Charlie Jade's first season ends (in Canada, anyway)

The first show I ever worked on as a staff story editor (ie: not a freelancer) comes to an end tonight in Canada. It's called Charlie Jade. Staff jobs are hard to get in Canada. So the end of the season is a melancholy thing. Somewhat.

The season will air again, in Canada, or parts of it anyway, on A-Channel. And apparently we're on in Poland. Yeah! I love Poland!

But still not in South Africa. Mmm. SABC 3, what are you up to?

Anyway, here's what I posted about the end of the show on the Spacecast site: which is the message forum for CHUM's Space channel, the first broadcaster for CJ:

Ouroboros is the symbol of the snake eating its own tail.
The saga of Charlie Jade comes full circle tonight.

By now, the people who've stuck with Charlie Jade through our short Canadian summer have been a very dedicated group indeed. I wanted to take a moment and thank each and every one of you, not just on my behalf, but on behalf of everybody who worked on this show. I do this not because I'm so important -- my contributions to the show were as a lowly story editor/writer..I did nothing to get it going, I didn't carry water for years to get it made. I played my part. But I'm also the guy who for whatever reason is silly enough to post on these boards. So I want to talk a bit about the show, and what the people more important than me on it have said, and maybe a bit about who those people are and how the finale came to be.

In the last few weeks I've talked to actors, writers, editors, and producers who worked on the show. All are very proud of the work we did, very proud of how the show ultimately turned out. We all went in trying to make something that didn't look like your typical Canadian show, and didn't tackle stories like your typical American show. I think we did a pretty good job on that score. But what's gratified most of the people I've talked to about the show is that the audience that's watching GETS IT. We have been told, a lot, that it's "too challenging," that the mythology is "too complex." The pressure to dumb things down in TV, as in entertainment, is often deafening. It's a hard thing to resist that call, just because there is a lot of money involved. Maybe Charlie Jade will never be a mass-appeal show. But stubbornly, a bunch of people thought that maybe, just maybe, there was room to do something that was different and challenging. And we're very, very gratified that so many of you have come to it, and grokked it, and even tried to spread the word about it. Thank You.

The Executive Producer of Charlie Jade, & the co-creator, is a man named Bob Wertheimer. Bob spent -- I kid you not -- FIVE years of his life getting this show off the ground. There were times in Cape Town where Bob looked kind of like a ghost. A ghost who, um...yelled a lot...(Sorry Bob, you did. You were a big yelly-yeller.) Bob constantly wanted the envelope pushed. He wanted it not to look Canadian. Some of us -- all of us at some point -- thought that maybe Bob was going a little Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now on us... And maybe he was. Maybe that's what you have to do to get your vision out there. But he did it. And more. When all of us packed up and went home, Bob spent most of another year in post, shaping the show, color correcting it, working with SFX and sound mixing and supervising the music. It's kind of like his baby. And when you do that, you worry more than anything else in the world that someone is going to tell you that your baby's ugly.

But Bob did not create an ugly baby. Bob's baby is beautiful, and unique, and I firmly believe that even if there's only ever one season of Charlie Jade, it's still a show that I'm going to get asked about in ten years. It's a hell of a calling card. A great achievement.

Now a word about CHUM. There is NO WAY that any other corporation in Canada would have made something as offbeat and unusual as Charlie Jade. I don't know if the show will be a financial success for them -- that's just not my end of the business -- but as an artistic success, I think they have a lot to be proud of. The woman who oversees Chum's original, developed programming is Diane Boehme. Diane believed in Charlie Jade, too. Over the last few months, I've been diving into old TV shows, and listening to commentaries and stuff, and the thing that I have noticed is that every project that is edgy or different, and succeeds, requires one essential component that never gets talked about. The director and the actors and the writers get talked about -- okay, the writers don't get talked about, but never mind -- but no one ever talks about the executive at the network. They joke about 'suits.' And usually the term suit, is used pejoratively. Yet what I've found in the last few months is all those groovy shows that I love: Seinfeld, The Sopranos, The Office, Six Feet Under, Lost, Buffy -- all of them would never have happened without a determined network person fighting for them. Diane was that person for Charlie Jade. She has a really hard job. And she does it very very well.

A production is like a big dysfunctional family. And every production has its own challenges. For Charlie Jade, I was part of the second team of writers who came in on the project. That phrase "creative differences" is a great phrase because it describes so much that you can't understand if you weren't there. Sometimes things don't work out, and it's nobody's fault. Everybody needs to be driving the same bus in the same direction.

I got the job on Charlie Jade on a Friday. They wanted me to leave for South Africa that Monday. I had to shut my whole life down and move on a dime. About five days after getting the job, and less than forty-eight hours after getting my passport, I was in the harsh Cape Town sun trying to figure out where Bob wanted to go with this show.

