What I Learned Today

Courtesy of This American Life.

In Chicago, bridges sometimes smell like chocolate, because of a chocolate factory on the City's west side that's been making chocolate there since 1939.

Of course, as is inevitable in this day and age, someone complained, and the EPA went to check it out and announced that they were spewing too much cocoa into the air. So they had to install scrubbers or something and now there's less chocolate smell.

Meanwhile, the many coal plants in the area spew toxic dust some 200 times a year into the air, but because they only exceed the guidelines for a few minutes at a time and are mostly in compliance, that's okay.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the way of our world.

***

I have to work today because I didn't "earn my Saturday" by getting far enough into my script. I have also been enjoying my week of positivity, and my layoff from Canadian TV moaning. Early next week I'll be back in the fray with a two part post: Tours & Talks are Nice But Jobs Are Better, and The Solution to the Canadian TV Game That Will Never Ever Happen. See y'all soon.

Oy, Jan.

She's no Tina Fey, but Melora Hardin, as Jan Levinson on The Office gains points for the awkward, vulnerable, laugh out loud line of the week.

And extra points for finally making an oveused, never funny Michael Scott phrase freaking hilarious.

On why she's gone public with her relationship with Michael Scott:

"I am taking a calculated risk. What's the upside? I overcome my nausea, fall deeply in love, babies, normalcy, no more self-loathing. Downside, I, uh, date Michael Scott publicly and collapse in on myself like a dying star. Why is this so hard? That's what she said. Oh my God, what am I saying?"

Between that and the stunt directing (J.J. Abrams this week, Joss Whedon last week) you'd be forgiven for thinking this was the hottest comedy on TV right now.

To some of us it is is, no doubt, but then again, the list of comedies breaking my heart in the last few years is too painful to mention.

When It Clicks

Today I'm not making the drive out to Maple Ridge. I'm going to be sitting at my living room table in the East End of Vancouver, doing my best to pound out the penultimate episode of the first season of Blood Ties.

Somebody once said that when you're doing TV, six is a mint; thirteen is a stretch; twenty-two is a war. Blood Ties' showrunner, Peter Mohan, told us a story yesterday of an old show where he had to deliver twenty-six episodes. And it was a difficult series with a lot of problems. I have to hold my head just thinking of it.

Meanwhile, I don't happen to think that six is anything to sneeze at, having just written the bulk of a six-pack myself -- a process that necessitated the loss of much of the remaining hair I have left.

Six is also the number of weeks that I've been on this show. So I'm new and fresh-faced, but I'm already tired. In a sense, I guess that's because the time that everybody else got to take off at Christmas I spent finishing work, prepping to come out to Vancouver, boning up on this show and actually starting work. When this gig's over, the first thing I'm going to do is put on a snorkel and some flippers.

I can't commit to going somewhere where I can use them, yet, of course. One step at a time.

Six weeks is long enough to discover something else, though. And it's this:

This is a great movie.

Every movie has its own set of problems, to be sure. But when I compare the look-around I have now to some of the projects I've worked in the past, there's an inescapable conclusion: Blood Ties is a wonderful place to work.

Why? Well, let's break it down. There's laughter in production meetings. Lots of it. When the producer walks in to a meeting, there's usually a bit of banter, not scowls and hushes. People give the production designer a bit of stick -- and he takes it and laughs it off. The writers laugh their heads off every day.

For the first time in my life, I'm working with another Dennis. And you think it would be confusing, and sometimes it is. Denis/Dennis isn't one of those names that you get a lot, so you don't get used to people calling it out and not meaning you.

Then there's Denise, who runs the office. I had the sublime pleasure of getting an envelope with a contract in it yesterday marked, "To Dennis and Denis from Denise." That's poetry, man. You can't make that shit up.

Just so the confusion doesn't run too much toward French farce, the two Den(n)ises have fallen into a shorthand. There's "Good Denis" and "Bad Dennis." It may surprise some people who know me well to know that I am actually the Good Denis.

