Much Ado But Not Too Much

IF YOU WERE a teenager in the 1980's you had MTV and his moon men.

Unless you lived in Canada, where the big M logo stood for something else entirely. Twenty-five years ago today, August 31, 1984, Muchmusic signed on the air from downtown Toronto. In doing so, Canada became one of the only countries in the world to go a different way in just licensing the American MTV brand.

Yeah, I know. I can scarcely believe it either. Canadian TV, doing something different.

Muchmusic would, through the years, run MTV programs through licensing deals -- but the relationship was never what you would call cordial. It was either a lawsuit or a threat of one that finally got the powers-that-be to change Much's "M" logo to the current Globe version, for instance.

It's hard to overstate Much's cultural influence

over the generations of kids who came of age in the 1980's or even into the 90's. In the pre-internet age (yes, it wasn't that long ago,) TV was the main cultural arbiter, the place teens looked to for style and information that catered to them.

Because the rest of the culture -- baby-boomer focused in those years -- hadn't yet realized the value of targeting teenagers in all things, Much was often the only place you would see stuff that appealed and talked to a younger demographic. It was the place you found out about new music, taking over largely from radio during the era. If you're of a certain age, when you hear a song from, say, the mid to late 1980's, you can probably picture the video. God knows you saw it enough.

Along the way, you also saw a product on air that sometimes was shoestring, but was always compelling. From the moment they moved to their current headquarters on Queen St. West at John, the Much brand took a hard peel away from the MTV brand.

Because the VJ's were live. Absolutely, perfectly, gruesomely live. Stumbling on air, in all their imperfect, improvised glory -- Much eschewed the processed, edited and inert links of the MTV VJ style and let it all hang out. The technical direction was in the background. There was no studio -- only the "environment," where chase producers would sit with their fingers in their ears, shouting down the phone while some degree of foolishness was going on in front of the camera. People would gather out on the street, and the VJ's would interact with them. Musical acts would come in, and they'd push desks out of the way to let it happen -- and all the while, the street beckoned and watched and fed back. It wasn't always great television -- but it was alive.

While Canadians grew up on Master T, Chris Ward, Erica Ehm, J.D. Roberts, Steve Anthony, and later Simon Evans, Rick The Temp, Monika Deol and Sook Yin Lee just to name a few -- they were also getting a daily dose of Canadian music and musicmakers, amidst the world product.

This is just my opinion, but I think that's one of the main reasons why Canadian music has such a healthy reputation among people in this country. Wonder of wonders, when you're actually exposed to it daily, as a matter of course, the people comes to view it as normal. The idea of hating a band or an artist just because "they're Canadian" would seem ridiculous.

Muchmusic is a lot of the reason why.

Which isn't to say the channel was all that puffed up and important. There was silliness, such as the venerable Electric Circus dance show, annual Video Cutup show Fromage, and more improvised traditions like the yearly Christmas tree toss off the roof off the CHUM building -- a stunt that seemed to get more byzantine and dangerous each and every year.

Occasionally, Much would court controversy and even ambition. They got into deep dutch for running Ren & Stimpy in the early 1990's -- it's the first time I remember hating the CRTC -- and under Avi Lewis and later George Strombo, they even dipped their toes into the political arena with coverage of elections and specials like "Too Much 4Much."

I still maintain the day that Master T quipped, "Yo Brian, wassup?" to then-prime Minister (and sire of the uncomfortable-to-watch Ben) Brian Mulroney was the day something changed in Canadian Politics. (And I'm certainly not the first to say that.) The soon-to-be ex-PM ignored Much -- but he'd be the last to do so. The next three Prime Ministers all made campaign stops at Muchmusic at one point or another. I don't know if Stevie Sweaters went, but, hey, anything's possible.

After growing up with the channel as a teen, I was lucky enough to have a close-up view of Muchmusic at the very tail end of what I'd call the golden era.

I worked upstairs on a show for Citytv, but you were forever walking down to see who'd dropped in to play a set. You'd drop by to grab a tape you needed from an edit bay and run into Stephen Tyler or the Tragically Hip or No Doubt or Bono back before his sainthood. One time I went to the bathroom and found myself peeing beside Joey Ramone.

I did not shake his hand.

Just before I got hired in the building, I was there doing a paper-edit of my "audition piece" and walking about I ran into Peter Garrett -- the lead singer for Midnight Oil. This was just post "Beds are Burning" days, and Midnight Oil was a pretty big deal. The guy towered over me -- no mean feat, and we had some time in the elevator together (the front elevator in the 299 Queen Street W foyer redefined slow.)

He asked me what I did there, and, too surprised to think up an excuse, I told him. He was very kind and looked around and said, "this looks like a really cool place to work. I hope you get it." Then he invited me to come see their show that night.

I did. It was great, and several hours later, after the taping he looked over, saw me and came over and asked me how the "audition" had gone. I smiled and said, "Good. I think I got the job." And he pumped my hand and said, "that's great, great."

Shit like that happened all the time.

But whether you were within or without it, Muchmusic brought something new to Canada. Everywhere outside of Toronto complains about Toronto and sees Toronto bias in everything. Much went all across this country -- hosting shows with a western and Eastern focus, doing "Snow Job" alternative spring breaks from B.C. to all sorts of far flung Canadian locales. It wasn't unusual to see people or requests or reports from Alberta or Newfoundland. I think, in many ways, a kid watching Muchmusic in the 1980's or 90's got a better sense of the vast diversity of Canada than, say, a CBC Radio listener. And it was all osmosis -- you didn't realize you were sucking up the country. It just happened.

