Washington Square. On air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review. Lansing Community College's literary journal. Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing. Hey there. This is Melissa Ford Lucken, editor for the Washington Square Review. I'm here today with writer Alex R. Johnson, who's just had a book come out. Hey, Alex, tell us about your book and tell us a little bit about yourself.

Hey. The book is called Brooklyn Motto. It's a take on first person detective noir fiction, but it takes place in 1998, Giuliani era new York City detective novel. But it's also about being 28, that moment in time in your life where you're going from passive to active, from, you know, reactive to, I don't know, kinetic, or just where you have to make choices and have to engage with life and not have life engage with you. Like most of my work, it's heavily character driven. So primarily I'm a screenwriter. I made an independent film about 10ish years ago called Two Step that I wrote and directed, which is a bit of a Texas noir, kind of a revenge thriller. And that started my career. And then I became a what is called a working screenwriter, which in many instances can mean you have a career and not a lot of your movies get made.

Okay, well, let's kind of dig in and talk a little bit more about the book and then we'll kind of float away and talk a little bit about the screenwriting. So you said it's kind of about being 28. The way you describe it, it's, you know, in your 20s, you're kind of planning for your future and thinking about your future. And it sounds like this is kind of a moment where somebody starts to realize that they're in their future now and they need to maybe take more direction of their own life.

Yeah, absolutely. Totally. Yeah. I mean, there's that kind of idea that you've started it, but you're not even aware that it started. And so there's a question of, are you gonna take control of it or are you gonna let it happen to you?

How do you think the character started to realize that they were in that moment where they needed to take control?

I think when people started dying, when people started being killed around him and it might happen to him. So, yeah, in that moment, the very basic plot is that he is an insurance. He's a private eye, but he focuses on INS insurance investigations for the city. And so whenever there's a insurance claim by a city employee, mta, you know, sanitation cops, something like that. And it's over a certain amount. They will hire his agency to go and just follow the person for a few days to make sure they're not doing anything like lifting something heavy or doing whatever, and then so they can try to reject the claim. So he's following a police officer, and while he's following the police officer, other police officers murder that police officer. He has it not clearly on tape, but he has the police officers going into the building and he takes it back to his, his boss and everything just sort of unravels from there.

Mm. Where'd you get the idea for this?

For that? I mean, it's, you know, I've just like, like any writer, I just always desperately wanted to have my own detective, you know, and to fold into the screenwriting aspect. I was adapting an Ernest Heidyman novel called Big Bucks and Ernest created Shaft and was a pretty famous screenwriter as well. I just love how he kind of, I made him a part of my adaptation. I just fell in love with him as a character so much. He's all about empowering writers to take control of their work. And part of that I think made me just look inward at myself and I wanted a detective that I could identify with, at least my 28 year old self could identify with. But also, you know, key to the character is that like me, he is a mix of Anglo and Ecuadorian and you know, second generation on one side, first generation on the other. But you know, the idea that the kind of complications that that can, can lead to not being brown enough for the white, not being white enough for the brown, and also just kind of like having a kind of cloudy sense of self. I always avoided making characters seem like me just because I feel like, I don't know, I feel like I didn't need to like, you know, increase the level of difficulty for some reason. And then I was listening to an interview with Gary Steingart and interviewer was giving him some crap about how his latest character was another New York based writer of Russian background. And he kind of pushed back and was just like, so what? You know, like this is my world, this is what I write. And it's very personal to me. And as I was getting older and you know, trying to learn more about myself and who I was and the people that can answer those questions disappear or not disappear, but, you know, pass. There are less of those people. The book and kind of making Nico have a similar genetic makeup to me turned into sort of an investigation of myself.

In some ways, I think this is just the way I see it. So you can tell me what you think about this. That as you get older and you start to realize you do actually have questions about your past and your relatives and your background, you don't start to realize you have those questions until it's kind of too late. And like you said, a lot of people that could answer them have passed. So you have to find another way to reconnect with yourself in a more like, I don't know, cerebral kind of way rather than the immediate way. Because, you know, like we're saying in your 20s, you're more about the immediate and planning for the future, but it seems really far off, and you're more like, what am I doing today? You know, who am I going to talk to or hang out with? And then all of a sudden you realize, wow, this I am in my life and I have to.

Absolutely, yeah.

