Re: diff version
Subject: Re: diff version
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: 5/14/10, 12:32
To: patrick stack <pjs@outofpocketfilms.com>

Pat-

Here's the edited version. I ended up making a lot of what were mostly just small tweaks, more in some parts than others, and took out a small section towards the beginning. Added a few lines where I thought necessary.

The one additional thing I think this needs is just a brief paragraph relating what you did end up doing acting-wise before moving on to sales. If you want to just write two or three sentences summing that up, I can stick it wherever it would work best. Or I can just write it for you if you'd like since I've got your film credits already. 

Let me know what you think.

In the fall of 1958, thousands of leaves fell on to our  to our front yard each day. It was my job to make them disappear.  

I would start off by arranging them in large mounds.  Sometimes the mounds would be in a straight line and sometimes I would take the opportunity to play tic-tac-toe.  I knew that eventually, they needed to all be put in the street, arranged along the curb in a tidy row, and so I didn’t want to get too crazy with these sadly ephemeral designs.

This bi-weekly exercise could hardly have gone unnoticed by the younger kids in the neighborhood, who quickly came to learn the routine. I would make these huge piles appear in some Christophe-like exhibit and they would meanwhile wait patiently on the sidewalk. Depending on my mood - which was usually upbeat in those days, my responsibilities being then relegated to leaf management - I would let them pick one pile to attack on the grounds that this was fun to watch. Then, after the kids had flattened the mountain and had re-raked the leaves in to some semblance of a pile, it was time to get down to business.  

It didn’t take me long to convert the four or five mounds of tree droppings on the grass in to a long, multi-hued tube that would run the length of the gutter in front of my house.  The kids would know it was close to show time and you could see them start to get antsy.

After some last minute tidying up, making sure the stretch of grass between the sidewalk and the street were leaf free, I would yell to my dad that I was ready. He would appear in the front door, pulling on his coat and adjusting his ever-present fedora as the excitement built up among the spectators. Then he’d amble down the driveway, pull out the matches he used to smoke his pipe, and - cupping his hands to block out any sudden gust of air - he would light one up. And just like that, with a flick of the hand, that long neat row of leaves would quickly turn in to this orange, crackling tube of fire. The kids were happy to watch the flames eat their way down the long row of leaves, chasing and tamping out any escapees caught up in unexpected gusts of wind. And, of course, there was that fantastic smell! But that’s not what I was waiting for; my real fun would come later, when the flames had died down and we were left with the smoldering remains. The street filled with wafting smoke, intermittently obscuring my vision. And when the “haze” was just right, it was time for me to begin “the show”.

In seconds, I would become a newly-hired marshal, walking down some deserted street in Laredo, squinting from the high noon sun and the dust being stirred up by tethered pinto ponies. The street was deserted because the town folk were afraid. They saw me searching for the no-good desperado who had earlier killed everyone in my family.  

The varmit in question was hiding out in one of these buildings and I was eye balling each one, squinting like James Arness as Matt Dillon, or Richard Boone as Paladin, or Gene Barry as Bat Masterson. It was my job to make the town safe again, which of course meant finding that coward before he could slip away. Because I wasn’t allowed to have toy guns (another chapter!), I had to rely on other props: hats, kerchiefs, vests, canteens, bed rolls, all easy-to-get stuff for the most part. But the smoke was the key to fully getting in to character. When you got smoke, you got real production value. And that made the squinting more real. Which made the danger more real.  Which made the satisfaction of saving Laredo and disposing of that low down dirty rotten scoundrel even sweeter.

What was the point of this story, other than to illustrate the many ways in which I helped contribute to global warming? It is to give you some small insight in to the actor’s lifelong passion for playing different characters.  Some people call this “acting.” I call it “having a blast being someone else and putting that person in really cool situations where that guy always wins or if he is shot, he dies a really cool death and falls down but then bounces back up again in 4 seconds to start all over.”    

