Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Booking Ben Johnson
Casbah staffer chronicles Children of the Web
Ben Johnson had to weave many threads in order to finish his Webworld series.
Writer, film director, and Casbah manager Ben Johnson thought the manuscript for the final installment of his Webworld trilogy, Children of the Web, was in final draft form. Then he passed it to his beta-readers last fall. “The one who I have worked with forever, Arabella Harrison, she gave me a big list of stuff,” he recalled. “Then I went back through and read it, and I was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t ready to give to someone as a final approval.’”
The glaring issue Harrison caught was the introduction of a major concept near the novel’s end — a bomb drop sort of like if George Lucas had introduced the Force to the Star Wars universe around the same time that the Ewoks appeared in Return of the Jedi.
Past Event
Ben Johnson Book Release
- Saturday, September 25, 2021, 7 p.m.
- Verbatim Books, 3793 30th Street, San Diego
According to Johnson, Harrison told him, “I don’t know that you want to introduce something at the end of a trilogy for 40 pages and then have it be this super-important thing that was never mentioned before.” Johnson conceded this was a valid point. So, instead of wrapping everything in late 2020, Johnson didn’t finish the final edits until July of this year. He completed layout for the book in August. Now, Children of the Web is officially, 100% D-O-N-E, with a release event set for September 25 at North Park’s Verbatim Books.
Meanwhile, Johnson isn’t slowing his creative output. He has already begun work on a new novel, Second Story, which centers on a father-and-daughter cat burglar team. He has this one roughly outlined, though — a step that he regrets skipping in the past. “With the Webworld trilogy, I did not outline anything,” he explained. “So for the first one, that worked out great. The second one was a little work, and the third one was an immense amount of work to try to bring all these disparate stories that kept spreading out and spreading out. Reigning them back in, so it could become one story again. I worked on the last book for five years, mainly because the movie [Fanboy] took most of my energy. But then when I came back to reign the book in, it was about 30 beginnings and a couple of middles and no ends.”
As for Fanboy, Johnson’s rock and roll thriller stocked with San Diego musicians, the film is streaming on Amazon Prime and he’s planning more local screenings. It now also serves as a worthy blueprint for independent filmmakers seeking to craft feature length, self-funded films that won’t bankrupt them. “It was such a minimal expenditure for the film that the drive-in [screenings] really took care of all that,” he said.
With the books and a film under his belt, Johnson is now focused on crafting pitches and teleplays if opportunities come knocking. “I’m preparing myself for anything that comes around. ‘Hey, do you want to make another movie?’ I say, ‘Yes, I have this script.’ ‘You wanna make a series?’ ‘Yes, I have this ready to go.’ ‘You wanna make another book?’ ‘Yes, I’m already working on something.’ I want to just be prepared for any situation that might arise from all this.”
He also devised a rather ingenious way to expose Fanboy to national bands that are (once again) playing the Casbah. “I tell them, ‘Hey, this is about the world you live in, if you want to check out this movie.’ So, I have little stickers behind the bar with QR codes so they can QR it, and it goes right to my website where you can click a link to watch it on the web. That’s been successful, and uses that sphere of influence that they have. A couple of bands have reposted it so their fanbase sees that it exists. Grassroots is probably the most effective way for this movie to be marketed.”
Here's something you might be interested in.
Booking Ben Johnson
Casbah staffer chronicles Children of the Web
Booking Ben Johnson
Casbah staffer chronicles Children of the Web
Ben Johnson had to weave many threads in order to finish his Webworld series.
Writer, film director, and Casbah manager Ben Johnson thought the manuscript for the final installment of his Webworld trilogy, Children of the Web, was in final draft form. Then he passed it to his beta-readers last fall. “The one who I have worked with forever, Arabella Harrison, she gave me a big list of stuff,” he recalled. “Then I went back through and read it, and I was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t ready to give to someone as a final approval.’”
The glaring issue Harrison caught was the introduction of a major concept near the novel’s end — a bomb drop sort of like if George Lucas had introduced the Force to the Star Wars universe around the same time that the Ewoks appeared in Return of the Jedi.
Past Event
Ben Johnson Book Release
- Saturday, September 25, 2021, 7 p.m.
- Verbatim Books, 3793 30th Street, San Diego
According to Johnson, Harrison told him, “I don’t know that you want to introduce something at the end of a trilogy for 40 pages and then have it be this super-important thing that was never mentioned before.” Johnson conceded this was a valid point. So, instead of wrapping everything in late 2020, Johnson didn’t finish the final edits until July of this year. He completed layout for the book in August. Now, Children of the Web is officially, 100% D-O-N-E, with a release event set for September 25 at North Park’s Verbatim Books.
Meanwhile, Johnson isn’t slowing his creative output. He has already begun work on a new novel, Second Story, which centers on a father-and-daughter cat burglar team. He has this one roughly outlined, though — a step that he regrets skipping in the past. “With the Webworld trilogy, I did not outline anything,” he explained. “So for the first one, that worked out great. The second one was a little work, and the third one was an immense amount of work to try to bring all these disparate stories that kept spreading out and spreading out. Reigning them back in, so it could become one story again. I worked on the last book for five years, mainly because the movie [Fanboy] took most of my energy. But then when I came back to reign the book in, it was about 30 beginnings and a couple of middles and no ends.”
As for Fanboy, Johnson’s rock and roll thriller stocked with San Diego musicians, the film is streaming on Amazon Prime and he’s planning more local screenings. It now also serves as a worthy blueprint for independent filmmakers seeking to craft feature length, self-funded films that won’t bankrupt them. “It was such a minimal expenditure for the film that the drive-in [screenings] really took care of all that,” he said.
With the books and a film under his belt, Johnson is now focused on crafting pitches and teleplays if opportunities come knocking. “I’m preparing myself for anything that comes around. ‘Hey, do you want to make another movie?’ I say, ‘Yes, I have this script.’ ‘You wanna make a series?’ ‘Yes, I have this ready to go.’ ‘You wanna make another book?’ ‘Yes, I’m already working on something.’ I want to just be prepared for any situation that might arise from all this.”
He also devised a rather ingenious way to expose Fanboy to national bands that are (once again) playing the Casbah. “I tell them, ‘Hey, this is about the world you live in, if you want to check out this movie.’ So, I have little stickers behind the bar with QR codes so they can QR it, and it goes right to my website where you can click a link to watch it on the web. That’s been successful, and uses that sphere of influence that they have. A couple of bands have reposted it so their fanbase sees that it exists. Grassroots is probably the most effective way for this movie to be marketed.”
Comments