About Larry Beinhart
My friend Robbie Dupree was kind enough to let me use a song – Knockin’ On The Gates of Eden – written with another friend, David Sancious, for this web site.
It’s off Robbie’s new album, Time and Tide. There’s another song on it called Lucky.
Done a lot of living in my time
Looking back I guess I’ve done all right
Brooklyn boy with nothing much to lose …
I got lucky …
New world risin’, summer of love …
So many friends lost along the way
It’s a wonder that I’m still here today
Gonna roll the dice, shake it up tonight
I got lucky
Looking at my life, there’s an overwhelming sense that I got lucky.
I grew up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Fort Greene had a park. There were some great brownstones along one side of it. Cheap row houses along another side. On my side there was a hospital and the Raymond Street Jail, though I never found a street with that name. It was a few blocks from the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. It was near to Downtown Brooklyn, and past that to Brooklyn Heights, the coolest neighborhood in the borough. It should have been a nice and prosperous place.
It wasn’t.
There was an elevated subway that ran along the fourth side of the park, on Myrtle Avenue.
Across the tracks from the park, and from the high rise I lived in, was the Fort Greene Projects. At some point, I think when I was in Junior High, it was named the worst projects in the country.
The city immediately leapt into action.
It split them in two and gave each section a different name. Walt Whitman Houses was one of them. There were no other changes.
My memory is that they were about half black and half Puerto Rican. I went to Sands Junior High, down by the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was about five percent white. In those days – and perhaps still – classes where separated by “tracks.” Everyone who could read was in one class. It was 75% white.
I passed through the projects every day on the way to school.
I had nice middle class parents. My father was a lawyer who wrote for Corpus Juris Secundum, “America’s Great Law Encyclopedia.” My mother was the administrative assistant to the advisor in charge of foreign students at Long Island University. I liked them both and, in spite of having some very intense battles with my father, wouldn’t have traded them in for anyone else. We went away summers to a bungalow colony and winter holidays to an old mansion that had been turned into sort of co-op hotel with a lake that froze for ice skating.
Every time I passed through the projects, which is to say, most every day, I knew that I’d got lucky.
It was a time when America was riding high. New York City was the center of the f**kin’ universe. Everything seemed possible, including fixing all those things that were wrong with our world, poverty and racism and war. Money was easy. Rent and food, college and medical bills, and even my addictions, when I came to them a few years later, cigarettes and coffee, were always affordable.
I knew enough about the rest of the world, past and current, to know that I’d got lucky.
I went to Brooklyn Technical High School.
It was on the other side of the park from me, this time past the jail and the hospital. It was one of the four NYC schools that required an academic entrance exam. It was, in direct contrast to the neighborhood, almost 100% white.
It was also gender segregated. Seventy-four hundred boys. All competing for grades. When I got a chance to get out in the middle of my senior year. to go to college where there were girls, I grabbed it without a moment’s hesitation.
During those years I began to meet kids from outside of the city, from the suburbs. Even more so, once I went to college.
They had a sense of entitlement. As if what they were born to – money, expensive housing, safe streets, equipped to go to college, then enter a profession – was automatic. The natural and inevitable state of things.
Like they had no idea, not a clue, how lucky they were.
I went to the State University of New York in Binghamton. Where I discovered that white people were a majority group. Later, to SUNY Stony Brook. Tuition was about $400 a semester and that was covered by the minimum regents scholarship. It was a time when people believed in public education. Cities and states competed, using tax dollars, to provide the best of it.
That’s all gone. Even public universities are now organized so as to turn students into loan consumers. Instead of investing in education we now manufacture debtors.
I was lucky.
On my way out the college door, a friend of mine, Robert Schnitzer, asked me to help him write a screenplay.
Which I did. Bob raised twenty thousand dollars or something like that and actually got the film made.
There was talent walking around the streets of New York in those days. Sylvester Stallone starred in it. For nothing. We all worked on it for nothing.
Bob finished the film. There were a lot of good things about it, but there were bad things to. The worst being the script. That was very clear to me. Very clear. I stopped writing.
