d e a d t h i n g s o n s t i c k s .

CBC Drama Gets It Right

2012-01-27T00:10:00.000-05:00

Wrote this on FACEBOOK this morning and it got shared around. The completist in me wanted to post it here. One time only thing. Comments are disabled since I don't really do this thing anymore. If you want to send me a Tweet on Twitter, I'm at @heywriterboy

WRITERS LIKE TO complain. That's our lot. But if you're of the Canadian lot, you should be taking a closer look at the CBC this January -- specifically their drama department. There's good news there.

The CBC premiered a show called ARCTIC AIR a few weeks ago. It's about pilots flying in the North, very much an offshoot of (and produced by the same company as) ICE PILOTS, a popular reality show. The show was the highest premiere on CBC in twenty years. But the real story is not getting a big number for a first show -- lots of Canadian programs manage that. (Which says to me that Canadians are perfectly willing to sample homegrown fare, contra to the naysayers; they simply won't watch if they don't like what they see. Which should be, you know, the point.) The real story of Arctic Air is that they stayed. They like what they see. Three weeks in and the show is still over a million viewers. What's more -- I've heard that it's also very solidly PVR'd -- with final numbers adding sometimes 20 or 30% to the final viewer tally. That's not supposed to happen with CBC shows. The audience is older and conventional wisdom says that they don't use PVR's. Except that's not what's happening. ARCTIC AIR is winning its timeslot -- and it's being PVR'ed for later.

Beyond that one show you have REPUBLIC OF DOYLE consistently pulling in over a million in their 3rd season. It's not just a Russell Crowe guest shot. I personally don't think the stories are as good as they could be (but full disclosure, I worked on the show for 10 minutes in Season 1, so I would think that.) I raise that point because what the show does have is specificity -- it's utterly unlike anything you'd see on private nets in Canada..it's firmly rooted to place and people like it enough that they hang in through the loopy plotting. That's a win and I'm happy for it.

Beyond that you have an aged Warhorse in HEARTLAND, a show that rates consistently huge for a family audience, up near 2 million some weeks, with Christmas movies also pulling in great numbers.

CBC just wrapped up the last season of BEING ERICA. Though the numbers slipped as the show went on, I talk to women I know in their 30's and there's a definite chord that was struck there. It connected emotionally. And it also managed format sales -- when was the last time a Canadian TV drama did that?

I've heard encouraging things about the upcoming pilots CBC has in the pipeline. I'm just at the beginning of developing something with them, and find the executives engaged and passionate about story. You always have to worry about bureaucracy at a place like CBC - it's a crown corporation, after all. But the point is - on CBC, Canadian drama is actually CANADIAN drama. It doesn't disguise locations. It doesn't get shuffled off to summer or bounced around the schedule.

Nothing's perfect. ARCTIC AIR has been promoted, and it paid off. But the CBC buried its excellent movie on John A. MacDonald...a movie that MACLEANS said might have been the best Canadian historical drama ever. I watched it and it reminded me of I CLAUDIUS...low budget and you didn't care because the characters and the meat were so good. They also mishandled the promo for MICHAEL: TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS, which at least partially led to that show's disappointing ratings. But the critical reception was almost universally positive.

So they're doing dramas that win timeslots -- in winter, when the competition is tougher -- and dramas that get populist love and critical acclaim.

People, that's firing on all cylinders.

Brits are rightly proud of stuff like SHERLOCK or LUTHER or LIFE ON MARS or ABFAB or DOCTOR WHO...where's the chorus of people going, "hey, you know what, for my $30 bucks a year CBC's actually giving me some pretty good stuff?"

There's a lot of layers at CBC and much opportunity for second guessing, and that's something they have to continue to be vigilant about. But there's a core there that's not flailing -- they're actually blooming.

Considering how much of the time people just want to bash the CBC for ideological reasons, and the number of people who want to complain about the CBC cancelling INTELLIGENCE like, 6 years later, I believe only for the sake of decency maybe it's time to acknowledge that something pretty spectacular is happening over there.

They're doing shows that Canadians want to watch. Not all of them, no... and yes, the sample size is very low compared to your average U.S. network...but really, look at how many shows they do total, and how many are connecting with audiences, and the conclusion has to be that they're doing something right -- unless you're being churlish, I mean.

If you're a creative and you've been wary of developing with CBC in the past, I think it's time to recognize that the team there is getting things right, finally. May the corporation have the wisdom to keep them moving onward and upward with great Canadian shows rooted in place, inventive in tone, that Canadians continue to embrace the way they're embracing them now.

And wouldn't it be wonderful if some journalist wrote THAT for a change?

Blog Fallowing Writing Advice for Screenwriters from Sticksville

2011-08-15T02:30:00.001-04:00

These pieces last updated August 2011. If you have a suggestion for other past pieces to include, let me know in comments. thanks.

The "Big Ones" (Pieces that got me noticed.)
10 Things That Would Make Canadian TV Better. 4 years old, and still relevant.
How Corner Gas Ruined Everything
(taken together, those two posts are the closest thing this blog gets to a "blogafesto.")
Notes on a Frog (this is also linked below but it's one of my favourite posts ever.)

How to Write A Spec:
Part 1: Prep,
Part 2: Research,
Part 3: Breaking The Story
Specs: an addendum

Writing The Television Series:
Part 1: Setting the Table,
Part 2: The Outline,
Part 3: The First Draft,
Part 4: The Second Draft,
Part 5: Production White & Beyond
Being a Freelancer (My episode of Stargate: Universe)
The Importance of The Takeaway
What is the "Objective Correlative?"

The Economics of Freelancing in Canada:
Part 1
Part 2

The 'Notes' Process & Prep:
How to Give Notes
Prep: Day 1
Prep: Days 2, 3, and 4
Prep: As Prep Continues
Notes on a Frog

Development & Writing Pilots:
Beware 'the napkin'
Avoiding 'backstory fatigue.'
Don't get caught up in "The Tyranny of Why."
Coincidence, & Knowing your Franchise
The Second Episode Problem
The Fresh, The Familiar & The Impossible Trick.
Hero, or Protagonist?
The Limits of worrying about "Fridge Logic."
How Much Research to Do? Just enough to deliver "The Takeaway." (features Burn Notice)

And when all else fails:

Employing 'The Snooki Principle.'

Writer Time Management:
Pomodoro
Writing at Night is Bullshit.
If you HAVE to Procrastinate...

Breaking In:
What to do before nobody will read you.
Why you should work on your Story Literacy
Co-Writing & Gang Breaking
How becoming a Writer is kind of like "Coming Out."
Take the damn job
Acing the Meeting
Defending Josh Olson
Writers talk: There is Wisdom in Brunch

Misc
The Difference Between an 'Original Work Inspired By' and a 'Derivative' Work -- With Stunning Real Life Examples!

Loving the Bottle Show

The Eyeballs of Men

Writer on the Set

How Interrogation works, really.

Creator Interviews/Talks:

Greg Daniels from "The Office" -- Part 1 and Part 2

Paul Abbot (Shameless, State of Play)

Robert Towne (Godfather, Chinatown)

The Creators/Exec Producers of "Being Erica"

I talk about how I didn't really like "Twitch City" and creator/star Don McKellar takes me to the woodshed (but we part friends. Aw.)

One more for a Good Cause: Why Censoring Summerworks Means No More Flashpoints.

2011-06-27T17:04:00.000-04:00

HI. HOW ARE YOU? Great, Great. Oh, Good, Good. You know, working and stuff. Same old same old.

Buncha stuff, really. Ah, too much to go into, and you don't wanna hear about that. So, one might say, why have I busted out of blogtirement (which I've been enjoying immensely, thanks much) after all this time?

Well friends, let me tell you a little story.

About fifteen years ago, I was a frustrated, unchallenged segment producer at CityTV. My job was fun, but unfulfilling, because I knew what I really wanted to do was write. But before I could take the ridiculous leap of quitting my job and going to write full time, I had to build up confidence. So I wrote a one-act play.

That play was called "Press'd." It was a little media-savvy potboiler about an fragile actor hot on the heels of a painful breakup, manipulated by his agent into doing a day of Press Junketry. During the course of a day of canned interviews, he takes a grasping journalist and her idealistic cameraman hostage. And then, this being show business, everyone immediately starts working the situation to their advantage.

It was fun. It spoke to my world and experience. It drew wonderful, large, enthusiastic crowds. One of the best nights was when my then-boss, the irrepressible Moses Znaimer showed up. That caused a bit of a ripple.

More importantly, I got to sit at the back of the theatre, and hear the jokes land. I got to hear people laugh where I wanted them to laugh -- "get" what I wanted them to get; gasp at turns they didn't see coming until I wanted them to.

Long story short, it allowed me to see my work up "on its feet" in front of an audience, on a stage. It gave me the confidence to think, "Maybe I'm not crazy with this writing thing." It would be another few years before I quit that job, but the groundwork was laid. That show created my next career.

That groundwork, in fact, was laid for a lot less money that it otherwise could have cost me. Because that first play of mine was presented under the auspices of a new theater festival called Summerworks.

Thanks to Summerworks, my cost to get that play up and running was only about $2000. We made our money back at the gate, and even extended for a short run with another play that did well at the same festival, by a wonderful Toronto writer named David Widdicombe.

My play, Press'd, along with David's River Lady, (which was recently revived in Toronto) played into September from their launching pad at the Summerworks Festival. And it was at that remount, the stars of both my play and David's met.

Mark Ellis & Stephanie Morgenstern were both working actors at the time -- Stephanie had been working as an actor for more than 15 years at the time, and had written and co-directed a short film. From the moment they met, Steph & Mark clearly were destined for more than artistic collaboration.

Flash ahead to 2011, and Mark & Stephanie are the co-creators of Flashpoint, now finishing its fourth season, and one of Canadian TV's greatest success stories.

Summerworks went on to greater things as well. Over the years I would see many new works, and see new, exciting emerging voices there. It was at Summerworks where I first saw Poochwater, an amazing play by Mike McPhaden, who I'd later practically DEMAND start writing TV. He won the Dora Award for that show, too. It was a revelation. I'm sure McPhaden would credit a lot of his start to Summerworks. There's also Chris Leavins -- Cute With Chris internet star, who wrote one of the sharpest faux memoir pieces I've ever seen. And Sean Reycraft's One Good Marriage was a fantastic, macabre story. Sean's gone on to write many TV shows in both the USA and Canada, including Degrassi, The Vampire Diaries, 90210, and many others.

Summerworks, too, focused itself, becoming an important venue for new Canadian work -- for new generations of playwrights and actors to cut their teeth. The ten day festival and the shared-costs of presenting that many shows kept costs low enough for new writers to afford the fees and get that first chance to put themselves out there for an audience.

I simply can't stress how influential, and how important, that Festival has been for the development of new voices in the Canadian Film, Theatre, and Television community.

Mark Ellis tweeted today, "NO Summerworks, NO Flashpoint..." -- and it's hard to dispute the fact.

So now here's where the story gets ugly:

In the 2010 Festival, a play called Homegrown was presented. It concerned a woman's relationship with one of the "Toronto18."

The Sun newspaper chain (no link, cause really, fuck them) ginned up a bunch of controversy -- without ever seeing the play in question -- by saying it "glorified terrorism."

It didn't matter that the work, flawed, naive, unpolished maybe -- as are many of the works presented at a festival like Summerworks -- really did nothing of the sort. The narrative caught fire. It became more tinder in the fight to export U.S. style culture wars north.

(If you're curious to read what the play was actually like -- including some very fair criticism of it -- here's a link to a review.)

Flash ahead to today -- it's 39 days before the next Summerworks Festival.
And this morning, the Department of Heritage cut 20% of their budget.

Read the article about the cut and draw your own conclusions, but to me this feeds into a nice long narrative about what the Conservative Government does to organizations that espouse (or whom they say espouse) points of view that don't gibe with the good Conservative mindset.

What's lost in this -- in the noise from the Sun and elsewhere - is the good that Summerworks does. Flashpoint alone has generated millions of dollars to the artistic economy. Its early encouragement of me has taken me from a frustrated salary-worker to a freelancer who paid a whole stinking load of taxes last year, and for several years before that. Many of us can tell that same story. It, in fact, has invested in not just the cultural life of the country -- it's driven and sparked the careers of those who continue to create jobs, and wealth, as well as ideas and culture in this country. It is more than a good investment. It's low cost seed money for an entire industry.

It's a cause worth supporting, which is why I donated $1000 this morning to try and help Summerworks make up its $45 000.00 shortfall this year.

Don't let the playing of cynical politics be the last word. Take a stand for artistic freedom, freedom of expression and the right to say things that maybe might not make a Conservative happy, but are things that are legitimate and absolutely essential if our country is going to remain a democracy where different points of view can be respected, and debated.

You don't have to kick in a grand, but can you afford $100? What about $50? $25 even?

Art creates wealth.
Art creates debate.
Art creates society.

Don't let creeping parochialism win. Help save Summerworks.

Click here to make a donation. (It's a charitable donation, which means you'll get a tax receipt back.)

Thanks for reading. Oh and if you want to buy tickets to shows this year, that link is here. Please do both. By investing in the shows, you might be investing in the next Flashpoint. And by helping the Fest, you'll give those artists somewhere to learn their craft, so that someday they may entertain you, spark your fancy or pique, or enrich your life.

Now, it's back to the shadows with me. Hope you're having a nice summer. I'm off to L.A. tomorrow, thanks for asking. That's another story, of course -- and, I'm happy to say, one that I'll be telling only in person at pubs and at parties. I remain, gleefully retired from the soapbox business.

For now, anyway.

Whoops.

2010-12-01T13:27:00.001-05:00

APPARENTLY I GOT WIKILEAKED.

Aint I a stinker?

How To Give Notes

2010-11-07T01:34:00.002-04:00

Indeed.

How to Give Notes.

Repost: Me & Mister C

2010-10-19T17:46:00.000-04:00

TOM BOSLEY -- to a generation of man-children who are starting to get squirrelly about revealing their ages, will forever and ever be our generation's model father...the kindly Mr. C, from Happy Days. He died today at the age of 83. Here's a remembrance Rob Sheridan wrote on this blog last year.

(Originally published May 21, 2009)

I didn’t start writing TV until I was 30. Based on my earliest credits you would think that would make me 38 by now, but you’d be wrong. I’m 32. So shut your face.

Anyway, before I started writing, I did a variety of things, one of which was working as a publicist for the now-defunct Livent out of Toronto. The one run by, you know… that guy.

I knew nothing about publicity and even less about musical theatre, but for whatever reason someone snatched me out of the mailroom one day and said “here, do this.” So I did it, for nearly four years, as my twenties quietly slipped away from me without my really noticing. Note to twentysomethings: Pay attention.

It wasn’t really a bad gig, though. I got to travel around the U.S. with the touring companies of the various shows and set up media interviews with the actors in each market. Sometimes it was a real A-list town like Boston, but usually it was places like St. Louis, Indianapolis, Hartford, Cleveland... cities you might not otherwise find yourself in, but were often more fun than you’d think. And sometimes not.

The lead actors in these shows tended to be people with some background in musical theatre, but were primarily known from television, and often sitcoms, hence the marquee value. Cloris Leachman. Betty Buckley. Pat Harrington. Yes, for a brief moment in time, I called Schneider from “One Day at a Time” a friend.

One slight variation was the time we had Dean Jones in a show. Dean was a Disney star in the early 70s and had been the original dude in “Herbie the Love Bug.” Very nice man.

One night Dean Jones and I are in the back of a limo trying to get to a television station way out in the sticks. Big snowstorm. Traffic’s just crawling. And Dean’s telling me about the height of his career, and it sounded pretty great. Lots of parties and women. Lots and lots of women. And I’m really enjoying the stories and feeling kind of envious until it all culminates in Dean having a moment of clarity in a hotel room late one night. At this point in his story he turns to me and says “Rob. Have you accepted Christ into your life?”

And so a long drive suddenly got a lot longer.

But I digress. The actual story I wanted to tell was about Tom Bosley, Mr. Cunningham from “Happy Days.” Tom was playing Cap’n Andy in one of the touring companies of and before his career in television, he too had been a musical theatre star, most notably in the tile role of “Show Boat,”“Fiorello!” back in the 50s.

When I first met him in Detroit several months earlier I had heard that he could be a little crusty at first, and I guess he was. But at some point not long thereafter I had taken the time to tell him that I had been a huge fan of “Happy Days” as a kid.

That in and of itself was unremarkable – Bosley heard this sort of thing a hundred times a day. But I also happened to mention, genuinely, that my favourite seasons of the show were the first two.

In case you’ve forgotten, during the first two seasons (the ones with the “Rock Around the Clock” opening instead of the other one) Happy Days was actually a single camera show. There was a laugh track, but no studio audience. The humour was a little smaller and more subtle, the cast didn’t have to play to the back row, and Fonzie was not yet a superhero. He was there, but more of the stories revolved around small stuff between Richie and Potsie, and Richie and his Dad. Most of these episodes are really kind of terrific, if you get a chance to check them out on DVD.

Anyway, I got the sense that Tom Bosley especially liked those shows as well because we got along like a house on fire after that. Couldn’t have been nicer.

So one day we were driving around San Francisco, visiting a bunch of local TV and radio stations for various interviews. Ron Howard also happened to be in town, shooting “Ed TV.” I had, in fact, seen Ron Howard putting mustard on his hot dog at a Giants game just the day before, but I was alone at the time and hadn’t found the courage to go up and say hi. That was already eating at me by the time Tom and I had our media day.

Then, out of nowhere, Tom turns to me over lunch and says, “Oh, you know… Ronny is shooting his movie around the corner. Do you wanna go visit the set and say hi?”

I told Tom I thought that would be a little bit of all right, and so we did.

There was the usual amount of security surrounding the perimeter of the set, but the funny thing was that we didn’t have to show or do anything to get on. Tom just smiled at one of the guards and said “I’m here to see my son” and the guy smiled wide and shook his hand and removed the barrier. It was kind of awesome.

Then, we march right up to Ron Howard, who is between set-ups, and for like, ten minutes, I just stood there talking to Richie and Mr. C. Well, mostly I just stood there slack-jawed, saying squat. But it was, as any other TV-baby like me might imagine, one of the highlights of my life.

The amazing thing is that not once, not even for a second, while I’m standing there with one of the biggest directors in the world, who is himself standing there talking to his TV-Dad, who also happens to be starring in the expensive live musical that I am in town to publicize, not once does it occur to me to tell someone to grab a fucking camera.

The point is: I was a really, really shitty publicist.

Wait. That wasn’t supposed to be the point of this story.

Oh, right, now I remember. So the Ron Howard encounter behind us, we returned to the business of the day, which was ferreting Tom around to all these TV and radio stations. And it was then that I noticed that every single person we came into contact with throughout the day had the exact same reaction as that security guard on the set. The second, and I mean the second, Tom Bosley walked into a room, there wasn’t a twenty, thirty or fortysomething person who didn’t immediately smile wide and, with almost childish enthusiasm, step forward to shake his hand.

It was like their own father had gone out for a pack of smokes 20 years ago, disappeared, and had magically returned. These people were positively giddy, I tells you.

At some point, at one of the TV stations, maybe the local NBC affiliate, the woman who booked the show comes up to me and says “You know, we’ve had a lot of big stars come through here.” And she rattles off a list of names I’ve mostly forgotten, but they were all big, A-list movie stars and rock stars. Springsteen, Cruise, Hoffman. This sort of thing. Then she says: “But I have never, ever seen the staff more excited about a guest coming in. It’s Mr. Cunningham.”

I got what she meant completely.

Now, I’m not saying this was the exact moment I decided I wanted to write for television (I’ll leave that for Chapter Two of my upcoming autobiography “Rob, We Hardly Knew Ye”) but it made a big impact on me nevertheless. I think in some way every television writer kind of quietly yearns to be writing for the movies. There’s a romance to that, and you know, it would be pretty cool.

The thing is, and I realize this has been said before by people a lot smarter than me, there really is something about the primacy and intimacy of that little box being right there, in your home, every single day, that establishes an emotional connection we’re simply never gonna have with Tom Cruise. That’s the magic of the medium. And while we’re all working on those desk drawer feature screenplays with visions of glowing marquees and opening night klieg lights dancing in our heads, I like to remind myself from time to time what a privilege it is to work in television, even if I never make 1/1000th the impact of a cultural touchstone like Mr. C.

That was my point. I’m sorry it took me so long to get there.

Anyway, as luck would have it, San Francisco was, I think, the last time I ever worked with Tom. Livent basically imploded at the end of the year, and that was that. But I remember lying in my hotel room that night and feeling kind of privileged to have had that experience, and then doing a little math and realizing that it was entirely possible that there were periods in my childhood when I spent more time with Mr. C. than I did with my own Dad.

This says absolutely nothing about my father, by the way, who was a wonderful guy. Only that I was horribly, horribly addicted to television. It was a real problem.

Still is.

Kate Taylor Tackles Canada's Culture for Eh or Nay.

2010-09-24T14:59:00.001-04:00

KATE TAYLOR spent a year as an Atkinson Fellow looking into Canadian Culture, for an extended series of articles now available on the Toronto Star website.

I'm not returning to blogging, not anytime soon, anyway, but I've been waiting awhile for Kate to post her findings, so I wanted to call your attention to it.

An example:

if place generates self-respect, so does culture. In his 2008 book A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada, the philosopher and novelist John Ralston Saul accuses Canadian elites of harbouring colonial attitudes, always looking over their shoulders to check what is being done in the mother country, or now the United States.

His is a damning and painfully perceptive account of the mindset of those Canadian media leaders whose claims to cosmopolitanism are merely cover for a lack of ingenuity at home. It’s a phenomenon that manifests itself every year at the commercial broadcasters’ “upfronts,” the presentations of their new seasons to advertisers and the media.

At the CanWest upfront in June, for example, executive vice-president of content Barbara Williams trumpeted what shows she had just bought in L.A. and boasted of no less than 15 prime-time hours of simulcast American dramas. The commercial broadcasters’ business model is based on simulcasting U.S. shows, but the idea that such coattail-riding is worth bragging about strikes me as sad.

Canadian governments have embraced the notion that cities and communities need to be creative but, to judge from their funding, they don’t seem to have given much thought to who is going to do all this creating. Meanwhile, Ottawa’s talk of a digital economy focuses on technology rather than content. If we want a creative economy, we had better start by figuring out how our creative industries are going to survive past next year.

On their blogs and their fan sites, young, wired Canadians show great confidence as potential creators. But if the only place for professional creation is abroad, the only acceptable references either generic or American, we will be forced to deal with not just a continuing brain drain as the new generation of so-called prosumers follow the natural talent flow southwards. More worryingly, those left behind will only be the wannabes, the might-have-beens, the losers.

Bracing and honest, Northern Lights is great reading. One more list worth breaking out:

Nine myths about Canadian culture

1. Fiction: Canada is a small country and a small market.

Fact: Canada is the 14th largest economy in the world, and English Canada is home to an estimated 26 million people. The cultural firmament is full of examples — Danish film, Quebec TV — where smaller populations sustain local content. English Canada’s challenges have to do with the cultural and physical proximity of the U.S., and with the country’s geographic spread.

2. Fiction: Canadians just don’t want to watch Canadian TV shows.

Fact: If that were true, Canadians would be the only people in the industrialized world who preferred American shows to domestic shows of comparable quality. U.S. shows do consistently outrank Canadian shows in ratings, but they have significant advantages over Canadian shows. Simulcasting means American shows appear twice on the dial. Canadian shows tend to be relegated to times when fewer people are watching, and they usually offer half the number of episodes, making it more difficult to build audiences. Nonetheless, Canadian shows do score with audiences: CTV’s Flashpoint, the highest-rated Canadian drama last season, drew an average of 1.5 million viewers.

3. Fiction: Canadian shows would get the ratings if they were any good.

Fact: After the U.S. and the U.K., Canada is one of the most significant exporters of TV programming in the world. Canadian shows regularly appear on U.S. specialty channels and European networks. CBC’s Being Erica is seen in 21 countries including Turkey, Poland and the U.S.