Then again, you've never met Dennis. Dennis has a black, black heart, my friend. Where the joke ends for you, it starts for him. This is the part, the joy of being a professional writer, that's just impossible to convey to you spec monkeys out there. Often, the best part of finally clawing your way in is not in benefits or payments or production fees or onscreen credits -- (though don't get me wrong, those are all nice things) it's the simple joy of this: being able to work and interact with smart people who just make you laugh.

Put the Good and the Bad with the Pretty, our fearless Story Coordinator, Travis, (who's getting his big first produced writing credits on this show) And you've got a great team. I met Travis when he went to the Film Centre. And I must admit when I met him I never guessed how good he would be at taking the merciless hazing that we throw at him. Course, he may yet kill us. I think maybe I caught him yesterday measuring my head for a box. Time will tell.

It's a dog friendly office, too. I'm a sucker for that. Most days you can see one of a few pooches wandering around. I was stuck on some really rough bit, sitting in my windowless, pea-soup yellow office, and this little terrier wandered in, sniffed the boxes in the corner, gave me a look that seemed to say "can't you throw those out already?", turned around three times, cocked his head and walked out. Amidst my broad smile -- there it was. The answer. I had solved my logic problem.

I'm not giving the dog a co-write.

Somebody - it may have been my father - said years ago that one of the best ways to gauge the quality of a work experience is: Am I still learning? And the answer here is definitely, absolutely, yes.

First, let me tell you what I've learned from the actors. We've got a core cast that is so committed and professional that it makes me give my head a shake. It's like winning the lottery.

Writers carry plenty of cliches about actors, not always undeserved. There's often a lot of eye-rolling when a version of, "but my character wouldn't say that" gets busted out. Now I'm not saying there aren't egomaniacs out there, and difficult actors -- just like there's difficult people everywhere. But when you have professional actors, who really read the script, try to work their way through it and are trying to work with you to make it better, here is the single greatest thing they do:

They never let you get away with anything.

I'm serious. You fanboys and fangirls out there tracking continuity errors or logic errors -- I'm not saying that actors solve the problems (the last thing we need is more people thinking that actors just make up all their lines and deserve even more of the glory than they already get,) but sometimes, an actor bump, just like a network bump -- is exactly the thing you need to Get you right with God on your script, and stop trying to paper over something that shouldn't be papered over.

My first script for the show finished shooting yesterday. A week ago, at the read-through, the lead balked at an action that she was supposed to take in the last act that she needed to take for story's sake, that maybe didn't 100% make sense. In the back of my mind I knew this, but I quieted the voice that said, "uh uh," because every solution I came up with seemed to unnecessarily complicate the story at the end -- right at the point where you're trying to bring everything into port and end the show quickly. Endings have their own momentum, and the last thing you want to do is shoehorn in another beat. To do so can throw off that race to the finish and murder the pace of the show at exactly the point it needs to be tightest.

So you gulp your apple juice and write the scene and cross your fingers and hope that nobody asks.

Actors -- good actors -- always ask.

In the end, the solution to the problem flipped the end scene a bit, and opened up an opportunity to bring back some mythology from the backstory. That solution, though, created a logic problem for another character. That objection led to a two-line on-the-day rewrite that added a whole other layer to the scene - all without slowing up momentum.

And NONE OF THIS would have happened if the actors weren't doing their jobs above and beyond saying their lines, and selling the drama. Good questions bring great solutions. And you see, again, just how the collaborative process is supposed to work.

Then there was the case of the other lead. I sat in the showrunner's office yesterday and studied this actor's face as he tried to work through what was definitely a difficult, challenging scene for him. It's a scene where the actor has to play two very specific things -- and those things are fighting within him, both bubbling up. And he was having trouble with the dialogue getting him there.

And you know what the solution was? Cutting two lines. Because they were head lines, at a moment where the reaction needed to be all heart.

Actors are cool.

Now, let's talk about the people actually making the movie.

The Director of my script, Andy, came up to me several times this week and just ran blocking by me. In every case his blocking was spot on; he and the actors discovered a way to stage the scene in a way that exactly communicated my intent in the scene -- even though -- and this is important to note -- it often deviated from what I had down on the page.

In the majority of cases I've had up til now, I've gotten used to "The Trade." The Trade is where you look at the scene as it was shot and you suss out what was gained and what was lost. If you're lucky, you can make peace with what the director added and paper over or accept what was lost.

