The Tension When Shooting a TV Episode

In writing my novel Star Time, I wanted to describe the shooting of a TV episode, so that my readers would get the sense of the tension that arises during the shooting of a show:  Here's an excerpt:

Biff Stanfield was nearly insane with worry. He had watched the rehearsal just before the initial take of the first scene between Sally and Chad and had nearly thrown up. The woman character he had created so carefully now seemed as contrived as a Saturday-morning cartoon, Chad's as stiff as an ironing board.

"It'll be fine," the man in the safari jacket answered.

John Rosenthal was a red-bearded producer-director who had cut his teeth at MTM and directed a dozen hit shows over the years. The high fees he now received and the residual checks that came in each month had made him a rich man. He was heavily in demand during pilot season because of his touch with comedy. This year, though, the project he and his wife, Marti, an experienced producer, had personally developed had fallen through at the last minute, and Marian Marcus had talked them into joining the team for Adam and Eve's pilot.

"You keep telling me not to worry,' Biff was agonizing, "but somebody sure as hell better!"

John smiled. He walked over to Sally and Chad. "Take it a little faster this time. And move a little closer."

"That's it?" Biff moaned when the smaller man returned to his chair. "If the world was collapsing in front of James Cameron’s eyes, would he just say, 'Move closer?'"

"Marti!" John called over to the pretty, round-faced woman in discussion with Marian Marcus near the side of the studio. "You've worked with Cameron. Would he have told them to move closer?"

She noted the hint of a smile as he spoke, and she shook her head. "Farther apart."

"John turned back to Biff. "I guess you have your choice."

Unnerved, Biff rushed away.

"Let's shoot it this time," John directed the cast and crew. "And let’s have it faster.”

Read more:  Star Time. http://ow.ly/sULaK 

Adultery in America and STAR TIME

I think many people were as surprised as I to learn that adultery, one of the charges in General Sinclair's court martial, is grounds for discharge from the military.  In effect a Biblical admonition that has become for most people a question of personal morality is, in the military, grounds for the ending of a career and losing one's income.  The only way that stance seems justifiable to me is by recognizing that because military installations are basically sealed-off communities, adultery is a disruptive act that threatens the stable functioning of the entire base and, thus, American security.

My novel STAR TIME addresses adultery in a wider context among highly prominent participants, where there is no imbalance of power between the offending parties or their spouses, who are all powerful in their own rights.  Nonetheless, the offending couple finds that their moral choices have consequences as damaging as if their actions had been banned by law or regulation.

Greg Lyall is a TV news producer in Hollywood.  Christine Paskins is a local TV reporter.  Their love affair is passionate and committed--until he meets the daughter of the TV network's powerful CEO, who can accelerate his career into the stratosphere.  Ten years later, when Greg is running the network, he hires Chris, now a nationally known newscaster, to be his network's nightly news anchor, its Diane Sawyer, if you will.  The passion that burned so hotly ten years earlier re-ignites with hurtful consequences for both families. Like the general, Greg is put at risk of being toppled from his elevated position, in his case by his outraged father-in-law. Chris's husband is a U.S. senator, who finds much more than his marriage at risk when she begins to investigate a secret government program.  Although the lovers understand how hurtful their affair will be to their spouses, their passion burns so hotly, so all-consumingly, that this time they cannot break off and separate.  They must face the consequences of their actions.  And those consequences, while personal and not institutionalized, can be as harsh as if the penalty for adultery were carved on a stone tablet.

READ MORE: STAR TIME http://www.josephamiel.com/

Reconstructing a Downed Airliner to Learn the Cause of the Crash

I've written a number of novels, including Stalking the Sky or Stalking the Sky (Kindle). A Question of Proof or A Question of Proof (Kindle); Star Time: New Version & New Introduction or Star Time(Kindle); Birthright or Birthright (Kindle); and Deeds or Deeds (Kindle). In writing my book Stalking the Sky or Stalking the Sky (Kindle), I wanted readers to know how National Transportation Safety Board investigators reconstruct a downed airliner to aid them in discovering the cause of a crash.

