I'd Give You Everything I've Got For A Little Piece of Mind

There are two types of music I use to measure emotional states in my life.

Heartbreak = Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks. When I'm Tangled Up in Blue, that's the album I inevitably turn to. I even have a rule for its proper deployment: here it is:

One play, once a day. Do not exceed recommended dosage.

The last time I had trouble enforcing that rule was when I was in South Africa. I played Blood on the Tracks a few days ago and I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I hadn't needed it in a while. Not cause I'm drinking champagne out of the glass slipper with Ms Right, mind you, but just because...Ida know...didn't feel I needed it. It's almost...almost...become just another CD on the shelf.

My other crutch is another story. The other one is The White Album. I know that as a card carrying member of Baby Boom Deriders Inc, I should probably not be picking two iconic boomer artists and albums. But sadly, when I came up no one gave a crap about young people. I was imprinted. You go to war with the cultural touchstones you have.

It's when I find myself turning to some of the half lullabyes, and the soothing Lennon vocal on "I'm So Tired" that I know that I've run out the stress clock.

I have a lot of projects I'm juggling now. Every single one of them wants to demand my full attention -- or more. On some, I'm on my own. On others, I'm partnered with other people. My basic makeup means that in a pinch, I'll always defer to the projects where I've got other people along for the ride. Because people bug you. And I hate when people bug me. So I cave. I never know if that's the right decision or not.

I keep a diary of what I'm working on and when -- very informal, just so I can look back on what I've been doing and spending my time on. Generally, I'm pretty good at giving each project its due. I don't shortchange anything. But every time you have to switch gears, it's like retooling the whole plant.

The battle to make money and juggle artistic output is an inimical marriage at the best of times. But I'm tired. I'm tired of working weekends. I'm tired of the fact that I haven't taken any sort of vacation since about Sept of 2004. I'm tired that I have to switch gears every day, and sometimes more than once a day. I long to be busy in the focused way production brings -- one job. one show. one goal.

Development is -- even when it goes well -- such a crunching, driving, uphill process. Every time I read a spec from someone with talent who's nevertheless done a half-assed job, I wonder, "what's this person going to be like when they have to roll that boulder up the hill, day after day?"

Tomorrow may be shiny. But today it's a lot of 'what nows' and 'what nexts.' And lurking just behind is the knowledge that at some point I have to refresh my specs. Soon. Like, next two months, soon.

Doesn't sound like a lot of beach time in my future. This is why when you become a writer, there is nothing more important -- nothing -- than having a couple of people around who can always make you laugh.

They're so valuable, you should be able to deduct them on your taxes.

Oh well. Better go ... think. And blame Sir Walter Raleigh. He was such a stupid git.

The Eyeballs of Men

This is a story, and within this story lies a tale.

A little over fifteen years ago now, I was dating this very nice actress. (I had yet to learn.) We had gone to school together. She was a peach, really, but I knew the whole thing was doomed from the start. She was too pretty, and I was too insecure. But anyway, that doesn't really figure into the story or the tale. One night, I went out with her and a couple of my good friends from high school came along. One guy was my roommate at the time; he was blowing off steam because he was studying astrophysics. (That's right, bitches, I know an astronomer. I expect a gas giant named after me any day now. How appropriate that would be.) My other friend was working on his history master's at a school a ways outside of Toronto, so I didn't see him too much. (Of course, I saw him a whole lot more then than I do now. Such is the nature of those college good times -- you never think they're going to end.)

Anyway, me and my girlfriend and my friends went out and we had a great night. She was genuinely interested in people, and they were nice to her, and I thought we had a great night.

So I stayed over at her place, and it took til the next day at breakfast for me to realize that something was horribly wrong. I was getting the Silent Treatment. Thus began an hours-long odyssey that every man dreads, and endures: the honey-what's-wrong? After the requisite punishment period elapsed, I was shocked (shocked!) to discover that for once I hadn't said or done anything to her. Nope. Finally, with frustration and maybe even a real fear in her eyes, she looked up and through heavy-lidded eyes spat out, "I don't know how you guys can be friends. You're so horrible to each other."

And then I replayed the evening. And yeah...I guess, in a way...well...we gave each other the dozens. Pretty heavily. My astrophysicist friend, when I was in high school and ran for Student Council, spearheaded a write in campaign for a parrot. That parrot just may have been my Ralph Nader. My other friend was going through his 'harsh' phase. Everything was about being harsh. Then there was me. I got thrown off the announcements in high school for refusing to stop saying "What the hell?" because David Letterman said it. (Jesus. This was a different time.) Anyhow, no matter how I tried to explain it, she couldn't get it in her head that giving each other shit -- sometimes mounds, and mounds, and mounds of shit -- was how we expressed friendship. We enjoyed each other by torturing each other. That was how we communicated.

This is by no means a rare occurrence in male friendships, by the way. Just as women share every secret, men haze each other. Go to a schoolyard and you can see it every day. It's one of those basic differences.

I've been thinking about some of those differences lately, and how they affect the way that I do what I do. There's one truism in animation that isn't too surprising when you think of it: when you make an animated series for kids, or tweens, if you're expecting a mixed audience of boys and girls, you must keep in mind the following, unfair truth:

• Girls will watch stories where the main character is a boy
• Boys will not watch stories where the main character is a girl

Is it fair? Hell no. But it is so. There aren't a lot of boys watching Kim Possible. And there never will be.

How does that change through the years? Turn the boys into men, and what's the viewing pattern, and how is it affected?

Well, there's the usual cliches. Guys will get dragged to date movies only through extreme coercion. And for a great percentage of women out there, I would say that they've seen probably about 120 percent more Ninjas, about 342 more decapitations, and 35 873 more torture killings than they otherwise would have chosen to view, thanks to their boyfriend picking the movie that night.