I started working in film production.
I was a grip, a gaffer, and a production manager.
After a few years doing that, I put some clothes in a backpack, went down by the Holland Tunnel and stuck out my thumb.
I ended up in Miami and worked for most of the film production companies there. They left me far less in awe than the players up in New York and I said, ‘Hey, I can do that.’ I formed a partnership with a likeable guy named Dennis Linn. We mostly made commercials, plus some industrial films.
We survived our first year because we had a mango and an avocado tree in the backyard of our office, which was also my apartment. Business eventually picked up. We became the second busiest house in town, though not the most profitable.
Then I went back to New York, sold out to Dennis, and went freelance.
I did a job for an emerging political consultant named Hank Sheinkopf and ended up doing all his TV, some of the radio, some of the print and some small amount of the client handling.
I loved working in politics. It was entertaining and instructive. Later on, it gave me substance for my writing.
Anyway, Hank put me on staff.
Politics is like picking crops. It’s seasonal. So he laid me off after the peaches were plucked.
It had been the first time in my adult life I’d had a job – as opposed to being freelance or being the boss – and it was now the first time in my life I was entitled to Unemployment Insurance.
I didn’t know it, but I’d got lucky.
I’d go down to the unemployment office. Explain that my last work had been as a political consultant and as a commercial film director. They’d look in their files, see that there was nothing like that on their rolls to send me to, and hand me my check.
Subsequently I came to see it as a New York State Grant to the Arts.
Unemployment wasn’t much. But it was enough for me to move into the basement of my friend Mitch Wood’s Brooklyn brownstone.
It was in a state of reconstruction. I remember one night, lying in bed, trying to figure out a way to get my bedroom door to close in a reliable way. I thought and thought about it. At last, I came up with a brilliant idea. A moment later, I realized that my design had been realized previously. It was called a door knob.
I used to read a lot of mysteries. A lot.
One day, I read two that were just dreadful. It came to me. I could write a book. Even if it were as bad as those two, I could get money for it.
I did a little research. Found out what publishers paid for first mysteries. Did a calculation. And figured out that if I could do one in four months, it was a living wage.
This, I now understand, is not how most people approach writing. But it has two great advantages.
If you set out to be Shakespeare, Goethe, Hemingway, Faulkner, Hammett or Chandler, you can spend several years tearing up the first page and never get to page two.
Then, if you put yourself on a time/cost ratio, you have a pages per day schedule.
It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that a finished book is more likely to be published than an unfinished one, so that turned out to be a good way to get started, unintimidated, without the dead weight of pretensions, and businesslike.
I got lucky.
My first attempt, No One Rides For Free, got published.
It got great reviews. “The man really can write,” from the NY Times. “Beinhart starts his career out with a home run,” from Kirkus.
It won the Edgar.
I have to admit, that made things more complex.
I was being told I was a good writer. So now I did have things to live up to. Instead of just trying to write a cheap detective novel, something I say with all due respect, a good cheap detective novel is hard to find, I had to do something to top it.
There have been, frankly, difficulties, ups and downs, some failures and punishments. But over all, I’ve been lucky.
I’ve been handed gifts. The time and place of my birth. The parents who raised me. The woman I’m married to. The two beautiful and very interesting children we have. I’ve lived in Rome, Oxford, Miami, New York, and felt, each time, that I was living in paradise. But then, I felt that way when I was a kid in Fort Greene.
Here are some of the things I’ve done.
AWARDS
Fulbright - Raymond Chandler Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford
Gold Dagger - Crime Writers Association (UK)
Edgar - Mystery Writers of America
Gold Medal - Virgin Islands International Film Festival
Emmys (2) - Commercials/Florida
NOVELS
THE LIBRARIAN,
“Think John Grisham meets Jon Stewart” Rolling Stone
WAG THE DOG (Originally published as AMERICAN HERO),
"A tour de force of subversive wit ..." The New Yorker
1,000 Great Books of the Millennium, Capital Magazine
5 Best Books on Public Relations, Wall Street Journal
FOREIGN EXCHANGE,
N.Y. Times Notable Books of the Year
YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR,
"A masterly novel." Kirkus Reviews
NO ONE RIDES FOR FREE,
Edgar Award
NOVELS
with and as Gillian Farrell
ALIBI FOR AN ACTRESS,
“Applause, applause.” The New York Times
MURDER AND A MUSE,
“Welcome back.” The New York Times.
