I love TV. I love democracy.
Uh oh.
I would love for Current TV to work. I really hope it does. But if you want to know why I'm a writer of entertainment and not a journalist anymore, go read this.
And don't complain it's too long.
Read it.
Friday, October 7, 2005
Thursday, October 6, 2005
Never smote a note
I don't know what that means. I just wanted something that would look good in orange.
Anyway, I really miss the blog "Why Television Sucks." It was so bracing, and true, and I like the way that it showed clearly how...insane...writers really can be. (This is also why Josh Friedman is so crazy-brilliant.)
One of the best posts she made was about giving notes to people -- how she would spend time reading people's scripts and really think on notes how to make it better, only to find half the time that the person on the other end really wanted to hear how brilliant they were, or, um...maybe a line suggestion or two. This pissed her off bigtime, since, you know, actually reading something and giving notes takes time, and thought, and having it blown off makes you want to kill them, and then yourself for having wasted your time.
Being able to take a note is an art in itself. You will go through the five stages of grief, immediately. No one likes to be criticized. It does not feel good.
The difference is that if you're a real, honest-to-good writer, notes (at least in TV) will help you if you have the courage to listen to them.
Do you not understand the note? Ask and probe further. Sometimes someone doesn't really know what's wrong -- sometimes they might mis-identify the problem. Your job is to find out what's making them bump and to come up with a solution. This does not always involve doing exactly what they say. Though sometimes it does. There's a story about Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney, when a writer was giving him guff, saying "do I have to take the monster out of the bag?" Then he mimes taking something out of a bag and says, very quietly, "we're paying for it." Then he puts the monster back in the bag.
Um. Yes sir. Three bags full, sir.
I say all this because yesterday I had a long notes call about one of the projects I'm currently developing. This is a series that I wrote as a spec three years ago. I've done many, many drafts on it. And written the bible, and the network and prodco have been very enthusiastic and supportive of the project.
So yesterday the notes came on the pilot. They weren't killer, but they were major. There is going to have to be a major rewrite, especially in the last two acts.
And you want to know a secret?
They were right.
I am a dumb monkey.
The amazing thing is that you can be smart, and you can pour your heart and soul into a script, and in the end...well...it's a long road before you get to the end.
Yes, things can be overdeveloped.
No, not every note you get is going to be golden or even comprehensible.
But for the most part, my experience is that smart people with a genuine interest in doing good work are going to give you notes that you can execute. And dealing with those notes generally strengthens your final product.
Now that doesn't mean that you're not going to bitch about notes. But what bothers me when I talk to a lot of (Canadian) TV writers, there seems to be a general ornery-ness about being given any notes at all.
I really think that's the main thing that separates the pros and the soon-to-be-pros from the wannabes and will-never-be's -- it's one thing to have confidence in your ability...quite another to have overconfidence in your infallibility.
If you're that attached to your art, and your artistic temperament, then you should probably be writing your novel, or manifesto, or, you know...uh...fingerpainting or something.
Completely unrelated point: Kanye West's new CD is the shizzle. And I don't use the snoop-speak lightly.
Anyway, I really miss the blog "Why Television Sucks." It was so bracing, and true, and I like the way that it showed clearly how...insane...writers really can be. (This is also why Josh Friedman is so crazy-brilliant.)
One of the best posts she made was about giving notes to people -- how she would spend time reading people's scripts and really think on notes how to make it better, only to find half the time that the person on the other end really wanted to hear how brilliant they were, or, um...maybe a line suggestion or two. This pissed her off bigtime, since, you know, actually reading something and giving notes takes time, and thought, and having it blown off makes you want to kill them, and then yourself for having wasted your time.
Being able to take a note is an art in itself. You will go through the five stages of grief, immediately. No one likes to be criticized. It does not feel good.
The difference is that if you're a real, honest-to-good writer, notes (at least in TV) will help you if you have the courage to listen to them.
Do you not understand the note? Ask and probe further. Sometimes someone doesn't really know what's wrong -- sometimes they might mis-identify the problem. Your job is to find out what's making them bump and to come up with a solution. This does not always involve doing exactly what they say. Though sometimes it does. There's a story about Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney, when a writer was giving him guff, saying "do I have to take the monster out of the bag?" Then he mimes taking something out of a bag and says, very quietly, "we're paying for it." Then he puts the monster back in the bag.