There were three of us in the Story Department. The Head Writer was a Montreal-transplanted New Yorker named Alex Epstein. Alex has written a great screenwriting book and runs his own writing blog at http://complicationsensue.blogspot.com. Sean Carley was a writer that I knew because we went to the Canadian Film Centre together. Sean has written for Instant Star and Degrassi, but he loves, loves, loves sci-fi. Later, near the end, just as we were getting tired, we were joined by a delightful South African name of Dennis Ventner, who's posted here from time to time. Dennis writes sitcoms in South Africa. He's utterly charming and a good guy.

Alex and I and Sean and Dennis are very different people, with very different skills. That's what you need in a writing room. Story Breaking is hard, hard work, and you better have people who can come at it from a different perspective. Or you're dead.

The reason why I set the stage there on the writers is so you know going in that almost from the moment we arrived, the notion of the Season Finale was like a time bomb waiting to go off. We were afraid of it. How the hell do you tie up loose ends? What do you do? What do you leave unsolved? By the time we actually got to working on it, we were all shattered. Exhausted. We had our fights, we knew our quirks. Dennis Ventner, to my everlasting delight, nailed me in one phrase, apparently the phrase I would use in the writing room: "now. here's why I hate that."

Coming up with a last episode is HARD. It goes through so many changes, and Bob really had a demanding vision for it, for what he wanted it to be. But the realities of production also mean that you're under the gun in ways you don't understand: the actors are tired. The crew is tired. You have just about run out of money. How do you craft something that is worthy of the huge, expansive shots of the first few episodes, when you don't have any money left for those helicopters?

Well somehow we did it - but it took all the writers and Bob working on the script right up to and after the start of production. (We shot 18 last, so 20 was actually the 2nd last CJ script to get filmed.)

Once we got done with it, we handed it to the director, who's a Quebecker named Pierre Gill. Now -- Pierre was actually a big DOP who was making the jump to Directing. He was a good friend of one of our other great Charlie Jade directors, a great guy named Eric Canuel. Pierre took the story department's script and knocked it out of the park. Bam! His vision of things, of design, of shots and everything -- he made difficult locations work. He made the material sing.

Two other people that haven't been mentioned really helped make this finale, and the whole series look great: the editors, Isabelle Levesque and Simon Webb.

Sometimes an editor is handed footage to do an assembly of an episode and you watch that full assembly and you go, "uh oh." It is humbling to see a really good editor fix your mistakes, the mistakes of the director, the art department, the camera department, the sound department, the actors -- they are really your line of defense. Simon and Isabelle worked with Bob and made a show out of what was shot, and sometimes out of what was not shot.

Then there's all the other people I haven't mentioned: the hard working South African crew, and talent. Adam Shully, the producer who kept the whole machine humming; the office people, the security people...CJ was not an easy shoot. Everyone worked hard. Everyone came through.

When you watch the show tonight, you're going to see a name come up at the end. Bob Wertheimer, and the other creator and exec producer, a great guy named Chris Roland, gave up their credit tonight in memory of Robin Spry.

Robin was one of CJ's producers. He was a kind man who worked very hard into his sixties, at a time when other people would have rested on their laurels. And if you track Robin's long career going back decades in Canadian broadcasting, you'd see his laurels were many. (And his dad founded the CBC!) Robin, sadly, died in an automobile accident last winter. He never got to see the finished show that he helped make happen. I'm glad his name is on the finale of CJ. It's good work, and everyone who worked with him and felt his kindness remembers him with fondness and prayers.

So that's it. Thanks for watching CJ. I hope that the second season -- storylines for which are being worked on right now, though not by me -- does get financed and made. It would be wild to go on that coaster again. I hope that maybe I'd be a part of it, but who knows. That's to be seen.

For my part, CJ has been a very good thing for my career. It's allowed me to have meetings that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. I've made friends and new collaborators that I hope will bear fruit for years to come.

Thanks for listening to my ramblings and way too long posts on this show. I hope you've gotten something out of them. Most of all, I would ask that if you believe CJ is worth it, keep telling people. Tell people when the show goes to A Channel. If you have friends in the USA or Britain, get them to bug their broadcasters. If you're in the Seattle/Vancouver/BC area -- I think Bob Wertheimer and Jeff Pierce will be at some convention there around Labor Day, promoting Charlie Jade. if you're nearby, check it out.

It's hard to imagine in these days of the internets, but once upon a time, say, 1969, 1970, Star Trek fans were a much smaller group. They kept that show alive and carried the torch for it and their perseverance eventually paid off. I may occasionally seem perplexed by some strange attitudes that come from fans, but there's no denying that fans of a show are their most valuable resource. You guys get to carry the ball now. I know you'll carry it well.

Thanks for listening.

His Master's Voice

A few years ago, in a previous life, I was a television producer at a hip TeeVee station. I would do the kinds of stories where you talked to authors, people plugging their new book, videogame, pyramid scheme -- things like that. I didn't do many musicians - there were other people for that. I did lots of people who were big in advertising and marketing. Though I was tangentally related to that field, mostly the act of interviewing those people made it utterly clear to me that, boy, was I ever glad that I had not sought out a career in advertising and marketing.

