Category Archives: Screen Enemies of the American Way

I finished the cast/credit section which is, obviously, the most top-heavy on names. 26 pages, took me … well, I wasn’t keeping track, but a lot of hours. Exacerbated by a couple of non-writing emergencies (resolved now).
The remainder of the book will be relatively simple. I should be back to normal blogging next week.
I am slightly annoyed to discover—
a)I left out Million Eyes of Sumuru and The Enemy Within from the cast/credit section. Hopefully we can squeeze them in at the end.
b)I keep thinking of things I should have mentioned, like the fact the shopping scene at the end of the Stepford Wives remake has to be an intentional imitation of the shopping scene at the end of the original. Of course, that just drives home how much better the first one was: It ends on a note of horror as the fembots carry out their duties, while the second one is a wacky note of fun—what could be a better punishment for all those guys mindcontrolling their wives than making them do girly stuff like grocery shopping? Not to mention that in this version, it’s ultimately a woman who’s behind it all, not the men. And that although Kidman’s the lead, it’s Broderick who’s technically the hero—if he didn’t relent on mindwiping her, she had no solution to saving herself. As I’ve said before, it’s made 30 years after the original and it’s actually more sexist.
Okay, that rant over—one thing which does interest me is when I do the cast/credits, names keep popping up, over and over in different movies. Nothing worth mentioning immediately comes to mind, but it always surprises me. And it shows why having a good index is worthwhile—anyone wanting to look up Roland Got or Philip Ahn films in my book can find them easily enough.
Sorry this is a little rambling, but it’s been a looooooong day.

I finished Phase One of indexing Screen Enemies of the American Way today: Getting every name in my book (names of people and names of films and TV shows) in alphabetical order. Now, as I go through and proof it, chapter by chapter, I’ll also attach the right page numbers to those names, chapter by chapter.
The proofing isn’t too bad; indexing is truly a tedious, mind-deadening, crawlingly slow activity. Alphabetizing is probably the worst part, but not the only dull part; I now have more than 100 pages of names (in single-column format), and every time I find one in the manuscript I’ll have to find the name, note the page, then find another name, note another page …
Another annoyance is that while indexing, I discover so many damn errors in what I thought was a well-proofed manuscript. I remember when working on Wizard of Oz Catalog, I decided that next time I’d alphabetize the name before I sent in the manuscript, for precisely that reason. Only I wound up in a time crunch and didn’t. Now I wish I had.
But it will be done and off by next Wednesday. Guaranteed. Come what may. Or, at worst, Friday. It goes to the printer in four weeks, so I can’t take it easy (except tonight, the last four hours of alphabetizing wore me down).

My publisher’s list of questions for Screen Enemies of the American Way turned out to be quite advantageous. While I was working through a question about Oliver Stone’s JFK, I discovered that I hadn’t included the cast and credits in the appendix, so I was able to fix that (since McFarland hasn’t paginated yet). And then I had the sense to check for any other glitches and found that I’d done the same for X-Files and The Silencer. So that fixed an embarrassing error on my part.
Plus I was able to include a synopsis and cast/credits for Salt, which came out this summer. It’s totally appropriate for my book, and I was bummed at not being able to cover it in detail.
Took longer than I expected, but it paid off.