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The other night Elaine and I got a rare treat – to see Hal Holbrook perform his incomparable one-man show as Mark Twain at the Thousand Oaks Civic Center. We were third-row center and it was a phenomenal performance, with Twain as timely as ever, speaking out against corporations, ban

Went to the Los Angeles Festival of Books last week at UCLA, my alma mater (now that’s a story for another time…) and spent the day browsing through wonderful tomes old and new, checked out a fun exhibit on Huckleberry Finn at the Powell Library, bought a Fahrenheit 451 t-shirt for th

Wanted to chime in with some more fun details about my visit with Ray Bradbury a few weeks back. One of Ray’s great friends was the brilliant actor Charles Laughton.  Ray recalled that the first time Laughton came over to his house, he towered over one of Ray’s young daughters. “I’m v

Hi, guys, Ray Ramos sent this photo from a recent book signing of me with Ray Bradbury, Norman Corwin and George Clayton Johnson.  Quite remarkable; they look like aged wood, distilled wisdom. If you don’t know of Corwin, he was the guy both Bradbury and Serling wanted to grow u

Just finished doing the audio commentaries for THE TWILIGHT ZONE — fifty-two episodes, one third of the entire series! One of the highlights (and there were many) was the commentary I recorded last week with Richard Donner, who directed “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (as

Hi, guys, I just wanted to chime in on the announcement that the major networks, studios and agencies have agreed to pony up $70 million to settle a class action age discrimination suit for writers. It’s common coin for most folks to believe that ageism is really sour grapes expressed

Hi, guys, Folks often ask how our classes differ from those offered by others, and I wanted to share what happened this past Monday night as an example. We asked our students one week earlier if there was someone they’d like to have come in to coach them each individually.  Previously

Last Wednesday was huge fun, as I wrap up recording the TWILIGHT ZONE commentaries for the blu-ray set (when complete, I’ll have done fifty-two episodes – one-third of the entire series). That day, I drove to a non-descript location in Los Angeles, showed my ID and was waved through t

Spent the afternoon with Ray Bradbury this past Monday and it was marvelous, as always. We sat in the back room of his house, which is filled to bursting with his books, awards, original artwork from his works, amazing, amazing. He asked what I was working on, and I told him I was jus

Just spent the day with Neil Gaiman in his hotel room, recording audio commentaries for the TWILIGHT ZONE blu-ray. What great fun! For those of you who don’t know, Neil is the amazingly talented writer who wrote CORALINE, the Sandman comics, the recent Newberry Prize-winning GRAVEYARD