4. Fiction: They are shoving Cancon down our throats.

Fact: Canadian content regulations in radio and television have ensured there are Canadian choices that would not otherwise exist, but Canadians also have easy access to most American television, as well as all U.S. movies, music, books and magazines.

5. Fiction: Canadian movies are just bad.

Fact: How would you know? When have you ever seen one? It is estimated that Canadian films account for only 3 per cent of screen time in Canadian cinemas.

6. Fiction: The CBC is lavishly funded by the taxpayer. . .

Fact: At $33 per citizen per year, the CBC is one of the worst funded public broadcasters in the industrialized world. Only the United States and New Zealand pay less per capita for public broadcasting. Routinely cut and seldom increased, the CBC’s parliamentary appropriation, in today’s dollars, is worth $500 million less than it was in 1991.

7. Fiction: . . . unlike the commercial broadcasters, who have to survive without any government money.

Fact: There is no such thing as a free market in Canadian broadcasting. The commercial broadcasters are protected from competing American signals by regulation and also receive government subsidies for their Canadian programming in the form of tax credits and grants provided to TV producers.

8. Fiction: You can’t regulate the Internet; the CRTC might as well close up shop.

Fact: It’s not just the censors in Beijing who are looking at a national government’s ability to exercise some control over the Internet. In the United States, the broadcast regulator is attempting to establish rules for net neutrality; the Australian government upholds obscenity laws it created for the Internet in 1999. The question for the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is whether any kind of Canadian content regime on the Internet would be fair or effective.

9. Fiction: Canadian ownership is key to providing Canadian content.

Fact: The link between domestic ownership and domestic content is weak, depending more on producers’ business models than their patriotism. For a Canadian-owned broadcaster, it is easier to make money airing U.S. shows than producing Canadian ones. On the other hand, it is possible to make money on Canadian books and music, two areas where foreign companies do produce Canadian content.

Again....well, well, well worth reading. Kate Taylor's full series can be found here.

Flame On!

2010-08-19T19:27:00.000-04:00

So, it’s just shy of two months since I signed off this blog. So why something new now?

Well the main reason is that it’s August 19^th. So today marks five years since the first entry I made on Dead Things ON Sticks.

I was not a young man when I started blogging, by any means. But boy, I was naïve. Through the ride, and now with a bit of time away from it, I realize that what I miss the most is talking about the flame.

So, to celebrate the 5^th anniversary of my leap into the blogosphere, I’m not going to take the bait on stupid stories about the CRTC or the continued craven doings of TV, Canadian style… let’s crack off one more good-old fashioned craft post about the joy of discovery and how the flame you protect leads to great television.

Right now it’s pitching season down here in L.A. People are out honing their ideas and their concepts to try and sell. I’m working stuff up, others I know are working stuff up, the guy who delivered the Orange Chicken for lunch is working stuff up.

Here’s a return to the old, “where do you get your ideas?” question. The hardest thing for civilians (TV viewers) and new writers (the ones who are afraid that the staff of so-and-so-show might steal your genius spec idea) to get straight is that your best ideas are not unique & beautiful flowers.

This all has to do with the odd & unique position TV occupies in the world of creative products. It comes into your home. You don’t have to go out to get it. That creates a different, hazier vibe around “what works for tv.” TV works best not when it’s completely different and original; TV works best when it’s a combination of original and familiar. It’s new wine in old bottles. The idea is not nearly as important as the execution of same. In TV, writers make big money because of their ability to execute.

For all the praise The Sopranos got, the idea of the mobster with analysis and anxiety issues is – exactly the same as Analyze This – which was out at the same time. Same basic idea. Different executions. Alias. Covert Affairs. Same idea. Different executions.

In every show that works, there is a flame. There’s something about it that lights the way toward the most effective execution of the idea. A nice little flame leads to a show that works. And if you don’t have the flame clear in your mind, and you don’t nurse it…no matter how good a writer you are, no matter how hard you work – the show’s not going to work, because you don’t know what people are supposed to be excited about.

Good writers are the people who can identify the flame and nurture it through development (or who can inspire their room to do the same.)

It’s not to say the writers are the only ones who can find the flame, it’s just that, like truffle-locating pigs, we're the ones most likely to find it. If you let us. Mmm. Truffles.

(And if you don’t let us – you could have 19 writers in a room for eight months, and you’re not gonna come up with a show that people love. Sorry Chester.)

So sometimes when they do these remake shows that someone somewhere thinks are a slam dunk, (Bionic Woman? Knight Rider?) and they arrive inert, it’s because that flame isn’t there.

By all accounts, the Hawaii 5-0 pilot is great. When it airs in a couple weeks, watch it and ask yourself: what does this show have that Bionic Woman didn’t?

You may not like the show, you may not think it’s the best thing ever – but as another for instance: Rookie Blue. The flame on that show from the beginning, before there even was a finished script was: Grey’s Anatomy (the old bottle) but with cops. (New wine.)

I didn’t say it had to be, you know, expensive wine. But there you go.

The nice thing about recognizing that flame is that it allows for cross-pollination.

I’m not the biggest Doctor Who fan in the world, but one of the reasons that everyone agrees with (and which is clear everytime you read Russell T. Davies’ interviews about the subject) is that Davies recognized the flame in Doctor Who – which is what allowed him to smartly update it & spark a new franchise.

Which brings me to my most joyous viewing discovery of late.

From the pilot, I was a huge fan of HOUSE. And the flame that everybody saw in that – the brilliant, acerbic Doctor…the male camaraderie, the mystery element – clearly burned brightly.

And it was clearly familiar.

The flame, of course, was from Sherlock Holmes. HOUSE had a huge debt (lovingly acknowledged) to Conan Doyle. (Holmes/Watson – House/Wilson etc.)

Well, the BBC has gone and giddily gone back to the source, with SHERLOCK. Sherlock Holmes is a consulting detective in Scotland Yard, with his good friend Watson, a Doctor back from Afghanistan. Sherlock is acerbic, brilliant, viewed as a freak by the perplexed police that he helps. He also sends texts, and uses all the 21^st century trappings of communication.

It’s SHOCKING, if you grew up with the original stories and the Victorian settings of the old movies, to see how well this works. Cross-pollination from Holmes to House, and now House has returned the favor by showing a way back to beloved characters seen fresh (and more natural to my eye than the Downey Jr. film).

In the same way, Sherlock creator Stephen Moffat was able to recognize the flame in Friends and do a British version, COUPLING, that is arguably one of the only Friends-like shows that ever worked. Because he found something in the Friends formula and married it to British sensibilities seen in edgier sketch comedy shows, where the characters were just MAD. The characters were recognizably, reliably British types.

(Come to think of it, Moffat took over from Davies this year on Doctor Who. Maybe people should just go talk to Stephen Moffat more.)

Interestingly enough, when they imported Coupling back across the pond, it was a flop because it was, to put it kindly, flameless. The characters who were funny in the British version didn’t have any verve in their American counterparts. They didn’t bother to find plausible equivalents.

On the other hand, the American OFFICE succeeded because they found the American equivalent of the British characters. It took a while, but they did it. (Go back and watch the British show again, and it’s amazing how different Jim is from Tim, Pam from Dawn, and Michael from David).

If you’re not practiced in seeing the flame – looking at these few remakes and pollinations can help. When it works, and when it’s missing.

And it’s not just a British-American thing either.

Canadian series Slings & Arrows was licensed for Brazil, in a Portuguese language version. When it premiered, it got something like 18 million viewers.

One more thing. Another British show, starring Idris Elba, is bananas. LUTHER. Oh man. It’s just…great.

Anyway, that’s my disjointed, running to the room, sunburned thoughts on the anniversary. Keep the flame burning in your scripts. Don’t let it get noted or developed out of you. And don’t let people snuff that flame. Or you’re not gonna have no fun and your show won’t work anyhow.

Let’s see…what else… oh yeah, in INCEPTION, the top totally stops spinning just after the cut to black.

Don’t get used to this, kittens. But hope you’re all well.

Now. Gotta go attend to the flame.

Hopefully I'll see you before the next Friedman.

There is Wisdom In Brunch

2010-06-24T14:00:00.002-04:00

THE SCENE: A sunny Sunday morning in pre-G20, soon-to-be-fortress-Toronto. A circled table, light streaming in through huge windows. The sound of easy laughter & whispered confidences; a bit of gossip, some eggs, a couple of killer beignes and coffee for miles.

Six TV writers -- all Canadian. All, strangely, working right now. From far flung Nova Scotian comedies to single girl in the city shows, to new plans & destinations & adventures and maybe even a little bit of Prairie heart.

The question is raised: "What's the single best bit of career advice that you'd give to a noob? We're talking the knowledge hardest won... not "advice on writing" or "how to write" or "process advice." Everybody's got that and you can find it everywhere you look if you take the time to Google.

More like, "what's the thing you know now you wish you knew then?" Some thoughtful chewing, and many nods, before the torrent starts:

"When you're young, you're not as good as you think you are. When you get old, you're not as bad as you think you are."

Nods & chirps; dark rumblings of, "Hey, I resemble that remark." But we're just getting started.

"I don't think I knew how important tenacity was. There were people in University who were way more talented than me. They were better writers. But I kept at it. I'm better than they were then -- now -- but that's cause I kept going. Eventually you outlast people, if you stay focused. Keep showing up."

An insanely juicy piece of gossip squeaks out. A quick check to confirm for one and all that we are "under the dome." Ah yes. The dome of silence.

"Keep your mouth shut."

Everybody laughs.

Someone quotes a personal mentor: "So-and-so's line was always, 'never repay petty with more petty.'"

The group takes stock, mentally flicking through the cards -- instances where pettiness was met; the scorecard of how often it was repaid, and how often one managed to rise above.

"Your best writing will never make it to the screen." Nods all around. And, "the market has nothing do you with your talent."

A few nods, a few quizzical glances, "I'm just saying that process is more important than product. For all we do, to stay focused always on the commercial success, to fixate on that is ultimately meaningless. All this, 'will the show go?' It's more like, "How am I going to have a good day this week?"

"Having a show go doesn't excuse, condone, or ameliorate a situation if you're hating every minute, feeling abused, marginalized, belittled, ignored. The writing can't be a chore; you have to enjoy the process. You have to have quality of life."

After all, "it's just TV."

Sigh. Yes it is. Oh, TV. Bitch mistress to us all.

"Make friends with frustration. It's the precursor to change. Frustration shouldn't make you give up -- your dissatisfaction is telling you something. Keep at it and the breakthrough comes."

Sip of OJ. Crunch of toast. A slug of a mimosa. I pipe in with my contribution, "Learn to write fast. There's no sense spending six months working on that spec script if the job is how much can you rewrite on the fly. If you want to staff, you have to be able to crank pages out."

I get ragged, that's writing advice. I've broken my own rule. A heaving sigh. It's true. Too much blogging, I guess. The teat is dry.

A slide into shop talk.

"Isn't it fun to get premise-challenging notes at Blue?" Yes. Yes it is.

Everybody agrees that you get to a point where the "no asshole" rule is inviolable. It doesn't matter how talented someone is if they're a jerk. It sucks all the goodwill out of the room.

But there will be idiots. Oh yes. They're everywhere. Oh, the difficulties. The hours spent trying to keep your disbelief in check. What about getting through that? "You will survive the network executive who is making your life hell."

But how? How do you do all this? Stay tenacious, make friends with frustration, live through the assholes when they come, embrace process...never be petty -- it sounds great, but how? HOW? How do you do all this?

A beat. Then,

"Remember that everyone was an itty bitty baby once, that their Mama loved. If you can remember that, you can find the way to be kind."

Silence. Just so.

The check comes. Cash & the three credit card split. We write out the amounts to try and help the waiter. Tally -- the tip is generous. Deep down, we're service industry too. We know.

The sun's brighter now, even higher in the sky. It's going to scorch. Hugs & Last glances; stumble out into the day -- "Remind me of that TED talk you liked again?" And "How badly is the core fenced in?" And "how many more days you got?" And as the group breaks up, brunched, sated, talked out, happy -- one final riposte, tossed over the shoulder as we depart:

"Never, ever, ever admit your real age."

W. Profound thanks & respeck to badlady, Clooney, KMac, Escog, and Whitey McLegs4days.

It Is Accomplished.

2010-06-24T08:00:00.006-04:00

WELL THIS IS a day some time in coming.

It's with not too heavy a heart I'd like to let y'all know that effective immediately, I'm pressing 'pause'. Dead Things ON Sticks is finally, especially dead, or at least mostly dead, in that magical Princess Bride-y kinda way. Why?

Wellll...

I've got a new gig that's going to take me to Los Angeles, like so many Canadian creatives before me. I apologize to the friends I didn't get to see before leaving: it came up as these things do, and boom, next thing you know, you're throwing clothes in a bag and hailing a taxi.

The gig is finite; the move...um...Ida know. I think I can honestly say that I've tried as hard as anyone to make my stand here. I've worked, agitated, evangelized & given to the cause of keeping quality Canadian creatives at home, in the hopes that things were changing, and that we were getting closer to being recognized & given the creative respect and environment in which to grow. On good days, I still believe this. On bad, I accepted a lot of joshing for being naive. There are people who I consider good friends who actually cussed me out when they found out that I had an actual U.S. Passport.

There was even a time at Banff last year when -- mmm... let's see, how do I put this?...let's call it a party with a direct, measurable degree of power over the way the Canadian system runs asked me flat out, with deep incredulity, "if you can work in the USA, why would you ever stay here?"

That question made me sad then. It does now. But it is, unfortunately, like our own Gulf of Mexico Oil Slick. That kind of thinking has permeated the water table and the wetlands and the marshes and the beaches and driven deep down into the shale and the bedrock of the cultural consciousness of this otherwise wonderful nation. Fighting it has made me very, very tired. Mr. Blackett, this is why. You're just the latest symptom of the problem.

The L.A. writing life & industry is more than well represented by bloggers, and I won't really have my finger on the pulse of the Canadian scene anymore, so I think it's better to leave you in the capable hands of other observers of same: Prairie Dog Will Dixon and Uncle Jim "Axe to Grind" Henshaw. There's also Jaime Weinman in Macleans. (I secretly think he's more Canadian scene-curious than he fronts; guy just needs a little push.) Hopefully, John Doyle might get over whatever's been up his bum for the last little while, too (if we don't lose him to soccer writing, I mean.)

For a dose of your Canadian crafty, may I suggest the redoubtable Alex Epstein? And if you want info on Canadian shows, there's no finer resource than Tv-eh? -- still a one woman, all volunteer shop run by not-connected-to-the-industry-at-all writer/editor Diane Wild.

I might pop in from time to time. Maybe I'll post a few dirty Haikus about CRTC policy or something. I honestly have no idea. I'll also continue to represent my fellow Central Canada WGC members on the Writers Guild of Canada Council, as long as I'm able. From foreign ownership to value for signal to licenses to copyright, there's still a lot of fights ahead. I won't stop if you won't.

Evolution of a Canadian Creative.
Maybe Brioux will write about me now!.

When I put out a PayPal button earlier this year, I was stunned by the number of people who gave me a donation. Five bucks here, five there -- and more than one person stepped up way more than that -- giving me the equivalent of the yearly subscription fee to Playback Online. That is just...crazy. Not bad for something I dashed off every day. Thanks, from the bottom of my heart for your support. You bought me a portable hard drive so I could back up five years worth of my rants. Don't trust the cloud, people. Heh heh.

I've learned a lot, knitted closer to my fellow Canadian creatives, and enjoyed the exchanges I've had here immensely over the last five years. Even the occasional glimpses into the petty underbelly of the internet has made me a stronger person & a better writer.

(Truth be told, I came very close to packing it in last summer after a couple of weird incidents where I was stalked by people mistaking their online familiarity with my writing for an offline relationship. More than once, I found a stranger laying in wait so they could yell at me "because I yelled at him every day on your blog." Uh. Yeah. Then there were the pests who'd just somehow ... be ... whereever I was. Sometimes with a camera!)

As Craig Ferguson might say, "I KNOW!!!"

The supportive emails & comments, and the Cuppa Joe donations got me through that patch. But I have to say with all honesty & humility that the thought of being one more dressed-down writer in a city teeming with them is tremendously appealing to me right now. I won't miss being the lightning rod -- even admitting that sometimes, yup, I sought out that role. I guess at the root of things, I like telling stories a lot. Being the story, really not so much.

In any case, I'm a big believer in both professional honesty and giving back, which is why as my career gained some steam I tried, whenever possible, to offer a take on industry doings that never seemed to make it into the paper or the trades. That's also why I tried to make myself available for mentoring & advice to up and coming writers. I don't know how much good that's done, if any, but I encourage each and every one of you to punch through your fear and to speak up for what you believe. It turns out that the jobs you lose are few, and the fellow travelers you meet quickly become friends. (Most of them anyway; hey, you meet crazies on the subway, too.) When it comes to the important stuff, the disagreements we have are better solved in the warmth of the cold light of day. Secrecy, jealousy, and passive aggressive tendencies have not served our industry well. It is time, finally, finally, to try another way.

Look at that. Sermonizing til the end. Little bit douchey. Sigh.

This has become the quotational equivalent of using Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" in your big climactic TV montage. But it fits, so eff it--

Margaret Mead once said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

We're going to have one more post on crafty later today, just cause that's how I'd like to leave it. So watch for that.

Good Night, from Sticksville…and Good Luck.

WGC Members: Take Ten Minutes to Help Yourself.

2010-06-23T18:18:00.001-04:00

RYERSON UNIVERSITY is in the middle of a very worthy survey -- the first ever -- of Canadian screenwriters. This is a major research project designed to--

"gather information on the demographic makeup, careers and opinions of Canadian screenwriters. While such studies are regularly undertaken by U.S. Writers Guilds, this survey is the first of its kind in Canada. Results of the survey should provide valuable insight into current working conditions for screenwriters in Canada."

Tired of being mis-identified as a gala-going dilettante? Sure you are. There is much good that can come out of this survey. By knowing things like income averages, who's actually working, what TV & Film writers' main complaints are, and also things like how much work is going on in digital...these insights, compiled anonymously by the Research Study Organizers will provide a much-needed resource for everybody from Telefilm to Provincial Arts Agencies to the CMF to anybody who has a vested interest in Canadian culture.

It's hard sometimes to get writers to participate, I know. It's like herding cats. But whether you're somebody who's written three animation scripts or a showrunner with 25 years in the biz, your opinions & data here will help paint a TRUE picture of the state of the Canadian screenwriters' plight.

The survey is open to WGC Members only, and can be accessed by signing into the Members Section of the Writers Guild of Canada Site.

I filled it out last night. Totally painless. And I'm way busy. So you have no excuses, mate. It's Easy peasy. Go. Do it now.

Um.

2010-06-23T14:17:00.002-04:00

WELL THAT WAS a hell of a thing.

I get to feel an Earthquake. In Toronto. Ironic.

More on that later.

Oy Vey.

2010-06-22T17:50:00.001-04:00

I HAD TO laugh at Jaime Weinman's latest article about the strange zombie-like existence of Til Death (with a tip to a linked article by Todd Vanderwerff, who's almost as astute an observer of the TV as Weinman.)

As VanDerWerff notes, It wasn’t exactly good, but it was some of the strangest material we’ve seen on prime-time TV in the past year, a testament to the weirdness that can arise when the writers have no audience, no job security and nothing to lose.

Yet more proof, Canadian creatives, that WE JUST AREN'T TRYING HARD ENOUGH!

Actually, after reading Vanderwerff's article again, I'm pretty sure that he's stumbled upon a pretty accurate description of what it would feel like to be in TV Writer Hell.

Why The Canadian Media Sucks

2010-06-22T11:11:00.001-04:00

IT'S ONE THING to source entertainment stories from U.S. wire copy, and to only report on Canadian talent once the courtly eye of U.S. interest descends upon them, or to not report controversial remarks by a culture minister for more than a day, and to mostly miss the context after that -- but as my friend Howard Bernstein points out, that's small beer.

Our media isn't particularly good at asking the hard questions on real news, either.

From Medium Close Up:

Everybody’s main focus of the coverage of the summits has been the security details, the fences that surround a large portion of downtown Toronto and Huntsville, the street closings and the charges and counter-charges from the protesters and the police about what each of the groups is preparing in order to greet our foreign visitors. There have been the inevitable think pieces and op-ed deconstruction of summits past and what they accomplished. University profs are cashing in pondering the usefulness and possible success or failure of this summit. Heck, Global TV is even doing a story on the legacy of the summit on the Muskoka region, who knew the G-8 was about helping out Ontario’s lagging tourist industry? This may be good public service information but it misses the point for all but a few Canadians who live and work in the fenced off parts of Toronto and Muskoka or are macro-economists and historians.

Canadians want to know about the fake lake, but as a symbol of the money being thrown away. Yes, the fake lake is a national, no international, joke and it truly is a waste of 56,000 dollars but it is such a small part of that waste. I still do not know how the government of Canada is going to spend over a billion dollars to do what the United States did in Pittsburgh last year for $30 million and what the British did two years ago in London, a much more difficult city to secure than Toronto, for a mere $50 million.

It would seem to me that these questions should be the fodder and the lifeblood of everyone who calls him or herself a journalist in Canada. So far we have not seen or heard of any of the investigation and the resulting reportage that I for one, expected from our fourth estate. Until now we’ve got the obvious. Tony Clement’s riding being the recipient of millions of dollars of summit cash for fake summit projects to beautify towns that are nowhere near where the world leaders will be. Mr. Clement won his riding by a mere 38 votes in the last election so Prime Minister Harper is buying him enough votes to get re-elected in the next election. But even that is a drop in the bucket of the over a billion dollars. Do the fences cost that much? Is police overtime the issue? Are the transportation and hotel costs of police from across Canada driving up the cost? Why isn’t the army being used more? I don’t think we have to pay them overtime. Why are the costs more than twenty times more than in London? Where is the money going? Are there partisan political connections to where the dollars are being spent?

These are the kinds of questions Canadians are asking and not getting the answers to. From coast to coast citizens are asking how a government that preaches belt tightening can throw away billions on a five day palaver about the world economy. Yes it is Stephen Harper’s job to explain, but when he doesn’t it is a journalist’s job to poke and pry and get to the bottom of what is all too clearly a boondoggle.

If they can't get the big stuff right, what hope do we who depend upon the puff piece have?

(Did that sound as pretentious and solipsistic as I meant it to? Gosh I hope so.)

[Sharp Intake of Breath] Oooooooh.

2010-06-22T10:13:00.003-04:00

YESSSSSS.

Stop The Presses

2010-06-21T12:21:00.001-04:00

APPARENTLY, JOURNALISTS ARE making the switch to writing dramatic TV. It's a trend and everything. Who knew? Heh.

Director David Wellington throws out the word, “orpie” (his slang for dialogue that looks good on the page, but will likely sound awkward coming out of an actor’s mouth). Show runner and head writer Tassie Cameron thinks a particular scene could use a “save the cat” moment (in other words, a script device to endear a particular character to viewers). Another writer, Semi Chellas, pipes up that a proposed plot twist is “mutant subtext” (a term she coined to mean something in an episode that seems random).
At the far end of the table, Ellen Vanstone, a long-time journalist and the co-creator of the ABC/Global show Rookie Blue, which debuts on Thursday, listens to the weird lingo with a huge grin on her face. “What I love about scriptwriting,” says the National Magazine Award-winner, “is the jargon and linguistic shortcuts used to get an idea across quickly.”
And it’s precisely the staccato exchange of ideas in this room that persuaded her to join the rush of television and print reporters and editors to TV and film scriptwriting to pay the bills and challenge themselves in a different creative genre.