Gradually, the television audience has been shifting for years now, skewing ever more female. It's changed the ways stories are told, and it's influenced the kinds of shows that are a success. A few years ago, like the makers of cartoons, TV programmers were afraid to make any shows that didn't have male appeal built in. Then came Sisters, Gilmore Girls and Sex in the City and what do you know, that's not such a concern anymore.

Except...

Men have been disappearing. In droves. It's been a heady concern for a while now. Where have the men gone? Especially the young men? They've seemed to desert TV. Lost, Invasion, Threshold, Criminal Minds -- that's an attempt to lure'em back. Women and Men both like Law and Order and CSI? Thank the Christ! Let's order ten of them!

Where'd the men go? Well, the pointy-heads can give you a hundred answers for that. Some of 'em are watching more male-friendly shows on cable like The Shield, or Curb, or Deadwood, or Sopranos. Some have decamped for videogames or the Net. And a whole, whole great whack of 'em are watching Adult Swim. (Way more than they thought. When they finally started rating that block, Cartoon Network found their ratings were mondo-higher than they thought. All. Young. Men.)

So, what the hell's going on?

I have a bold theory about this. It's going to get me in trouble. It's going to make for a lot of defensive "but's...". I understand all this.

I also want to say up front that I understand, and deplore, and find creepy, the whole trend of the fat-guy-with-the-skinny-wife sitcom, and the arrested development (as opposed to Arrested Development) man-boy trope that runs through the shows that still do stalk the earth, looking for male eyeballs. I also think it's a crime that beautiful, wonderful actresses from Joan Allen to Julianne Moore to Meryl Streep to..well...all of them, have to endure a litany of "the wife" and "the girlfriend" roles on their way to "the mother." This is not a grand unified theory of television. But for what it's worth, from a writing POV, here it is...my theory:

1. Mars doesn't understand Venus.
2. Venus doesn't understand Mars.
3. Mars responds to not understanding Venus by either consulting Venus, having Venus on staff or in the room, or ignoring Venus.
4. Venus responds to Mars by declaring that Mars is fucked.
5. Er..that's it.

I'm working on a couple of shows right now that have female protagonists. I do this partly because I grew up in a house of sisters, and a strong-willed mom, and partly because my particular style of writing favors dialogue. And if you're going to do that, then you better be writing women, because men don't talk that way. (Unless you count Al Swearengen, and even then, you have to throw in a lot of c***suckers.)

I am still learning the female voice -- in writing as well as in life. I am constantly on the phone to my female friends, grilling them on "how would this play out?" or "you're in this situation...how does that work?" My sister is a total type-A who studied feminist philosophy as an undergrad and right now is doing a big, big high falutin fellowship in Washington, D.C. She's smart as a whip and occasionally cranky -- but the few times I see her, there's always some point of female wisdom that drops out of her mouth and I lap it up like I'm a dog and she's tossing dinner rolls under the table.

I don't know what I would do if I couldn't talk to my female friends and run things by them. I don't know how I could possibly consider working on a show if there weren't female writers in the room. I understand that their perception of the world, by design, is always going to be different than my own. I'm a guy who likes to talk, and I'm not shy with sharing what I think. But I damn well listen, and learn, and it makes my characters better and my writing richer.

Now, does this mean that women understand themselves way better than men?

Well, uh. Hell no. Women do share. Or overshare. They talk out an issue. A lot. And in subtle observations of people, often there is an edge. I have come to fear and trust female intuition implicitly. But at the same time, I've watched women compete in the workplace. Ugly...I've seen several of my female friends as they cycle through a new best friend every two years. (They burn them out, I guess. Most of the men I know, their friends are people they've known for a decade or more.) And it's not like men are the only ones who make the same bad dating choices over, and over, and over.

The difference is, unless he's a total ass, and doesn't care -- a Male in a development position will read a script and wonder at the female reactions. He'll want to know that they're accurate. He will not attempt to say, "women do this or women do that." Because he'll know he's probably got it wrong. At least, he'll want confirmation that it's reading true.

But now there are a lot of women in development positions, at production companies and networks. In Canada, it seems, it's nearly all women in those positions. (And here's the sexist valve -- I know, I know, in many cases they are not the final say -- the final say is ... ahem ... a man.) Naturally, a lot of those women execs are focused on correcting the years of sexist portrayals by making the female roles meatier, more meaningful. In fact, I dare say that I have yet to get a note about how a female character was portrayed, and could be portrayed better, that wasn't spot on. And great -- after all, TV is indeed about pulling in female eyeballs.

But when it comes to the story, and how the men are portrayed -- the cringing starts where will is imposed on how men actually think and act. The stories I've heard from various writers, and my owe experiences too, have led me to conclude that part of the problem with why men are fleeing tv is because it's getting harder and harder to get scripts past the process where men act like men really act, and do what men do, and bond how men bond -- because women don't like it.

And that's a big problem.

Remember the story at the top, about my girlfriend hating how horrible me and my friends were to each other? Well, I've had two separate conversations about two separate projects with two different creators where there's serious pressure to have the guys be nicer to each other -- because that makes them more 'likable.'

It makes them more likable to women...but to male viewers...uh...it makes them...um...aliens.

A half a dozen times in the last year I have found myself in a head-scratching position where I had to figure out a way for two male characters to have a conversation that they would never, ever have, because they would never, ever, ever talk that way.

It's really frustrating.

And it doesn't just extend to development either. Sometimes, you can see how the summary judgement based on female-skewed perceptions trickles down into the review process.

In the Globe TV guide this week, writer Ceciley Ross spends a whole column being mystified at what the appeal of Family Guy is. It's racist, sexist, homophobic, and juvenile. (I would add, 'she says,' but in truth, I can't disagree with any of that.) She kind of mourns the fact that anyone would watch this show. Meanwhile, her husband is on the exercise bike killing himself laughing, and in the end she has to admit she laughed, too. But she seems singularly ashamed by that.

