Steve Knopper, Author of Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age

May 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! The next guest on my show is perfect for the title of this show, of course.  Usually I’m interviewing authors, three authors per show and one musician, and what’s fun about this book is that it hits both.  Author Steve Knopper is the author of Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.  Welcome to the show. Do I have Steve on the line? I think we’re having some technical difficulties.  Do I have Steve on the line?

Steve Knopper: Yeah, I’m here, can you hear me? Hello?

Dr. Kent: Now I can hear you, how’re you doing?

Steve Knopper: Can you hear me now?

Dr. Kent: Yep, I can hear you.

Steve Knopper: Sorry, ok.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about this book.  Most people go into a CD shop, and they don’t think much about this, but as someone who is in the publishing end, music world, I’ve seen a lot of things change, as you certainly have.  Tell us about the changes that have happened.

Steve Knopper: Yeah, absolutely.  My book is on, it’s a chronology, and it begins with, it’s basically tells the story of the record industry, sort of the rise and fall.  It begins with the adoption of the CD in the early 80’s, and it goes through that period when everybody was replacing their record collections from cheap vinyl LPs to more expensive CDs.  And there was a huge boom in the industry, and everybody got real rich until about 1999 or 2000, and then Napster came along, and everybody got their music for free after that, and it kind of destroyed the whole model of selling CDs.  Then iTunes happened, and really the record industry has been shrinking and crashing and struggling ever since.

Dr. Kent: What are some of the industry’s big mistakes.  There’s so many, and it’s one after the other that we hear about and sort of laugh about. The famous one, of course is the 8-track, which wasn’t a mistake, but now it’s kind of something that we laugh about.  So tell us about some of the funny stories.

Steve Knopper: Sure.  I have a series of small chapters in the book called Big Musics, Big Mistakes.  And they’re separate (inaudible).  The first one is the CD longbacks.  Remember that cardboard thing that you had to buy in order to get the CD, you had to tear this thing open and get blisters all over your fingers and so forth.  That was actually created because record retailers like The Towers of the World were initially resistant to the CD, and they came after the industry basically said you don’t have to rebuild your LP racks, which would have cost a lot of money.  So they created these cardboard things, side by side they were about the same width as a vinyl LP.  So that was a big one, another one that I mention is killing the single.  By the late 90’s, part of the reason Napster was so effective was that people were just kind of sick of having to go out and buy $18.00 CD’s that had one or two good songs on them. Napster came along right at that time, and it allowed people to cherry pick the singles they wanted for free, and then iTunes later allowed you to do it for just 99 cents.  That destroyed that whole business model of selling an $18.00 CD as the only format.

Dr. Kent: And how is it, it’s such an interesting thing, now that there’s interactions directly with musicians, and musicians will put their own record labels together, and put their own music out, and this and that.  Is the record industry even breathing?

Steve Knopper:  Yeah, the record industry still is.  Basically when we have heard of the record industry we’re more or less thinking before major record labels.  Sony, DMG, Warner, Universal and EMI.  And those companies are huge companies that have a lot of overhead, they have a lot of payments to make, a lot of high executive salaries. So they’re carrying a lot of freight, and they’re not doing that well with their own problems, their own business model problems.  Then the economy is really giving that a hit as well.  So these companies are shrinking, shrinking, they’re laying off people left and right, they’re finding it harder and harder to discover new talent and market that new talent, although that’s still going on to an extent.  The question is, how that’s going to affect artists.  Sort of the glass empty way of looking at it is, it’s much more difficult for the artist to take that traditional path, sign to a major record label, use its connections to get on the radio, and become a huge star.  But I think the glass half full thing, which is sort of what I believe, is that no longer do you even need a major label for a lot of this stuff. You can use MySpace and Face Book and YouTube, and all these different ways of do it yourself marketing that didn’t even exist 10 or 15 years ago.  Maybe you won’t turn into Beyonce, but you can still eeke out a decent living as an act if you have talent and you’re willing to put a little work into the marketing.

Dr. Kent: It’s so much fun thinking about the rise of a company like Apple and the iTunes thing.  It’s so iconic.  Tell me about some other iconic moments in history.

Steve Knopper: Sure.  Again, Napster was sort of the most iconic of all dirt in this kind of profit, in this progression.  Napster came along, everybody knew Napster, used it, millions of people were on this thing, after Shawn Fanning invented it in 1999, and it’s become kind of a symbol, when you look back, of two things.  More negatively, it’s a symbol of piracy.  It’s a symbol of people being able to get all their music illegally for free, and copyright infringement and all that stuff.  But I think, as I say in the book, it’s also a positive legacy, or symbol as well because it showed the opportunity of the new digital business model, the new online, very convenient way of getting music where you didn’t have to go to stores and spend all that money on a CD.  So therefore I think that Napster was really a major crossroads at the time.  I argue in my book that the record labels at the time had a chance to make a deal with Napster, and they should have done so, but chose not to.

Dr. Kent: Is it all about money? Is all of what drives the market, is it ever what a consumer wants necessarily? It seems that Napster was, but are any of the decisions made by consumers and not money makers?

Steve Knopper: Yeah, everything in major business is all about money.  That’s true in the music business as well.  And you’re absolutely right, during that time period beginning in the late 90’s, even before Napster internet music was seen as an opportunity by some people in the music business.  But others, higher up in the business, who had been selling CD’s a certain way for a long, long time, and then before that final LP (inaudible) and gotten incredibly rich in the process.  They really had no interest in changing the business model and looking at the fork in the road, and taking the fork and going in the completely new technological direction.  And that’s true of many industries.  We certainly saw it with newspapers, we’re seeing it now with the auto industry.  If it works, people don’t want to change it, but that’s why you have to hire high tech people and listen to them.  And that’s where the record industry went wrong, is that they actually did have a lot of very credible high tech experts on their staff, very experienced people in both marketing departments and the new media, and the strategic department.  All the labels had lots of people like that.  But in the end the business affairs people and the people at the head of these labels didn’t listen to them and they just sort of poo-poohed them, and they went on their way selling CD’s and they wound up paying a major price for that decision.

Dr. Kent: I was the kind of guy when I was in college that was a little CD obsessed.  I remember so many people of my music-philic friends who had whole walls of their house devoted to CD’s.  Then talking through the years with folks, there’s still people that have whole walls full of LP’s.  You can’t really have a whole wall full of mp3’s.

Steve Knopper: Yes, that’s true.  I’m the same as you, I’m 40 years old, so I grew up right during that time.  I was in high school and college, right during that time when they were in that changeover from LP’s and CD’s, caught the tail end of getting obsessed with buying LP’s and having a big collection, and then obviously kind of grew up with CD’s and doing the same.  Yeah, I’m actually looking right now at my wall of CD’s, and I really like it, and I like that physical way of collecting records, and it’s sad to me that that’s a relic, that it’s kind of going out of style.  But on the other hand, you’re right to make the point that there’s something romantic that’s lost, because you can’t have wall of mp3’s.  But the iPod is pretty cool.  It’s pretty iconic, and I think if you’re a college student who’s grown up and come of age with music over the last 10 years, I think that you’re going to feel just as warmly and just as nostalgic as we do for CD’s about that moment when you got your first iPod, and you looked on it, and you realized you could carry 10, 20, 30, 40,000 of your favorite songs and play whatever one you want, and that’s a very, very powerful and cool idea.  So I do a lot of these interviews, and a lot of people bring up the same point, which is isn’t there something lost.  The physical collection going out, isn’t there something lost?  I think that’s true, but I also think that you have to look at the flip side of it as well, which is something really that’s gained.