Long as they get the show & the time right, right kids? Rookie Blue, Thursday 9pm, ABC/~~CTV~~. Global

Stress Reading

2010-06-18T11:10:00.001-04:00

I'M IN A bit of a pickle right now. Lot of stress, lot of open questions, lot of stuff to do & think about & move & collect & everything. And of course there's our old friend Mr. Insomnia. But with that and all I want to call attention to two wonderful books I've been reading in fits & starts when I can. (Both on my Ipad, but I hear you oldies can buy them in hard copy too.)

The first is Kathryn Borel's memoir of an ill-fated wine tour with her difficult father, Corked.

Borel's prose style is easy & conversational, and what starts out feeling like one long overshare winds up being tremendously affecting and wise thoughts on dealing with aging parents, death, and coming to terms with personal responsibility -- the debts we owe others, the hurts we inflict on family, strangers, lovers, and ourselves. Borel's funny, too. Wish I got to know her better when I was doing all those Q bits.

And as an added bonus, you get to learn a bit about wine. How fine.

While the vuvuzelas are still droning, it's nice to read into the context & beauty of The Beautiful Game. I remember so well being in South Africa in 2004 when the Cup was awarded. On the ground in Cape Town less than two days, jetlagged as hell, and suddenly the whole city went BANANAS with joy. It was quite something to see. Then there were the many games of the Euro 2004 tournament that various Scots, English & Africans educated me about during that summer in bars down on the V&A Waterfront. Come match time you couldn't find a soul on the stroll, even with the pleasant winter sun shining down. (The kind of sun that still had the South African girls wearing scarves. Ah. Memories.)

So with that kind of recall, it's a pleasure to read John Doyle's new tome about the meaning of soccer -- The World is a Ball. Other books about the game I've found dry, too much process. But Doyle's gift is capturing the moment, and putting you among the joyous, raucous, jubilant people. We all need stories that uplift, these days -- and Doyle's painting of scene after international scene shows the world for the glorious mosaic it can be. That little ball comes with a whole lot of hope that doesn't necessarily translate into kicks and feints & yellow cards. But then again, maybe it doesn't have to.

Anyway, that's what I'm reading in ten minute increments here and there when I'm not a twitter and a-worry. Pick 'em up.

Guest Blog: Rob Wades Into The Shit

2010-06-17T17:52:00.001-04:00

I'M STILL UP to my neck in professional & organzational, well, shit -- but further to the below, it looks like the day late & dollar short Canadian media finally caught up to Lindsay Blackett story. (And Tv, Eh's Diane Wild has a must read eyewitness account that better contextualizes what the guy said. I still think he misspoke, but there you go.)

Much of my pique, and yeah, it's pique, and sure, maybe it's a bit precious is the frustration that comes from this guy seeming to voice an opinion that is demonstrably false. Yet it IS a millstone that we deal with each and every day. Last night I was out with my friend Mark, who created Flashpoint with his wife. There's no arguing that that's the most successful Canadian show going right now. Yet somewhere in Canada, somebody's calling it Shit. Mark told me a story about being at the airport heading out to Calgary for the Gemini Awards, and people recognizing Enrico Colatoni & Hugh Dillon and it being cool, until the Trailer Park Boys showed up in character and the departure... lounge...went... bananas. I've seen that myself. It's great to see. A Canadian show that undoubtedly connects with Canadians, just like Corner Gas did, and there are all sorts of people who'll line up to say it's shit. We can't have an honest conversation when we have to wade through basic, ill-informed, self-hating douchebaggery like that. But whatever.

What I really wanted to do was promote this comment from my friend Rob Sheridan. I think it says what I haven't seen anybody else saying about this thing -- including me. So take it away, Rob.

Feels like we're being a little hypocritical jumping on this guy but I'll get to that in a second. The annoying part of what he said, for me, is this whole business of asking "Why aren't broadcasters picking up more Canadian content? Because Canadian content isn't what it should be."

Assuming he's referring to Canadian broadcasters, we all know what's wrong with that argument and why it's ridiculously simplistic. The financial incentives aren't there and they make more money on U.S. programming and they're not investing enough in talent or production because they view Canadian programming as a mandate of their license and little more etc. etc. So laying all the blame on the creatives is obviously a stupid thing to say and he should know that.

But what everyone seems so up in arms about is the "shit" comment. C'mon. This guy's not saying anything I haven't heard nearly every single writer and actor I know say at some point in private, either over drinks, or around the writer's table, or between takes, or at a WGC party. Seriously. It's a national fucking pastime. We all do it.

This show is shit, that movie was shit. Who decided to make that shit? How did that shit get funded? I can't believe that guy keeps getting shows/movies. He's shit. Hey, how's that show you're working on? It's okay, but I'm worried it might be shit. How's that show you created? I don't know yet. I'm hoping I can make it good, but a million things could go wrong, and it could be shit.

Shit is like gravity. Shit is the baseline. We're always trying to do slightly better than shit. Because no matter what country you're in or if you're writing movies or plays or novels or TV shows or albums, it's really, really hard to make something that isn't shit. It requires a lot of time and effort and talent and money and sometimes a couple of those things are in short supply for reasons this dude has clearly chosen to ignore, but that doesn't mean he's wrong.

There's lots of shit out there. Canadian shit. U.S. shit. UK shit (see Stephen Fry's comments at BAFTA). I'm always amazed if I do anything and can look at it when it's all done and go "hey, you know, some of that wasn't shit." There isn't a day goes by when I don't worry that I'm not shit at what I do. I'm sure there are lots of folks who think I'm entirely justified in that.

Is this healthy? Maybe not. Probably it's a better thing to build each other up instead of tearing each other down, and usually after our second cup of coffee or a couple of drinks, when we're feeling more generous we do just that. But would we really be worse off we weren't all at least a little harder on our own shit?

Anyway the guy didn't even say that everything was shit. He said "so much shit." True, when asked for specifics he could only say Heartland which is indeed a little self-serving given that, oh, look, it shoots in his province.

We all know we've made some great television and movies in this country. There are plenty of unbelievably talented, hard-working people working at the top of their game. I won't trot out the titles. The same dozen or so movies and shows tend to come up in these arguments and I agree with them. They're not shit. Not at all.

But we have made a lot of shit, too. As I said off the top, a lot of the reasons for that are beyond our control as creatives, and I totally get why it's infuriating that one of the guys at the top of the funding system doesn't seem to get that. The U.S. have made an awful lot of shit, too. The hit and miss ratio may even be more or less the same, but they get away with it because volume is a lot higher and there's rarely public money involved.

We need more investment of money, not less. But throwing money at it alone isn’t enough. We need to train talent and retain talent and give enough care and incentive so that every gifted writer and actor and director and producer and crew member in this country knows they are surrounded by people who are also the best at what they do, and were given the resources to do it.

We need to make more shows, not fewer, even if it means smaller episode orders with slightly lower budgets. A network that only produces one or two homegrown shows a year is naturally going to want to get their hands all over those shows – they have plenty of time and reason to do so. More shows with less at stake might mean that those networks could back off a bit and allow those shows to breathe a little, be what they are, good or bad. The batting average might end up the same but the better shows are going to have a real voice, and probably a real audience (As Steve Smith used to say about his first pitch meeting with CHCH: "Gimme enough money that I can do something, but not enough that you care what it is.")

More shows also mean more opportunity. For young writers to staff, to grow, to be promoted, to learn about how a TV show gets made. Those people will then hopefully go on to create not-shitty shows of their own one day, as opposed to the current system, where more often than not we hand out development deals to untested writers and then assign experienced showrunners to “story edit” their projects, which generally speaking won’t get made anyway. Because if you’re 23 and you’ve never worked on another person’s show, the show you’re creating has a decent likelihood of being… well, shit.

But even my little farm system-utopia idea won’t make a lick of difference if, when those people are experienced enough to become showrunners, we don’t actually let them run the show. We all know that the word showrunner gets bandied around a lot in Canada, but that we rarely fully embrace the model, so that the showrunner is often reduced to the role of “head writer” and does not, in fact, have final say on the script, the costumes, the editing, the anything, and must instead collate input from all manner of non-writing producers. I’m not talking about collaboration, which is healthy and important, I’m talking about the right to say “no” when it counts.

We all bitch about this. Everyone agrees on it. And we know that on those rare occasions where showrunners actually run the show, the show is often good, and when they don’t, the show is often less good. Sometimes a lot less good. Sometimes even… shit. So what are we up in arms about, exactly?

The problem with this guy is that he sees the symptom but he completely misdiagnoses the disease. Which, given his position, is highly regrettable. But I just don’t think we should be babies about this. Yeah, the bad man said a mean thing. Okay. But really, deep down, we all know his biggest mistake was saying it in public, instead of doing it the only proper, decent way we can respect: Behind our backs.

Oh so THAT'S how you're supposed to do it? Well aren't I the king of the douchebags. Shit.

Thanks Rob. Seacrest out.

Shit My Crazy Alberta MLA Says

2010-06-16T17:24:00.014-04:00

I HAVE HAD roughly eleventy-billion emails from people in the last hour and a half or so asking for my reaction to remarks made by Alberta's Minister of Culture yesterday on a panel at the Banff TV Festival.

Remarkably (or not so, if you follow Canadian media) a Google News search of the minister's remarks a few minutes ago turned up nothing. That's more than 24 hours after the remark was made.


Nary a word on the Google, more than 24 hrs later.	If something happens in Canada & the Canadian Media doesn't cover it, are they doing their jobs? Or just waiting for Mary Hart to break the story?

Globe & Mail, CP, nada. Nobody has covered it.

A friend of mine who works at CBC Radio (which will be going with the story at least locally, soon) forwarded me the clip & script for the soundbite that got people talking. Here it is:

Some startling remarks made by Alberta's culture minister are creating a bit of a stir.
Lindsay Blackett was part of a panel at the Banff World Television Festival on Monday.
The panel included Canadians who've become Hollywood stars -- people like Eric McCormack from the series, "Will and Grace."

The conversation was meant to discuss an actor's journey from small town Canada to the big leagues of Hollywood.

But it turned to bashing the quality of Canadian television.

And Blackett was one of the critics.

(and we apologize for the quality of this clip)

in: I sit here
runs: 23 sec
out: what it shoudl be

<<<<I sit here as a government representative for film and television in the province of Alberta and I look at what we produce ... and if we're honest with ourselves .... I look at it and say why do I produce so much shit? Why do I fund so much crap? Why do we do it? Why are broadcasters not picking up more Canadian content? Because Canadian content isn't what it should be.">>>>

Blackett later backtracked a bit by saying Canadians make great programming -- and he pointed to the CBC program, "Heartland," which is made in Alberta.

That's a helluva clip. Yet it didn't make anybody's news. It showed up NOWHERE until today.

Calgary North MLA Lindsay Blackett. Is it just me,
or should we get this guy partying with Michel Arpin, stat?

This is one piece of the puzzle that serves to answer Mr. Blackett. Our concentrated, spoon fed, report every last bit of LiLo but none of what happens in our own cultural backyard media, sucks. To be honest, though I'd dearly love to get further into it, I'm going to hold my fire for a couple of days.

Because I'm in the middle of something that will perhaps serve as another part of the answer to Mr. Blackett. Not the answer anybody wants to hear, necessarily, but an answer that should be pretty familiar to anybody who's been paying attention to Canadian Film and Television for the last thirty five or so years.

My favorite part though is that even when the guy backtracks, the only show he comes up with is the one that films in his riding. Asshat.

Which reminds me...a tiny little bit of homework. Brush up on the meaning of this word here. And some of its wider implications.

And if you want a slightly lighter take on this fucked up bullshit from "MLA Who Doesn't Even Realize He's Part of The Problem", may I guide you to the always amusing Mike's Bloggity Blog.

Right now, I'm gonna get me a drink and try to wash the stink off.

FOX North? Oooh! Wow! Puh-leeeze.

2010-06-16T09:58:00.002-04:00

YOU CAN TELL that they're scraping the barrel for Canadian news (because you can't report too much on the fact that Toronto is already a fucking detention camp because of this stupid G20 meeting, because nobody outside Toronto cares because it's Toronto) by the fact that the ridiculous "Sun TV" "we're bringing right wing news to Canada!" story is getting so much play.

The whole thing is risible, and it's shocking that no one's calling them on it. Well, there's Brioux, and the slightly less fulminated Howard Bernstein, but like most media stories in the Great White North, this one's being allowed to waft hither and thither without much of a reality check.

As Howard put it:

So far very few right wing media organizations have succeeded in Canada. The National Post can barely give their newspaper away. Alberta Report faded away. Sun Newspapers (owned by Quebecor) have been losing money and laying off staff for two years. So where is the market? It might be the talk radio crowd. They seem to gravitate to the wild right but every poll of their listeners has shown them to be older, lower income and lower educated. Not the crowd that the advertisers are looking for.
The bottom line for me is that the Canadians I know, even the very conservative ones, tend to be more moderate in their ideas and their expectations. In the land of “sorry” I am not sure that media crazies will be a welcome addition. Quebecor’s track record for picking winners in English Canada is a poor one. I expect we are getting our shorts in a knot prematurely.

The fact is that even in Canada's fractured parliamentary landscape, 4 out of 5 parties that people vote for consistently are left of BOTH the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States. Break down the, oh, be nice and call it 40% of the populace that would EVER watch this news channel (very few of whom are already watching FOX News -- the channel does hash tags here) and how many are non-old angry white guys who advertisers don't care about?

Brioux busts the Category 1 thing wide open, and points out the inconvenient truth that an effective news channel requires money, which is something that Quebecor is allergic to spending. Oh, and let's go there again: they have failed at EVERY SINGLE THING they've tried to put on the air in English Canada.

Mondoville also broke down an interesting point that if this was a viable alternative, there's at least five cable channels on the air right now that would have tried it already.

Kory Tendollarshoes is sure entertaining -- and I'd love to see some livening up of news panels & coverage in this country. And lets hope that the spectre of this never gonna hunt dog might do it.

But wow. The day Canadians open their cable bills and read that they have to pay a dollar a month more for a third national all-news channel -- and this one's like FOX news? Oh man, I'd hate to be manning the phones that day.

This is a supremely silly story. It's not even 'truthy.' You'd have to be a brain-dead idiot with no understanding of either the country you live in, the media landscape or the fundamentals of business to even entertain it as a viable notion. Can we all just stop with the handwringing and move on?

So You Say You Want a Job?

2010-06-15T18:31:00.002-04:00

OKAY, IT'S PROBABLY not for the ahhhhtists among you -- and you do need to be a U.S. citizen, and um, CT isn't the most vibrant place, and Stamford's not the most rockin city, but... sod it.

Tell me this doesn't sound fun?

On The Strangest Sea

2010-06-15T16:41:00.023-04:00

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me

-Emily Dickinson

WOODY ALLEN famously titled one of his collections of written essays, "Without Feathers," and that's a hipper usage than I can probably muster today. But there's always been something about that Dickinson poem to me, something that keeps bringing me back to it at certain times, or during certain trials.

I think one of the reasons why I like it so is because it tells me that hope, besides being free, is generous if you let it, and can survive whatever kicks you choose to throw at it. The secret is to let that little bird in.

In that spirit then, a few stories today that could conjure the usual clouds of creative cynicism, but won't. Not today. Today let's look on these items and try to hear the song without the words.

Hollywood realizes that safe sucks. Nikki Finke has an interesting story about studio heads scheduling meetings with agents to try and figure out where the hell to go next. The retrenchment that's gone on over the last couple years hasn't been just about the economy, though the over-reliance on sequel-bumping & TV show remaking is tied up in that. There's also a lingering anger & resentment left over from the last WGA strike. Hollywood's uneasy relationship with that dificult and whiny & prickly class, scriptus writerus, fed a lot of fantasizing over the last little while -- from the idea that Leno could work at ten to the multiplexes would still burst with gelt no matter what crappy, half-assed spectacle you threw up there. Well, with the box office off so much, it seems like maybe there's finally a move to listen to some new ideas:

"I have three heads of studios coming into my office. They're completely at a loss about what to do," one top tenpercenter put it bluntly. So what are the agents going to tell the studios? Here are our writers, here are their pitches and treatments and scripts, here is the originality you should be making instead of numbing predictability. Like, duh. Could this be an opportunity for creativity? That's what a major producer told my colleague Mike Fleming yesterday: "this sluggish summer might be a blessing in disguise for talent and producers who want to take risks but have been hamstrung for the past two years by studios that have been operating in retreat mode, and looking for the safest bets possible.

We'll see if it materializes. It depressed me a bit to see that Splice didn't catch on in its theatrical run -- but the horror market has been so dumbed down & Sawporned that maybe expecting more was ambitious. I bet Splice will do great on Video. For my part, I read the articles like this one tracking the up-and-coming promotional efforts around Inception with great interest.

About a month and a half ago I i.d.'d this as the only film that was likely to get me into a theater this summer. If it does well, maybe we'll see more movies with smarts & thrills. And that's good for both audience & creators.

Good Looking Cops Having Sex? I'm in!

Meanwhile, here in Canada, Canwest Global sent out a press release alerting people that they were going to really, really, really promote the heck out of Rookie Blue, in advance of its premiere June 24th. (Simulcast on ABC in the USA.) They've got a website with flash & whistles, even a special game you can play.

Complementing the vast off-air, on-air and digital media elements of the campaign are promotional rookie cards – a collectable item featuring glossy photos and key facts about the series’ rookies. These cards will be distributed in a targeted fashion to consumers, advertisers and press in the weeks ahead.

In tandem with the marketing efforts, Global’s comprehensive publicity campaign involved an original press kit in the unique form of a police academy notebook distributed to print, online, radio and broadcast outlets across the county. Additionally, the network is actively leveraging the homegrown cast with a number of targeted publicity tactics including an integrated press junket to build awareness of the series and the up-and-coming stars.

All creative and media plans were developed in-house through the Canwest Creative Agency and Media Strategy teams.

I guess Global's still smarting a bit from the pasting they took in the articles on their upfronts last week. Oh sure, one could point out that it isn't actually too newsworthy for a putative media company & TV network to try and self-congratulate for doing what is normally considered, uh, part of the job, but hey, it's Global promoting a Canadian series and spending money to do it! So Shhhh, naysayers. Listen. Listen for the bird. Ahhh. See, doesn't that sound sweet?

The air may be lousy with cop shows, but Rookie Blue has always struck me as a savvy pitch -- Grey's Anatomy, but with cops. That sounds fun and frothy & summery. The scuttlebut and whispers in the industry say that when ABC tested the show, it did really, really well. I'll be tuning in. I hope lots and lots and lots and lots of people do the same, and Global gets giddy on the thought that maybe their CanCon could make money for them. Oh little bird, sing your song. Sing the fuck out of it.

"If you tell me TV is dead one more time,
I'm gonna kick you in the Rundle."

Finally, there's Banff. Oh, sure. Once upon a time, when Pat Ferns was in charge it seemed to be more about the content & less the deal -- and deals actually got done there instead of just being announced there -- but Ferns kind of ran the fest into the ground. Still, every year it seems to be more about visiting U.S. creators & less about creativity -- and now that it, like every other conference in the world, has been swallowed by the Convergence Traveling Digital The Future's Coming TV Is Dead Honky Tonk Roadshow, the expecations are even lower. I'm still hoping that along with all the self-evident tweets from #banff2010 (ably ripped on by Jim Henshaw here) there might be one, teeny tiny morsel of creative juice, one tiny new idea that gets reported back that makes me think, "ah yes, that festival is good for something other than clean mountain air."

Oh little bird, flap those wings harder, fly faster...sing louder -- cause I'm working real hard to name that tune.

Or, in the case of Banff, somebody could just, you know...shoot the bird.

The Long, and Long of the Proposed Copyright Act

2010-06-14T10:03:00.001-04:00

THAT BRANDON LARABY is a bit of a corker. Imagine -- reading through the entire new proposed Copyright Act & posting his thoughts on it.

For an act of citizenry & a view slightly un-Geistian, check out Brandon's odyssey comparing the old and new copyright acts. Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five are available at his digs.

It's not particularly exciting -- policy never is -- but it's nice to see a regular guy trying to bull his way through a piece of legislation that's potentially going to have such great effect on us all.

Hindsight Week Reprint: Take the Damn Job

2010-06-11T09:30:00.001-04:00

HERE'S A POST with hindsight for me. What I might not have realized when I wrote this, but know now after a few more kicks ... when you're younger you're more resilient. It's better to get those disaster shows out there early because not only do you build character; it's easier to get up off the mat.

Ironically, after another year of spiral in the Canadian TV biz, I wonder if there's anybody left out there who WOULDN'T "Take the Damn Job"!

THERE'S AN INTERESTING article I want to link to, but I'll get to that in a moment. In my travels, I often find myself talking to aspirants; people who want to get into the writing room and want to work in TV but ... aren't sure. The worst kind of "aren't sure," is the person who seems to have a job on the hook. Maybe they've made a connection with the producer, but the material is something that they hate, or don't respond to very well.

Maybe it's the fact that the producer seems a little shady, or the show's a little shaky.

In any case, even though a few months back the only thing you could possibly imagine is having the chance to sign up to write on something, or to be a story coordinator and be close to writers in the room, but something, something now is holding you back...you just can't put your finger on it.

I'm telling you to take the job.

It's a funny business. It's full of charlatans and pretenders. There is definitely an A-list, B-list, C-list etc of everything -- Producers, Prodco's, Writers, Crew. Everybody wants to start with the A-list. And very few people get to start with the A-list.

And that's a good thing.

Have you ever noticed that when you watch a totally amazing movie, there's very little you can learn from it? You can steal, but not learn. We got talking the other day about Goodfellas in the writing room. Goodfellas is guycrack. You see Goodfellas on TV, you have to keep watching it. It's almost beyond your control.

But as a writer, Goodfellas has very little to teach you. It's wonderfully executed. A lot of elements have come together in exactly the right way. And that's why you can't learn from it. Now, if you watch a noir or a comedy that misfires in the final act, or that doesn't set its characters off the top correctly, the conversation you're going to have about what was wrong and how maybe it could have been fixed would have been far more illuminating than sitting around for the 100th time and running down all those awesome, favorite scenes from Goodfellas.

The fact is, the same thing holds in the writing workplace. Everybody has their disaster shows. Shows which are managed poorly, where the showrunner doesn't have a vision, or where toxic relations with the producers, basic criminality, insanity or mental illness makes a great product impossible. Or maybe the material just is what it is. Maybe it's beyond being "elevated," whatever that word might mean to you.

That's okay.

The idea is to get those shows under your belt early in your career. This serves a number of purposes:

1) It gives you stories.

There will come a day when you're grizzled and hopefully not old; still creatively vibrant, where you will be able to bond over stories over the abject insanity, mendacious behavior and sheer stupidity you saw back in the day. You will go into these bull sessions thinking that your story will be the craziest and most outrageous. This will be true about 10% of the time. It's also a great way to bond and connect with writers who have a few more years in on you. Maybe they've been at it a decade, or two, and you've been on the job five years, but you've both been in the shit.

2) It builds up your "never gonna do's."

Writing is largely self-taught. Writing professionally on TV is self-taught, too -- but there's also (hopefully) an element of mentorship involved. But a lot of the self-taught component is watching people behave spectacularly badly: scream at underlings, lie for no reason, reject wise counsel simply because it wasn't their idea... any and all of this kind of thing goes in your bank of experience and hopefully hardens your resolve to never, ever, ever repeat those mistakes when you somehow find yourself on a better show.

Again, watching a remarkably well-oiled machine, where the showrunner is always on the ball, the producers make things happen, and the writers support each other and turn drafts in on time doesn't really teach you very much at all. In fact, it can be a little traumatizing if you have that experience, and then go to your next show and find that it's an utter disaster. It's one thing to be in hell and imagine the shape of heaven; quite another to have been there and now to have to undure an unending flaming pitchfork in your butt.

3) It lets you get to know your fellow travellers.

Sometimes the people that you find yourself beside on those really bad shows are going to wind up being players. If you were in the shit with them, and showed grace and supportiveness, you never know. Somewhere else somebody wrote about the "Nash Bridges" effect -- how that show, even though it was a straight up-and-down, not very creative effort, nevertheless trained great writers who one day found themselves on LOST. Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars, Cupid) also cut his teeth on that show, I believe.