MOTION PICTURES
WAG THE DOG, based on AMERICAN HERO, Acadamy Award nominated Screenplay based on previously published material - David Mamet/Hillary Henkin. Director - Barry Levinson, Starring - Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Harrelson. Studio - New Line
THE AGENCY - original screenplay, currently in development with Bavaria Films, Munich, Germany.
THEATER
RISE & FALL OF ISABELLA RICO: Book & Lyrics. Music by Neil Rolnick. Excerpts performed by the Albany Symphony, 1997. "The work captivates ... and you don't find lyrics as witty as Beinhart's anywhere this side of Sondheim." (Steve Barnes, Albany Times Union).
NON-FICTION
FOG FACTS: SEARCHING FOR TRUTH IN A WORLD OF SPIN - Nation Books, “The one against which all others will be measured,” Bob McChesney
HOW TO WRITE A MYSTERY - Ballantine Books
“The best genre specific book on writing we’ve seen.” Denver Post
OTHER WRITING
FUNNY STORY: Gold Dagger, Best Short Story 1995
DEATH IN A SMALL TOWN: Edgar nominee, Best Short Story, 1995
ESQUIRE MAGAZINE (UK Edition): Ski article
WOODSTOCK TIMES: Reporter, Criminal Justice System
SHORT STORIES: New Crimes Anthology, Robinson (London), Schwarze Beute #7, Schwarze Beute #12, Rowolt (Rinebek)
GEORGE MAGAZINE
LA TIMES BOOK REVIEW
OP-ED
New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Newsday, Alternet, Buzzflash, Common Dreams, Huffingtonpost.
EDITORIAL
SCHWARZE BEUTE #8: Crime Writing Magazine, published by Rowolt (Germany). Guest Editor of the Larry Beinhart Edition.
TELEVISION
In Your Face: Politics, comedy & music.
Distributed by FSTV on satellite
Producer, Creator, Co-host, Writer
FELLOWSHIPS, CONFERENCES & LECTURES
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Antioch Writers Workshop: July, 2005
BALTIC CENTER FOR NORTH AMERICAN STUDIES, University Of Tartu, Estonia, Plenary Speaker, Conference - “Americanization of Europe: Myth or Realty” - April, 1995
GOTTLIEB-DUTWEILLER INSTITUTE for SWISS TELECOM: The Manufacture of Reality
LA TIMES BOOK FESTIVAL: Satire
NATIONAL ARCHIVES: War, Movies, Presidential Sex and Libraries.
RAYMOND CHANDLER/FULBRIGHT: Wadham College.
SEMANA NEGRA: week long conference in Spain sponsored by the city of Gijon and the International Association of Crime Writers.
AMERICAN THRILLER WRITERS: Readings and meetings sponsored by the city of Köln, Germany.
INSTITUTE OF GERMANIC STUDIES, London, Symposium on the Detective Story.
TEACHING
WOODSTOCK GUILD OF ARTISTS: Creative Writing Course.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY: Lectures, How To Write Crime Fiction
OTHER EXPERIENCE
Founder and President of the Big Orange Production Company, Miami, Fla., and New York, N.Y., produced several hundred television commercials and industrial films.
Director/Writer/Producer, political commercials for Sheinkopf Communications.
Motion Picture Production Manager: features (Family Honor, Rebel), industrials, commercials.
Motion Picture grip and gaffer, NABET #15.
Ski Instructor: Belleayre Mountain, NY, Killington, Vermont, Hunter Mt. Ski School, Hunter, New York, Kölner Club, Trois Valleés, France
Member Senior Common Room, Wadham College, Oxford University