Blooming Late and Next Year's Pilots

I TRIED, and probably failed, recently to explain the concept of royalties to somebody on a message board, and why the WGA was so dead set against having them rolled back.

And by extension, why the hardline on internet royalties is needed (because the business is moving to downloads, and a bad deal on net usage royalties amounts to the same thing: a rollback in effect if not name.)

I know that issues in any Labor dispute are hard to understand for people who aren't intimately familiar, or immediately concerned about them.

That's why something that I read somewhere else in all the strike coverage has really stayed with me. Forgive me for not being able to attribute this -- I just don't remember where I saw it. But it's a good, concrete example.

Royalties allow writers who bloom late to hang on, and make enough of a living til that one great idea comes along.

See, development can take years. It's intensive, it's in your own head -- the creative process, mysterious and weird and peculiar as it is, doesn't often work on an easily monetized timetable.

Writing -- good writing -- also requires smarts. Lots of smarts. It's no exaggeration for me to say that the writers I know are mostly also the smartest people I know.

Now, if you're smart, there comes a point where you just can't justify doing this thing that makes you so little money, when you know for a fact that if you went into law, say, or advertising or marketing you'd be able to support your family, or even yourself better.

Even if you're a great writer, it's entirely possible that you will go months, and years between jobs. That's just the way it is. In the U.S. system, your royalties can carry you and keep you in the business long after you think, "maybe I would be better off doing something else."

Now take an example like David Chase. Chase wrote for The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure -- and did some great work. But that one great idea, that game changer, actually came pretty late to him in life.

If he hadn't had royalties to support himself, he probably would have quit. Money runs out, writing is hard, at some point -- stop struggling. Go do something else.

If there were no royalties, it's entirely possible we would have never gotten The Sopranos.

Now, for a 180 degree turn, friend o'the blog Blueglow has the laugh out loud dark cloud to the dark cloud of this strike:

I guess my biggest fear regarding the fallout of the strike's eventual outcome will be the number of shows and stories about "labour disputes" I am going to have to endure next year.

Oh God. Right. That's gonna be horrendous.

Midseason 2009 Pilot Schedule

FOX

Labor Pains - A buxom yet misunderstood legal secretary (Pamela Anderson) convinces all the secretaries at her law firm to fill out union cards. It's the suits versus the saucy secretaries! Co-starring Kathy Griffin, and Flava Flav as the boss.

Final Offer - Each week, a firebrand mediator (Adam Arkin) has just eight hours to conclude a contract before a key industry shuts down forever. Co-starring Knocked Up's Dr. Ken as the People's Republic of China, with special appearances by Abe Vigoda as the Ghost of Sam Walton.

CBS

Black Rock - Each week, Les Moonves yells at somebody. A lot.

Steeerike! - Kevin James plays a former Showrunner who once ran a 40 million dollar action adventure show, til he refused to cross a picket line and was blacklisted forever. But none of that stress compares to the horror of coaching Little League Baseball! Starring Mischa Barton as the skinny wife.

NBC

Hardliners -- Three lovable lugs (Kenan Thompson, Andy Samberg, Kristin Wiig) walk the picket line as the strike against Globalco enters its 3rd year. In a very special Episode 3, Former Vice President Al Gore stops by to fit the pickters with solar-generating beanies and windmills for their signs.

...are you rocking foetally yet?

Any other suggestions, let loose in the comments below. *unless you're a striking WGA member that is...pencils down means pencils down.

Why Does David Chase Hate Me? And Why Even if the Call IS Coming From Inside The House, That Isn't Necessarily a Bad Thing...

I'M HOPING that sometime over the next several days I'll get into more "slice of writer's life" posts. I've been fighting bad headaches and trying to give the gig my full attention, so I need a bit of a breather.

I will say, however, that it's a good feeling when that draft finally gets kicked back from the network, and everyone goes around the horn at the production meeting, and even though you know it's all going to change anyway -- there's something very special about the first time on a new show when you get to type those magic words on a cover page:

"PRODUCTION WHITE."

Yessss.

