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To access Ray Carney's complete website, go to www.cassavetes.com

A note from Ray Carney: A frequent reader of the site sent me the following "inside information" about working in Hollywood. These tips are invaluable since they come from someone who has actually, really, truly "been there and done that." Read them, study them, commit them to memory if you can. These are the true down-and-dirty, the real fat skinny, the reality, the facts-of-life for the Hollywood-bound. These are the jobs and opportunities you spent four years of your life at film school qualifying for rather than wasting your time learning history, studying philosophy, looking at works of art, building your soul. No, you are too smart for that. You want to see your name in lights. Who wouldn't? -- RC

Subject: hollywood and other jokes

Hey Ray,

How does the new year find you? Hope all is well.

Having worked almost a year in the crazy landscape of Hollywood, I thought I'd jot down some tongue-in-cheek ideas about what the job opportunities are like. The reality of it, I mean. Then I thought I'd share these with you and you could let some of your students know what it's really like in Los Angeles (for those planning on pursuing their careers there) if you want. This is just the sort of stuff that I wish someone would've told ME when I was going to school. I broke these up according to career ambitions (director, writer, actor, etc.)

If you want to be a: DIRECTOR

In order to be a director, you have to work your way up from the rock bottom. And the rock bottom is a Production Assistant (PA). PAs work harder than anyone in Hollywood. As a PA, you will often put in over 12 hours a day, sometimes six days a week, on the set. You will have no social life. You cannot be married or have a girlfriend/boyfriend. You will get very little sleep. You will live off of Top Ramen, just like you did in college. You will need to live within a half hour of the studio you are working for, which, considering the traffic situation in LA, is an amazing improbability. Expect to spend 90% of your paycheck on your rent. The other 10% on gas for your car. Did I mention you have to have a car? You have to have a car. You will put many many miles on it, as you will run errands all over the LA area and sometimes beyond. Expect to get paid very low, often as low as eight an hour (usually somewhere between 8 and 10 an hour) without overtime compensation. Which is above minimum wage, but you can make more money waiting tables. Hell, you can make more money BUSSING tables. EVERYONE starts out as a PA, no matter what their educational background is, and (hopefully) works their way up. But it won't happen overnight. You will be a PA for a good 3 or 4 years, if not more. Make friends on the set, because what will happen is someone will take a liking to you and when THEY make it to something like, say, Assistant Director, they'll make you 2nd Assistant Director, or something of that nature, which in Hollywood-speak basically means that instead of being a PA to the film crew, you're a PA to the Assistant Director (who is, in turn, a PA to the director). However, your responsibilities extend to the whole set, not just the AD, which means you'll be doing double the work for around the same pay. Let's say in 10 or 15 years, you actually make it to the director's chair. By the time you are there, Hollywood has drained so much life out of your soul that, in order to maintain steady work (enough work to live on) you will have to churn out bland, generic Hollywood films and ignore any sort of creative, artistic impulses you may have. Due to the high cost of living in Los Angeles, it is just far too risky to deviate from the assembly line nature of Hollywood filmmaking. To go out on a limb and attempt to demonstrate artistic aptitude is to risk being fired. If you are fired from a set, you will likely never get work as a director again and your landlord will evict you. To avoid that, you follow the rules, goose step to the drum beat, do whatever your producers tell you. Creativity is dead in the Hollywood director's chair. Also, you do not need to go to school to be a director, but it helps to have a reel to show people if they (rarely, if ever) ask to see one.

CINEMATOGRAPHER, OR OTHER SET PRODUCTION POSITION

See above.

ACTOR

If you want to be an actor in Hollywood, good luck. There are about a billion people just like you, and that "billion" is only a small exaggeration. Even if you have tremendous talent, these other out-of-work actors probably look better than you. That means they're most likely to get the jobs, because acting in Hollywood is about looks, not talent. Most of the auditions you go to, you won't even read. You will stand in front of a casting director who is busy making squiggles on other peoples' applications, who will look up and stare at you for no more than two and a half seconds, make a squiggle on YOUR application and send you on your way. Sometimes your application consists of nothing more than your head shot with a piece of paper that has your name and telephone number on it. You will rarely be asked to read anything, and if you do, it will probably be something like "When I bite into a York Peppermint Patty I - BRRRRRRR!" and other such nonsense. What little work you get will be in commercials or lame sitcoms where you sit in the background of a diner set and pretend to be interested in the out-of-work actor sitting across from you (who looks ten times better than you do) while the stars of the show ham it up downstage for the live studio audience. Don't even think that one day YOU'LL be the star because you won't. You know how I know? Because every actor in Hollywood thinks that, and they look better than you. As an actor in Hollywood, you will spend your time doing three things: waiting tables to pay the rent, going to auditions, and looking for an agent. Even if you are lucky enough to get an agent, you will still have to find most of your work on your own. Which means, now that you have an agent, even if you found the job on your own, your agent gets 10% of the pay. So maybe you weren't so lucky after all.

