Why Was J. Neil Schulman
Missing For Eleven Years?
From the publication of his Prometheus-Award-winning novel
The Rainbow Cadenza in June 1983 to the appearance of his short story
"The Repossessed" in Carol Serling's Adventures in the Twilight Zone in
September, 1995, J. Neil Schulman published no fiction. His first nonfiction book,
Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns was not to be published
until June, 1994.
After two well-reviewed novels, which received endorsements from Anthony
Burgess and Milton Friedman, public praise from Robert A. Heinlein, and a
LASERIUM show based on The Rainbow Cadenza, what became of J. Neil
Schulman's writing career for over a decade?
The appearance of "Profile in Silver," an original script by Schulman, on
CBS's revived Twilight Zone series at 8:00 PM ET March 7, 1986 is what
happened.
For most of the decade following the publication of The Rainbow
Cadenza, J. Neil Schulman was trying to expand upon his entry into the
screenwriting community by writing screenplays and screen treatments, including
additional never-produced scripts for The Twilight Zone, a full-length screen
treatment, a full-length screenplay, and assorted other projects. He got paid for writing
some of them, but none of them made it to the screen.
You never saw J. Neil Schulman's second Twilight Zone episode
titled "Colorblind," a script so politically correct on the face of it (but subversive
under the surface) that Harlan Ellison charged it with being "knee-jerk liberal."
You never saw the movie Schulman wrote about the pending divorce of
the Prince and Princess of Wales, which he wrote in 1983, when the royal
marriage was still being treated in the tabloids as a fairy-tale come true.
You never got to see the musical screenplay J. Neil Schulman wrote, in
which a rock band invades a symphony orchestra -- and the symphony fights back
with an electronic violin.
You never got a look at J. Neil Schulman's story about the discovery of
ancient artifacts on Mars, or a cross-dimensional time-traveller whom we first meet at 16
when he's seduced by a supermodel at the 1976 World Science Fiction convention,
or the unsold spec script for Star Trek: The Next Generation that Schulman
co-wrote with his wife, in which the Enterprise is responsible for an ecological
disaster on a planet for endangered species -- and the Ferengi save the day.
Now you can use your own imagination to project these stories into your own private screening room, by reading the screenplays and screen treatments that J. Neil Schulman was writing after his two
award-winning novels. And, Schulman has written introductions for each of these
scripts and treatments, in which he tells the inside story of how each one was written ... and why it
never reached the screen.
For the one story that did reach the screen, "Profile in Silver," J. Neil
Schulman has written for the first time the complete story of how it was written
and how he participated on the shooting set in its production -- and he has
included both the original outlines for the story and both drafts of the script as
he originally wrote it.
You'll find out how Schulman helped to direct the performance of Andrew
Robinson, who played President Kennedy in "Profile in Silver" and is now Garak
on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and how he coached Lane Smith, who
played the time-traveller who prevents the JFK assassination, and now plays
Perry White on Lois & Clark.
In a recent interview in Psychotronic Video magazine, Andrew
Robinson said of "Profile in Silver": "The JFK episode was wonderful. It was
such a good script."
Now you'll not only get a chance to see that script as J. Neil Schulman
originally developed it, but his other work from the "missing decade" as well.
For fans of Schulman's novels and short stories, this book contains
some of J. Neil Schulman's most original and intriguing storytelling -- and is
not to be missed!