Dr. Kent: And one thing that I’ve started to do is one people jettison their old record collections, I like to record my vinyl into my iPod.  I’m a big iPod freak too, and I’ve actually revived the classic feelings and the kids really can feel like they’re connected to that music, because it’s so diverse, and you can put anything in there, live shows, live shows have been revived again.  So talk about how has the music itself changed?  Because what’s interesting is you talk about the industry kind of scrambling and trying to figure out what to do, what have musicians done?  And I know part of that is in how they can release live shows and things that they might not have done before because they had to print 10,000 copies, or something like that.

Steve Knopper: I think that’s a really excellent point. I think you’re talking more about what established musicians can do as far as getting out different types of outside material, and stuff like that.  There are a lot of ways of doing that, if the musicians are willing, than there were even 10 years ago.  There’s YouTube.  When YouTube first started, as you remember, before the real copyright issues really kicked in, the stuff that you could see on YouTube was basically the entire history of music on video and DVD and VHS and TV, was right there, right in front of you for free, and that was a really cool moment.  For fans, not necessarily for people who have the rights for that stuff.  But still, you can go on YouTube and find all kinds of really interesting stuff. Live recordings, there’s another site that’s not totally supported by the original artists, there’s a little bit of controversy there, but there’s this site called Wolfgang’s Vault, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but they basically bought all the rights to the old King Biscuit radio shows, and also to Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium recordings from the 60’s all the way up, and there is some fascinating stuff in there.  My two favorite artists to buy bootlegs of are Bruce Springsteen and Who, and there’s a lot of amazing material for both of those artists there.  So this whole internet thing has kind of broken open a dam.  I was actually just on a panel at South Heights Southwest last week, and one of my fellow panelists was Kim Quirk, who used to be in the band Too Much Joy, and is now with Rhapsody, and he made the point that when Napster came out, he thought there was no one who could be a bigger Clash fan that him.  He had all, no on could go deeper into the Clashions catalog than he could.  He thought he was as deep as he could possibly get with rare Clash and Joe Strummer recordings, and he said when Napster came out he realized ok, I’m going (inaudible).  So I think that’s dated in and of itself.  Obviously he has some more complex opinions about was Napster a good or a bad thing.  But I think that sort of sums it up in a nutshell, that this sort of internet stuff is a real opportunity for precisely the type of chance that you’re talking about.

Dr. Kent: And you know, an interesting thing that I’ve found is that a lot of musicians that are sort of the octogenarian crowd, a lot of them are resistant to some of this stuff, but a good number of them say you know what, if I’d have had this when I was a kid, man, it would havd made everything so much easier.  As a musician, and I see, even my students, with their iPods, I’m amazed how much variety of music they get and how educated they are about music.

Steve Knopper: Yeah, I spoke to a high school class here in Colorado where I live a few weeks ago, and I walk in to talk about the record business, and as I walked in a couple kids were arguing at their desks, they must have been 16 or 17, about whether or not Robert Johnson actually sold his soul to the devil. I hear that often.  I’m a huge Robert Johnson blues fan, and so I actually, we all go, all the music fans, rock music or pop music, go through this process of, “Oh, I heard the Rolling Stones hit, where did that come from?” So you go back and look through the Muddy Waters and Howard Wolf, and then you go back and listen to Robert Johnson.  You just keep going back, and you learn all this stuff, and you and I when were kids buying CD’s and LP’s, the only way to do that was to raise some money and keep making these trips back and forth to the record store.  Which on one hand is awesome, you know.  It’s just a great rite of passage thing as a kid.  But there’s a great power to be able to just do all that stuff at your computer.  You know, iTunes certainly enabled you to do that, and streaming services like MySpace now, and Rhapsody.  Not everything’s out there, but it probably will be, and very soon.  If it were 1980-whatever, and I was 14 and I was sitting in front of my computer going, “Wow, I can do that whole process and go back as far as I want, just by sitting here for an hour,” I think that’s an incredibly powerful thing, and it just supports music enthusiasm across the board, and I think that’s good.

Dr. Kent: So was Napster kind of like the audio YouTube? I have several colleagues that always talk about, “Why is there no YouTube for audio?”

Steve Knopper: Yeah, well, that’s a complicated, that’s a really good question there, it’s got a complicated answer. The YouTube for audio, music, audio recordings from the time of Napster had issues, legal issues, involving who has the rights to that.  Obviously all these things were fought in the courts, who has the rights to various songs, and various audio recordings.  And that was really meticulously wrangled through in various court decisions involving Napster, and all these different other places.  But then, when YouTube popped around, I guess it was 2004 and 2005, people realized that they really hadn’t gone through that same discussion for music video.  Kind of the difference between music video and audio is that you can dowload audio really easily, and it’s leading to a mass huge collection of songs for free, and illegally, as you know.  But it’s a little bit more difficult to do that for video, and so YouTube became kind of a middle ground option where you can rent all this stuff by streaming it on the YouTube website, but you can’t actually buy it and own it.  So, that was a long winded way of saying it’s just two different things.  The YouTube for audio right now is being worked out.  Rhapsody is one answer to your question, you can go to that website pay twelve bucks a month, and you can stream whatever song you want, but you can’t really own it.  Another example that’s kind of developing is MySpace music.  I never thought MySpace music was that big a deal, but just in the last few weeks I realize that all kinds of records are out there for free streaming basically.  There’s like 27 YouTube albums on there, there’s the new Kelly Clarkson on there, there’s all kind of stuff on MySpace you can get.  (inaudible) So the answer to your question is it’s developing.  So sorry I got a little complicated there.

Dr. Kent: So tell us, in closing here, I mean I could talk with you for hours about this, I love it.  How’d you get into this, and obviously the book’s done very well by you, and how did you get into this and come up with this one?

Steve Knopper: Well, basically I’ve been covering the music business a long time.  I started out just by being a music writer and a music critic.  I became a freelancer in 1996 and I realized that everybody was writing about music.  I wanted to write a record review for a major magazine, I had to compete with a billion people.  But if I wanted to do a news story about the music business, and interview 20 people, it’s a little bit harder to do that, but then the competition among people who can do that exact thing is not as much.  And it’s easier to find story ideas that no one else is pitching.  So that’s sort of how I got into it, and I originally wrote for Billboard, and then I wrote for Spin, and now I write for Rolling Stone about the same topic.  I had done a piece for Wired a couple years ago about trying to kill my computer with viruses.  Basically just clicking on all the stuff you’re not supposed to click on, and downloading all the spam stuff.  I wounded it pretty well, and the story ran and got some attention.  And someone from New York called me and asked if I had any book ideas.  And then the story gets kind of long and drawn out, but the short answer is I sent him ten ideas and he liked one of them, and eventually we had a book deal.

Dr. Kent:  It’s wonderful, I love it.  The fascinating thing about it is that you come to all of this from I think a really fresh perspective.  We’re so used to hearing, “Oh, that damn MySpace,” or you’ll hear it from the other end, “Oh, iTunes has really changed the whole world, and it’s so perfect, and everyone has such a tact.  And so I think what you’ve done brilliantly is sort of bring everyone together and tell the whole history.

Steve Knopper: Well thank you very much, that’s what I realize is that nobody had actually really told the story from the perspective of the people involved.  I interviewed something like 280 people for this book, and they were the people who were right there in it, negotiating, and I realized no one had done kind of a journalism book, kind of like what you just said, kind of fleshing out exactly what you just said. People basically know what happened, but not too many people know the inside details of what happened, and that was my goal, and I’m just really gratified that people seem to like it.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s so cool.  So where can we find your writing online, do you have a site?

Steve Knopper: Yeah, I do, I have a website.  It’s KNOPPS.com. My last name is Knopper, so that’s my long time nickname.

Dr. Kent: Well, Knopps.com, and we can check out all of his writing and I hope that also the piece from wired is up there somewhere?  I gotta go check that out. The book is called Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.  You gotta pick this book up. Thank you so much for chatting with me.

Steve Knopper: Thank you for having me, I enjoyed it.

