Travel & Worldview

Commenter Webs posted down in the "Chihuaha" comments something that was too good to just keep to the sidelines:

I'm an anglo Quebecker, and I've had a sequence of francophone friends in my life, federalist and separatist.

If there's one factor that is responsible for whether a francophone is federalist or separatist, it's travel. Francophones who have traveled outside Quebec - never mind outside Canada - are nearly always federalist. Those that stay inside Quebec, where "going out west" means a visit to Gatineau, tend to support separatism.

I have a similar story.

When I was in South Africa, one weekend just before I left we traveled to Durban, which was on the Indian Ocean, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. We drove into the Zulu country one day -- very beautiful -- and on the way came to a craft village. There was a store there run by a couple who made beautiful toys out of wood. On the wall, they had a map of the world. Little push-pins marked the places of origin of all the visitors who'd bought something at the store.

When one looked at the map of the United States, the most striking thing about it was that practically all the pins came from the so-called "Blue States." (States that had voted for Al Gore in 2000.) There were very few pins from any of the "Red States." Funnily enough, the Redder the state, the fewer pins there were. For instance, in Texas, there were a bunch of pins from what I assume was Austin -- a blue district in a very red state.

This was the summer of 2004, and I just thought it was a funny, interesting anecdotal observation. Overwhelmingly, the people from the U.S. who had strayed this far from home were from heavily Democratic-leaning areas.

Now, of course, there's other stuff going on there -- Democrats do better in big cities, and cities have more people, so there would be more pins...but still. It was striking. I kept looking for a break to the pattern -- a Red place with pins...and there was none.

I never forgot that. Then, a few months later, the election of 2004 went the way it did. And in the election result number crunching, one of the most interesting stats I saw was people who held valid U.S. passports supported Kerry, by almost a two-to-one margin.

Just sayin.

Zeitgeist

See. It's not just me.

If I Could Teach My Chihuahua to Sing

This is one of those random-thoughts post. Anyone looking for a well-constructed argument best move along.

I've got some attention issues right now. I've got someone else's script to read and story edit, an outline for a cartoon to deliver by Monday, and another outline that I really should get in at the same time. For the last two days I've been pulled apart and discombobulated. On the procrastination scale, it's been about a 6.1 -- which doesn't sound so bad until I tell you this: the procrasitnation scale is like the Richter Scale. It's exponential.

So today, sadly, is a bit of a load-bearing day. And once more, I'm probably going to be working through the weekend, which isn't too bad because I don't have too much planned this weekend.

Anyway, last night I went to see Texas singer-songwriter Joe Ely at Toronto's legendary Horseshoe Tavern. It was both Joe and the Horseshoe's birthday, and both were in fine form. I keep going back and forth about whether I'd seen Ely before. I saw him a couple of months ago at Massey Hall in a songwriter's night with Guy Clark, Lyle Lovett, and John Hiatt...but I can't remember if I'd also seen him on one of my trips to Austin in the 90's. It was either him or Guy Clark. I can't remember. Too much tequila.

Anyway. Last night we were at the back of the half-full 'Shoe, and there was a drunk Maritimer there. (I don't mean a salty seaman, I mean a guy from Nova Scotia.) I have been known, in my time, to be loud. But this guy was the loudest human I've ever heard. When he sneezed, dust came down from the ceiling. There was a blast radius of about ten feet around him as people tried to get away from his cellphone conversations, silly observations, and excruciatingly personal and banal conversations shouted at top volume to his pliant friends. He was roaringly drunk, and probably had no idea how loud he was being. The funny thing was, none of his friends mentioned anything to him. I found that telling.

Random thought number one:

When you're a writer, you can find yourself spinning out whole scenarios about a guy you've never met based on one detail, and the reactions of others around him to that detail. You can do this in the back of your head, whilst listening to a live performer you're really digging. It's a background process that just chugs along. And no matter how marvellous a skill this is, it is no guarantee that in the morning, your focus will be any sharper on the thing that you're actually trying to complete. Sigh.

Ely is a storyteller. He had a great one last night about turning forty above the Arctic Circle in Norway, not knowing a soul, waiting for an icebreaker to come and clear a path so he could travel south. Now that is a bad birthday.

If you check Joe Ely's tour schedule, you'll see that like Bob Dylan these days, he's a guy who basically lives on the road. I find that fascinating. I always wonder if that's an attempt to run away from something, or just a way to keep yourself from running to something. I know that the few times in my life where I've had extended work assignments on the road, I've hated it. And I'm a guy who doesn't feel particularly rooted anywhere.

One thing Ely did, though, was remind me how much I loved Texas. At least the Texas I saw. I didn't much care for Houston. But something about the flatness and the loneliness of the land really appealed to me. San Antonio was moving, and Austin ... well, if I ever chuck my life and disappear, people should know to look for me in Austin.