And eventually, people noticed. Spinoff Muchmusics were exported to South America, Europe -- and mighty MTV copied the Much Environment idea and planted a studio in Times Square for "Total Request Live."

The Golden Age faded, of course, as these things are destined to do. And it wasn't just the changing of the guard and getting older, as the VJ faces changed and the original audience, and the 2nd generation and 3rd moved on... No, slowly, as it became more successful, Muchmusic got more corporate, reflecting the corporate culture CHUM had become around it.

First the logo changed...then there started to be restrictions on staff getting into the live performances in the "environment." Every week, you'd get a new email about so-and-so being appointed Vice President of this or that or the other thing. The Canadian Music Video Awards became the Muchmusic Video Awards - and a legendary party that everybody in the building went to became all swarming publicists and nineteen wristbands and threats that if you were in the building and you weren't working, they'd come in the night and steal your children. Muchmusic, who'd once been an accidental innovator, became the snake eating its own tale, when it created "Much on Demand," a photo copy of "Total Request Live," which stole from Much. The photocopy of the photocopy became the norm. Where once there was the desire to do something different, now the consultants preached samennes. The first wave of the old guard left for elsewhere in the building, or sunnier climes at other broadcast networks.

Along about the time that I left the CHUM organization to make the jump to writing full time, the memos had started to get byzantine. One missive spelled out the great restrictions on not being in the halls when Harrison Ford came to visit. Then there was the one that told people not to look at Tom Cruise. I mean it -- no eye contact. (Never did find out if that was a CoS thing.)

What had started as this ratty and ragged and improvised Canadian, scruffy thing had grown up, drank the fizzy water and started to believe its own hype. Then, of course, the business changed. Youth programming rose, videos were over, and MTV started rebranding as a lifestyle channel. The Much I knew slowly faded away, but, of course, to a new generation of viewers -- it was still the place to be. And I guess that's the way of the world, right?

Still, I've got a lot of fond memories of the place. From being able to work with a guy I once watched on TV, Simon Evans, to that interview with David Bowie that Avi Lewis did that was the best interview I'd ever seen of Bowie. It was so good I watched the Raw. There were a hundred encounters with rock and pop stars in hallways and parking lots and parties. There was that time in the edit bay when I watched and laughed at this filthy little construction-paper greeting card that was the original South Park vid. There was the legendary, unedited Speakers Corner tapes, and Carl Armstrong's latest incomprehensible and brilliant I.D.'s (he roped me into appearing in one or two of those) and the outtakes from America's Funniest Home Videos. Why do editors always have the sickest shit?

I remember returning to work with a coffee one time, to see a horde of screaming girls and five pop tarts whiz past me, and asking who they were. "The Spice Girls," came the reply. And I, inevitably and terminally square now that I was out of the Much demo, replied, "Like Old Spice? Who the @#% are the Spice Girls?"

I railed everytime the Backstreet Boys showed up. Then felt guilty years later when, homesick, I heard "I Want It That Way" in the back of a Cape Town taxi and hummed along, lustily.

And then there was the strange, spontaneous, and terribly sad impromptu vigil when the news of Kurt Cobain's suicide came down. A wave of kids, gathered outside, not knowing what to do or what to feel. Me thinking about being twelve and hearing about John Lennon on the radio.

Most of the people who made Muchmusic what it was in those early days have moved on now -- John Martin passed away, Chris Ward's in L.A., the VJ's are no more, Denise Donlon's at CBC, Moses Znaimer, David Kines, and even most of the producers I knew there are all gone.

The strange coda to the first quarter-century of the channel is that a couple years ago, CHUM was sold to CTV Globemedia. Finally, the warring MTV Canada and Much brands are under the same corporate umbrella.

I don't know if that has anything to do with the really strange and insensitive interview the current poohbah gave to the Canadian Press last week:

"We will be doing absolutely nothing for the 25th anniversary," said Brad Schwartz, senior vice-president and general manager of Much MTV Group.

"It's actually really, really important to me. ... You will not see a press release from us, they will not do anything special on air, there will be nothing going on, you will never know that Much turned 25, because for us it's not a story.

"We are in the looking-forward business, we are in the looking-at-today business, we are in the young-person business. We are not in the looking-back business."

The point about the channel needing to look forward and cater to its current audience notwithstanding, It's hard to believe from a P.R. point of view that somebody would cackle about not even sending out a press release to mark a milestone like the 25th anniversary. But then again, maybe it's not so hard.

After all, not only was the guy not there, but marking the anniversary would have to acknowledge the contributions of a whole bunch of people who also are no longer there -- some of whom CTV had a hand in putting out to pasture. Then there's the MTV connection. Maybe it's impolitic to celebrate something that was a mote in the eye of one of your partners for so long.

So is it any wonder that as record co.'s get calls from reporters asking about the 25th anniversary, they're actually getting calls from Much P.R. asking them to play it down?

And they are. In the Record Business these days, you stick close to where your bread is buttered.

Still, in the end, the most tin-eared part of that interview is that it misses the point that a channel like Much is more than what they did, or put out there; it was a conversation that young Canadians had with each other. It's not just their anniversary, it's ours too.

Today's 14 year olds might be Much's focus now, but they should know that once they pass out of the demo, they should turn in their Much stickers and get out. Another case of a Canadian channel not really thinking about the audience.

You might think about that the next time they talk about you helping to "save local tv."

So Happy Birthday Much. Sorry there's no cake. Not even from Cake. Guess you'll just have to make do with this little clip. BTW, one of those DJ's is the former J.D. -- now John -- Roberts. Former CBS White House Correspondent, current anchor of CNN's American Morning.