Dr. Kent: All right, my next guest on the show has an extraordinary tale to tell, Terry Healey wrote a book called At Face Value, and it’s really unbelievable the story that he has to tell us throughout more than 30 surgeries on his face, and has an incredible life story to tell.  Come on back for that in just a minute.

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John Gilmore, Marilyn Monroe Friend & Expert

May 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! On this first day of spring it’s always great to look back. And my next guest on the show knows a whole bunch of really interesting people from back in the day.  One of his latest books here is called Inside Marilyn Monroe, and it’s a memoir by John Gilmore, my next guest.  We’ve chatted with him before, and happy to have him back on the show.  Welcome back, John.

John Gilmore: Hello, how are you doing?

Dr. Kent: Pretty good.  So tell me about this book.

John Gilmore: Well, I never wanted to really write a book about Marilyn, but a couple of years ago some things came up in Paris, and a book that they’re doing over there, that wanted to incorporate a piece by me on Marilyn.  I did it and then they wanted to do a book and I said no, I don’t know if I want to do it, but we went ahead.  We couldn’t come to terms, and I finally did it with an American publisher here because I’ve kind of taken the dive into the water to do the book, and it was swimming or sinking, one of the two, so I just went ahead and had to do the book.  It’s been very, I don’t know, I did the same thing with James Dean, who was a friend of mine.  I don’t particularly like writing books about friends and now this.  Oh, it was a good 20 years before I did anything about James Dean. And once again, I was kind of talked into it, the same as I did with Marilyn. It’s nothing I really chose to do.

Dr. Kent: So they were your personal friends.  What was the scene like?  Paint it for us, when you knew these folks.

John Gilmore: Well, in the case with Marilyn, I knew the actor John Hodiak.  I’ve kind of been a friend of his, and one of the few times I’ve actually approached someone and told them how great I thought they were.  We got kind of on, you know, chummy, and he lived on Bohemians and Complex, and Marilyn was living there.  This was like 1953, and he had a little party one afternoon.  Marilyn was down in a kind of foyer.  It was a very open, big space down there, and she was having her own party, and he introduced me to her.  And she was actually quite gorgeous on that day.  It was a beautiful spring day, sunny spring day, just like it is here in Hollywood today.  She was all dressed in white, and had these red, open-toed shoes and large sunglasses.  We talked a little bit, like “Hello, how are you?” and something like that, and John was right there.  It wasn’t until later I had the agent that I was dealing with at the time, because I was a fairly young actor, and his name was Wyn Marcamora. He was a very famous Hollywood agent.  And I went to, I was at a little Sunday afternoon kind of get together at his house, and Marilyn was there, too.  And we started talking again, because I’d met her, and it kind of got so that I don’t know, so we talked about things, I don’t know, she sensed something in me, I think, and we were talking about where we were from, and we came to the conclusion that although she was a few years older than me we were both born in the charity ward of the general hospital in downtown L.A.  She took that as kind of an astonishing fact in some way, I don’t know why it was so terribly surprising or such an intense kind of thing to her, but she did.  And then I saw her once or twice after that, and then I went to New York.  When I was in New York, that’s where I met her again.  She was then under the tutelage, if you want to call it, of Lee Strasberg, and I was associated with people in the studio, although I was not a member of the studio.  And I was at that transcribing all these new Strasberg lectures into a book that he was planning on doing with this director friend of mine John Stix.  I frankly, I’m not a great fan of actors studios.  A lot of people in there, and some are good people, but I was trying to become a very heavy handed way of dealing with things.  And the studio people, except for a few Broadway successes of a couple of the women there, I don’t know of too many people who really became major figures out of actors studios.  Marlon Brando never was really a member of the studio. James Dean was not.  He was visiting, sat in a couple of times.  He didn’t even get along with Strasberg.  Marilyn, she’d been fired from Fox at that time because she refused to do something, which was kind of interesting in way.  Here is a female under contract, and suddenly saying no, I don’t want to do these dumb things anymore, and so they dumped her.  And she went to New York and kind of went with her heart in her hand so that she could be taken care of, in a sense, by Lee Strasberg. And as time has proven, of course, they found that it to be a very financial good move for them.  It confused her, the work there, the whole thing confused her.  She had the idea that she wanted to really be a serious actress, and she did have a great deal of talent.  But it wasn’t going to be brought forth. I know she wanted to do the film Babydoll that the studio was doing, which was a Tennessee Williams piece, and never did get guts enough to do it, they told her really not to do it, and kind of held her back so that she could kind of be part of the actors studio.  Which of course gave her a real feather in her cap.  Well, it did a little bit, but more of a feather in the cap of the actors studio to have a major movie star in there all the time.  I know that Sheldon Winters was a real good friend of mine, and Shelly, she told me years later that they approached her, and they wanted her to be friendly with Marilyn and to kind of keep Marilyn happy all the time and tell her that this is really where she really belongs.  I saw her a few times in New York, she had dinner at John Stix house with myself and Marie Stapleton, and a number of other people.  She seemed to be an extremely unhappy person.  She was troubled, and I’m not saying, because people ask me, “Wow, what was Marilyn Monroe like?” but she wasn’t at all like you’d see her in the movies, you know.  That was an image that Marilyn really worked very, very hard to bring to perfection, because that was the woman that seemed to be working, and she was succeeding like that.  Unlike other movie stars, like John Hodiak for one, who was a movie star, but you’ve got Kirk Douglas, you’ve got Constance Bennett, you’ve got even Gloria Swallerton back then, and all these people.  Very much exactly as you meet them and talk to them, they are very much like that on the screen, unless they’re playing some very way out character role.  But Marilyn was not in any size and shape like the image that she was portraying on the screen.  She was really a very troubled person, she had a lot of hang-ups going.  Within this inner sanctum of Hollywood, which is not the average fan or the average people who leave all the time.  Michael James, or whatever it is, you know, really aren’t privileged to know what goes on.  And in Marilyn’s case, she just had been battling addiction to pills for so long, for so, so long, I mean since she was like 16 years old.  I think the first time she had her period as a girl, I think that the pain was so excruciating from, and later she was diagnosed with endometriosis, which she suffered the rest of her life.  And it was extremely painful.  And there are some times when Marilyn would say, “I’m too sick.” And they thought oh, here she goes again, copping out.  But she actually was really sick, she was just, she took, my God, she took, she was averaging probably around 30 ambutol a day, and that was really astounding. Of course, it eventually killed her.  It was a great loss, a tremendous loss, because she was just coming out of breaking away from that stereotypical role that she had worked so hard to develop, you know.  And you take a movie like the Misfits, which is to me one of the greatest American films made.  And Marilyn’s performance in that is absolutely stunning.  And she does, she’s coming through you, she breaking through, that kind of cute blonde blonde role and emerging, her real talents kind of emerging, which is really quite remarkable, even though there was some very difficult work, (inaudible) because of her addiction.  Anyway, that’s sort of what it was like and was going on back then.

Dr. Kent: What do you think she’d be doing if she were still alive today?

John Gilmore: I’m sorry, what? Come again.

Dr. Kent: What do you think she’d be doing if she were still alive today? What kind of roles would she be playing?

