Real Live Drips and Bleeding Fingers

Well, I cut my finger.

I mean, I did a lot more this week. But this fucker's bleeding a lot, so it's pretty much the first and foremost thing on my mind. I don't know exactly when I did it, but it was in the course of cleaning out the messy storage closet in my condo. See, that's where the air conditioner is. And um...the air conditioning is dripping. A lot. This is, as they say in the second official language of my adopted country, une grande drag. (I might have the masculine/feminine thing wrong there.)

Every once in a while I have to face up to the shape of how useless I am. I mean, I don't know why an air conditioner starts dripping. I just have to put a pail under it and empty it every nine hours. I look at my bleeding finger and I think, "how would I know if this sucker needed stitches?" And how did I cut it in the first place cleaning a closet?

One of the things that got ruined in the waterlogged closet was the last, pathetic vestiges of a comic book collection I had as a child. They were personal favorites. I was never a plastic bag collector. There were a few Mad Magazines there, too. I'm kind of bummed they're gone. But in that close there's also a couple of huge boxes filled to the brim with cassettes. Cassettes!

I don't even have anything to play them on anymore. I think I had a boom box that played tapes, but the cassette thing's broken. It's all part of my pack rat personality. A good friend of mine looked around my apartment and said, "clearly what you need to do here is throw out every. second. thing." He's right. That's my project for fall.

And maybe after I get up and running and hand off scripts to the people who will make them on Across the River, I'll get right into that -- and also decide what things I don't know I'll learn for fall. I doubt Air Conditioning repair or battlefield surgery will make the cut. But you never know.

I'm hoping I'll have more blogging time this week. I'm also trying to work out what to write about in Across the River. I'm not really eager to share any details of plot -- because it's a mystery series and what's the fun in that.

But right now I'm in the phase of trying to reduce the scripts so they become produceable. In all the spec advice out there, I haven't read a lot of stuff about that. So I'm hoping over the next couple weeks I can reflect some of the perspectives of Location Managers and Art Directors. I'll focus on process, since that, more than specifics of the project, is probably the salient thing, right?

This sucker's still bleeding, by the way.

Oh well. After a prodigious amount of sleep yesterday, today it's simply coffee and the New York Times and three other days worth of papers I never read.

And later, maybe, just maybe -- I'll see just how many motherfucking snakes can fit on a motherfucking plane.

DTOS: Issue Zero (With the Shiny Cover)

So, blogaversary celebrations being muted and hurried because of my current clusterfuck situation, I nevertheles thought I should at least repost the Origin Story of Dead Things On Sticks

Originally posted: 9.12.2005

Thanks, Mr. K.

Okay: so here it is. A thousand years ago, when I was still a journalist, I was interviewing an author. Doesn't matter who, but this was a writer I admired greatly. While the tape was changing, I peppered him with questions for my own interests' sake: "how did you make the leap to professional writer?" and things like that.

He smiled for a bit and nailed me with a glance. He saw what I was asking without me even asking it. He laughed and said,

"getting sick of the treadmill?"

And I smiled, too. He caught me out. This was certainly the first time any of my interview subjects had showed the slightest interest in the guy asking the questions. He paused for a second, like he was weighing saying something, and then he said,

"You'll get there. If you really, really want to write, you'll find a way to do it, and you'll find a way to make money doing it."

"Okay, I've got speed."

That's the cameraman telling me that he's ready to keep going; to resume the interview. So the last part of what the author said was the first thing I saw when I screened the tape back to cut my story together.

His face changed for a second there. Just a wisp of darkness crossed, and then was gone, as he settled back into interview mode. And before I got off my next question, he said,

"Just don't expect it to solve all your problems. At a certain point, you're still in the corner at the party, staring out at people; bewildered, munching dead things on sticks."

So. Now you know.

Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy

Well, what do you know? W.C. Dixon points out that somehow in the midst of all my dudgeon, I missed my blogaversary. So there.

What's funny about this is that I still have the brokedy-ass couch...though I'm supposedly getting a new one delivered in a week.

Good times. Good times.

Feel free to surf the archives and find a post you like. I think I made fun of Anderson Cooper a couple of times.

Now I have to go. Daddy needs a beer before bed. Also, I have a wicked hangnail.

My first post:

08-14-05

What Am I Doing?

A writer's day is procrastination. I live alone, I work alone. There are three things I'm supposed to be working on right now. Four or five, if you count the friends' "can you take a look at this-es?"

I don't know how long I'm going to do this for. I don't know why I'm doing this. Like all writers, I'm a little narcissistic, but not quite as narcissistic as any actor you're likely to meet.

What I crave is to be in Production. I'm a great Production writer. I write fast, I have energy, I'd like to think I'm good in the room.

Sitting on my brokedy-ass couch working on development stuff is like a long slow root canal performed by that dentist Steve Martin played in Little Shop of Horrors. Without the singing.

So, procrastination. Wait, there it is. The guilt bell.

Thank you, Catholicism. Guilt calls. Gotta go.

In lieu of gifts, you can always send me an Itunes Music Store (Canada) credit.

Oh, relax. I'm kidding.

I'm serious.

No. Kidding.

Oh Bartender...

This Millstone Round My Neck Is Stylish AND Comfortable!

Nah. Just kidding. Wow. I need to be writing, and I just spent four hours in a meeting. That's what you get when you're your own writing staff. For those of you keeping score at home, I am also my own Grandpa. Thank you.

Since this obviously obviates the need to procrastinate -- I use it to explain my light blogging.

But the world stops for no DMc:

If you're in Canada, and by Canada, I mean what the Quebecers lovingly refer to as ROC, Bon Cop, Bad Cop opens this Friday. Alex over at Complications Ensue had a hand in writing this one. A buddy-cop picture that explores the French-English divide sounds like a fun idea to me.