We all grow up and put away childish things eventually.

"Yo Brian, wassup?"

Classic.

Link to the video at The Star: (if it doesn't format correctly below)

Why Writers Are Prickly

WE ARE. No sense denying it. We get shirty sometimes, and rise to take offence. Why, you may ask?

This, from Emmy Award nominee & HOUSE writer Doris Egan's fine blog:

If you watch the Emmys, you've seen what happens when the "Best Series" prize is awarded; a ridiculously large group of people go up on stage, where they shift uncomfortably but happily from one foot to another while their boss makes a speech. These are the faces behind the show: the writer-producers, mainly, usually along with a few director-producers and line producers. They are the people who create and round out the characters, design the story arcs, write the words the actors speak. As it turns out, however, these tasks are considered unimportant by an Academy whose raison d'etre is supposed to be acknowledging and rewarding quality of effort. The Academy has determined two things:

1) Only a producer should receive an award for "Best Series."
2) Only a producer who spends a greater portion of their time producing other people's episodes than writing their own should receive an award for "Best Series."

Directing producers, in. Line producers, in. Writing producers... well, the Academy's letter reads:

"A priority of the Acadmy is preserving the value of the Emmy Award thus insuring that those who are most deserving and actively involved are the ones honored with nomination."

That would not include writers, apparently. Though it would include people who do the scheduling and handle the budgets, and it would include producer-directors.

Before I go any further, I'm sure you're asking yourself, "Why should I care?" Indeed, you may be asking, "Why should youcare?" It's just another stupid awards ceremony, you're thinking.

If you think that, you're correct. But if you think that status in this foolish town does not translate into power, money, and the opportunity to do the work you love, then God bless your naivete. I could write a treatise listing all the ways this is so. And here's the trouble with the way writers fit into this picture: they're low-key. They're pathetically grateful to be making a living writing. Whenever discussions of money take place, within two minutes or less a writer will point out to other writers that we make a comfortable salary in a world where people are starving. This is true, but it's not an attitude that gets you very far in Hollywood. This is a town full of loud-talking narcissists, who walk in laying claim to everything. You may recall the island of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels, where no one could have a conversation without a person designated as an "ear flapper," who would strike the person who was supposed to be listening and make them pay attention. In Hollywood, there are entire companies whose sole reason for existing is to attach themselves to a writer with the promise that they can get somebody to listen to them. (And I'm not talking about agents.) There are directors who direct a pilot, leave, and retain executive producer status for the rest of the series run. A great many people, all along the way, puff up their status and take a huge chunk of power and budget from the studio. Writers, however, come from a long tradition of holing up in their caves and working. They are rarely political. Frankly, they are often political idiots.

They do work, however. Let's talk about that. Writers come up with the ideas that become episodes of the show. On many shows, every writer works on building every single episode, and then one person goes off and writes it. On other shows, every writer contributes to other episodes when asked, and spends the bulk of their time building their own episodes. All writers join in brainstorming general ideas and creating the overall series arcs. None of this counts with the Academy however, and I'll tell you why: it's writing.

At a certain point, when you continue to take abuse, you cease to garner sympathy and garner a touch of contempt instead. To the credit of writers I've spoken with, they're not just depressed and resigned (their normal state). They're angry.

#Globe Fail, or "It's the Context, stupid."

TODAY'S GLOBE AND MAIL has an absolutely textbook definition of the way the media often distorts issues by leaving key bits of context and framing out.

Interestingly enough, I've experienced this in just about every news story I've ever been directly involved in. It's a little disheartening.

The article, by James Bradshaw and Karim Bardeesy is titled, very prejudicially, "Music Industry Seeks New Levies."

That's a great way to foment grumbling right there, of course. Because it's the music industry -- or as I pointed out yesterday, more accurately, the "record industry," who've been suing people, and who've thrown their weight behind digital locks that screw up people's computers, invade privacy and prevent some lawful uses of material the user has paid for. In reality, Thursday's calls for a levy extension to hard drives, Ipods, and other storage media was put forth by several creator groups & individuals at the Town Hall -- not just the music industry. I have nothing to do with the music industry -- which makes it doubly annoying that the authors of the Globe article chose to misquote me:

A town hall meeting in Toronto on Thursday evening – dominated by music industry executives andintellectual property lawyers, and attended by Industry Minister Tony Clement – sparked a lively debate about the iPod tax.

When digital music downloading caught on in the late 1990s, the Canadian government established a levy on blank recording media, compensating artists for the copying of their music. The fee is now 24 cents per audio cassette and 29 cents per CD.

“The levy works so well, we don't even realize we're paying it,” television writer Dennis McGrath said.

But the fee was already dated when it launched in 1999. The era of mass downloading – through sharing hard drives, flash memory, DVDs, music players, or online file-sharing networks – is here. Fewer people are buying blank CDs, and blank tapes are obsolete. So the money generated for artists fell to $32.5-million in 2007 from $39.4-million in 2004, a 17-per-cent decline.

A regular annual drop in music sales has spurred the industry to try again. With two million iPods and iPhones in Canada, according to the mobile advertising firm AdMetrics, the potential haul from Apple products alone could be substantial.

Now, besides the fact that they spelled my name wrong -- which happens all the time, but isn't a great sign -- if you check the webcast or read the transcript of the proceedings, you'll see exactly how they changed my quote.

What I actually said was, "The levy has worked so well, that we had a guy here tonight who doesn't even realize he's been paying it."

That's a very different quote -- a quote that demands context.