So even if the work is ass, the contacts may not be. Tell yourself that. It will help. A bit. At 3am. When you're rocking like a ball in the corner.

4) Only Assholes pick at early credits.

It's true. You think you're going to be forever stigmatized because you worked on a crappy show? By who? They've all worked on crappy shows too. I know two guys who were drivers -- pretty low on the crew. One's an international rock star now who's won Grammys. The other pitched a Director and wound up being a screenwriter who's now written several of the top grossing films of the last twenty years.

The other joke you hear writers make all the time is a version of this: they hold up their resumes and say, "oops, there it is! that's the sound of that credit falling off!" It's a happy, happy day when momentum allows you to 'retire' a less-than-desirable credit. But until that day, anybody who gives you stick for that show where you were a staff writer or story editor is just showing their utter and complete ignorance of the business.

If you achieve any degree of success -- and I mean ANY degree, whatsoever, the amount of jealousy and crazy-hate that's going to come your way will astound you. No, you did nothing to deserve it. Yes, they are small people and possibly disordered. Maybe they live with their moms, or hang out in IRC chatrooms or in Second Life or something. Fuck'em. The idea that one day someone might point at that early credit and judge you for it -- and that being a valid reason to not take a job -- THAT WILL PAY YOU TO WRITE -- is flat out, the craziest thing of all.

5) Nobody knows Anything: or the Inverse Rule of the Film/TV job.

Talk to the crew and they will tell you that when you're making it, there is usually just no way to tell whether it's going to be a good show or a bad show. Sometimes the best movies or TV shows are nightmares to work on. And sometimes the crummiest stuff will form friendships and memories that will carry you through a very long, long life. You just can never tell. So you may as well relax.

There's a show on my resume that I'm not particularly proud of, that was a pain in the ass at times, that exposed me to insanity and stress like you wouldn't believe. But it was fun. Lots of fun. And I made friends. And that's enough.

Now...all's that preamble to this. Imagine a show so packed with talent behind and in front of the camera, given such free rein by the network, that it just couldn't possibly fail.

Well, then you'd have the Dana Carvey Show, kids. With Carvey and Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert on screen, and Robert Smigel and Louis C.K. behind the scenes. It's out on DVD this Tuesday.

See? You just never, ever know.

So stop kvetching. Take the job.

To comment, please click through to the original post.

Hindsight Week Reprint: Tories that 'Get It'

2010-06-10T09:30:00.000-04:00

CONSIDERING THE WAY the election turned out -- so surprisingly, and the "Team of Rivals" approach that won the day, the question at the end of this post is even more trenchant.

At some point, there's going to be an election in Canada again. There doesn't seem to be any big game changer. The Liberals have depended on the Arts community for support without truly giving anything back for far too long.

What now? And what have we learned about Cameron & his Tories' view of "the arts" since?

BIT OF AN eyeopener today in the National Post, which neatly contrasts (without saying so) the attitude of the U.K.'s Conservative Party towards Arts Funding, with our own Paleo-Reform Party Tories. The article liberally quotes Ed Vaizey, the Shadow Culture Minister for the Conservative Party.

Vaizey's immediate superior in theConservativeOpposition's shadow cabinet is Jeremy Hunt, the shadow culture secretary (the Westminster counterpart, in other words, to Liberal heritage critic Denis Coderre). Hunt told a gathering of British arts leaders in June that his party "absolutely supports a mixed economy for the arts, in which funding continues to come from government, the lottery and private donations.
"When art and politics clash, art wins. Politicians beware," Hunt also said in a speech in which he name-dropped British artist Tracey Emin, who once displayed her messy bed strewn with used condoms as an installation (and today belongs to the elite Royal Academy of Arts).

What are we to surmise from this?

One, that David Cameron's Conservative Party is confident and thinking it's going to win the next election. The article freely goes on to admit that the Tories know that most artists don't support them. Yet they still support arts funding.

Well, why? Whatever for?

Lo and Behold, they even make economic arguments:

Part of the Conservatives' argument is that the culture sector spends money wisely. As Hunt said in his June speech, "every organization we visit seems to be effective, imaginative and passionate, more than justifying the public investment they receive. The arts in Britain are a huge success. I have only one task -- to help you make them even better."
Vaizey says his party wants to encourage more private support of the arts, noting that philanthropy in the United Kingdom is not as developed as in the United States. However, he says, public funding will always be part of the picture in the culture sector.
"Government money is pump-priming money," he says. "Success breeds success. The irony is, if you double the grant to an arts body, you probably end up doubling the amount of private giving to it as well, because people say, 'I want to invest in something that has the backing of government.' "

Parochialism or 21st Century, Enlightened Branding and Discourse?

It does beg the question -- what are the Canadian Conservatives so deathly afraid of?

To comment, please click through to the original post.

Hindsight Week Reprint: My New Favorite Show

2010-06-09T09:00:00.001-04:00

THIS IS FUN. It's been up and down for some people, but I still maintain that the greatness of Mad Men was all on display in this pilot. This is the kind of script that gets you a staff job on The Sopranos.

It's also interesting that three years later, and with Breaking Bad continuing the example, that so few Canadian channels have picked up the baton of trying to come up with the brand-establishing, iconic original series.

HOW GOOD is AMC's first foray into original series programming, MAD MEN?

Well, it's not just the art direction and acting, which is impeccable. It's not just the presence of clutch actors like John Slattery and Elisabeth Moss, or the very fine Jon Hamm & Christina Hendricks.

It's not even the nifty tag line, "where the truth lies."

What sets Mad Men apart is from the moment it unspools, creator Matthew Weiner paints a world as indelible and interesting as that first blush you had when you saw The Sopranos, and thought, "Wow. I don't think I've ever seen a mob story like this before."

And not to steal from Golick's gig, but I think that the Pilot of Mad Men is an absolute textbook evocation of how to manage your audience's expectations.

There's a lot that works thematically about MM. Setting the show in 1960 really does cry out for you to recognize the watershed between then and now. This is America at its most righteous and confident. The biggest industries aren't those who leverage things, or cut costs, they're people who make things and buy things. In this zippy, confident, post-war New York City, JFK is just on the horizon, but Vietnam is not. Advertising types pooh-pooh research, they don't swear by it.

Much has been made of all the red meat eating, highball drinking, smoking in every scene (including a gyno exam) -- but what's ingenious from a story standpoint is how much you're filled in about the world of the show just by the simple needs and wants of the main characters.

Don Draper, our main guy and hero, just wants to come up with a new slogan for Lucky Strike, cause they can't claim their product is healthier than other cigarettes anymore.

Peggy, the new secretary, simply wants to negotiate this new world of work, and maintain a bit of dignity.

But in that world there are a number of tough-sell elements for a modern audience.

The smoking, of course, is simply astounding. But so is the sexism and the casual racism, too. Peggy endures being talked about openly and lewdly. When she gets a prescription for the Pill, the doctor -- in the most demeaning way possible -- lectures her, basically wagging his finger and telling her not to become a slut.

How do you make anyone in this world sympathetic? (We're going to get into spoiler territory below. You're warned.)

Well, right off the bat, they do it by putting Don Draper in the arms of a woman named Midge. Midge is a character that you're apt to recognize from our time. She's independent, self-employed, strong. "I don't make plans and I don't make breakfast," she says to Draper first thing in the morning. He muses they should get married. She makes it more than clear that that't just not going to happen.

That buys you a lot of room to have other people carry the water when it comes to the sexism in the piece. Draper, such a good guy, apologizes to his new secretary for some of the boorishness of the other men in the office. Okay, you think. Okay.

Then, just as you're comfortable, they start taking the rug out from under you. "I'm not going to sit here and let a woman talk to me this way," says Draper, our enlightened hero, when challenged by a new client -- the female president of a large Department Store.

And Peggy, too, our ingenue, isn't what she appears to be. Early in the episode, she's told by Joan, the seen it all and sexy as hell Queen of the Secretarial Pool, "find out what your boss likes so you know what kind of girl to be." The job's described to her as somewhere between a mother and a waitress. So, maybe it's not so shocking when she makes a play for her boss -- a play that he turns down right away. But the ending -- where she invites the drunk, soon-to-be married letch who humiliated her earlier into her bed -- well...that's just...

Why would she DO that?

But there's one more surprise coming. Just as we think we've gotten used to Don Draper's quirks -- he redeemed himself with the Department Store lady, after all -- he heads home. To his house in the suburbs, with his waiting wife and two kids.

Who we haven't heard about before.

And now we think back to that early scene with Midge, and we're thinking very differently about Don Draper. Very differently indeed.

The brain-scratching WTF of John From Cincinatti is one thing...but this is pitch-perfect writing and storytelling. This might be the next great, thoughtful Drama series. And I get the strong feeling that just like all good sci fi is about the present, well, the world of Mad Men may purport to show us 1960 -- but around the edges and in the cracks, I think it's really all about us...not about how much things have changed, but really about how little they've changed.

We just don't smoke and drink and say it all out loud anymore.

That, and the best presentation since Adult Swim. They got me to sit through every commercial break, simply by value adding info to each commercial. Genius.

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Hindsight Week Reprint: Rock'n'Roll, Cancon, & the Salt Eaters

2010-06-08T14:15:00.000-04:00

I REMEMBER SEEING this play like it was yesterday. And the cultural battle talked about here is still worth fighting. We still have to get back to the ordinary meaning of words like "culture."

JAN: How many voted for the Communist party, Max?
MAX: About two-tenths of one percent. It’s called the parliamentary route to socialism.
JAN: You got the strange gods vote: Marxism, Fascism, anarchism, kept on the side of the plate like a little bit of salt to bring out the flavour of English moderation. A thousand years of knowing who you are gives a people confidence in its judgment. Words mean what they have always meant. With us, words change meaning to make the theory fit the practice. We eat salt.

-Tom Stoppard, Rock N’Roll

ROCK N’ROLL is Tom Stoppard’s story of the life and times of several characters from shortly after the end of the Prague Spring in 1968, to the end of the “Velvet Revolution” which brought Vaclev Havel to power in 1989.

The show unfolds the stories mainly through the eyes of two protagontists. Max, played by Brian Cox, is one of the last unreconstructed Soviet-style British communists. Jan (Rufus Sewell,) starts out as one of Max’s students as Cambridge, but returns home to Prague to look after his mother.

But what Rock N’ Roll is really about is the intersection of culture and politics. It also, at the margins, tells the story of the Czech band “The Plastic People of the Universe,” whose persecution in the 1970s led to a sensational trial, and Charter 77 – a manifesto of sorts that for Havel and other dissidents, started the reclamation of their society from the Communist jackboot.

The love Jan has for music transcends politics, which is precisely what the above passage is about – it’s what makes it so dangerous. Through his thirty year journey, Jan, who starts out politically agnostic, is gradually pushed into dissidence simply because his desire to be left alone, to listen to the Plastics and music, can’t be accommodated.

Rock N’Roll is ultimately about so much more – the wilting promise of the sixties, paganism and freedom of thought and expression; a love story, a lament for Syd Barret (really). It’s meaty and provocative and vibrant and moving.

I’ve never been to Prague. I know very little about Syd Barret, pitifully little of the writings of Vaclev Havel – but such is the power of culture that I’ll be seeking each of these things out now.

For those of you drilled to think this way – there’s even a Canadian connection; Paul Wilson, the translator of much of the writings of Havel that Stoppard leaned on for the play – is Canadian. He was also a member of The Plastic People of The Universe. So there. There’s your angle!

I kid. That reductive, “what’s visibly Canadian?” angle is actually part of the problem. But that's another story for another time.

The true power of culture, of course, is when it can take a story like this one, a story that’s specific to a place, and time – and make you relate it immediately to something local and familiar. That’s the reason we’ve read Shakespeare’s “history” plays for five centuries. I guarantee you that there’s nary a soul anywhere who gives a toss about Henry Bolingbroke; and what does it matter that Richard III was actually a pretty decent monarch? Culture elevates us all. It makes us think. It tells us who we are, as it breaks us down and makes us look inward and outward at once.

And like it or not, the primary delivery system of culture today is television.

Now, let’s talk about words.

The passage I quote above – the argument between Jan and Max, sent a chill down my spine when I saw it on the stage of the Jacobs Theater last Thursday night. Because of course it (admittedly, with lower stakes than Russian tanks and secret police persecutions) echoes wonderfully the ridiculous masque that unfolded at the CRTC hearings into the Canadian Television Fund last week.

“Culture” and “Commercial” there were the buzzwords. The ostensible reason why the mechanism for funding domestic TV production could only be improved by splitting the current fund in two – each following one of those elusive, ephemeral definitions.

There were submissions through the week, by the creative unions, by the DGA and WGC and ACTRA; by creatives, by the CTF itself – which strongly disputed the idea that this differential was in any way meaningful. These unions came armed with Data: examples of shows that succeeded though they had 10/10 Cancon points – shows that were not as successful though they aimed for the 8/10 threshold that is the new savior proposed by the CRTC.

But unlike Jan’s words to Max above, we don’t have the confidence of a thousand years of knowing who we are in this country. Quite the opposite. As a nation that defines itself largely by what it is not, we tend to eat a lot of salt.

Or maybe salt’s the wrong analogy. Let’s call it… cheeseburger.

It’s good cheeseburger. The best in the world. American Cheeseburger. Very popular. Very tasty. I can haz American Cheezeburger. There’s simply no question that Canadians like the taste.

The reality is that this distinction the CRTC is currently peddling – “cultural” versus “commercial” – that’s a very U.S. way of looking at the problem.

In the U.S., “culture” is often used to connote the high-falutin – classical music, intellectual or literary novels, jazz, yup – theater too…things that are not designed to appeal to the mainstream. Culture is often to be suspected – part of a peculiar strain of anti-intellectualism that has always been at the core of American cultural life.

America, of course, needn’t worry about things cultural, since there is also the rubric of “entertainment.” And the U.S. is better at “entertainment” than just about anybody out there.

In other countries – countries like Canada, with real first world economies and everything -- this essentially American overlay of what “culture” means is not the understood meaning. And the results of this difference can be staggering.
In Great Britain, culture is Keeley Hazell and Page 3 and it’s also The War of the Roses and The Proms. People argue over the relative merits of this part of the culture and that part of the culture. They might even call it high, low, and middlebrow – but they won’t deny that it’s all culture.

There’s also a general recognition that supporting culture is good for building the nation. Why are all those British actors so goddamn good? Because they come up through a system of training in theatre that’s heavily subsidized. The British Film industry has its ups and down, but also has spates of being able to turn out films that run the gamut from challenging (anything by Ken Loach) to fun and still trenchant (Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Full Monty.) Comedies that are aggressively, specifically British still export – whether it’s types satirized in Little Britain, or the all-offense fest of Catherine Tait.

In France, there are very serious political consequences to not protecting the French culture. And yes, that culture includes some very silly comedies. And some very decidedly non-commercial dramas – both of which can become “hits.”

In fact, if there’s been a shift that Canada (the English speaking part, at least) has not been part of, it’s the rise of the domestic program. Other countries used to have an insatiable appetite for American shows, too. But somewhere over the last few years, from Germany to Italy to France and beyond, the populace has gotten a taste for their own cop shows, lawyer shows, medical shows. Nowhere was there a discussion or an argument as to whether it was cultural or commercial. There was a recognition that it was all culture, and that it was worthy of support. Most of these countries, to varying degrees, have the same challenges Canada faces – it’s a difficult playing field to compete against the American product. Because it’s difficult, it’s generally recognized – even as a point of national pride – that it’s to be supported. It’s good for the culture, which means good for the country.

This is also true in Quebec, by the way. It’s all well and good to put it down to the language barrier, but that doesn’t tell the full story. Les Boys is as worthy in their eyes as La La Human Steps. Which is as it should be.

But here in English Canada, culture comes smacking up against industrial policy.

And make no mistake, there’ s an industrial element to this, too.

When one country sells a product into another country at a cut rate, it’s called “dumping.”

If I have more cuttlefish than I can possibly eat in my nation, and I sell you my excess cuttlefish at a really cheap price, it’s good for me because I’m getting rid of it.

Of course, often, that means the cuttlefish industry in that country never gets going. That’s why tariffs are put in place.

What we’re in the middle of here is the side effect of an ongoing skirmish that concerns the industrial dumping of U.S. shows on Canadian channels. The system in this country is set up to allow for that. Simultaneous substitution practically demands it. The networks profit handsomely from it. They argue and lobby to keep their commitment to indigenous production low, as low as possible, to preserve it.

Adopting the U.S. definition of “culture” fits into this. So does a number of other things: getting people to run down the CBC, and question Canadian successes when they do happen. In order for all this to work, we have to keep alive that idea of “culture” having that slightly nasty, metallic, American definition to it. That way nobody notices what you’re doing. Nobody will rally to your cause.

Another component of this, and in many ways its most shameless part, is exporting and shipping off all your homegrown talent.

Ingrid Bergman was a star in Sweden before she went to the U.S.A. South Africa has a star system. UK bands always break at home first. Movie stars arrive from other nations with an adoring crowd in tow back home. But time and time again, a writer, or a director, or a star turns up in California having never really done anything or gotten anywhere in Canada.

And then if they are successful, then we claim them. It’s perverse.

Jim Carrey toiled for years here. There are still oldtimers here who, if you track them down, will run down how deeply, deeply Carrey was humiliated and ignored as he tried to make it in TV here. It’s not that he didn’t try. He did. He may occasionally mention his Canadian roots. But you notice that Carrey never comes back – never does a project here. Why would that be, exactly? There’s darkness in there – and memory of what it was really like.

Substitute Carrey for a lot of Canadian talent and you’ll hear a similar tale. People who couldn’t get anywhere here who left, and suddenly found out that driving 2000 miles south made them brilliant. Some will smile and wave and play the game and wear Leafs jerseys on Letterman. But don’t be fooled. Deep down, they know. They know.

It’s shameful. And we’ve been doing it to talent – both behind and in front of the camera – for decades in this country.

And the players in the system reinforce it. Shaw may say that what it wants is to be able to control investment in “Commercial” programming. But that’s not how he makes his money. He makes his money by being protected – by NOT doing exactly the thing that he accuses Canadian talent of not being able to do -- compete. Shaw, Rogers, CTV, Global – they all make money by bringing in U.S. signals. Shaw, in fact, instigated his brawl with the CTF soon after his request to bring in additional U.S. channels was turned down. This is not a coincidence.

Everybody in the system has a vested interest in making the U.S. definition of “culture” – ie: not for the people, not fun – stand, because that way they can continue the lock on the thing that makes them money, which is the industrial dumping of U.S. product into Canada, unfettered and unencumbered by limits.

Pushing talent away works for this, too. It’s better to have talented Canadians go south and learn to tell U.S. stories than it is even to keep them here to do a few things first – even if their ambition would eventually lead them to the bigger pond. If you don’t expand and encourage the talent pool, you see, then programs don’t get better. If no one can build on success, and move up the chain, and hone craft, and take that first staff writing gig or first feature script and go on to something better and get better – if in fact you can reinforce the idea that “if you’re any good you don’t stay here,” then you get to keep making your money off the dumped cuttlefish.

You can have truces. CTV, for instance, is so flush with a good run of successes that you do see them doing a bit more for Canadian homegrown material. They’re the best we have. Could they be doing more? Absolutely. But they still mainly make most of their money off the dumped cuttlefish.

The bottom line is, if too many people start watching Canadian shows, you have to say that the numbers don’t matter, and compare them to CSI or HOUSE.

And if shows strike a chord, like Trailer Park Boys, you have to figure out a way to run them down, too. Because getting a popular toehold in the culture and recognizing that might muddy that tidy split of “culture” and “commercial” that you’re trying to sell.

And if the CBC starts making you look bad by running way more Canadian shows – you have to go after them, because nothing can stop the forward momentum of the meme that Canadians don’t want to watch Canadian shows. Everything else depends on that, you see.

And you also have to make sure that the coverage the companies get when they go before the CRTC and talk about the “broken system” gets far more play than the voices of the creatives – because then you hope the people will hear “broken system” and swallow the lie.

And you have to make sure that it’s hard – too hard – too hard to stay if you’re blessed with actual talent, because if you were able to stay and train up and get better and have access to great actors here, if, in fact there was a whole bunch of talented people who could work regularly and advance both their expertise and craft without having to go to L.A. (like the class of Actor and creator who chooses not to leave Great Britain, for instance) then those empowered voices might juke your whole rotten system – and poke it for the sham that it is.

And if the result is that generations of Canadians think the crime rate is higher than it is, or that abortion is a third rail topic, or that you can plead the fifth here, or that racism is out of control in Canada, or that the War on Drugs is a noble and not an idiotic fight, or any one of a hundred other values that are not borne out in the Canadian reality are, in fact, real, then that’s a small price to pay, right?

And if you control all the papers and can reinforce this view, then that’s good too, right?

And if you can influence the regulatory body that’s supposed to oversee you, and ignore the experience of other nations, and just accept that American definition of the split between “culture “ and “commercial” well then that’s the best thing of all, right?
Sure, there’s a strong undercurrent of philistinism in the character of the nation that makes this possible. You couldn’t do it if there wasn’t already a glee to be had from chopping down all the tall poppies.

But still – you do need all these things marching in concert to maintain the status quo. Especially when shows start selling elsewhere, or the New York Times writes a good review, or you’re getting a million or a million two viewers a week..

There’s a moment in Rock N’Roll, quite near the end of the play where Jan comes home from being imprisoned. The secret police has been to his apartment and his records, which lined one wall – have been smashed. He looks over the terrible mess, and it’s at this moment that the friend who accompanies him remembers – he borrowed a record while Jan was away. Jan unwraps it and takes it out. It’s Pet Sounds. He puts it on and the two of them listen to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” It’s beautiful. It’s unbearable. It’s wonderful.

And it’s in music that I know that I’m right about everything I’ve written above.

For we were here before. With all the same arguments. With all the same hatreds coming from the audience who said, “we don’t want to have crummy shows rammed down our throats.”

Except that the shows were songs. And the medium was radio. And then, in the late 1960’s, the regulatory bodies – led in a large part by Pierre Juneau (for whom the Junos would be named) held firm and said, “no, we will carve out a percentage for our own material.”

And the result today is a cultural music scene that is vibrant and groundbreaking – successes at home and ambassadors to the world.

Cancon worked. And nobody made distinctions between “cultural” and “commercial.” The only distinction made was between doing it half assed, and really, really committing to it.

And so today we have Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene and Stars and Blue Rodeo and the Hip and K-os and Sum 41 and Holly Cole and Barenaked Ladies and Feist and Black Mountain and….and….and….

Toward the very end of Rock N’Roll, Jan finds himself back in Cambridge, and in a raucous dinner party, returns to his old argument with Max:

JAN: …All systems are blood brothers. Changing one system for another is not what the Velvet Revolution was for. We have to begin again with the ordinary meanings of words. Giving new meanings to words is how systems lie to themselves…

Amen to that. Funny how it took a play by a Czech-born British playwright seen in New York city to make a New York –born Canadian writer see that.

Or maybe it’s not so funny.

Maybe that’s exactly what culture is for.

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Hindsight Week Reprint: If Da Bunk Can Do It, So Can You

2010-06-08T09:30:00.002-04:00

LAST YEAR, BEFORE anyone got a chance to see Treme, I wrote about the actor Wendell Pierce working to bring back his community. My community is Canadian TV, and I've done -- and continued to do -- everything I could to make sure that there is traction for all of us. I did a bit of soul searching recently about whether to continue on the WGC Council, because to tell you the truth -- there's a lot that comes out of those meetings that just makes you feel hopeless & distressed. There are just so many forces in the Canadian business that really look to do harm to writers. But I decided that the old "if not you, who" thing wins in the end. Same reason I keep on doing what I do here.