In lieu of anything major from me as I give notes, wait for location scouts, screen actor auditions and all, I want to point you to a couple of very interesting articles I've read in the last couple of days:

The Long Con

Now that it's been a few weeks, Emily Nussbaum weighs in with an excellent, thought-provoking article in New York Magazine about the real legacy of Tony Soprano. And she kind of puts David Chase on the couch about it.

I found myself forming many of the same thoughts that Nussbaum expresses so well in the last couple of weeks when I tuned in some first and second season episodes of the Sopranos, in reruns. I was struck, as she was, by how much broader and lighter the show was in the beginning. I put that together with all those interviews with David Chase over the years, the ones where he talked about his real ambivalence toward the TV medium and how he always wanted to make movies, and I got to roughly the same place Nussbaum did: Chase's brilliance came not just from his self-loathing, but a little bit from his loathing of us.

In one passage, she has a lovely description of TV auteurs:

But he [Chase] was willing to give us what we didn’t want. There are many breeds of TV auteurs: the great mythologizers, Buffy’s Joss Whedon and Lost’s J.J. Abrams and The X-Files’ Chris Carter; the quirky dialogists, like Gilmore Girls’ Amy Sherman-Palladino and the maddening David E. Kelley; deadpan craftsmen like Dick Wolf and sadomasochistic visionaries like Tom Fontana and California dreamers like Alan Ball. There are the utopian solipsists (okay, just Aaron Sorkin). But they all share an essential love for their characters—a natural side effect, one might imagine, of building one story for many years. Their protagonists suffer, but they rarely corrode.

In this sense, Chase was a true iconoclast, a prophet of disgust. He seemed determined to test TV’s most distinctive quality, the way it requires us to say yes each week. To be a fan, we needed to welcome Tony Soprano again and again into our homes, like a vampire or a therapy patient. Chase gave that choice a terrible weight.

I do think somewhere along the line, Chase started to really hate what he created. And he hated how much we loved it. Now, how much of that was based in this resentment toward him not being able to do what he really wanted to do (make movies) and how much of it was rooted in just a general cant of Chase's character, I can't say, having never met the man.

And in the end, it's not relevant anyway. Artists are notoriously poor at judging their best work, or at least coming to terms with the pieces that the audience loves. Woody Allen is forever perturbed that we preferred him funny; Alec Guinness went to the grave hating being beloved for having played Obi Wan. Ingrid Bergman was lukewarm on Casablanca. Miles Davis spent a good part of his career with his back to the audience, daring us to hate him...and didn't I read somewhere that Mozart hated The Magic Flute?

Still, there's something in Nussbaum's article that fills me with a kind of cognitive dissonance: "David Chase is a genius." "He hates the medium I love, and he's not crazy about we who love his work." I dunno. I dunno.

More from Nussbaum:

Over the course of the show, Tony’s sessions with Melfi have taken on many metaphors. They are like sessions with a hooker: She takes his money and plays a seductive role. (In one sequence, he dreams her office is a bordello.) They are like sessions with a priest: She hears confessions and guides him toward meaning. They are like sessions with the FBI: By talking to her, he’s betraying his family, putting his livelihood at risk, and violating omertà.

But most unsettlingly, they became a metaphor for our relationship, as viewers, with the show. Like Melfi, we began openhearted, proud of our empathy, and thrilled to have a character so rich to explore. Then came the counter-transference, the audience crushes, the endless articles on James Gandolfini, sex symbol. And slowly, as years passed, one could feel an insistent chill, even as Melfi herself receded into the background and message boards flooded with fans aping mobspeak. The violence was growing more intense: the assassination of Big Pussy, then Adriana, that brutal scene where Ralphie killed a pregnant stripper (a brilliantly sick sequence that caused a wave of viewer protest), the curbing of Coco. Dread, not excitement, began to feel like the show’s signature emotion.

The full article's really worth the read. Go here to read it.

Secondly, Will Dixon's got a fun and interesting post up about the problems of "The Telephone Cheat."

Most people carry a cell phone these days, so the "We can't reach them." or "We aren't able to call for help." complication always seems a little convenient. Most often it's solved with 'No Service' on the call display or whoever is trying to be reached is 'Out Of Range', but both are feeling more and more like a cheat or a cop out.