Um. Yes sir. Three bags full, sir.
I say all this because yesterday I had a long notes call about one of the projects I'm currently developing. This is a series that I wrote as a spec three years ago. I've done many, many drafts on it. And written the bible, and the network and prodco have been very enthusiastic and supportive of the project.
So yesterday the notes came on the pilot. They weren't killer, but they were major. There is going to have to be a major rewrite, especially in the last two acts.
And you want to know a secret?
They were right.
I am a dumb monkey.
The amazing thing is that you can be smart, and you can pour your heart and soul into a script, and in the end...well...it's a long road before you get to the end.
Yes, things can be overdeveloped.
No, not every note you get is going to be golden or even comprehensible.
But for the most part, my experience is that smart people with a genuine interest in doing good work are going to give you notes that you can execute. And dealing with those notes generally strengthens your final product.
Now that doesn't mean that you're not going to bitch about notes. But what bothers me when I talk to a lot of (Canadian) TV writers, there seems to be a general ornery-ness about being given any notes at all.
I really think that's the main thing that separates the pros and the soon-to-be-pros from the wannabes and will-never-be's -- it's one thing to have confidence in your ability...quite another to have overconfidence in your infallibility.
If you're that attached to your art, and your artistic temperament, then you should probably be writing your novel, or manifesto, or, you know...uh...fingerpainting or something.
Completely unrelated point: Kanye West's new CD is the shizzle. And I don't use the snoop-speak lightly.
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
Dear Geena Davis,
You are still very, very, very hot.
Maybe it's the aura of worldshaking power.
I do vaguely recall confessing at 3:30 in the morning, that weird Wednesday in November 2000, that I had a small thing for Hillary Clinton.
Some men are intimidated by powerful women.
I just want to be Kyle Secor.
Maybe it's the aura of worldshaking power.
I do vaguely recall confessing at 3:30 in the morning, that weird Wednesday in November 2000, that I had a small thing for Hillary Clinton.
Some men are intimidated by powerful women.
I just want to be Kyle Secor.
Tuesday, October 4, 2005
Why "The Room" is like Vegas...
So there was a little tempest in a teapot in writerville last weekend.
The details are readily available elsewhere, so I won't belabor them. The short version is that in comments in a nationally-available magazine, one of the writers from the first season of LOST, a writer who's no longer with the show, made what seemed to be disparaging comments about the LOST writers, comments that were easily interpretable as "these guys have no idea what's going to happen on the show."
Lots of nettie explosions later, there was a response by one of the guy's colleagues, and a current LOST writer. It was a good post...it illuminated a lot of the process of working on LOST, with tantalizing glimpses into the specifics of story breaking of some of the first season's episodes.
And by Monday, said writer had taken it down, saying that the issues raised by the article and his response were better dealt with in private.
Which, in case you're paying attention, is a pretty nifty admission of the thing that makes writers' rooms work: what happens there, stays there.
The writer's room, by definition, has to be a place of trust. When you're working on a show, you're going to probably spend more time in that room with the people in that room than you will with loved ones and family. You are going to say a lot of stupid things, some outrageous things. You're going to disagree and bang your head against the wall and eat pretzels and potato chips and probably drink way more Diet Coke than is healthy.
It's a difficult and sensitive process when you're in the middle of it -- and almost incomprehensible if you're on the outside.
The LOST spat, and another incident that was brewing in H'wood over the last year (a lawsuit where a writer's assistant on Friends sued for sexual harassment over some stuff that was said in the writer's room) pulls back the lid a bit on an area of television writing that, I feel, can't and shouldn't take much scrutiny.
Being inside a writer's room means hearing things, and saying things, that may be off color or not acceptable in other workplaces -- because the most important thing is breaking the story.
Being inside a writer's room means having to be savvy about group dynamics; if you're gregarious, you have to know when to back off. If you're reticent, you have to learn when to shout down. Because it's a tricky group dynamic, often times given the choice between hiring a superb but difficult writer, and a writer who's good but not superb, but better in the room, you will always go with the latter because it's better for the show.
In other words, if you have any hopes of writing on staff for a tv show, who you are as a person is at least as important as how you write.