You have to build.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's that idea that I think in my 20s and you, I mean, probably for most of my life, you just have that thing where you're just in the back of your head, you feel like you're going to get another shot at it or something. You know, like, you just, like, you're like, you don't have to stress or anything. And then, you know, your knees start clicking and you're just like, wait a second. This, this body's weari down something in our DNA that prevents us from kind of, at least some of us from, from realizing that in the time. So, you know, in some ways it's also making myself, I don't know, it's like time travel in some ways, to go back and to investigate that, that part of being younger and what was happening then in my life and, and, and kind of building it in this, in this fiction, in this fictional mystery.

Yeah, yeah. And so you said it. The book is set right before 2098. Is that what you said? Okay, so what do you think? What do you think about that time period really influences the character in the story?

First of all, the era, the Giuliani era, was a weird time to be young in New York. It was heavy police force, older, whiter. Folks are very happy about his crime stats and all that stuff. But, but, you know, he was also just. Cops were kind of off the chain in some ways. I mean, everybody had stories about, you know, the amount of times some undercover cop tried to get you to go buy weed somewhere, and it was just like, so obvious. They were a cop, and you're just like, just leave me alone. I don't want to buy anything. And, you know, there's a classic story of they would leave bikes out in public parks, and if you touched the bike, you would get jumped and arrested for stealing a bicycle. You know, it was like little things like that in addition to the stop and frisk, which is huge. It was a tense era, and so I liked that setting. It's still a bit of a wild, pre Times Square cleanup time. I mean, Times Square cleanup was probably happening around then, but it was like, you know, it was still a city that was less mass marketed towards tourism, so it had an edge. And then I love the. I mean, when I was thinking about investigating myself, you know, why not. Why not go back to an era where I felt immortal, where I had mostly fun? But the kind of thing that sealed the deal with it was as I was. I was doing some research. I found my little. These to be, you know, this little, like, hard back. It's a. It's called a diary. But it was just a date book, Right. I found mine from 1998. It sent me back to that moment, flipping through, seeing names, bands I was seeing, you know, films I was seeing. I used to be in production, so I had to have that to block out my time if I was put on hold for a job or something like that. And so that kind of flooded the memory banks. And then I got a couple of old Village Voices from ebay and just, you know, just sent. Just must. I mean, once you just see the layout, these. This pages that used to burn through every week, and then just seeing the old ads and all, that really kind of made the time come alive again for me. And when I think about what I want to do with the character, I have an arc that I want to continue to go with other books. It was a good starting point for his story. And I'm pretty much dressing and listening to all the same things I was listening to then.

Right. For anyone who's not from New York, fill us in on what the Village Voice is.

Oh, so the Voice was the independent weekly. Most places have them. You know, Chicago Reader was a pretty famous one. You know, you would just. It would be your bible for the week. Pre Internet, you would pick it up and, you know, flip through the band section, try to plot out your week, look at the movie section, you know, maybe read an article or two. But really it was. And it would be everywhere. And so you would just, you know, sometimes you wouldn't even Carry it with you because you knew whatever, wherever you're going next, there's probably a pile of voice by the front door.

I don't know if it's still around. Metro Times, same thing. That kind of gave me an idea. For anyone who's doing research on a setting, going back and looking at the newspapers, the local newspapers in particular, could be really helpful because I could see how just the gist of the way that it's written, the way that it's laid out, the images for the ads, what bands were playing.

Yeah. You're reminded of what's happening politically at the time and you kind of get a sense for. To be kind of true to your character and my character's age and I remember being in my 20s at that time and like, how of local politics was I paying attention to. Not a massive amount. So trying to keep that, Keep that honest.

It's interesting to think about the way that you're affected by politics when you don't even follow them, you know?

Right, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Well, let's talk a little bit about the creative process of writing the book because as you mentioned, you've had been working in screenwriting and so now you're writing a novel. Very different. Sort of different. How is that?

It's so. It's sort. It's sort of different. I'm what's called a very literary writer. Screenwriter. Now, that is sometimes said as a compliment and it's frequently said as an insult, but okay, you got to explain.

That a little bit first.