I would have kind of wished to see a few other strong writers, with voice and passion, rise up in the last year and join the fray. I'm encouraged by the signs that our animation writers are becoming more engaged. But to read this piece now, my wish for help still stands. I meet people wanting to start out every day, trying not to be discouraged...and I'm running out of stuff to tell them.

But I'm still watching Treme... and that situation seems hopeless, too...

IF YOU EVER watched THE WIRE, you were probably mesmerized by the performance of Wendell Pierce as Bunk, the long-suffering partner of McNulty.

So -- you at all curious as to what he's been up to lately?

Turns out, according to this nice little profile in the New York Times today, (article by Stuart Miller; photo by Cheryl Gerber) he's been in New Orleans, filming a roll in a David Simon pilot called Treme.

But he's been doing a whole lot more than that. The N.O. Native has thrown himself into the community rebuilding effort, trying to bring his historic neighbourhood back after Katrina:

In late 2007 Mr. Pierce discovered another project, this one in his own backyard. Pontchartrain Park, according to its neighborhood association, was created in 1955 by white politicians looking to maintain segregation. The neighborhood provided stability for working-class blacks, with ranch homes, wide curving streets and 200 acres of green space, including a golf course and later a Little League ballpark and tennis courts.
Before Katrina 92 percent of the neighborhood’s residents owned homes (nearly double the city’s rate), and only 10 percent lived in poverty (versus 28 percent in the parish of Orleans). Those who grew up there include Mr. Pierce; the trumpeter Terence Blanchard; Marc Morial, a former mayor; and Lisa Jackson, now chief of the Environmental Protection Agency.
But the neighborhood had the city’s second-lowest rate of posthurricane return. Many older, long-term residents couldn’t tackle rebuilding projects themselves.
“There were people talking policy at a 40,000-foot level, and everything was held up by policy conflicts,” Mr. Pierce said. Worse, he said, this desirable territory “was in the bull’s-eye” for developers. He fretted that they’d co-opt the area for wealthier (and likely white) residents. “My parents’ generation gave us this great upbringing, which is the foundation of our success. It would be sinful if we allowed this neighborhood to just go away.”
Mr. Pierce undertook a crash course, meeting with experts and sitting in on governance and technical sessions. He rattled off acronyms and figures, explaining mortgage credits or geothermals loops. “I’ve always been a quick study,” he said. “It’s part of being an actor, understanding the world I’m trying to portray.”
The redevelopment authority’s request for proposals received 15 responses, but Mr. Pierce’s was the only local group. Over three years his nonprofit corporation plans to build 350 homes, each likely to cost between $200,000 and $300,000; subsidies will reduce mortgages to as low as $125,000. Geothermal and solar heating and cooling will lower costs and earn mortgage credits.
“His folks lost a lot of memories there, but he is not just rebuilding; he is turning a page forward to what this place can really be,” said Irvin Mayfield, who’s on the board of the redevelopment authority. “It is hard to describe the amount of effort and time it takes to do something like that.”
Richard Monteilh, the executive director of the redevelopment authority, said that a celebrity frontman can accomplish a great deal, praising Brad Pitt, whose Make It Right Foundation has rebuilt six homes in the Lower Ninth Ward. But he added that Mr. Pierce is a more hands-on president.

A couple days back I wrote about Wendy Crewson, using her celebrity to try to bang the drum for indigenous work at a difficult time. Before that, I ran down the amount of Special Pleading that was likely to be at work in the cases made for "broadaster relief" at the CRTC and Heritage and elsewhere.

There are times when you can't let the developers have the neighborhood, and there are times when you can't expect the celebrities to do everything.

Driving home from a dinner party last night, I got into a conversation about the cycles of the business. My passenger and I both lamented a bit from the Toronto and the Vancouver experience of how when the U.S. crews are rocking the service projects, everyone thinks the party's never going to end.

And it always does, and people are left scraping. Now, the sheet starts showing a trickle of shoots coming back, and there's a powerful pull to forget how bad things have been, how recently. But that's a sign. It's a sign of what happens when you don't control your fate.

Of course, writers in Canada don't have that luxury. There is no 'service' work for us. If Canadian produced shows go down, we go down.

I know there are lots of writers who read this. And lots of producers besides.

Today I'm asking you to read of the example of Wendell Pierce, who saw an untenable situation threatening his family's home and neighborhood, and rushed in to fill the gap.

Today should be the day you fill the gap. Spend a few hours, find your MP's number. Call the constit office and ask for a meeting. Draft a letter outlining your concerns. Send an email to Charlie Angus on the Heritage Committee... explain to him why you think giving "broadcaster relief" from their CanCon obligations is a terrible step that's an overreaction to the problem that exists. Crib all you want from the Canadian TV posts here.

Most of all, today is the day not to sit back and let someone do your fighting for you. There is nobody else. There's just you.

Be the change.

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Hindsight Week Reprint: Don't Ask Me About My Tv Series, Kay.

2010-06-07T14:30:00.000-04:00

YET ANOTHER PIECE where we see my growing unease with the audience-approach I wrote about in depth with the LOST finale.

ALAN SEPINWALL has a very interesting interview with Battlestar Galactica's Ronald Moore over at his digs. Moore is one of the writers that noobs really should be tracking, just because in all his podcasts and interviews, he's just so refreshingly open about the process. That kind of openness can sometimes work to a writer's detriment, especially in the case where they use it in the endless "there's a plan," "no, they're making it up as they go along," argument.

The problem with that argument is that the answer is: they're doing both of those things. But that nuance, and the reasoning behind that nuance, is not something that's ever going to translate to the mostly-wisdom free province of the internet message board.

Moore is the guy who admits mistakes in the writing while watching the show for a podcast. He's posted long recordings of discussions from the Writers' Room, for heaven's sake. And in Sepinwall's interview, here's the key exchange about the whole, "planned out" aspect of series writing:

In terms of "Galactica," how long have you known how you were going to end it?

In general terms, over the last year and a half, somewhere in the middle of season three I started asking, 'What's the shape of the ending? What's going to happen at the end of the show and what's going to be the case when they meet up with whoever they meet up with?' As we got into season three, I started thinking of it more seriously, and last summer, almost a year ago, we had a writer's summit up in Lake Tahoe and said, "It's going to end here." But a lot of the pieces didn't fall into place until I was sitting at the computer writing the teleplay that I realized exactly how the cards were going to fall for different characters.

One of the things I find interesting is, on "Lost," Cuse and Lindelof have always claimed they have a master plan and know where it's all going, and fandom has been skeptical at times and said, "Yeah, right." Whereas you've been pretty candid about the fact that you'll throw stuff out there and figure it out later, and yet people assume there's some cohesive plan to "Galactica." How do you pull that off to make it seem like there's a plan?

To me, that's the job. The job is to figure a way along in a story but make it all feel like it's seamless, to make it all make sense. Hopefully, if I've done my job right, when all is said and done and the story's been put to bed and you've got the entire set of DVDs before you and you watch them, that it feels like a cohesive narrative -- that stuff we just threw up and decided to take a flier on without ultimately knowing where it would pay off, when you look at in hindsight, that it all tracks. You're painting this large painting on this big canvas, and you may not know what it's going to look like at the end, but when you're done, you want it to feel like it's a cohesive vision and makes perfect sense.

So, for instance, when you decided who four of the Final Five would be, how much thought did you have to put into it before revealing it in "Crossroads," and how much was, "Oh, we'll say this and figure it out over the hiatus"?

The impulse to do it was literally an impulse. We were in the writers room on the finale of that season, always knew we would end season 3 on trial of Baltar and his acquittal, the writers had worked out a story and a plot, they were pitching it to me in the room. And I had a nagging sense that it wasn't big enough, on the level of jumping ahead a year or shooting Adama. And I literally made it up in the room, I said, "What if four of our characters walk from different parts of the ship, end up in a room and say, 'Oh my God, we're Cylons'? And we leave one for next season." And everyone said "Oh my God," and they were scared, and because they were scared, I knew I was right. And then we sat and spent a couple of hours talking about who those four would be. Surprisingly, it wasn't that hard to lock in who made the most sense and who would make the most story going forward.

To an element of the fanboy crowd, that is going to always be a maddening answer, because the only way to grok it is to think of it fully formed and ready to go. Which is weird, of course, since nobody bats an eye at artists' sketches or tests or studies for major paintings, or thinks that a demo of this song or that with different lyrics spoils the cohesiveness of the work. But there it is. You'll always be fighting the don'tgettits out there, who think that the ability to say, "this sucks" is the highest form of intellectual jousting.

But if you're trying to find your voice and your way, the combination of risk and doubt that suffuses every interview with Moore shows you he's the real deal. I learn something from every podcast he's done, and that's why, ultimately, despite off episodes and the occasional flaw, Battlestar Galactica is the show teaches me more about what I do than anything I currently watch.

Oh yeah, and the title of this post, I'm just being silly. I thought it was funny that he had the big writing summit for BSG up at Lake Tahoe. You know who else hung out at Tahoe...

EDIT: Hilarious. I go and write this post, and look what the VERY FIRST COMMENT over at Sepinwall's place is:

As much as I love this show, it really is frustrating to hear how RM just decides on a whim such major plot points as "let's make 4 main characters find out they are cylons". It really does call into question some of the earlier narrative and choices made by the writers and actors.

I appreciate Moore's honesty, but honest to Pete, maybe David Chase's "the work speaks for itself and I'm not explaining it" F-you is the right approach. Something to ponder...

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Hindsight Week Reprint: I Was LOST But Now I'm Found

2010-06-07T09:30:00.010-04:00

I GUESS THIS post doesn't exactly "add" anything to the "did they know the ending or didn't they?" debate. If you didn't like the LOST ending, I mean. But I'm satisfied, anyway.

AT THE RISK of setting major bad precedent, in the comments section of the previous post on the NYTimes article on J.J. Abrams, a commenter named Chris had this to say:

I call bull. They have changed Lost so many times it is now a confusing mess, too many questions left unanswered and to say they always knew what they were going to do, is crap.

I answered him and tried to contextualize a bit what the article was going for -- but Chris was not appeased.

Saying "knowing the goal posts but being able to move them" is a copout. They have zigged too many times for me to believe them anymore. One example, 'Ben' was supposed to be a 3 eps role. Now he has spent two seasons as the main bad guy? I agree the flashforwards were a brilliant idea, but I know for a fact that was not planned at the beginning, therefore changing many storylines. I think I'm pissed off because I loved Lost so much I feel cheated.

I found Chris' comment interesting on a few levels -- and started answering, and at some point the comment became so long that I thought, "hey, free post!" So don't feel singled out here, Chris. Thanks for sparking.

Chris, you have me at a disadvantage here because I don't really know anything about you.

But based on your take on this I'm going to make the bold prediction that you're not a working television writer.

This blog, and just about everything in it, is written from that perspective.

So while I understand the fan point of view that might think that being able to "move the goalposts" is a cop out, the primary audience I'm talking to understands that it's actually an on-the-job necessity. The only way around it would be to know at the outset that you were guaranteed 48, or 88, or 102 episodes and out. And the business just doesn't work that way.

And your point about Ben, in fact, is the thing that delineates most clearly the wide gulf between the way a writer needs to approach a show, and the way a viewer approaches a show.

See, to a writer working on LOST, seeing those first dailies come back on Ben had to have been the most satisfying, electrifying experience imaginable. Because so often it goes the other way. You cast someone for a key role, and they don't really deliver -- a combo of they messed up and you messed up, or maybe it was just one of those things beyond everyone's control. Anyway, when that happens, often you have to junk the whole plot. Which is why threads get dropped and friends disappear on shows.

But sometimes, a great actor steps up and surprises you.

On The West Wing, Janel Moloney had such chemistry with Bradley Whitford, that what was supposed to be a minor role was bumped up - and an actress that was supposed to be a major part of the show got shuffled out.

And when they saw those dailies come back on Ben, I bet they whooped -- and chattered their way back to the story room full of high-wire excitement. "Oh My God," they said. "How do we write more for this guy?" "What if, what if..."

See, Drama TV is a quirkly little art form. The only thing I can think to compare it to is writing a story in serial form for print, which doesn't happen very much anymore. That's how Charles Dickens wrote most of his books, which is why his stories have such well-drawn and memorable minor characters.

Before I seriously turned to writing, while I was still in high school, in fact, Rolling Stone Magazine serialized an early Draft of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of The Vanities. I read it chapter to chapter, and then immediately devoured the book when it came out in Hardcover. The differences between the two forms were illuminating and incredibly interesting, both from the point of view of the art, and from the point of view of the craft. It upended the usual process of a reader reading a book in its finished form. Because the finished Bonfire was quite a bit different than the serialized, publish as you go version.

And yet in another way, it wasn't that different at all. Wolfe knew where he was going, if not precisely how he was going to get there.

In metaphorical terms, it's that thing that drives women crazy sometimes when the guy in the front seat next to them insists they're not lost. In his mind, they're not, because he knows the direction they're going in, and roughly where they are, and where they need to be. And the woman's POV is "do you know exactly where you are RIGHT NOW? No? Then we are LOST."
(Gentle readers, I'll stipulate the stuff about this being gender stereotyping, ok? I got to watch about 25 years of this from the back seat, and have experienced roughly another five or ten from the driver's seat. I'll agree that I'm stereotyping, if you agree that we're just gonna let this one slide by and not get bogged down in a sidebar, k?)

Now, Chris -- you're the woman in this scenario.

(I think I just heard about 40 thousand Hillary Clintonistas snap their pencils in half. heh heh. I am such a bad, bad man.)

Anyhoo, the great, high wire act of TV is that unlike film where it's all done and in the can, and posted and release dates picked out and whatever, whatever -- most TV is on the air at the same time as later chapters are being made. It makes for a radically different level of engagement, and it requires a radically different type of writer. You have to be someone who can let go of what was in your head if you see something that's better. You have to know how far you're deviating off the beam, and when to bring it back. The LOST writers have been more candid then most about when and how they got off the beam. (Pablo and whats-her-name?) And in our shark-jumping age, the coolest thing is seeing people through the work, find the rhythm again and bring it back.

Hopefully HEROES gets to do something similar. I've said before that my favorite part of the BSG podcasts is how freely Ronald Moore cops to when a mistake was made in the writing.

TV series are invented beasts, made as you go along by craftspeople, all who you hope are working at the top of their game. But it's also a machine, and that rolling, 25 or 50 million dollar machine makes compromises along the way. The best shows seize on their happy accidents, and hopefully find a way to bury and overcome their shortcomings.

In a way, Chris, what you've stumbled into here is the other side of what I was talking about a long time ago when I talked about how what happens in the room has to stay in the room, and how writer/creators need to stay out of fan forums, no matter how tempting it is to go there. (And no matter how many times you may slip and do it anyway. I was raised Catholic, so hell -- you confess and say a novena and vow to do better next time.)

Just as the fan reaction to stories and to shows should be pure -- and overlord writers shouldn't wade in there and try to tamp opinion or blunt it by "sharing their knowledge," fans who take craft points they don't understand and use them to justify why they didn't like something can seem foolish, if they're not careful. Just because someone says they have evidence that we never walked on the moon or that men walked with dinosaurs doesn't make them, well, credible.

In a way, we were all a little bit better off when it wasn't so easy to see the man behind the curtain. Which is exactly the implication of what Abrams was saying in the Times article.

The moment in that article where I reeled back and realized, "wow, so much really HAS changed" was when Abrams was talking about Star Wars. I haven't thought about it this way, but yeah, back then we really did wait three whole years to find out if Darth Vader was telling the truth about being Luke's father. That boggles the mind now, in the era of 24/7 spoiler sites, where I can have instant access to Lindsay Lohan's dental records if I want them. No wonder the complexity has amped up.

And yet, and yet, and yet -- all this knowledge doesn't lead to happiness. You knowing that Ben was supposed to be in 3 episodes didn't make you like the show more - it in fact did the opposite.

That's why those who manage the information flow about projects like masters -- and Abrams is definitely in that realm -- have my undying admiration.

Of course, you're free to think that LOST sucks, and you're free to say it here. Just don't be surprised if people like me disagree with you. It's not that we don't respect your opinion. It's just that we look at it in a very different way. You think LOST is lost -- and we know that getting a little lost is just how you find your way to the final destination in your head.

To comment please click through to the original post.

20/20

2010-06-06T15:53:00.001-04:00

SO, I JUST finished up a very fast four weeks in a wonderful story room -- the third season for the much-admired (even by me) Less Than Kind. Besides offering a chance to work with people I've long admired, like Mark McKinney (Kids in the Hall, Studio 60, SNL) and Brian Hartt (Jamie Kennedy Xperiment, MADtv) -- it's also a chance to come full circle. I story edited a very early version of the pilot script by my friends Marvin Kaye & Chris Sheasgreen, when they were part of the NSI Totally Television program.

And then there's Jenn Engels, who was nominated for a Canadian Screenwriting Award for a season 1 LTK script she wrote. She's great on story. And Kim Coghill gamely, patiently keeps the notes and preps for what will be her first professional script...one more new member for the WGC!

What a pleasure it is to be back working on a show that has a set of well-defined characters, and actors who you know can sell the scenes, as well as a tone that goes for both laughs & heart. It's amazing that Canada's pay channels TMN & Movie Central rescued this worthy show.

As much as I love the room, now there's an outline and a script to write, as well as my own ongoing projects. Now that I'm in a good, fullsteam workweek groove, I'm loathe to give it up. And Oh Bloggy, you can so be a distraction.

So I'm stepping out for a bit. For the next week or so, we're hosting "Hindsight Week" here in Sticksville. Part of the fun of blogging is that there are no lead times; publishing is instant. What happens when we revisit old posts & opinions with wiser, older eyes & a fuller appreciation of what followed?

Well, guess we'll find out.

Note to commenters: comments will be on the original posts, but since I'm stepping out -- approvals might be slower than normal. I'll get to them. Meantime, enjoy the sun, and feel free to use this as an open thread to leave any suggestions for stuff you'd like to talk about or see down the road.

An earlier version of this story contained errors. It has been corrected.

If You're Going To The Movies This Weekend...

2010-06-04T17:57:00.001-04:00

MAY I RECOMMEND SPLICE, the nifty horror flick that's currently 72% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes (so you know it's good) featuring the talents of, among others, Canadians Sarah Polley, Director Vincenzo Natali -- and one of the most nattily-dressed screenwriters I know, Doug Taylor.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Hey Canadian Nets, Can We Be Upfront?

2010-06-04T09:31:00.001-04:00

I FELT SORRY for Barbara Williams.

I really did. She had a job to do -- a very specific job, which was to present the new fall offerings from Global Television in a positive way to entice advertisers. It's a presentation that requires charm & clarity of message. If you read any account of the U.S. network upfronts, which generally happen in the middle of May, you can see how it's done. A stage managed parade of "it's never been better." The brain might know that a year from now, 90% of these new shows you're talking up will be lying dead, broken, ignored, unloved, canceled -- but you will it not to show that. Instead, you smile. "Things have never been better."

Oh that was tough the last couple of years, to be sure. Advertising was down, audiences were still eroding, everyone was abuzz about piracy, the internet, cable cannibalization of network numbers, the scourge of Tivo...not to mention the bankruptcy of GM, the world's largest advertiser, and that unbelievably stupid Leno-at-10pm turd.

But this year? Advertising's up. They're back. They're looking to spend money. The data on PVR's isn't so bad. People still apparently appointment view. There's life in the old network girl yet!

But at Global's presentation of its fall schedule, something was definitely off.

Was it the protestors outside from ACTRA? A few dozen of them, saying what they say at every one of these things -- "we should tell our own stories," etc.

It can't be them. Can't be! I mean, ACTRA's been protesting like that for years. They did it in front of the upfront at the Elgin. They've done it ... well, they've done it A LOT.   Eric Peterson, God love him, he always shows up. And sometimes Paul Gross is there. If you spot Wendy Crewson at one of those things, you get to yell, "bingo!"

Yet, lo and behold, and a wag of the finger to all you Eeyores out there who insist there's no point tryin' anything -- this time, that protest worked...

If the press is anything to go by, I mean.

In article after article after article -- Global's launch message was muddied, shoved aside, and forced to share the spotlight with some very unusual creative-driven questions: "why does the spending on U.S. programming go up every year?" "Why does your big splashy fall schedule only have one homegrown show on it?" "Why should we be excited by a warmed-over rehash of shows we get on the U.S. networks on our cable dials already?"

When you're talking through the smile of "things are going great," that's just not the message you want to have out there. So what happened?

Well, I submit to you that finally, the Broadcasters brought this on themselves. And Global bore the brunt by going first, and not being ready with an integrated counter message. The combination over the relentlessly partisan rah rah "Save Local TV" campaign, combined with the CRTC hearings and scrutiny over their business models has finally filtered through to the journalist class.

Instead of viewing the economic downturn of 2008 as a cyclical bump in their business, the Canadian nets pounced and called it a "permanent downturn" and used it to hysterically call for all sorts of relief -- Fee For Carriage, and of course, a reduction in CanCon.

But, see, you can't square that with the upfront mentality, especially when all signs point to a resurgence in ad spending. And there is the inconvenient fact that the U.S. spending still went up when they were crying poor. With those numbers floating out there, and the whole bad taste from the "Save Local TV" imbroglio still brewing, it was bound to create a climate where people took a harder look at what the business model of Canadian TV really is.

And when you do look at it, it's pretty indefensible. It's lazy. It's parasitic and it trades only on the creativity of another nation. Even the CRTC knows it -- though they do try to bury their own reports when they come out and say it.

The other piece of blowback could be called, "the Corner Gas/Flashpoint effect."

Now that some of those homegrown shows are starting to get good, it's a natural thing to ask, "well, why aren't there more of them?" Why DO the Canadian nets insist on doing only the bare minimum that they are dragged kicking and screaming into doing? From a consumer standpoint, what is the value of having networks that only replicate the U.S. schedules?

When Barbara Williams stood on the stage earlier this week, what she didn't realize is that she was standing on the wrong side of the Tipping Point. She faced a "friendly audience" at the CRTC when she presented there last year about the network TV problem (so friendly that the CRTC redacted all her testimony, creating the odd spectacle of a commission that's supposed to protect consumer's rights in the broadcast sphere holding secret hearings) but the combination of bad theatre over the local TV thing, the mounting questions, years of ACTRA protests, the wall-falling nature of things like Hulu, the Net, Torrents and iTunes have all coalesced.   These questions over CanCon, and what are you doing, what are you MAKING for viewers? They are never going away again. They are a permanent part of the conversation now.

The truth is, Global is making homegrown shows. More than perhaps they've ever done before. They have a simulcast coming up with Rookie Blue in a couple of weeks. They have greenlit pilots, and ordered series. But they're so used to not talking about any of that that Barb Williams only got to bring it up in response to questions about the lack of CanCon, and the ACTRA protest -- which immediately made them sound defensive. Because it WAS DEFENSIVE.

CTV read those tea leaves clearly, and did a serious adjust in time for their upfront presentation yesterday. Among the self-congratulatory email releases was one frontloading just how much they were doing in terms of CanCon. And you know what? They deserve the lap. I, and many others, may have differing things to say about a slate that includes Flashpoint, The Bridge, The Listener, Dan For Mayor, Hiccups, Degrassi and all -- but they all got renewed yesterday. Some of them are even drawing numbers. CTV supports them with advertising. They play some of the same games at the CRTC, to be sure, and they're certainly not busting down the doors to bring you CanCon this fall -- but the truth is, they deserve their victory lap. They've done the work. And they were ready with the release to shine a light on what they have. I'm sure the fact that it also allowed them to tweak their rival Global played a part in it, but you know, whatever.

Meanwhile, there are the others. You know a few years ago when I had a show on Citytv -- I wasn't even invited to the upfronts.   Don't boohoo for me, Argentina -- I'm not so special...nobody with a Canadian show was. And in the Rogers-era, so far there's no evidence that that's changed.

Last night, you could read tweets from the CTV party by the co-creator of Flashpoint.