So here's the context: Sophie Millman, the jazz artist, stood up and spoke in favour of the levy as a way to recover some of the monies lost by artists to the pirating of their materials via peer to peer networks.

Later on a young gentleman, whose name I gather from Geist's site was Tariq, spoke against the levy, explaining that he's never paid it at the cash when he bought CD's.

Of course, that's the not the way the levy works. Like the levies that are placed on Gas at the pump, the blank media levy is included in the price of purchase before the consumer buys the product.

That's the point I was speaking to. But the messy reality doesn't necessarily support the Globe writers' thesis -- that the hated music industry, having failed to secure a greedy levy in the past, are now trying again in a different way. Cue the heavy handed music -- Dum Dum DUM!

The rest of my remarks on Thursday throw my support for an Ipod or DVR levy into proper context. It's absolutely an imperfect solution, for both sides -- under a levy system, artists will never receive as much money as they would if their works were paid for 100%. And some people who buy Ipods who don't ever download, or some people who buy hard drives for a purpose other than storing ripped DVD's or music, might have to pay a levy for an activity they don't participate in.

But that, my friends, is what's called a compromise on both sides. And the result -- the price -- of that compromise from my point of view is that we throw out the restrictive and backward thinking, DRM, DMCA style U.S. copyright -- where digital locks are thrown over content to incovenience users, and Industry Organizations spend a whole lot of time threatening people and filing lawsuits for having a downloaded Coldplay mp3 or episode of Friends on your home computer. It's a concept called, "Collective Licensing," and it recognizes the reality that digital networks, and peer-to-peer is here to stay.

If we move beyond the idea of the bricks-and-mortar content as a physical thing arguments, then just maybe we can focus on ways peer-t0-peer distribution could actually be monetized. The taint will be gone, and a great 21st century technology can lead to new market and opportunities.

$75 on top of the cost of an Ipod sounds like a lot to me, too. So maybe that's too much. Point is, the intellectual underpinning of the call for a levy is far more sophisticated, and forward thinking, than either the "information wants to be free" retards or the buttoned-down Globe writers want you to believe. The flaky artists are actually trying to come up with a workable solution here, that blends with the technological reality.

Screenwriters already have a Collection Society that distributes monies from foreign sales of the shows they wrote. I'm on the board -- it works well. It doesn't get them every dollar they're owed, but hell, it's actual real money -- not a theoretical payday that depends on being able to stamp out consumer behavior that's here to stay anyway.

Furthermore, if we get beyond the fight over digital locks and peer-to-peer, maybe we could actually tackle some of the big consumer issues around copyright that don't get a lot of air -- things like the abolition of crown copyright, the length of copyright terms, fair use in the area of parody and satire -- and any of a hundred other real, important issues.

But none of that fits within the Globe writers' narrow categorization of an us-and-them cash grab. They sneak in that the CD levy was obsolete when it was approved, because of the move to networks and storage on hard drives -- without discussing the other philosophical underpinning to the levy argument -- it's technology neutral. It doesn't tie us into talking about what we do with a physical storage device or product that might not be around in five or ten years. It will actually allow our copyright laws to function as technologies change, rather than be inadequate and hopelessly out of date, as the current law is, and as the law the Conservatives proposed just two years ago would be today.

Any and all of that could be said. But none of it would fit into the thesis of the article. So, you know, it's probably just easier to change my quote to give it the context you want.

Nice.

Two points to end off:

First, just so the black hat-white hat reductivism at work here is in even sharper relief: when the court struck down the extension of the levy to the Ipod by the Copyright Board, I was in favor of that ruling. Not because I didn't think the Ipod levy was a good idea, but because I recognized that it was overstepping the law as laid out in the (old) Copyright Act.

Second:

Ironically, after the Town Hall, Tariq who doesn't pay the CD levy sought me out -- and said to me that he knows he didn't pay the levy because he buys no-name spindles of CD-Rs that only cost 10 bucks on College Street. So that's why levies don't work.

Uh. Okay?

In that case, maybe that makes my crack at his expense during the town hall not as accurate as it might have been. He wasn't clear in his point, so inadvertently, I miscategorized what he was trying to say. (And to be fair, he did it first.)

But in any case, it's a distinction without a difference. If you're buying knockoff, grey market stuff, you're more in the piraters' column, anyway. We don't make law or set rates based on the people who steal cable or who buy knockoff sneakers, either.

Copyright is a contentious issue, no matter how you slice it. There is much that I feel needs to be done to protect consumers' rights -- but that discussion must absolutely go hand in hand with a workable, technology neutral solution to the problem of artists' not being compensated for their intellectual property.

Lumping our concerns together and spinning them as another grab by the music industry is dirty pool and not worthy of the Globe & Mail.

How Can It Be Copyright When It Feels So Copywrong?

SO LAST NIGHT, I attended a good old fashioned dog & pony.

The Copyright Consultation Town Hall took place in Toronto's Royal York Hotel. It was the second such event. There's also been a bunch of roundtables in places like Vancouver, and another one in Toronto yesterday where selected "industry representatives" make their case to the government about what needs to be done to bring Canada's copyright laws into the 21st century.

Copyright is an extraordinarily complex issue, made all the more complex by the rapidly changing nature of technology, and the issues that have sprung up around the use of that technology.

From the public side, from consumers -- there's a number of concerns that speak to individual rights -- many of which have been crystallized by the digitization of content and the ease of spreading that content around.