Here's an excerpt:

Sunday morning in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is for church or sleeping late. For Will and Clayton, the morning was for viewing a reconstructed section of a 747 in a drafty hangar at the edge of an airfield.

Hunks of debris from 211, the first plane downed, were marked with chalk or tags and scattered about the floor, while the tail, still miraculously whole, towered high into the steel joists, emphasizing the devastation of the rest.

Tal's plane would look like this one, Will realized with a start. As a boy dragged along to church each week, he had pictured the Apocalypse like this—cemeteries littered with the broken toys of the forever departed.

"It's the most perfect flying machine ever built," Bill Ewing said softly as he led them around the twisted metal wired on wooden scaffolding into the rough configuration of what used to be the front end of a 747. "So perfect it can take off, guide itself across country, land and end up within twenty feet of the gates with the flight crew playing gin rummy all the way. Every system has a backup. It can fly routinely on three engines and land on two. It has even made it safely down on one. It flew two billion miles without a fatal accident."

Ewing pointed to the far end of the empty hangar. "Those engines can lift over three quarters of a million pounds of fully loaded plane forty-five thousand feet into the sky and fly six hundred miles an hour carrying between four and five hundred people. But if only ten or twenty pounds of that load is high explosive, this is what you have left."

Bill Ewing had spent half of his sixty years designing and building ever larger, more sophisticated airliners, and the last ten years putting bits and pieces back together.

"Where exactly was the bomb placed?" Clayton asked.

Ewing pointed. "Right about there. Above the left lavatory in first class. Whoever put it there unscrewed a ceiling panel that shields the light fixture, placed the bomb inside and put back the panel."

Read more: Stalking the Sky or Stalking the Sky (Kindle). bit.ly/PojdHz

Mutual Distress Over a Plane Crash Begins a Love Affair

In writing my book STALKING THE SKY, I wanted to show how, in the course of talking about her feelings about the death of her co-worker in their airline's recent plane crash and her fears about flying again, flight attendant Donna Harney can develop a rapport with the novel's protagonist, Will Nye, an executive with the airline, that can blossom into an intimate personal relationship.

Here's an excerpt:

Donna was standing in the doorway.

"Can I speak to you?" she asked.

He nodded.

She closed the door behind her. The blue eyes were anxious.

"You were kind before . . . and I have to tell someone."

The words seemed to hang back, like outnumbered soldiers. "Now that I know you’re with the company, maybe you can tell them for me."

She was leaning against the wall, relying on it. "I’ve never been afraid to fly. I never really thought about anything happening up there. The evacuation drills, the oxygen masks and life vests were just something you did as part of the job, not because you might need them." She paused to refocus her thoughts. A hint of her fear was beginning to quicken her words. "I should have been on that plane last night. Jeanne would be alive. I barely knew her. Jeanne was just a stew who happened to live in my new building and was willing to switch trips with me."

She turned on her listener. "You can’t understand what it’s like knowing you’ve caused another person’s death, and this isn’t the end of it. Every day I’d have to wake up to a job of flying in something that can kill me and hundreds of other people in an instant."

"Whether I understand or not isn’t the point," Will responded. "If you want to quit, I’ll call Personnel for you and advise them. Do you have another way to pay for your apartment?"

"We’re talking about my life!"

"Your home seemed awfully important a few hours ago."

"A lot has happened since then. I’ll just have to get another job. With a normal schedule maybe I can go to college."

"How are you getting back to Denver?"

"What difference does that make? Train. Bus."

"They take a long time. If you wait a few hours or so and can bring yourself to fly one more time, I’ll be able to tell you when the Westwind is heading back."

"You really are an annoying bastard," she said, anger beginning to replace the fear and the sorrow. "I was right about you last night, I really was."

"I gather then you don’t want a lift back to Denver."

Unexpectedly, she laughed. "I hoped you would at least give me the satisfaction of talking me out of quitting."

The laugh had been warm, her distress genuine. Will was caught off-guard by the unanticipated intimacy. His own tone softened.

