Lessons of the Sith

Boy, Star Wars: Episode III sucked.

I remember when I saw it last May. I was in New York for a few days for a family wedding and they had digital projection at the AMC on 42nd Street. So I bought my ticket to a matinee and settled in.

Undeniably powerful in places, sure, but I remember audibly groaning at most of the dialogue - and I wasn't the only one. After it was over I trundled out into the greatest city in the world and, you know, found a bar.

I really didn't think too much more about it. Well, since the DVD's out, last night on a lark I decided to rewatch it with my critical eye. I guess it's good when art allows you to salvage some meaning, even if it's not the meaning the creator intended.

REFLECTED DRAMA, RELY ON IT YOU MUST NOT.

Now that we've seen the three films of Lucas' second trilogy, the whole "why did they suck," "are they really kids films" etc. Let's lay all that fanboy stuff aside. What struck me watching the third film a second time was, though it was easily the best of the flawed second trilogy, it also relied heavily on you bringing your knowledge of the first trilogy into it. In fact, most of the emotional moments were tied and predicated on you knowing what happened next. Yet they did nothing to reveal or recontextualize those moments. I see this a whole lot in student scripts and scripts by new writers people ask me to read. A crime drama that spends so much time referencing Pulp Fiction or Goodfellas, that there's not really any room for any spark of originality. The fact that Lucas was cannibalizing himself was just sad. Really, you have to ask yourself, what beyond circumstantial evidence (the "CSI-what's") did you learn about the turning of Anakin from watching the third film?

In structuring the second trilogy, I think the biggest mistake they made was making it the story of Anakin. Because we know what happens to Anakin. The hero of the first trilogy is not Anakin, it's Luke. The natural heroic journey for the second trilogy would have been to track Obi-Wan. Then maybe you could have had an interesting character exploration -- how does one man's failure lead to the loss of a friend forever?

Near the end of Sith, it gets interesting for about fifteen seconds when Anakin thinks that there's something between Obi-Wan and Padme.

Now there's a story.

A triangle! Wow! I get it! A triangle between Padme, Obi-Wan and Anakin would have given the whole second trilogy so much more heft. The friendship would have been messier, it would have given rise to jealousies real and imagined. It would have given Obi Wan some soul. Imagine having to step aside because the woman you loved loved someone else?

Nah. Probably wouldn't have worked. Certainly didn't work in say, oh, I don't know... the King Arthur mythology.

What did the entire "Jedi's must not love" thing serve? And where did it come from? I mean, the idea of courtly love is a big part of the Knights of the Round Table, which is presumably the inspiration for the Jedi.

Throughout the first trilogy, whenever you heard about the Jedi Knights, you got a great chill. It was great. But by the second trilogy, the Jedi Knights became the Jedi Order. And ... you know... not so much with the chill. In fact, more with the yawning than the chilling.

Watching Episode III, I kept thinking that the fatal flaw that made the Jedi boring was this: with the dark side, you give in to your bad emotions. Okay, yup. Got it. That's not good.

But the Good side of the force, as embodied by the Jedi, seem to me to be not about keeping those bad emotions in check (which is interesting, and indicative of actual human struggle) but learning not to feel them at all. And why do I want to watch a film about characters who don't feel anything?

Pretty retarded.

WHEN WRITING GENRE, TO THE FANBOYS DO NOT LISTEN

Fanboys always like to nitpick. And George Lucas is nothing if not the ultimate geek. Fanboys like to know the reasons why spaceships work, and how this thing could happen. Trying to play that game is ri-dic-u-lous. They will find flaws that aren't there. And if you play that game, you'll wind up going down some weird paths.

Exhibit A: The MidiChlorians. No one cared how The Force worked. Exhibit B: Ben Kenobi and Yoda appearing after their deaths. No one cares that that's a skill that needed to be learned. It was nice to bring back a name check to Qui-Gon or whatever his name was, but in a film with nine endings, it just wasn't needed.

Ten or twelve minutes could have been cut from the ending by just getting to the hero shot of his uncle and aunt holding baby Luke on Tatooine.