Where you get into trouble is where the thing that was lost was supposed to presage or tip something that was coming down the line. Because the problem with series, of course, is that one ep is only part of a whole. Writers often have to change direction for a million different reasons: you cast an actor as a love interest or nemesis and it doesn't work, so you have to switch gears. That's the nature of the game.

But it's hard -- really hard -- when you work on something, and you lay something into a scene because you want it to have a build that may not pay off for another three episodes, and the director just summarily decides not to shoot it. Up to now, my mantra has always been, "it doesn't matter if you don't do exactly what's there, so long as you add something to replace it." The beat has to be there.

I'll give you an example of a case that didn't work, that always bothered me. On a show I wrote, I wanted to play a moment between two characters. Here's the situation: they've just slept together. It's the morning after. What I don't want to have is the standard, "it's not you baby, it's me..." conversation. But our hero can't commit and the woman playing opposite him is supposed to be tough, but someone who's just opened up and gotten it thrown back in her face.

So in the script, I busted out our old friend the objective correlative. I set it in the kitchen. She's made breakfast. He enters the kitchen. She serves it -- with all the hope and the vulnerability of someone saying, "is this something?" "is this going somewhere?" And our hero, bastard that he is (at this point, I must qualify,) starts in on his variation of "it's not you, it's me." And our she, she's so clever, and she's been here so many times before that she gets it even before he's said it -- she takes the plate of eggs off the table, and walks over, and dumps them into the garbage. All without a word. Then she turns and plays the rest of the scene -- but you get it already, right? From that action you get what she's going through.

Except the director didn't shoot it. She just takes the eggs and puts them on a counter -- not that you really even see her do that, because that's not focused on, even in a glancing way.

Maybe they couldn't find exactly the right garbage can. I have no idea. But the result was a flat, flat, flat scene like a scene we've seen a million times before, where her character just stood there and had nothing to do. She didn't reveal that she knew it was coming, she didn't anticipate, she didn't show her anger or her strength with one motion, and there was no object, no objective correlative of the subtext underpinning the scene.

It played like a scene where she cooked some eggs.

Now contrast to that to the experience I had this week. This week I learned that you can get most of what your intent was in the scene -- AND have the Director make it way, way, way better. You can preserve the arcs and beats you have in your head for down the road -- and still add to the whole scene. You don't have to accept the trade.

I mean -- this is the way it's supposed to work. I am over. the. moon.

I've only been to set a few times. I still think a writer on set is kind of like a fish with an Indy car...you don't have a job and you just get in the way. But when you go to set, what you see is a crew doing their best to keep upbeat, do their work. The director calls for something, and people haul ass. They come together on other things, too. They've worked on someone's music video on the weekends. There are signs up for birthday parties.

It's hard to say this, being Toronto-based, and with Toronto taking a hit now because of the ACTRA strike and all, but to my eyes, you can really see the difference that TV series culture has wrought here. This is not a show with all the money in the world. Yet it's definitely the most professional set I've ever been on -- and that includes all the sets -- some of them big shows, that I visited as a journalist before I started writing professionally. The last time I was on a set in Vancouver, it was as a journalist, and it was about nine years ago. And it was...um...not like our set. Thank You, X-Files. Again.

I overheard someone say yesterday that there's thirty days left in the shoot. I'm the new guy, the interloper -- and I spend most of my time upstairs anyway, but there's no denying that this group is something special; and I hope that the show hits and shoots right through to a second season, because when you get a group working this well together, breaking them up and apart seems a colossal waste.

On that score... we've started to see more and more of the cuts come through. We're seeing the work, and it's good. I think we've done it. I think this is actually a fresh, fun, sharp spin on the vampire story. There's humor, there's pathos, there's comedy, there's spookiness and scariness. It's good!

And in just under three weeks, Americans will get to see it on Lifetime. (I am sorry, my fellow Canadians, you will have to wait till the fall. But look at it this way: maybe you'll know if you're committing to a series that's going to continue by then.)

Oh, are my fingers crossed. People working at the top of their game have made something special here. I can't wait for you to see it.