Paul Gilmore: I would imagine, I never like to be hypothetical about things, cause it doesn’t really mean anything. Anything could have happened, she could have died when she was 17, or 36.  But I would imagine that would be trying to do roles that similar in the shade of like something that Betty Davis would probably do, or, I mean this all hems on the idea she could have somehow freed herself from that image.  You know, the image of the dumb blonde, the gorgeous dumb blonde that’s really just after the millionaires and things, had she freed herself from that.  But I don’t know that Hollywood would have allowed her to free herself from that, you know.  My career as an actor ended in 1960, the early 60s.  At that time it had led up to the point where I was going to do a picture with Marilyn, which was based on the William Inch play, A Loss of Roses.  And I knew it in New York, and actually in New York the playwright told me at one time, this is long before the picture was contemplated, but he told me that everything I write of her, of the character, in this film, which was a kind of washed up stripper, a side show kind of stripper, a young girl who was really on the skids, he said every line that she says is Marilyn Monroe speaking in my mind. And I acted in the Los Angeles production of A Loss of Roses, which led me to 20th Century Fox, to Jerry Woolhalt, who was going to make the movie of Marilyn when Marilyn was on the contract at Fox.  She was doing some things rather good at the time, and she had some wonderful ideas for the stripper, and she did try volunteering them.  I had a very good friend of mine was Jerry Lod’s associate, and I was very privileged to be inside the convention when they were going on back and forth between them.  There was a couple of scenes in this picture, two or three scenes which are highly beautiful, dramatic scenes, especially a scene between her and myself.  It was this romantic scene where she falls in love with this young boy, and it was me, and it would have been absolutely wonderful.  And then there was a scene where she attempts suicide with broken glass. And Del Zanek at the time didn’t want to have anything like that, with the idea that Jerry Wall was going to do, and he kept cutting everything out of there.  And Marilyn told me that she was just so freaking out because the biggest thing that she wanted to do, that she felt was really a vital contribution as an actress would be cut out of the thing, and just cut arbitrarily almost, and reducing this script to just kind of a TV melodrama almost, you know.  But she got fired in the midst of it, in the midst of making of (inaudible), which I’m sure everybody probably knows, and she took off.  At that time Jerry Walt’s project had evolved from being called The Stripper to The Woman of Summer, it just came to halt, just completely fell apart, it was almost canceled until Walt finally just rescued it and brought in another director, who brought in another actor from New York in, who would play (inaudible).  It was all devastating to me, I just wanted to walk away from it.  Because I wanted to be a movie star, you know, I was a good actor, but my basic feeling about being an actor or being in theater or movies was simply I wanted to be a movie star, that was my whole goal, but it didn’t work out, didn’t turn out.  And Jerry Walt, they started shooting the movie, and  another friend of mine was Joanne Woodworth, she actually did come and replace Marilyn.  And she looks almost like Marilyn in the movie.  She said that she did it only as an homeage to Marilyn, and then Jerry Walt died in July of ’62, the year there were making the picture, and my friend Curtis had to take the reigns and took over the whole thing.  And then of course Marilyn died in August of that year. The movie was really quite unsuccessful and it’s not a very good movie, and it’s hard to find.  But it’s out there, but it slipped into nothing.  And Marilyn, of course, after the initial thing was fairly well forgotten for many, many years as most people, I guess as actors, and people succeed tremendously and achieve their par.  Now Marilyn was a major icon, the most famous of all motion picture personalities, but I must confess that this was the manufactured image and there was a tremendous amount of money being made on this, which Marilyn never saw any of this and she was really highly underpaid all that time but she did work it out with the studio that she was going to do the picture, going to finish Something’s Gotta Give and they renegotiated.  She actually was going to get some more money than what she was getting paid before, but she died before they could even get back and start it really going at the end.  That’s the story, but today, I don’t know.  Today she could possibly be playing character roles, which she’d have to do, she’d be considerably older now, she’d be well into her 80’s. But there’s no possibility that Marilyn was going to continue with it.  I think she probably would have eventually got into something else in life.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been fascinating chatting with you, and I can’t wait until the next time, and we’ll talk about another one of your…

John Gilmore: Yeah, Bonnie and Clyde.  This is the 75th anniversary year.

Dr. Kent: Exactly. And we can visit John Gilmore’s site online at johngilmore.com, and of course with just that book he’s got a website for the Marilyn Monroe biography, and that is insidemarilynmonroe.com.  It’s been great chatting with you.

John Gilmore: You too, take care.  Bye, bye.

Dr. Kent: And now my next guest on the show is the author of the book that talks about his transformation to becoming an ER doctor, and life and death in the ER, something that a whole lot of people know something about, and all of us would like to know a little more about.  So come on back for that and we’ll talk to him.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Entertainment, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Sharon Waxman | Live on Sound Authors

February 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome to Sound Authors!  I’ve got four great author guests on the show today.  My first guest will be award winning journalist Sharon Waxman.  She’ll be speaking to us about her latest book called Loot: The Battle over stolen treasures of the ancient world and later on in the show we’ll talk to Jocelyn Crowley, who has a book called Defiant Dads: Fathers rights activists in America and there’s an author called Karen Brody and her latest book is called Birth and at the end of the show, we’ll speak to musician Dan Goldman who has truly gorgeous songs.  But my first guest, it’s my special honor to welcome Sharon Waxman.  She’s written a wonderful book called Loot: The battle over the stolen treasures of the ancient world.  Beautiful inside and out this book.  Welcome to the show Sharon Waxman.

Sharon Waxman:  Hi, thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me about how this book started for you.

Sharon Waxman:  Oh this book well you know I’m actually better known to my readers as someone who’s written about Hollywood a lot in the past decades plus, but before that I was a foreign correspondent for about ten years and for particularly interested in the ancient world and the middle east.  Living in Los Angeles where I do there were a lot of headlines that at one point started to emerge as problems getting ###, which is based here and Italy and Greece, demanding antiquities be returned from the museum.

Then I started hearing from friends; I used to have long-distance relationships in Egypt and the chief archaeologist of Egypt was telling me he had started this campaign to get the return of major treasures from western museums like the Bust of Nefertiti, which is in Berlin and the Rosetta stone which is in London at the British museum.  I started putting the pieces together thinking there’s some broader trend going on here, what is it all about?  Why are all of these smaller countries challenging big countries like the United States or France and England to get these things back?  Then I started realizing that its part of a bigger picture that’s going on in the world, which is people, smaller countries taking control of their cultural heritage and taking possession of their cultural identity and wanting the return of these treasures as part of that.

So I decided to explore that question as a journalist, just to take that journey back in time to countries where pieces are now residing and where it was taken from and it was really fascinating.  I learned about these amazing characters in the 19th century and I also learned a lot of stuff that I had kind of taken for granted.  For example, I never knew how the Rosetta Stone got to the British museum or how the bust of Nefertiti came to be in Berlin.  In fact I didn’t really know how the great treasures or even how the collections of ancient treasures even originated at the great museums.  So all of it was a great learning journey for me and if readers are interested in learning about that I think they’ll like that journey back.

Dr. Kent:  Its almost its not too far a departure from your Hollywood reporting because all of us love talking about these ancient treasures in Egypt and since we were small children we’ve seen it in cartoons and documentaries.  How did your passion start for all of this?

Sharon Waxman:  For the ancient world?

Dr. Kent:  Yes.

Sharon Waxman:  Well I think probably going to museums as a kid.  I grew up in Cleveland and there was a really great collection of antiquities and art too in the Cleveland Museum of Art by the way which is not a major character in the book but does happen to be one of the museums in the crosshairs of countries like Italy and Greece.  In fact they just made a deal to give 13 pieces back from their collection, so this is a trend that’s going on and its affecting our museums.  It’s absolutely true that as a young person, which I guess I’m not anymore, it was going after college to the Louvre and discovering these amazing treasures helped really peak my curiosity in archaeology and the ancient world and ancient civilizations.

Dr. Kent:  So let’s talk about the politics of this right away because I don’t think all that many folks are familiar with the battles that have gone back and forth and the legal aspect.  You talk about what’s the law surrounding it.  How long does it have to be gone and all that stuff?

Sharon Waxman:  Well there aren’t really laws that govern who took what, when and what’s the right thing to do.  That’s part of the reason why it’s a free for all right now and why as you say it really does become political very quickly.  There are local laws in each country for example, the curator, the former curator of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Marian True, is on trial today in Rome under Italian law for fraud and for receiving stolen goods.  So it’s actually a criminal trial.  You’re talking about a Harvard educated PhD in Greek and Roman civilization who for 24 years collected antiquities as chief curator of the antiquities department at the Getty and its not like she was stealing for herself, she was collecting for the museum.

