Give up on the Screenwriting

One of my resolutions for 2006 is going to be to not try so much with the typing of words in dialogue and action descriptions.

Nope. If you really want cultural impact, you gotta come up with a really stupid book idea.

From today's Globe & Mail:

So it is that, at their recent sales conference, many Raincoast sales representatives reported that the surprise hit of the season so far has been the Chronicle Books title Fuck This Book. Here is this season's poster boy for the stupid book. Author Bodhi Oser's scheme is simple: Wander around with bumper-stickers that say Fuck and a camera. Place bumper sticker over sign to create hilarious incongruities like "Fuckle Up and Drive Safely" and "Please Do Not Fuck the Pigeons." Snap photo.

Fuck This Book captures many of the key ingredients of the genre. It feels vaguely subversive, it's brightly rendered, and you can spend two minutes or two hours thumbing through it. It takes a single silly idea and goes with it. And goes with it. And goes with it. Finally, Fuck This Book is populist-inspired in that arm's-length Internet way. You can visit the website and order your own bumper stickers and submit/peruse more hilarious pics.

For the record, if anyone cares, I'd really like to own a copy of Me Write Book. Bigfoot was my first non-sexual crush.

He Let Bartlet Be Bartlet

John Spencer, 1946 - 2005

He was a character actor's character actor. More than Sheen's showy Josiah Bartlet (who only entered in the last scene in any case) it was Spencer's Leo McGarry who set the tone in that West Wing pilot, and who told you, unequivocably, that this show would have a soul -- that it wasn't just a stunt.

His performance of the role was never showy. Yet when West Wing was good -- as it so often was in those early, Sorkin-driven seasons -- it was Spencer's Leo, along with Richard Schiff's Toby who embodied the heart and the soul of deceny and belief that made millions want to believe that our government servants could really be that dedicated. He was also my favorite kind of actor: he relished what he'd achieved, and felt lucky to be there.

Room Types: 2

TYPES YOU FIND IN THE ROOM

#2 TWISTY

Twisty has bad body language: tortured posture, a strange way of sitting, or draping over the furniture. Twisty shows every ripple or eddy of neurosis coursing through them. Sometimes, they will resemble a question mark. At a certain point in the long, story-breaking day, you may find it difficult to look at Twisty. Some may think that not looking at Twisty might seriously impede the story process -- after all, how can you be in sync with a fellow writer if you can't look at them? But fear not. Twisty will let you know when they have a very good idea by sitting up ramrod straight -- a welcome straightening that will register peripherally, and that can't help but bring a tear to a jaundiced eye after seeing what you swore was a live dislocation of the vertebral column sometime before lunch. Twisty may be Male or Female. When Twisty is Female, it's way, way, way worse -- since Twisty's clothes may become twisted, rise up, and enable you to see things you shouldn't. Thinking about a fellow writer in the room in that way is kind of like crushing on your sister -- so cut it out. Twisty's spine will be fine, as soon as you wrestle the story to the ground. Don't let Twisty down.

Good Night & Good Luck & Good Decisions

I saw "Good Night and Good Luck" about two weeks ago, at an afternoon screening at a dingy old theatre in Toronto's tony Yorkville neighbourhood. I say dingy with affection, because this theatre is one of the few places left in the city where you can see a movie and not have it seem like you've just stepped inside a game of HALO.

I'm glad to see that this fine film (and even finer allegory for current events) is getting the critical attention it deserves. There's nothing groundbreaking or ultimately envelope pushing about it. It's the kind of intelligent, well-drawn, nuanced and serious film that Hollywood used to have a place for, before they enjoyed one gorging too many at the summer gigaplex buffet.

At its root, Good Night and Good Luck is about a decision. And the most intriguing decision made in the film is not what David Straithairn's Murrow does, or what George Clooney's Fred Friendly does. It's the decision made by William Paley.

Paley, played in the movie by Frank Langella (right,) has to decide whether to go along when Murrow and Friendly decide to take on Senator Joseph McCarthy. Paley has plenty of reasons not to: he's losing sponsors, people are nervous, and there is a genuine fear in the country over the "communist threat." Yet, he stands by his newsmen. He makes the right decision to support them, knowing it may bring trouble for CBS.