And I feel very lucky being six weeks on something that other people have slaved away on for months.

We have one more story to break -- a story that will end the first season and reshuffle the deck and scream out for more stories of Mike Celluci, Vicki Nelson, and Henry Fitzroy.

As Lifetime's slogan goes: A detective to keep her cool. A vampire to keep her warm. Some women have it all.

So do some shows. When it clicks, it's like no other job in the world, people. It really is.

EDIT: I actually have been reminded, much to my embarrassment, that I have worked with a Dennis before. In South Africa. I guess we didn't really play the confusion beat too much though because he had that plummy accent and I was a bloody Yank. Still, I'm red faced. Sorry Mr. Venter. Mea Culpa.

Some of My Favorite Words All in a Row

These things are starting to become a YouTube cliche. But damn if I didn't really enjoy this one. For those of you with those things they call "jobs," in the lingo of the day, this is so totally Not Safe for F***ing Work.

Props

Versions of this have been floating around YouTube for weeks. But this one's probably the tightest edited one I've seen.

Look. We all use props. Actors love 'em. It lets them focus all their feeling on something external. It's a trick that many like to use.

Writers use props too. We talk in shorthand in the room. We have jargon. We do things like cut to the chase and say, "it's a Frankenstein story" or "we got a High Noon showdown here." We may even think of certain plot turns or reveals that it's good to use and reuse, because they always work. We call them go-tos. Or we talk about something hacky and say, "we'll do the good version of that" and then somehow run out of time and leave it.

Directors have the lenses they love to shoot with. They have their pet visual tricks, their flash, their ways of working entirely inside their comfort zone.

Props can be very useful. The only problem with using props is that it's so easy -- too easy -- to become utterly dependent on them. And one of the downsides of the watching-tv-on-DVD revolution is it makes it easier to spot the pattern, see the seams in the storytelling, or the same old, same old choices of the actors.

It becomes easier to see the props. And when you do, you say, well, then what happens?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you David Caruso's Sunglasses. Oh Lordy loo, them be a warning to us all.

Character Study: Why I Love Big, Gay, and Orange

Oh boy. What kind of blog traffic am I going to get with THAT post title?

The New York Times does this every once in a while, and I thought I'd do it too because it's a format I really like. I was watching old eps of How I Met Your Mother on DVD the other week, and it really struck me how at sea that show would be without Barney. Neil Patrick Harris really does sell that character so well. It's a perfect blending of character and scripting, probably the best I've seen since early O.C. Seth Cohen.
But there's another set of characters that have kind of stolen my heart.

Why do Steve and Brian, (Steve Agee and Brian Posehn) Sarah Silverman's "neighbors" on her eponymously-titled program, work so well?

Well, there's the obvious. On a simply visual level, these guys as gay men are just funny. The way Silverman describes them in the first episode of The Sarah Silverman Program (and which I cribbed for my post title above) perfectly encapsulates the base, grade school reaction one has when you see them together. I read my Dan Savage. I know all about bears, and obviously the prevailing gay esthetic of chiseled and super-buff isn't any more representative than trussing up supermodels to play the girl-next-door -- but you never see that on TV except as a punchline to what is inevitably a somewhat homophobic joke.

To see these two on screen together just puts you in a good mood. Because they fit. They do. I totally buy these two as a couple. They seem real. The way they act, and especially the way they bicker with affection.

I love the way Steve busts Brian for saying he's "bi" when he isn't, and the hilarious sight gag of Steve getting repeatedly knocked around while his karate-knowing BF stands by -- it works. It works so much better than it would if these two were your standard TV gay men.

It's worth noting, too, that though it's safe to assume that Sarah Silverman wouldn't go conventional with anything -- one of the most subversive things about Steve and Brian is that they're part of the ensemble at all. You can have the gay best friend on a sitcom, of course...that's been okay for years. But like the magic black person, there are rules -- time honored rules, for deploying them. Woe betide you if you violate those rules.

(Hint: the rules have to do with them being sexless so you never have to contemplate one of those icky man kisses. Corollary to this rule: Lesbian kisses are A-OK, but only if your characters look like Mischa Barton.)