The writer's room is a place of trust -- I know I've said that before, but it's so important that I'll say it again...and building that trust means giving into some important principles.
The most important is that what happens in the room stays in the room. You do not betray confidences. You don't go running to mom if someone says something that upsets you; you deal with it then and there.
Once an idea is out there, it belongs to the room. Many's the time that someone has said, "hey, did you come up with that line?" later -- sometimes even an Exec Producer with whom you could curry favor by saying yes, and I've answered "I really don't remember." If you want to really work well, you credit the room. The nice side of this is that when something screws up, you also blame the room. You don't hang out the episode writer to dry or the person who was story editing that episode, because you know who got what episode is largely logistical.
(You do screw freelancers. Sorry. Heh heh.)
Part of this is again, personal group dynamics. You don't want someone who keeps track and guards every idea that they come up with, or someone who never misses an opportunity to remind you that they came up with something. That sucks. But part of it is also necessity...because things move fast in the room. If you come up with an idea, and that sparks someone else to say one thing that makes you think about it differently, and oh yeah, didn't that other guy say that thing 20 minutes ago that we couldn't make work, but now that I think about it...
Okay, stop. Now...who came up with that idea?
Credit the room.
In order to be able to do that, you have to let go of a bit of your individual ego, and really, truly try to credit and form a group ego. If that gets betrayed in any way, the betrayal can seem personal and catastrophic. That's what the LOST spat was about.
If you want to understand the need for freedom and how people really need to cut loose in the room, see The Aristocrats. It's by no means a great movie, but I think by the end of it, you get a good look into how creative people work, and how important pushing the boundaries and being fearless is a part of that.
That's the inside stuff.
The outside explanation of why what happens in the room needs to stay there is this:
Fans will never get it, and the further they try to get it, the more poison is introduced into the process.
Writers crave approval. They do. It's a lonely job, and it's natural to want approval. But the more I do this, the more I think that professional writers need to insulate themselves from their fan base. It's not just the disasters that ensue when Simpsons or West Wing writers get into dustups with their online fans; it's that the internet's ability to disseminate any little nugget of info renders what would be a small, entre famille feud (Like the LOST spat) into a huge freaking deal that will never go away -- and is picked over obsessively by fanboys who will never understand what they're talking about because they have not and never will be in the room.
When a writer says to another writer about LOST, "they know where they're going," a writer with any experience knows what that means. It means that they have the basics of their mythology sketched out. They know what the major mysteries are and how they will resolve. But the individual details of how A goes to B -- well, the fact that they don't know that yet doesn't mean they don't know where they're going, it's the air that feeds the flame of the creative process.
To say that you have a show where you have every detail of every episode worked out over five years perfectly ahead of time -- well...uh...that's kind of going into Beautiful Mind schizophrenic territory. Of course you don't. Yes, I know that JMS had a five year plan for Babylon 5. But that five year plan was broad strokes, not every freaking detail...that's why he was able to adjust to things like cast departures.
But the problem is that to a fan, they look at TV like they look at a novel. It exists, and if "you're just making it up as you go along," then the moment something happens that they don't like, they ascribe it to desperation or "not having a plan."
In short...there's just no talking to these people.
Years ago, I remember reading how magicians were pissed at Penn & Teller because they revealed how tricks were done. I thought they were being prickly. Penn & Teller were just hilarious.
Well, I still think that, but now I also understand the objection. The focus should always be on the product, on the story. But the fan impulse (the root IS fanatic, after all) is always to know more, more, more details about the how.
But just because they want to know, doesn't mean you tell them. Even if it would make you feel good about yourself. Even if it would be fun. Because at the end of the day, even if you show them how the trick is done, they don't have the context to understand what they've seen.
Now, if there is a cone of silence around the process, that does make it difficult for aspiring writers. I know that. How do you get around that? Well, get yourself in position to actually talk to writers, however you can. And take classes on things like psychology and group dynamics. Learn about personality types. Understanding people is way more important for writers, than hearing the latest skank about what went on in the LOST writing room.
Most of all, stop thinking like a fan.
Train yourself out of it. There are shows that I watch and love, but I try always to approach it from a professional side: how would I have done that, or what are they going for there? NOT...how could they get X and Y together, etc, etc, etc.