Being an interviewer and producer was a strange gig, especially at this place where there was such high turnover; that kind of low level info tv is a factory -- you churn out one story after another, each one as disposable as the last. I was always an "off-camera interviewer." It meant that you tried to keep your questions short, and leading. You were constantly trying to get people to expound - not to have a conversation with you, but to talk for posterity, like they were communicating directly with that audience of one, watching at home. If you do it long enough, you start to feel like a ghost. You become about process, ever aware of the camera and the clip. It got so I could hear when we were coming near the end of the tape, because of the change in the whirring of the camera motor. I would always get my camerapeople to turn out the red light, and tell them to start rolling early, and just ease into the conversation. People got less nervous when you did that. While they were talking, you became the master of not interrupting, of feeding back signals of response that weren't verbal. A whole lot of smiles, and nods, and hand motions - everything short of speaking so that your voice wouldn't be heard on the tape. You learn to listen in clip. As you followed the conversation, there would be a dispassionate part of you that said, "bing. there's my opener. bing. that's a closing clip. bing. there's the clip I need to bridge the piece." You were simultaneously of the moment, deep in the conversation, and utterly apart from it.

Rarely in this life do people get to talk, really talk, as long as they want to. Conversation demands that you follow along, that you engage the other person; that you cede ground and give and take. An interview isn't like that at all. You could always tell the media-trained people, who spoke in soundbites and never veered off the mark. But with other people, civilians, the same pattern would always emerge. People can talk on one subject for about twenty seconds. Sometimes as much as thirty, but usually not much more. After that amount of time, they either go off on a tangent, run out of steam, or start repeating what they've already said. Try it sometime. It's uncanny.

Over the course of a few years, I probably interviewed close to five hundred people. Just the ghost in the chair listening to clip as the camera motor whirred. A couple of times in my social life, people would grow cross with me as they caught me "interviewing" them. They would call me on it, and ask me to stop. One woman put it best, when she said to me, "I'm not sure I like you when you do that. You go so far away."

Looking back on it, I realize that job for was perfect preparation for what I do now, though my life couldn't be more different. Then, I'd meet fourteen new people each week. Now, I spend most of my time alone, and the people I try to make speak, are entirely fictional constructs. Though some of those advertising types would give them a run for their money on that score.

What's remained is that separateness, that apartness. Part of actually being a writer, a working writer, is having an ability to disengage from the world, and from the people around you. To take that step back; to listen for the clip, the line, and notice the inflection and the rolling cadence of how people talk. Sure, it's artificial. But when you saw my interviews on the TeeVee, they were naturalistic, and you believed them. And that's just what I'm striving for when I write a script. It takes an awful lot of craft, and stepping back, to make things seem natural. To create a believeable world, one must sometimes take yourself out of this one.

For a long time I thought those years spent talking to people as an off-camera interviewer were wasted years; an unfortunate eddy that I'd followed for a while. For a long time, I saw that time of my life as a man who knew what he wanted to do, but lacked the courage to do it.

Now I'm not so sure. Though those interviews became tedious near the end -- I knew I had to get out when I found myself with a pasted-on smile listening to some guy talk about his new Molson ad thinking, "I could reach across right now and poke out your eyes, and you'd probably keep on talking about the breakthrough creative of your cheesy beer ad," -- I gravitated toward that job for the same reason as I settled into this one: because it suited something in my personality. I never wanted to be the centre of attention: not at work, anyway. But I did want to pull the strings.

I can hear the camera motor. I'm almost out of tape. And to think, I started out this entry wanting to explain what "Dead Things On Sticks" meant. Ah well. I'll get to that.

Slawkopalooza!

So Slawko Klymkiw, doyenne of the CBC Schedule, is taking Wayne Clarkson's job at the Canadian Film Centre. And he's leaving CBC in the middle of a cute, honkin management lockout. Niiiiice optics, there, guys.

Clarkson's gone to Telefilm, where he at least canceled that stupid deal where they were going to find Canadian stories by asking CAA in L.A. The Telefilm job opened up because Richard "I'm an important cultural bureaucrat" Stursberg went to CBC, which really cheesed Slawko so he eventually decamped to the CFC, in the middle of the largest lockout in CBC History.

It's like that "Circle of Life" sequence from The Lion King, except without all the carcasses lying on the savannah.

How does any of this result in more, healthier Canadian drama on television? Ya got me.

Click Slawkopalooza! above for the full story.

What am I doing?

A writer's day is procrastination. I live alone, I work alone. There are three things I'm supposed to be working on right now. Four or five, if you count the friends' "can you take a look at this-es?"

I don't know how long I'm going to do this for. I don't know why I'm doing this. Like all writers, I'm a little narcissistic, but not quite as narcissistic as any actor you're likely to meet.

What I crave is to be in Production. I'm a great Production writer. I write fast, I have energy, I'd like to think I'm good in the room.

Sitting on my brokedy-ass couch working on development stuff is like a long slow root canal performed by that dentist Steve Martin played in Little Shop of Horrors. Without the singing.

So, procrastination. Wait, there it is. The guilt bell.

Thank you, Catholicism. Guilt calls. Gotta go.