That is the person who is now on trial for fraud and criminal possession in Rome under Italian law.  So there is a problem that you have a ### law and you can have a politically motivated prosecution because this is certainly politically motivated in the case of Italy and the Getty.  In fact they told me and you can see in the book what they say is what they really wanted was to get their stuff back but the Getty wouldn’t give it so they undertook this prosecution of the Getty curator.  The thing about it is my first instinct was to say the west stole all these things, they should give them back it would be the just thing to do, but as I investigated I found its really more complicated than that and raises so many questions.

In addition to that, of course I traveled to the countries that were where the ancient world was; Egypt, Turkey and one of the stories I tell in the book is how Turkey through the Metropolitan Museum a law suit actually sued under American law the Metropolitan Museum of New York in the 1980s to get these golden treasures back from the time of King Crisis.  You know the phrase he’s as rich as Crisis so there really was a King Crisis and he was very rich of course and they were very skilled in making gold and silver back in the time we’re talking going back 2500 years.  That civilization is now completely gone but its in Turkey so Turkey found out that the Met had bought illegally dug up and smuggled gold and silver pieces and sued and got them back.  Then I went and found out that in 2006 a hoardist called the Lydian Hoarde was stolen from a museum in Turkey where they didn’t have security cameras and they didn’t take care of it and let anybody visit it.

So the question arises is the right thing to do, certainly its not right to buy illegally dug up things because it ruins archaeological sites and kills our common heritage, but is it always the right thing to give it back if that country cant take care of what they have.

Dr. Kent:  I spent a little time in Cairo and went to the Cairo Museum and I was astonished that the wall is just plastered with things and I had no idea what I was looking at.

Sharon Waxman:  Yeah, exactly.  That place is a relic in and of itself, it’s amazing.  their trying to build a new museum; trying to raise money to build a state of the art museum outside of the pyramids, but it is astonishing.  I’m sure some of your listeners have been to Egypt and if they’ve been to Egypt they’ve been to the Cairo Museum and you can see that the lettering on the typewriters looks like it was done in 1902 and it was.  The labeling is there; the museum was built in 1900 so it’s a great example of colonial architecture and stuff goes missing.  I could go on but its all in the book.

Dr. Kent:  I heard that they even stored mummies in the hallway for awhile for some reason.

Sharon Waxman:  Things are stored not only in the hallway but one of the things I tell in the book because I had lost who your listeners if they’ve seen anything about Egypt they’ve seen this guy.  He’s an Indiana Jones type character, you know he wears the Indiana Jones hat; he’s always very charismatic and is really trying to drag Egypt into the 21st century so he has a team of people building a computer database because they have no proper inventory of what they even have.  But what I discovered when I went to the museum and lots of people were doing the inventory were students who were volunteering from France and England and America, but on this little team of people on the left off in this very sweaty corner of the museum.

I found that there was another rival project going on underneath the building which I also went to visit, which is funded by the Japanese to do the same thing.  So there’s bureaucracy, politics, and I went and asked why are there two projects duplicating one another’s work?  They said, well it’s true that there are but we are going to take this out to the new museum when it opens.  It kind of highlights a bit of chaotic and Byzantine and a hard job to take a country like Egypt which has so many issues; poverty being a main one, and try to bring it to a state of the art museum.  They have so much, they have far more monuments and statues and mummies than even a wealthy country would have trouble taking care of all of that.

Dr. Kent:  Now I’m curious, I’d like to talk a little about your background.  I did read that you learned both Hebrew and Arabic.  I’m also an Arabic speaker.

Sharon Waxman:  Oh cool; we could conduct the interview in Arabic.  You might lose all your listeners, they might not like that.

Dr. Kent:  Yeah, I don’t think the transcriptionist would be happy with me!  How have all of your life paths crossed in your latest project?

Sharon Waxman:  In my latest project?  Are you referring to the book?

Dr. Kent:  The book and whatever else you’re working on.

Sharon Waxman:  My latest project is actually a news site, a news organization which took me back into Hollywood and that was launched a week ago and is called thewrap.com, which is a play on “that’s a wrap” and that’s taken me back out of the world of cultural politics where I’ve gone to and I’m not sure that all the strands of my life do meet.  I’ve been a newspaper journalist for 20 some years and you may know and your listeners may know that newspapers are in deep trouble financially at the moment and we’re trying to create a new kind of digital news organization that’s still professional journalism.

Dr. Kent:  I’m looking at one of your latest articles that says exclusive, Bale says his F-bombs were justified.

Sharon Waxman:  Oh where did you find that on Google?

Dr. Kent:  No I found it on your thewrap.com site.

Sharon Waxman:  On the site, right, so we got a big story today, the studio is rising, the studio is falling, deals are falling through the Oscars are coming.

Dr. Kent:  I’m curious about this whole Christian Bale thing and all of the celebrity things that end up being pitched to major networks and coming through CNN and all that.  How does all of that happen?

Sharon Waxman:  How do celebrities get on major networks?

Dr. Kent:  There’s a lot of people that have meltdowns, how does this particular story about Bale get front page?

Sharon Waxman:  Well that’s one of the things that we’re really focused on in the wrap because nobody’s really chronicling and the web has changed our culture; that’s too broad a statement but how it has just I’m sure nobody’s reporting on that in the Hollywood arena basically because that’s exactly what happened is you had this A-list star Christian Bale who had a long moment of indiscretion on the set of his movie but that happened nine months ago!  Just because somebody released the audio of that, it was the seed that was in his microphone.  He was miked as an actor, got out on the internet and within 24 hours the guy went from being a hero, the Dark Knight into being the subject of ridicule and satire and poor moral judgment.

Not to say that he does not deserve that but it serves as a mirror of what the bloggists here and the web becomes as a collective judgment.  That in turn percolates up immediately to the broadcast networks or the big boys of which there are fewer and fewer.  It is a real lesson I think in how our culture has changed so profoundly.  Just think about it, a set is a very private place where it’s considered a closed circle of that family.  For that to come out in public in this community where I am in Hollywood is a very jarring but it’s the world we live in now.

Dr. Kent:  I’m fascinated; now as I’m listening to you and checking out your site at the same time, you’ve got the waxwork and I find it so interesting these days that all these media collide.  Books, blogging, and news media all sort of blend into one these days.  Where do you think its going?

Sharon Waxman:  I think we don’t know exactly where it’s going and that’s what makes for a very exciting time as a journalist to be able to be writing about it and learning and exploring.  Stuff is being invented every single day and the kind of changes we’re seeing in the way we communicate and the vehicles that create common glue that holds together as a society.  Movies are a big part of that; TV is a big part of that.  Newspapers were a part of it but they’re going away so what’s going to replace that is obviously something that’s a conversation, the connection that’s happening on the web but a different kind of communicating and its much more interactive obviously and fluid and instantaneous and global.  That to me as a journalist is one of the most fascinating things we can observe and write about but yet we’re also part of that because we are changing too as part of those changes.  It’s a really interesting time to be doing what I’m doing, at least for me.

Dr. Kent:  Wow.  It seems like you always choose the things that you enjoy.  Let’s go back to Loot for a minute.  Because you’ve covered celebrities and big figures how did you find it chronicling these big figures in all of history here?  Being tossed back from country to country.

Sharon Waxman:  It was really wonderful.  It was like being Indiana Jones as a journalist because the 19th century had; you know what they did in the 19th century?  You’re bopping me back and forth but I spent a year mostly by myself in libraries and crawling through tombs and now I’m back in the web world which is completely different.  The thing about the people in the 19th century is that they all kept journals.  All these guys with these incredible characters; one of whom I write about in the book, this guy Giovanni and he was a circus performer who became an archaeologist at a time when it was being invented.