The details are readily available elsewhere, so I won't belabor them. The short version is that in comments in a nationally-available magazine, one of the writers from the first season of LOST, a writer who's no longer with the show, made what seemed to be disparaging comments about the LOST writers, comments that were easily interpretable as "these guys have no idea what's going to happen on the show."
Lots of nettie explosions later, there was a response by one of the guy's colleagues, and a current LOST writer. It was a good post...it illuminated a lot of the process of working on LOST, with tantalizing glimpses into the specifics of story breaking of some of the first season's episodes.
And by Monday, said writer had taken it down, saying that the issues raised by the article and his response were better dealt with in private.
Which, in case you're paying attention, is a pretty nifty admission of the thing that makes writers' rooms work: what happens there, stays there.
The writer's room, by definition, has to be a place of trust. When you're working on a show, you're going to probably spend more time in that room with the people in that room than you will with loved ones and family. You are going to say a lot of stupid things, some outrageous things. You're going to disagree and bang your head against the wall and eat pretzels and potato chips and probably drink way more Diet Coke than is healthy.
It's a difficult and sensitive process when you're in the middle of it -- and almost incomprehensible if you're on the outside.
The LOST spat, and another incident that was brewing in H'wood over the last year (a lawsuit where a writer's assistant on Friends sued for sexual harassment over some stuff that was said in the writer's room) pulls back the lid a bit on an area of television writing that, I feel, can't and shouldn't take much scrutiny.
Being inside a writer's room means hearing things, and saying things, that may be off color or not acceptable in other workplaces -- because the most important thing is breaking the story.
Being inside a writer's room means having to be savvy about group dynamics; if you're gregarious, you have to know when to back off. If you're reticent, you have to learn when to shout down. Because it's a tricky group dynamic, often times given the choice between hiring a superb but difficult writer, and a writer who's good but not superb, but better in the room, you will always go with the latter because it's better for the show.
In other words, if you have any hopes of writing on staff for a tv show, who you are as a person is at least as important as how you write.
The writer's room is a place of trust -- I know I've said that before, but it's so important that I'll say it again...and building that trust means giving into some important principles.
The most important is that what happens in the room stays in the room. You do not betray confidences. You don't go running to mom if someone says something that upsets you; you deal with it then and there.
Once an idea is out there, it belongs to the room. Many's the time that someone has said, "hey, did you come up with that line?" later -- sometimes even an Exec Producer with whom you could curry favor by saying yes, and I've answered "I really don't remember." If you want to really work well, you credit the room. The nice side of this is that when something screws up, you also blame the room. You don't hang out the episode writer to dry or the person who was story editing that episode, because you know who got what episode is largely logistical.
(You do screw freelancers. Sorry. Heh heh.)
Part of this is again, personal group dynamics. You don't want someone who keeps track and guards every idea that they come up with, or someone who never misses an opportunity to remind you that they came up with something. That sucks. But part of it is also necessity...because things move fast in the room. If you come up with an idea, and that sparks someone else to say one thing that makes you think about it differently, and oh yeah, didn't that other guy say that thing 20 minutes ago that we couldn't make work, but now that I think about it...
Okay, stop. Now...who came up with that idea?
Credit the room.
In order to be able to do that, you have to let go of a bit of your individual ego, and really, truly try to credit and form a group ego. If that gets betrayed in any way, the betrayal can seem personal and catastrophic. That's what the LOST spat was about.
If you want to understand the need for freedom and how people really need to cut loose in the room, see The Aristocrats. It's by no means a great movie, but I think by the end of it, you get a good look into how creative people work, and how important pushing the boundaries and being fearless is a part of that.
That's the inside stuff.
The outside explanation of why what happens in the room needs to stay there is this:
Fans will never get it, and the further they try to get it, the more poison is introduced into the process.
Writers crave approval. They do. It's a lonely job, and it's natural to want approval. But the more I do this, the more I think that professional writers need to insulate themselves from their fan base. It's not just the disasters that ensue when Simpsons or West Wing writers get into dustups with their online fans; it's that the internet's ability to disseminate any little nugget of info renders what would be a small, entre famille feud (Like the LOST spat) into a huge freaking deal that will never go away -- and is picked over obsessively by fanboys who will never understand what they're talking about because they have not and never will be in the room.