When I got older and was allowed to watch  different kinds of TV shows, my own scenes got more involved,  the stories more complex and if necessary, they would often last a good part of the afternoon. The neighborhood kids would be rounded up and given their parts (I was the oldest and I ran a benign dictatorship). After going to the Saturday matinee at the local theater, we would recreate the movie we just saw. We’d form musical groups and hold talent contests; we’d dress like young reporters and stop people on the street to interview them. But we had no film in the camera.   

This love affair with character playing continued in some form or another right through high school.  When I was floundering in my first year of college, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do with my life other than try and stay out of Vietnam, my mother suggested I take one of the  acting classes offered to freshmen.  “After all”, she said, “you have always enjoyed being on stage.” So I enrolled in Acting 101 at the leafy institute that was desperate enough to accept me, and it was soon after that I realized people did this for a living and that you could actually train to become better at such a thing. You could, in fact, be paid for being someone else. I knew then what I wanted to do with my life.

After a couple of feeble attempts at two different colleges, I moved to New York in hopes of beginning my life as a thespian.  I was armed with a slight familiarity of Manhattan, a bartending job, and a whole lot of entitlement. I had done some plays in college and was thus ready, I thought, to take my innate ability to the next level. I didn’t expect to be bartending very long!

I met Sully in one of the colleges in which I wasted everyone’s time. He had already moved to the city and, as my new roommate, he was going to show me the ropes. I quickly fell in with his friends and became part of a group that met on Wednesday mornings at a diner on Ninth Avenue.   

We were all relatively new to the city and even newer to show business so the round table discussions and general BS sessions were a great way to gage where everybody
stood in the pecking order of success.  But even though there was very little professional experience amongst this crew of wannabes, we somehow assumed that we knew everything there was to know about breaking in. After all, our little Gang of Five had been big deals in College.  A few had done some summer stock, and one guy had a big time Broadway voice.  The college plays seemed like a huge deal at the time but we often failed to grasp that were we all cast in roles for which we would never be hired in any professional setting. I’m certain that the folks in Boston are still talking about my watershed performance as the dashing, 50-year-old Colonel Vershin in Checkov’s “Three Sisters”.  The fact that I was 22 at the time and completely ill-equipped for
such a demanding role was not lost on anyone unfortunate enough to have sat through the three-plus hour production.  

But that was college we were all in the same boat. The summer stock productions were community theater efforts. We assumed that those types of credits looked great on our bulked up and inflated resumes. None of us had actually ever been paid to act, but now that we were all in New York and completely dialed in to the system, that was all going to change very soon. We were all going to break the mold and prove that this business wasn’t as tough as everyone said it was. Sure, thousands came and quickly washed out, packing their bags and head shots, driving  back to fly over cities like Tulsa and Canton and Springfield, IL.  But those casualties were the untalented losers who didn’t have the goods; they were nothing like us. We had a lot going for ourselves and, we had the goods. Especially me! I was tall, nice looking, great hair and very funny. That meant I was a lock for either soap operas, movies, or sitcoms. I really wasn’t interested in live theater even though I craved the applause.  I wanted the notoriety and the life style that a successful Hollywood actor got to have.  I wanted to be able to walk in to any
McDonalds in this country and be recognized.  That was the dream. Brando and Casavettes had their little group of kick ass actors who owned New York. Well, now it was time for me, Flacker, Sully, Sler, and Frisch.  We were next!  This was the undeniable truth that came out of every Wednesday morning meeting at Gloria’s Diner.  It was October, 1974. I was 23 and ready to be a star.  

More than three decades later, it might be a good time to take a look back and compare what was destined with what actually ended up happening. I continued to study under a great teacher in New York for another three years. I would occasionally get work as an movie extra; of course, I always felt that such work was way beneath me. Like all actors, I was well above-average and deserved a lot more that being the piano player in a Lindsay Wagner Movie of the Week.  