Silverman just bruises right past all of that. You have a pairing here of two guys who have a good energy, and the status of their "relationship" is never a major point. Who cares? It's just woven as part of the fabric. If you believe the press, the two actors didn't even know they were supposed to be a gay couple until after they were cast. Whether or not that's true, the fact of the matter is, that's how it's played.

If you're agitating for gay acceptance, I say you surf the big gay orange wave coming through on Comedy Central each week. (In Canada, The Sarah Silverman Program starts on The Comedy Network in a few weeks. It has already been picked up for a 2nd season by Comedy Central.)

On the performer front, it helps that Agee (big, glasses, orange, and ...um...hair) wrote for Kimmel and Posehn (big, glasses, orange, balding) was part of the much-missed Mr. Show with Bob and David, but mostly, the thing I like about these guys is just that: I like these guys. I would love to hang out with them. You know you could have a great conversation with them. They're not stereotypes of anything. They are big, gay, and orange. Hear them roar.

What characters are doing it for you right now, and why? Let have it in the posts below.

As We Were Saying...

If you're a Canadian producer, I don't know how you're not screaming that you get treated differently than big American productions on new media rights, but whatever.

From Playback (by the way, Playback Daily rocks!):

Actors and producers have a deal -- again

ACTRA, the CFTPA and its sister APFTQ on Tuesday finalized terms on a tentative three-year deal to end Canada's first-ever actors strike.

As part of the revised IPA deal, producers may choose either Option A or Option B to pay ACTRA members for performances that show up on the Internet or other new media. Option A will see actors receive a full daily rate for new media work, and then earn 3.6% of gross distribution revenues after six months of initial use. For old media converted to digital media, including TV shows, ACTRA members will this time receive a percentage of revenues from the first dollar.

Producers can also choose Option B, which allows negotiating with ACTRA on a production-by-production basis, setting minimum fees for Canadian actors.

The catch is, productions choosing Option B must be guaranteed by an approved distribution guarantor --¬ in other words, must be a U.S. studio shoot, without being designated by name as such in the IPA agreement.

Full Playback article is here.

I *Said* I'd Report Good News...

So here it is:

Shaw to resume TV funding

Feb 20, 2007 10:18 AM
Canadian Press
OTTAWA – Shaw Cable has agreed to pay up its commitments to the Canadian Television Fund.

The president and CEO of the cable company, Jim Shaw, made the announcement during an appearance before the Commons heritage committee.

Not to anger the Henshaw, but I'm still mulling and keeping to my CanTV layoff this week. Stay tuned.

Reprints are Golden when They Involve Karate and the baby Jesus

So today, I want to call your attention to one of my favorite reprints. I do this for a very specific reason.


When I first came up with my fantasy-series based on the above awesome album cover, it was just a lark.

Never did I guess that about six or so months later, I'd be on the west coast of Canada, working on Blood Ties with a real life Mike Crain.

So far as I know, this Mike Crain has never been a Karatist preacher.

But...

You never know.

(BTW, keep reading through to the comments on the linked post. My response where I explain the terms of my fantasy world to Alex is one of my favorite things I've ever written on this blog, ever.)

Now. Outline delivered. Time to drive out to Maple Ridge. Chop Chop.

When I Heard About "Deal Or No Deal Canada" I Didn't Think That Meant Anything Like This...

From Playback:

Hollywood studio heads have balked at Friday's handshake agreement between Canadian actors and producers to end the ACTRA strike, leaving CFTPA and ACTRA representatives to find a face-saving formula on new media residuals for the major studios so a new IPA deal can be finalized this week.

Hollywood studio CEOs flinching over payments for Internet rights on Friday caused widespread frustration among the Canadian bargainers.

For months, the industry has questioned why humble Canada had to hammer out a deal on Internet compensation before Hollywood took a crack at it.

For weeks, ACTRA urged that the issue should be side-barred to a joint committee for up to a year, likely until the SAG talks began. But the producers insisted they needed certainty, and so pushed for a deal on new media residuals.

And when they had one, the studios balked.

Words just fail.