COOL EFFECTS SHOW DON'T TELL DOES NOT MEAN

There's an article in the Globe & Mail today, picked up from the WSJ, that talks about how visual effects are becoming more cost effective for TV shows. I think they use the example that there are 200 more effects shots now in each episode of Smallville than there were a few years ago. And an effect that once cost $7500 now costs only $1500 to reproduce. One of the speculations is that this, combined with the move toward bigger TV's, might shift TV from being more about the writing and the story to the spectacle, a la the movies. Of course this means that TV then becomes a director's medium, just like film is now.

Once again, based on the example of Sith, and that whole second trilogy: I call bullshit.

George Lucas could have done anything. He proved pretty muscularly that he could show anything. That whole final fight on the Lava planet is some pretty jaw-droppingly awesome stuff.

But the rest of the film, the big ugly middle, is all talking. We hear about plots and plans and suspicions, and never see them. The film finally takes off only when the Jedi start getting offed. At least that's visual.

I have zero patience for the whole writer vs director pissing match. It's why I don't have much ambition to ever work in film. But the thing is: the directors who make good movies are the ones who actually do have an understanding of story.

Most directors I know think in terms of visual sequences, and cool moments, but not in terms of story. The ones who do -- Clint Eastwood, say -- inevitably turn in richer, better films. George Lucas is not a story guy. Michael Bay is not a story guy. And you know it from the second you see their films.

You know what show I've been watching a lot of lately? South Park. And you know the thing about South Park that's great? The stories. They actually have nice, simple, executable, logical stories.

George Lucas could learn a thing or two from Trey Parker and Matt Stone. I know he's developing series based on the Star Wars universe right now.

Whether I watch one second of those series is entirely dependent on whether he steps up and hires a showrunner. A writer.

Spectacle might fool me into the theater. But it won't keep me coming back week after week.

Which leads me to the final lesson of the Sith:

SURROUND YOURSELF WITH SYCOPHANTS, YOU MUST NOT

If there was ONE person around Lucas who could speak truth to power, maybe the films could have been better. Rick McCallum, you hack, I'm looking at you. Or whoever.

But for powerful producers or spec monkeys alike, the lesson is the same: you need someone reading your shit who will call you on your shit. Some writers I know are married to that person. That's great. For some, it's a trusted friend, or a fellow traveller. Whatever. Find that person you must. Or suck your work always will.

Haiku Happy Place

Ah, the glamor. Another working weekend living the dream. Freelance is Awesome! I leave you with a soothing ode to the power of Network Notes delivered Friday.

Act one foolishness
Can it really be the truth
Must I raise the stakes

Oh my comic foil
They want more drama for you
Will the center hold

A writer friend told
Of a notes call filled with bile
And it went like this

"It will be funny
That we know for sure" he said
Like it was easy

Revision mode on
Turn jokes from black to bright red
Different not better

And yet much was good
Suggestions that spark and flame
How can you ask more

Somewhere I'm making
Closing arguments at trial
The road not taken


Have a fabulous weekend.

Who's to Blame for Arrested Development?

Well, it doesn't look good for the Bluth Co.

FOX yesterday benched Arrested Development for the remainder of the November sweeps. VARIETY and others are reporting that the episode order was also cut from 22 to 13.

Now it's true that FOX has cut the episode order every year, but never this much. No one seems to be saying cancellation yet, but you have to assume the writing's pretty much on the wall.

I was one of four million tuned in to see the show's post-baseball return on Monday, and I laughed pretty hard the whole hour. But sadly, though those numbers weren't that far off what the show has done this season, two Very Bad Things combined to put the shiv to the further adventures of the Bluths: the show dragged down the ratings for Prison Break, which follows it...and number two: reruns of Prison Break in that timeslot tend to do better.

(By the way, Kitchen Confidential also got the same no-love treatment, but let's not dwell on the further misadventures of Ex-Alias and Buffy alums.)

There's going to be lots of blame-gaming coming down the pike in the next little while. So, really, who's to blame?