It was in the fall of 1977 that I formed a comedy team with Nathan Lane and we started to get noticed. We didn’t really want to do stand up comedy but we felt it was a good way to get our names out there. We signed with William Morris and in 1980, we took out first trip to the Coast. After a few years of opening for big name acts, and the occasional talk show, we went our separate ways. I’m not sure what ever happened to Nathan Lane or if he stayed in show business or what, but I continued to eek out a marginal living with small television and film roles, commercials, and, of course, bartending.

After a decade of wild ups and downs and more than enough jobs lost for some crazy reason or another, I decided that I had had enough.  It was my 38th birthday and I was
bartending at a very hip and trendy Beverly Hills restaurant called Tribeca, which was the place to be in those days. As the night wore on and the bar slowed down a bit, the
staff brought out a cake covered with way too many burning candles and sang Happy Birthday.  A lot of the patrons also joined in the fun.  

I, on the other hand, was having an out of body experience.  I could see the cake and the candles, and I could see the happy faces of the staff and the customers as they sang their hearts out but I couldn’t hear a sound. It was like I was underwater in the deep end of some pool and there was zero noise.  That’s because when they set the cake down on the bar, I happened to look down for a second and saw that I was wearing an apron.  And then it hit me as if I’d been bitch-slapped by Mike Tyson: I was 38 and still a bartender.  

Destiny appeared to have gotten everything mixed-up. I had not signed on for this life.  And it became very clear to me, at that moment, that I needed to do something else.  I was no longer going to be able to be an actor. I wanted to get married and have children and I didn’t want us to be living in a Volvo station wagon. So I was going to have to find another way to make a living.  And with no college degree, no job experience and not even knowing how to use a fax machine, I had my work cut out for me.

One of my bar regulars was a successful salesman; I asked if I could take him to lunch and “pick his brain,” although I had no idea what exactly I ought to be asking him. He told me I should try and get in to sales because “I was a natural.” This was the last thing I wanted to do; my father had done it and he hated his job. He was good at it but hated it. One of the reasons I went in to acting was because I knew that I would never be in such a situation. But here I was, miserable and frustrated, kind of hating show business and determined to find a new life.

So I applied for some ad sales jobs and ended up getting one. The reason for the story, and the reason for this book, is that it became very clear to me in my job interview process and within the first several months of my new job at Advertising Age that absolutely everyone - I mean everyone, whether they know it or not - is in sales. I had been in sales all my life but this had never occurred to me.   

My thinking going in had been that I was an actor, a comedian, a left-side-of-the-brain kind of guy, but certainly not a salesman.  My dad and his cronies were salesmen.  Losers like O’Neil’s Hickey and Miller’s Willie Lohman were salesmen. Used car dealers and snake oil vendors were salesmen. Not me. I was an artist. But in this crazy new world of magazines, and ad agencies and media sales that I now found myself buried in, it didn’t take me long to realize that trying to land an acting job was no different than trying to sell a media manager advertising.  

Peel away the particulars underneath, and it was all selling. So I vowed to one day write a book for actors and writers and anyone else in the arts and help them connect the dots and understand that we are all salespeople. And in order to be successful in the arts, or education, or medicine or whatever our chosen fields might be, we need to approach our business as any good salesman would approach his business and the selling of his product. And after 15 years as an actor, and after ten years of selling print media and being one of the first to sell advertising and promotions on the internet, and after eight years as a successful independent film producer, that day has come.

So please take these stories and these exercises and these examples of disaster and success for what they are worth: nothing more than a little insight in to one person’s
experiences and, ultimately, what I consider to be the best way to approach one’swork.

By the way,  this morning,  I went in to a McDonalds to get some coffee and nobody asked for my autograph.  Maybe someday.
 

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 7:23 PM, patrick stack <pjs@outofpocketfilms.com> wrote:
here you go:

In the fall of 1958, there were thousands of leaves that fell 
every day on to our front yard.  It was my job to make them 
disappear.  I would start off by arranging them in large 
mounds.  Sometimes the mounds would be in a straight line 
and sometimes I would play tic-tac-toe.  I knew that 
eventually, they needed to all be put in the street, arranged 
along the curb in a tidy row.  So I didn’t want to get too 
crazy with the designs and create a lot of extra work.   