It's often framed as a showdown between the piraters who don't feel you should pay at all for TV shows and movies, and the industries that market, make and sell such content. But it's so much more than that. Digital locks or attempts to "copy proof" digital materials have led to embarrassing privacy-concerns, and concerns about tampering with users' systems. The Heavy Handed American Approach, where certain users were targeted and whacked with huge lawsuits to deter filesharing, have made martyrs of people who shouldn't be, and cast copyright holders as the bad guys, sometimes unfairly. There are all sorts of other legal, philosophical and creative issues swirling around, too. What is the public domain? Should big companies like Disney be allowed to pressure for extensions to copyright past the normal 50 year term? Should there be exemptions for things like parody, or satire? What about the use of copyrighted materials in classrooms? And what is a creator, anyway?

The landscape has changed so fast that the bill the Conservative Gov't tried to table last time (which died with the last election) is already out of date. As it stands, Canada's copyright law references VHS tapes, and is so out of date, it's almost like those early 20th century statutes that demand that someone run ahead of an automobile, telling pedestrians to get out of the way. There is much to disagree about around the subject of copyright -- and the horses are spooked. By being slow to take up this subject, Canada has fallen behind most other jurisdictions in the first world in figuring out what the balance between consumer rights and creators and copyright holders should be in the 21st Century digital economy.

So then, to last night. The 300 or so participants in the Town Hall had registered a few weeks ago when the event opened. I was notified by the WGC and registered. When I arrived last night, I got a name tag and a number. Three streams of people got to participate in the two hour session -- people drawn by lottery, a few "industry representatives" drawn by a different lottery, and web commenters, whose submissions were read out in the room by one of the facilitators. When your number got picked, you went up to the mic and started speaking. You had three minutes. That's it.

No matter what happened next, at best this would have been an imperfect, agonizing evening. There are so many perspectives, so many issues, and plenty of complexity to go around.

Except none of that came out.

After a moving first presentation by a musician who talked about his fears for his future livelihood and his moving desire to just be able to continue to make a living, there was a steady stream of representatives from the major Record Labels. All told, we heard from three people who worked for Warner Music (I heard later that there was a fourth,) a couple from Sony and several from Universal.

Now, it's no surprise that Record Companies turned out in force. Starting with the birth of the original Napster and all that came after it, the Major Record Labels (as opposed to the faux synonymous "music industry") have been the Canary in the Coalmine for the challenges of the digitization of content. And, sad to say, this is an industry that has not comported itself very well. From resisting the shift to legal digital downloads, to supporting punitive and outsized lawsuits, to flirting with the cure-all of digital locks that punished the legitimate purchaser more than the average pirate, the leadership of this industry has dropped the ball at just about every step. They've clung to a bricks-and-mortar, 20th century business model that rivaled the Hollywood studios for strange accounting practices, chargebacks, and largesse in the promotion, monetization and exploitation (in many senses of that word) of music.

In many ways, it's the screaming of these large labels -- and their lobbying groups like the RIAA, that have held back discussion of possible new ways forward, by focusing on their needs and monopolizing the debate.

And so it went last night. Speaker after speaker from the labels poured out their view of the rights of artists they were protecting, and the horrible impact of the losses of jobs in their corner of the industry.

Which is indeed sad. And unfortunate. And ... here's the Band Aid getting ripped off fast ... inevitable.

I imagine that the makers of sheet music, and player pianos experienced a similar agita as the technology changed. And I'm going to guess that the makers of intricate handsome cabs didn't all succeed in the auto industry. And pager makers didn't all get to switch to cell phones, American TV manufacturers saw their business shift to Japan and then China, the mimeograph industry fell to the Fax Machine and then Email, and so on and so on.

The thing is, as sad as the losses of jobs are -- and they are indeed sad, and unfortunate -- the arguments that these reps make, when they bother to make them -- are not solutions at all. The Genie is out of the bottle. Like a lot of literate people, I find myself very worried about the steady decline of the newspaper business. But I'm enormously relieved by the fact that I don't really see any calls from that industry to somehow, oh, I don't know, figure out a way to force more people to buy newspapers -- or to sue a Grandmother in Calgary because she passed her copy of the Herald onto her neighbour.

But speaker after speaker from the Record Labels got up, and made the same points, over and over, despite the admonitions from the moderator to please cede your time if your view had already been expressed. Well, their views were expressed. Ad nauseum. And they're points that you've probably already heard through any one of a hundred of their well-funded anti-piracy campaigns.

My heart sank a little every time someone introduced themselves as being from one of the labels, because I knew that there was three more minutes gone, where we wouldn't hear another point of view, another concern, and another possible solution. And inevitably, it seemed to tip the evening into exactly the place it shouldn't have been -- another discussion about the problems of the illegal filesharing of music.

Yes. That's a problem. But it's a well discussed problem, and it's not the only problem, and between the CRIA and the RIAA, it's a problem that their industry representatives have reflected to the government time and time again.

Interestingly enough, there were some other voices from the music industry -- as opposed to the record industry -- who went their own way, and discussed other possible models and solutions. Sophie Millman, a quite wonderful jazz musician (who my compatriots assured me also had the best shoes of the night,) got up and spoke in concrete terms about her specific experiences, and for the first time brought up a solution that goes another way from the American model: the blank media levy.

Introduced when home taping was the issue, the blank media levy is a charge that's put on blank cassettes and discs. That charge is invisible to the consumer -- worked into the markup on the product when you buy a stack of CD-Rs. In Millman's case, her share of a levy one year came in at about $12 000 -- which she said was a significant factor in her label deciding whether she could tour.

Now that example is specific and concrete, and as an artist, she was asking for a specific remedy: she felt that Canadian law should be amended to extend the levy to PVR's, hard drives, Ipods and the like.