I'm not. Family Guy is awful. And awful funny. South Park, ditto. Next.

Then there's the case of Love Monkey. I want to quote you a bit of the Entertainment Weekly review of that show by Gillian Flynn.

"The more mystifying tweak to the novel is the decision to switch Tom's occupation from tabloid headline writer to an earnest music A&R guy...Love Monkey seesaws awkwardly between this music biz intrigue (don't care) and Tom's big city social life (wanna care.)"

Sigh. To one hundred percent of men I know -- the A&R hook is the thing they most liked. Flynn name-checks High Fidelity early in her review, but she obviously doesn't understand the lessons of that book -- and how deeply that resonates with the male psyche.

She goes on, in talking about the heightened dialogue:

"One entire scene is devoted to explaining the curiously dated "Grant's Law" -- that all men are like Hugh Grant, who despite having a gorgeous girlfirend at home (Liz Hurley) will want someone, anyone else (in this case, Divine Brown.) A good comedy rule: If your joke needs a PowerPoint presentation, it's not working. The Sex In The City women spawned their catchphrases within the course of natural, witty conversation. It can be done."

Again. Every guy I know who watched the pilot - Grant's Law was their favorite scene. For my money, too, especially in the first couple of seasons, Sex In The City's "catchphrases" were mystifyingly forced. I remember scratching my head, wondering how in the hell women were responding to what, to my ear, was so obviously a gay-male parody of how women talk. It was only in later seasons, where Michael Patrick King took some truly heavy-hitting female writers and gave them power (Jenny Bicks, Alexa Junge, Cindy Chupak, and others) where the show started to sound authentically female to me.

But you know what? Whatever. I wasn't the target for it. And therein lies the difference. There's not a guy alive (at least none that's working, that I know) who would point to a scene where women were speaking and say, "Women don't talk like that!" At best it would be a question, "Do women really talk like that?"

The reverse is not true.

And I think until we fix that problem...male eyeballs are going to continue to flee the small screen. It's not so much that big, grown up boys don't want to watch shows built around women. It's that we're creeped out when we see men who don't act or talk anything like the men we know.

Our culture spends a lot of time telling men that how they interact is broken. But it's not. And if TV presents us with only that view too, well...we're gonna go somewhere else.

For an intriguing illustration of what I'm talking about, there's a book I really want to read, and that I think should probably be on the bedtable of every female development executive, too:

Norah Vincent's Self Made Man.

They printed an excerpt from this in the paper last weekend. Vincent tells the story of her interactions in an all male bowling league. The climax is a ritual that she at first finds puzzling: one guy is having a hell of a game, and one by one all the men stop bowling. They just sit down. Eventually he bowls a perfect game, and everyone whoops. Vincent's amazed by the lack of communication, how the men just stopped, and waited respectfully for the man to finish his game. It was a sign of respect, yes -- but it was also a communal action taken without having to talk about it at all.

Reading the story, I immediately knew what was going on, and I suspect most men would, too. It's nice to hear the refreshing point of view that just because we don't hyper-articulate everything, it doesn't mean we don't communicate.

It took a gay man to give women their voice in Sex and the City. I love the fact that maybe, just maybe, it takes a lesbian writer from California to give men their due, without the fooferal and crap of all that bogus Iron John stuff. I hope this book gets read in TeeVee land. (At least in Canada. I know none of you Californios read.) It may point a way to get some of those male eyeballs back.

Logrolling Part XXV

Well, I'm hosting a story breaking session for a friend's show in my condo right now. One guy's raiding my CD's, one guy's downstairs taking a smoke break, and the other guy's in the bathroom.

That should tell you how it's going.

Alex at Complications Ensue has a great interview with fellow scribe blogger Ken "The Comedy Machine" Levine. Go and read it.

Now we're back. Back to the magic.

Nobody Knows Anything, Episode XL

The New York Times this morning has a great article about Greg Garcia and his tenacious battle to get My Name is Earl on the air. He endured tribulations a-mighty, including executives telling him "it doesn't feel like a series" and a multitude of 'no's.' Including from NBC. Too downmarket -- not funny -- a truly ugly litany. Even when the pilot was shot there were people who said it wasn't funny. In a reverse of the testing curse, they didn't lose confidence because it tested poorly, they kept sending it back for testing because it kept scoring higher and they didn't trust the tests.

I pass along an article like this with trepidation, because the last thing the industry needs is -- like the rock and roll dreams of the truly bad American Idol-wannabes -- the last thing we all need is a would-be writer pushing their bad series like a dog with a bone, and not letting it go...

But when you read the article, I want you to note the two early safety valve things that you need if you're going to have an inspirational, Greg Garcia-like end to your story:

1. You need an early champion of the work. And it has to be someone real. Not your mom.
2. You absolutely need a champion at the network--even one who's willing to stick their neck out. In this case, that guy happened to be Kevin Reilly.

Read the article here.

Good News Cross the Pond...and at home!

Today, in programming statements, UK casters Five, ITV, and Channel 4 all promised an increase in the amount of original drama they're going commission this year. That's great news for British TV writers.

Canadian broadcasters...you listening? Is this thing on? Bueller?

UPDATE: Moments after posting this, my friend Marvin "Big Bald Marvin" Kaye called me with news to lift the spirits. It seems that the CRTC (the Canadian Broadcast Regulator, kind of like the USA's FCC) has released a seven-page notice that constitutes the biggest change to their drama policy since 1999.

They've ordered Canada's 3 private language networks to both increase the money spent on drama, and to try and raise viewership of these dramas.

Under the plan, CHUM, CTV, and GLOBAL are asked to raise their annual expenditures on drama to 6 percent of their total annual gross revenues. (The current level of expenditure hovers around 3.3 percent) They have five years to do this.