Besides Alex, I was lucky enough to work with the Director, Erik Canuel, in South Africa. The film is already a huge hit in Quebec. So if you go one film this weekend, I know it will probably be Snakes on a Plane. But in case you're in the mood for more, do check out Bon Cop, Good Cop.

And also...this is kind of interesting...check out the subtle differences in how they sell the movie in the English and the French trailers. They're largely the same, but slightly different -- and those differences say a lot about the English and French in Canada. What do you notice?

See you when I come up for air.

He Won't Be Right Back. But Thanks, Mike.

"It used to be that you couldn't touch some girls with a ten-foot pole. Well, I was the guy with the twelve-foot pole." Mike Douglas

The model Oprah used when starting out in her own talk show. The guy who co-hosted with John and Yoko for one extraordinary week. The program that first introduced the world to a two year old child named Tiger Woods -- who showed Bob Hope his golf swing; The show that aired from Philly for most of its life. The show that brought Malcom X and Jerry Rubin into America's living rooms. The show that featured over 30 000 guests, over 6000 shows, over 21 years.

All the while, Mike Douglas was an affable, genuine host. A decent guy. His niceness, I guess, really did belong to another age. I remember him so clearly as a child. I remember wondering "how is it possible that my Grandmother prefers Merv Griffin?"

Mike Douglas was a class act. May he Rest in Peace.

Three Moons Over Milford and the Flexibility of Ideas

So, call it my erstwhile hangover from years working at Canada's sci-fi channel, Space, but I knew from the moment I read about Three Moons Over Milford, I was going to have to check it out at least once.

Here's the very definition of a high concept, plausible sci-fi idea: As the series starts, people are acting strangely. They coyly reveal the reason why during the course of the teaser. Seems that sometime just before the start of the show, an asteroid slammed into the moon, breaking it into three large pieces. Scientists believe that one of the pieces (at least) is unstable, and will eventually plunge to earth, causing nuclear winter and the end of all life as we know it, above the cockroach level.

Here's the conceit: that could happen in twenty years. Or next Tuesday.

Which sets up the premise: what do you do when you think the end of the world is imminent?

This is such a potent zeitgeist concept for our times, I just have to shake my head and curse the fact that I didn't come up with it first. I imagine a lot of writers are doing that. It's such a good metaphor for the uncertain times we live in, that it's the kind of sturdy concept that could show up just about anywhere.

So what the hell is it doing on ABC Family?

Well, let's break it down. Three Moons Over Milford, as it's currently constituted, revolves mainly around one family. Papa Bear made a lot of money in a company, and responds to the news of possibly-imminent judgement day by abandoning his family and going off to "find himself." He leaves his wife, Laura, and two kids, Alex and Lydia, to go climb mountains.

There's a kindly, decent lawyer in the town of Milford named Mack McIntyre whose mother tries to sell her house to send him on a cruise around the world. He doesn't want to go.

The setup in the pilot demonstrates all the different ways people deal with the new reality of possibly impending doom. Dad flakes out. There's an unscrupulous real estate agent that tries to take advantage of people. The police chief is now young and green as hell -- why? Because everyone more experienced quit. Sixteen year old Alex wants to drive right away, and maybe have an affair with an older woman, because why the hell not? Daughter Lydia tries to knit the moon back together with her friends using some Wiccan ceremony, and burns down the school in the process.

By the end of the pilot, we've seen a bit of Milford (good people, quirky town, under stress) and the Davis family. Mom is going to deal with the loss of the family fortune by going to work in Mac's law office. Nice, clean setup.

What struck me about the execution is that it was a lot edgier than I thought it would be. The nasty characters are allowed to be nasty. The mechanics of the plot set up a situation where it's the son's birthday, and the daughter is supposed to address the town meeting to apologize for burning down the school. She says to her mother that she'd rather commit suicide. And mom's response? "Good. More cake for us."

That's pretty funny. Also not what you'd expect for a "family" show.

Yet there is something ineffably family about Three Moons. Obviously, a lot of the stories are going to focus around the two kids. The town is very reminscent of Stars Hollow, which is obviously no accident, since reruns of Gilmore Girls is apparently ABC Family's backbone.

Elizabeth McGovern gets to do her best Lauren Graham . Her character's name is Laura, wink wink, just in case you didn't get it...(although there's been some strange surgery in the years since She's Having a Baby. Brr.)

I enjoyed the pilot. It was well done. And I will probably never watch the show again. Why? Because I don't watch Gilmore Girls, either. The show doesn't really appeal to me. And in the end, really, neither does Three Moons Over Milford.

But that's A-Ok...and I still think they've done a great job, and I'm still envious of the flexibility of their concept, and how much fun they can have with it.

So many starting-out writers I meet -- even writers that are mid-career, like me -- seem to misunderstand terms like "Character Driven Show" "High Concept" or "Procedural" that it's worth noting in the case of this show, just what these things really mean. Three Moons provides a perfect example. (And it's not just writers, either. Lots of Producers and Network People I meet seem equally confabulated.)

Why is Three Moons a high-concept show? Because the concept is the thing that initially sells it. You don't need to know anything else. It could also, with the same concept, be a bunch of very different shows:

-The Sci-Fi Channel Version: a group of international scientists are brought together as the world goes quirky around them to try to solve the problems of the three moons.

-The Lifetime Version: Three women try to keep their different families together while dealing with the men in their lives who've all gone crazy from moon-fear. (In this iteration, the moons stand in for midlife crisis craziness.)

-The Cartoon Network/Comedy Central/FX version -- Ida know. But let's say it's in New York, and everyone decides, "fuck it, there's no rules." And anarchy ensues.

-The CW Version -- Same as above, but starring Felicity. A lot more hugging and crying. And a new Dashboard Confessional song in every episode.