WRITER

The good news about being a screenwriter is that you don't have to live in Hollywood to do it. But it sure does help. There are almost as many would-be screenwriters in LA as there are would-be actors. If you want to write features, you are unlikely to get enough work to cover the cost of living expenses. Very few screenwriters make enough money per year to make a living off of it. Like the out of work actor, you will have to wait tables. TV writing pays well, but it's even harder to get anyone to look at your work than feature writing. Most agents will want to see at least two samples of TV writing: a pilot (your own idea for a show) and a spec script (an episode of an existing show). From what I hear right now (as of Jan. 07) most agents want to see a sample of Gray's Anatomy. Don't ask me why. But even getting an agent is no guarantee. Writing staffs are hard, if not impossible, to get on. You will not be a TV writer. I can say this because of the odds. Chances are, it will not happen. So that leaves feature writing. Not as good money as TV writing, because even though you get paid more per script, it is not regular work. Pre-production and development is a very lengthy period of time, which means to make a living off of feature writing, you will need to be optioning as much as you can. Optioning means a production company pays you a small sum (usually 10% of the amount that they would buy a script outright from you) to retain the option rights to your script. These options usually last a year. If the company hasn't started production on your script within that year, the rights to your script revert back to you. You can either renew the option (for another 10%) or shop the script around at other production companies. Most screenwriters get steady pay off of optioning, not selling scripts. But optioning is not a glamorous income. I know one screenwriter who makes on average 30,000 a year and has never sold a single script. I know that sounds impressive, but 30,000 a year is hardly liveable in LA. 30,000 a year gets you a West Hollywood studio apartment with no AC and no utilities and a lifetime supply of Top Ramen. That's about it. You think I'm joking. If you still want to take a stab at being a screenwriter in Hollywood, check mandy.com or craigslist.org for ads about screenwriters. Every now and then a company will announce that it is "accepting queries." Send in a query letter detailing the plot of your script (do not send the script itself). You will probably not hear back, but make it sound as exciting and dynamic as you can anyway. This is a good yet unlikely first shot at getting producers to look at your scripts. Also, you should enter some screenwriting competitions (there are several every year). You will have to pay a fee to enter, but if you win an award, this looks very good in a query and will usually get someone's attention. But overall, screenwriting is not a terribly lucrative career path. Keep in mind, also, that you really don't need to go to school to be a screenwriter. No one asks for your credentials when you submit scripts, and even if you mention in a cover letter that you're a film school grad, no one will give a tin shit. One student told me once that he was getting his BA in Film Studies because he wanted to be a screenwriter. I laughed.

PRODUCER

If you want to be an independent producer, you will have to have a ton of money and connections. But then, if you have a ton of money and connections, you can get pretty much any job in Hollywood. To start out with everyone else, you will have to be an office assistant (although it's possible to move from the set to the production office, you have to make it big on the set first: see DIRECTOR, above). An office assistant is like being a secretary, with the added bonus that you have to occasionally run errands throughout the city and do your boss's laundry. Sometimes you'll get a parking space. Despite how it sounds, these assistant positions are actually coveted throughout Hollywood. They are "the way up" and are not overly strenuous as compared to a set PA (again, see DIRECTOR, above). However, to get one, you need previous experience, which presents the classic paradox of how do you get experience when every job requires experience. The answer is in the agencies. I recommend at least a year with a talent agency, preferably one of "the big 4" (UTA, CAA, WMA, ICM). See TALENT AGENT, below, on how to get an agency job. After you spend a year in the agency, you might actually get some callbacks for the production office job. Maybe even an interview. And if they like you, *gasp*, a job as an office assistant. Which you will have for quite a few years. Many. Depends on how long it takes you to figure out what you need to do to make the leap to producer. And that all depends on vacancy, charisma, skill, extraordinary luck and I don't know what else. In fact, I should stop right here, because I have no idea how to make that leap from assistant to producer. Even the producers I've met won't tell me how they did it. It's one of the great Mysteries of Hollywood. Maybe it involves sexual favors. I have no clue. "Maybe it has to do with having a film degree." Hardly. Most of the producers I know were business or econ. majors.