Archaeology itself only dates back to the 19th century and he kept these amazing diaries of his travels up and down the Nile.  He discovered the Abu symbol, these huge statues in Aswan that was a temple built by Ramsey’s and he discovered the entrance to the second pyramid and he really was a circus strongman, that’s how he started.  But he was a self taught engineer and inventor and all these guys in the 19th century is part of the people getting educated and they learned how to draw.  So they would keep diaries and do sketches of their work.  There’s this one amazing character after another that you can read and listen to their own words because they really come to life.

Dr. Kent:  When you cover Hollywood, do you also find yourself in a back dusty room of libraries?

Sharon Waxman:  No, not at all, I’m at my desk.

Dr. Kent:  How do you go about that?

Sharon Waxman:  Oh we’re just fielding phone calls, emails, texts from all over but yeah, we do go to the movies occasionally, not often enough.

Dr. Kent:  You really tread the line between generations; it’s fascinating.  Well there’s many websites online that detail things about this book Loot.

Sharon Waxman:  There’s my site which is lootbook.com and all the reviews and commentary are there, discussion about the book and that’s the most gratifying thing is the response from readers who really have embraced the subject and offered up suggestions and thoughts.  That was my goal with the book to bring the subject out of the hands of the museum authority and bring it to the wider public because there are solutions to be found to this issue of antiquities that are in a state of war at the moment.  But only when more reasonable people, which are those of us who are not primary actors in this thing, there are ways to find to come to solutions that serve all of us and that in fact most of all serve the antiquities themselves so they’re not lost.

Dr. Kent:  Absolutely and where can we find out about the antiquities after reading your book?

Sharon Waxman:  Well, you can go to lootbook.com, that’s one place where there are resources, there’s lots of resources in the back of the book in the bibliography and I would contact the local museum and get involved in your local museum.

Dr. Kent:  And visit Egypt.

Sharon Waxman:  Yeah.

Dr. Kent:  Now I have another question for you.  from my personal experience, when I went down beneath the pyramid like most tourists do in that narrow, narrow tunnel and there’s this sort of empty room at the bottom.

Sharon Waxman:  It’s a tomb.

Dr. Kent:  What did you feel?  You’ve been down there I assume.

Sharon Waxman:  I didn’t go down there because I went all the way to the top, which is I think his name was ### tomb at the top.  ### And it’s amazing; it’s like being in a modern art gallery, all wax that was floated up the Nile and yeah.

Dr. Kent:  In your mind can you picture the works of art in those spaces?  I know when I was in this tomb I was like man, this is empty I wish I knew what used to be in here.

Sharon Waxman:  Either it was empty, or I think the tomb robbers took whatever was in there many years ago and I’m not enough of an Egyptologist although I did learn a great deal from doing this book, but I don’t know if that tomb was full in the same way that the tombs in the Valley of the Kings was filled absolutely chalk a block with furniture and food and like King Tut which was absolutely top to bottom every square inch filled with the belongings of the king.  Those might’ve been the same.

Dr. Kent:  It’s so much fun thinking about this stuff, just like I’m pretty obsessed with the newest headlines in Hollywood and this book I’ve heard a lot about it.  I’m only a few pages into it but I’m psyched to read the rest.  It’s called Loot: The battle of the stolen treasures of the ancient world.  It’s by Sharon Waxman, thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Sharon Waxman:  Thank you and I hope your listeners will check out my new site thewrap.com if they’re interested in intelligent dialogue about what’s going on in Hollywood.

Dr. Kent:  Yeah, its good stuff.  Thewrap.com.  Well thank you so much and have a nice day!

Sharon Waxman:  Thanks for having me, see you later.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show will be Jocelyn Crowley who has interviewed more than 150 father’s rights group leaders and she’s got a new book called Defiant Dads: Fathers rights activists in America, so come on back and listen to that.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Entertainment, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Interview with Norma J. Watts | Sound Authors Radio

January 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome back to Sound Authors!  My next guest on the show is Norma J. Watts.  She’s the author of The Art of Baby Nameology, Explore the Deeper Meaning of Names for your Baby.  But its more exciting than just that, she’s also an expert in saying what names mean.  So lets start out, what do you think my name means; Kent Gustavson?

Norma J. Watts:  Oh hi Kent.

Dr. Kent:  How are you?

Norma J. Watts:  Oh I’m good.  I just work with the first name.  I found that there are some studies that they run the whole name.  They study the middle name, the last name, all of it and with women they drive you crazy; they get married several times and their maiden name and this name.  I’ve just based the Art of Nameology on the first name because of the point is that when we meet someone, we just know their first name and that says a lot about us so that is what this basic study is all about.  And your name Kent is there’s a hidden seven in the beginning of your name if we add the K and the E together so this tells me that you’re either spiritual or scientific but this is hidden, not everybody knows but you have an inner search for knowledge.  Having to do with scientific or spiritual.  A Kent could be a person who studies the bible or a Kabala or possibly you study the stock market or a handicap horse racing, you may be into because there’s a science in that.  But somebody with the name Kent or with the first two letters together, there’s a hidden step in there, so there’s something you like to study.

Dr. Kent:  I’m certainly a little obsessed with not horse racing, but definitely interested in the bible and science and all sorts of things.  What does it mean to take a name that parents gave a child and then find deeper meaning within it?  How does that work exactly?

Norma J. Watts:  When we’re born, our names are drawn to us subconsciously at birth and that name has the energy of our personality.  So of course it reveals our personality really.  To a person like me and to people who study names like I do we have a little bit more inside knowledge of what that persons about.

Dr. Kent:  I have to say I’ve seen a lot of information since that there is a lot to a name.  My fiancé, her name is Katarina and when I first heard the name I thought what a beautiful name and then I thought she was a more beautiful person.  Not that I didn’t think she was beautiful before but there’s a lot to that; people say oh does it fit with my last name and they’re always thinking about names and you can almost in your head think, oh what would a Kent look like, or what would a Norma J. Watts look like?  Talk about perception in the world of certain names.

Norma J. Watts:  For example, Katarina, by the way when you said that, I saw she has two T’s in her name, right?  And that sort of matches up with your name.  Our names can be compatible with other names and the T means dynamic, busy lifestyle.  She’s probably always, even when her plate is full, she’s taking on more and usually getting it all done.  She’s probably very dynamic.

Dr. Kent:  Indeed.

Norma J. Watts:  So it does tell what we’re like.

Dr. Kent:  Are there people who, I always hear this?  People that change their names or for example, my mother, her name is Cynthia and as a kid she was called Cindy.  After about 40 years or 45 years of that, she said listen, my name is now Cynthia, nobody calls me Cindy anymore.

Norma J. Watts:  I’m seeing a lot of that because I have a blog on Amazon and it’s in a new age section and it’s called Our Names Reveal Our Personalities, I’ll Prove It.  I have over 1100 posts and I tell people just tell me your first name and I’ll tell you what it means and invariably people that didn’t like their birth name, when I tell them what it means they actually like it again.  To feel that about your birth name and even if you go to a nickname, you end up, you can’t get away from your birth name, you just can’t.

Dr. Kent:  Here’s another hard question for you.  My father works with undernourished children and abused children and he once worked with kids called Whiskey and Brandy, they were twins.  What do you do when you’re named Whiskey from birth?

Norma J. Watts:  Oh for heavens sake!  That’s sad.  Well, I’m thinking that is still their destiny name.  The letters in the name give us a definite description of that person’s personality.  It’s interesting when you say Whiskey and Brandy; they both have a Y at the end and Y means a lot of freedom.  These kids, we’re still going to be like our heredity; there’s heredity in everything and even in nameology when I look at the letters in the name and what the parents’ names are, we inherit certain letters from our parents time and time again.  We’ll see that our children have the same letters or similar letters and we want to put those letters in their name and they’re going to inherit certain qualities no matter what.