-The FOX Version -- More violence, more fucking (implied), and prettier people.

Note, that in all the versions above, the basic premise stays the same: the threat of imminent (but uncertain) destruction causes people to abandon their usual roles and react differently.

See, it just so happens that they sold the ABC Family version, which dictates the quirky town setting (a la Gilmore Girls) and the focus on two kids. But you could still get several different shows out of it. Is your concept really the precious thing here? If you change the characters, does the show really change? I mean fundamentally. Does it wreck it, or can it really go another way?

See, a lot of people I talk to are so completely attached to the precise execution of their idea that they don't see that changing some details could actually make it better. To tell you the truth, of all my flippant "versions" above, I kind of think that maybe the ABC Family version is probably the best one. They tailored their show to their broadcaster and it paid off with something that's actually kind of different. Awesome. Even if it's not for me.

Now, it also takes you about ten seconds to explain the basic concept of Three Moons. You can fill in the characters and details later. That's high concept.

If you don't know the show without knowing the Characters and why they're doing what they're doing, then you have a character driven show. You actually need to know the character dynamic to understand the show. Think back to that one sheet for the first season of The Sopranos. Tony is in the middle. All the mobsters are standing behind him to his right. Carmela, AJ, Meadow, and Tony's Mom are standing behind him to his left. And the tagline says, "If One Family Doesn't Kill Him, The Other Will."

See, you don't really need to know who the Davis family is to understand or get Three Moons Over Milford. But you have to understand the family dynamic, and the therapy angle, to get what is different about The Sopranos. That's why it's character driven. You change any of those elements too much, and the show doesn't survive.

Is your concept really like that? Great. Now. What makes it different from other shows? What makes YOUR character driven show different from someone else's character driven show?

Or have you come up with the next great procedural? CSI's characters don't matter (not at first -- not when you're making the sale -- it's what they DO that matters -- and the fact that a mystery is set up at the start and solved by the end, an the audience is solving it along with the team.)

Obviously, hybrid-ing these different concepts can come up with fresh pitches and elements, but you do always have to keep a handle on why you're asking people to watch, and what you're promising them. I think that people who watch Three Moons Over Milford on ABC Family are being promised a certain kind of show, and based on the pilot, they're going to get that kind of show.

What are you promising your audience?

You gotta know -- because you have to be able to explain it to your broadcaster, and your producer, and your collaborators...and finally, to your audience.

And here's the funny thing: if you're pitching a broadcaster and you find that, hmm...your show really CAN'T survive the changes, then you really do have to walk away.

Because it's only too common to go into development and then have your vision chipped away at. You have to have clear vision going in, because only then are you going to recognize when your concept is irretrievably broken. Trust me. You'll see it before they do. But if you keep going past that point just to preserve the relationship with the network, well -- the show will inevitably fail and you will be the one that pays the price.

The flipside of that? If you don't know EXACTLY what kind of show you have, and what you're promising off the top, you're going to get lost very quickly.

And then where are you? Can't you smell the sulphur.

Yes, kittens. That's right.

You're in Development Hell.

Try the veal.

Blah blah blah 9/11 Shampoo Bottle Blah

CRAWFORD, United States (AFP) - US President George W. Bush seized on a foiled London airline bomb plot to hammer unnamed critics he accused of having all but forgotten the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Weighed down by the unpopular war in Iraq, Bush and his aides have tried to shift the national political debate from that conflict to the broader and more popular global war on terrorism ahead of November 7 congressional elections.

And I swear, my fellow countrymen, if you let these craven opportunists shift the discussion away from their utter and complete failure to rationalize, plan for, or meet this threat for the third straight election cycle, then the terrorists really will have won.

As a foreign-living expat, I have to sit this November out. But you don't.

You know what? I can't even write about this stuff anymore. I don't know where Rogers gets the patience.

Oh, and just in cased you three or four fat assed Bush autocrats missed it, here's yet another way our government is making things worse.

You really think you're in control?

I was all set to spend some time being collapsed last night, but of course it was not to be. I had tickets to go see Gnarls Barkley at Toronto's Koolhaus club.

For the two-and-a-half people who've somehow managed to miss it, Barkley is the mashup band of Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse. They give a wildly entertaining stage show where they dress up in various costumes. Last night, they came out dressed as fry cooks, with the women dressed as waitresses, and Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse wearing Chef's Hats. They stepped up and did the shtick they do at every show: "Gnarls Barkley can't be here tonight. We're the Sam Cook(e)s."

Then they ripped through their set. (They also opened with, appropriately enough, "Hungry Like the Wolf," which was pretty funny.

The band was so tight, the music so infectious (really, is there a better summer song out now than "Crazy?" I think not) that you couldn't help but be in a good mood. Which is good, because Daddy's pretty stressed right now. So though my feet and my ass are tired from the shaking, the soul is doing okay. Which is good, because there's plenty of grinding ahead.

Things I have to write about soon, when I get the chance:

-Three Moons Over Milford. Why, all of a sudden, is ABC Family the place for high-concept Sci-Fi? And what, exactly, did Elizabeth McGovern do to herself surgically?

-Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. Oh yeah. I saw it. Oh yeah. I dug it. Oh yeah.

-Why Brotherhood is the next Sopranos, bitches.

Holy Sheep! Three More and We Have a Table Read!

Apple previewed Leopard, their next operating system iteration, this morning. In it there's a new voice, Alex. Click here and scroll down and you can hear how Alex does in natural-sounding speech. (You'll need Quicktime.)

Seriously good, huh? I mean, intonation, breath sounds...great stuff.

I would already gladly use this to hear voiceover read back, and we're almost at the point where that "read back the script" thing might actually be useful.

Way cool.