You know, sometimes there's some. There's an old school vibe in terms of screenwriting that is, you know, you should just barely be explaining things and it's leave it all to the director and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A great example of like seeing how things have changed because they did start changing, I think, in the 90s, maybe earlier. But if you read the first Alien screenplay, so the first Alien screenplay, all of the descriptive elements are literally bullet points. Like, I don't think any is longer than one line and I don't think it even goes to the end of the page, you know, so it'd just be like, this happens, this happens and then it's dialogue. James Cameron's Aliens screenplay is one of the most beautifully written. I mean, it feels like a book, you know, it's just like descriptive tone, smells, sounds. It's just. It goes really deep. And, you know, that was fine if you're James Cameron, you know, sometimes it's frowned upon if you're not as Successful or not as like, you know, commercially successful. But I really. And this will bring it back to Tyneman. You know, when I was doing research on him, he really believed that the screenplay should make every department, every department head that reads that script should be so excited to do whatever they are going to do with that. And to do that, you need it to be active and kinetic and engaging. You still have to use an economy of words. You still have to be efficient. You know, you need to cut back when you can. You know, just because there is that there's this kind of industry idea that it's about a page a minute. So, you know, if you're in 200 page land, a lot of people aren't even going to read your script. So you need to find a way without changing the font size. So my screenplays always did have some descriptive element to it. I had originally wanted to write this as a TV show and I think when I, when I pitched my agents on it, when they were asking me what I was up to, I kind of pitched them on it and I hadn't figured out the narrative yet. And so I gave a really crappy pitch. And without sounding pretentious, I'm an organic writer. That might not seem weird in prose, but in Hollywood and with screenplays, there are some writers that can just crank out treatments, kind of like facts. This is how the story goes. I need to hear the characters talk and all that stuff. So sometimes to get a treatment, I might have to write like a mini screenplay and then kind of back it into a treatment. Because when the characters start talking, that's when I know who they are. So I did a half assed pitch and they kind of tried to talk me out of it. I was like, I really think this is going to be special. I really think this is important. I still hold on to my writing style, my writing process that I learned sophomore year in high school in D.C. from Rick Cannon, my creative writing teacher at the time. And he was a real advocate of the spillage. You have a document that you put all of your thoughts in and you never erase anything in that document. The thoughts could be awful, stupid, whatever, but the idea is that no one's going to see that but you. So it can be as dumb as it needs to be, but it's going to spark other ideas. So I started my spillage document for Brooklyn motto thinking it would be a TV show. And then I started getting into dialogue and then suddenly it snapped in the first person narration and it was just started to flow and I don't do first person narration really, in screenwriting. So it was new and exciting for me. And then I, you know, a few pages in, I was like, I think this might be a book instead of a screenplay. Which, you know, immediately the other voices in my head tell me, who the hell am I thinking I can write a book? So I stuck to that. And that's, that's kind of, that's kind of the process of how it went.

So when they were trying to talk you out of it, why do you think they were trying to talk you out of it?

You know, I don't want to overstay like them talk. I mean, it's, it's, it's, you know the phrase it is an art and a business film and, and most things honestly, you know, they're trying to guide your career. They know what the market's looking for at the time. If they think that what you're working on will not sell in the marketplace at that time, they'll try to dissuade you, you know, and they'll be like, I don't know, that's a period piece. You know, period pieces cost more money because he's got to do all the stuff to make it look like it was period. You know, it's the period that it takes place in and this and that and, and I honestly, you know, I didn't pitch it well, you know, so it's not all on them, but mostly on my pitch. But, you know, they do that. If you don't talk to them that often, you'll at least have a call, a quarter that'll be like, what are you working on? And yeah, that sounds good. Focus on that. You know, like. But the silly thing is, you know, it takes time to write. And so if the market is looking for something, you know, erotic, you know, erotic thrillers, and they're like, write an erotic thriller, you know, in six months they're going to be looking for something else and you're just going to be finishing your second draft.

Right.

You know, so it's kind of pointless to, to bend to those whims. It's more important to just be true to what you want to write and what excites you.

Yeah, writing for the market is always something that comes up with writers, you know, like you said. So if you write something for the market, the market's going to shift and.