There will be tons of fanboy rage directed toward FOX. But I don't think that's fair. I was shocked when they renewed it at all. Gutsy move. They've done their best trying to get Arrested an audience. They haven't been stingy with timeslots or promo power. The show won Emmys galore, and they knew they had a prestige project on their hands. Compared to say, Family Guy, I can honestly say that FOX seemed to always treat Arrested with respect and with a genuine concern that the show didn't seem to connect with an audience.

Do you blame the creators for making a show that wasn't accessible?

Well, maybe. I don't know. I've got to confess that this entire third season, the show has felt to me like they're just doing things to make themselves laugh. Which is fine, because that's exactly my sense of humor and I find the show hilarious. But I can see how the show was impenetrable to people who hadn't tuned in before. And let's face it, if you can't get an audience for a show where Charlize Theron is your guest star, there has got to be something else going on.

Do you blame the audience?

I'm sure you're going to see some of these articles. Critics hate it when people don't watch the things they praise -- even though that's hardly a rare occurrence. Here in Canada, there will be the inevitable examples that point to Arrested's failure to thrive as an example of how dumb or unsophisticated the US viewing audience is. (Seriously, there's a small and persistent population of cultural elitists who love playing that game. This, in a country that played Variety shows in Prime Time with people playing fiddles into the 1990's. Tommy Hunter. Rita MacNeil. Brrrr.)

Arrested was a dense show. It moved fast and furiously, it didn't circle back and include you in. I watched my parents watch it one night, and they were...completely...utterly....totally lost. Actually, it was kind of sweet.

But at the same time, I feel pretty leery about blaming the audience because they didn't like a show. LOST is a hit, and it's smart. But it also appeals to a very large group of people -- probably lots who aren't smart. Arrested demanded that you follow, and that you know things, and that you were quick.

I went to the Genie Awards a few years ago (they're like Canada's Oscars, except, um...soooooo Not) and, if you can picture this, filmmaker after filmmaker got up and basically berated the audience (who wasn't watching on tv) for not going to see these "great" Canadian movies that were winning all the awards. To them, it was fully and completely the audience's fault. Imagine their impertinence, not showing up to see the nominated masterpieces! I wanted to throw up.

Nope -- blaming the audience isn't gonna get you anywhere, son.

So the thing I keep coming back to is this: maybe it's no one's fault.

Network TV is in such a squeeze right now that I can't exactly blame them for benching a comedy that underperforms, especially when they give every opportunity for it to catch on and find an audience. Seinfeld started out disastrously too, after all. NBC gambled and it paid off eventually. FOX gave Arrested the good ride, and it just didn't pan out.

And 4 million viewers, or 5 million viewers -- is that really such a small number? If the real estate wasn't so expensive, Arrested wouldn't be such a disappointment. We crow over the Daily Show and Chappelle's show and The Shield and Battlestar Galactica -- but those shows don't reach nearly the amount of people as Arrested did on its worst week.

And it's not like My Name is Earl or The Office are burning up the airwaves over on NBC, either. Scrubs is smart, and hilarious, and it's never had a big audience.

Maybe it's just time to admit that comedy, unlike drama, is such a hard medium, and so dependent on taste, that the idea of a wide-appeal comedy might be a thing of the past. In a world where everyone's experience is fragmented, when we all have different touchstones and obsessions, maybe there's no middle ground to make that broad appeal comedy TV series anymore.

Or maybe Americans really do want to see more fat guys with skinny wives. I don't know.

I'm just glad Arrested got its three seasons, however truncated. And you bet I'll pull the chair up to the TV the next time I see Mitch Hurwitz has a show.

That Wacky Josh Friedman

Just look at what that scamp is up to.

Where do you start?

It's not an easy question when you're trying to design an original television series.

First there are the numbers. If you're doing a half hour, you're probably trying to come up with a three act story that tops out at twenty-one minutes of screen time. If you're doing an hour, you're aiming for about 42-44 mins of story (it's different in Canada and the US) and either four or five acts.