When a writer says to another writer about LOST, "they know where they're going," a writer with any experience knows what that means. It means that they have the basics of their mythology sketched out. They know what the major mysteries are and how they will resolve. But the individual details of how A goes to B -- well, the fact that they don't know that yet doesn't mean they don't know where they're going, it's the air that feeds the flame of the creative process.
To say that you have a show where you have every detail of every episode worked out over five years perfectly ahead of time -- well...uh...that's kind of going into Beautiful Mind schizophrenic territory. Of course you don't. Yes, I know that JMS had a five year plan for Babylon 5. But that five year plan was broad strokes, not every freaking detail...that's why he was able to adjust to things like cast departures.
But the problem is that to a fan, they look at TV like they look at a novel. It exists, and if "you're just making it up as you go along," then the moment something happens that they don't like, they ascribe it to desperation or "not having a plan."
In short...there's just no talking to these people.
Years ago, I remember reading how magicians were pissed at Penn & Teller because they revealed how tricks were done. I thought they were being prickly. Penn & Teller were just hilarious.
Well, I still think that, but now I also understand the objection. The focus should always be on the product, on the story. But the fan impulse (the root IS fanatic, after all) is always to know more, more, more details about the how.
But just because they want to know, doesn't mean you tell them. Even if it would make you feel good about yourself. Even if it would be fun. Because at the end of the day, even if you show them how the trick is done, they don't have the context to understand what they've seen.
Now, if there is a cone of silence around the process, that does make it difficult for aspiring writers. I know that. How do you get around that? Well, get yourself in position to actually talk to writers, however you can. And take classes on things like psychology and group dynamics. Learn about personality types. Understanding people is way more important for writers, than hearing the latest skank about what went on in the LOST writing room.
Most of all, stop thinking like a fan.
Train yourself out of it. There are shows that I watch and love, but I try always to approach it from a professional side: how would I have done that, or what are they going for there? NOT...how could they get X and Y together, etc, etc, etc.
Monday, October 3, 2005
Bushie and Harriet
Why anyone would ever be surprised that an oilman who never found oil would nominate as Supreme Court Justice, a woman who had never been a judge, is beyond me.
The real question, of course, should be: what experience does she have with Arabian horses?
I'm sure Harriet will do a heckuva job.
I only get to do this about once a month now, and it's only the third, so I know it's dicey, but:
DON'T BLAME ME. I DIDN'T VOTE FOR HIM.
And I voted from Florida, too.
The real question, of course, should be: what experience does she have with Arabian horses?
I'm sure Harriet will do a heckuva job.
I only get to do this about once a month now, and it's only the third, so I know it's dicey, but:
DON'T BLAME ME. I DIDN'T VOTE FOR HIM.
And I voted from Florida, too.
CBC Plugged Back In
Late last night or early this morning, depending on your orientation, word came that there was a tentative deal between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the union representing 5500 locked out employees. This ends a 50 day lockout where Canadians in many parts of the country were deprived of the national radio, television, and online services they have come to depend on.
The lockout exposed a number of truly fascinating fault lines that are likely to be studied for some time to come.
For Americans who don't understand the nature of the publicly-funded CBC, the glib answer would be to imagine a PBS with teeth. Only not really - CBC has plenty of commercial aspects to it, but part and parcel of its mandate is to reflect Canada to Canadians.
(I'll try to keep this paragraph short so the interesting applicable-to-all stuff comes later.) That's not an easy thing to do. Though the CBC gets about a billion dollars a year from Canadian taxpayers, for that money it has to run two national television services in English and French, as well as two radio networks, also in English and French. It makes comedy, variety, current affairs and news shows, drama, and movies for tv out of that stipend. This is difficult to do in Canada because it's a nation of only 30 million people spread out in the 3rd (I think) largest national land mass on Earth. During the lockout, as all that programming disappeared, initially there were a lot of articles about how nobody noticed. Typically, that came from large media centres where there are many private broadcast choices. But for a large portion of the country, CBC is it. You're not going to get a lot of private broadcasting competition in Newfoundland or Nunavut. There just isn't a lot of money in it.