With that I bid adieu to Canadian TV for a week. Seriously. Cold Turkey. I'm busy working a script, it's all too depressing and frustrating, and my teeth are starting to hurt from the grinding. Until at least next Monday, only happy news about Canuck TV, if even that. Daddy's getting the monkey off his back, at least for a while.

Wherein I Punt...

Those of you who read this blog frequently should know by now that I don't really burn to make movies. I much prefer the TV medium. That being said, like a lot of people who live in what the Quebecois call, "ROC," (Rest of Canada,) I have a somewhat difficult personal relationship with Canadian Film.

There have been some I liked, to be sure. And I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with Art House film (some of my favorite films are Art House, to paraphrase an ancient justification...) but I find the Canadian flavor of Art House frequently enervating, unengaging, precious, and narratively challenged.

I know some of you just popped a clot. That's fine.

Yes, I know the TPB movie was accessible, maybe too much so. Yes, I acknowledge that Bon Cop, Bad Cop is a step in the right direction (only one step though, and only part of the direction -- we don't need an industry of Bon Cop clones, I'm not saying that.)

But I think it's telling that when I try to think of a truly Great Canadian film made in the last few years, the only one I can come up with is actually very, very, very much a Quebec film. In French.

I last wrote about C.R.A.Z..Y. (among other subjects) here. I'm just putting the mention in now because I see that there's finally a decent special edition coming out. With features with English subtitles. I suggest you go get it.

Oh, and I'm not the only one who likes C.R.A.Z.Y. Looks like the Director will soon be partying with Scorsese.

What can English Canadian film learn from C.R.A.Z.Y.? You tell me. In the comments below.

Musings on a Sunday: What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding?

The nice thing about working on a Sunday is that you have a little time to meander. I mean, it's Sunday, after all.

And I wanted to post something else, because really, I can't bring myself to have bald Britney top of my page for more than a few hours.

In my meandering I was reading this article in the great British Music Magazine UNCUT this afternoon. It's a recounting of a tumultuous press conference Elvis Costello gave in the U.S. in the midst of his tour to support Armed Forces.
What happened was this:

Elvis and his mates were in some bar with some American musicians from another band. And things got loud and scrappy. It's hard to remember now, with the Krall and the Twins and all, but onceuponatime Elvis Costello was quite an angry young man. Anyway, things get heated, and Elvis winds up saying something horrible about Ray Charles and James Brown. Come on. You know what he said. Let's just say he called him two things, and one of them was "blind."

Well, this gets reported in The Village Voice and, understandably, there's a bit of a flap. What the UNCUT article does (it's in the issue with Radiohead on the cover -- I know that doesn't really narrow it down too much, but I bought it off the stand yesterday so it's either the new issue or the last issue) is recount the entire press conference where Costello attempted to set the record straight and say that he's not a racist.

This thing had the potential to sink Costello in America, remember. He was getting into fights and scraps on the tour all the time.

The press conference is remarkable. Costello tries to explain himself, and say that he's not a racist, it was just a matter of trying to hurl the most outrageous thing you could say into the atmosphere of the fight. But he's also still clearly annoyed with the press, and he will not back down from that. In fact, he makes no secret of how much he dislikes them. He winds up apologizing but tries to evade that at first, as he tries to make the point that the only reason he's here is because the reporting of the incident takes things out of their context.

Reading this flap, more than a quarter century on, strikes me as peculiar and interesting. Because the questions from the press are the same plodding, usual questions trying to trap him into this and that. They're peevish and high handed, and though he's being a bit of a prat, your sympathy reading the thing is clearly with Costello. The context was, and is, important. It must have been mortifying for Costello, who had written lots of songs decrying racism and had great respect for black music, to find himself in the position of having the press he loathed (and who loathed him right back) trying to sink him with a quote that he had actually said.

But of course...it went away. We don't think of Elvis Costello as a racist today. In fact, today we see him doing records with Allen Toussaint.

Bowie flirted with Neo-Nazi statements in the midst of his Berlin drug haze. Today he's a rock elder statesman and a new father with Iman.

