He decided that he didn't have the dedication or love of the game to treat it as a full-time job. "The chess really did mark a crucial turning point in my career." "But, by then, I was much better established as a writer," he reflects. There was no longer much money in setting up tournaments. All those enthusiasts who had taken up the game after Fischer's victory over Spassky stopped playing. The chess generated enough money for me to pay my bills."Īfter a year or two, the American chess bubble burst. These chess tournaments were all on the weekend so I had to work on Saturday and Sunday – but then I had five days off to write. Most writers who have to have a day job work five days a week and then they have the weekend off to write. "For two or three years, I had a pretty good situation. Martin was hired to direct the Midwestern circuit for a national organisation that ran chess tournaments. On the back of Fischer's success, the game became hugely popular. "Bobby Fischer played Boris Spassky in Reykjavík and won – and the entire American chess community went nuts!" In 1972, Bobby Fischer did Martin a huge favour by winning the world chess championship. My big dream was to be a full-time writer and support myself with my fiction but I wasn't making enough money to pay my rent and pay the phone bill – so I had to have a day job." "The importance of chess to me was not as a player but as a tournament director. (These were composed longhand, on school notebook paper.) He sold them to the other kids in the projects for a nickel.
#George rr martin a song of ice and fire movie#
Little George used to scrimp together money to buy comics and movie tickets by writing and performing "little monster stories". The picture Martin paints of himself as a kid growing up is Dickensian in its pathos. When he was growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, cinema-going was as important to him as reading Marvel comics and Robert Heinlein sci-fi novels. In Santa Fe, where he has lived since the late 1970s, he owns and runs the Jean Cocteau Cinema. Working primarily as a novelist, and now in television, Martin may seem an incongruous presence at a film festival but he is self-evidently a cinephile.
I am hardly the first person to kill a character unexpectedly and thereby get a big reaction from the audience." I wanted to establish that connection in particular. "Hitchcock and Robert Bloch did that in Psycho.
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