"If it’s cheap advice you want, I’ll give it to you. But let’s get some lunch. I’ve got a two-thirty appointment I can’t be late for."

He held the door for her. She did not move.

"You know," she said, not bothering to mask the surprise in her voice, "it just occurred to me that you’re probably important enough to get me fired, the way I talked to you last night."

"You just said you were quitting."

With a smile she allowed the surprise to burst on her features again. "I knew I heard that somewhere."

Donna did not bother to change out of her uniform, but while she washed up, Will read newspaper accounts of the crash. With a sinking feeling Will realized that the intimations of a criminal cause could lay the blame for failing to prevent the mass deaths at his own door.

Read more:  STALKING THE SKY bit.ly/PojdHz

How the FBI Investigates Suspects in Airliner Sabotage

In writing my book Stalking the Sky, I wanted to show in a brief way the slogging person-by-person investigation that must be undertaken to find possible motives behind the sabotage of an airliner that killed hundreds of passengers by describing the FBI agent's visits to relatives of three of the deceased. 

Here's an excerpt:

Clayton’s last stop was at the home of Sandra Guerin, the wife of the late SEC official. Grief was slowly evolving into resentment at having been left behind to cope with raising children, paying the mortgage and the taxes, not having enough insurance money to stay in graduate school, and worst of all, having to live out every day, from rising till sleeping, alone.

They had spent Thanksgiving weekend with her mother. She and the kids had planned to spend the rest of the week at Grandma’s before returning to Washington on Friday. He had left for the airport at eight, attended a meeting there and caught a later plane than he had originally planned to take.

Charles Guerin had received a telephone call that morning, his wife explained. She had overheard snatches of a conversation that seemed to deal with the Senate confirmation hearings. He appeared to be angry after he hung up, and said only that he had agreed to an airport meeting and would have to change his reservation.

No, she didn’t have any idea whom the appointment was with. No, she didn’t have the name of anyone else who might know.

Clayton’s colleagues had already questioned dozens of people who had been at O’Hare the night before. They had all been shown a photograph of Guerin, but none could recall having seen him. Clayton held out little hope that more information would be uncovered.

Occasionally Owen was struck by the realization of how superficially even the most intense investigation scanned a person’s life. Markowitz might have been hated by a mistress no one would ever know about. Evelyn Flein might have had a secret suicide compulsion. Charles Guerin might have had a shoe-box full of thousand-dollar bills stashed in a closet. And there were three hundred and thirty-six other passengers and crew members whose lives would ultimately remain as much a mystery as these. Clayton knew that his best chance was to stumble after motives and hope he bumped into the real one, like a grown man playing blind man's buff.

As Clayton was about to leave Guerin’s house, Sandra Guerin added to the mystery by remarking she was sure that when Charles left the house that night he told her he was flying to Washington, not New York.

Read more: Stalking the Sky bit.ly/PojdHz

How a Banker Capitalized on the Suez Crisis

In my historical novel BIRTHRIGHT, I wanted to show how Samuel Kronengold, the dominant figure in the British Kronengold bank, could try to maneuver political leaders to his will, while simultaneously deciding where to place the bank's investment bets. I chose the Suez Crisis. Egypt's President Nasser had just ordered the seizure of the Suez Canal from Britain and France. Along with Israel, they countered by attacking Egypt to retake the Canal, infuriating U.S. President Eisenhower. Within days, Britain's weak-willed prime minister, Anthony Eden, would cave in to the U.S. and end the invasion.

Here’s an excerpt that occurs just after the three countries attack Egypt:

EGYPT'S SEIZURE OF THE SUEZ CANAL from Britain and France in July of 1956 set into motion events on a scale far larger than a single person's or a single family's destiny. The resulting crisis four months later would threaten world peace; would shake the Atlantic alliance; would humiliate Britain, dishearten it, and hasten its decline, its self-absorption, and the fall of its prime minister. It would frustrate France and accelerate its loss of Algeria, the end of its Third Republic, and the return to power of Charles de Gaulle; and provoke hostility to Britain as a future Common Market partner. It would endow Israel with more secure borders for the next decade and a port on the Gulf of Aqaba, leading to the Indian Ocean; would safeguard Egypt and make a hero of Gamal Abdel Nasser, that nation's chief of state; and would sow the seeds of a pan-Islamic oil policy based on nationalistic needs and concerted action, which would someday bring to once poor countries wealth and power beyond their wildest hopes and shake the foundations of the industrialized world.