I don't know what, if anything, this says about Michael Richards -- but Richards was caught in a remarkably similar situation to Costello. I mean, remarkably similar. But this time there's video, and video that's instantly playable on YouTube. And then there's also the 24 hour news cycle. And those things have changed everything -- and I'm not sure the changes have good implications for what we as writers do.

Maybe it's the fact that if I see one more mention or picture of a certain poor deceased Playboy model, I'm gonna hurl, but I think that the mediascape we live in now goes beyond venerating the shallow and being celebrity obsessed. I think it's rewired us in a way to not reach conclusions -- or at least to jettison context for ubiquity, and form conclusions based not on consideration, but repetition.

It's in the best interests of the cable news 24 hour cycle to keep you watching every moment; to not have you reach conclusion or closure with anything. Even (especially?) when there's nothing new. So we get endless updates with no context at all. And the repetition of images, over and over, replace thinking with pure emotion, which we're expected to internalize and feel, and react to: and inevitably, we conclude certain things because we are "familiar" enough with the story to think we've thought it through. When really, we're no further than those reporters were at that Elvis Costello press conference. We don't have answers. But when someone asks you what you think, you have to say something, and what comes out of your mouth is the spin.

When the news only came once a day, the politicians weren't focused on never losing a moment of the news cycle. The absolute primacy of spin hadn't yet taken root. It seems to me that now, with the internet and the 24 hour news cycle, it's not just in the best interests of the news people to keep the story alive, it's in the best interests of the news people to keep the story from progressing too much. Details need to be revealed for maximum impact, teased endlessly before you get anywhere. And we all watch. So the simple narratives of celebutards are perfect because, really, how much change and growth are you going to have?

Before all this was available, more of us read newspapers or newsmagazines which weren't so hot in their reaction, but offered the context that allowed us to slow up a bit and weigh different elements and points of view before coming to a conclusion.

If there was a 24 news cycle back on the Armed Forces tour, I'm not sure Elvis Costello would have survived. And maybe we'd be calling David Bowie that flaming Nazi poofter.

What does this say about what we do as screenwriters? Well, one of the other things I used to love was the movie that I had to think about for three days. You'd come out of the theatre and think one thing but then you'd consider it a little bit and a little bit more and eventually there'd be a synthesis and that process was engaging and delightful.

But now movies are made for the 24 hour news cycle, too. Which means that ponder time, that time that allows for the sober second thought, is cut off. Same is true with TV. Though shows like LOST are analysed and discussed endlessly -- I'm not sure it's people coming up with their own constructs. It's not a synthesis. To be perfectly honest, when I watch shows that I think are layered and interesting like Battlestar Galactica, I'm baffled and appalled when I go online and see the utter banality and surface nature of most people's analysis of what they've just watched. It's not that they're not getting it (well it is, but that's not my point) it's that they're not even giving themselves the time to get it. Any moment of character development, any moment of ambiguity, needs to be answered or stamped out immediately. After every cliffhanger of every show, I check the Google search queries that bring people to my blog, and inevitably they're trying to get an answer about this or that possible plot point that just unspooled.

People used to try to work this out on their own...and that working out..that helped to provide context. It helped improve the quality of our understanding. Now people Google because they need to know what to think right away. They need to know the answer, they need to know how to feel, who to hate, who to blame -- and I think it's our mediascape that has taught them to be that way.

I just don't know how we tell stories for that. Because it seems like those aren't the kinds of stories I really want to tell.

I bought the 2 disc DVD of The Departed this weekend. And I was watching the documentaries, and all of a sudden, I saw Scorsese talking about one scene that is pivotal in the narrative. (Not to spoil too much but it's the scene where a certain character says, "I sent you to the wrong address.") What Scorsese says is that scene is ambiguous, because there's a couple of ways to read it. And that blew me away. Because I read it one of those ways and thought that was the only way you could possibly have read it when I saw The Departed. But he's right. It is ambiguous. And that's way way cooler. Why didn't I see that ambiguity the first time? Am I skipping the consideration stage, too? Is that why I went straight to that conclusion?

I'm not sure. But since the point, these days, is to jump to a conclusion and not allow for any context, I'm going to go ahead and blame Wolf Blitzer.


Way to go, Wolf. Asshole.