 

This bi-weekly exercise did not go unnoticed by the younger 
kids in the neighborhood.  They knew my routine.  I would 
make these huge piles appear in some Christophe-like 
exhibit and they waited patiently on the sidewalk.  
Depending on my mood, which was usually upbeat, I would 
let them pick one pile to attack.  It was actually kind of fun 
to watch.  I was 11 and way too old to partake in that little 
kid activity and besides, I had other plans.  After the kids 
had flattened the mountain and had re-raked the leaves in to 
a semblance of a pile, it was time to get down to business.  
It didn’t take me long to convert the 4 or 5 mounds of tree 
droppings on the grass in to a long, multi-hued tube that 
would run the length of the gutter in front of my house.  The 
kids would know it was close to show time and you could 
see them start to get antsy.  After some last minute tidying 
up, making sure the stretch of grass between the sidewalk 
and the street were leaf free, I would yell to my Dad that I 
was ready.   

 

He would appear in the front door, pulling on his coat and  
adjusting his ever present fedora.   Excitement started to 
build… we were about to experience one of the very best 
part of Fall.  My Dad would make his way down the driveway 
and he would pull out the matches he used to smoke his 
pipe.  Cupping his hands to block out any sudden blast of air, 
he quickly lit the match and just like that, with a flick of the 
hand, that long neat row of leaves would quickly turn in to 
this orange, crackling tube of fire.  The kids were happy to 
watch the flames eat their way down the long row of leaves, 
chasing and tamping out any escapees caught up in 
unexpected gusts of wind. And of course, there was the 
fantastic smell!   But that was not what I was waiting for.  
My real fun would come later, when the flames had died 
down, and we were left were the smoldering remains.   The 
street filled with wafting smoke, intermittently obscuring my 
vision.  And when the “haze” was just right, it was time for 
me to begin “the show”.   In seconds, I would become a 
newly hired marshal, walking down some deserted street in 
Laredo, squinting from the high noon sun and the dust being 
stirred up by tethered pinto ponies.  The street was deserted 
because the town folk were afraid.  They saw me searching 
for the no good desperado who killed everyone in my family.  
And that meant trouble!  That varmit was hiding out in one of 
these buildings and I was eye balling each one, squinting 
like James Arness as Matt Dillon, or Richard Boone as 
Paladin, or Gene Barry as Bat Masterson.  It was my job to 
make the town safe again and that meant finding that 
coward before he could slip away.   Because I wasn’t 
allowed to have toy guns ( another chapter! ), I had to rely 
on other props.   Hats, kerchiefs, vests, canteens, bed 
rolls…easy to get stuff.  But the smoke was the key to fully 
getting in to character.  When you got smoke, you got real 
production value.  And that made the squinting more real.  
Which made the danger more real.  Which made the 
satisfaction of saving Laredo and disposing of that low down 
dirty rotten scoundrel even sweeter. 

 

What was the point of this story?   Not to illustrate the many 
ways I helped contribute to Global Warming but rather give 
you some small insight in to my lifelong passion for playing 
different characters.  Some people call this “acting”.   I call 
it “having a blast being someone else and putting that 
person in really cool situations where that guy always wins 
or if he is shot, he dies a really cool death and falls down but 
then bounces back up again in 4 seconds to start all over”.    

 

My earliest memories of acting involved my mother playing 
the various girl parts and my baby brother Tim playing some 
sidekick who didn’t speak.  Around the holidays, he was 
often caste as The Baby Jesus and my mother would be the 
Virgin Mary.   I would play the pivotal role of Joseph, my 
head covered with a dishtowel, and I would come home from 
a hard day of woodworking and general carpentry and greet 
my family as I had heard my father greet his.   
“ Hello Mary, Hello Jesus, did you have a good day”? 
“Yes, Joseph.  How was your day”? 
“I’m bushed.  Can I get a martini”?    