Others have observed that it's not even really a question how that would go today. We've seen so many examples of corporate interest trumping truth or journalism that it's hardly worth being cynical about it anymore. Today, we get to hear about a fictional "War on Christmas" while the very real abandonment of New Orleans is under way. It's all par for the course and grist for the mill.

Last year, I think, there was a plan to run a movie on CBS about The Reagans. It dealt with all the silly Reagan gossip: the disconnected leader, the astrology, the "Mommy" figure, Nancy, lording things over the dottering old President.
Les Moonves, the President at CBS at the time, gave into pressure from Reagan hagiographers, and pulled the movie. It eventually went to Showtime. Again, at the time, there were howls about self censorship and how CBS wasn't bold to take a stand. But in the end it was a crappy TV movie, fueled with a tabloid sensibility. I'm not sure if I was in Moonves' place, that I'd want to take a stand on that, either. Even the great Paley had to eventually give in to realpolitik: the end of Good Night and Good Luck shows the great CBS leader cutting Murrow's weekly news hit to occasional specials. The market demanded it.

I say all this as preamble, to try and point out that I do understand that Network people have to weigh different factors when making their decisions. Which brings us, as it has a lot lately, to CBC.

A few weeks ago, when the election in Canada was called (Canadians go to the polls Jan. 23) the CBC responded by pulling a high-profile, two night drama about Tommy Douglas. Tommy Douglas was voted "The Greatest Canadian" last year in a series of TV specials. He's a politician, (also, he's Kiefer Sutherland's Grandfather!) the guy who's basically responsible for introducing Canada's medicare system. They said they didn't want to air programs with the appearance of bias during an election campaign.

When the CBC made its decision, I wrote about it here. Well, since then, things have gotten stupid. This election, even though it's Christmas and nobody really cares, is turning into a bit of a bruiser. There's a lot of talk on the campaign trail about how Canada differs from the USA. Some of it is to score points, and some of it is passion of a different order. One of the things that Canadians are passionate about is their health care system. It's a little broken right now, and there are legitimate debates about introducing private elements into it. But the system still works infinitely better than the ridiculous, embarrassing, wasteful goliath that is the US health care system. Health Care is always an issue in Canada, but now it seems that the US is paying attention a little bit. In the news over the last few days we've seen images of the US ambassador to Canada wagging his fingers at Canada's PM for criticizing the US on the campaign trail. Guess who the ambassador's close personal friend is?

Anyway, NeoCons in the USA would love for the Conservative leader to get into power here, since he's far more in line with GW than the Liberal government of Paul Martin.

Now, remember the whole health care thing? And how CBC didn't want to take sides? Well, twice in the last week, they aired a documentary called Medicare Schmedicare. This is a doc that's a polemic against Canada's current health care system. And guess who it takes lots of shots at? Tommy Douglas. That's right, kids. You can't take sides for the thing that most Canadians think is the finest hour in their last few decades: the creation of a workable and easy Public Health Care System. But the nationally funded broadcaster can air a doc that trashes it.

The worst part is, unlike CBS, past or present, there is no one person to look at and say, "there's who made the decision." That's not how CBC works. They hide behind committees and "official spokespeople." It's a joke. And unlike the decision to pull a dumb movie about calling Nancy "mommy," this decision actually stifles and hurts the public discourse.

It's one more bankrupt decision to issue forth from the unaccountable halls of the CBC. The entire top executive should resign, or be fired--for cause If you're a Canadian viewer, you should call or write the CBC immediately and tell them to air the damn movie in its original slot. Then you should show up at some campaign event and ask the candidate in your riding how they feel about the CBC summarily deciding that anti-health care docs are okay during a campaign, but historical movies showing how the system came to be are not.

Shouldn't you have the chance to see a movie about a man actually standing up and making a decision? Especially a decision with such great implications for Canadians -- then, and now.

The only thing I'm sure of, in all this -- there's sure as hell no William Paley anywhere inside the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Hey, all you South Africans, Vancouverites, and Californalenos...

Bite me.

From today's Toronto Star:

"As much as 15 to 20 centimetres of snow will whack us in the next two to three days as storms move in from the east, north and west. "We're getting attacked on all sides," said David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada. This is unusual too because storms often "hit and run," but "this storm is slow moving," Phillips added."