Now, here's another number: 56. That's the number of years narrative dramas have played into people's homes. (That's taking an arbitrary date of 1950 as a time when TV started to be in a lot of homes. In Canada, it would be 1952. As I'm learning from John Doyle's delightful new book, A Great Feast of Light, if you're Irish that date's sometime in the early 1960's. Anyway, go with me here.) The point is that we're now into the fourth generation of stories being written for television. With every year, the audience has seen more plots. And hybrids of plots. And post-modern deconstructions of plots. Anyone need a mimosa yet?

So you're trying to come up with a show. (In the USA, if you're trying to do this, you're likely a writer with a whole lot of money and a shiny career, which really does beg the question, "what the hell are you doing reading a blog by some poor bumpkin in Canada?"

What an excellent question. "I'm sorry, I really can't comment on that as it's the subject of an ongoing investigation." This is how I think we should all answer uncomfortable questions from now on. But I digress.)

In Canada and I think in some other places around the world, the above isn't the case. In Canada you have many mid-level writers trying to pitch shows because getting a development deal to write six or thirteen shows is often the only way that you can get work. It's a little nutty, but whatever.

So - your show. Presumably you've got yourself a kickass concept, (the premise) and you've populated the ensemble with interesting and compelling characters who read as something other than an amalgam of cliches over those 56 years of television burned into your bones like white phosphorus (let it not be said that I'm not current.)

Maybe you even have a first draft of your bible. Now you want to sit down and come up with your pilot episode.

And the question I asked in the title of the post immediately pops up. Where. Do. You. Start?

Premise vs. Backstory

It's not an easy question to answer. If you've read any screenwriting book, you probably know the dictum to always "enter late, and leave early." Well, how does that apply to a pilot?

At the end of the day, I think it comes down to how you define your Premise, and how you define your Backstory.

When people talk about a "Premise Pilot," they mean a show that tells the story of how so-and-so came to be. Moonlighting is a premise pilot since it tells the story of how Maddie and David started working together. Friends is partly a premise pilot -- because it tells the story of how Rachel comes to be part of the group. Interestingly, lots of the other relationships are already in play, and clearly defined. You don't learn how Chandler and Joey met -- that's in the backstory. Frasier is a premise pilot - his Dad moves in with him, and they hire Daphne Moon, and Niles immediately falls in love with her. In the British Coupling, Steve is dating Jane at the beginning and has fallen for Susan by the end - what has been before is no longer, we are into a new reality. You've told the story of how your premise came to be. Compare that to The West Wing - Bartlet has been Mr. President for a year, and the staff are already all in place in their jobs. The Trailer Park Boys are up to no good in the very first episode. In The Office, BBC Crew is already following David Brent and the poor drones of Wernham Hogg all around Slough, and Tim is already ass over teakettle for Dawn. That's not a premise pilot. You're just thrown in the middle and asked to catch up.

I got thinking about this partly because I'm in the middle of developing three pilots, and partly due to a convo they've been having about an existing show over on another site.

Brollywood Does Weeds

Over at Brollywood they've been pondering the pilot of Weeds. (I know it's old news to you Yanquis, but up here North of the 49th Parallel we're only on episode 4 or so. I've seen the whole series and love it. How have I seen the whole thing? NEVER YOU MIND.)

Here's the relevant passage:

But damn, it takes off at a brisk clip. Normally the first episode of a show like that, you’d expect to start off before all this happened. Meet the happy housewife, blissfully unaware of what fate has in store for her. We’d meet the husband, see how wonderful everything is. Then at the end of the first act, the husband would keel over dead. Oh no, what will she do? She finds out there’s no money, she’s desperate. She somehow gets hooked up with her supplier and, at the end of the ep. she plunges into the world of dealing pot to bored suburban hypocrites.

That’s what’s called a premise pilot. It tells the “origin story” for the show. If this was a movie, it would basically be act one. We start with the protagonist in her ordinary world, then we have an inciting incident - her husband dies. She reacts to that incident by leaving the ordinary world and crossing the threshold into the extraordinary world of the story. That would be your act one turning point.