Reprint: Book Review: A Great Feast of Light

I noticed that John Doyle's book is newly in paperback, so I guess now's as good a time as any to repost my review of it, (originally posted 11/2005)


It could be that I'm just becoming an old fogey. I recognize that. But lately, when I look out at a television landscape of TIVO's and extended cable, of satellites and timeshifting and VOD, 343 channels of Gilligan's Island starting on the hour -- I can't help but think that something's been lost.

It's not just that Bruce Springsteen's once-scorching "57 Channels and Nothing On" seems crazy-quaint. (Dude, it's your own fault! Why didn't you TIVO?) It's that the explosion of choice and program-management techniques (what we used to call "taping,") has fundamentally altered what made television so revolutionary in the first place.

John Doyle's "A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age" is a memoir and a love letter. It's a book that rights the wrongs of a thousand McLuhan descendents who like to natter about how TV ruined everything. It's the story of a young boy growing up in a cloistered, maddening, provincial country, and how a magic window into a wider world changed everything, forever. Doyle manages to be both wistful and clear-eyed, speaking of his childhood in the small Irish town of Nenagh. Television came late to Ireland...RTE went on the air in 1961. In describing the people of his little town, Doyle paints a scene ripe for a shocking, cathode-ray corrective:

"...their stories were always the same, going around and around until everybody knew the punch line. They were always about farmers and shopkeepers and how the world was fixed with everybody in their allotted place. On television, events changed things. The truth came out and justice was done. I knew that teachers and adults weren't as instantly entranced by television as small children were. And I knew why, without anyone explaining it to me. Grown up people were stuck in their ways and their old stories. They knew everybody they were ever going to meet.

But that would change too. Television would break through all the layers of habit and conformity. The smallness of their old world would become clear as day."

The book contains amusing reminiscences of programs as varied as Bat Masterston and Get Smart, The Avengers and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. But the focus is squarely on how these new worlds, new ideas and ways of looking at the world seeped into a society that was still in thrall to the Catholic church; filled with "thick" brothers and cruel nuns, and a generally backward way of thinking.

For the Irish Americans tugging at their collars now, this is no Angela's Ashes, a parade of miseries and petty cruelties moving from horror to horror. The Doyles sound a lot more like my people -- a little more middle class, perhaps. But with a father working for Irish Life and a mother who didn't seem to cotton onto those who promoted small mindedness, Doyle paints a quiet childhood where television did exactly what all its haters feared: gradually seeped in and molded the thinking of a young boy.

The Doyles moved around Ireland quite a bit. I was pleased to read the chapters about tracing a childhood through County Roscommon and Leitrim, since that's where my Mom's people are from. This section also gives rise to the book's most moving passages: contrasting the peace of a country childhood with the horrors that lurked just beyond the mist. As young John Doyle walks the fields of Carrick, we're reminded that this area was once ground zero of the famine that decimated Ireland.

It's a strange turn for a memoir about television, but it does set the stage -- because if you know your Irish history, you know what's coming.

I've often talked to my parents about what it was really like to see Vietnam on the TV every night. I've spent hours in a little cubicle at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York, watching back news programs of the time. I've seen the moment where Walter Cronkite turned against the war. As an adult, I, like everyone, sat back and watched in quiet awe as satellites relayed live pictures of bombs raining on Baghdad. Twice.

But I don't think that compares to being a young Irish boy trying to sort through an old war that suddenly re-ignites on your doorstep, brought to you in glorious color on the TV. As Ireland descends into the bitter thrall of sectarian violence, Doyle clings to the images that make sense to him: the anti-authoritarian, anarchic revolution that was Monty Python's Flying Circus, the pull of soccer -- even the much milder social critiques of shows like The Liver Birds and Upstairs, Downstairs.

All in all, the memoir paints a coming-of-age that was reflected, pushed, and prodded by television at every step of the way. It's an engaging portrait of an Ireland that's simply not there anymore, an Ireland consigned to the dustbin, in part, by the tide of change ushered in by the tolling of the Angelus Bells on RTE, that night in 1961.

I'm not sure that people much younger than me (I'm 37) think of television that way anymore, or if they ever did. Television was that thing that was always there. There were always more than four channels. You never had to 'get home in time to watch something.' There are so many different types of entertainment vying for your attention now that the social effect of television is muted; and discussions of the power of the medium are far more likely to be driven by reactionary forces, for whom nothing is scarier than a hint of breast or a bad word.

I don't remember the start of television, of course. But I do remember the time of four or five channels and no VCR. And I remember the winter of 1977.

In January, 1977, we were living in Orlando, Florida. Our TV was a beat up old SONY, black and white, maybe 20 inches.

Six months later, when we moved to Canada, my Dad bought a big cabinet model color TV, and I was shocked and enthralled. Enthralled to watch shows like The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island in color for the first time -- they seemed like new shows! Shocked when I caught a rerun of Gilligan's Island in black & white. I thought the TV was broken. My Dad had to explain to me that the show used to be filmed in black & white, before they switched to color.

I loved living in Orlando. The two years I spent there still seem a little magical to me. We lived in a development called Bay Hill. (now the site of the Bay Hill Classic. If you care about golf, I'm sure that means something. Not to me, alas.) Ours was still a new development, and our street dead-ended in an orange grove. We were also across the lake from Walt Disney World. Every night of the summer, we'd walk down the road to where the orange trees started, pick one off the tree, and watch the fireworks over the Magic Kingdom.

Then there was this one time when, like wildfire, a rumor went through the neighborhood. We rode our bikes up to the Golf Club, and sure enough, dining there, surrounded by kids and other admirers, was Evil Knievel. He signed our autographs and indulged us with stories, and when it was time to leave, he simply got up and walked out, and we all hushed to see if it was true-- did he clank when he walked, from all the metal pins in his many broken bones?