If I die in the snow on the way home from the Writer's Guild Party on Thursday night, I want everyone to know that my last words will be: "I'll see all you skiers, ice skaters, and snowboarders IN HELL."

Room Types: 1

Well the season of Yule is finally starting to take its toll. I'm running low on small talk, and waking up less rested than I should. Plus it's not even the fifteenth and I'm running low on Advil.

So that being said, I should attend to some screenwriting things. Oh, and marking papers, too. But no one likes to be left high and dry. I mean, TV's in reruns already, how much does that suck?

I decided a while ago to try and run down some of the common types one finds in the writing room-- an important service designed so that you, the writer-reader, can decide where you fit. I'll do these piecemeal over the next couple of weeks. Here we go.

TYPES YOU FIND IN THE ROOM

#1 SILENT BUT DEADLY aka "CHARLIE"

They sit and they wait. They don't have much to say: most of the time. They just sit there. Quietly. Sometimes they creep you out. You may get the idea that they're judging you. Then you become convinced that's what's going on. Otherwise, why didn't they laugh when you made that crack that broke everybody else up? They don't pitch a lot of lines. They don't offer a lot of story advice. They don't even give off a lot of body heat. But just at the moment when you think you're safe from Charlie, they open their mouths and out comes a) the funniest thing anyone has said all day, or b) The absolutely brilliant answer to the story point that's eluded you since 10:30 this morning -- the story point that allows you all to get out and go home. Charlie may have supernatural powers. Do not look directly at Charlie. Just let Charlie wait. That's what Charlie does best.

*point of Clarification -- a word of caution. Unlike the Charlie one may have met in Apocalypse Now, this Charlie, armed with web-enabled cell phone or Blackberry, may indeed surf.

It's Good to Be The Prince

From The Guardian: this is fun...

Saudi prince changes Fox's Paris riots coverage

Fox News was ordered to alter its coverage of the riots in France after a Saudi prince with shares in its parent company News Corporation complained to Rupert Murdoch.
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul aziz Al-Saud told a conference in Dubai he had telephoned Mr Murdoch after seeing a strapline on the news channel describing the disturbances as "Muslim riots".

"I picked up the phone and called Murdoch and said that I was speaking not as a shareholder, but as a viewer of Fox. I said that these are not Muslim riots, they are riots," Campaign Middle East magazine quoted the prince as saying.

"He investigated the matter and called Fox and within half an hour it was changed from 'Muslim riots' to 'civil riots'."

The prince said his intervention had been an example of how Muslim people can change the portrayal of their religion in the western media - although few Fox viewers will have his contacts.

Why do I feel oogie?

This Blog is Unrated for Your Pleasure

Okay, he stacked the deck by including clips from NC-17 films, but it's still a delicious irony.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated is an IFC Films documentary that goes behind the shadowy world of the MPAA's vaunted (and infamous) ratings system. (You know, the one that seems to freak out anytime any kind of indie movie comes near, but who rolls over and plays "rub my belly" for the crapulent product that oozes forth from the great studios?)

Filmmaker Kirby Dick was nominated for an Oscar(TM) this year for Twist of Faith.

As quoted by Reuters, the filmmaker's reaction:

"We encountered what many indie filmmakers encounter," he said. "There are a great many inequities and inconsistencies in the rating system, in part because it is so secret. The ratings board is reluctant to be specific, which can be maddening."

The film will premiere at Sundance.

Say it with me in your best Mr. Burns, now, kids....

"Exxxxxxxxcccceelllent!"

And what about the eyebrows?

Someone found my blog by Googling the phrase "Rachel McAdams toenails."

I'm sorry, that's a little too "It rubs the lotion on its skin." Even for me.

"We tortured an Elf to get this information."

In this great season of sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy (I didn't use to think this way; only since the religee-righty started thinkin' that somehow Christmas was in danger, you know, since they're under attack from all sides since they only control all 3 levers of US government and all) it's nice to see someone get it gloriously right.

Sam Seder from Air America, come on down. From an exchange on CNN, as quoted by Salon:

Sam Seder: Listen, as far as the war on Christmas goes, I feel like we should be waging a war on Christmas. I mean, I believe that Christmas, it's almost proven that Christmas has nuclear weapons, can be an imminent threat to this country, that they have operative ties with terrorists and I believe that we should sacrifice thousands of American lives in pursuit of this war on Christmas. And hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

Phillips: Is it a war on Christmas, a war on Christians, a war on over-political correctness or just a lot of people with way too much time on their hands?