Through marketing and scheduling, the CRTC also is requiring these networks to boost viewership to at least 16.5 percent of total drama viewership. (In 2003-2004, the level was about 9.2 percent, though CTV, with hits Corner Gas and Degrassi, claims 10.5 percent. CHUM was around 9.1, Global at 8.1)

Taken together, over the five year span, this would mean an 80 percent increase in both investment and audience from current levels. It is an incredibly ambitious plan. And frankly, I can't believe they put it out. This is such good news for Canadian writers, producers, and performers that......well......sniff....I'm a little weepy. Don't look at me. I said don't look at me.

There. Okay.

With the stick, there is the previously announced carrot. In November 2004, the CRTC announced it was changing their policy to allow Canadian 'casters to air additional ads on popular (and lucrative) U.S. programming, provided they air a certain level of indigenous drama in prime time.

American readers might be scratching their heads by now. How can the regulator tell these companies what to do? All these companies have to have their licenses renewed by the CRTC every seven years. (The airwaves belong to the people, don'tcha know. Using them is a public trust. Imagine such an idea.) As I've explained before in other posts (I'm not linking to them, but trust me, go back through archives and you'll find them) Canada's situation is unique in a number of ways. The short version:

• Canada is the only country where Canadian networks get to simulcast shows at the same time as U.S. Networks
• Canadian Networks are very profitable, and get a great break by being able to substitute their advertising over U.S. ads when they show the show at the same time.
• Before the policy was changed in 1999, there were a lot more Canadian dramas on TV here. The broadcasters lobbied for rule changes, and pretty much as soon as the rules changed, those shows disappeared. Profits at the private networks went up, careers of writers and producers of drama in Canada went off a cliff.

Quotas and edicts, of course, are not the answer -- at least, not the whole answer. But there is a beachhead to be had right now -- with Corner Gas we have a bonafide Canadian hit on our hands. It can be done. And if you market your wares honestly and not cynically (in the past a lot of Canadian drama has just been 'dumped' and shuffled around the schedule, because that's not where the channels make their money.) there will be a reward.

And the great thing is that a lot of the dedicated developers and production execs I deal with at some of these networks might actually have a bit more clout now. You sometimes get the sense that they're the poor cousins, sitting there and trying to get Canadian shows made while the Sales guys eat steak and burn bags of U.S. money to keep warm. Now, their jobs become more important. So I think it's good news for a lot of hardworking people on the Network side, too.

This is the best news I could have hoped for today. I'm over the moon. I'm feeling....positive.
About the future. Me. Oh God. I think I need to lie down.

"No, Mr. President, I am a Patriot!"

I have a bad, bad feeling that 24, Day 5 may have jumped the shark last night.

And it did it in one scene.

I hope not.

UPDATE:
Not really about the above, but I just wanted to give a SPOILER WARNING to any Canadian fans of Battlestar Galactica. The comments thread below contains SPOILERS for episodes that have yet to air on SPACE. Avoid if that kind of thing upsets you.

Music in Scripts

Hi. Can we talk? Why don't you come in. There. It's best if you sit down for this. Comfy? Can I get you something? Tea? I think there's a biscotti in there too. Wait, it's stale. Um...just the water it is, then. Yes sir. Aqua. The Old H20. Awesome thing, water. Refreshing, right? Ice cubes nice and cold? Mmm. Yeah, that's it. Oh. Oh. Yes. Right. Okay. Mmm.

You are not Nic Harcourt.

Whew. That was hard to say. I feel good. I feel better.

You don't know who he is? Oh, okay. Um, he's this totally cool Los Angeles DJ. He's also a Music Supervisor for movies and shows like Love Monkey. And he wrote a book called Music Lust. His L.A. NPR station, KCRW, played Norah Jones, Coldplay, Sia, KT Tunstall, Damien Rice, Jem, Kate Earl, Rilo Kiley, Death Cab for Cutie and just about any other cool band I've heard in the last few years before anybody else. Nic Harcourt is very good at what he does. There are a couple of other people out there who do what Nic Harcourt does -- they kind of act as the cool music pipeline to TV shows and movies. It's a great job.

It's not your job. Stop doing it.

One of the single biggest noobie mistakes I get in all the spec scripts I'm asked to read -- whether it's from students as part of my teaching duties, or friends or acquaintances just looking for feedback is this:

scenes built around a particular song.

Right there, in the script. Sometimes people leave it in the action descriptions....a discreet note that says, "This scene plays out to Death Cab for Cutie's I Will Follow You Into the Dark" or KT Tunstall's "The Other End of the Telescope."

Others will go further. They will print lyrics for the soundups -- showing how the song totally illustrates the conundrum that the main character is going through.

This is wrong on so many levels. But I understand why people do it.

Lots of shows these days make their bones doing the end-of-show music montage. When it's done right, and when it's not a horrible cliche, it can be very effective. Yup. That whole season-ending scene of the West Wing, cut to "Brothers in Arms?" Awesome. Sia's "Breathe Me" was a breathaking focus of those mesmerising last five minutes of the Six Feet Under finale. I will always have a soft spot for Billy Vera, just because his song broke young Alex Keaton's heart in such a sublime and totally awesome way.

But that, my friends, is not up to you.