I set that scene to give the proper context to this story:

We had a big backyard. Lots of flowerbeds, lots of plants and trees. My father was the General Manager of the Pepsi bottling plant in Orlando, and through that job, he met Mr. B. Mr. B was a large, kind black man with enormous hands and a booming laugh. Mr. B was the go-to man in the plant. He knew when people needed things. I first met him when he came to pick up the baby stuff -- the cribs that my sisters didn't need anymore. He loaded them into the truck and carted them off to whoever needed them. I was fascinated by this: how did he know? My father was pretty straightforward on the matter. "The people in the plant don't have a lot of money," he'd say. "He takes care of them." "Is that his job?" I wondered. "Nope," my Dad said. "That's just what he does."

I figured Mr. B was a pretty important guy, knowing what everyone needed like that. Mr. B worked the bottling line as a supervisor, and when my dad took me to work, and I saw him, I'd always run up and say hello. He'd smile, and sneak me some Dr. Pepper off the line. It tasted horrible cold -- I never did get the taste for it -- but hot off the line it was delicious.

There was a woman who used to help out my Mom with my little sisters. Mrs. L. She'd babysit sometimes, sew, and mind my sisters so my Mom could run out to the supermarket. Mrs. L was a kind southern woman who loved singing along to the country music on the radio.

One day, when Mrs. L was there, Mr. B and some of his guys were doing some yardwork for us. Mr.B came to the front door looking for water for the crew. Mrs. L said she'd get it, but Mr. B had to come to the back door.

I had NO IDEA what the hell was going on. Why did he have to go to the back door, when he was standing right there at the front door, in the 95 degree heat? It seemed stupid, so I asked my Dad about it later.

I think my Mom had a conversation with Mrs. L the next day. I didn't hear any of it. I was sent to my room to play.

A few months later was January 1977. We didn't know yet that we were going to be moving to Canada. Maybe my parents did, but I didn't. But the really exciting thing is that my parents let me stay up late with them, to watch something on TV. My parents had let me stay up to watch TV late before. One time, a neighbor of ours was on To Tell The Truth. And if there was a baseball game or a space launch from Cape Kennedy, sometimes I'd get to watch that. But this was different. There was a program, airing every night for seven nights... I'd never heard of that happening before.

It was called Roots.

After I watched it, I started to put together a lot of what I'd seen -- with Mr. B, Mrs. L -- even the strange looks I'd get sometimes from some of the white workers in the plant when Dad would take me to work, and I'd run up to say "Hi" to Mr. B.

Everyone watched Roots, it seems. We talked about it in school. And the next time Mr. B and Mrs. L were both working at our house, I noticed that she had trouble looking Mr. B in the eye. Later that month, Mr. B came by with his pickup truck, and picked up a whole bunch of baby clothes and toys Mrs. L had collected. He thanked her for them, and said he knew just who they would go to. And she nodded and turned around very fast and walked back into the house. She didn't know what to do with her hands...that's what I noticed. Her hands kept fluttering by her sides. I knew what was making her feel that way. And I wondered if she ever thought of the day that she asked Mr. B to go to the back door -- that simple, incomprehensible action that I now understood completely, thanks to Roots.

I was glad she didn't know what to do with her hands.

Anyhow. How's that for a digression?

Point is that Doyle's book re-energizes me and reminds me why I loved television in the first place -- why this is the medium where I want to tell stories. Maybe the landscape is different, and maybe television will never affect people quite that way again.

But then again, every time I'm in a new place, I remember to flip on the TV at least once. You learn things that way. Things you'd never learn anywhere else.

Was it Sunnier Before?

I fully accept that this might be a heretical view. And the caveat is that I've only seen two episodes of the new season...but...

...is it just me, or was It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia funnier without Danny Devito?

I think Devito's funny, it's just...I don't think the anarchic spirit where they'd go for any joke last season is quite the same. Now they have to service his character. I find the show a little unbalanced now.

I'm hoping that's transitory, as this show has given me more solid laughs than most shows I've seen in the last year or two.

Omnibus of Exhaustion: On Muppets, the Street, the Book Club and the Medium

I'm plum tuckered. I spent last week cranking out three production drafts for Across the River To Motor City. That's when you take the writer's draft and ready it for production by cutting pages down, cutting all unnecesary locations and characters, and just generally trying to sharpen the document down to its most concise and shootable. I have three more to go, before smaller rewrites to address further production, actor concerns, etc, kick in. So amidst a bunch of other stuff, I've been trying my best to take it easy this August long weekend.

But a bunch of articles I've been reading all seem to lead me in a similar direction. First of all there's one from the New York Times this weekend. The Children's Television Workshop is doing something for the 37th season of Sesame Street that they haven't been able to do -- introduce a lead female muppet who sticks. The new candidate is called Abby Cadabby -- she's meant to be a kind of girly-girl muppet. It is interesting to me that in the entire run of Sesame Street, none of the female muppets ever achieved iconic status. Don't get me started on Elmo, now. I was the first Sesame Street generation, and thoughts of Elmo and of the fact that adults can now see Mr. Snuffleupagus just make me feel dead and cold inside.

LIZ NEALON, executive vice president and creative director of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind “Sesame Street,” wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted in a new Muppet for the show’s 37th season, which starts on Aug. 14. But she did have one major goal: She wanted the creative team, at long last, to come up with a female Muppet star. The show did already have a number of female characters, including Zoe, a rambunctious, orange, furry friend of Elmo’s, and Rosita, an emerald-blue, bilingual Muppet with a sweet, friendly soul.


“We have our wacky, and we have our gentle,” Ms. Nealon said in a recent interview. “But we wanted a lead female character. If you think about ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ some girls relate to Rhoda, who’s our Zoe, and some girls really relate to Mary, who’s a girly girl. And we didn’t have that girl. We made a definite decision to sit down with the writers to figure out what this character might be.”