TALENT AGENT

Being a talent agent can be quite lucrative if you make it into one of the Big 4 Agencies. But this probably won't happen to you. At least not before you reach the age of 50. Here's my best guess how to become a talent agent. First, you will need to start out as the lowest of the low at a talent agency, which means either HR or Mailroom. In order to get these jobs, you will need prior experience. How do you get that prior experience? The answer is simple: internships. Internships are where you work for the company for free and for two or three days a week. If you're still in school you may be eligible for college credit. Yippee! These last around three months. You will probably need to intern at bare minimum three times. This will give you 9 months experience in the industry, which is almost a year, which is usually enough to get the mailroom job at the agency (interning a lot may also get you that coveted producers assistant gig, see PRODUCER above). On the down side, you will have to work at minimum two days a week for 9 months with no pay whatsoever, so I hope you're a good waiter. It is relatively easy to get an internship. Your school may have postings for them, or check online at craigslist.org and mandy.com. They offer them all the time. Use your internships to meet as many people as you can. Networking is key in Hollywood. And I don't just mean with the higher-ups. Make friends with your fellow interns. One person making it big could be your ticket for promotion. Go out for drinks after work with your fellow interns and assistants. Talk shop. Gripe about waiting on unruly customers. This is your chance to forge relationships before Hollywood sucks the soul out of you. You are going to need this. By the way, you can intern at either production offices or talent agencies. Both do about the same thing. You also might consider temping for a staffing agency, like Friedman Personnel Agency in Los Angeles or Appleone. Your temp jobs you get from them are unlikely to lead to permanent positions, but at least they're resume builders (and at least they pay, unlike the internships). Anyway, after you've accumulated your year or two of experience, you should be ready for the mailroom. Expect to be there awhile. As long as two years, maybe even three. While you're there, befriend several agents' assistants and ask them if they are leaving their job anytime soon. If one of them says yes, buy that guy a lot of drinks until he is your friend. Congratulations! You just made it to agent assistant. Expect to be at this post for quite awhile. Ten years, quite possibly more. Now, how to get to the talent agent level is another of those Mysteries. My best guess: Befriend agents and ask them if they will be leaving the agency soon. If one of them says yes, buy that guy a lot of drinks until he is convinced that you would be a suitable replacement. Sexual favors may be involved.

EDITOR, AND POST-PRODUCTION IN GENERAL

Like trying to be an agent, trying to get in post-production will likely involve internships and buying drinks for people. Sometimes you will be called an "apprentice" instead of "intern" but they both pretty much mean the same thing: no pay three days a week for three months. The idea of being an editor's apprentice is that your editor "mentor" will take you under his/her wing and show you the ropes. From there, you are on your own. Since no company will hire you without actual produced movie credits, you will have to continue to apprentice until your mentor either retires or dies. As you can imagine, this may take awhile. You will need his/her letter of recommendation so make sure he/she bequeaths that to you before they pass away. Editors and post-production jobs in general don't pay extraordinarily well, but if you're really lucky, you might be able to make an okay career of it. Just remember to return the favor to your apprentice when you're on your deathbed.

A FINAL NOTE:

Hollywood is about building relationships and pretending that you really like the person you're building that relationship with. This can be a struggle. You should never assert any individuality or creativity while in LA, but you should definitely assure everyone of your drive and ambition to be just like everyone else. When Hollywood says it's looking for "creativity" and "originality," it means that in the same way that Vogue magazine means that their periodical is for the "everyday woman." You just have to sort of wink and smile and pretend it's true.