That's the new world, kids. The conversation is different now.

So congrats to ACTRA for keeping the heat on, and WGC for doggedly getting those U.S. spend numbers out there, over and over -- and anyone who raised a finger to raise the alarm. The message has finally trickled down. What happens next?

Well, that's up to them. I dream of the day when these guys realize -- as CTV has started to -- that maybe pushing your CanCon just a little is good business, too.   That celebrating Canadian talent only after you've forced them to move to the USA is a bit perverse. That if you're the CBC, you can fade a lot of built-in goodwill by floating a fall schedule with nothing new. That burying stuff on the specialties & Fridays & Saturdays in the winter in favor of shows -- 90% of which won't live the season -- isn't the best foot to put forward. That if you're the Movie Channels -- Astral & Corus-owned, and you push your CanCon like you push stuff from HBO and Showtime -- that you gain respect.

Most of all, I dream of the day when the Canadian nets -- all of them -- realize that the shows they make themselves are part of the story they have to tell at the upfronts...not merely the tax on their business they have to endure.

You want a party free of protestors, and headlines that are on message? That's what it's going to take.

I hope Barbara Williams gets lots of good headlines when Rookie Blue premieres. After the rough ride she had this week, she deserves them.

The New Copyright Bill in 50 Words or Less

2010-06-03T08:56:00.001-04:00

THERE'LL BE MORE later, including the WGC's reaction to the bill, but basically, to parse the new copyright bill:

If you're a consumer: you get some concessions for fair dealing, timeshifting, format shifting, parody, satire & YouTube -- unless there's a digital lock on the content, in which case you're fucked.

If you're a content creator: you're just fucked.

If you're a huge multinational company in the bricks & mortar business: you get a "get out of freedom free" card -- no restrictions on placing digital locks on anything. So basically, you get a license to fuck.

So, same old story.

POVTV

2010-06-02T08:58:00.000-04:00

SERIOCITY'S Kay Reindl has some crunchy crafty goodness with a big bright post about POV -- and especially how POV relates to LOST. There is a definite chill every writer feels when it comes to storytelling POV... you have tremendous pressure to make the character's choices understandable at every single juncture.

And yet from The Sopranos, to Six Feet Under, to LOST, to The Shield -- many of the most compelling shows with the greatest characters don't bother with that fooferaw.

Both Lost and Twin Peaks had ensembles that were heavily into their own points-of-view. I think the shows that try to ape this success, like FlashForward, do so with the typical omniscient TeeVee point-of-view. And just before some of you wiseacres think I'm saying that ensemble shows are character-driven while single-lead shows aren't, that ain't the case. THINK ABOUT THIS. In most TeeVee shows, you're watching a chosen point-of-view. It's safe; there may be character or plot surprises, but you know that what you're seeing is what's happened. Stuff may get held back, but you watch because you know that the omniscient friend with which you've made a pact will faithfully reveal the truth to you at some pre-designated point in the future (end of episode, two-parter, episode arc, season).

Lost didn't make that pact with people. Now, if you went into the show expecting the answers that you get from other shows, then yeah. You'll be disappointed. And maybe that kind of storytelling just isn't your cup of tea. Doesn't mean it's wrong.

You know what other show does this? Damages. And I dig that show. Except for season two. But one and three? Fantastic.

In the great unfortunate battle between creators & that one vocal nitpick section of the audience, more ammo. Go read Kay.

No News is Just No News

2010-06-01T08:52:00.001-04:00

WE LIVE IN a bit of a fraught media moment. There are new rules on copyright coming -- rules that might unnecessarily shackle consumers and content creators at the behest of large corporate conglomerates. After crying poor because of the recession & stating that there wouldn't be a huge spending spree for U.S. shows this year, it looks like the Canadian nets went down and did exactly that. Meanwhile, the pushoff of license renewals means that Canadian creatives won't have any sense of what we're making for about another year, as lawyers everywhere tread water and try to find loopholes in the new Canadian television policy.

In the meantime, homegrown gossip mavens send out breathless press releases about dubious scoops. The number two private network in the country has just been taken over by a large cabler. The same large cabler has successfully reconfigured the CMF so that the board members are all cable cronies. Creatives need not worry, they say, you will be heard -- in the same fabulous, paternalistic way as always, I suppose.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives are on the warpath about...everything, really, but let's just call it the CBC for now.

There are questions, and lots of them, about media concentration, the future of homegrown broadcasting, how consumer choice should shape the industry going forward ...

... not to mention things like, well, the fact that they're talking about a National Digital Strategy five years too late; the people who seem to have the ear on the government on that file are the same snake oil salesmen I've been hearing bleat since my days pre-dot.com crash covering the street for Media Television... oh, and nobody but my friend Howard Bernstein seems to be able to lay out a cogent explanation of the ongoing troubles with Canadian Local TV.

And nobody knows who, or how, Canadian networks are going to make the transition to full digital broadcasting. (The U.S. stations by the way, are mostly done.)

Canada is the second largest country in the world by land mass, yet it's small in population. Spread out. We are wracked by regionalism, resentments rooted in geography that go back to our founding as a nation. Not fighting at your birth means, maybe, that you push the big fights further down the road. But at a time when we need local voices & local coverage, we have less than ever. We have some of the most concentrated media in the world.

One story can show you what happens when you have a concentrated media and no valve. Jim Henshaw wrote about this the other day, but if you'll indulge me a moment, I will recap it in short for those who may not be from my corner of the country. The Province of Ontario's Attorney General was involved in a vehicular accident a year ago in which a bicycle courier was killed. There is surveillance footage showing the car speeding away. There were also unsavory details that came out about the courier -- his alcohol level, previous altercations with motorists, etc. Point is, the courier's dead. And now, because an outside prosecutor brought in to hear the case decided there was not enough evidence, there will be no trial for Michael Bryant.

This may have been the right call, for all I know. I know that the details about the courier gave me pause. I've ridden a bike downtown, and been scared by crazy drivers -- but I've also been a driver desperately looking for bicycles and incensed when a rider flouted the rules of the road; riding unsafely, running lights, going the wrong way up a one way street and a hundred other moves.

But what's happened now is that there is no satisfaction on either side. Evidence will never be heard. We will never settle this as a society. It will always remain there, hanging, the two factions convinced they're right, a vague queasy sense of a backroom deal, and many people feeling like that deal robbed us of a public airing; of justice.

There's a lot of that in Canadian society. I remember learning about the Family Compact in my Canadian History. Like Tammany Hall in NYC, the Family Compact was the group of families who ran everything for their own benefit here in the early days of Upper Canada.

It was a set of controls made all the easier by the docile nature of the Canadian. Slow to provoke, slow to object -- given to grumbling mightily but never organizing or really doing much of anything. (Save the occasional rebellion or General Strike, I mean.)

Well, here we sit now in an age of communications uncertainty. Foreign ownership, editorial independence, Canadian voices -- all of this is up for grabs right now. And it's not really being written about.

A strong rumor from many sources indicated that in the runup to the "Save Local TV" "TV Tax" last time, a certain Canadian paper with broadcast interests had a standing policy that the discussion of the issues of Fee For Carriage be restricted to the Business Pages. The Arts pages were not to be used to discuss the issues arising from the debate -- lest they rile up those excitable creatives & people who care about culture. And lo, they were not used for that purpose. And that part of the debate was never joined. It stayed a nice, hermetically sealed business story.

Even papers like The Toronto Star, with no major broadcast interests, gave the issue short shrift. Who is reporting on media issues, whether from a creative industry or consumer side? A few blogs. A few paid industry newsletters that never trickle down to the public. Nobody else.

Then, last week, a wonderful piece of doublespeak flew into people's inboxes. It seems in order to serve us better, Playback, the publication that served as the putative "industry paper," for the Canadian TV industry, had folded its print version, and would henceforth publish only electronically. This would allow for more immediacy, or something.

Playback has gone through a rocky road through the years, from being a rag that published stuff you mostly already knew to having occasional flashes of insight or good writing & reportage. Mostly, though, it's always been a reliable repository for the fawning "tribute to" this or that issue -- somebody in the club who's retiring, meeting a career milestone, grabbing a gold watch or something. It's not rare to see a single-sourced story in Playback -- nor is it particularly odd to see a rewritten press release served up as news.

What was interesting in the runup to their announcement, though, was Playback didn't cover what I would say was the real story: the fact that when they folded the paper, they laid off a significant portion of their staff. About 20 people, including the editor.

Now you can play any game you want talking about how they're going to do more with less -- but we both know that's not how it works.

And though I looked, I didn't really see any coverage of Playback laying off their staff in any of the nation's newspapers.

So there are all these questions, all these issues going forward in Canadian broadcasting. It's a strange time.

And I guess you better hope that all us free bloggers keep writing about them, because aside from some expensive subscription-only newsletters with narrower focuses, you're not going to read any day to day journalism covering the beat.

Don't you feel well served?

Don't...

2010-05-29T14:56:00.000-04:00

YOU $@%^#* LOOK AT ME.

It's always sad when a Dennis goes out. I would now like to direct you to Jim at The Legion for one of my favorite Dennis Hopper stories.

"Mommy!"

Not So Glee-ful Anymore

2010-05-27T09:11:00.001-04:00

AWASH IN SERIES finale nostalgia, what I think of as the most dramatic story of the 2009-2010 U.S. Television season has gotten a little lost: and that is the bizarre flameout of GLEE as an original, creative force.

I'm certainly not the first to lament about the decline of Glee since it returned for the second half of its first season. Not since first-season O.C. has a guilty pleasure series flamed out so fast. One of the best critiques I've seen (and I can't remember where I saw it now; if you know, please let me know the link in comments) is about the "two Glees." One is the show that's smart, with heart & surprising & interesting characters & situations and the other is the post-Success, Madonna-themed, shoehorn in as many numbers as possible Glee.

(EDIT: an enterprising reader emailed me the link. Of course the two Glees came from the excellent Maureen Ryan at the Chicago Tribune.)

Though the latter version is still capable of moments of beauty & pathos -- like the great sequence where Artie imagines rising from his chair to do "The Safety Dance" (like all things Gleek, it sounds ridiculous when you type it out loud) it seems like increasingly, the only thing keeping me watching is this:

And Brittany bon mots, as unexpected & wonderful & lovely as they are, aren't enough to keep me in the Glee camp. Not by themselves.

Add to that this speech. I can't figure out if it's sublime, or just overwritten. I'm a little thrilled to see this on network TV, but at the same time, it feels a bit ABC Afterschool special. But man, does Mike O'Malley sell it. Two snaps up for the Emmy bait.

Glee? Yay or Nay? Have at it below in the comments.

Zip.

2010-05-27T07:44:00.001-04:00

EVERYTHING is satisfactual.

The Bridge finally goes Stateside

2010-05-26T11:26:00.001-04:00

JULY 10 on CBS. Flashpoint returns to CBS June 4. And Rookie Blue goes to ABC June 24. So we'll finally have three Canadian produced series on U.S. Nets at the same time.

Depending on the reception, this might cement the whole "Canadians fill the summer strategy." Or maybe it'll start the backlash. Considering the kinda cavalier way FP was treated, there's so much more potential down than up that all the hoopla over this model two years ago seems kind of silly now.

Then again, anybody still remember crime time after primetime on CBS?

- sent from iPad, nerds.

Events Occur in Real Time? Not Any Real Time I Recognize.

2010-05-25T08:05:00.000-04:00

NOT MUCH TO say about the 24 finale, save for the fact that I really was rooting for Jack to die. The tribute to Chloe was nice; it was great to see President Logan eat a bullet, finally. (And whack a guy. Seriously. WTF?) And it was fun seeing Nazneen Contractor in there, too.

I smell spinoff! "Totally Chloe!" Wacky office comedy with Guns!

But you know how in horror movies & suspense movies now they have to do that thing to get rid of the cellphone?

I'm glad they saved that whole "Rewind the tape on the Predator, and then dispatch it immediately, and then have it make a direct microwave call" thing til the series finale, cause -- Dude! -- that is some SERIOUS FUCKING DEUS EX MACHINA.

Seriously? Is this the same CTU that had a mole every season and never once successfully set up a perimeter in EIGHT YEARS?

I'd like to see the writing room come up with Day 9 after you've pulled THAT Shit.

Anyway, Dink, Dink, Dink, Dink we hardly knew you. There was lots of quiet/loud Jack Bauer yelling, which is always good times.

But beyond that? Ehhhh.

Maybe it's best to just go back to sunnier, more innocent times, and remember and ruminate one more time on How 24 Changed Everything for writers.

Was Blind, But Now I See.

2010-05-24T14:20:00.006-04:00

THE SHORT VERSION? I liked it. A lot.

In retrospect, maybe this promo shot shoulda been a clue.

I liked it because the final LOST gave me the moments I'd always loved about the show: memorable, emotional, wrenching scenes between characters I cared about. And because those characters, to a one, demonstrated in the final episode how they changed completely in their time on the island: Jack found humility and completed his transformation to man of faith -- after being unlikable for a while, and mired in self-pity, he became worthy of the mantle of the hero. (And his eulogy/upbraiding of his enemy for disrespecting John Locke was incredibly moving.) Hurley found a strength to lead. Ben found validation & forgiveness. Kate proved herself as the person you wanted most in the clutch. Sawyer's strength & decency (tipped this whole season, imperilled by the flirtation with Locke) was confirmed. Claire got her second chance.

In the end, I liked that there were no do-overs, and that what happened, happened. The 'sideways' world wasn't a cosmic do-over. The bomb didn't split the universe. Actions had consequences. LOST flirted with that trope for a very long time, and I'm glad in the end they came down firmly on the side of the immutable. See, because it's the very idea that there's only once choice that makes faith so important. Anyway... that's what I believe.

I think that has a lot to do with how one reads the final LOST.

If you forgive me for a moment, I'm going to veer off for a second in my post about a show that millions of people watched religiously (and a show where millions more lost their religion for the thing along the way) to talk a bit about a show that I worked on that almost nobody saw.

In 2004, I went to South Africa to work on a show called Charlie Jade. The show was this crazy Canada-South Africa co-production that had a famously troubled run. (It was contracted for 22 episodes, delivered 20. 'Nuff said.)

The show was an overstuffed burrito of narrative hoo-ha. Sci-fi magicks embracing parallel universes, environmentalism and a whole bunch of other isms, hero & villain tropes, tattoos, dystopian futurism, corporate responsibility, flashforwards, backs, dream sequences, X-Files style paranoia, film noir...I'm surprised there wasn't a unicorn in there. I was part of a complete reboot of the writing staff, about halfway through the run of the show. (This is where I met my good friend Alex Epstein.)

Of the many flaws of Charlie Jade, (and they were legion) one of the biggest challenges we faced was a whole bag of mythological ideas that had been thrown at the wall in a slightly ADHD way, and didn't really add up. There was no plan. (Well, that's not true, there had been a plan in the deep longago, including a series bible conceived by the Executive Producer with some help from Sci Fi writer Robert J. Sawyer... but that had effectively slipped between the couch cushions.) By the time we hit the ground they were halfway through shooting, and the new writing staff had to figure out a way to try to tie the disparate threads of story continuity & myth together, and work toward a new end point.

At the same time, there were some truly perplexing characters who didn't act in ways that made sense, and we had to try to iron out a character arc, too.

(This kind of chaos still happens far too often on Canadian TV series. It's happening on a couple of shows right now. It's not just a Canadian disease, but it is endemic of a system of TV production where you don't have writers riding point on story -- but that's a story for another time. Or, um, five years worth of blog.)

What put me in mind of Charlie Jade watching the LOST finale was the particulars of the big island solve.

The following is sort of a spoiler alert, but, uh, not really. And if you didn't watch LOST, it can probably be more accurately described as a "glad I didn't waste six seasons on this" alert:

So there's a giant butt plug in the island's heinie. Desmond takes out the butt plug, and instead of cool flowing water, and golden light....there's nasty fire & rocks start falling all over the place, and steam shoots out and things get very very dire. What can I say? The Island likes its butt plug. Jack puts the butt plug back in though, and the island calms down. But Jack is kind of covered in golden light water & nasty steam & island spit up & other...juices...and, uh, he's got a stab wound so he's all septic & stuff and he wanders off into the jungle and dies of a staph infection.

In retrospect, maybe going for a pacifier metaphor might have been better. Oh well. Moving on.

Now for people wanting answers about Jacob & the Man In Black and the Smoke & what kind of energy and just what the $#@ is the island, anyway? I imagine this is just going to be a TOTALLY...ENRAGING... DEVELOPMENT!!!!

And yet, watching it all unfold, I couldn't care less.

Back in 2004, on Charlie Jade, we'd promised some sort of resolution that involved parallel universes. They had spent a jillion dollars on the first three episodes. Now it was the end of the series, and instead of spectacular, spectacular, we had about three carrots, a Springbok & a package of biltong to throw at the screen.

So what the story department came up with was an impressionistic ending that pitted the two main characters against each other in a battle of wills, in a dreamscape that was a place between three parallel universes.

After bible fulls of plane theory and advanced scientific quantum explanations of how one universe would collapse upon another and all matter of hoofera, the final test of the two main characters came down to trying one another for their actions and intentions -- and the objective correlative of the struggle became three melting blocks of ice. The two characters -- evil but complicated & good but complicated, finally worked together to unite the universes in a stable way that removed the threat of annihilation.

You know how they did it?

The ice from the symbolic blocks dripped into a glass. And they both drank from it. And lo, they redeemed the universes.

Did I mention I'm Catholic?

Here's a clip from the finale. I'm telling you right now -- if you haven't seen the show (which includes the vast, vast majority of you -- you're gonna find it incomprehensible.) The drinking comes about 3/4 of the way through.

Charlie Jade was a rough ride, but I think we got out with an emotionally satisfying finale. We scrambled toward that together -- the writers, the Creator/Executive Producer, the crew, the actors...But the only way we could do that was by letting go of the nitpicks and the how-this's and delivering emotionally resonant satisfying conclusions. Which always come down to sacrifice.

But come on. They drank the kool aid? That's the big problem solve? Are you freaking kidding me?

Uh, no. I wish we'd thought of the big old butt plug. But that's why the LOST guys are geniuses. Heh.

I firmly believe that they delivered a great finale because they focused on the right things. We had to scramble to do that on our show. They got to work toward it. And the resonance was much the greater for it.

In all seriousness, as movies have become stupider and stupider, and most of the quality of storytelling has come to roost on TV, one of the most disturbing compensatory forces at work is the rise of the shrill demand for answers -- that things be tied up in a little bow.

I don't think that everyone thinks this way. It's just that the internet makes it so those voices can amplify themselves in ever more obnoxious ways. It's part of the tenor of our age, a cousin of the force that reduces political discourse to simplistic talking points.

I understand this impulse. I really do. We all have it in us to nitpick. It can be fun. It can offer validation. And in a remix age, the ability to manipulate George Lucas' cuts of his films & vent in real time about something you don't like gives the audience a tremendous amount of power. And that's good. Mostly.

But not always.

The older I get, the more I realize that in life, there are no answers that don't lead to other questions. And the big questions are so vexing, and so big, that we spend our whole lives seeking their answers and mostly failing.

This used to piss me off to no end. But with each passing year, I accept it more and more. In a strange way, it's kind of comforting. Everybody flails. But hopefully, we flail together -- and that's what gets us through. Flail together, and maybe we don't have to die alone, I guess.

I believe the desire to want to see things tied up in narrative, in art, in story, is rooted in a childlike state. And I think it must be resisted, in the same way that manchildren need to grow the fuck up, and people need to accept responsibility for the things they do, and the messes they create.

It's a lot easier to nitpick a television show than it is your own soul & motivations, after all. Stories are metaphors for life -- and I think when we focus on details rather than larger emotional truths, all we're doing is insulating ourselves from having to ask the tough questions. The big ones -- the hard ones, the unsolvable ones. The ones that matter.

I know many people use TV as comfort food, babysitter, secret lover, etc, etc. But I think LOST signaled pretty early on that it wasn't going to be a show that made answers easy -- or that let their characters off the hook. Which is exactly as it should be.

Yes, there was a sadness to the realization of what the Sideways world was. But what I loved, more than anything was that in that anteroom -- resplendent with the iconography of many faiths, the answers came down to an honest exchange between father & son. The talking cure. Connection. Love. Faith.

Yup, there was a light. But there wasn't someone in that church telling people what to think or what to feel. The fellowship was the point. The power of forgiveness, of redemption, of transcendence, of love, and of sacrifice, all of these are our gifts to each other..."This is the world we made," the show says.

And I say, "Amen."

What's nice about the ambiguity is that the religious among us can choose to see the hand of their God in that ending, and claim the ending of LOST validates a Judeo-Christian vision of the afterlife. And that's fine. And there are those among us who can reach for a more humanist, secular view and the ending accomodates that, too.

Fun tip: If you want to anger a Nun, take the scissors to this.

I don't think we're going to get very far with the idea of the new TV renaissance if we demand that narratives be tied up with explanations for every nitpick, every idea, every flaw. When I look at Starry Night, I can love the imperfections in the canvas & appreciate the brilliance of the mind behind it.

My Mom tells a story of seeing Starry Night in art class when she was a little girl and being so incensed by it that she cut it up. The Nun yelled at her for defacing the art.

I'm fascinated by that missed opportunity. The truth & the beauty & the humanity in that reaction -- and the sad, quotidian limitation in being told it was "wrong."

How wonderful! How exciting, how incredibly, how indelibly human that a little girl could see that image, and have such an immediate reaction, even a negative one. What did she sense in that moment? What did it make her feel? Why at a young age, in the 1940's, in the Bronx, did Van Gogh's vision so reach her that it made her do that? The painting did that -- it inspired. To this day, my Mom hates Starry Night. She doesn't see what I see when I look at that painting at all.

And how great is that?

I know there are some who will say that I'm doing the very thing I decry by denying the nitpickers their fun. But I don't think it's the same thing. To nitpick is to hold at a remove -- and to surrender to story -- even if ultimately you decide you don't like what's being said, is to grok the totality. My Little Girl Mom didn't cut up Starry Night because one corner of the painting didn't match the other one. To operate along those lines leads, I think, to a kind of cultural Asbergers' Syndrome.

I suppose what I'm saying here is fair play to those who want to say that the end of LOST or Battlestar Galactica or the cut to black on Tony Soprano forever marred their enjoyment of those series, but I just can't agree, and I will fight you in that story-Calvinism as a viewer and as a writer until the day I die.

LOST ended with an explosion of emotional resolutions that felt right. I watched with my heart in my mouth for much of the final episode. It offered few easy answers that quieted my brain, it didn't get bogged down in the details... and it serviced my soul.

There are a hundred wonderful, bracing, fascinating arguments that could spring from the two and-a-half hour endgame of the story of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 -- like Starry Night, there is much room for those who say, "I hated it," to give their reasons & spark debate & conversation.

But to start from the Nitpickers List is a thought so utterly depressing to me that I think I need to figure out how to glibly extricate myself from those conversations. I respect your right to tally the list of unanswered questions & find the show wanting for not tracking each detail.

I just think it's a dreary, unimaginative & emotionally closed way to view the world, is all.

Lots of people have quoted Amazing Grace when talking about LOST. But for me, especially after the finale, I think the better epitaph is a song by Iris Dement.

Some say they're goin' to a place called Glory
and I ain't saying it ain't a fact
but I've heard that I'm on the road to purgatory
and I don't like the sound of that
I believe in love and I live my life accordingly
but I choose to let the mystery be

Goodbye LOST. I forgive you for Nikki and Paulo.

For an awesome other-view of the finale (and that coda) check out Televisionary.

