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I've been quiet on Goodreads getting my blog Video Days off the ground. I devoted May to cop movies of the '80s. June is for treehouse adventures, my latest a big article on The Lost Boys. I've had fun reliving those days, with production history for each film plus commentary. Substack asks for an email address, but subscriptions are free and you can opt out anytime.

I've been scarce on Goodreads getting my blog Video Days off the ground. I devoted May to cop movies of the '80s. June is for treehouse adventures, my latest a big article on The Lost Boys. I've had fun reliving those days, with production history for each film plus commentary. Substack asks for an email address, but subscriptions are free and you can opt out anytime.

I've been scarce on Goodreads getting my blog Video Days off the ground. I dedicated May to cops and robbers thrillers, and my latest article marks the 40th anniversary of a summer adventure classic. I've enjoyed reliving the '80s with production history of each film, plus commentary. Substack asks for an email address, but subscriptions are free, and you can opt out anytime.

People who fantasize about living on the beach--this was what they never figured. After a while, the ocean view, the salt air, even the thunderous ocean song disappears, and you are left with yourself, your place in the scheme of things. All that you reach for and all you can't hold runs up before you like the tide and reaches for you. It takes a very strong soul to keep from getting swept away.

The night Annie Linden disappeared, my world spun out with double-time speed.

”Well, this is it,” said Ava. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to find these fools.”

"All right, then," the professor said. "Here's your case: Who are you?"

Cynthia started to laugh, thinking Professor Gold was joking. Of course Cynthia knew who she was! She was a teen detective, an orphan, and the best student at Rapid Falls Junior College. She lived with her beloved housekeeper, Mrs. McShane, and had passionate almost-sex with her fiancé, Dick, every Friday night.

I used every trick I knew to find the episode of Bewitched. I thought maybe if I could watch it again, some memory of insight of how to help people would be shaken loose. But I never found it, and if the best detective in the world couldn’t find it, it probably never existed at all, and no further insight came.

The crime was solved, but I knew the case wasn’t closed.

The problem was money. I was just about thirty. I’d been a working detective since I was twelve. I didn’t need a lot of money, but I needed some, and I didn’t have any. Fees from the last few jobs had gone, variably, to a guy I was sleeping with who didn’t have a car and a girl I knew who was trying to keep her mother in a nursing home and a trip to Mexico City that had lasted too long and cocaine.

You are Claire DeWitt, the greatest teen detective in the world. You are standing on the corner of Rivington and Ludlow Streets on the Lower East Side of New York City. It has been a long night of nightclubs and bars and minor crimes; early in the evening, maybe, you were on a case, but you’ve forgotten that case now. The Case of the Silver … What was it exactly? Something about metals.

"The mystery," I said, "is the situation or fact or lack or feeling or patch of existence that no one wants to look at. And in that spot, where no one wanted to look, there was an opportunity for a crime."

"Oh," Helena said. "Oh."

She understood.

Alcoholism makes detecting hard! So Cynthia Silverton, the best teen detective in the world, was called to the case. Cynthia pulled up in her canary-yellow Cadillac, matching yellow-framed sunglasses on her face, in a charming white sundress and white kitten heels. In her yellow handbag was a Saturday night special, a deck of tarot cards, and a cyanide pill for worst-cast scenarios.

Dear Amanda, I like how grounded this seemed compared to your other stories. This kind of thing may be something you keep working on, even if you end up going back to that meta-stuff you like. I am a big believer of learning the rules before you break them. And I think you may be taking steps toward learning the rules here.

You probably couldn't tell by looking at her, but once, back in her twenties, the writer had slept with the Devil. They met at a Halloween party in a pop-up art space in 1999. She wore a red dress and pillbox hat, like Nancy Reagan. Though the way the dress cling to her curves mocked the First Lady's performance of propriety. No one got it; the closest she got was "naughty Jackie O.?" But the Devil would get it.

"I was much smarter twenty years ago," Elaine said that night. "I was much smarter in my first movie than in my second. I was much smarter in my first play than in my second. The only thing I think experience teaches you is what you can't do. When you start, you think you can do anything. And then you start to get a little tired."

It would be eleven years before she directed again.

Elaine, years later, thought it better to stick to the not-nice routine from the start. "I think the real trick is, for women, start out tough. They don't start out tough. They start by saying, 'Don't be afraid of me. I'm only a woman.' And they're not only women, they're just as tough as guys. In that way, I think I did have trouble. But only because I seemed so pleasant."