For anyone who spends time trying to wrestle characters to ground, it's nice to see that the Sesame Street folks have their own meticulous process to go through. Article is here.

That article was still in my head as I went back through the Globe and Mail yesterday and looked over Kate Taylor's piece on the male-female fiction divide.

“Women read more, they read more novels, they read earlier and they read later. Sixty-five to 70 per cent of the [Canadian] book market is women,” observes Brad Martin, president of Random House of Canada, adding that the American and European markets are probably similar. “How many men do you know who are in a book group?”

No surprise, then, that when the federal Department of Canadian Heritage surveyed Canadian reading habits last year, it found a distinct gender gap. Women accounted for 60 per cent of the daily readers and 70 per cent of the heavy readers who had read 50 or more books in the last 12 months. Women also outnumbered men two to one as regular readers of both classic and contemporary novels.

The divide is not new: The department's previous survey, in 1991, had found similar results, while academics can trace the characterization of novel reading as a genteel — or frivolous — female pursuit as far back as the 18th and 19th centuries. However, the gender gap is both particularly pronounced and much debated these days, partly because publishers have exploited it so successfully with their marketing strategies, and partly because teachers and parents are so concerned that boys lag behind girls in their literacy skills.

I find this article interesting because of my own experience, and also the implication Taylor comes to later in the piece.

Once upon a time, I had a fairly constant reading regimen: I'd read one work of fiction, followed by a work of non-fiction. I'd sometimes stagger them so I was reading both at once. But the busier my career got, the more fiction became kind of a siren call. If I'm into a novel, it's too easy for me to just disappear and do nothing else. I've had to burn the midnight oil a couple of times for no other reason than I spent seven hours reading when I should have been working. When you don't have someone standing over your shoulder in the office, you can do that kind of thing. So, gradually, I tapered off my fiction reading. I can read non-fiction for a few pages at a time, not voraciously, like fiction. So except for rare treats or special occasions, fiction to me is like videogames; love'em, but seriously, I can't afford to lose that much time to them. Which, I recognize, is somewhat sad.

Where Taylor gets in her article is that because the fiction gap is so pronounced, marketing to it has become pronounced, and that's making the problem worse. Women read fiction, so fiction that's catered to women drives the market. This does change the kind of stuff that gets talked about and written -- because besides habits, reactions are so very much different. I think I wrote before that when the whole James Frey/Oprah thing blew up, it was the women I knew who read the book who felt betrayed. The men shrugged it off.

The same thing that Taylor talks about in fiction is also happening in TV, of course. The female audience is becoming more pronounced as the male audience shrinks. And consequently, except for things like the zombie-driven Fat Guy w. Skinny Wife comedy shows, it's getting harder and harder to actually get male characters who act like male characters on the air.

Having watched it a few times now, I think the best thing that Lucky Louie has going for it is that it actually deals head on with how men and women think differently, and doesn't take a stand on one side being right and the other wrong.

We're both crazy -- Men and Women. That's funny. And hilarious. And true from the moment we hit the playground.

But it strikes me as so weird that they've never been able to sell a female muppet on Sesame Street.

Oh Eff It.

I say we all start drinking. Now.

Antonia's got a doozy.

Vamping the Sideboard

I'm only on Page 17 of my latest rewrite, so home haul-assing is in order.

In the meantime, you should go welcome some new links to the sideboard. Frequent commenters both, Jutratest and WCDixon both work in CanTV and have their own blogs to prove it.

Go and Sally Forth, and especially thrill to this entry Will's posted. He links to an article from the great Aaron Barnhart, TV critic for a KC paper (who I remember most fondly from his email list years ago about the Letterman show. That's right, kids. A TV fan who became a paid TV critic. It is to swoon.) Apparently there's going to be too much good TV this fall.

Kid, meet candy store.

Dude! That's wack! Or...sick! Or...God, I Don't Even Know Anymore.

To: God@heaven.org
From: I.fecan@CTV.ca

Dear God And/Or Santa:

I know you've given me everything I could possibly hope for in terms of utter domination of the Canadian TV landscape, but if you could feel free to bless my network, CTV, with some free awesome publicity, that would be awesome.

Love, Ivan Fecan
CEO, Bell GlobeMedia

Reply To: I.fecan@CTV.ca
From: Santa@northpole.ca

Done, and done.


How about this:

VANCOUVER (CP) - Gold medal snowboarder Ross Rebagliati is suing CTV over a television show he says makes him look like a drunken criminal.

CTV and Boardwatch Productions are airing a new television show called Whistler.

But lawyer Joyce Thayer says the lead character looks exactly like Rebagliati.

The character is a drunk driver who leaves a woman paralyzed in a hit-run accident.

Uh. Yeah. He also, like...dies in the first episode.

Rebagliati says he's had strangers approach him and ask if he's the one in the show.

He says he's concerned people are losing the connection between fact and fiction.

Um. A majority of Americans think Saddam had WMD's. A Majority of Canadians think we're loved around the world as peacekeepers. The Daily Show really IS becoming the most trusted name in news. Dude. That ship has so sailed.

Thayer says their suit doesn't quantify the damages they are seeking but she says they are significant.

I'll bet. Hey, Waiter? I'll have what he's smoking.

Slings: The Love You Take IS Equal To The Love You Make

For the Second Week in a row, Slings & Arrows delivered a sucker punch ending surrounding William Hutt's character, Charles Kingman, the actor playing King Lear in the New Burbage Festival's production.

Of course, each season of Slings manages to nicely weave the theme of the major production through the offstage storylines. I guess I'm a traditionalist that way, but I really much prefer TV writing -- especially in drama -- where the various plotlines all comment and expand upon aspects of the same theme.

