What keeps authors awake at night

Writing a book and hav­ing it pub­lished by a prom­in­ent house is a gen­er­ally pleas­ant exper­i­ence, to put it mildly. Having your book get a warm recep­tion from review­ers and read­ers, which my book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas mostly has, is also nice. Selling well is…well I don’t want to repeat myself. My first Author’s Statement comes in January and since my edit­or has already told me that the book “exceeded expect­a­tions” I’m look­ing for­ward to good news, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

The down­side of this multi-level exper­i­ence is know­ing where you screwed up and tem­por­ar­ily hav­ing lim­ited means to do any­thing about it. A few errors made it into the first print­ings of Made Men; they all ought to be fixed by now, as we go into (I think) a third print­ing. But hav­ing made them  in the first place stings, espe­cially when I think of the people involved in the movie, who’ll be read­ing, and who’ll spot them, and whose con­fid­ence in me as a chron­icler of their work will be at least slightly under­mined. (And yes, I do appre­ci­ate how they let down the lay read­er as well.)

How do these things hap­pen? Actually, it’s too easy. Mostly through a com­bin­a­tion of simple human  error coupled with over-confidence. And what you come up with after you’ve read some­thing over and over again, and are kind of semi-automatically going back to the text for what you think is a thor­ough tidy­ing up, when in fact what you’re actu­ally doing is a robot­ic (as in mech­an­ic­al, not as in laser-focused) pan­to­mime of proof-reading. Your eyes see, but you don’t think through what you’re see­ing. An error that’s been in place for some time starts to register as “right’ just because you’ve scanned it so many times and come to accept it as a reality.

One of the Made Men review­ers on Amazon slammed me for two errors that they found early in the book: my misid­enti­fy­ing The King of Comedy as a 1984 film when in fact it was released in 1982, and my pla­cing “Smooth Criminal” on Michael Jackson’s Thriller album as opposed to his Bad album, on which it actu­ally appears, and whose title track was made into a video by Martin Scorsese from a Richard Price story and script. This was a bit of a “gotcha” moment for me, in the pri­vacy of my ima­gin­a­tion at least, because it tipped me off that the review­er was basing his slam on the bound uncor­rec­ted gal­ley proofs, which are announced in a circle on the front cov­er as uncor­rec­ted gal­ley proofs for a reas­on — they’re not cor­rec­ted. So this guy had def­in­itely not made an “Authorized Amazon Purchase,” phooey [author mimes spit­ting at the floor]. Because for the final ver­sion, the release year of King of Comedy was changed to the cor­rect one. Except, uh-oh, the Thriller error remained intact.

Later on in the book, writ­ing about movies with pop song soundtracks, I com­pare Mean Streets and American Graffiti and glibly state “While both acknow­ledged as clas­sics today, neither Mean Streets nor American Graffiti were box-office block­busters.” While Graffiti was a little slow out of the gate — it became what used to be called a “sleep­er hit,” some­thing that the sub­sequent muta­tions of the film exhib­i­tion industry made a prac­tic­al near-impossibility — it of course was a box-office block­buster, the third highest-grossing film of the year. You like to think that you check every fac­tu­al asser­tion you make, but you don’t. That’s why fact-checkers were inven­ted. But fact-checkers are thin on the ground these days. I’m not mak­ing excuses. The point is, the “facts” you don’t check, because you think you know, will bite you on the ass every time. 

People like to bat around that F. Scott Fitzgerald obser­va­tion (did he even really say this? I’m not so cer­tain any­more, and who can really state with cer­tainty that he did?) that “the test of a first-rate intel­li­gence is the abil­ity to hold two oppos­ing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the abil­ity to func­tion.” As it hap­pens, then, maybe hav­ing a “first-rate intel­li­gence” has more in com­mon with being an idi­ot than was here­to­fore believed. Because, you know, here I am, writ­ing about Scorsese’s video for “Bad,” writ­ing about Joe Pesci’s appear­ance in the Michael Jackson film Moonwalker, which is largely tied in with Bad, and I’m nev­er­the­less identi­fy­ing “Smooth Criminal” as hav­ing appeared on Thriller. And later on, there I am talk­ing about how American Graffiti was suf­fi­ciently pop­u­lar to inspire the sit­com Happy Days, and then I state it wasn’t a box-office blockbuster.

These goofs have been fixed, but it’s embar­rass­ing to have them in a first edi­tion, and those are not the only ones. At one point I cite the girl-group The Ronettes when I mean the girl-group The Crystals. I mis­spell “Bufalino” as “Buffalino.” For a little while after the book went into hard­cov­er all I could see were the errors, and I star­ted to hate the book. I had to pull myself back to some­thing I told myself after I sub­mit­ted the manu­script, which was that abso­lute per­fec­tion was an unlikely out­come. I still would have liked to come a lot closer to that than I did with the first printing.

Oh, and there’s anoth­er side to this: what did not make it in. I recently got an e‑mail from a read­er who was rather per­turbed that I did not cite the obvi­ous ante­cedent to Goodfellas’ “meet the gang” Steadicam shot, that is, a sim­il­ar characters-address-the-camera bit in Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni. The thing is, I had. In my manu­script of the book’s fourth chapter, a scene-by-scene break­down of the movie (a favor­ite with some read­ers, a source of “I already know what hap­pens in the movie” com­plaint for some oth­ers), I wrote this:

Liotta’s voi­ceover accom­pan­ies an elab­or­ate track­ing shot.  The inspir­a­tion here is the open­ing (post cred­its) shot of Federico Fellini’s 1953 I Vitelloni, which moves across a board­walk res­taur­ant and intro­duces three of its main char­ac­ters, in less than a minute. But Scorsese goes big­ger than Fellini, giv­ing us 10 char­ac­ters in less time,  in a Steadicam shot that goes on for a little more than 60 seconds. 

In the fin­ished book, the pas­sage goes “Liotta’s voice accom­pan­ies an involved Steadicam shot. There’s an overtly the­at­ric­al feel some­how…” etc. That sen­tence about the the­at­ric­al feel kicks off a new para­graph in the manu­script fea­tur­ing the cita­tion of the Fellini film. I’ve gone over the notes and drafts and PDFs of vari­ous ver­sions and I still can’t suss out how the pas­sage got dropped. It should be restored some time in the future.

What have we learned here? As I embark on a new book, I’ve made some new rules for myself that I’m not going to men­tion here because that sort of rev­el­a­tions tends to soli­cit reac­tions such as “you mean you DIDN’T do [X]?” and or soli­cit sug­ges­tions as to what I ought to do, which I think should be con­fined to my imme­di­ate circle of pro­ject col­lab­or­at­ors, no offense. Mainly I have a new appre­ci­ation of some­thing I thought I already knew, which has to do with how you can nev­er be too care­ful, and what you owe to the read­er. I have been told many times over by read­ers how much they enjoyed the book and how much they got out of it, so I know to some extent in the lar­ger scheme of things they haven’t been let down. But I also know that I can’t snick­er at anoth­er author writ­ing that Max von Sydow played the role of Death in The Seventh Seal as vig­or­ously as I once might have.