There's a lot of reasons why not to specify music when you're writing a script, but I'm just going to hit on my favorites:

• Music is added last, in post. First, if you're trying to use a hot new song, you can't do that at the script stage, because of lag. You specify a song that's even slightly new, it won't be by the time your show airs. And that's if you're in production.
• "Okay," you say, "But I'm using a classic rock track." Now, why is that still a bad idea? Do you want the business or the creative reason first? Business? Okay. Music costs money. For every "Needle drop" you have to pay a royalty. Sometimes that royalty is huge. Sometimes it's not. What happens if you build your whole scene around a Sigur Ros track and Sigur Ros comes back and says, "Nope, you can't have that track?" Or worse, "Yes, you can have that track, but it will cost you $20 000.00. Oh, and you can't have it for the DVD." See, suddenly your idea to build around that song doesn't look so visionary. It looks like a huge problem. Which it usually is. Clearing music is what has kept many TV shows from coming out on DVD, or what has led to tracks being replaced when they do come out.
  
• Now, let's do the creative reason. Wait. There's two of them, too. Which do you want first, the writing reason, or the reading reason? Reading? Okay. When you specify a song for a reader in reading the scene, what do you hope is going to happen? That they're going to read it and go, "oh my God, that IS the perfect song for this scene...so and so is a frigging genius?" That's not going to happen. What's more likely to happen is this: either the person reading doesn't know the song-- which comes with its own fraught minefield: "Why don't I know the song? Is the fact that I don't know this song evidence of the fact that I'm not hip anymore? Was I ever hip? Who is this little fucker to tell me that I'm not hip?" -- or the person knows the song and hates it. "Oh, Great. Another song cut to After Midnight by Clapton. Genius. Wow, Jeff Buckley's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah? Really? Awesome. Very 1998." Do you notice what's happening right now? They're not thinking about your writing, are they? You've taken them out of the script. In other words, you've lost.
• More importantly, and this is the second creative reason - even if you do come up with the perfect song, it's still not your job, so it looks like you don't know what you're doing -- and you're also trading on someone else's creativity. I already know that Joni Mitchell can make me feel sad. Ditto Jeff Buckley, or Nick Drake. The point of a script is to see what you can do. Why would you cede your impact powers to someone else's intellectual property? The point of your script is to get me to want to buy into you, not to go out and buy Johnny Cash Live at Folsom Prison.

Now, there are exceptions. If you can pull off making a song such an ingenious part of a scene, so counter-intuitive, such a fascinating juxtaposition, then maybe...maybe you could suggest it. But I have to tell you in all the scripts I've ever read that included music cues, not one has ever risen to this challenge. Nor have I ever bothered to include a music cue in anything I've ever written. Because even if you're being clever and you know how music supervision works, you don't want to look like you don't know how it works.

The other exception is original music. If your story is about a singer-songwriter, and you want to include your original songs. Hey. Awesome. But remember, if your original songs suck (and 90% of them do) it's going to damage the impression you create in your reader, too.

So next time you have that hottie plugging the jukebox, why not just go for broke and write the scene. You know, "A slow, haunting blues number starts to play. Jenny's hips start to move...slowly at first, then faster, in time with the insistent beat...it's hotter than an Alabama August..."

Or something like that.

Just leave the Needle Drop to Nic.

One is the Loneliest Monkey

Vancouver's House-addict, essayist, and Blogcritic Diane Kristine takes on Love Monkey's Michael Rauch in this delicious Q&A. No feces are thrown. But I can't vouch for the banana consumption.

Bonus points: Diane has correctly identified the Love Monkey theme song as a cover of "Someone Who's Cool" originallly by the Odds, not Sloan. I had the wrong Canadian coast. My bad.

Diane's interview is here.

Shades of Grey

Because you're the only ones I trust, chickens, I will tell you these four things:

1. I know that post Superbowl episodes always suck.
2. I always play Poker on Superbowl Sunday
3. I have deep and unresolved shame over my Sunday-night love for Grey's Anatomy.
   
   Now, those three things being said, there is also this:
   
   
4. What. The Fuck. Is a CODE BLACK?

Copyright & The Stage...

I know that's not the barn-burningest of titles, but it's actually yet another fascinating article in today's Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. (My friend Jeff Reynolds was right, it was a good week.)

When I was a teenager, I was a drama geek. My high school drama teacher, a gentleman (in every sense of the word) named Jim Hunt, always had great ideas for staging this or that...some of them were inspired by bits and pieces he'd seen on Broadway. Later, when I started dabbling in theatre myself, I became fascinated with how Jerome Robbins had gotten his original choreography copyrighted as part of West Side Story. I even put a line in about that when it came time to write my stage spoof Top Gun! The Musical.

Jesse Green, in an article called Exit, Pursued By a Lawyer, tracks a case currently before the course that could have a profound and chilling effect on the stage. Briefly, should a director's contributions to a play be copyrightable?

The case has arisen out of a couple of cases where directors have seen their stagings reproduced almost exactly -- stagings that were not part of the playscript. Currently, the Playwright's Union specifies that no changes to what is written in stage directions or dialogue can be changed without the express consent of the playwright, and once those changes are made, they become the property of the playwright. The Directors and Choreographer's union maintains that Directors contributions are copyrightable. A case now before the courts might decide the issue.

So what's the problem? Well, in a sense, imagine a playscript as a house or structure. It's meant to be produced and reproduced. If a Director gets to copyright their interpretations, then in a sense it's like a lien is placed against the structure. You can't do that; someone did it before. Enough productions happen, and the choices of staging are going to become more and more limited.

In this way, even a public domain work like Romeo & Juliet could become unproducable. If there are fifteen ways you can't do the balcony scene without coughing up dough, then at what point does it become impossible to stage?

(Aside: Remember how you used to be able to see It's a Wonderful Life on TV all the time at Christmas? That's because it passed into the public domain. A few years ago, though, someone managed to re-copyright the score, and that's why you see it a lot less now. The intent of copyright often makes works less available to the public. Ah lawyers. They make everything fun.)

It's an interesting and thorny problem. I know if I was a director, I'd be cheesed if I saw my hard work lifted in another production. Then again, they are an interpretative artist -- and as such, should their contributions be held up against the original work?