Of course, you're not going to find a more potent broth to steal from than King Lear, but still, even in the early stages, the way that they're setting up the conflict between age and youth, and echoing the idea of the faithful daughter (Cordelia) versus the interlopers -- well, all of it is tremendously satisfying. Especially if you've read your Shakespeare.

For as much as sometimes I get down on Canadian TV in this blog, this is where I start to get really pissed off. The people who do this show have one of Broadway's biggest hits right now. This show is funny, and heartfelt, and as well-executed as anything I've ever seen come from an American and British source.

So where is the coverage?

Where are the articles? The Ads? The columns? The buzz?

I'm not talking about the half-assed "Slings and Arrows returns" pieces that greet the premiere. Any half-assed piece of shit gets that sop thrown at them -- usually all reprinting the same article by Canadian Press.

I have no truck with people who say you should watch Canadian produced shows just cause they're Canadian, if you're Canadian. That's a load. But Slings is one of the cases where, if you're not watching it, I can honestly say that culturally, humanistically, and from an entertainment point of view -- it's your loss.

So why is no one writing that?

Anyway, back to the ending. Hutt's performance is something -- fearsome, reducing cute little Sarah Polley to tears like that -- and then at the end you find out why and it's perfect, of course, but also...wow. It makes me realize anew the ultimate truth of TV writing -- Directors and Network types will always talk about the opening, and the teaser, as where you absolutely need to grab and hold the audience's attention. That's true, as far as it goes. But the real punch to the gut that brings you back -- where the decision to return is really made, far as I know -- is the ending. The ending, the ending, the ending. That's where your casual viewer converts to a loyal, regular viewer -- no matter how cluttered the viewing landscape.

LOST knows this. DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES used to know it, and hopefully will again. 24 is all over that. And SLINGS, with a tenth of the budget and nowhere near the histrionics of those American shows -- understands that lesson too.

And just because I couldn't figure out how to work it into the body of this post: Chris Leavins has a very deft turn as Geoffrey's therapist. Puts Huff to shame.

That's All Well And Good, But What About The Feelings of The Sugar-Titted Community?

So the Mel apologies keep right on coming.

Y'know, the whole weekend I kept thinking that this scene was so over the top that if you wrote it you'd get a bunch of notes about how over the top it was.

Has Real Life Always been OTT, or is that a more or less recent thing?

What It's Like Being Alone in a Northern Town

Caught a couple of new CBC summertime offerings last night.

The first was a CBC half hour comedy called Northern Town. This is a series set in the Yukon, and it's kind of like a Canadian Northern Exposure. Good so far. I loved Northern Exposure.

The whole thing seems to be built around a meteorite that explodes one night over the town. Slacker Brian (Luke Kirby) wants to find it and get rich. His hyper-loquacious boss, Heinz (Tom McCamus) is a skeptical naysayer in a winning deadpan performance. Good thing he has crazy Iveson (the always winning David Fox) to inspire him. There's also cutie wildlife officer Mona (Jessica Greco) who manages to be gamine and winning with her hands in bloody marmot entrails (don't ask.)

Northern Town is a sweet little series populated by oddballs with their own little obsessions. (I told you it was NX-like) but with a nice Canadian perspective. The main character saying, "I don't want to do this," while doing something -- well, that's Canadian to the core. And Iveson's quixotic desire to defend Yukon airspace from the Americans flying out of Alaska, well...let's say that I usually don't find the phrase "godd**** Americans!" funny. But in this case -- it's all in the delivery.

The show comes courtesy of Daniel Irons, one of the producers of Slings & Arrows, Daniel Janke, a writer based in Whitehorse, and Director Gary Burns. Other writers include Kate Miles Melville and Bob Martin -- who also wrote Slings and is currently heating up Broadway as Man in Chair in The Drowsy Chaperone.

The show could perhaps be a little tighter...but they've got the right cast and it's a setting we haven't seen -- at least not since NX. It has terrible opening credits, however. Like, Grade School Art project terrible. More glitter and macaroni, please!

This is a show that if nurtured and supported, could have the potential of becoming CBC's Corner Gas.

And they'll probably strangle it in the crib. Wheee!

I wanted to like What It's Like Being Alone. And I'll probably give it another chance. The animated series comes from Brad Peyton, an ex-Canadian Film Centre Guy who grabbed a lot of heat a few years back for his hilarious short Evelyn the Cutest Little Dead Girl. It was produced by new CBC Head of Programming or whatever his title is, Fred Fuchs. There's a lot to recommend the show: it's got that Tim Burton-Nightmare Before Christmas kind of look -- there's a crazy character named Princess Lucy who flops back and forth from being annoying to being funny in the same scene. I'm sick, but there's also a one armed character named Armie whose head hits the floor any time he tries to use his one appendage to do anything. It's that kind of show.

Ostensibly, there are all these ugly orphans in an orphanage just trying to get by. Good setup. But the jokes are obvious and a little heavy handed. The second half of both episodes I've seen, once the plot kicked in, I didn't laugh once. There's something there, but it desperately needs a story editor.

But they did manage to namecheck my favorite flash thing ever. Shout out to Strindberg & Helium!

Both shows are a step up from what CBC has commissioned over the last few years in terms of ambition and execution. Let's see if they survive the new regime.

Darth Vader, The Great White Hope, and Perspective

An interesting thing happened to me last night. After a long and, sadly, not particularly lucrative poker game (though not as dire as some,) I found myself trying to find, for a friend, this hilarious video I'd come across on a website last week of a bunch of scenes from Star Wars recut so that they used James Earl Jones' voice from other movies to craft a slightly new narrative. Of course, I couldn't remember what the remix or mashup or whatever we're calling it this minute was called so I trolled YouTube.

