The Wizard Was Right

In response to my comments about CBC moving The Hour to their main network, writer PEI writes:

I love strombo.
He's everything you said he is.
fuck the writers, I wouldn't mind him just shooting the shit on tv for awhile just talking about whatever he wants to talk about cause he's that informed and intelligent to do it.
Just like Jon stuart [sic] or Colbert, I mean sure having 20 writers help but i don't believe it's truely necessary

I graduated PEI's comment to a post here for a very good reason, which I'll get to in a moment. First let's deal with the factual landscape he's talking about.

If everything is humming smoothly, it should look like that: like George is just being George. Like Jon Stewart is just being Jon. That's the magic of TV. You should believe that everything is just coming off the top of his head, and that the person looks good because they are just that naturally erudite and informed.

The reality, of course, is very different. No matter how informed or funny someone is, to get to a certain level and produce a good product takes an enormous amount of work. A standup comic hones and hones the same twenty minutes of material over and over and over, to a pinpoint delivery so that when they appear in front of an audience, there's the illusion that everything they're saying has just occurred to them, and you're the first crowd ever to hear it. In reality, if you watch films like Comedian, the Documentary Seinfeld did about his return to live performing, you can see that it's a painful, painful, long and labored process for a comic to build five minutes, then ten minutes, then fifteen, and so on.

In a large city like Toronto or L.A. or New York, one of the perks is that occasionally you can see professional comics working out new material on stage at new material nights. Some jokes bomb, some fly, and you can see them struggling to figure out if something didn't work because of construction or because it's just not as funny as they thought it was. This is a rare chance to see all the gears working -- and it can be both very instructive, and seriously humbling.

Now, add TV and five nights a week, and I don't care HOW talented the person is. If they're going to seem like they're on top of it all, they're going to need more brains. More brains to research. More brains to write jokes. More brains to keep the whole ball of wax moving. Take away the brains, and the wheels come off the train.

PEI, you may not be old enough to remember, but there was a time several years ago when any audience member could see for themselves how wrong you are about how great it was to see a guy like George " just shooting the shit on tv for awhile just talking about whatever he wants to talk about cause he's that informed and intelligent to do it."

During the last Writers' Guild strike, production shut down on films and TV series, but also on shows like Letterman, and I believe (as he was still hosting then) Johnny Carson. After a few weeks or a month or so off the air, Letterman returned to the air. Carson did too, but I wasn't watching him as much, so my memories of that aren't as clear.

Because Letterman didn't have his writers, and he couldn't replace them (that would be scabbing, and he, like every big network show, was a Guild signatory) the only way he could return to the air was to write everything himself, or he just had to wing it, as you suggest George is talented enough to do.

Though it was sometimes thrilling to watch, and it was sort of interesting in an intellectual way because you knew he really was making it up as he went along (kind of like the feeling you get when you watch Improv comedy, an art form to be appreciated rather than really loved) the fact remained that it wasn't really the Letterman show. It was a pale imitation. Less funny, less full of the stuff that made Letterman great in his heyday. Paradoxically, with the loss of the constructed reality of writers who made Dave seem effortless and off the cuff each night - the show seemed somehow less real.

"Late Night With David Letterman" was pierced by a labor dispute, and suddenly anyone could see that the show that looked so natural, so off the cuff, was anything but.

Similarly, I know that one of the great appeals of Reality Shows is that it looks like all this crazy stuff is just happening out of the blue!

But the reality of reality is that a lot of producers and yes-- writers -- are working hard behind the scenes to manipulate events, shape the material, and engineer situations and conflicts. It takes a lot of work to make everything look so spontaneous. One of the biggest looming fights in Hollywood is the fight to try and organize to get reality tv covered under the auspices of the Writers Guild of America.

So okay, PEI's wrong. So what? Did you really just reproduce his comment to take a couple of blog-swings at the poor guy?

No. Exactly the opposite.

I reproduced this because I think it should be instructive to writers. Remember when the Wizard called out, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?" Well, you're seeing that in the comment above. And it's fine. Wait, no. It's more than fine. It's exactly what we should be working for.

See, if you're going into screenwriting because you want the world to know your brilliance, give it up. It's not going to happen. So much of what we do succeeds only if we make it seem effortless. We are never going to get the general public to understand what we do. We are never going to change the perception that everyone could write if they had the time or that everyone has a great idea for a movie or a TV series.

In almost every case I can think of, writing for the screen that calls attention to itself is self-indulgent, and actually hurts the cause of quality. Aaron Sorkin's one of my favorite writers, but even he occasionally gets caught doing that extra-smarty-pants victory lap. And that -- just like a bad prop or a bad accent or terrible acting or a stupid camera move, can pop you right out of the action.

When we're really cooking, really, really cooking, the audience should not perceive that we're there. That we were ever there. Especially in things like variety, or talk shows, it's in our best interest to make sure that guys like Letterman or Conan or Strombo are just that funny off the top of their heads. Mike Bullard (a once-nightly talk show host in Canada) is a funny guy. But his show failed. Why? Because they did it on the cheap. Not enough talent -- not enough resources. Not enough writers or producers. Not enough material. The seams showed every night.

It's our job to make it seem like Clint Eastwood or Jay Leno or Craig Ferguson would be brilliant and funny and informed even if there weren't writers or researchers behind them.

So that means there's a lot of silly fights that we shouldn't waste our energies on. In Canada, there's a group that keeps saying we need to get the public onside in the fight for increasing Canadian content.

Never gonna happen. Why should it? They don't care. Nor should they. They're the audience. Don't blame them -- they just want to be entertained. Trying to make them more aware of what you do is quixotic at best, toxic at worst. They will never care about the plight of the artist as much as property taxes or schools or making sure that the city isn't going to dump garbage in their backyard. It's a waste of energy. This is not a path that should be pursued.

Similarly, all the stick that Ted and Craig take over at Artful Writer about "raising writer's profiles." Hooey. You know what? I'm never going to get a million hits a day on this blog and I wouldn't want to, either. If I wanted to, I could always put up fake nudes of Jessica Alba. It's not the goal toward which any of us should strive.

That being said...

The point I made in that column below is still valid. Just because the public doesn't know what goes into making Strombo look brilliant (and don't get me wrong, he is brilliant. A natural interviewer, very sharp, very informed, and quick as hell -- he just isn't brilliant enough to carry it on his shoulders because NO ONE IS THAT BRILLIANT) doesn't mean we should let the people who should know better off the hook.

Stop chasing the approval of the public. You don't want them paying attention to the man behind the curtain.

Focus your energies on the people pulling the strings.