But not this time. The very first scene of this pilot, we meet the protagonist at a sort of PTA meeting where she’s debating with her best friend about whether they should remove all sugary soft drinks from the school vending machines or spare the diet soda. It’s got nothing to do with anything, except maybe to characterize the friend. All the stuff that sets up the show has already happened - we never meet the husband because he’s already dead. We just get hints in the whispered gossip among the women in the audience wondering how she’s doing.

Similarly, the question of how she got introduced to these drug wholesalers from a very different side of the tracks, and how it occurred to her that the thing to do under the circumstances was start dealing pot is almost completely ignored. She’s just there in the kitchen, with pot all over the table, while they bag it up and weigh it and banter with each other. There was one quick reference to someone’s brother hooking them up or something - it went by so quickly that I mostly missed it.

The logistics of how she found her suppliers, I’m not worried about. Obviously they found each other somehow, because there she is. But the whole “I’m going to sell pot to support my family” thing is another story. That’s a pretty huge leap, and I’m not sure we can be expected to buy it just because they show her dealing. There’s a weird feeling about it, and I want to know what other options she considered and rejected beforehand.

Still, they mostly got away with totally skipping the setup and just dropping us in the middle of act two. TV is getting more and more sophisticated all the time, and relying more and more on the sophistication of the audience.

Now for the record, I agree with Sullivan's contention that the audience is becoming more sophisticated. And also that stories are being told faster and faster. In fact, if there's a persistent weakness in Canadian development, I think it's how little the people here seem to trust the audience. Things are always being over-explained.

(Shit, here he goes, off on a tangent again: I promise this one will be quick. Three examples: If you watch the commentary of the pilot for E.R. there is a lot of talk about how the network was freaking out about all the medical jargon. It moved too fast and no one would understand all these crazy tests. People would become confused and tune out. Instead, it changed the medical drama forever. Example 2: the film Rounders. All sorts of arcane poker talk, none of it explained. No 'window in' if you didn't understand the jargon. It made the film fresh and real, and oh, by the way, anticipated the poker craze by at least three years. Example number three: When I was a resident at the Canadian Film Centre, we were lucky enough to have a visit from Peter Casey, the Executive Producer and one of the creators of Frasier. He told the story that when they were designing the show, they knew they wanted Frasier and Niles to be erudite, and make jokes about literature, opera, and the like. For the people they were suppposed to be, it was a no-brainer, but the network was nervous. They didn't want to turn the audience off or make them feel dumb. Casey and his partners responded that those jokes would just be "10 percenters," as in 10 percent of the audience would get them, and they'd be happy with that. It wouldn't turn anyone off, because there would be enough for everyone to laugh at throughout the show. Well, after Frasier was on the air for 4 or 5 weeks, they got some interesting feedback. They found that somewhere between 40 to 50 percent of the audience was getting the 10 percenters. He paused at this point and took a sip of water. "Which begs the question," he smiled, "the shows that won't go for the 10 percenters -- what level are they being aimed at?")

Where Brollywoodster and I part ways is on this question of what is Premise and What is Backstory? I would argue that the impulse to start the show with the happy housewife, and having her deal pot by the end of the show, would be such a wrenching, disconnected, awful slog that the show would have never gotten past the pilot. Jenji Kohan probably would have gotten a mountain of stupid notes saying that the whole thing was too unrealistic. You would have to deal with all sorts of things that aren't dramatically interesting.

Then there's the problems of characters acting like characters and how do you arc out a season? In Weeds, Mary Louise Parker is clearly frustrated and grieving, but has started to try and pick up the pieces of her life. If the husband dies in Episode One, you have all sorts of problems: the grief of the family is raw, and full of histrionics. That kind of grief may play well come Emmy time, but it's not as dramatically interesting as aftermath and trying to start over. How do you make the leap from grief to we have no money, to I'm going to deal pot? How do you have her date someone in episode 9 or 10 if the audience thinks, "you should still be mourning?"

