3 money-makers
- Screenwright: the craft of screenwriting.
My electronic screenwriting tutorial and ebook, first published in 1997 and updated annually until 2005, earned more steady royalties for me than anything I'd written. Not in total but in steady, consistent income during the period when I actively marketed it. Moreover, it generated more positive feedback than anything I've written. By far. Its fans gush with admiration, which of course made me feel good. This product was and remains ahead of its time. I kept waiting for a corporation to copy my idea and blow me out of the water but it never happened. It's still a viable product but no longer updated or actively marketed, so sales have plummeted. Marketing matters more than content. I got bored with the grunt work of adding analyses of current films. I brought down the price when I stopped updating it and today it may be the best bargain out there in the screenwriting instruction field. But few seem to know about it. - Ramblin': the songs and stories of Woody Guthrie
Institutions that gave out grant money loved this show in the 1980s. The former Metropolitan Arts Commission especially loved it, giving it a total of three annual grants during this period (they not only suggested the additional grants but told me to ask for twice as much money!). Other grants came to the project as well. I practically lived on this show, which I toured from Seattle to LA in the west, but mostly in Oregon, during the decade. Even as I was busy doing other things. I think one of the reasons it was attractive was that I had constructed it in thematic modules and could perform anything from a ten-minute to an hour full show. Also the full show was only an hour. I'd started with a three-hour show with an intermission but had the good fortune to see a local one-man show about Kerouac while I was assembling mine. It was too long! I vowed to keep Guthrie at an hour so I could do it without intermission. I've always thanked the Kerouac actor for giving me this insight. Both Kerouac and Guthrie tend to play a two-note tune, and it can get old quickly. I finally got tired of doing the show and retired it. A decade later I revived it with a second musician, the late Jim Wylie, and we had some decent shows, perhaps the best at the Newport Performing Arts Center. We also got it online for posterity (one hopes). - Waitresses / Ruby's Tune
This play is significant in several respects. It was my last production as a resident playwright, here with Peter Fornara's Cubiculo Theatre, where I'd gone after administrative changes at the New Rose Theatre that found me homeless where I'd be the resident playwright. I looked forward to a new long relationship with Fornara, something of a theatrical genius, but the producer pulled the plug about a year after I got there. Too bad because Peter was going to produce a four-play cycle I was working on, The Quantum Quartet. Never happened. But it's not as a stage play that this became a money-maker. It's the first play I optioned to Hollywood. A producer fell in love with it, kept optioning it year after year, good money for which I had to do absolutely nothing, decided to direct it herself, and at one point told me it was a done deal, contracts were being signed in a few days. Didn't happen. Fornara called this my best play (I don't agree) and if nothing else, it got me into screenwriting, which changed my professional life.
5 crashes into the dark hole of near oblivion
- The Seagull Hyperdrama
There's no doubt that this is my Magnum Opus. I never expected it to be produced, actually, but I thought it might generate more than the occasional interest it gets in Europe. If I were younger, I'd try and raise money at Kickstarter for it today, producing it myself in my design for a hyperdrama theater space. But I'm about 15 years too old for the energy that requires. I did get brownie points for this: a letter from the Dean at the university complimenting me on my scholarship. I was pleased he realized the work this took, not only in writing but in dramatic criticism and scholarship. This is the ultimate commentary on Chekhov's play, of course, daring to be specific about what happens to characters when off of his stage. - Dark Mission, an opera by John Nugent
I wrote the libretto. I love John's music, and I love this opera, a retelling of the "Whitman Massacre" from the Cayuse point of view. I hope it gets done some day. It's harder to be a composer than a writer, I think. - Varmints, a libretto in search of music
This was to be another collaboration with John but life intervened, he moved to LA to make a living in musical theater, where he struggles today, and I decided to release the libretto on its own. It's now a Kindle book and in the fall will be published by Round Bend Press. The stage play, written with a grant from the Oregon Arts Commission to conclude a retrospective of my work called "Charles Deemer's Oregon" (a de facto wake! it turns out), had mixed reviews and indeed I prefer the libretto to the play. The verse adds another layer against "realism" where the dark satire works better, I think. Not until my recent novel Sodom, Gomorrah & Jones would my anger at American history find such passionate expression. - The Man Who Shot Elvis and other stories
I had success as a literary short story writer early in my career. This anthology brings together the best of these stories. I thought someone might notice. Well, if it had come out in the 1980s, I'm sure I'd have gotten good local press. But later, when I became an ant on a turd miles from the picnic, well, nobody much gave a shit. - Dress Rehearsals: the Education of a Marginal Writer
The same can be said about my memoir of the writing life. In the 80s, my decade in the sun, I expect this would have done well. By the time it appeared, I was of little interest to the local, regional, or national literati. Only in Europe, did I retain an audience, and this for my work in hyperdrama. What I like about this memoir is that it documents something that has always fascinated me, the relationship between autobiography and creative recreation as fictional narrative. I make many connections between my life and my work.
So there you have it. 3 projects that made me decent money. 5 that crashed sooner than I expected, none of which were expected to be money-makers but perhaps attention grabbers. Nope. Oh, somehow they've managed to find a few fans but expectations were higher than this.
The memoir has a review at Amazon slapping my hand for being too hard on myself. Ha! If I were to write the ending of my memoir today, it would be far darker than what I wrote then.
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