Lots of you out there just groaned. I know. It's an awful, imperfect solution. But this is what artists and copyright creators are down to, now. Unlike many of the people speaking for the Labels, we accept the proposition that a portion of the audience will always choose to pirate our material. We know that can't be stopped -- not through lawsuits or digital locks. Some combination of going after wholesale, large scale piracy and an alternate, compensatory revenue stream is the only -- imperfect -- solution to many of us. It won't be as much as we would get if every copy of our work was bought and paid for -- but it's something.

It is truly amazing that most of the people in the room, whatever side they were on, would very blithely and easily agree that artists should be compensated for their work. But then, in the ideology, the hows and how-does-that-works become fuzzy and indistinct.

Well, content creators -- we, the ultimate freelancers, cannot afford to trust, and have it be indistinct. Any more than you would feel great about going to a job where the boss told you, "keep working, you're doing a good job and you deserve to get paid and, uh, we'll figure out a way to do that. Somehow. Someday."

"But I buy hard drives and I don't copy music or movies on them...." the chorus says.

Sure. Okay. Maybe that's so. I don't have kids. And I paid a whole bunch of taxes last year on income I generated from my intellectual property that went to schools, and daycare credits, and child benefits, and the upkeep of playgrounds.

Anyway, that's a bit of a tangent.

Other points of view that were buried or downplayed in the march-to-sameness from the label reps: A guy got up and made an excellent point about how a Canadian author's work falling into public domain resulted in an explosion of new annotated editions, and repurposing of the work. His presentation was marred somewhat by kind of an elitist lead-off that dogged teenagers and had the whiff of preciousness, but it was a new point -- and it made me want to click my heels.

A very nice University student got up, and made an extremely earnest presentation about what copyright meant to him. He was nervous, and didn't get all of what he wanted to say out, but I would have heard three more like him rather than another Record industry rep.

Intriguingly, one very articulate guy -- I remember neither his name or face -- spoke about opportunity. He's a guy who actually quit the business to get into the business of tracking usage and copyright online -- to collect and distribute monies to content creators. That's another piece of the pie that got short shrift -- the opportunities new business models, and ways of thinking might bring.

I've written for most of this post now about the artist or copyright holders' points of view, but of course there's another side of that -- the consumer. And unfortunately, the consumer really did get a bit of short shrift last night. The point was made not to restrict with digital locks, and many of the Web commenters made excellent points about the public's rights.

There were a couple of presenters talking on behalf of researchers and university libraries about trying to extend "fair dealing," -- the ability for researchers to use works for academic purposes. And there were a couple of authors' and writers' reps that argued why that might not be a way to go. Finally! Two sides of an issue given an airing.

I was there with my colleagues from the Writers Guild of Canada. K.L. Ashton does yeoman's work at the Guild on Policy issues -- Maureen Parker is the hardworking Executive Director, and then there were three of us who were wearing two hats -- working screenwriters, and members of the WGC Council. Jill Golick is a working writer and new media creator (you may know her from her story2oh and writing blogs). Rebecca Schechter is the President.

We all had our numbers, and notes, and thoughts on what we would say. But in the end, only my number got called.

And oh My Lord, was I nervous. Which is weird, because I normally have no problem talking in front of large groups. But partly, it was looking down on those notes and trying not to repeat points that had been made before, part of it was the responsibility and the knowledge that one point of view was already being over-represented...

...but part of it was just a pure and simple struggle. You see, I don't just get up there and talk as a creator. I'm a consumer too. I've been enraged by digital locks that got in the way of my perfectly legal use of paid-for material. I have issues with corporations subverting the Public Domain. I feel strongly about some aspects of Fair Dealing, especially when it comes to enshrining and carving out a place for parody, satire and fair comment. I don't know how what I do will be paid for in the future -- I'm not even sure that the format of what I do will survive. But I know in my heart that there's a way forward that puts the power in the hands of the individuals, and doesn't favour huge conglomerates -- because in the end, isn't that the real point of the digital revolution?

So I did the best I could. I was breathless, I got off a few jokes, I underlined the levy option as one way forward and I spoke up for Parody and Satire. And that was that.

I noticed later that Michael Geist -- who I don't always agree with 100%, but who certainly has a comprehensive handle on all these issues that speaks from the consumer side -- tweeted that I had done well, and that made me feel a bit better.

But when it comes to public reaction to Geist's summation of the event -- I get a growing, bad, restless feeling.

It's the same restless feeling that I've had when dealing with many of those who fully evangelize for what's become known as "fair copyright." And that's the blitheness with which they choose to paint everybody with the same brush.

You see it in the sneering attitudes toward "industry representatives." Like we're all equal. You know, when I'm called a lobbyist by somebody in a situation like that -- as I was last night -- I want to do more than groan. I kind of want to punch the fucker out. A Lobbyist? Excuse me? You try pouring your heart out to create something, trying to cobble together a living and encourage fellow travelers and make something entertaining and then turn around to wonder if it's all going to be for nothing in three or five years. You try sitting in Council meetings to serve your fellow writers, for which you get a pittance -- and then get called a lobbyist, while some dude has the nerve to talk about him making his 6 terrabyte server of other people's work available to the world makes him more virtuous than you. Lobbyist. Hey buddy -- fuck you.

What I know to be true is, far from being endlessly consulted, the WGC often doesn't get a seat at these tables. We struggle to make writers' voices heard. Nobody's chomping cigars and flying business class and living the high life. Lobbyists. Sheesh.