Yeah, totally. And what's so silly about writing for the. And for film when you're pitching to a studio or when a studio is, you Know, it's your script has been elevated to the highest ranks and discussing it in a potential meeting about what they're going to purchase. They have a different brief on every day. And like the day your script rises to the top, if you don't fit in that narrow concept of what they're looking for on that day, and it's not going to happen, and then they may shift to what you did in two weeks, but just kind of the forward, ridiculous way Hollywood works, they don't go back to old projects. They won't go like, oh, that project. I mean, maybe they do, but they normally don't. It's just old projects have a stench of failure on them, no matter how good they are. So they don't go back to them. But just briefly, just about the screenwriting versus book writing. You know, one of the frustrations about being a working screenwriter is that at the studio level, which is what I, what I'm at, I'm in the union, and I. And I write at the studio level for the most part, is the realization that, you know, there are a limited number of studios and each of them makes, I don't know, three to six movies a year. And right now there's about three of them, but they each buy hundreds of screenplays a year. So the reality is you could have a make a living and be in the union and have health care and all that stuff, but you might not have a film get made at the studio level. And that is frustrating. You know, that's the only way to really describe it. I mean, I do understand it's the business, and I'm not like, angry at it or anything. But, you know, sometimes you create a world and you sell it, and then they don't want to make it, and then your characters are on a shelf somewhere in some junior executive's office and your world that you created, and that's it, it's done. You can't touch it again because we as screenwriters in the United States, we give up our copyright. We basically gave that up in exchange for health care years ago and for other benefits as well. And so, you know, you lose the world. So at least this way, you know, whatever happens with this, with the book, the characters will be mine to do what I want with, you know, in the future if I ever do want to do anything with them, which I do.

I was thinking while you were describing that it's a little bit like painting a, you know, a beautiful painting and someone putting in a closet.

It's like, well, thank you for that or. Yeah. Or. Or in storage at some airport in Europe so you don't have to pay taxes on it or something.

Right. The longer it sits there, the more stale it becomes. It's all dusty, like.

Yeah, yeah. We create for people to experience our work. That's the goal. You know, if you make a gajillion dollars doing it, great. But the goal is actually to create and share your work, you know.

Yeah. It could be disheartening after a while because you put all this energy and all of your best talent into it, your best collaboration with other people, and there it is, just. Yeah, yeah. So when you were writing the book, did it feel differently to, you know, page after page? Because it's, you know, it's a different vibe. You got more pages.

It's certainly slower. It's certainly a slower writing process, you know, and part of my whole spillage thing, spillage document thing, is that I also look at that as a fuel to get me through. In a feature. It would be basically, get through the second act. Because the second act is so often where projects just fall apart. A lot of people don't continue past the second act because they can't crack it. Or if they do, it's a flawed project. So I like to have enough meat to get through it. I knew I had. I had a pretty huge document that I was working off of when I started writing the book. So it was cruising at first. But, yeah, I think I read the. The first, like, you know, 12 or 16 pages. And it's pretty similar to how it is still in, like, you know, the first few days. And I was just like, this is easy, you know, and then you're calling all your friends.

You're like, this is a life. I love this.

Oh, my gosh. I've had, like, telling them how words I have at this rate, and then, you know, it gets more complicated.

And, yeah, you get to like, 18,000. Yeah.

Every time I start to try to review what I've written, it takes longer to review. I equated it almost to, like. I just wanted to hit some positive numbers every day. In terms of words, I wasn't even thinking about pages. I think I compared it to, like when, like, a parent teaches you how to swim. And I just keep, like, they just keep backing up and making it go further and further, you know, So I had my reasonable goal, but in my brain, I was backing it up, you know, each day and trying to. Trying to hit something. But, yeah, it just. Once I. I understood the time, but I was also, just for context, I was in Austin. We had moved, you know, I'm born in New York, and then after university, came back to New York and was here for 18 years before we. We moved to Austin. And we moved to Austin in, like, 2012. And I was in Austin for. For about 10 years. And while I was in Austin, I made my film. And, you know, my whole career started while I was in Austin. And I wrote the book. But I wrote the book during COVID The initial plan was to move to Austin and then eventually go to la, you know, and just be in Hollywood proper. But when Covid hit, it was just kind of like, well, all our family's in the East Coast. All our families in New York. Oh, you have one kid, he's an only child and wanted to be able to be close to family. We kind of talked about a return. But, you know, I started writing the book, and I was living in New York when I was writing the book. I was home, and it felt right. So it was a joy. As much as writing can be a, you know, can be a slog at the same time, it was a joy to be there because that's where we wanted to be. And eventually, I think in 2022, we. On a whim thing in May, we were like, we gotta. We gotta go home. And then I think we were. We were in New York by end of June, early July.

Oh, that's fast. Yeah.