The funny thing about Texas, for me, is that though the majority of people outside the Austin area hold political views that I find ... well ... reprehensible ... the people themselves are warm, generous, inviting, and funny. Desperately funny. I've always had a wonderful time there. I miss it, in a way that you can miss somewhere you don't really know very well. Maybe if I spent more time there the bloom would fade.

Random thought number two:

People who have traveled or lived in other places are always more interesting than people who haven't. Even people who are from somewhere else and came somewhere and stayed there. I've spent time in L.A. and in New York, and in both places you find a lot of people who came there and stopped. L.A. was their destination, and now they're rooted there (as much as you can be) and they're done. And I think this reflects a lot in the entertainment that comes out of there. The blandness, the sameness of L.A. is, to me, one of the great shortcomings at work in entertainment today. If you don't have weather, how can you expect to have a diverse and singular understanding of the world? (Similarly, if your idea of "getting out of the city" is Brooklyn or Far Rockaway, we got trouble, kids.)

I've seen racism in all its ugliness at work in lots of places: the U.S. south, multicultural Toronto, cosmopolitan London, prairie Alberta, South Africa, 'tolerant' Vancouver -- and you know what I most took away from Paul Haggis' Crash?

I was bored. Even the racism in L.A. bores me.

I wish I'd backpacked when I was 19 or 20. I was so eager to get out of school and start working, and I never felt the wanderlust then. It's probably why I dream of Texas now. Or New Orleans. Poor, sad New Orleans. But one thing I do know: the perspective change I've gotten, whether as a Yankee living in Canada, or Florida, or being two continents away working in Cape Town, or laughing and enjoying the company of people I think are political idiots in Texas -- it's all that that makes me look at the loud drunk in the bar and wonder about him and his story, rather than summarily hate him and dismiss him.

Now...I did wish for some duct tape. Don't get me wrong. I'm human, after all.

Monkey Down! Monkey Down!

Ah, nuts.

We are all Karl Rove now...or...Baby want bottle?

Even as a kid, I was interested in what was going on in the outside world. Probably more than your average third grader. I remember a day when I was home sick from school. Actually, I'd stayed over at my Grandma's place. It was a January day in 1977 and I lived in Orlando, Florida.

It also happened to be the day that Jimmy Carter was sworn in as President of the United States. I watched his whole inaugural. I had the sense that this was important. Moreover, it was interesting, because Carter was from the South, and I was still -- little New Yorker that I was -- trying to understand what being from the South meant.

My grandmother seemed to find me watching the inaugural with rapt attention a little upsetting. Later, I'd find out that she called my mother and said with a sad heaviness, "that boy's too serious. He'll never be happy."

I remember when CNN went on the air. I was just on the precipice of going from Grade School to High School. CNN was neat. Finally, you could watch the news when you wanted to. You didn't have to wait til Cronkite came on at 6:30.

I look back on that now and I think maybe that was the beginning of the end.

Watching the riots and burnings over the last few days (Let's hate the Danes! It sounds like a Kids in the Hall joke.) and especially the reaction and overreaction in the right wing blogosphere, I'm starting to come to the conclusion that maybe we've all surrendered the capacity for democracy.

The issue of the cartoons, the over-reaction by Islamic mobs, and the over-over-reaction by gleeful wingers here illustrates exactly what's broken in discourse today:

No one can sustain a nuanced argument.

I've read plenty of articles that condemn the riots and rioters and point out what freedom of speech means, whilst pointing out the uncomfortable truth that there is a double standard when it comes to Islam -- and to a one, when you see the comments, it's all people seizing on one strand they didn't like and going to town -- as if the rest of it was never written.

And that's where we live today, all of us. It's a Rovian world. Only the most basic, easy-to-understand, pre-digested and sloganeered reaction can make it through the noise. That's why so many Americans still think there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11. That's why the President can stand up and send out his minions and actually argue he's not breaking the law when his past conduct on the file, and the law itself clearly indicates he did.

If an issue or point has any complexity at all...if it can't be expressed in ten seconds and two bullet points, it bounces off. In a sense, the only difference between us and the mobs rioting over ugly cartoons of Mohammed is that we've yet to pick up our nails-with-boards, and pipes and torches. (And I don't doubt that's coming.)

CNN moved us to "news, now!" Which has come to mean a whole bunch of bloviating about nothing and not a lot of sober second thought. No one reads newspapers anymore. Fewer read newsmagazines, which offer a cooler, more cerebral, and yes-- nuanced -- approach to the news.