The sneering rhetoric and the blithe, "yes, yes, artists should get paid, but they should also remember that consumers are the ones paying the bills," is a bunch of self-congratulatory, cooler than school, information wants to be free, aren't we edgy, 21st century bullshit.

I'm a consumer, same as you. I struggle to try to find a middle ground between individual rights, and securing a viable economic future for people who do what I do. It's damn hard.

And as much as it may be disappointing to see so many record label folks speak -- they organized. They came out. You can whine about the fix, you can pooh-pooh and turn everyone who doesn't think like you into "the man," but the fact of the matter is -- you don't help your cause when you venerate guys like the last man who rushed the mike and delivered an incoherent ramble that was the only time all night where the copyright forum sounded a bit like a U.S. health care Town Hall forum. That is not your standard bearer.

Geist is a great resource. And Fair copyright is important. And I will be right there with you complaining if a bill comes around that gives the short stick to the consumers' rights in the digital future. But the smugness and the self-satisfying tone, and the casual dismissiveness towards people who, after all, are only worried about their entire livelihoods -- is odious. It doesn't make you a crusader, cochise.

It kind of just makes you a dick.

Alan? Is That You?

OKAY, THIS COMES courtesy Matt MacLennan. I laughed so hard I think I might have dislocated an intestine.

Mmm. Marrow.

THIS POST TITLE is nonsensical, I know. It's a little thing I like to do sometimes that makes it certain that if I ever need to go back and find this post, I will never be able to because I named it some weird thing instead of being straightforward and declarative.

In this case, I half remember some awesome thing on the Onion a few years back written as an open letter from a guy who just wanted your marrow. He would suck it out of your bones if he good. It basically devolved into, "just give me the goddamn marrow."

Now, we all know that time on the internet is measured in nanoseconds, and so something that happened two or three years ago might have been during the last ice age. But way, once upon a time, Josh Friedman, the showrunner of the (now shit-canned) Sarah Connor Chronicles, wrote a hilarious and funny and trenchant blog called "I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing." Josh, besides being the guy who got the whole Snakes on a Plane meme going, would occasionally drop bon mots and pearls of wisdom that really amounted to nothing less than pure screenwriter marrow.

Well, he's guest blogging this week at io9.com. Go. Suck out the marrow.

The Questions You Shouldn't Answer, And the Details You Can't Let Go Of.

-- A seriously, seriously cool article about world-building...

and The Television I Need Therapy to Work Through

...this is all part of their "TV Ate My Brain Week," and former Heroes and current Day One writer/creator Jesse Alexander is also blogging.

Go forth and read.

Morr et Elevun at Eleven

Y'KNOW YOU can argue skills all you want. You can make the case that training, and experience, and professionalism matters. You can make sure to be prepared, so that when a natural disaster hits, you're there ready to fulfill your societal function and clean up in the ratings too.

Or you can just hire anybody, pay them crap, not care about the product and...uh...well...

Y'know, let's just go with the pic. This #epicFAIL brought to you by Writer-Producer Chantal Jackson:

"Can we get school in there one more time so people know what we're talking about?"

What Corner Gas' Gemini Snub Means

IT'S INTERESTING TO contemplate a tale of two awards shows and what they reveal about the industries they celebrate -- or attempt to.

A few weeks ago the Emmys got into a flap when the producer wanted to bump some awards -- the writing awards among them -- off the live broadcast. A storm ensued, with over a hundred showrunners signing a petition against the move, and the Guilds threatening not to allow the use of no-fee clips.

The Producer backed down, but lost in the back in forth was the reason why he'd tried to institute the change in the first place: Ratings for the broadcast are way down, and he thinks it's the shows that get nominated.

There's no question that in the last few years, the quality baton has passed out of the hands of the networks and to some of the edgier cable shows. The Sopranos and HBO was one thing, but when AMC is picking up more statues, it's an "uh oh." Because, critical darlings that they are, huge tastemakers and drivers of fashion spreads in magazines -- shows like Mad Men, Damages, and Breaking Bad are not being watched by tens of millions of Americans.

This turn of events is in itself, interesting, since the knock on the Emmy's has been traditionally that they were out of touch -- rewarding the same programs year after year, instead of celebrating the new; being sentimental and attached to comfort shows instead of really celebrating the best.

But whatever the year's controversies may be -- people know the shows, and those who like to follow awards shows have plenty of fodder. The Emmys are a known quantity, and the faces that pop up in the audience are familiar to Americans, like old shoes.

Now let's contrast that with the Gemini Awards.

The Geminis came out of the old Actra awards about a quarter-century ago. The idea was always to raise the profile of the Canadian industry by honouring our best talent and brightest programs and personalities.

It's always been a harder road, of course, because so much of the TV viewership in this country is directed south, all the time. There's also not nearly the breadth and depth of material from which to draw nominees. Sometimes, in some categories, it seems like every possible show that could be submitted, is. That can lead to grumbling that we're now giving out awards to celebrate baseline competence -- "Yay! It Got Finished!" -- instead of excellence.

There are bright spots. Take a look at the Best Drama Series nominees:

Being Erica, The Border, Flashpoint, The Tudors, ZOS: Zone of Separation.

Those are five great shows. All of them are well-made, though very different in execution and subject matter. (And yes, I know, I should say here that I did indeed work on The Border last year.)

They're also shows that have varying degrees of audience familiarity. Flashpoint leads that pack and ZOS inevitably trails it, but still, these are all shows that it would be difficult to quibble about the nomination.

When the noms were announced yesterday, it took a while before anybody noticed the big, missing link. Corner Gas was not nominated in a single category.