This is the video I found first:





Pretty funny, right? I mean, I laughed, and my friend laughed at this one. Cause it's funny. But it wasn't the one I was looking for. This one was way more...well...obvious.

The one that I'd laughed my butt off a couple days before had struck me because besides being just funny, it actually took the thought to recast all of Star Wars as Vader's personal death (star) spiral: a journey that was partly racial, partly sexual in nature -- and far more the portrait of a Sith Lord in the grip of a serious existential crisis.

It was a more sophisticated piece of work. Yet it sprung from exactly the same idea -- and though entertaining, let's come out front and state for everybody, it aint exactly a rocket science, off-the-charts, original idea: take clips from other James Earl Jones movies and mash them into images from Star Wars.

See, what "The Vader Sessions" (the version below) has that the other doesn't is narrative vision. It actually arranges its clips in a cohesive way to explore a theme, and not just go for the easy laugh.

It also helps that the guy who arranged The Vader Sessions had access and knowledge of a much richer and wider palette of clips to choose from: including one of my favorite James Earl Jones movies, the film adaptation of The Great White Hope. (The story of Jack Johnson. No. Not the singer from Hawaii. Seriously. If you don't know who Jack Johnson is, or his story, go. We'll wait.) See? Like Ali, only earlier. Neat, huh? Okay.

See, this is what people talk about when they say that you can't copyright an idea. I you're serious about telling stories, the tale of the YouTube Vader mashups is where you can start on the idea of interpretation. You should also probably take a look at the two versions of the Exorcist prequel, by Paul Schrader and Renny Harlin.

But the other thing to keep in mind when you're exploring this territory is: what's your depth? What do you know? What have you read? What have you experienced? Are you sure you're attacking your story from a fresh point of view that actually takes into account what came before?

I remember when I was in high school, and I'd hear a song and someone would later tell me that the version that I'd heard was a cover, I'd feel a little silly or ashamed that I didn't know the original version. These days, I'm constantly running into people who -- never mind they don't know that riff or sample is from James Brown or whoever -- they don't care. Seriously. If you're looking to make music or generate filmed entertainment in the early years of the 21st century, and you don't realize that the medium has about a century's worth of history on you...well...then...ugh. Sad for you.

I know that this is a classic old fogey move...but I can say with conviction that over the last few years -- in the time that I've taught a new crop of 20 year olds every year...I've seen the appreciaton for and the knowledge of culture outside your immediate frame of reference go down. I think Hollywood TV weathered the storm a few years longer than it maybe should have because all those smartypants grads from Harvard actually had a good education -- but education doesn't replace curiosity, especially when it comes to culture.

And not knowing about "The Great White Hope" seriously burns you when you're trying to do the definitive James Earl Jones Vader mashup. Just sayin'.

Here's The Vader Sessions on YouTube:



Or check out the original site and tell them what you think.

Torn in Toronto

So, here's the deal.

This blog gets many more hits than comments. I do mix it up a bit -- probably write too much about the CBC, but you know, it's the summer. I keep up the TV writing stuff when I can, and I do enjoy writing about other work. But I don't think I've ever been shy that the primary function of this blog, for me, is to give focus (and thereby, control) my bouts of procrastination.

We're about three weeks away from my blog-a-versary here, and I'm faced with a philosophical decision.

It's about commenting. Anonymous commenting.

Blogger lets you set three levels of comments. The first, and most restrictive, means that only "members" of the blog can comment. Not what I'm looking for. The second allows people who've registered an account with Blogger to comment. It's easy to sign up. I think they still have it worded so you "have to set up a blog" to comment -- but you really don't. You can just go through all the steps and then just register without starting a blog. It means you have a screenname, and any blogger blogs you go to, you'll be able to comment under that screen name.

It's the first level that's giving me pause. Blogger also allows a setting where "anyone" can comment. You see these -- they're the 'Anonymous' comments that show up. It's the quickest and easiest way to go. It means you'll get more feedback.

But...

It also means that the person really is anonymous.

I have a longstanding disdain for anonymous commenting going back over my whole career. When I first started work at the Small Educational TV Station, at some point they started a BBS, and in that BBS there was a provision for an "Anonymous Forum" where people could post...anything. Well. They did. This Small Educational TV Station was a terribly dysfunctional place, with lots of management by fiefdom and jealousy and frustration, and poison in the air. The anonymous forum got hairy pretty quickly. And because I was a fairly voluble young guy anyway, I got accused of making a lot of the posts in that anonymous forum. And 99% of the time, it wasn't me. Nope, I was (and am) actually dumb enough to tell you what I think with attribution.

At this same Educational TV Station, there were weekly leaks to a Canadian satirical magazine called FRANK. (Kind of like Private Eye, but not as funny.) One of the top execs -- a dour humourless bureaucrat -- became convinced that I was the leaker, even though most of the stuff that appeared was material about money and decisionmaking that I didn't even come close to having access to.

Anyway, though it was meant to be a valve, this first experience with anonymity plus the internet plus the desire to stamp out those who avail themselves of anonymity left a sour taste in my mouth.

Through the years, I've found that anonymity causes people to say things they wouldn't otherwise say, and also to be, obviously, less accountable for those things.

Anonymity works when you're trying to criticize the power structure. But in this blog, there is no power structure. There's me. I don't have power, or I have exactly the power you would expect a freelance writer to have.

The bottom line is: every time there's an anonymous comment on this blog, it seems to be something posted by someone looking to say something nasty that they wouldn't say if they could be identified. Now. I'm identified with this blog, but most of the time, I don't have a dog in that fight. Nor do I want to.

I know that if I change the settings I'll make commenting fractionally harder and less democratic. But -- it will remove the stigma of being attached to remarks that I would rather not be associated with.

What do y'all think?