One final thing: There is a job list known as the UTA Job List which purports to be the best employment resource in the industry. It is often quite mystified and many people think it doesn't exist, that it's just some urban legend of the entertainment industry. Yes it does exist, no you cannot be on the mailing list for it, and even if you got your grubby little mitts on it, no you will not find a job off of it. Just ignore it if anyone tries to push it on you. It will just make you feel worse about being unemployed. I have sent my resume to over 200 of its job listings time and time again and I have never interviewed for a single job on the list. I have not known anyone who has ever gotten a job off of the UTA list. No one. I got a callback once but it was to tell me the position had been filled. My theory on why this happens is that the UTA List gets sent out to grad students at UCLA and USC first. So by the time it somehow haphazardly falls into your hands, all the jobs are gone, no matter how recent the posting. So just ignore the list. It will just break your spirit, and that's not the List's job, it's Hollywood's.

Ray,

If you'd like to print this out for your students or post it on your web site, that's fine, but make sure it goes down as "Anonymous." Thanks!

Best,

"Anonymous"

A Postscript from Ray Carney: If the above leaves you hungry for even more detailed information about the rules of the Hollywood game, I highly recommend a recently published book: The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God! by Joe Eszterhas (St. Martin's Press, 2006). You won't know whether to laugh or cry as you read it.

A note from Ray Carney: Who is Rodrigo Garcia? I have just recently discovered his work and it is A-MA-ZING!!! He's one of the great living directors of actors, as far as I can tell. I highly, highly, highly recommend to site visitors the following three features by him. (I already have a brief note about the most recent film, Nine Lives, on an earlier Mailbag page.)

Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000)
Ten Tiny Love Stories (aka Women Remember Men) (2001)
Nine Lives (2005)

All three give me hope for "simple filmmaking"--no special effects, no stylistic razzle-dazzle, no scenery-chewing, no cinematographic show-boating, no apocalyptic scare tactics--just small-scale brilliant, intimate, emotional explorations of particular lives and ways of being. And what a sense of form Garcia has (and how rare that is). Each of these films is episodic, but the episodes are knitted together by his brilliant sense of shapeliness, paring away what is unnecessary, foregrounding what is essential. This is the world Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, and Tom Noonan (in their totally different ways) have cinematically mapped and explored.

It is always a great moment in my life to learn about the existence of another genuine, deep-souled artist, and Rodrigo Garcia is a name I am delighted to add to my personal list, a name to conjure with in the future. May he make dozens of more films.

Subject: Mark Rappaport contact

Ray,

Do you have an email contact for Mark Rappaport? We'd like to rent 16mm prints of some of his work from the 1970s.

Best,

Alain LeTourneau

RC replies:

Alain,

Great to hear from you! I'm sure you're doing great film work, as always.

Mark Rappaport doesn't distribute his work any more. He left the country about two years ago and had stopped renting prints even before that. It was a losing proposition, like so many indie situations. And now that he's left the country, there is not even the chance for a special exception. No more rentals, alas. I'm not sure you know: At this point, he lives in Paris. As you undoubtedly realize, shipping prints in and out of the US from France would be virtually impossible, given all the customs and shipping paperwork involved. But that isn't even a possibility since he doesn't now have any prints in his possession. He gave them to me. I have them. He just couldn't take all that stuff to Paris with him. It would have been too much to ship and store there.

Let me explain what happened. Did you know the following? Mark is a great friend and gave me almost everything he owned when he left New York for France? Thousands of pages and box after box of material. So I am now the "Mark Rappaport Archive." I have the largest collection of material by him in the world: file cabinets and storage bins full of amazing things: production notebooks, film prints, rough drafts, revisions, scripts, film stock, DVDs, tapes, notes, jottings, journals, etc. etc. etc. It's a dream come true for me and one of the major film collections by one of the world's greatest artists. All being preserved for posterity at any cost. (Just like my rare Cassavetes material--both unknown film material and scripts and notebooks.) But, alas, I am not a rental operation, and can't possibly deal with sending things out and tending to the paperwork and cleaning prints and repairing splices, etc. (Let alone the risk of losing the only print of something, the only copy I have.) So my massive collection is of no use at all for your purposes. Mark is one of cinema's greatest living artists and I would love to make all of this material available to a museum or film archive for a massive retrospective "show" of Mark's work, notebooks, scripts, etc., but I just can't send individual films out to movie theaters for one-time bookings.

Sorry I can't help or be more encouraging. You know I'd like to help you if I could.

