"If you don't have anything to actually do on a shoot, there is nothing in the world more tedious than being on a movie set."
- Craig Spector

PVW: Were these the experiences that you had on Volcano: Fire on the Mountain?

Craig Spector: That was one of the rare exceptions. One of the reasons why there is such a gap between the last Skipp & Spector book and my new book is that I was about a hundred pages into my new novel when all of a sudden The Light at the End got optioned and I was adapting it. That started a process of about three-and-a-half to four years where I was working back to back, mostly in television - going from one project to another. I was writing and working constantly, but very little ever got produced. It was languishing in that zone called "development hell." That's the irony of the writer in Hollywood: you can work constantly, but nobody ever sees it, because for every movie that you see, there are at least thirty that were in development never made it out, and from those there are at least another hundred that are trying to get into development. It's astonishing the number of scripts that get generated, and projects that people try to get set up versus the ones that actually come out. It's a fraction. There were projects that I was working on for two, three, four years, trying to get them going. And then Fire on the Mountain just came from out of nowhere. I had worked with the producers before, we had a really great relationship. The exec at ABC had just come in from Hearst Entertainment and he inherited this project. It was a project that was already in motion at the time when Dante's Peak and Volcano were racing each other. It was steam engine time: TV wanted to get one and ride the wave, so this movie was going to get made.

One day I came home to fifteen messages on my answering machine: "Where are you, call us, you're hired, save us." All of a sudden there's a knock at the door and there's a messenger handing me a script. I opened up the script, sat down to read it, started laughing. When I met with them, and they asked me what I wanted to do, what kind of changes I had in mind. I held the script up. "See this?" I tossed it and said "You can't fix this. That's the problem, it's un-fixable. But we can bag this, take the basic story that you guys already developed and I'll go another way with it." I wrote five drafts in two and a half weeks. And it got green-lit off of hour one. While I was writing hour two, they were in helicopters over Vancouver scouting locations.

It was weird, because here are these projects out there still in development hell, or in turnaround, and this weird little Irwin Allen on a shoestring project gets picked up and made in record time. When they were shooting, it was sub-zero temperatures. If you don't have anything to actually do on a shoot, there is nothing in the world more tedious than being on a movie set. The only thing worse than being bored would be being bored and freezing. I went up for the ski lodge scenes. At one point I was over at the monitor watching them orchestrate this whole big thing and the director was doing the blocking and that ad lib stuff that always happens during the moment. They were reblocking the scene and Brian Kerwin, who plays the lead, asked "what am I supposed to say?"
And the director said "Hey, wait a minute, the writer's here."
And he turned around and yelled across the room "What does he say?" I was sitting there staring at the monitor and I'm like "Who me? Uh, he says this."
And I threw a line back. The whole room just stopped, and then the director said "Yeah, that's good." And they shot it on the spot. It was one of those times when you feel you have some particle of control.

PVW: Do you have any more film projects in the works that you're at liberty to discuss?

Craig Spector: I recently spent two years adapting F. Paul Wilson's The Tomb for Beacon Pictures. Officially I did about five drafts; unofficially I did about 15. As with all things, I ran my contract out and now Beacon is in bed with Universal on it. They brought in Scott Neimerfrau from Tales of the Crypt, he worked on it for about a year, and now I hear they're off looking for new writers. I wish them luck, I hope it gets made. I enjoyed working on it, and it was great that I had Paul [Wilson]'s approval: he e-mailed me when he found out I was hired, and said he was glad they picked me. I did what I could, and tried to be mindful of his fans, and the fact that if this thing gets made they're going seeing the movie, and I didn't want them to be disappointed. I wanted it to do all the things it had to do to be a big Hollywood movie, but still be true to the story. Fool that I am, I believe it is possible to make something that the average person who's never read the book will like, and yet people who read the book will also like.

"We're also injecting some radical notions back into mainstream publishing - radical, lost notions, like respect, loyalty, relationship."

PVW: What is the mission of Stealth Press?

Craig Spector: To cause trouble! [laughs] Stealth Press is committed to taking good books that have gone out of print, and which can only be found in used bookstores if at all, and bringing them back out in quality hardcover form, and then marketing directly to the reader via the Internet.

PVW: Is Stealth Press strictly going to publish reprint material?

Craig Spector: Initially yes, but not entirely - we have some never before published titles scheduled in our first year. We've got the company built over a five-year plan, with three distinct phases. The first phase is the easiest and most obvious: we go to writers whose work we respect, and we make deals to acquire rights. We basically bring the books back to new life. We started working on this last year. In the time we since started, publishing startup companies went from a radical concept to "what, another one?" You can't throw a rock without hitting some dot-com, print-on-demand thing going on, which is great. But ours is still a little different.

PVW: How so?

Craig Spector: I look at the Internet and this whole digital revolution from a writer's point of view, but also from a reader's point of view. This new pod [Print On Demand] and downloadable stuff is all well and good and fascinating, but I like books - hardcover books. But the digital revolution does two interesting things: it changes the nature of production and distribution. It allows for the most direct proactive, interactive connection between readers and writers. Thats what's good about it. It eliminates the sort of bloated, corporate infrastructure that's gotten so huge and has led to the current state of things.