Everything in the above paragraph is the basis for a Lifetime movie, but none of it resembles the series Weeds. Weeds is about the contradictions between the suburban ideals, and the "real world" of dealing pot. It's a great metaphor, or satire, or whatever. And by starting the pilot with the complicated issues of backstory out of the way, Jenji Kohan was able to deliver Showtime a show that did reflect what the rest of the series would be like.

Instead, you have a very cagey first scene with Mary Louise Parker on the fringes of the PTA meeting. We see her attachment to suburban affectation by the four dollar iced coffee she's sipping. We see the shallowness of the concerns af the Agrestic wives, and the climate of gossip that surrounds the "new widow." And for good measure, we get a nice dollop of wicked satire -- she'll argue to the wall against sugared drinks in the schools, but, oh, by the way, she's a pot dealer.

Deciding what is backstory and what is premise is really difficult sometimes, especially when what happens in your backstory is compelling. Network people, particularly, will sometimes try to push you toward including it. But you have to keep in mind "what is your template going to be?" Ie: What is going to happen every week. If the premise pilot strays too far from that template, you have got to seriously think, and re-think, and re-think again, the story that you're going to tell in that first episode.

For my money, the smartest thing The West Wing ever did was throw you right in the middle. Because down the road, it gave you four or five episodes where you could flash back and explore the backstory once the audience already knew and loved the characters.
I'm not sure I would have ever tuned into Rescue Me, if it had shown what happened to Tommy and Jimmy on 9/11.

Here's another current Canadian example: DaVinci's City Hall. Yup, it probably would have been pretty interesting to see how Dominic DaVinci fought and won an election, but that's not where you want the stories to be every week. Haddock et al were intersted in how DaVinci exercises power, not how he campaigns to get it. So yup, you've got a fascinating backstory; but it's not your show.

In the current scripts I'm developing, one is a premise pilot, because the template of the show is students living together in a residence, and how that changes them. So you need to see the people they are first, and how they come together.

I've struggled a bit more with the hour-long show I'm developing. It's set in an office, in a field where there haven't been a lot of shows set before. (or, um...any.) I wanted to try and avoid having to over-explain things in the episode, but in the end I've gone with "it's so-and-so's first day," because I felt that it would help the audience to see the story through a fresh set of eyes. But at the same time, I'm not sure it's a premise pilot, because it's not about how the place is changed by this new person coming onto the scene: it's more about how that new person experiences the place when she's thrown headfirst into the environment.

Anyway. Where do you start? Big question.

Unfortunately, I can't address it any further since it's the subject of an ongoing investigation.

The Struggle for the CBC ...well, um...duh.

Almost fifteen years ago, I was working one of my first jobs in television. I was a Researcher/Story editor on a ridiculous call in show on a small Public Educational TV Network here in Canada. (It was literally a phone in show. That's right. Radio on TV.)

Anyway, the host was this irascible old Newfie broadcaster named Harry Brown. Harry had been around forever. He had stories for everything and opinions to match. Sometimes Harry was a bit much, but he was our host and he'd been in the business forever, and I was all of twenty-one. So I listened.

One time we were on a remote in Ottawa. (It may have been radio on TV, but at least this time it was radio on TV on location.) We were driving from the University of Ottawa back to our hotel. On the drive we passed by the CBC Headquarters in Ottawa. Harry was an old CBC type from way back. He pointed at the building and turned to me and shook his head and said, "There it is. CBC Headquarters. One thousand people work in that building. And the place is completely innocent of camera or microphone."

I couldn't believe that such a huge building could house so many employees that had nothing to do with the actual work of broadcasting radio or TV. I was young, and obviously had a lot to learn about the CBC.

My thoughts returned to that day several times during the recent eight week lockout of creative employees by CBC Management. The incident made the CBC a joke around the world -- I mean, the national broadcaster basically shut down for two months.

The reverberations from that are ongoing, but one of the most depressing things to come out of the chicanery and bloviating that surrounded the "labor disruption" (to use the management weasel-phrase) was the sense that the CBC will probably never be fixed, because the very people charged to fix it are...um...the problem.

