- Paperback
- Publisher: Crown Publishers (2008)
- ASIN: B001HY0396
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I've lived in some interesting places, starting with New York City....
When I was five my father joined the Foreign Service of the State Department. His job took us to Washington, DC, Mexico, South Vietnam, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Uruguay and Nicaragua. We lived in Saigon during the Tonkin Gulf Incident, the overthrow of Diem, a number of other coup d'etats and almost daily Vietcong terrorist attacks against Americans. We survived three years gasping for air at 13,000 feet in La Paz, Bolivia during the time that Che Guevarra was trying to build a guerrilla base in that country. In 1980 I was in Nicaragua debating politics with guys like Tomas Borge and the Ortega brothers and witnessing the first days of the Sandinista Revolution (the subject of the non-fiction book At the Fall of Somoza, which I wrote with my father).
So, yes, I have some stories to tell. After college I worked as a freelance journalist and for the National Endowment for the Arts. And when I moved back to New York City, I started writing plays. By the middle of the wild '80s I had became part of the downtown avant-garde theater scene working at such places as La Mama, Theater for the New City, Here and the Public Theater. Since then, fourteen of my plays have had their premieres in Manhattan.
In 1986 two movie producers attended an Off Broadway play of mine called The Education of One Miss February (a farce about the rise to fame of a Playboy bunny), optioned it for the movies and commissioned me to write a screenplay. That got me started writing for TV and film. I've also worked as a copywriter, speechwriter, published poems in literary anthologies and written an eight-part radio series called The Swamp Fox for National Public Radio and the BBC. (And I've been a bartender, actor, rock guitarist/singer, cruise planner, construction worker, labor foreman, baseball player, soccer coach, short order cook, writing teacher and ghost writer.)
I had written just about everything, except for a mystery novel. But that changed with Eve Missing published in October 2003. At the close of that year, I moved to Los Angeles to jump into the film world. It's been interesting so far working with directors like Oliver Stone, Antoine Fuqua, James Foley, Roger Donaldson, etc. Equally fascinating has been my work (book and film) with former CIA undercover operative Gary Berntsen (Jawbreaker, The Walk-In) and former LAPD detective Steve Hodel. I keep learning. Isn't that what it's all about?