Yeah. To get our kid registered for school, we realized we had to be. We had to have an address by a certain date. Yes, you do. Crap. Yeah. So we did, like, the FaceTime realtor thing or rented an apartment and just like, yeah, it looks great. Okay, yeah, we'll go there. We've been back for two or three years now, and almost three years, and it's great. I always imagined, you know, getting old in New York. So it's happening.

Okay.

It's a dream come true.

All right, before you go, I have two questions. You already kind of gave us a background about some things about being a screenwriter that people probably, you know, aren't aware of. The everyday person. Can you think of one other thing? Like, you're like, here's something the public needs to know about being a screenwriter. They probably don't know.

Well, without being a total negative jerk, I'm in the union, and we were on strike, and we were on strike for various reasons. And one of the things that's always been an issue that it's hard to regulate from the union is the amount of free Work writers do, screenwriters do. People may hum and haw about how much screenplays people get paid. Most working class screenwriters are not making the money that you hear about. But you have to realize, like when I get a gig, I started that process about six months before, maybe four months before, with you have an initial call with the producers, like where they've read your stuff and they think you might dig what they want to do. And then you have an initial call with them and they tell you about the project. Say it's a book or it's an adaptation, or it's just an idea they have that they want someone to write. And then you have to piece together a pitch for them. And that takes a few weeks. And then you write maybe a month. And that takes. Takes a while. You write that pitch, you pitch them, guess what? You did great. Now you get to pitch the people just a little higher than them. So you need to hone the pitch. Now the guys that you pitch to really want you to get the job. So they're going to give you some notes on your pitch. So now you got to change those notes. And then you got to do that though. And then, you know, and then you might have one or two more of those. And then sometimes you got to actually pitch to basically the executives at the studio. And for that you've got to Suddenly take your 10 minute pitch and make it like 90 seconds, you know, to. Or much shorter. So regardless, it's just there's a tremendous amount of free work that you do. And unfortunately the union can't regulate that because you do that before there's a contract. And a union can't oversee something when there's no contract. But it's just a state of the business. So when people be like, wow, you sold a screenplay for $500,000, you know, great, mazel tov. But you know, that guy worked probably, you know, a couple years on that project, you know, and he probably actually didn't make 500,000.

Right. And then over time, a person could have put a lot of work into several others that never went anywhere.

Yeah, and that's, and that's partly what I was saying before about how the agents can be like, what are you working on? What are you doing? You know, like part of their job, I think. You know, I mean, you know, the concept is that agents work for you. You know, they don't work for us. Oh, we don't work for them. But the dynamic is almost rarely seems that. But they're trying to manage your time because writing takes time, and they don't want you to waste it on something that they don't think is going to sell. But, yeah, so there's a lot. There's a lot of. Of work. So even when you get to the studio level, I mean, like, you know, Billy Ray is. Is probably not doing this amount of free work. You know, big, huge screenwriters are not doing this. But your average working screenwriter is, Is, you know, doing a lot of free work. And, and, you know, it's part of the job. So that's one thing, probably.

All right. My other question is, what are you working on now?

Speaking of free work, in the middle of putting together a pitch, I can't really talk about it. It's a remake of a foreign film adapted for the American audience, potentially for Netflix. And so putting my pitch together now for the director, and then when the director signs off on it, we'll go and pitch to the studio. And so that's the immediate thing. I'm supposed to be editing the audiobook I'm working on.

Okay.

And. And then I'm. I'm trying to get serious about getting the second book in the series going for Brooklyn Motto. So, I mean, I have. I know what I want to do. I have. I have my spillage document pretty well spilled, and I know where I want it to go. So I just need to start focusing on that, get going.

That all sounds beautiful. If people want to keep track of you and your projects online, where can they find you?

I'm generally Haciendafilms. Just one word. So Haciendafilms on Instagram and Blue Sky. I skipped out on Twitter a few months ago, but yeah, Hacienda Films and my. And like I said, Two Step is out there. Available for rent to Texas noir, kind of Coen Brothers Y vibe. And then Brooklyn motto, BrooklynMotto.com will send you all the places you need to go.

Okay, awesome. We'll be sure to include those links in the show notes. Thanks for joining us today.

It was great. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for stopping by the audio town square of the Washington Square Review. And until next time, this has been Washington Square on air from Lansing Community College. To find out more about our writers, community and literary journal, visit lcc.edu. wSR writing is messy, but do it anyway.