UPDATE 11:56 Victoria Day. Whew. Long weekend winding down -- and thanks to Friend of the Sticks Angry Yalie for the steer to Jezebel's chock full of win wrapup here. Check out the "Bardos" explanation:

a component of Tibetan Buddhism, bardos are the different phases the deceased experience between dying and rebirth. It's a dream-like reality, created by the "awareness" (or a soul) that is freed from the body upon death. Because of the disconnect of the awareness from the physical body, the deceased doesn't immediately realize that he or she is dead. In the different bardo phases, the "awareness" needs guidance—from different deities, or, you know, guides (hello, Desmond)—to attain enlightenment, i.e., realize that they're dead. A karmic mirror (remember all those mirrors?) is held up to the deceased so that s/he can reflect and eventually recognize. Once this happens—and it can happen in any of the bardo phases, depending on how much emotional baggage a person has packed for the afterlife—the deceased achieves Nirvana, and can "move on." Depending on your belief system, this can be heaven, reincarnation, or some kind of simulated reality, like Eloise Hawking for herself and her son.

Mmm. Goodness.

TV Finales on Q

2010-05-24T11:45:00.000-04:00

THE PODCAST for my appearance on Q last week is now up. Check out me and author Nikki Stafford at about thirty-eight minutes in.

So Long, Farewell...

2010-05-19T20:03:00.000-04:00

NO, NOT ME, suckers... some venerable hits taking their final bows...Law & Order, 24, LOST...

...I'll be talking about the shows and their legacies tomorrow on CBC Radio Q.

Lucy, Schroeder & Robin Hood Explain the Movie Business.

2010-05-19T09:05:00.000-04:00

IF YOU'RE LIKE me, you probably greeted the new Robin Hood movie with a bit of mystification. Especially when the reviews came in. If you were going to tell such a well-trod & explored story (a couple of movies & TV series just in the last few years!) how could you not make sure you were bringing something new and different to it?

Well it's simple. As Bill Martell explains, you start with new and different -- in this case, a nifty script called NOTTINGHAM, and then you systematically murder it. Until it is dead, dead, dead, well and truly dead.

So, Ridley Scott wanted to change the NOTTINGHAM script which featured period forensics to a script about archers and archery...

Then he came up with a brilliant idea! What if the Sheriff Of Nottingham and Robin Hood were the *same person*! Kind of like FIGHT CLUB. He’d be chasing himself for the whole damned movie! And there were some drafts of the screenplay written like that, until someone (maybe Helgeland) must have hinted that it might be a little silly.

And draft after draft, they script changed - evolved - twisted - becoming something completely different. The way the most expensive meal you have ever eaten turns into something else when it goes through the digestive process.

The full blow by blow is painful & illuminating.

Of course, this kind of collaboration doesn't just happen with Directors. Sometimes it's with Producers too. Most writers have these stories floating around. And most of those stories can be very adequately explained by this simple interaction between Lucy & Schroeder from A Charlie Brown Christmas:

Hot, Not, Gutshot

2010-05-18T08:52:00.000-04:00

HOT:               that trailer for Inception.
NOT:               that trailer for MacGruber.
GUTSHOT:    "MacGruber is the first R-rated SNL Movie. Um. What?"

HOT:    hating on "Treme."
NOT:    hating on "Nurse Jackie."
GUTSHOT:    hating on the episode of LOST where Alison Janney introduces the Man In Black & Jacob to the Golden Island Vagina.

HOT:    The Trotsky, Heartbeats, & comedies made by Canadian auteurs in their early 20s
NOT:              Proof that even with good products, Canadian distributors have no idea what the fuck to do.
GUTSHOT:    Anybody who tries to make their living exclusively as a screenwriter in Canada.

HOT:              NBC's Pilot Development
NOT:              David Shore's "The Rockford Files"
GUTSHOT:    Anybody holding their breath for that remake of Cannon.

HOT:    Pointing out that "Glee" was much better before all the attention.
NOT:              the plot where the Gay kid tries to be straight for his Dad & turns to Mellencamp. (Dude, Mellencamp is like, totally closet gay. The guy's name for a while was COUGAR. Rowwr.)
GUTSHOT:    You, after any line that comes out of Brittany's mouth (as played by Actress Heather Morris.)

HOT:              Stefon
NOT:              Those Fifteen Kristen Wiig characters that are essentially the same character.
GUTSHOT:    SNL turning everything into a returning character. A personality tic is not a character.

HOT:              Huddy
NOT:              Hameron
GUTSHOT:    Forchase

HOT:              Saying the CBC is biased against Conservative viewpoints.
NOT:              Taking responsibility for being in government for nearly five years.
GUTSHOT:    Anybody who tries to reason with anybody else from the great Province of Alberta.

HOT:              Repatriating Canadian Talent from L.A.
NOT:              Preventing Canadian Talent from going to L.A. by offering merit-based opportunities here.
GUTSHOT:   Excuses by everybody other than Jay Baruchel.

HOT:             Friends-like comedies.
NOT:             Nihilist cop shows.
GUTSHOT:   Ben Silverman.

HOT:             That blonde.
NOT:             That blonde from last year.
GUTSHOT:   Lindsay Lohan. Oh cm'on. Am I right? AM I RIGHT?

Practically Perfect in Every Way

2010-05-14T20:07:00.003-04:00

ONE OF THE most common questions any professional TV writer ever gets is, "what shows should I spec?" It's literally asked multiple times in any talk or career day or meetup you ever do. Agents get the question. Writers get the question. I'm pretty sure studio executives' dogs get the question.

A couple of weeks back I did a one-day workshop in Winnipeg sponsored by Film Training Manitoba & the CFC (and I'm pretty sure there might be another organization in there too, I'm sorry if I'm leaving you out. There seems to be a good bit of government support for the Film Industry in Manitoba. Coming from Ontario, where they've starved the OMDC for years, it was weird.) Anyway, that's a digression.

What I did at that workshop is what I always do. I asked people what their favorite shows were, and what they were thinking of speccing. This is always a trick question. We got several Californications, a Dexter or two, a bunch of Breaking Bads, Sons of Anarchy, True Blood...one brave soul stuck up for Being Erica. I think there might have been a Flashpoint.

But the point was that about 80% of the room wanted to do a cable show. That's natural. Writers or would be writers are attracted to good writing and sometimes that means investing in a show that is more of a cult thing.

But every slice of the pie that grows smaller means less of a chance of connecting with a show that your reader knows. And that's why new writers looking to make a mark with their first specs ignore network shows at their peril.

Announcing itself in the poster.

The L.A. Times today has an article about Modern Family & The Good Wife, where the critic calls them nearly perfect shows. They have their reasons -- well and thoughtfully laid out. I tend to agree with most of them.

The most important thing is to like the show you're speccing. If you don't, that will show. But I defy anybody who really wants to write professionally to watch a few episodes of either Modern Family or The Good Wife and not appreciate the deep and solid craft at work in these shows. Both programs, now wrapping up their first seasons, have managed to maintain a consistent, superior quality that connects to a network sized audience each week. Now, true, that is a slice that's getting smaller by the year, but it's still the most significant slice.

It's a hard thing to have to explain the ropes to somebody that really, really wants to write an episode of an obscure cable drama that might or might not see another season. There are plenty of people who are working who should know better. There are people working on Canadian network shows that don't count a single network hit among their likes and influences, and I think it shows in their work. Californication is not an example of anything except maybe a male writer's Arrested Development.

(Arrested Development was a bad spec back in the day. And 30 Rock's not as great as you think it is, either. Better to do a good, solid Big Bang Theory.)

The Best Character on TV Right Now

There are other questions, like "when should I spec a show?" And to this I usually say, "second season, when you know its place is secure." But such is the strength of both Modern Family & Good Wife that I think there's no doubt that these two, comedy & drama, are the specs you should be working now.

(As an aside, another thing to keep in mind for next season: pay attention to the first positioning spots the Network does in print and on TV during the summer: they are the clearest indicators of how they see the show, and how they'll try to position it. Half the time, the poster announces the theme of the show.)

There will be time to build your portfolio with other colours, other paints -- maybe something with a more cable feel. But take a look at the article linked above, and ask why tens of millions of viewers agree with it each week. That is the business you're in, my friend.

This is a populist medium. It's okay if you admire The Wire. We all do. But if you've got talent, a solid The Good Wife will get you more work in a month of Sundays. You don't get points for being an auteur in this game. You get points for writing good, accessible stuff -- and writing it fast. Surprise the audience, yes, but also give them something familiar and relatable. Save the cable spec til later. Stalk the big game first.

For what it's worth, that's my thinking. Maybe now I can punt on the question for awhile. :)

No Business Like Show

2010-05-14T07:51:00.000-04:00

IN WHAT OTHER business can you sit around with colleagues, speaking in the voice of a Thai Ladyboy about how what you do is more honest work than screenwriting, whilst a smoky, take-no-prisoners dame provides Yenta services for the next generation, and the shop talk reveals human frailty, the apex of vanity, and murderous incompetence all at once?

Accountants don't get to do this.

But then again, they no meet Ting Ting.

Law & Order Canceled

2010-05-13T19:14:00.000-04:00

SUPPOSEDLY.

Later tonight: the moon will run with blood; a two headed dog will give birth to a cat; Ryan Seacrest will give long, soft butterfly kisses to Donald Trump, and Charlie Sheen will kill a hooker live on Larry King.

Find That Moose & Beaver in Your Script & Hit "Delete."

2010-05-13T08:26:00.002-04:00

IN THE DISCUSSION on the CBC post below, Deborah Nathan & a couple of other commenters raised the issue of content guidelines. Deborah wrote:

The CAVCO rules state a "Canadian citizen" not resident. So they are perfectly within their rights to court any Canadian who lives anywhere in the world.

Get the CAVCO rule changed if you want to stop this practice.

I'm more concerned about the practice of Americans being deemed as Canadian so they can front a show here. And the practice of camouflaging an American series as a coproduction so it receives full 10/10 status and tax credits.

I would also like to see changes to the definitions that gets rid of the parochial nature of creating drama here - as in a Canadian setting, speaks to Canadians. Really, I think if the networks want to be part of productions like the Borgias and Camelot, we should be allowed to pitch such projects, too. After all, what is British or American about the Borgias? Yet those two nations can see the value in a drama about that family.

First of all, I never claimed that CBC doesn't have the right to look for talent where they want, merely that they are seeking green pastures while doing a not-very-good job of tending the garden they already have here. The thrust was the "if you're in L.A. you're A-list" mentality.

Secondly, CAVCO is a tax credit scheme. I think it would probably be difficult to impose residency requirements. And there are certainly beneficial effects with having service productions able to access tax credits.

But let's move onto Deb's central point, because it's one that I've heard a lot of people make over the last few months.

The idea that shows must be "primarily set in Canada" and "reflect Canadian themes" has been contentious for a long time. It's one of the reasons, in fact, that Canadian Sci-Fi was so hard to do. The WGC got an exemption to this for Sci-fi awhile back.

But a lot of people seem not to know is that the hated guidelines have also changed, with the transition from CTF to CMF. I turned to WGC Director of Policy Kelly Lynne Ashton for help with this one. The new guidelines read:

The project speaks to Canadians and is primarily intended for a Canadian audience.

(Emphasis added by me.) As you can see, the stipulation about setting and themes is gone, and is replaced by the much broader "primarily intended for." So The Borgias might still be a tough sell for 10/10, but a Canadian WWI or WWII movie that takes place entirely in Europe, or a movie about two Canadian guys around L.A. a la Passenger Side, or even my own ministeries Across The River To Motor City, becomes a lot more doable.

And the old knock about having to throw in a few moose and beaver, thankfully is no more, too.

The WGC kept on the CMF all through the consultation process to make sure that this looser definition wasn't further watered down by allowing less than a 10/10 production, so light industrial shows that don't use any above-the-line Canadian talent couldn't qualify. And the "primarily intended for" is a valve so that, say, CBS couldn't partially finance a cop show set in Chicago but shot here. But it's a way better definition, especially paired with continued 10/10 protection.

As for the "deeming Canadian" practice, the WGC continues to monitor projects & keep an eye on it. They're aware of the problem and have managed to walk back a number of these attempts.

I look forward to hearing from Deb about how none of this is enough, and how working for these things has actually made us weaker.

Respectfully, Minister Moore...

2010-05-12T21:52:00.002-04:00

...I think "Canada's Team" just announced itself.

Never Learn Anything Ever

2010-05-11T09:06:00.001-04:00

I'M BACK IN a writing room again today...first time in awhile, and the familiar tingle is a great accompaniment to the morning Cup o'Joe. Nothing can spoil this mood that...what's that? CBC News!

Damnit!

CBC Goes Searching for Talent, in the States

The CBC is heading to south for a talent scouting trip.
The Arts and Entertainment and Factual units are looking for pitches for new shows and series, and they’re hitting the road to do it. First stop was Vancouver yesterday, then on to L.A. ”We are open for business. We are the only people who make Canadian prime-time series and we’re looking for the best of the best,” Kirstine Stewart said to the Toronto Star yesterday.

I don't even have the energy for the long screed on this one.

It is an article of faith in Canadian Television that every generation of network executive, or production company executive must make the same mistake, over, and over, and over.

So let's review.

When Canadian talent "goes to the States" it is for the possibility of vastly greater opportunities & paydays.

If you hit, and receive those paydays, you cannot afford to work for Canadian money anymore. The difference is vast. Oceanic.

What more likely happens is that you, in the role of the Canadian -- aw hell, let's call it like it is -- the wide eyed-ingenue holding satchels of multicoloured cash -- manages to snag yourself a piece of "talent" that is scrabbling at the edges. L.A. based, yes, but at a level of success somewhere south of, say, David Shore and Paul Haggis. Let's say, Mexico south.

Are these people better & more qualified than the Creators & Producers & Talent you just left behind? Arguable at best. Probably not. But they do have a 213 cell phone, at least. Huzzah! So sign them! And make sure the deals are favourable in a way you'd never give to talent living in Canada! Yay! Money well spent!

There are production companies that make a career out of importing C and D list Canadians and wondering why the expensive faerie dust they've bought doesn't work; why, in fact, they can't miraculously rescue a concept. Why, in fact, they aren't just so much better than the talent they had sitting right here all along?

I mean, Gosh, they live in L.A and everything! I had a cell phone conversation with them when they were driving down the 405!

Whatever could be the matter?

[I have a caveat. I know, I am, in fact, friends with, plenty of writers who try to work both sides of the fence. Or even people who do most of their work in Canada but choose to live in L.A. Maybe they have a spouse working in L.A. or a hundred other reasons. There are, in fact, many Canadians who are L.A. based but actively working here. But clearly this "CBC Trip" isn't to find those people, because they already know those people.]

This is about turning over rocks. And kissing frogs. At a time when most of the A-list here is chronically underemployed and thinking about getting out.

Nice one, national broadcaster!

Oh ye of the generation past, feel free to share (anonymously) your favorite "importing Canadian talent from L.A. because if they live there they must be better" stories below:

The "Copyfight" Reaches Epistemic Closure

2010-05-10T11:54:00.000-04:00

THERE ARE MANY, many arguments you can make about the societal benefits of limiting the terms of copyright.

Unfortunately, you won't find many of them in the comments section on Michael Geist's site.

Geist has staked out his territory -- as an academic and law professor, he believes in an expansion for fair use/fair dealing and frowns upon mechanisms such as digital locks that prevent people from using purchased content the way they want. Through newspaper columns, consistent advocacy on the issue, and assiduous courting of so-called "copyleft"ists, "copyfighters," and other creatively-monikered folk, he's become the de facto clearinghouse for a so-called "consumer-focused" view of copyright reform.

As I've argued previously here, and privately in friendly emails with Geist himself, what's consistently missing from his site (and from the points of view of his commenters) is any realistic representation from the creators of artistic works.

See it's quite easy to rail against copyright when the enemy is a huge multigloobinial copomoration breathing fire out its greasy lawyer-tusks, but wee people have a dog in the hunt too when it comes to protecting their intellectual property.

Not that you'd know it from Geist's site.

Argue politely or otherwise that the content creator's opinion is a little light on the ground, and you're very quickly met with rhetoric & indifference, ranging to outright hostility. In some cases, you're lumped in with the corporate weasels because they're the most fun to fight. (The blowback from suing customers is the single greatest mistake made in this area in recent years. It's emboldened the immoral, and given fire to the muddleheaded. It's like a layer of volcanic ash-gunk that covers anyone who tries to argue the creator's side.)

Otherwise, you're treated to a lovely, shopworn, half-assed screed on the "you can't stop the ocean" style argument about making money in the new world. (Seriously, hands up anybody who's been hearing this argument since before the last dot.com bust?)

There's nothing quite like a lecture on economic models given by people who don't seem to really grasp how it works, and who don't realize that arguing theoretics to someone with a concrete, measurable and immediate economic interest is a bit insensitive at best, and monstrous at worst. It's especially welcoming when you spend a whole lot of your daily life discussing monetization with other groups, seeing presentations from Comscore, interacting with people working to monetize online efforts everyday. The newsflash, of course, is that nobody's figured it out yet. Not Jill, not The New York Times. We're all still waiting for that 9-year old girl in Passaic, N.J. to show us the way. (Pick it up, there, Heidi. We're dyin' out here.)

In the meantime, one is supposed to put up with people who argue with a straight face that the baby & the bathwater must be thrown out. Because ... well ... um... because.

I didn't expect a whole lot of sympathy or a whole lot of uptake-taking on the Geist droids. What did strike me, though, is that in the lobs of arguments I've heard a hundred times before, nobody asked a question. Nobody. Nobody asked for a clarification about how TV is financed, or maybe how the "tour and merchandising" model of artist recoupment doesn't work across all forms. See, in the closed circle of "copyfight debate" they know how artists have it wrong, how corporations have it wrong, and the way forward is already completely decided.

When the copyright town hall chugged into Toronto last year, there was the predictable over-representation from the recorded music industry (the guys you love to hate) defending a business model that nobody outside of a record company would even dream of sticking up for anymore.
Their arguments, hiding sins of excess from an industry that took exploitation of talent and practically forged a whole separate art form out of it -- screwitecture, let's call it...such are the documented excesses of the record industry that we shant go into them here.

The fact that arguing for copyright for content creators involves sitting at the table with these guys is kind of like having to put up with pervy Uncle Eddie at the family wedding. You hold your breath and try not to look as embarrassed as you really are inside. (And you keep your ass out of reach of his freaky hands.)

But aside from the majors, there were some thoughtful contributions from creator groups -- and some truly passionate representations from artists & creators themselves.

That night, both before & after the town all, the brief chats I had with artists & creators mirrored each and every conversation I've had with somebody who makes things for a living. I'm always amazed by the thoughtful, measured attempt to wrestle with creator rights versus consumer good. Most are unhappy with the current law, thinking it does too little to protect in some areas and too much to restrict in others. There is no uniformity in boundaries or solution, but there is always a heartfelt, honest attempt to grapple with how to expand consumer rights in the way the digital world practically demands, without losing the thread that allows for fair renumeration.

When it came to the so-called copyfight side, however, we were treated to a few people arguing flat out in favour of piracy and a couple of university students, stumbling, ill-informed, unsure, arguing something that they felt in their heart but couldn't articulate clearly. The failure was easy to understand. This was the real world, not the safe harbours of copyfight central, where the tiny demographic slice of internet people all agree. They weren't playing to their closed epistemic circle. Must have been scary.

You see the shallowness of understanding of the creator side in the response to organizations' like the WGC's position on collective licensing. Based on already running, successful collection societies that are running in Europe to compensate rights holders for things like PVR use, timeshifting, tv rebroadcasting and such, the WGC proposes that one solution be a levy system. They're quick to jump on the "levy" part and scream how it's unfair, will never work, etc, but miss the second part of it, where the WGC suggests that now-illegal uses be made legal in exchange.

See, that's negotiation. You give something up, you get something.

But even when you take out the pirates who don't think you should pay for anything, the bulk of copyfans in Geist Nation still approach the idea of negotiating a new copyright law as...say it with me, now:

"Gimme."

Even Geist's vaunted expansion in fair-dealing for academic use goes against the current grain. Starting from "it should be free" goes against what's in place now with academic copying for textbooks & other materials. If the cost is too onerous and does restrict legitimate research use, then obviously that needs to be looked at.   But it's a measure of the exclusion of the artist from Geist's roundtable that it seems to be an article of faith that "free" must be the default. Well, uh... huh? Why? Are Profs going to lecture for free now, too? What about students. When you get those degrees & jobs are you gonna go work for free?

There's so much I wish for for consumers in a copyright bill. I think terms of 75 years for copyright is ridiculous. I think that parody & satire should be codified so that Disney, or me, or anyone can't order a YouTube video removed through copyright law as a cudgel and censorious act to quash a video that makes a valid, socially desirable criticism. Or even a wicked parody. I want recognition of mashup art & I want consumers who pay for content to be able to use that content and view it on whichever device they want.

All these are points of negotiation, but I do have to say that I'm far less passionate about pushing them forward than I otherwise might have been because I know there is a significant constituency that believes I should have no rights over my creations at all. A constituency that wants to speak for me, and then dismiss my voice as "not relevant to where digital culture is going."

Finally, to those of us who have a longer-than-undergrad view of changing culture, one should remember and take the lesson of the 'original mashup' -- the audio sample.

There was a fierce battle at the beginning of the hiphop era over sampling. Copyright holders sued to remove & ban songs that used unauthorized samples.   The law was used as a cudgel, sometimes with the blessing of the original artist, sometimes not. The thought was that the sample devalued the original work. People who wanted to use samples argued that it was new art, that it deserved to be heard. Suggestions were made about licensing samples, making the whole thing legal -- and for a while there was squawking over that, too. It would be too hard to decide the value. Who would police it? Is it a good idea?

The point is, it got worked out. Maybe artists couldn't use as many samples as they wanted, but the culture changed & absorbed the change, and everybody learned how to deal with it.

The bad road we started down in the digital realm is that the first responders -- the canary in the coal mine -- was the music industry. And they responded badly, first by denying there was a problem for too long, and then being talked into a strategy where suing your customers and trying intimidation was the answer. It wasn't. We lost a lot of time to that silliness.

A solution will come in the copyright debate, too. It might take a few tries, it might mean a bad law needs to be amended, but eventually we will wind up with something that allows, hopefully, for the most socially desirable outcome that balances a right for renumeration for labour with socially desirable consumer use.

Geist protests that he does the best he can, and doesn't agree with a lot of what's in his comment sections, but leaves it open in the spirit of the internet. That may be so. But the degree to which the Geistians have a hand in the future of copyright is directly inverse to the degree to which they continue to close ranks and insist they have all the answers, and everyone else is "the man."

* * *

A note on comments on this post: this is a post on the semiotics of the debate. You want to critique what I have to say, go to town. But we're not arguing copyright in this thread, for the same reason that I closed comments the other day -- I'm not interested in having the same boring debate I've had a hundred times with people who simply aren't listening.

Mothers' Little Helper & The Road To Nowhere

2010-05-09T16:00:00.000-04:00

THE MESSAGE LIGHT blinking caught me by surprise. It’s not often I get a call on a Saturday night these days. Calls are mostly exchanged in the afternoon, plans set or broken. By Saturday evening either I’m out with those most likely to call, or burrowed in for a bit of middle-aged hermitage.

Last night, then -- a dinner party for a friend’s milestone birthday. Much mirth & fine conversation and then, a strange echo of a once-common ritual – a bunch of us sitting around watching Betty White take her unlikely star turn on Saturday Night Live.

Once upon a time, watching SNL in a big group was a common Saturday night activity, usually punctuated by a cheap two-four of whatever beer was on sale. But Lord, that was seven casts, a passel of missing friends, practically a whole head of hair and a half-dozen apartments ago.

I hit the blinking light and my Mother’s voice filled the room. She sounded happy, but tired. Mom’s in Massachusetts, with her sister. This weekend the two of them are tag teaming, minding my second cousins, so their Mom gets a well-deserved shot at attending a reunion of friends in Manhattan.

The kids are adorable; big-hearted, full of life – two boys and a girl, all under the age of eight. But sadly, it seems, none of the kids in my family are any less than an advanced level parenting assignment. My mom has laughed about it before, “It all comes back to you after awhile – it’s just everything happens a whole lot more slowly.”