 

Or, I was Davey Crockett, fresh off of blazing some trail in 
“Old Kintuck” and coming in to some rugged Frontier Fort, 
asking  for some “grub” .  My brother was my faithful 
sidekick George.  Again, in my version of the popular TV 
show, George, who was played by Buddy Epson, was a mute. 
“ Hello M’am.  Me and George could sure use some vittles”. 
“Comin right up stranger.  You from these parts”? 
“No m’am.  Me and George are from Kintuck”. 
“I see.  Well, here you go…fresh rabbitt”. 
Even though my mother had just put down two peanut butter 
& jelly sandwiches, I thought it was the best damn rabbit I 
had “et” in a long time. 

 

When I got older, and was allowed to watch  different kinds 
of TV shows, the scenes got more involved,  the stories 
more complex and if necessary, they would often last a good 
part of the afternoon.  The neighborhood kids would be 
rounded up and be given their parts ( I was the oldest and I 
ran a benign dictatorship).   After going to the Saturday 
matinee at the local theater, we would recreate the movie 
we just saw.  We formed musical groups, we held talent 
contests, we dressed like young reporters and stopped 
people on the street to interview them.   But we had no film 
in the camera.   

 

As a young kid and later as a teenager, I really spent a lot of 
time being some one other than myself. This love affair with 
character playing continued in some form or another right 
through high school.  When I was floundering in my first year 
of College, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do 
with my life ( other than try and stay out of Vietnam), my 
mother suggested I take one of the  acting classes offered 
to Freshman.  “After all”, she said, “you have always enjoyed 
being on stage”.  Taking her advice, I enrolled in Acting 101 
at the leafy institute that was crazy enough to accept me, 
and was zapped!  It was then I realized that people did this 
for a living and that you could actually train to become 
better at playing characters.  You could be paid for being 
someone else.  I knew then what I wanted to do with my life.  
I was going to be a professional actor! 

 

 

 After a couple of feeble attempts at two different colleges, I 
moved to New York to begin my life as a thespian.  I was 
armed with a slight familiarity of Manhattan, a bartending 
job, and a whole lot of entitlement.  I had done some plays in 
college and was ready to take my innate ability to the next 
level.  I didn’t think I would be bartending very long!  I met 
Sully in one of the colleges where I wasted everyone’s time 
and he had already moved to the city.  He was going to be 
my roommate and he was going to show me the ropes. I 
quickly fell in with his friends and became part of a group 
that met on Wednesday mornings at a diner on Ninth 
Avenue.   

 

We were all relatively new to the city and even newer to 
show business so the round table discussions and general 
bs sessions were a great way to gage where everybody 
stood in the pecking order of success.  But even though 
there was very little professional experience amongst this 
crew of wannabes, we somehow assumed that we knew 
everything there was to know about breaking in. After all, 
our little Gang of Five had been big deals in College.  A few 
had done some “summer stock”, and one guy had a big time 
broadway voice.  The College plays seemed like a huge deal 
at the time but we often failed to grasp that were we all cast 
in roles that we would never be hired for in a professional 
setting.   I am sure that in Boston, they are still talking 
about my watershed performance as the dashing, 50 year 
old Colonel Vershin in Checkov’s “Three Sisters”.  The fact 
that I was 22 at the time and completely ill equipped for 
such a demanding role was not lost on anyone unfortunate 
enough to have sat through the three-plus hour production.  
But that was college we were all in the same boat. The 
“summer stock” productions were community theater 
efforts. We assumed that those types of credits looked great 
on our bulked up and inflated resumes. None of us had 
actually ever been paid to act, but, now that we were all in 
New York and completely dialed in to the system, that was 
all going to change very soon.   