And don't think I don't realize what an interesting reflection this is of the battle of the "authorial credit" long lost in Hollywood to the Directors.

Like I said. Lots of issues. For my money, the weighting HBO puts to its series -- where the episode writer and director are given pride of place credit placement just before the show starts -- well that's class all around.

The most interesting part of the Times article I reproduce below:

Mr. Weidman, who worked with Mr. Mantello on the recent Broadway revival of "Assassins" — and who, in gratitude for his directorial contributions to the show, offered him a share of the authors' royalty, which Mr. Mantello declined — is more diplomatic. The director is an interpretive artist, he said, often doing brilliant work. For his work to be systematically copied by someone else, he agrees, is "manifestly unfair."

But that does not mean, he argued, that the director owns his work, any more than an actor does. Not everything creative is copyrightable. The repercussions, he said, would be too dire. If each director's staging of a relatively new play had copyright protection, very soon there would be no staging options left. The play would become so encumbered with licenses, or the risk of lawsuits, that it would be impossible to produce — a net loss to the culture. Even classic works like "Romeo and Juliet" might gradually be removed from the public domain, thus perverting the aim of copyright law, which is to increase the flow of ideas and artwork by providing an incentive to their creators. "If Leonard Bernstein had been in a position to copyright his interpretation of Mahler," Mr. Weidman asked, "would another conductor who thought that interpretation was right, and then conducted Mahler in the same way, be stealing from Bernstein?"

The full article is available here. It's well worth a read.

David @$#% Mamet, @$#Damnit.

"Doing a movie or a play is like running a marathon....Doing a television show is like running until you die."


That's among the wisdom and interest contained in Dave Itzkoff's NYTimes profile of Mamet and Ryan's upcoming CBS show The Unit.

Definitely worth a read: not just for the usual pithy Mametian insight, but for the single greatest line of writing-room advice I've ever heard, which apparently hangs in The Unit's writing room:

'Only tell those stories which are told in the half-hour before closing time.'

Sho.Nuff.

Offered without comment...

After 48 hours of talking to people about the James Frey memoir and the Oprah-driven public stoning debacle that's followed it...

Number of people talked to who have read the book: 9
Number of people who read the book who now feel "betrayed, and angry at having been so deceived...": 5
Number of people who read the book who felt "he's probably making some of this up," and who now feel, "it doesn't really change anything, it was still a pretty good book." : 4

Now. Guess the gender of the Five, and the gender of the Four.

Things that make you go, "hmmmm."

Being Able to Work for "The Boss."

And no, I'm not talking Springsteen.

In my day-t0-day experience working as a TV writer in Canada, I would have to say that the main flaw I see running rampant is that not enough of us here seem to be working for The Boss.

We talk about the Boss, of course. We complain about him, we bitch and moan that he never seems to be around. But secretly, we're not really working for him. We're all trying to express ourselves. Deal with our inner pain, or our inner artist, or whatever. Often, what the Boss thinks is very, very far down on our list. It's incredibly counterintuitive, because the Boss is the one with the power to fire our ass.

Except that he isn't. See, sometimes in Canada, you deal with the Board. The Board could be Telefilm, it could be the Canadian Television Fund, or that exec at the network who isn't The Boss and hasn't a clue of what the Boss wants because they don't ever really take that meeting.

I wish more people I met here really wanted to work for the Boss.

And if you don't know what the %@!# I'm talking about, you need to go read Craig Mazin's excellent post about The Boss at Artful Writer.

A Million Little Bullshits

Watching the flagellation of James Frey on Oprah today, I gotta tell you, was one of the most interesting things I've ever seen on television. It was fascinating. I can't believe he didn't explode.

The whole debate around this now has metastasized into a discussion that I think is just unreal.

I'm only about a quarter of the way through Frey's book. It's a great piece of writing. And even as I read it before I got busy, and before the Smoking Gun piece broke, I found myself thinking, "this can't all be true."

It seems to me that there's an almost naive thing working through Oprah's -- and America's -- understanding of this story, and all stories. It puts me in mind of the controversy that surrounded The Hurricane when it came out, and the desperate attempts to discredit Michael Moore's Columbine and Farenheit 9/11 by coming up with minor and ultimately unimportant distortions of time and place, and using that to try and damn the larger truths contained within.

Oprah and others can rage against Frey, I truly believe, because in the end his story really doesn't matter. It's safe to get outraged about it.

But drumming up the true rage one should have about distortions -- like, say, the distortions of a government that has lied consistently to its citizens about science, the law, foreign policy, and the conduct of a war fought in our name -- well...that's scary stuff. That's stuff that could actually tear a country apart.

Better we go after the fibber with the book on Oprah.

We live in interesting times. We surely do.

Love Monkey = My New Favorite Show

Not necessarily my new favorite, more like my favorite of new...um...right. Where was I?

I loved Kyle Smith's Love Monkey when it came out. I loved everything about that book. Nick Hornby with an American accent. I can't believe John Cusack didn't buy the rights.

Then comes the casting. Tom Cavanagh, so effortlessly winning in Ed. Judy Greer, who's always been so much funnier and greater than her role as the secretary -who-always- exposes-her- new-breasts in Arrested Development. "Say goodbye to these, Michael!" Give her the chance to play doe-eyed. Mmm. Ingenue. Throw in an A&R theme, (changed from the book's journo.) Throw in Larenz Tate and Jason Priestley, and Ivana Milevic (I'm not sure that's how you spell her name, but she was the best thing in the Mind of the Married Man.)

I was predisposed to like this show. But I've been so swamped the last two weeks I hadn't had a chance to check it out. Great script. Great characterizations. Beautifully shot. New York for New York -- there's a concept. Captures all my manboy-like-tendencies in one tidy package. And a cover of "Somebody Who's Cool" by Sloan as the theme song. Whoosh.