Ray

Hola Ray Carney,

This is from Reagan Molina who out of nowhere discovered Norman Mailer (finished Executioner's Song, third of the way through Armies of Night ) and in my research of his interviews I found this nice little exchange between the son and father Mailer in their interview book The Big Empty:
NM: The fight now in America as I see it- the primal fight, if you will, the one that underlies all the others - is the level of American intelligence. Is it going to improve or deteriorate? A democracy depends upon the intelligence of its people. By that, I don't mean literary intelligence or even verbal intelligence. Rather, it is a readiness to look into the face of difficult questions and not search for quick answers. You can measure real intelligence by that ability to live with a difficult question. And patriotism gobbled up, sentimentalized, and thereby abased is one of the most powerful single forces to proliferate stupidity.

He then goes on to say the following: NM: ...We're not necessarily headed for disaster, but we may be. I don't know much about the Greeks, but the little I have learned about them in recent years does inspire some respect on this matter. Because they saw life as a dynamic mixture of hope and despair. In other words, you never live without the possibility that disaster may be near. That's part of the human condition. Any attempt to wipe out one's fear of the possibility of disaster is totalitarian, and this is a spectrum that extends all the way from political correctness over to the worst of Hitler.

We are not living with a guarantee of the happy ending. Anyone who purveys such a notion is not working for humanity, but against it. I would go so far as to say that.

In my own personal opinion, Norman Mailer is the greatest living writer, though sadly I don't know how much longer we have him.......

Reagan

RC responds:

Norman Mailer is one of the greats. One of the great American geniuses of the present. I used to teach his work in my literature courses all the time: Why Are We In Vietnam?, Armies of the Night, Advertisements for Myself, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, and many of his other novels and collections of essays. Glad to hear you are on the case in my absence. Following his trail. Tracking him down. Seeing where he's headed. (My current position doesn't allow much opportunity to continue doing his work in my courses.)

What is it to be Norman Mailer? What is it to be a great artist? I asked that question in the first meeting of my Bresson course last week, and got a dozen interesting answers. My own is that "to be a genius is to see a little further than the rest of us.... and to be able to express what you see." (The former is hard enough but the latter is an additional challenge when you see further than the existing systems of understanding allow, when you outrun the lingua franca, which is what artists always do.)

Well, that's a pretty good definition of Norman Mailer and his writing. He sees just a bit further and deeper and truer than the rest of us. And he finds a way to say what he sees. So thanks for the quotes. They are important. Study his comments. Heed his words. He knows whereof he speaks. He understands things that it will take most others a century or two to understand.

But he will never be a best-selling author in America. The culture is too shallow. Too light-weight. The educational system is too perfunctory. The sense of history is too absent. America is a theme-park culture. (Look at the terrorist event in Boston today, where the Turner Broadcasting network planted fake bombs on bridges, underpasses, and buildings to promote a TV show. America has no sense of reality. Certainly no sense of a complex reality. What's next--a "terrorist ride" at Disneyland? Come to think of it, they probably have that already.) That's what Mailer calls the failure of intelligence in our culture, and it is pervasive. It would take a massive overhaul of the entire educational system, and all of the media (newspapers, TV, movies, magazines, the works!) even to begin to create a culture of intelligence. And, baby, it just ain't gonna happen. Hence our brain-dead foreign policy, our catatonic election campaigns, the stupidity of American film and television, the silliness and frivolousness of our so-called intellectual culture. (Henry Louis Gates interviewing Oprah Winfrey for PBS. Need I say more?) We are in real trouble.

You know those yellow magnetic automobile ribbons that read , "Support the troops"? I want to get one that says: "Pray for my country." I'd like to put it on my car. I'd hope that both Democrats and Republicans could rally around it, without objection. American needs a lot of prayer. Right now. And now more than ever in its history.

Fond wishes to you and to my country.

Love,

RC

A note from a former student of Carney's, Lucas Sabean:

I just "really" listened to Haydn for the first time. It has some of Mozart's humor and lightness and some of Beethoven's intensity. The last few weeks I have been really into listening to Baroque, meaning like two hours a day. It has opened up universes. So wonderful, it makes me get out of bed everyday. It's funny I would never have paid attention to Haydn unless it had been for Junebug. Thanks again for turning me onto all this stuff. I guess when you showed me that Frans Hals painting, the one with the guy with the red face. It all started then somehow, understanding what you meant about "energies" in art which you first mentioned to me when I wrote you an e-mail about the sacred fount...it was something about "I think this means that" and you said, "look for energies in James's work". And I thought hmmm energies. He said something about that in Eakins work too. See it is all connected somehow...maybe?