It was something seeing Betty White hoof it through her sketches at the age of 88 and a half, but having seen my cousins in action, I’m definitely glad that my Mom & my Aunt had each other’s backs.

It reminded me of another time, or many other times – fidgeting in the back seat, bored out of my skull, feeling the pointlessness of a drive that would never end. A stretch of I-4 in Orlando. The time: The mid 1970’s. A stretch of the highway from the downtown to Winter Park. It seemed we’d drive that stretch of road for hours & hours, butt becoming numb against the tacky vinyl of the back seat of the Ford LTD, seat belt pinching as you tried to scale the back seat, or lean forward far enough to see the good stuff. I’m there on the right. On the far left is one sister. She’s nervous & a little unsure. To my eternal shame, this is the sister who would sometimes thump down onto her butt the moment I wheeled into a room in my bullish six or seven year old glory. You don’t spit into a hurricane, after all.

In between us is sister number two – red tight curls & thumb parked firmly in mouth as she regards you with the stare – a size-me-up, suffer-no-fools countenance that recalled both my Grandmother & your best approximation of a police interrogator...Age Four. It’s not that she wasn’t buying whatever you were selling – she just demanded the time to judge for herself.

So then, I-4. Past Colonial Drive & Church Street…the wrong way from Disney World or anything fun. On the ramp. Off the ramp. Same stretch of road, again and again. Would anything else ever be this boring?

I had my answer, of course. At that point I still remembered the great furniture store incident. That involved, I believe, eighty two hours of debate about the relative merits of a couch in Huffman Koos. That previous incident ended inauspiciously with, I believe, me lying on the floor of the store wailing. Not my finest hour, I’ll admit, but when you’re under three feet tall your quiver of arrows is a little shallow.

Past the bank building. Neon sign. Off ramp to Winter Park. Again. And again. And again.

What stygian horror was this? Why were we being subjected to this mind numbingly boring exercise? Distracted thoughts turned to whether I should poke my little sister. It might provide some momentary scuffle, some enjoyment, a little drama when the wailing started. And the denials could stretch out a few more minutes. But then, as now, the blowback of tussling with the little red curls came with a high, high price. If the thumb leaves the mouth, trouble starts. Then maybe it's the wooden spoon. You don't want to the wooden spoon. The wooden spoon was very bad.

Oh I indulged. I gave into baser instincts. I don’t want to sugar coat it. I acted out. I whinged & complained and hit, & hogged the seat & undid the belt, & probably made things a lot worse.

See, when you’re a 34 or 35-year old mother of middle-class means with three kids under the age of eight, your learning opportunities to change & grow are necessarily restricted. So you find yourself in imperfect situations, where you have to improvise, like practicing for your Drivers' road test, getting on and off the highway with three kids in the back seat.

Truth be told, practically my Mother’s entire driver education career happened with her three kids buckled in in back. For the life of me, I don’t know how the lessons took. But they did. She took lessons from an instructor, and weekends would be for practicing with my father. On the ramp. Off the ramp. Parking lot. Park. Reverse. Again. Mom, can we goooo?

It would be years before I associated the boring drives to nowhere with the necessity of her practice. And then, the wash of shame would wave over me as I realized my role. Wow. In the real life driving game of life my poor Mom never got to play at anything other than the Expert level.

That might have had something to do with the failed tests.

Oh Yeah. My Mom failed her driving test. She failed it a lot.

She was cautious, she knew the rules, and she was a perfectly qualified novice driver, but it seemed like the action of testing & being judged was infinitely more difficult than learning to check mirror, signal, blindspots, kids in the back not killing each other.

Finally, in what has become family legend, my Mom’s driving instructor came up with the solution. A final, last minute refresher before her fifth crack at the test. “You know this,” he said. “You just have to stay calm, and not get nervous.”

Three kids under the age of eight. One of them a rambunctious proto-sociopath.

He sighed.

Then he slipped her a valium.

The time of the appointment grew closer. A few last minute parallel parks. My mom talked, and the driving instructor rolled his eyes.

“Try not to be too talky. Stick to yes & no if they ask you questions.”

Liiiiitttle bit slurry, y’see.

In the end, fifth time was the charm. And I can say with confidence that not only is my mother an excellent driver who has never been in an accident, I can’t even really recall any close calls with her behind the wheel.

Though I’m also pretty sure she doesn’t like going above sixty.

The message on the machine last night, then, was a thank you for the gift basket I’d sent Mom and Auntie & Cousin – just three of the wonderful mothers in my life. Anticipating the end of the weekend of kid-minding, I’d instructed them not to stint on the wine. My mom seemed to appreciate that, and look forward to the end of her shift.

“I’ll tell you this,” her message said. “God bless young mothers.”

Amen to that.

For all the white knuckle times, behind the wheel or not…thanks for everything, Mothers everywhere.

No, Really, Dude...shaddup!

2010-05-07T14:36:00.000-04:00

ALEX EPSTEIN has a really fun one on why alleged evildoers really can't help themselves.

The State of the Copyright Debate

2010-05-07T11:00:00.003-04:00

I LIKE MICHAEL GEIST. I think he's smart, I think he's provocative and writes well and certainly knows his issues from his perspective. But when he reports on creators' issues (and challenges going forward) with any new copyright law, this is the general quality of comment he attracts from his legions of copyright fans:

Heres a tip...
Hey, creators of music, movies, any type of IP, heres a tip. The world is changing, they way you do business has to change as well.
Try creating something that people will actually PAY for, like something decent for a change

Oh to be twenty-one (or thirty-three) and to be so blasé and dismissive about complex issues.

The problem with the copyfans & the fair use now advocates of all stripes is that they have a wonderful ability to view the debate in the most simple of terms. We can categorize those terms thusly:

Gimme.

The problem with gimme, of course, is that it's hard to plug into any kind of self-sustaining economic model by which artists get paid for their labors. Add to this the fundamental ignorance that people seem to have about the entire structure by which content creators currently get paid. You'll often hear this expressed as "I buy a book once, why do I have to keep paying for it?" or some such thing.

The impression seems to be that the true value of the art is paid for by the consumer at point-of-purchase. And that artists and content creators want some cushy deal that nobody else gets. (Ie: I paint your house once, and you keep paying me to paint your house for five more years, or until five years after I die, or whatever.)

What makes the idea of the art fundamentally different is three factors: 1) reproducability 2) timelines of creation 3) life of the artist

In the case of 1) reproducability let's take a painting, like the Picasso that sold for a record number this week. It's easy to understand why that fetched so much: it's unique. Picasso painted it, and it's the only one, and people like Picassos.

Consider what it would be like if the Rolling Stones had recorded, say, Exile on Main Street and everybody knew how great it was, maybe there had been a listening party or something, and then only one person could buy it. How much would that recording be worth? What about The Godfather? There was a film fest in 1972 and they showed The Godfather and everybody went apeshit, and then Francis Ford Coppola sold the film -- the original negative -- to one guy. And then only he got to show it to friends & lucky people. How much would that cost?

Obviously with these kinds of art, a market developed for reproductions. In fact the whole model of making money was based on reproduction & distribution of those copies. The artist creator gets a percentage of each copy, mass produced, rather than imbue all the value in the one, unique work. (ie: the painting, though in the case of the Picasso, there is both -- reproduction rights, and the value of hte unique original.) So we bought our Picasso posters & prints for dorm room walls, and our Godfather DVD or VHS box sets. So long as everything was physical, it was hunky dory. But digitization changed the value proposition -- because now the physical product that would kick back whatever percentage to the artist (instead of its true value in a lump up front a la the auctioned Picasso) doesn't sell anymore. Now, digital bits can flow freely -- and do -- through bit torrent networks & sharing sites & burned copies handed from friend to friend to friend.

"I pay for cable so I've paid already so I shouldn't have to pay a levy for a PVR."

No, Chester. What you did there, was pay for the pipe to bring content into your home. You paid the admission price to the museum. That doesn't give you the right to go home with the Picasso. You can be as petulant as you want; stamp your feet all you like. The facts are just not on your side here.

The problem then as it currently exists in our imperfect world is that the cure has been worse than the disease. People who've lawfully bought DVD's of their favorite show find they're locked down with DMCA anti copy crap that keeps them from playing them on the device they want, or from playing it on two computers, or streaming it to another location in their house... in short, the idea of what people want to do, lawfully, with the media they've bought and paid for has expanded, but the system is trying to keep it locked down. This is retrograde and contrary to the way that people want to use media.

The idea of blanket licensing & levies is a more European idea that says, "look, people will use it how they use it. We may not get 100% of the money for other uses, the way we used to when "other uses" meant film, TV sale, audio book on tape, trade paperback, etc. -- but we will at least get part of that money. And that is way better than suing your customers or gumming up everything with stupid digital locks that the nefarious types are just going to break anyway, leaving you in the position of punishing your most ardent fans or consumers. And content creators are the last people who want that.

2) Timelines of creation. Inevitably, when I challenge some asshole directly about "why should I have to keep paying blah blah blah" and find out what they do, they're somebody who wants to talk about things in terms of their job. So let's do that.

We'll take me as an example. I get paid to write now. It's a precarious job, because I'm totally self-employed, and I can't collect unemployment benefits. My income swings widely from year to year, yet I can't average the income, so when I make a lot, I can't put more of it away because I'm taxed like a Wall Street CEO, and when I make mouse fart money I can't even go on pogey.

Add to this the fact that, just like a doctor goes to Med School for years, and interns, and goes through residencies to get to where they are, I had to teach myself to write. It took years. More than a decade of pounding out crappy scripts in my spare time, not making a dime, working one or two jobs I hated. Artists do the same thing, but have to somehow afford paints and brushes or canvases. There's more than one artist I know who spent their time choosing between whether to eat or buy another canvas one day. I have a friend who's an opera singer who blows me away with the rundown of the costs of vocal coaching, exercises, money to go to places to audition, other professional training. All of this to get to the point where -- if they're lucky -- if they're very, very, very lucky, you might hear of them, and maybe want to buy something they made. Now you get to see if their investment in themselves-- let's call it "sweat equity" -- pays off. We can all make fun of Michael Bublé now, but truth is the guy worked his ass off for a lot of years to learn his craft. Watch a bit of Tréme and see how all those musicians enjoy cushy wonderful, gala-ridden lives getting to make a living. I got a brave bit of prediction for you here: those braying loudest on the copyright file: put you in that life and you couldn't cut it, even if you had the talent.

In short, part of what you're paying for that "every time" isn't the thing you've got in your hands. You're amortizing the entire apprenticeship period of that artist for when they weren't making a goddamn dime.

The timelines of creation are long. And the initial purchase price of a movie ticket or a DVD rental or an Itunes track does not fully reflect that sweat equity. In a world where the purchase of physical items breaks down, something needs to rise to replace that, so that the true value of the creative work can flow to the artist. Believe me, left to themselves, the corporations will always figure out a way to get you to shell out more -- and for the most part, you'll do it happily -- be it a Happy Iron Man Meal or some piece of shit that you don't need. And that will never flow back to the person who did the initial creating. Joe Schuster & Jerry Siegel had to sue to get money out of Superman, the character they created that made Time Warner BILLIONS. No, where people like the brave commenter above leave the track is in trying to get the artist paid for their labour. That's why these guys, so long as you bray about what your rights should be & crap all over efforts for artists to earn a living, or comment ignorantly as above....well....you can lick my sweaty neck. (I was going somewhere else with that, but my Mom occasionally reads this blog. Hi Mom. Thanks for the casserole.)

3) life of the artist

Let's take the case of Yann Martel. Yann Martel was a big deal in 2001 for publishing Life of Pi. Book clubs, Booker Prize, the whole magilla. Martel's been working on his followup for years. It's 2010. That's nine years. Nine years to come up with the new book.

And it came out. And critics are shitting all over it. It's starting to look like it might be a big flopperoo.

Ouch.

Once again, the artist takes a huge risk -- and it might not pay off. And there's a limited number of those things that you have in you. A novelist's career might span thirty years -- but it's going to have a number of flops. And the flops that make you nothing still take the same sweat, and tears, and toil, and time, and psychic grit to get through as the lauded successes. Courtney Love is just as batshit crazy when she puts out her good CD's as her bad ones. Clint Eastwood's lovely, meticulous filmmaking might give you Million Dollar Baby, or something lesser like Gran Torino, or hell, Space Cowboys. That's just the way it goes.

A TV writer has a shelf life, as well. There's some cruel math at work. You start out a young turk, have a few years to rise up. Maybe you get lucky and do something that hits, or maybe you don't and are a journeyman. But if you get 15 years in before you get aged out that's pretty lucky indeed. You have to make your bones how you can, fast as you can -- from as many different ways as you can.

The point is, the model is not, and never has been the same as a builder who builds a house and sells it to you. It is much more like an owner of a house on the beach that's very desirable and lovely that rents it out to people because it's desirable and lovely.

There is a lot that's shitty about copyright now that many artists don't agree with. I think that the copyright terms, which are now more than 75 years after death (what they call the Disney exemption, because that prevented Steamboat Willie from falling into the public domain) are ridiculous. I think there's got to be a way to allow mashups & stuff to happen.

(And keep in mind that there are mechanisms that do work here. Onceuponatime the argument was all about how hip hop was going to be killed by the man because of having to clear samples. Most samples were illegal. Now most samples are legally cleared. And there's no hip hop anywhere on the shelves, or on the Itunes charts, right? Please.)

I think that when it comes to something like "fair dealing" it's a finer slice. I think works should be able to be used for comment, parody, satire -- and limited educational use. But you know, agreements were reached on things like copying for school use in textbooks and things - and I see absolutely no reason to think that "it's too hard to police" is a valid argument why wide-open educational use of copyrighted materials should be expected. I also think it's a bit odious that Educational representatives, most of whom have pensions & tenure -- ie: job security, are arguing against a fair compensation regime for people who are essentially self-employed freelancers with none of those economic cushions.

I'm a consumer too. And I certainly think that current law does not work for the consumer and how our relationship to media has changed in the last few decades. And I sure as hell don't think a draconian, DMCA-style U.S. law will make things better. And the law should be forward-thinking, to encompass and provide a roadmap of how to do things in NEW media not conceived yet.

(At the very least, I would like the next law to deal with the fact that for years I've been able to lend a friend a book -- but now I can't do the same thing for an e-book. That, to me, is a restriction of my rights. And maybe if they want to go that way then an e-book really shouldn't be priced anywhere near a trade paperback. I'm not paying Amazon $14 for something I can't lend. $9, we'll talk.)

What I do know, is that in the copyright consultations last year, the thing that depressed me most was the disconnect between the people doing the creating, and the so called "copyright activists" demanding their "gimme."

It seems to me that if you're an "expert on copyright law," with legions of followers with whom you exhibit great influence, then part of your responsibility comes with truly engaging on the creator side of the equation, and figuring out a stand that you can articulate to your followers that doesn't involve content creators assuming all of the risk in the brave new world going forward. It's not enough to demand. You have to engage on a creator-friendly, not just consumer-friendly solution to the problem.

Because, quite frankly, you may be educating your followers on things like "fair dealing" and "digital locks," but a quick scan of your comments section shows a paucity of understanding of creator issues, and a powerful desire to roll people like me up in there with the big bad "them."

I don't think of myself or my friends as "them." But by allowing that linkage to go unchallenged, you hurt the very cause you claim to espouse, and wind up looking like someone fronting another self-interest group who may be agitating for a pyrrhic victory: widespread use of copyrighted materials isn't going to get you too far once nobody can afford to make any.

Except, I guess, Sony.

All Michael Bay, all the time. Enjoy that world. Brr.

UPDATE: Not often, but sometimes you get a comment that you read and think, "well that's a way better ending to the post than mine was." So it's promotion time! I'll give commenter John the last word on this post. Please feel free to continue discussing in the comments below. I'm going to bow out for a while because I'm still really quite ill, and I think it's time for a little hard napping.

John writes:

Nice work -- your posting is making the digital rounds.

I agree with you on almost everything you've written, and most of my disagreements would be minor quibbles on language. For instance, I despise much of the vocabularly of the larger copy-debate. Words like "draconian," "corporatist" and "DMCA-style" start my eyes a-rolling.

Unfortuanetly, that's exactly the vocabulary that gets the mob excited, which I guess is why it's so often used. What's the point of having an accurate, meaningful, well-informed discussion on the way to new legislation, when you can shout DMCA in a crowded theatre and start a stampede.

The leaders of the copyfight were all invited very early on to genuinely engage with professional creators, and it seems clear they all consciously chose a different constituency -- "lowest price is the law" consumers. It's a shame for everyone.

Amen to that.

Come To Think of It, I've Never Seen Her Birth Certificate...

2010-05-06T17:16:00.000-04:00

I'VE SERVED for two years on the Writers Guild of Canada National Council, and was recently acclaimed to a second term. Today the new executive convened for the first time with an important task: to select a new President to help guide the organization through the next two years, and advise the hardworking Executive Director, Maureen Parker, and her tireless staff.

I'm very pleased to say that by unanimous consent we selected somebody with her eye planted firmly on the next frontier of opportunity for writers: the digital realm.

Many of you will already know Jill Golick from her blogging & her extensive work in new media creation. There are great challenges ahead, and Jill's well poised to help us meet them.

Over at her place, you can read her first thoughts on the challenges ahead directly.

It's a new day.

Moving Forward on Copyright: The Creators' Voice

2010-05-06T17:05:00.001-04:00

MY PESSIMISM was at a high ebb yesterday, egged on no doubt by the nasty intenstinal flu I've been battling for the last three days. But today I was reminded that though the tea leaves don't look great for the Government's upcoming views on copyright, no one has yet seen the actual legislation.

Through the consultations last year, one of the things that I found most disturbing is how little actual truck anyone seemed to be giving to the needs and wishes of those who create copyrightable works. It's one thing to argue about the loss to academia & the public with restricted fair dealing; but it seemed to me that too many of those who argued for consumer-focused and friendlier copyright laws seemed to little consider or integrate thought of creators' rights; what they should expect from a future law. I was quite supportive of flexibility for consumers; it's just that the love from the other side seemed... shall we say, wan at best.

Academics and the public have a case for expanded rights. So do consumers, in terms of demanding flexibility for lawful uses and the right to be able to consume media as they wish. But at the same time, the ones with the most to immediately lose are creatives themselves. And what seemed to be on offer for us is a whole lot of unproven faierie dust about "alternative revenue" and "becoming more entrepeneurial" -- stuff that sounds great and romantic to a 21 year old with a guitar, but is probably less helpful for a screenwriter who needs $15 million in loan guarantees upfront to get a film made.

So there were other signals to be heard yesterday, too, apparently, from a government that insists it's not going to turn its back on content creators. So we'll see. In the meantime, the Creators Copyright Coalition, an umbrella group consisting of many different creators' groups, including songwriters, Screenwriters, Directors, book authors & performers, released their position on a forward-looking copyright law:

The Creators Copyright Coalition (CCC) is an alliance of 15 professional associations of individual creators and performers and copyright collective societies active in the theatre, the visual arts, the applied arts, literature, music, recording and audiovisual (radio, television, film and commercials). Together these 15 associations and collectives represent more than 100,000 creators (authors and performers) who are copyright owners.

CREATORS PUSH FOR COPYRIGHT REFORM

Toronto – Canadian creators are urging the government to adopt copyright laws that support arts and culture in Canada.

“There are key steps the government could take today to reform Canadian copyright laws that would balance the interests of both Canadian creators and consumers,” said Bill Freeman, Chair of the Creators Copyright Coalition (CCC).

On behalf of Canadian creators from across the country, the CCC is looking for the new copyright bill to:
Ratify the WIPO Internet Treaties
Update the private copying regime
Designate writers and directors as joint authors of AV works
Facilitate consumer access to content while ensuring creators are fairly compensated
No expansion of fair dealing
Institute strong penalties against content piracy

“Our coalition brings together organizations with diverse interests. We all agree that these points must be reflected in the new copyright bill if the government is serious about taking a balanced approach that respects content creators,” said Freeman. “We also look forward to bringing our perspective to the upcoming digital economy consultations. For example, we’ll urge the government to consider the potential for collective licensing to facilitate consumer access to our works while ensuring Canadian creators are compensated.”

Media Inquiries: Bill Freeman, CCC Chair, 416 203-2956, billfreeman@rogers.com

You can read more by clicking here to download the release, or just read more after the jump.

BACKGROUND ISSUES OF COPYRIGHT REFORM:

Position of the Creators Copyright Coalition

· Ratify WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty and WIPO Copyright Treaty. There is no good reason for Canada's conspicuous failure to fulfil our commitment to the WIPO “Internet Treaties”, which Canada signed in 1997. In order to implement the WIPO Internet Treaties, Canadian copyright law must be updated on several fronts including a ‘making available’ right, adequate anti-circumvention provisions, protection of electronic rights management information, and moral and economic rights for performers.

· Screenwriters and Directors should be designated as the joint authors of audio-visual works.

· To maintain the balance between consumers and creators, copyright law must build on existing royalty systems so that income flows to artists regardless of how digital media develops. For example, the private copying regime needs to be updated and expanded to apply to technologies that are ordinarily used by Canadians for private copying so that creators are fairly compensated for this use of their work.

· Creators are looking for changes to copyright law that would facilitate the clearing of permissions, wherever practicable, through collective societies. These rights-holder-run societies, which provide reasonable access to users and reasonable compensation to rights holders, need amendments to copyright legislation in order to be able to function effectively in the digital environment. The real challenge facing legislators is how to provide reasonable access to our cultural heritage to everyone, including artists, without undermining the copyrights that allow art making to be an economically viable profession.

· New exceptions should only be introduced where the market has failed or is not able to meet the legitimate access needs of users. When exceptions are necessary, they should be carefully constructed to ensure that they meet the 3-step test mandated by the treaties that Canada has agreed to honour. Canada should not adopt fair use or an expanded fair dealing exception which would weaken copyright protection and require copyright owners and users to look to the courts for interpretation.

· We need strong penalties to prevent piracy of our works. At the same time, the government should concentrate on copyright reforms that facilitate legal access which fairly compensates creators.

· We need effective complaint-based mechanisms for rights-holders who object to their work being made available online without their authorization. It is not the role of ISPs to determine the legality of material being transmitted through their networks.

MEMBERS OF THE CREATORS COPYRIGHT COALITION:

Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA)

American Federation of Musicians (AFM)

Canadian Actors’ Equity Association (Equity)

Canadian Artists Representation/Front des Artistes Canadiens (CAR/FAC)

Canadian Artists Representation Copyright Collective (CARCC)

Canadian Association of Photographers and Illustrators in Communications (CAPIC)

Canadian Music Centre (CMC)

Canadian League of Composers

Guild of Canadian Film Composers (GCFC)

League of Canadian Poets

Professional Writers’ Association (PWAC)

Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC)

Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN)

Writers Guild of Canada (WGC)

The Writers Union of Canada (TWUC)

Consultation, Schmonsultation

2010-05-05T16:27:00.000-04:00

THIS IS JUST relentlessly depressing on every single level. I am filled with disgust.

From Michael Geist:

PMO Issues The Order: Canadian DMCA Bill Within Six Weeks

The bill is not expected until June, but it will have dramatic repercussions once introduced. First, the bill represents a stunning reversal from the government's seeming shift away from C-61 and its commitment to a bill based on the national copyright consultation. Instead, the consultation appears to have been little more than theatre, with the PMO and Moore choosing to dismiss public opinion. Second, after adopting distinctly pro-consumer positions on other issues, Moore has abandoned that approach with support for what may become the most anti-consumer copyright bill in Canadian history.

This is the part where people usually write in and say, 'wow, what can we do about this!'

And my answer, this time is, not a Goddamn thing. You're Canadian. You're just going to sit back and eat it. And they know it.

The fuck with the funny coloured money & the own the podium shit. We really want to save money, let's just make it official: outsource governance to Washington.

We'd still get screwed on copyright, but hey, they have a health care bill now at least.