We're also injecting some radical notions back into mainstream publishing - radical, lost notions, like respect, loyalty, relationship. This is kind of like United Artists for authors or the original A&M Records. It's a company, it's a corporation, it's investors, it's all this stuff, but the truth is it doesn't matter who publishes the book, the only thing that makes a publisher worthwhile is the service that they provide. Publishing in its true form is a service industry. It exists for the express purpose of servicing authors and readers. And if a company does that right, it deserves to live; if it doesn't do that, it deserves to die. It's a simple, startling concept, but we are only as valuable as the service we provide.

PVW: Will Stealth be publishing only horror?

Craig Spector: No, we're doing everything. Our first titles are horror, sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers, mysteries . . . even historical fiction and non-fiction. We'll be expanding as we go. Stealth is for everyone who loves books - and if it's good and there's an audience for it, we're interested.

"In my office, one wall is writing and one wall is music. And I'll just sit there in a chair and roll from one side to the other."

PVW: Are Stealth Press' books going to be high-priced, specialty limited editions?

Craig Spector: No. We're doing a quality book that is normally only seen from specialty press and limited editions for forty-, fifty-, seventy-five dollars or more, but we can sell them in the twenty-five dollar range.

Another mad, radical element of our plan is to try to and run a publishing company as if it were an actual business, instead of this Byzantine, bizarro thing built on 200 year-old code. I liken it to programming where you've got a program that was written years ago and you do updates and patches and this and that and you end up with a program that does everything you need it to do, but its huge and unwieldy and prone to crash. Or you could just sit down and write new code. We're not arguing whether the circle is round, we're just streamlining the wheel, and trying to create the simplest, most direct possible connection between writers and readers. Like I said, a mad plan, but a noble one. Our site launched November 1, with titles by Peter Atkins, Peter Straub, Robert Heinlein, F. Paul Wilson, and lots of other great writers.

PVW: Do you still play and write music? Anything that the public will hear?

Craig Spector: Because of Stealth now, yeah, maybe so. Music is one of the things I started with, and it's what I thought I was going to be doing before I "accidentally" became a writer. But it's been the thing I've never quite been able to get out there.

I'm working on a couple of different projects right now. Richard Christian Matheson and I are working with Preston Sturges Jr. on a blues project that we're having a lot of fun with. I'm working on an album of solo acoustic finger style guitar music, which is one of my great and early loves. I've been writing a bunch of instrumental pieces, and have done some other tracks of different styles of music. And because of the Internet now, we're talking about uploading MP3 files linked to the Stealth site.

PVW: Is music as important to you as it was before you became a writer?

Craig Spector: Yeah, I'll always play music. I would be very frightened if I didn't play, because I'd feel like if I ever stopped I would really lose a part of myself that doesn't really come out any other way. Music at this point has just become something I do for myself. If the thing that attracts me to it is interesting to enough other people, it will find its market, however big or small, and that's fine with me. Ironically in the path of my life it's become the private thing, the thing that I do for myself and anybody who cares. In my office, one wall is writing and one wall is music. And I'll just sit there in a chair and roll from one side to the other. My wife sometimes asks, "do you ever leave your room?" But I'm content.

PVW: The protagonist of your first solo novel, To Bury the Dead, is a firefighter who finds himself on the flip side of the coin when someone he loves is murdered. What kind of research did you engage in?

Craig Spector: I have a friend who is certainly not the character that Paul is modeled after but he has the same job. He gave me a lot of anecdotal research, and he also gave me the same manuals that firefighter cadets have to study in order to become firefighters. So I read 800 pages of highly technical manuals to get basic grounding. He allowed me to tag along, masquerading as a visiting volunteer fireman from California, and go on controlled burn exercises. I got to work both sides of the situation, spending half the time fighting fires with a volunteer fire crew that was coming in to do their training. And the other half of the time setting the fires with the instructors, which was actually more fun. It wouldn't have been the same if I hadn't done the dry, technical research, but I learned more about firefighting in that brief amount of time, actually dragging charged lines into a burning building and being there, than any number of books could have imparted.

Honestly, people like that to me are legitimate heroes in the world. For my purposes, when I was trying to find the character that fit the story that I was trying to tell early on, I realized that this would be the kind of person for whom these kind of moral dilemmas are really writ and very stark terms. Here is a guy whose life is literally and figuratively dedicated to saving other people: people he doesn't know, quite often people he doesn't want to know. And yet something horrible happens to him. For him, there's not a lot of moral equivalency there. He's a guy who is used to taking action and dealing with right and wrong on a very fundamental level, so when something so weird and gray hammers the center of his universe, it's not a big jump for him to do something about it. Especially being in the system, he knows all too well what it's going to be like, and unfortunately now I do too, from a slightly different angle.