"There's a big technical side which she could never master," Paul Sylbert, the film's production designer, explained. "She can't light a cigarette without burning her hand. She works on impulses, intuitions. It's easy to do on a typewriter, but impossible to do when you have other people standing around." Elaine herself would go along with that. "I'm not a pro as a director. I'm a pro at thinking about movies."

Though Elaine's capacity for self-editing was limited, when it came to others, she was a scalpel, killing darlings with precise reasoning. Plays operated with the same rules she and Mike had established for their sketches. Never go for the easy laugh, she taught McNally: "When characters deal in gags and jokes, you pay a terrible price for them. You're left without characters, and you're left without a play."

The audience would laugh--though only sort of, the lines blurred to the point where they weren't quite sure what was part of the sketch and what was reality, where the onstage action warranted amusement and where it warranted genuine concern. "The nice thing," Elaine said, "is to make an audience laugh and laugh and laugh, and shudder later."

On the album jacket of Improvisations to Music, she and Mike wrote their own biographies: "Mike Nichols is not a member of the Actors Studio, which has produced such stars as Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Ben Gazzara, Eva Marie Saint, Carroll Baker, and others too numerous to mention," Mike wrote. Elaine's said simply, "Miss May does not exist."

The Village Vanguard was perfect for them, casual and the charming kind of crappy, just like the bars they had played back in Chicago. Doing their act in front of relative peers would be a comfortable wade into the New York scene. There they would open for Mort Sahl, a stand-up who presented himself as the antithesis of the slick comic. Mike and Elaine, meanwhile, weren't getting onstage and telling jokes.

"It was the University of Chicago--we talked about everything that was wrong. We did not speak about anything that worked," Elaine explained. "You don't have a scene if you do that. People don't have a comedy act if they do that. You are in some way, one way or another, criticizing."

"She knew everything about the theatre and psychoanalysis," one of her suitors said. "She didn't know about anything else."

Being alone with ELIXIR reminded Ada, in an odd way, of being alone with David, at the end of his life. It was the uncertainty about what he was going to say: whether he was going to make sense, whether he was even going to speak. It was also the feeling of being reunited with someone who knew a great deal about her, for better or worse--the comfortable feeling of not having to explain much, or anything at all.

Later, Ada would remember these afternoons as some of the pleasantest ones of her life; it was the quiet of the library, its calmness (she breathed more deeply; her heart rate slowed); the smell of it, must and mildew and paper, like the smell of David's house; the echoing footfalls of students and librarians and researchers, which gave the place the feeling of a pool or spa.

Miss Holmes's apartment was not unlike how Ada had pictured it. Oriental carpets crisscrossed one another on top of hardwood floors, and the furniture was mismatched and comfortable. Not surprisingly, all of the walls were lined with bookshelves, and all of the bookshelves were filled with books. There was a Christmas tree in the corner, already decorated, with little colored lights strung around it in three loops

David always got off the highway early to drive through Lake George Village, which had a main street lined with kitsch of various kinds: giant, friendly lumberjack statues made out of papier-mâché; outsized teepees with arrow-signs pointing inward, advertising AUTHENTIC INDIAN APPAREL; Viking-themed miniature golf courses; a wax museum with a window display featuring Frankenstein playing the organ.

What more she longed for, she could not say, certainly it was nothing so terrifying as sex, nor any activity that required being unclothed. She was vaguely embarrassed by her body, certain that, though it was changing in wild and unpredictable ways, it could offer nothing of value to anyone else; to Ada it was simply the thing below her head, which bore inside it her brain--her only worthy attribute, she thought.

It was something she had never truly considered, about adults. She had always somehow imagined that the loss of a loved one would hurt less for them: that it would feel like something natural; that they would be calm and practiced and dulled to death. But something in Liston's voice, as she spoke of her mother, made Ada realize that she had been incorrect in this assumption.

Ever since learning about neurotransmitters from David, she had imagined her brain as a water park, a maze of waterslides down which various chemicals were released. Charcoal and smoke and fresh-cut grass usually sent rivers of serotonin down the slides in Ada's head. But that night the scents only served to remind her of David's absence. Warm summer evenings, he always said, were his favorites too.