I tend to come down on the side of, "you gotta cheat sometime," but I hate it when those cheats grow lame. In The Ice Harvest, the whole thing doesn't work if John Cusack can be contacted by cell, so one of the first things he does in the movie is drop his cell phone and fry it. It works.

In the script I'm working on for The Border, we establish right off the bat that "cell phone service is being jammed." Because something getting out is a plot point, and you can't make it easy to get out or there's no tension. The fact that everyone's got a cell phone camera and access to YouTube is wreaking havoc with the news cycle and celebrity image-making, (not to mention "macaca") but boy, when you're trying to plot out a story where people can't know something is going on, it is murder.

Answering machines. Now this one's a biggie. I mean, my mom still has a 'push the Play button' model that creaks and whrrrs and needs a cassette tape, but EVERYONE else I know has Message Manager or Talkmail or some variation thereof. This makes the plot device of leaving the warning like "Pick up, Laura. Pick up! Well, I hope you get this message...the killers your husband!" (for the killer to hear and/or erase), or the exposition message where the audience gets to hear the crucial information (either as it's recorded or when its played back) a lot more difficult to execute with voicemail. Especially since not just anybody (a friend, the detective, the killer) can access and play back a voicemail.


I've been involved with two rewrites recently that included answering machines and faxes, plus no one in either script had a cell phone. Now I acknowledge these were rewrites of movies that have been in development for many many years, or are based on books written years ago, but regardless, they aren't period pieces. They're supposed to be set in the present. But if an entire plot turns on someone hearing a message or not able to be reached by phone...what to do, what to do?

Okay, Will, there I gotta disagree with your police work. I have a chip-based answering machine that's part of my cordless phone. Millions of these things are out there and all the big companies make them. I don't have the voicemail because why should I pay 8 bucks a month for something that I paid 60 bucks for, once? Plus, when I phone in to check my messages, if it rings more than twice I know I aint got any. And I get less spa...

Hey wait a minute. I think I was even on tv about this once.

Freaky. But this isn't about consumer electronics.

The larger thing Will's Calvinism on this issue raises is, "what is an acceptable cheat or shorthand, and what isn't?" Different writers will come down on different sides of this issue...Arguing about minutae is one of the things we really do well. (So long as you're arguing about minutae, you don't have to face the writing -- it's our version of going to long "strategic vision planning" meetings.)

For my money, the answering machine thing is an acceptable cheat. People on TV, by and large, have answering machines rather than voicemail. Just like they all have 555 numbers, and just like they can always find parking places, and live in $5000 a month Greenwich Village lofts on a waitress' salary, and have sex standing up with hair looking perfect and in place, and just like if they smoke, they're really evil inside.

Oh, and they have miscarriages, not abortions.

And if they really, really, really fuck up, they have to appear before the Female Black Judge.

And anyhow, help, she is on the way: the march of technology is slowly starting to help us poor, beleaguered screenwriters. These days, if your cell phone goes dead or something, it's actually harder to make a call than it used to be, because everywhere I look it seems that pay phones are disappearing. The days when there would be a phone in any greasy spoon are going away, at least in the major cities I've visited over the last while.

If we wait a few more months, "dead cell phone battery" may become something other than the "guy wakes up with a newspaper on his head and removes it to see an article on the front page that talks about exactly the thing he needs to find/see/realize/get"

Finally, Alex has got a good book recommendation.

Walter Murch is God.

Ron Moore blogs on David Chase's Balls

I KNOW, that's a headline worthy of a five year old. What can I say, the air's thinner here.

Ron Moore, who has proven through three seasons of Battlestar Galactica that he is no stranger to the "OMG" mindblowing ending, thinks that the Sopranos final curtain was just perfect:

For weeks, the speculation has centered around a simplistic black and white question for a show that revelled in never providing monochromatic answers: would Tony live or die? The prosaic nature of the question and its anticipated answer was itself was the most disappointing thing about the lead-up to the finale. Either Tony was going to get whacked, or he wouldn't. "The Sopranos" would end with either the bitter little pill of the "bad" guy finally getting what he's got coming or with the vaguely false relief of family affirmed and life goes on.