The first retaliation for Egypt's seizure of the Canal occurred on October 29, 1956, when Israel attacked Egyptian positions in the Sinai. Two days later, in accordance with a secret scheme previously agreed to with Israel, Britain and France began bombing Egyptian airfields, alleging they were acting to protect the Suez Canal, an essential international waterway. Israel had swept across the Sinai on schedule to prearranged positions near Suez while pressing southward to free the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping.

As the days passed Anthony Eden, Britain's prime minister, hesitated to give the word that would unleash the French and British troops waiting on Cyprus and Malta and begin the full-scale attack. He faced a host of pressures: a popular outcry against the bombings in his own country, blustering condemnation from a Soviet Union allied with Egypt and trying to divert attention from its own invasions of Poland and Hungary, and perhaps most telling, United States President Eisenhower's fear that his own NATO partners were bringing the world to the brink of war. With only days remaining before the U.S. presidential election, Eisenhower, in order to force Britain to back down, was exerting both diplomatic influence in the United Nations and financial muscle by weakening the British pound.

Fearing that Eden was about to get cold feet and leave his secret Jewish allies militarily and diplomatically high and dry, Israeli high officials cast about for someone who might approach the British prime minister and allay his fears about Eisenhower's ability to undermine Britain's currency and economy. When they learned that Eden and his wife, Clarissa, were scheduled to attend a dinner at the home of Baron Samuel de Kronengold on that very night of November 4, 1956, they asked Pierre, his French cousin, to telephone Samuel about speaking to Eden.

Although Samuel was a contributor to Israel, the Israelis were far closer to Pierre, who spent a good deal of time in Israel and funded numerous projects there. The two cousins had been in negotiations for months about merging their banks into a larger, unified financial institution—after a century of separation—now that it appeared Britain would soon join the Common Market. Both men feared, among other things, that a failure to retake the Suez Canal and topple Nasser would result, instead, in toppling both the French and British governments. That would put an end to British acceptance into the Common Market for the time being and, thus, to the merger of the French and British Kronengold banks.

Samuel needed little convincing by Pierre, viewing Britain's refusal to knuckle under to Nasser as a reassertion, at last, of British greatness. He spent the day rehearsing the arguments he would use to stiffen Eden's backbone.

Only after dinner, when Samuel led the men, erect in black tie and tuxedo, to the Trophy Room, was he able to talk alone with Eden. Although they sat in a corner and conversed for a very long time, all of Samuel's persuasion proved fruitless; he found himself facing a very ill, very frightened man.

Read more:   BIRTHRIGHT bit.ly/PojdHz

The First Things an Airline Does When a Plane Crashes

I've written a number of novels, including Stalking the Sky or Stalking the Sky (Kindle). A Question of Proof or A Question of Proof (Kindle); Star Time: New Version & New Introduction or Star Time (Kindle) and Birthright or Birthright (Kindle) and Deeds or Deeds (Kindle). In writing my book Stalking the Sky or Stalking the Sky (Kindle), I wanted to describe the processes that are put into motion when a jetliner goes down without making the description tedious, so I had an executive in charge concisely describe to the CEO the steps his people had taken.

Here's an excerpt:

Conway handed Buck a folded computer printout and took a seat. "One of the guys at the Tech Desk asked me to bring up the plane’s maintenance log. I also thought you’d want to see the flight crew records. I’ve already been on the phone with our Chicago and New York people. We’re doing everything we can for the families and friends. Not three months ago I had every airport office review the procedures in case something like this occurred, so you can be proud your people are on their toes."

Read more: Stalking the Sky (Kindle). bit.ly/PojdHz