An excellent article in last Sunday's Toronto Star sketches the enormity of the problem, and offers a pretty provocative solution.

Which of course will never, ever, ever happen.

In some parts of the CBC, there is one manager for every 3 employees.

As a writer, I have never pitched a program to CBC. I don't even know who I'd pitch. I mean, I know names. There are six or seven of them. But who does what? Comedy doesn't seem to only do comedy. Some miniseries are done by the series department. There are TV series that didn't go through the drama series department.

Who do you call? Beats me.

Read the article here.

Orange on a Toothpick

Below, in the rollicking comment free-for-all, Jutra writes:

I am attending my first casting session this week.. What does one look for at these?? Does anybody know what makes a good actor for TV?

That's easy.

A huge head.

I am hardly the first to notice this, but I will for the sake of the argument, defer to the great early Scottish casting genius, Stuart MacKenzie:

"Would ya look at the size of that kid's head! It's the size of a planetoid and it has its own weather system! ... I'm not kidding, that boy's head is like Sputnik; spherical but quite pointy at parts! Aye, now that was offsides, now wasn't it? He'll be crying himself to sleep tonight, on his huge pillow."

South Park doesn't have things far off. Neither do the makers of those bobblehead dolls. In my experience, the most amazing thing about your exemplary TV actors is they seem to be bred for it. Not just to be unnaturally good looking (though the "plain girl" in any TV movie is usually someone most of us would give our eyeteeth to date) but also to be below-average in height, in a proportion that ... and you'll have to give me slack here, I'm doing this from memory ... roughly corresponds to DaVinci's Golden Ratio: Uh...I think it's roughly 20% legs, 10% torso, 50% head.

The eagle eyed among you will notice that that does not add up to 100%.

That's because the rest is hair.

Seriously, TV actors are a huge-headed, expressive bunch. Exaggerated eyes or huge mouths also seem to dominate -- especially in the newscaster division.

Steven Colbert mourned the firing of CNN's Aaron Brown last week because he was the last regular anchor guy with glasses. I also can't help but remark that the man who helped us through 9/11 helped us by stirring example. The terrorists who brought the Towers down could do nothing to dent Aaron Brown's head. Damn you, Anderson Cooper, and your Vanderbilty regular-headedness.

Lest you think I'm being glib, I submit to you a partial list of actors whom I've seen up close, or interviewed in my previous journalist life, who fit the big-head stereotype:

Sarah Polley, Will Ferrell, Nicholas Campbell, Charlton Heston (huge), Kevin Smith, Jill Hennessey, Kevin Sorbo, Patrick Stewart, William Shatner, James Doohan, Jeri Ryan, Penn Jillette, Martin Sheen, Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Jennifer Garner, Kirsten Dunst, Jennifer Tilly, Milla Jovovich, Mike Myers, Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis, Mark McKinney, Dave Foley, John Malkovich, John Cusack, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michael Douglas, Geena Davis, Rachel McAdams

And the list goes on.

Is it that the camera likes the big head'uns? Maybe. Is this changing with the move to 16:9 from 4:3 tv sets? Still too early to tell. I think a bigger change is going to be the shift to HD. A friend of mine is an editor in Toronto, and a couple of years ago he edited a couture special for Fashion Television. I watched it since I was just about the only guy he knew with an HD set. Two things disturbed me. In HD it was really, really easy to tell which of the models were dangerously underweight and sickly, not sexy, looking...and Joan Collins.

Joan Collins in HD almost ended my life. For real. Brr.

So there are other factors, Jutra. Sure, a certain charisma, smarts and flexibility in the audition, the ability to take direction, even a certain ineffable sense that maybe the needy actor in front of you isn't totally crazy and might be a decent person needing a break...all of those intangibles are important.

But if the field's crowded and you're pressed for time and can only consider one factor:

Go with the great big head.

The Holmes Bros. Bring it on Home

One of the questions I inevitably ask writing friends of mine is this, "do you write naked, or do you use the crutch?"

