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Chatting with author Neal Pollack

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wigglesatire: Where’s Neal?

Neal Pollack: Right here.

Administrator: Welcome to the latimes.com chat with Neal Pollack!

Neal Pollack: How may I be of service?

Administrator: Can you tell us about your panel appearance this afternoon?

Neal Pollack: Sure. I’m going to be on panel about “humor and attitude” in memoir writing.

Neal Pollack: It’s going to be a crazy sex party.

LAreader: Are you going to be involved in the film?

Neal Pollack: So you should all come. So to speak.

Eric: i’m there!

Neal Pollack: The film. Well, I wrote a version of the screenplay...

Neal Pollack: For which i was paid. And that version was then discarded.

Neal Pollack: But they have a hilarious writer, Dana Gould, on the project now...

LAreader: What’s the worst magazine you’ve ever written for?

wigglesatire: Do you have any bad feelings about that?

Neal Pollack: So I’m optimistic about Alternadad: The Motion Picture.

Neal Pollack: Not at all. That’s part of the game.

Neal Pollack: As for the worst magazine for which I’ve ever written, well, The New Yorker is just a huge pile of crap.

Neal Pollack: Actually, I’ve never written for The New Yorker. But I assume that it would be a tremendously unpleasant experience.

Eric: how is chicago noir different from la noir?

Eric: finally! how refreshing! the new yorker really is wretched

Neal Pollack: Now then, back to the movie: Dana Gould is one of the funniest persons on the planet, so I feel good about the whole project...

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Neal Pollack: He’s writing it as a Martin Lawrence vehicle.

wigglesatire: Cool. Who else will be in it?

Neal Pollack: Chicago Noir is a little more “literary” than LA Noir. But they’re both great books.

timesbooth1: So muc paenting stuff out there now -- books, blogs, magazine columns -- is for and by moms. How has your daddy’s perspective been received?

Neal Pollack: The Akashic Noir series is great because each book really reflects the character of the city in which it takes place.

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Neal Pollack: The LA book is full of greedy bastards.

Neal Pollack: Times, I feel like my “daddy” perspective has been received relatively well.

Neal Pollack: I have a lot of mom readers.

LAreader: What do you think about the state of satire? Are things better today than they were in the past?

Neal Pollack: The roles of father and mother are losing their distinction. Increasingly, we’re all just parents.

Neal Pollack: The whole idea of “parenting” is crazy to me. My parents didn’t “parent”. They just threw us in the back of the station wagon and took us to Shakey’s.

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Neal Pollack: The state of satire is excellent. The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, 30 Rock, Hot Fuzz...

Neal Pollack: To name just a few examples.

Eric: What makes a book easily adaptable to the big screen? When you’re writing, do you ever think about how a scene might appear on film?

LAreader: Are you any relation of the painter?

Neal Pollack: For the “written” word, you have the Onion, and onward. It’s a lively time. Satire thrives in apocalyptic times.

Neal Pollack: LA Reader, I am no relation.

Neal Pollack: Eric, as for adapting to the big screen, I do sometimes try to write dialogue as I think it might actually be spoken. That’s a radical concept, I know.

Administrator: How old is your son Elijah now? What are his current interests?

Neal Pollack: I need to work on story structure. That Robert McKee book gives me a headache.

LAreader: Who -- beside you -- is the greatest living satirist?

Neal Pollack: Elijah is four and a half. Right now, he’s interested in superheroes and animals eating other animals.

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Neal Pollack: And animals eating superheroes.

Administrator: What superheroes and what animals?

Neal Pollack: Well, he has an imaginary world of superheroes. I call it the Elijahverse.

Eric: where are you from in arizona?

Eric: did you hate it there?

Neal Pollack: The heroes and villains are too vast to even mention.

Neal Pollack: As for animals, he likes a Youtube video of a lion devouring a wildebeest. There’s also one of a jaguar killing an anaconda. And an octopus eating a shark. It’s like the NCAA tournament of predatory behavior in our house.

Neal Pollack: I grew up in Paradise Valley, Arizona, which is a suburb of SCOTTSDALE, for god’s sake.

Neal Pollack: So I didn’t exactly know privation.

Administrator: How much of an effect does the city you’re in affect what you’re writing? You lived in Austin for a while, right?

Neal Pollack: My family is so Jewish, though, I might as well have been growing up in Jersey.

Neal Pollack: We never went hiking, but we ate a lot of lox.

Neal Pollack: I hated it at the time, but in retrospect, I appreciate the comfort, particularly since I haven’t lived in a “safe” neighborhood since 1988.

Neal Pollack: City affecting my writing. Well, it mostly has to do with the availability and quality of marijuana than anything else.

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Neal Pollack: My writing really suffered in Philly.

Administrator: Ever live in Vancouver?

Neal Pollack: Was decent in Chicago, good in Austin, and is freaking GREAT here in L.A.

Eric: Philly is wretched

Neal Pollack: No, but I visited Vancouver last summer.

Neal Pollack: It’s the most beautiful city in the world, and has one of the most wretched skid rows that I’ve ever seen.

wigglesatire: What do you mean by “safe?”

Neal Pollack: I bought a “pipe” from a guy who’d lost his right hand in a boiler explosion.

Eric: oy

Neal Pollack: As for “safe,” I mean a neighborhood where I can walk with my kid without us getting attacked by scary dogs or hit by runaway windowless vans.

Neal Pollack: Time to stop living in “transitional” neighborhoods.

Eric: what is it about LA that makes your writing freaking great?

Neal Pollack: Here I go, complaining about money again.

Neal Pollack: I was sort of joking, but LA is an inspiring place for a writer. You never know who’s gonna be behind the door when it opens.

Neal Pollack: Also, there are people who pay you money to write here. That’s news to me.

Eric: yes, the hollywood money spigot.

Administrator: Can you define “rock and roll novel”??

Administrator: Are there others out there? Or just yours?

Neal Pollack: Yes. It’s a novel about rock and roll.

Neal Pollack: But I also write Never Mind The Pollacks in the spirit of a great punk album.

Neal Pollack: Fast and dumb.

Neal Pollack: Full of poop jokes and mindless screwing.

Neal Pollack: Just like my life.

Neal Pollack: Most rock books try too hard to be “literary.”

Administrator: Have you read any of the 33 1/3 books?

Neal Pollack: I read the one by Sean Nelson...

Administrator: Thank you for joining us for Neal Pollack’s chat! And thank you, Neal!

timesbooth1: Thanks fo supporting

Neal Pollack: My pleasure!

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