This isn't just about the news, either. I think the fruit of the poison tree is evident everywhere in our culture. Movie trailers that reveal the whole movie? It's simple. You want the audience not to be confused, so that first weekend word of mouth is solid -- so no one has to endure a surprise. Unless it's an M. Night Shamalamapalooza film, in which case YOU HAVE TO EXPLAIN THAT THERE IS A BIG, BIG SURPRISE TWIST ENDING!

It makes it pretty hard to write TV. Because now you get notes in note sessions that amount to "I don't know what's going on here." When that's the point. And the answer, "Yes, but that's what creates suspense -- and you find out in four pages what's going on..." well, that doesn't often wash. The audience cannot be confused for a second! If they are, they'll flee! Baby wants his bottle, and baby wants it NOW!

The problem, of course, is that life is not simple. Choices we all face are not as cut and dried as they seem on The O.C. or in the United States Congress. Political choices and issues should not be knee-jerk and automatic. But if you try for a third way, if you try to embrace the complexity, in life or art, there's always a Karl Rove there to point and call you a dreamer or a flip flopper, or worse.

I took a note in a meeting on Monday that was very different. Pointing to a reveal at the end of an episode that's meant to be part two of six, the executive said, "If we reveal that, I'm afraid the audience will feel finished, and won't come back for more."

I thought that was a pretty good note. It was at least arguable...a judgement call. In a sense, I was being told that I was revealing too much...I wasn't letting the mystery be. Maybe I'm starting to internalize the current mania for simpicity...for answering questions quickly. I don't know. In any case, I vastly prefer that note to the usual: "I'm confused, please change."

Confused is good.

Confused leads to scientific discovery, and art, and spiritual awakening.

But it's not easy to explain. And it's not instantly digestible, like the news on CNN or FOX, or the simplistic black hat/white hat view of Islamic rioting roiling through the blogosphere.

Oh Karl, how I hope they put you in jail.

It's not that there's a simple solution to this complex problem.

It's just that it would make me feel a bit better.

In The Sun With Grey

So I finally got to see the whole post-Superbowl episode of Grey's Anatomy. (My PVR only taped the first half because of the game running over, and I couldn't stay awake for the West coast feed.)

It's a funny way to watch tv -- an enforced break of sleep at the half way point. It used to be that I would never, ever stop watching something til the end. But you get older, and, you know...sleep. Sleep is awesome.

*There's gonna be some spoilers coming, so if you haven't watched and still intend to...well...git.

I have to say that after the first half, I hadn't really seen any evidence to get me out of my usual "post Superbowl episodes are always overrated" box. Christina Ricci is a cute guest star. The shower scene was a cute (if obvious) tip to the post-Superbowl berth.

But once the primary plot asserted itself, my heart sank.

Because I've seen it before.

And if you haven't seen it before, then there's an episode of TV you need to go get.

A few years ago, Homicide: Life on the Street won an Emmy for a truly moving episode called "The Subway." The guest star was Vincent D'Onofrio, and the setup was truly horrible. A man gets knocked onto the subway platform by an incoming train. He's trapped between the train and the platform. His lower body is twisted beyond belief, and the pressure is the only thing holding him together. When they move the train, he will die. Period. Andre Braugher's Pembleton and Kyle Secor's Bayliss arrive on the scene, confronted with the paradox of trying to investigate a homicide, where the victim is still alive. (If he was pushed, it's homicide, right?)

Anyway, the show is basically a one-act play between Braugher and D'Onofrio -- and it's one of the most exciting, moving, and devestating hours of TV I've ever seen. It's everything that made Homicide great.

So initially, when I went to bed, I was a little disappointed. The girl with the hand on the bomb in the body cavity just seemed like a pale version of The Subway episode to me.

Then yesterday I watched the second half of Grey's Anatomy.

Wow.

Not just the delayed-too-long sex between Alex and Izzie, but the great scene about the Pink Mist...a nice, nice piece of writing there...and then the great twist at the end with Meredith.

They pulled it off. The streak is over. A post-Superbowl episode worked.

All that, and that great duet version of Joseph Arthur's In the Sun by Michael Stipe and Chris Martin from Coldplay. A great Katrina Hurricane-relief single -- go buy it on Itunes, and while you're at it, check out Joseph Arthur. This is a guy who deserves to sell a lot more albums.

Anyway, I think Grey's is really hitting an amazing stride. And I still think that George is the heart of the whole show.

Getting closer...

I have nothing to add about Super Bowl XL except for this:

I'm pleased to see that Gillette has finally taken the leap to a FIVE blade razor.

I've said this before, and I will say it again:

I will never be a happy consumer until I can shave closely with my ten-blade razor, and then sip a glass of Vodka that's been distilled no less than twenty-times.

Hop to it, Madison Avenue. You're falling behind.

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.