 

We were all going to break the mold and prove that this 
business wasn’t as tough as everyone said it was. Sure, 
thousands came and quickly washed out, packing their bags 
and head shots, driving  back to fly over cities like Tulsa and 
Canton and Springfield, IL.   But those casualties were the 
untalented losers  who didn’t have the goods and were 
nothing like us.  We had a lot going for ourselves and, we 
had the goods.   Especially me!  I was tall, nice looking, 
great hair and very funny.  That meant I was a lock for either 
soap operas, movies, or sitcoms. I really wasn’t interested in 
live theater even though I craved the applause.  I wanted the 
notoriaty and the life style that a successful Hollywood 
actor got to have.  I wanted to be able to walk in to ANY 
McDonalds in this country and be recognized.  That was the 
dream.  Because if that happened, then I knew I had more 
than enough money to live on and that I had worked in 
enough movies or TV shows to be famous.   

 

The other guys all had unique abilities and qualities as well.   
It was a given that we would quickly separate ourselves 
from the herd.  Put in a little time, take some classes to stay 
sharp and this social club was going to rule!  Brando and 
Casavettes had their little group of kick ass actors who 
owned New York.  Well, now it was time for me, Flacker, 
Sully, Sler, and Frisch.  We were next!  This was the 
undeniable truth that came out of every Wednesday morning 
meeting at Gloria’s Diner.  It was October, 1974 and I was 23 
and ready to be a star.  After all, it was destiny. 

 

Well, now that its May, 2010, it might be a good time to take 
a look back and compare what was destined with what 
became reality.  I continued to study under a great teacher 
in New York for another three years.  I would occasionally 
get work as an movie extra and always felt that it was way 
beneath me. I deserved a lot more that being the piano 
player in a Lindsay Wagner Movie of the Week.  It was in the 
fall of 1977 that I formed a comedy team with Nathan Lane 
and we started to get noticed.  We didn’t really want to do 
stand up comedy but we felt it was a good way to get our 
names out there.  We signed with William Morris and in 1980, 
we took out first trip to the Coast.  After a few years of 
opening for big name acts, and the occasional talk show, we 
went our separate ways.  Not sure what ever happened to 
Nathan Lane or if he stayed in show business but I 
continued to eek out a marginal living with small television 
and film roles, commercials and of course, bartending. 

 

After a decade of wild ups and downs and more than enough 
jobs lost for some crazy reason or another, I decided that I 
had had enough.  It was my 38th birthday and I was 
bartending at a very hip and trendy restaurant called 
Tribeca.  It was in Beverly Hills and was THE place to be.  
As the night wore on and the bar slowed down a bit, the 
staff brought out a cake covered with way too many burning 
candles and sang Happy Birthday.  A lot of the patrons also 
joined in the fun.  I, on the other hand, was having an out of 
body experience.  I could see the cake and the candles, and 
I could see the happy faces of the staff and the customers 
as they sang their hearts out but I couldn’t hear a sound.   It 
was like I was underwater in the deep end of some pool and 
there was zero noise.   That’s because when they set the 
cake down on the bar, I happened to look down for a second 
and saw that I was wearing an apron.  And it hit me like I 
was bitch slapped by Mike Tyson.   I was 38 and still a 
bartender.  And that is not what was destined for me. I had 
not signed on for this life.  And it became very clear to me, 
at that moment, that I needed to do something else.  I was 
no longer going to be able to be an actor. I wanted to get 
married and have children and I didn’t want us to be living in 
a Volvo station wagon.  So I was going to have to find 
another way to make a living.  And with no college degree, 
no job experience and not even knowing how to use a fax 
machine, I had my work cut out for me. 

 

One of my bar regulars was a successful sales man and I 
asked if I could take him to lunch and “pick his brain”.  I had 
no idea what I should look for or how to begin finding a new 
career.  He told me I should try and get in to sales because “ 
I was a natural”.  This, of course, was the last thing I wanted 
to do because that’s what my father did and he hated his 
job.  He was good at it but hated it.  One of the reasons I 
went in to acting was because I knew that I would never 
hate it.  But, here I was, miserable and frustrated, kind of 
hating show business and determined to find a new life.   