It better not be tanking. I'm falling for this little monkey hard.

Book of Daniel is Dunzo.

And you know what? I'm no longer sure that the First Amendment really means anything anymore.

Yeah, viewers didn't watch.

But still -- it all feels to me like something is steadily getting added to the gunk. The gunk is what can be said and defended. America is such a poisoned, partisan place right now that I'm starting to wonder if debate's even possible anymore. Book of Daniel was about faith and how hard it is to keep it. It was about a guy who wanted to believe in the forgiveness parts of the Bible, rather than all the smoting. And, of course, the people who run the U.S. now, but who somehow are still under constant, unending attack by ... uh ... I don't know ... ghosts? ... well, you know, they get to call the tune and the MSM follows up with dutiful stories of station boycotts and "controversy."

Better that a show came and went and people said, "wasn't our cup of tea." But no -- now it's forever linked with the "you can't possibly say anything bad about religion. Not in America." Even if you weren't really saying anything bad about religion in the first place.

In the United States, today, remember - the most important thing to do is to "watch what you say."

Gunk. I don't know how you can breathe through it anymore.

Good Night and Good Luck, I guess.

Copyright, Shmoppyright...just one more.

Hey, I promise, this is the last Canadian-election related post.

One of the interesting results from the election is that the Liberal candidate in Parkdale-High Park, a West End Toronto riding, Sam Bulte, was thrown out by Peggy Nash's NDP.

Why is that interesting?

Well, if you've been reading Boing Boing, you probably know. Sam Bulte had some heavy-duty friends. A few days before the election, she held a fundraiser that was sponsored in large part by lobbyists who are trying to get Canada's copyright laws changed. Basically, powerful interests who want RIAA-style onerous laws that benefit multinationals and corporate interests, at the expense of citizens. (Canada's current copyright laws are currently not quite as stacked against the consumer as U.S. laws are.)

Anyway, thanks to a lot of bloggers, chief among them law professor Michael Geist (whose site offers a pretty good link primer on the whole controversy) and Cory Doctorow, Bulte found herself, as the campaign wore on, cast as "Hollywood's Candidate." The perception being that her point of view was heavily, and perhaps unfairly influenced by powerful lobbyist backers.

Bulte did herself no favors, by casting the opinions of those who disagreed with her approach as "pro-downloading zealots.." (reducing a big, big issue to the RIAA-sponsored bogeyman talking points.)

Anyway, she lost. But it's how she lost that's really interesting. Her support from the 2004 election didn't really change that much -- but almost thirty percent more people came out to vote for her opponent. The turnout in the riding was 72 percent, which was about 8 percent or so higher than any other riding in the country. If the turnout experienced in this one riding had been reflected nationally, 123 of the House of Commons 308 seats would have been in different hands today. That's incredibly significant. And it indicates that just maybe, the combination of copyright, the taint of lobbyist influence, and the blogosphere had an impact.

More on that here.

The Problems with Cancon

All through this election in Canada, just concluded, I would receive missives from Arts groups like my union, the WGC, and the Actor's Union, ACTRA, and various other arts organizations agitating the same line, "make culture an issue in this election." I kind of ignored them, because I knew that the real issues in this election would never be shoved aside for a discussion for culture, and because I honestly believe that an election is a stupid time to talk about culture anyway. It would just get reduced to hysteria about naked bums.

Now there's a Conservative government coming in. It'll be a weak government, and likely it won't be able to do much in the culture gutting department. But so many of my friends who don't work in the industry, or who are U.S. -based, don't understand the issues of "government support of culture" in Canada that I thought I'd just drop a few f-bombs here. Um. Wait. No. Not F-bombs. Call them "context statements."

The idea of "Canadian Culture" (in the vast, sparsely-populated English speaking part, not the concentrated French-speaking part) is always going to be one of nuance. Canadians do mostly define themselves by how they're different than Americans. And to an outsider, the truth is, they're not that different.

But Canada is in a unique position. We are the only country whose movie receipts are counted as part of the U.S. domestic box office tally. Think about that. We also are the only country where U.S. shows air at the same time, not just on the U.S. channels that we get on our cable, but on the Canadian networks too. (The situation is different for Cable channels...for instance, we don't have HBO, we have two Canadian equivalents, but they show all the same shows, and pretty much everything makes it up here sooner or later. Some of our Cable channels, like, say, Showcase or Space, I think are actually better than their U.S. equivalents) In fact, our position is so unique that our networks get to do something pretty extraordinary: if they show a show like CSI at the same time as CBS does, they get to block out CBS' signal with their own, for the duration of the show. So their commercials air on two channels. Pretty sweet.

This is one of the reasons why if you own a TV station, Canadian broadcasting is pretty lucrative. Plus, you don't really have to spend that much money promoting the shows you bought -- you just piggyback on the US media exposure. Again, if you're a network prez in Canada, awesome. That little gift used to be combined with one for the other side: the production community: Canadian drama quotas. But in 1999, the Broadcasters managed to get the rules changed so that they could count low-cost reality shows as CanCon. And overnight the number of drama series in Canada dropped from about 12 or 13 to, like, 4. Whoops. They still get the sweet commercial-substitution dealie, though.

Canadians have a voracious appetite for U.S. cultural product. Why should they be any different than the rest of the world?

Yet, because this is a nation of 30 million next to one ten times bigger, when the discussion of US cultural types comes to "there should be a level playing field" (code for: stop government support of the domestic TV production industry) the discussion becomes silly quickly.

As does most of the discussion surrounding the moaning the private networks do here about the CBC. Most of the private broadcasters would like it if the CBC couldn't sell ads. They don't want to compete with the CBC at all. They want the CBC to be like PBS in the U.S.