Dr. Kent:  That’s fascinating, my fathers name is Ed and mine is Kent and it does kind of make sense.

Norma J. Watts:  Yes, you’ve got his E.

Dr. Kent:  What about your name?  How do you analyze your own name?

Norma J. Watts:  Well I never liked my name, Norma.  I thought gosh, that’s such an old name.  I really used to be embarrassed about it but since I’ve become a nameologist, I love my name.  I love what each letter means.  Now, there’s a choice.  I could either live on the positive side of my letters or on the negative side of my letters.  There’s no bad name, there’s no such thing as a bad name because every letter has a positive and negative side to it and its up to us, whether we’re going to live on the positive or negative side of our letters.

Dr. Kent:  One of my favorite songs in history is A Boy Named Sue, where of course the father named his son Sue and the kid is angry, its an angry song and at the end the father says well do whatever you want to me but the reason I named you Sue is because I knew I wasn’t going to be there and that it would make you tough.

Norma J. Watts:  The funny song, its interesting that the name Sue, the U is a funny letter.  It has a sense of humor.  It’s ruled by three in that it’s the natural comedian so that was a really great song in that way.

Dr. Kent:  As a nameologist, what do you do everyday?

Norma J. Watts:  I have a regular day job that I cant quit and I even have a joke about that on my profile; don’t give up your day job and it has a picture of me at my workplace with my nametag and everything but at night I blog and I keep up a nameology blog and it kind of keeps the spark going, keeps things going and makes me happy.

Dr. Kent:  Okay, so how did you get into it?  What’s the history of nameology?  When you talked about numbers, what do those mean?

Norma J. Watts:  I actually as an astrologer, a student of astrology since I was 12 years old, I believe that all metaphysical studies are based on astrology.  So it was sort of a branch off of it and it was just sort of natural for me to understand it.  I understand all the metaphysical sciences.  Its sort of like if you can play piano you can easily learn how to play other instruments because if you have that basic understanding, you understand others as well.  It’s the same thing, so that’s why when I picked up a book on it, I right away understood.

There’s two different types of numerology that are studied here in the United States and the west studied the pathagarist [assumed spelling] method which I do as well.  It just connected with it right away, I understood it.  So I use the Greek mathematician pathagarist method and this method has been around for almost 3,000 years.  It’s still hard for me to understand why people don’t see this and why they don’t know our names are as plain as the nose on our face and yet nobody knows that you can tell a lot about a person just by knowing their first name.

Dr. Kent:  Right, it’s just like people say there’s that famous phrase, you can’t judge a book by its cover, but as someone in the book industry, you really can.

Norma J. Watts:  Yes, I beg to differ!

Dr. Kent:  Speaking of your book cover, it’s a beautiful book.  It’s been put out by source books and its one of so many baby name books but what’s great about this book is it’s almost like the names have more than just okay, where is this from or whatever.  It talks about the strength of the individual and all of that.  Did you just go about one name after the other?  You just started working?

Norma J. Watts:  Oh you mean the name definition section?  About 70% of the book is name definitions.  I wanted to do the work for the reader so you don’t have to try to mash out what does this name mean.  I kind of did that for people.  You can look up your own name, you can look up the names of your children or what you’d like to have and it gives a little idea.  I had to go with the system, a scientific mathematical system so it could’ve been very repetitive.  Most books like this are too repetitive so I really had to dice it up.  There’s looking at the power number, the secret numbers, there’s hidden numbers; I had to really tailor and custom fit every single name.  I spent a lot of time with this; it took a lot of years to do.

Dr. Kent:  It’s a fun book, even for someone who’s not expecting a child.  I was paging through it and you can look at every single letter and of course you always flock to your own name first.  You read the section and it talks about if the name starts with this letter.  It’s a fascinating book.  How’s this been doing for you?

Norma J. Watts:  It’s been moving along but this type of study hasn’t quite taken off yet.  People don’t know, they’re like what is this?  It’s a different kind of animal so I think it’s still an unknown thing, just a few people here and there really know about it and its kind of still hasn’t taken off.

Dr. Kent:  It’s still catching on.

Norma J. Watts:  I hope!

Dr. Kent:  When parents name the child, is there something unconscious going on?  My parents always say well we named you; my whole name is Kent Samuel Gustavson and they say we named you that because it sounded good together, the rhythm worked.  Certain parents then name their children Apple or in the public eye.  It’s so interesting how different celebrities are from normal folks, in certain communities people make up names.  Talk about all the different kind of names.

Norma J. Watts:  Again, our names they vibrate a certain personality so when that parent is thinking, gee, I think I’ll name my child apple, when they’re saying the word apple, those two P’s, they’re seven rule letters.  The P has a knowledgeable, commanding first impression and this is the feeling that the mother or whoever is naming the child feels in that child that they’re carrying.  They feel that vibration, that personality.  Oftentimes, parents will have a name all picked out and right after that baby’s born, just before they put the name on the birth certificate they think, you know what, this looks more like an Ashley, or this is more like a Karen, I think we should go with this.  Oftentimes they will change the name and go with what they feel; that vibration of the person’s personality comes out and that’s what they end up using.

Dr. Kent:  How about names like my middle name, which is Samuel.  How much do you credit to for that one it means in Hebrew one who fears God?  How much do you look at etymology?  How much does that interest you?

Norma J. Watts:  It doesn’t at all.  It’s a whole different thing; its apples to oranges.  I don’t even look at the middle or last name.  I kind of take it into consideration; sometimes a person’s middle or last name I can see some of that in their personality, but the very first name.  Nobody calls you Samuel, everybody calls you Kent.  That’s the name that I see that I dissect and that I look at and is the nose on your face.  To me, this is you.  You have a hidden 3 for example too.  Some hidden literary talent.  Not everybody knows, you probably have some books in the works.  There’s some things I can pick out of your name that say this is what this person is about and it helps me know, should I warm up to this person.  If there’s a salesperson knocking on the door, a Doris with the O first vowel, oh they’ve got to have kids or pets and I can sell my products with that in mind, you know?  So it’s good for everything, not just naming children; you can also get to know the other person that you’re dealing with.

Dr. Kent:  What are some popular names these days?

Norma J. Watts:  These days I’m seeing a lot of Peyton and Vincent are coming back.  I think its funny but recently I’ve been seeing Hunter for a girl and Gunner for a boy and I’m wondering if Governor Palin didn’t have some influence there.  Then Ashley is still popular, Jaden, Noah, Taylor and Madison.  People put names together like BethAnn and Julissa.  They’re putting names together now, especially with the girls.

Dr. Kent:  Right and a lot of the older names are kind of coming back.

Norma J. Watts:  Yes the vintage names, they’re coming back and I love it.

Dr. Kent:  Like Bella and things like that.

Norma J. Watts:  Yeah, I think it’s fantastic.

Dr. Kent:  Okay so let’s say you do name a child one thing and in college my nickname was Rusty.  Does that mean anything about a personality?

Norma J. Watts:  Ah-Hah!  Yes it does.  See it’s interesting, you didn’t lose that T.  You had it in Kent and then in Rusty.  Rusty has that U first vowel.  You were more funny in college, you had a sense of humor, you were probably more talkative and you ruled communications that maybe you did some kind of writing or a lot of writing.  The R is kind of I don’t want to say you’re a bully, but it’s a very strong presence.  Its very what do you call it?  Oh you could have been intimidating to other people with the R up front.  And the Y, you needed a lot of freedom.  I bet you were pretty wild actually with a name like that.

Dr. Kent:  Yeah a little bit.

Norma J. Watts:  I’m seeing that.