Instead, Chase managed to do the unthinkable, the unbelievable and the unprecedented: he yanked us out of their lives without any resolution whatsoever. We were torn away from Tony, Carmella, AJ, Meadow, Paulie, Sil and the all the rest without any idea what happens to them tomorrow or even later that same evening. In real life, when you lose contact with someone, you seldom if ever have the satisfaction of knowing how the myriad threads of their lives resolved themselves. They are removed from your circle of knowledge and yet their lives go on unbeknownst to you in ways you can only imagine. The Sopranos are gone from our lives, but their lives go on without resolution, much like ours. None of us have tidy, revelatory endings that are the culmination of our "story arcs" and neither will they.

Oh, I'm sure there are those who will bemoan the lack of resolution to the story or that Chase has somehow "robbed the fans" but I'm a fan and I'm ecstatic. I'm glad he thumbed his nose at the tyranny of the narrative drive to bring things to a tidy conclusion so we can all clap and walk away without another thought about that mob family in Jersey, satisfied that all's well that ends well. Screw that. I don't want to see Tony's death, nor do I want to watch him drive off into witness protection, or sit down to some kind of illusory happiness in the bosom of his family. I simply want to pretend that his life continues, that he's still simultaneously worrying about onion rings and whether that guy is hiding a gun in the restroom.

It's poetic. It's exciting. It's perfect.

And most of all, I wish I'd thought of it first.

Me too.

Bill Carter of the New York Times also is up with the story he was working on when we did our panel yesterday: he talks to several of America's top showrunners to gauge their reaction to the finale:

For David Shore, creator of the Fox hit “House,” one of the best touches was Mr. Chase’s own refusal to discuss the ending. Mr. Shore said: “Obviously he wants us to speculate on what it all means. Obviously that’s what we’re all doing.”

David Milch, who has created highly regarded dramas like “NYPD Blue” and “Deadwood,” said: “It was a question of loyalty to viewer expectations, as against loyalty to the internal coherence of the materials. Mr. Chase’s position was loyalty to the internal dynamics of the materials and the characters.”

I fear, a bit, this split between the writer and their vision and the audience's desire for closure. But it's true that any real student of the show over the last several years had to know that this was never going to end in a tidy little bow.

Forty eight hours later and I'm still shaking my head at the bravura turn of it.

The TV fan in me hopes we'll one day see a series as good. The writer in me, darkly, suspects not. One thing for sure, though -- years from now when people talk about that ending, it will still have the power to astonish. And that's something, isn't it?

Don't Stop.

I KNOW that many of you will disagree, and maybe you're even howling in protest even now. And I'll probably have more to say when I'm better rested. But I have to go down and just say that the more I think about it, the more I have to conclude simply that that was the bessst....endinggggg....evaaaaar.

The Writer Mafia at the Banff TV Fest 2007 (or at least part of it anyway) would like to strongly thank a few amazing and thoughtful and awesome women at TMN, the Movie Network, for making viewing of the aforementioned finale possible.

TMN on Demand will have the finale online on Wednesday.

I'll probably edit this post later.

Whaddya Gonna Do?

UM. I just realized something.

Thanks to the Memorial Day Holiday in the USA, the absolute, last-ever episode of the Sopranos ever, ever ever... is not going to be June 3.

It's going to be June 10th.

On June 10th I'm not going to be in front of my widescreen HD TV. On June 10th, I'm going to be with a lot of other people ... at the Banff TV Festival.

Um.

No.

No. No. No. No. No.

This is not good. It's the TV FESTIVAL. I am, to quote the man, "prostate with grief." How am I supposed to avoid spoilers with a thousand people who work in TELEVISION?

Pssst. Hey there, TMN and Movie Central. How you doin'? That's a very nice dress you're wearing. It really brings out your exclusive output deal with HBO. Listen, do you mind if I lean in and whisper a few sweet nothings in your year?

Cough. Screening Party. Cough.