Now, here's the problem. Due respect to the Wingers down in the U.S.--you know what, scratch that, who am I kidding?-- but Canadians, in ways other than culturally, don't really resemble the United States all that much. We are more liberal up here. We are not nearly as religious. Yes, the Conservatives just won a government, but they did it with only 36% of the vote -- meaning the majority of the population voted against them. (This happens in just about every election here -- it's one of the quirks of the parliamentary system when you have 3 or 4 viable parties.) The Conservative support is mostly concentrated in rural areas. They didn't win a single seat in the three largest cities in Canada -- Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. The funny thing is that the regions that the Conservatives draw their support from, are probably, well, more conservative -- more in line with the Red States in the USA. But Bush, for whatever reason, got 51% of the vote in 2004. In Canada, the Conservatives simply cannot make that claim. Hence the reality, that at any time, the other parties could cause the government to fall. (That's what's meant by "a minority," -- the ruling party doesn't have enough seats to pass legislation without help from some of the other parties.)

I'm sure that the Conservatives would love nothing more than to squish a lot of cultural talk or product that tells Canadians, that, um, you know...they think a bit differently than Americans do. Because that would mean that the American values' -- which are closer to their supporters than the majority of Canadians -- would be the only ones shown on TV. Maybe that would result in more social conservatism. Who knows. Stranger things have happened.

I'm amazed whenever I talk to Canadian nationalists who are rabidly anti-American, then in the same breath, rage at the fact that they can't get any American channel they want. There's a lot of hippie-dippie talk from Canadian cultural types about "supporting our stories" and there's plenty of cultural theory to back it up -- but the more compelling fact is that Canada was out of step with most western countries in that it was the one place where homegrown drama and comedy wasn't in the top twenty watched shows.

When I was in South Africa in 2004, I was fascinated by the wide range of homegrown product that was available. Youth shows like Yizo Yizo, and lots of soaps, sitcoms, dramas -- all cheaply made, of course...but they were popular. And sometimes they were in eleven languages. Freaky.

But here's the funny thing...that attitude has just started to change in Canada. The argument before from networks has always been 'Canadians don't want to watch Canadian shows.' But now there's shows like Corner Gas, and Degrassi, and Falcon Beach (which is doing very respectably for Global,) and even smaller cult hits like those dastardly Trailer Park Boys, that proves that nope, that's not true either.

So why support them at all with Government money? Because given a choice and a "level playing field" -- most Canadian networks would rather buy CSI cheap, and count their money. There is no level playing field. The networks have a way easier deal than networks in any other country. They're basically sucking at the teat of the U.S. tv industry, without having to break a sweat. And our broadcasting regs help them to do it. That's not level. Taking away cable substitution and saying, "Okay, CBS, you can now compete for Canadian ad dollars..." that's level, right? No? Um...why not?

The problem is once you introduce government funding for the arts in a large scale way, it becomes bureaucratized. You see this sometimes in the kinds of shows that get made, especially on CBC. They don't appeal to people, because they're committee'd to death, or greenlit for a reason other than, "we think audiences will really like this." There's no vision there. So that's a problem with government support of TV.

But here's the flipside: the arguments made against government support of the arts are exactly the same arguments made against CanCon on Radio in the 1960's. Then, a man named Pierre Juneau spearheaded those regs. (The Canadian Grammy Award, the Juno, is named after him.)

All the arguments that people made -- the "there should be a level playing field" stuff -- were made then about radio. And for a while, the CanCon quotas did mean that a lot of crappy Canadian music got played more than it should.

But then the industry grew up. Legions of musicians came up, and found support, and the result today is that the Canadian Music Industry is actually an industry...not a toy, like the domestic TV industry is. Bands like Tragically Hip can make a good living touring and recording, even though they've never really "broken through" in the USA. It's not unusual in the slightest for young Canadians to talk about, and love -- even prefer, Canadian music. The best hip-hop I heard last year was from K-OS, a Canadian artist who hasn't made a dent in the States.

In fact, the Canadian music industry got so successful with the regulations, that it became attractive to the majors. And there were mergers, and consolidations, and lo and behold, the major labels here are all run by lawyers now. They don't break new talent, they push for RIAA-style copyright restrictions that benefit multinationals, not humans, and the true excitement in the music scene comes from a network of independent bands and labels: Broken Social Scene, Arts & Crafts, Stars, Metric -- and a host of others. The fact that there is a vibrant indie scene only reinforces the fact that Canadian music, given a chance to grow through concerted, committed regulatory support, eventually matured to the point where even the independent artist could claim support and make a living on their merits.

We're seeing the first blush of success with homegrown shows on TV now. Will it be snuffed out because of political expediency? Or is it possible that twenty years from now, we'll be talking about the Pierre Juneau of Canadian TV?

THE CW?

Well. Bust my balls.
Just what we need. One LESS outlet for television ideas.

I love it when the business guys do things to salt my game. Interesting from a business POV. From a creative one? Not so much.

Daddy wants a Guinness. Before one p.m.

Not a good sign.

Good News, For Now...

Well, it looks like the Conservatives will form the next Canadian government, but not with a very strong mandate. It'll be a very weak minority, which probably means we in Canada will have to suffer through three federal elections in about six years. Mark sometime in 2007 on your calendar. Sigh.

Anyway, the other piece of news I got today was way better. I've had a pilot shortlisted in the new Pilot Program sponsored by The Canadian Film Centre.

This is the Canadian Film school founded by director Norman Jewison. I was a resident there in 2001. The new program is an initiative where the film centre will become involved, with broadcaster participation, in the production of pilots each year. Canada generally doesn't produce pilots -- shows are given 6 and 13 episode orders based on scripts. Which seems a ridiculously risky idea to anyone who's worked in the American industry, I know.

So, anyway, good news. One iron that might catch fire.

Now if I could just throw off the reality tv yoke, all would be swelligant.