Dr. Kent:  Let’s talk about some stars because I think that’s fun for everybody.  There are so many names out there that lately its almost like they want to shock the world by naming their children, but maybe that’s not the case, maybe its what they’re feeling.

Norma J. Watts:  Well if you think about it, their child is going to be very special like nobody else’s child because they are a child of a celebrity.  So right away that kind of makes sense to me that Apple, or Scout, or they come up with Ireland, Suri, Shiloh, and speaking of those names, I made sure I drove my publisher crazy at the very last minute saying oh, we got to get Suri in there and we got to get… I kept going back and putting celebrity’s children’s names in that book.

So if you look in the book, you’re going to see the name Apple, Suri, Shiloh and some others.  You also see a lot of multi-cultural or Russian type names, Hungarian.  I had a Japanese girl tell me the other day, you know what?  My mothers name is in here.  I wanted to have a little bit of everything in there.  I just wanted to be different.

Dr. Kent:  This has been a fun discussion chatting with Norma J. Watts.  She’s the author of The Art of Baby Nameology and I really appreciate chatting with you and we’ll stay in touch.

Norma J. Watts:  Thank you Kent.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show is a New York Times Bestselling author of the Wasted Vigil, a novel by Nadeem Aslam and it’s the winner of the Curiama [assumed spelling] Prize as well.  So come on back for that in just one minute.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Spirituality, TRANSCRIPTS, Childrens, Entertainment, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Inspiration, PODCAST 

Interview with Christopher Tennant | Sound Authors Radio

December 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome back to Sound Authors!  There’s a lot of talk these days about the rich and the poor, Wall Street, the scoundrels and the elite and all sorts of things.  There are some television shows on all about the lives of the rich and famous; Gossip Girl is out there for kids and the author of The Official Filthy Rich Handbook is Christopher Tennant and he’s on the show with us today.  Welcome to the show.

Christopher Tennant:  Hi how ya doing?  Thanks for being here.  Thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me about the lifestyles of the filthy rich in a nutshell here.

Christopher Tennant:  Let’s see, it’s the .001 percent of Americans who as you might have read made a ton of money in the last decade basically.  There’s always been the rich, but never this sort of filthy rich, which are people with more than well 30 million in liquid assets.  And they’ve never had a book; they’ve never had a guidebook in like every exclusive club.  Every exclusive club I’ve been to I didn’t see one so I decided to write a book for that.  It’s a hysterical tongue in cheek book that is really a cradle to grave guide of how to fit in with the filthy rich.

Sally:  This is so funny Christopher.  I was reading your website last night and right now I’m actually looking at the heiress and can you tell us a little more about how you came up with the whole idea for how you’re labeling her earrings and her dress.  Did you have any sort of models or guides for this particular photograph and picture?

Christopher Tennant:  Yeah, basically from my end I’ve been a journalist in New York for about ten years working at page 6 of the New York Post, and a bunch of different New York magazines; New York Magazine and a newspaper called the New York Observer and ran into all of these people.  I started thinking there’s a lot of, it’s a subculture like any other subculture.  They have their own kind of ways of speaking and dressing and their own social rules that guide how they all behave.

And the official preppy handbook you might remember came out in 1980 and basically the publisher I ended up going with actually published the preppy handbook in 1980 so I got to work with the same designer.  The preppy handbook was kind of a first satirical guide and that was about the declining species of the 80s, which was certainly the pop color, glossy, New England preppy.  So the format kind of worked for it.

Dr. Kent:  The book is amazing.  It pops on every page and I’ve got to say I sat there for about an hour just reading page after page when I first picked up the book.  It’s fantastically put together.  There’s so much information in there, this must have taken you for ever.

Christopher Tennant:  It took about a year and a half.  It started out being late so I kind of when I was finally done I looked back on it and said oh my god, how did you do that?  It was really kind of, I worked at 100 percent true and I wanted it to be 100 percent funny but I settled for 90/80 to be charitable.  Yeah, it was just tons and tons of research.  All of the information is kind of out there and I did a lot of interviews with a lot of very over privileged people in different parts of the country.

Dr. Kent:  This week is a big week in politics along with just the Wall Street stuff and I got to say I’ve been hearing about a lot of really rich folks scrambling a little bit because they know their taxes are going to be going up.

Christopher Tennant:  Yeah, they’re just, they seem, the filthy rich are just suffering the same kind of lack of awareness as everyone else.  It just seems like the country as a whole everyone is kind of pulling back in anticipation of something really bad happening, which I think is going to be a self fulfilling prophecy.  I’ve heard of people canceling their job charters in St. Bart’s over Christmas and all that.  It’s those tough decisions but it seems like nobody really knows what’s going to happen so they’re saying oh, maybe its not a good idea to you know go on a three week golf excursion in Scotland this year.  Everyone has this wait and see approach.  So their obviously doing fine, they’re going to be just fine.

Sally:  I’d love to know in terms of you working with your publisher and editor, how much input did you have and how much editorial control did you have to give up?  Were you involved in picking the photographs of the models?  Were you involved with a lot of it?

Christopher Tennant:  I actually did, yes.  The design was really a collaborative effort and I was involved in every step.  I recluded people for the photo shoots and it was really a back and forth effort.  Because there are so many pieces in it, I think there’s over 300 little pieces of independent boxes or little charts or whatever so I would kind of map out what the chapter would look like and the designer would go into it and we’d go back and forth.

Sally:  It’s just a great job.  As somebody that did my own book I just want to say it’s great.

Christopher Tennant:  Thanks, they really wanted to kill me by the end of it.  They gave me a lot of rope because it was this sort of seminal book for me.  I always wanted to write a book like that and I think its pitch perfect satire so that was kind of hanging over me.  I wanted to produce something that was at least as good as that so I was really, we didn’t speak for a few weeks after the book was done, they were like okay crazy person go away.

Dr. Kent:  Were these models or were they people playing the part?

Christopher Tennant:  Half of them are friends of mine and the other half are people that work in publishing companies.

Dr. Kent:  How about you?  Did you model the filthy rich on yourself?

Christopher Tennant:  No, not at all.  For better or for worse, no.

Dr. Kent:  Is that your goal with this book and all the rest to become on of these filthy rich?

Christopher Tennant:  It’s got to sell an awful lot of copies because it’s only $11.95.  So 100 million copies might put me up there.  If I had known what I was getting into from the beginning because it really took from cradle to grave to cover everything.  So I would go around and talk to people at parties or read something and go wait we have to mention that.  There would always be something.  Or ooh, there’s this picnic boat, this boat made by Hinckley and its 36 feet long and costs $750,000 and John Kerry has one and all these people have one.  And it was like no, I didn’t know about the Hinckley boat.  So then all these little kind of bits of information was tossed at me from different research excursions and I would add it in.  I really did want to be all inclusive.

Dr. Kent:  The book is called The Official Filthy Rich Handbook.  It’s really something that all Americans, especially middle class Americans have to read.  It’s about the lives of the filthy rich and how to get there by Christopher Tennant.  It’s a beautiful tongue in cheek satire, I love it, we both love it.  Thanks so much for being on the show.

Christopher Tennant:  Well thank you, so much.  It’s at Barnes, Borders and Amazon and I have a website filthyrichhandbook.com.

Sally:  By the way congratulations for being number three today in the sociology class at Amazon.  I’m very impressed with your ranking so good job.

Christopher Tennant:  Thanks, yeah I was worried about the total economic implosion but we’re hanging on.  But its still fun to read even if you’re hurting for cash.

Dr. Kent:  Thanks so much and have a wonderful day.

Christopher Tennant:  You too man.

Dr. Kent:  Right after the break we’re going to have book marketing strategist Warren Whitlock, legendary book marketing fellow and he’s going to be twittering at the same time as he’s talking with us on the show and I’m twittering here as well.  Come on back for Warren Whitlock.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Comics, Entertainment, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

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