Okay, now here's the interestng -- really interesting -- lessons of the CBC lockout that should have implications for people with national broadcasters like the BBC, and we-who-create:
-From the moment the lockout started, there was an explosion of blogging that got the stories of the locked-out workers out. Eventually, that morphed into radio shows being done on campus stations, caravans going across the country reporting the unreported news in various Canadian outports, and even an online news site filled with robust reporting that the overwhelmed locked-in managers, running a skeleton service, simply couldn't match. It's the talent, stupid. That's the message that came through loud and clear. The PR war was decidedly won by the workers in this one. The managers seemed like they did not have a plan; their justifications for why they needed to be able to hire and fire contract workers at will seemed, as the weeks went on, just to be indicative of how poor their strategic planning was generally. Ugly whisperings that have been around for years: talking about how CBC was ridiculously over-managed -- has now leaked a bit into the public consciousness. And it looks like CBC Management will now be called before Canadian parliament to justify "what the hell were you thinking?" So one group responded nimbly to new technology and the narrowcasting landscape, one group flailed. Make note: creative people have to be open to change. The good news is that you're probably more open to change than the people you're likely to be dealing with.
There's more labor fun to come, I'm sure. I can't believe that the next big SAG or WGA fight isn't going to go to wall on the whole DVD royalty issue: it seems like everyone's electing radicals all of a sudden.
I'm just glad that the news will be back. Americans, you are pitifully ill-served by your news media. The major private network here, CTV, does a good job with news. But no one beats the CBC for informed and thorough news coverage, designed to shed light and not just heat.
And of course, Hockey's back. Canadians are a docile people -- but do not deny them hockey or sh*t starts to get weird fast.
The lockout exposed a number of truly fascinating fault lines that are likely to be studied for some time to come.
For Americans who don't understand the nature of the publicly-funded CBC, the glib answer would be to imagine a PBS with teeth. Only not really - CBC has plenty of commercial aspects to it, but part and parcel of its mandate is to reflect Canada to Canadians.
(I'll try to keep this paragraph short so the interesting applicable-to-all stuff comes later.) That's not an easy thing to do. Though the CBC gets about a billion dollars a year from Canadian taxpayers, for that money it has to run two national television services in English and French, as well as two radio networks, also in English and French. It makes comedy, variety, current affairs and news shows, drama, and movies for tv out of that stipend. This is difficult to do in Canada because it's a nation of only 30 million people spread out in the 3rd (I think) largest national land mass on Earth. During the lockout, as all that programming disappeared, initially there were a lot of articles about how nobody noticed. Typically, that came from large media centres where there are many private broadcast choices. But for a large portion of the country, CBC is it. You're not going to get a lot of private broadcasting competition in Newfoundland or Nunavut. There just isn't a lot of money in it.
Okay, now here's the interestng -- really interesting -- lessons of the CBC lockout that should have implications for people with national broadcasters like the BBC, and we-who-create:
-From the moment the lockout started, there was an explosion of blogging that got the stories of the locked-out workers out. Eventually, that morphed into radio shows being done on campus stations, caravans going across the country reporting the unreported news in various Canadian outports, and even an online news site filled with robust reporting that the overwhelmed locked-in managers, running a skeleton service, simply couldn't match. It's the talent, stupid. That's the message that came through loud and clear. The PR war was decidedly won by the workers in this one. The managers seemed like they did not have a plan; their justifications for why they needed to be able to hire and fire contract workers at will seemed, as the weeks went on, just to be indicative of how poor their strategic planning was generally. Ugly whisperings that have been around for years: talking about how CBC was ridiculously over-managed -- has now leaked a bit into the public consciousness. And it looks like CBC Management will now be called before Canadian parliament to justify "what the hell were you thinking?" So one group responded nimbly to new technology and the narrowcasting landscape, one group flailed. Make note: creative people have to be open to change. The good news is that you're probably more open to change than the people you're likely to be dealing with.
There's more labor fun to come, I'm sure. I can't believe that the next big SAG or WGA fight isn't going to go to wall on the whole DVD royalty issue: it seems like everyone's electing radicals all of a sudden.
I'm just glad that the news will be back. Americans, you are pitifully ill-served by your news media. The major private network here, CTV, does a good job with news. But no one beats the CBC for informed and thorough news coverage, designed to shed light and not just heat.
And of course, Hockey's back. Canadians are a docile people -- but do not deny them hockey or sh*t starts to get weird fast.
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