 

So after mulling over the regular’s advice, I applied for some 
ad sales jobs that had come to my attention.  I ended up 
getting one of those jobs but that is not the reason for this 
lengthy preface to the wonderful self help book you were 
kind enough to purchase.  The reason for the story, and the 
reason for this book, is that it became very clear to me in my 
job interview process and within the first several months of 
my new job at Advertising Age Magazine, that absolutely 
everyone…and I mean everyone…is in Sales.   I had been in 
sales all my life but it never occurred to me.   

 

I was an actor, a comedian, a left side of the brain kind of 
guy.  Not a salesman.  My Dad and his cronies were 
salesmen.  Losers like O’Neil’s Hickey and Miller’s Willie 
Lohman were salesmen.  Used car dealers and snake oil 
vendors were salesmen.  Not me.  I was an artist.  But in this 
crazy new world of magazines, and ad agencies and media 
sales that I now found myself buried in, it didn’t take me 
long to realize that trying to land an acting job was no 
different than trying to sell a media manager advertising.  
Peel away the particulars underneath, and it was all selling.  

 

So I vowed to one day write a book for actors and writers 
and anyone else in the arts and help them connect the dots 
and understand that we are all salespeople.   And in order to 
be successful in the arts, or education, or medicine or 
whatever our chosen fields might be, we need to approach 
our business as any good salesman would approach his 
business and the selling of his product.  And after 15 years 
as an actor, and after 10 years of selling print media and 
being one of the first to sell advertising and promotions on 
the Internet, and after 8 years as a successful independent 
film producer, that day has come. 

 

So please take these stories and these exercises and these 
examples of disaster and success for what they are worth.  
Nothing more than a little insight in to one person’s 
experiences and ultimately, another way to approach your 
work. 

 

By the way,  this morning,  I went in to a McDonalds to get 
some coffee and nobody asked for my autograph.  But, 
hey…you never know. 

 

On May 12, 2010, at 3:30 PM, Barrett Brown wrote:

I can do that. Do you have a text copy you can send to me? Perhaps it would work best if you just paste the text into the body of an e-mail. If you're going to want to collaborate further/have me provide editing, the best way would probably be use of Google Docs. You might also want to get a Gmail/Google account to facilitate this.

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 6:18 PM, patrick stack <pjs@outofpocketfilms.com> wrote:
is the tweaking something you want to do or shall I

On May 12, 2010, at 9:58 AM, Barrett Brown wrote:

Hi-

I didn't receive a word doc from you recently, though I recall that early on one of your messages ended up in my spam filter for some reason so perhaps that's what happened. 

This is pretty good, though of course you'd want to have at least one chapter finished as well in order to convince one of the agents to sign you. A couple suggestions - the beginning portion should be clipped here and there just to make it move faster. The later parts dealing with your earlier career could meanwhile be expanded a bit, as they're particularly grabbing. Of course, you'll definitely want to stick in a great number of such anecdotes throughout the book. Also, the bits of humor work very well; a few more such lines or clauses would make it stronger ("bitch slapped by Mike Tyson," etc). Finally, this is in pretty good shape but needs a few small tweaks here and there for grammar and style - nothing major at all. 

Haven't heard back from the other agents I e-mailed but will send out another round of queries perhaps later today. Feel free to call or e-mail if you'd like to discuss anything.

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 12:48 PM, patrick stack <pjs@outofpocketfilms.com> wrote:
BB,

I think the word doc I sent has a virus.  so, here is the first draft of the Preface I wrote for the book.  Your thoughts are most welcomed.



Patrick Stack

Out of Pocket Films
Sony Studios
10202 W. Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310-943-6383





--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

Patrick Stack

Out of Pocket Films
Sony Studios
10202 W. Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310-943-6383




--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

Patrick Stack

Out of Pocket Films
Sony Studios
10202 W. Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310-943-6383




--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302