Not for acting, direction, writing -- nothing. And this, for the show's last season.

That's the thing about the Emmys. They do listen to their history and make sure to venerate the things that came before.

So what happened? Why did Corner Gas -- a show that was consistently both a critical and a ratings favorite over its run, a show that finished up in April with the astounding figure of nearly three million Canadian viewers tuning in?

I've heard lots of grumbles. Some suggested some sort of organized backlash for the plug being pulled on the show early. Some saw a typical Canadian response, "there's nothing we won't do to punish a success here!" But the true answer is probably a lot simpler, and it lies in the way that the Gemini winners are selected.

It's a juried award, which means that a volunteer group screens all the entries and decides on the nominees. That jury has a lot of power, and a lot of sway, and depending how it's made up, you can favor certain things, favor your friends, or fulfill vendettas, say what you will.

I've been on at least a half a dozen Gemini juries over the years, and served as chairman of one. When I was chair, I tried to balance my jury with writers (it was a writing category) of different perspectives, ages, and experience levels, so that we really could give everything a more or less fair shake. I was aware of my own biases, and compensated accordingly.

Comedy is subjective. And Corner Gas comes from a particular school of gentle humor. And it's not necessarily the kind of humor that, say, a lot of young comics might celebrate.

I have no doubt that the juries deciding Corner Gas' unsuitability for a nomination approached their task earnestly, and really tried to nominate what they thought were the best shows. But now we're stuck with a credibility problem and a particularly thorny one for the Canadian industry:

The Geminis do NOT have a high profile. Many Canadians already haven't heard of the shows that are nominated. But now we're in a place where even people who work in the industry haven't heard of some of the shows getting nominations! And the show that's been both a success critically, and with the audience, doesn't make the cut for its swansong season? I'm afraid that gets us optically right back into the camp where people can point at people in the TV industry and say, "see? they don't care about the audience."

I was talking to a friend of mine who did get a comedy series nomination, and we agreed that the shutout of Gas is unfortunate because it taints the whole category. If you competed against Gas, and won, that would be great. If you lost, fine. But to know that it wasn't even in the running is to somehow put some fatal asterisk beside the nomination you did get. And that's very unfortunate.

The Geminis have a whole host of very serious problems, that it's time the Academy dealt with. Bloated beyond belief, the fact that there are now 99 categories is pretty scandalous.

Four nights to hand out the trophies is indulgent, and if you read the category lists, the distinctions are so hard to understand, so completely outside the ken of the average person, that the PR value in them is lost. I mean, I work in the industry and I have a hard time telling you what the difference between best Lifestyle Information Segment and Best Magazine Show would be. And that goes for the endless slices of Acting Categories and yes, writing categories too.

We're simply not that large an industry. Everything shouldn't get an award. On some of those juries, I've sat through stuff that was barely competent, which makes you think that the game of submitting for an award is fatally flawed, too.

Frankly, the whole thing seems to be a bit of a cash grab. And the fact that the Academy has not been successful in bringing CTV back into the fold in the News Categories gives an unforgiveable taint to all of those awards. This isn't the Golden Globes, where it doesn't matter if the whole thing's corrupt because big stars are getting drunk in the audience... this is, at least partially, our industry making its case that we can be popular and relevant.

But right now, the Geminis are neither.

If the Geminis are ever going to be anything other than a punchline, they need to take a look at the jury procedure. They need to streamline the categories to a more manageable number -- even if that DOES mean fewer entry fees. They need to come up with a workable and new system for the News awards so that everyone feels they can participate and the deck isn't stacked against them. (They should also consider moving the News Awards to a different time of the year -- nothing's being gained by having them all lumped together like that -- except maybe a deal on chicken dinners and venue -- and yeah, that's a problem too.)

The idea of the different-night galas kind of burns me a bit too. I never meet anybody I used to work with when I was Producing lifestyle stuff, because that's a different night. Don't we want a bit of cross pollination? Shouldn't that be one of the goals?

In the end, you have to ask is this a trade show? Or is it supposed to be something that the public can care about, too? We all say we want the latter, but it's ludicrous to deny that what we've really got is the former.

Blanking the show that reached 3 million fans, and redefined the notion of a successful Canadian show?

Not a great way to make our case.

Opening the Vault to talk Specs

SO I'M BACK at the start of trying to come up with new development stuff. So I was rereading some old process posts of mine. I know a few people read and linked to my recent articles about the steps involved in production writing. That was from a perspective of working on a 'go' show. When it comes to speccing stuff from scratch, I did write about that too -- but in a much earlier series of posts -- which I'll happily dredge up for you now.

Starting out, or Know Your Shit Cold

(It's amusing to see how chipper I was then.)

Then a little while later I outlined my process of writing a spec.

Specs, Part One. Part Two. Part Three.

At the end of Part Three I talk about doing a Part Four. And I'm sure in the deep sands of time, I felt I had more to say about reading your spec back. But things happened, and Part Four never did, and now I can't figure out what the hell I was going to say. So there is no Part Four. Sorry.

Or Maybe, just maybe, Part Four is UP TO YOU.

Right? Right?

Nah. There's no part four. Just move it along, now.

Of course, once you're reading your script back, I guess any of a number of old posts could spiritually be your Part Four.

Like -- remember the cup. Be critical, but not too critical. Do try to avoid directing on the page, or throwing in music cues.

And if you're lucky, on the other end, maybe, just maybe, you may have pulled off The Impossible Trick.

Uncle.

I HAVE NOTHING to say today that would be half as entertaining as if you went to Will Dixon's joint and watched the trailers he has up there. The End.

Lions.