Some 'Splainin'

Professor Ben Stein

So … being new here on Substack, I’ve got some — in the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo — “splainin’” to do.* See, I’ve had a blog here for the last 17 years describing the life, trials, and tribulations of those who work below the line in Hollywood — in the trenches, so to speak — doing the heavy lifting on set necessary to bring a movie or television script to a screen near you. I still run that blog, but am transitioning to Substack for a number of reasons that don’t really matter … basically, it was just time for a change. I’ll continue to post once a month over there until I run out of things to say, but those same posts will go up here as well on the first Sunday of every month. What won’t appear over there — but will show up here — are all the babies I had to kill, which is to say, the chapters I cut from the ongoing book project, along with whatever else strikes my fancy and seems appropriate. Those will appear on whatever Sundays don’t host the monthly post. This may cause some confusion at times, but so be it. What’s life without a little confusion?

I’m ‘splainin’ this so that any who alight here from the wilds of cyberspace will know what to expect. Should you choose to subscribe — thus ensuring that future posts are deposited to your in-box — it won’t cost a penny, let alone the Substack standard minimum of five bucks a month. There’s a school of thought that says giving anything away for free automatically devalues it — that if a “customer” doesn’t have to pay for an item, they’ll assume it isn’t worth anything. I dunno … maybe that’s right. All I know is that an occasional five bucks isn’t going to change my life one iota. I’ve been writing for thirty-five years now, and in all that time made a grand total of $300, for a single piece that was printed in the San Francisco Chronicle many years ago.

The rest of my work (one unpubished LA detective novel, 750+ blog posts, and the work-in-progress blog book), has been “uncompensated,” and I’m fine with that. I write because I want to — it scratches an itch nothing else does — not for money. Look, lots of others on Substack charge for their posts, and I wish them all the best. Writing is a lot harder than people who haven’t tried it can imagine, so I very much support writers being paid for their labor … but since I don’t charge, neither will I pay to read a Substack unless I’m already a fan of that writer’s work. When I read a Substack from someone I don’t know, and after one paragraph hit a wall that says “This post is for subscribers only,” hey, I just walk away. No offense — I’m sure that post is well-written, interesting, and probably worth five bucks — but if I paid $60 a year to every interesting Substack, I’d be broke and living in a cardboard condo under a bridge somewhere by 2026. So if you “follow” me here, and charge for your Substack, please don’t take it personally when I don’t subscribe to the read-for-pay offerings.

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So … why the photo of Ben Stein at the top of this page? Well, he really was a professor — or at least a lecturer — at my school fifty+ years ago, where I took a class from him. It was “Film and Revolution,” if I recall correctly, and he was a very good teacher. I liked him, and many years later ended up working on a commercial for “E-Trade” (back when that was a thing), starring Ben. He didn’t remember me, of course, but was happy that I backed him up when our ever-skeptical director questioned whether he’d actually taught college.

No problem, Ben … and thanks for not flunking the worst student you ever had.

• According to Youtube, Ricky never actually said that phrase. Go figure.