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands and in Monument Valley, Arizona. A raucous evening with a spit slimed Iggy Pop to Hillary Clinton’s somber election headquarters the night Trump trounced her. “ATTABOY” had a total of 23 chapters. The biggest complaint expressed to me was that the book went by too quickly. Several of my readers resorted to reading it slowly, parsing out the chapters to make the reading experience last longer. While any writer would be ecstatic to have this relationship with their reader, it does present a challenge. The pacing of any book is very important, and I tried to pick and arrange chapters in a way that would both please readers and give the narrative flow.