Lucas

RC replies:

Haydn was one of Mozart's earliest admirers and best friends and taught him a lot. Not sure what you listened to, but Haydn's string quartets invented the genre and were so good that Mozart dedicated his own string quartets to the master. The Angeles String Quartet has a nice set of all them on 21 CDs. Haydn also wrote 104 symphonies. (Mozart was on his way to himself topping that number if he had lived past the age of 35. Since he died so young, he only wrote around 40.) Brilliant has a wonderful set of the complete Haydn symphonies recorded by Adam Fischer, but the late symphonies (the so-called "Paris symphonies" and "London symphonies") are a great place to start and are available separately on two CD sets very inexpensively. Thomas Fey is also recording a new cycle to be completed by 2009, the 200th anniversary of Haydn's birth. Only a few disks have been released at this point, and I haven't had a chance to hear them.

To compare geniuses is invidious, but Haydn is not really as deep or perceptive as Mozart and does not have as many new ideas and emotions, but he is a VERY great artist in any case and a laff riot. Full of jokes and puns and pranks. A real "entertainer" by 18th century standards, which is of course very different from being one nowadays. His entertainment was the playfulness of a brilliant artist; our entertainment is the stupidity of non-artists.

As for the flows of energy, the surges, the flickers, the switches I repeatedly talk about in my work (and have talked to you in person about both when you were a student and afterwards), read Emerson's "Circles" and "The Poet." He was the start of all of my best ideas. He was my teacher (along with Dick Poirier, whose classes were a revelation to me). Flow is right. We try to pin things down, to fix them, to stop them, to stabilize them, to clarify them, to turn verbs and participles into nouns. It's a bad habit of our brains and causes most of the trouble in the world and most of the unhappiness in our emotional lives. But great artists free us. They flux reality. They make it flow again. (The way it really does anyway, but we don't see it because we are so busy nailing Christ to the cross as Lawrence says.) Life is motion. Life is energies in movement. That's what The Sacred Fount shows. That's what great art always does. (And it's why Hitchcock, who is a master at stopping the motion, is NOT a great artist!) So yes to Frans Hals (and the painting in the Metropolitan Museum I vividly remember discussing with you). And yes to Rembrandt. And yes to Emerson. And yes to Cassavetes (whom I just spent an hour discussing yesterday in class and trying to show the students the flow, the flux, the mutability, the liquefaction--that's Herrick's word--of his scenes). The truth flows. Life moves. Experience blurs and blends and shifts and surges. It never stands still. Only bad art does that, and bad critics try to do that even to good art, with their quest for symbols and metaphors and meanings and all their other semantic and emotional and psychological stupidity.

Go, Lucas, go.

Ray

Ray,

I posted on line about my lack of actors a week or two ago. Something like "I'll work with anyone who wants to work with me, the only problem is that nobody wants to work with me." Full of rage and disappointment. Then, a few days later one girl from my city actually enthusiastically responded! She really wants to do something, but..... in my sneaky way, I put her screen name in Google and came up with some girl who posts stuff like "What's the best hair product", "What's the best way to move to LA", "what's a good tote bag for school supplies". Can you believe this? THIS is the only passionate person here? A female lead is all I need and I'm ready to shoot (I'm gonna play the stumbling angry haphazard often-quiet confusing dictator role...which shouldn't be too hard for me), so I'm waiting for her response to my proposal, wondering what Carl Dreyer would do with a girl like her... Well, I guess I'll have to found out on my own...

Anyone who doesn't believe God has a sense of humor needs to take a look at my life.

(Name withheld)

P.S. On a good note, there is a girl here and a boy here at my univ. who I found out are INCREDIBLE writers. They tell the truth in a way that is totally there own. The language they use reminds me of Faulkner (and Mailer even), all conscious-streamy. I told them how incredible I thought their language and contradicting, selfish, confident, frail, worried, headstrong characters are. The boy I called a "weather reporter of the inner hurricanes" a description I stand by too. I begged them to please do more. I'm not exaggerating either. I'm just waiting for the opportunity to work with them.

A note from Ray Carney:

Since the material is buried and not that obvious, I wanted to call readers' attention to the "Novelty Department" note at the bottom of page 54 of the Mailbag. It is worth going to and clicking on.