That's not nearly as interesting as it sounds.

I have two computers. A beloved, G3 Imac lamp which is ensconsed in my office, and my G4 Powerbook Laptop which made the trek to South Africa with me. (Though it's bothering me now because it's got a venting problem that means I often have to run if off juice with the battery out.) I bounce back and forth between the two of them. If the day's not going well, and procrastination is winning, I'll grab the laptop and head out. If it's rainy or cold and I'm making good speed, I'll stay in the office and stare out at Lake Ontario as I brood over the next page.

But I always use the crutch.

For me, the crutch is music. Always has been. It's forever on in the background no matter what I do. I've got it down to a science now that I can't analyze too deeply lest I rob the ritual of its power. Suffice it to say that there are certain scenes or themes that demand Ben Webster. While writing Charlie Jade in South Africa, I found myself haunting the jazz section of CD Wherehouse at the V&A Waterfront. I'd pick up the latest by Winston Mankunku Ngozi, Hugh Masakela or Andile Yenana, pay way more than I've ever paid for CD's in my life, then drive back to my rented flat in Seapoint in the production car they'd given me, (which I not-so-fondly christened "Old Paint." One day I'll tell you the true story of the day Old Paint died.) Once the SA Jazz fired up my Ipod, then I could write. (To my eternal shame, I also listened to a whole lot of Keane, proving the adage that when you're far from home and lonely, sometimes you need something even more twee than Coldplay.) In the throes of my last heartbreak, whatever I was working on at the time, I made only one vow to myself: thou shalt only listen to Dylan's Blood on the Tracks once in a twenty-four hour period. Lately, there's been nefarious action composed to The Killers or the new Depeche Mode.

Occasionally the crutch takes its toll, and I need to go back and re-jig. More than once, I've found a character taking on the slightly sonorous, dulcet and oh-so-English-Aus-L.A. tones of Nic Harcourt. (KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic is an afternoon staple in the Condo of Creativity and Reason.)

The reality is that I can't imagine writing without the crutch. It may be a carryover from the days with roommates, it may be the fact that (as several of my friends can attest) I come from a family where the concept of the Inside Voice is not as well developed as it perhaps should be -- but not listening to music when I write is simply a non-starter. To attempt to construct drama without it would leave me alone in the white noise of my head. And that way, reader, lies madness indeed.

The other value of being a music partisan is that you can find yourself in the tide of cross-inspiration. Such was the scene last night when I took in the legendary Holmes Brothers at Toronto's venerable, beat up and beautiful Horseshoe Tavern.

I've been in an okay place in the last few days with my various projects. Ideas are flowing, collaborations seem to be hitting their stride, and notes have generated ideas and directions that are reaping great rewards in the two pilots I'm writing. But to be able to shake and shimmy at the sight of three old men brewing a seamless weave of blues, funk and gospel: well, it just twists your own creative ideas around and shoots them off into another place entirely. I think it was halfway through He'll Have to Go last night when, BAM! Three thoughts entered my head. Two different shows; three nuggets, three ideas that reframe and recontextualize both projects. Where do ideas come from? I have no goddamn clue.

But last night, they came courtesy of the Holmes Brothers. (And I'm not even going to get started on Ornette Coleman, who I saw last week for the first time. The guy makes seventy-five look easy.)

Y'all can have your Ashlee Simpsons. I'll take the crutch.

*Interesting Aside Alert*


I was all set to try and link the "Ashlee Simpson" above with some interesting photos from a hilarious protest I witnessed outside her Muchmusic appearance Tuesday. Sadly, though they had great signs and everything -- protesting the "manufactured" nature of the pop tart, and the sheer fakery of the machine behind her, not a single Toronto media outlet seems to have mentioned the incident. Nope. Can't lose the opportunity to do the big-bend-over sell!

If she hadn't wigged out at a McDonald's later the same night, Ashlee's Much visit would have gone down as a pure P.R. triumph. (Actually, I'm ashamed to admit it, but the video's damn funny. Read about it here.)