Seder: I would say probably, if I was to be serious about it, too much time on their hands, but I'd like to get back to the operational ties between Santa Claus and al-Qaida. . . We have intelligence, we have intelligence.

Phillips: You have intel. Where exactly does your intel come from?

Seder: Well, we have tortured an elf and it's actually how we got the same information from Al Libi. It's exactly the same way the Bush administration got this info about the operational ties between al-Qaida and Saddam [...]

There's so much that's ooey-gooey good about this story: the fact that the spokesthingy for the Christian hordes of outrage actually brought up the Nazis -- that's right -- the Nazis, as an example of oppression when arguing about Christmas to a Jew...

...oh my sides.

But buried there, right there, in the story itself. CNN's own poll: 88% of Americans say, they have "no problem" having "Merry Christmas" said to them. Or Happy Holidays, or whatever.

In divided America, what gets 88% these days? Anyone?

The War on Christmas is the silliest non-story ever. Sam Seder gets it right. We should all respond with humor and ridicule.

Crooks and Liars has video. The Salon article is here.

...Maybe We Were Born to Run

Wings to Wheels is moving, I think, because its mix of historical footage and new interviews does an extraordinary job of chronicling just what it's like to try to push through, and invent something new, as a group.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band toil day after day, fourteen hours at a clip, reaching for just the right sound, the right mix, the right interpretation. Bruce pares his words down, from the frenetic demi-Dylan pose he took on his previous album, The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, to the spare and sparse signature that would elevate songs like Born To Run, Thunder Road, and Backstreets.

It's a process that takes its toll -- and exacts a cost on some mercurial personalities. Two members quit, and are replaced. One producer is usurped by another. Six months is spent getting one song right...

Born to Run.

But the absolutely undeniable thing that one takes away from the documentary is this: without those people, all of them, locked in a room like that for that length of time -- none of it would have happened.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were under the gun. Springsteen had two critically acclaimed but commercially anemic albums under his belt. This was their last chance; a third miss would most likely have gotten them dropped by Columbia. Their recording careers would be over.

They needed to invent a whole world. And when that album hit the streets, it was obvious to everyone that they'd done it.

Often when I'm trolling screenwriting sites, or internet postings, or even in conversations with Network people and development executives, I'm dismayed to see just how misunderstood the process of the writers' room is.

There's a lot of talk about "the vision." The "big idea" that needs to come from the "one unified vision" before a series is going to be any good.

I think this is poppycock. I think it's a hangover from the auteur theory and it has nothing whatsoever to do with making good television.

TV writing, especially at the conception or early stages, really doesn't have too much in common with writing a screenplay. It has much more to do with the kind of thing that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were doing thirty years ago.

It has to do with creating a world.

A film screenplay needs to posit a heroic journey that has a beginning, middle and an end.

A television series, on the other hand, is all about creating a template: an ongoing landscape populated with characters from which a series of narratives can spring.

And just as we wouldn't be talking about the brilliance of Born to Run today if not for the sax work of Clarence Clemons, the guiding hand of Jon Landau, the keyboards of David Sancious and the off-kilter interjections of Miami Steve Van Zandt, series don't become series until you pull in the beautiful minds who shape the initial idea, polish it, and make it the thing it needs to be to engage an audience not for two hours, but for up to seven years. It's a job that's too big for one person, even though -- like with Springsteen -- the mythology demands that in the end it be credited to one person.

Aaron Sorkin, a genius? Yup. But it was Tommy Schlamme that made that show sing. And a lot of writers, from Lawrence O'Donnell to Rick Cleveland, who helped shape the show so that Sorkin could claim to be a one-man band.

David Chase had Tim Van Patten, Mitchell Burgess & Robin Green, and Terence Winter.

Even our sainted Joss Whedon had David Greenwalt, and Marti Noxon and Jane Espenson and a group of other writers to help guide and shape and cajole the world into being.

I'm feeling this strongly right now -- not just because of the documentary, but because I have pilot scripts and development projects that are at the point where they simply cry out for the input, the give-and-take, and the back and forth of other writers. I need a room so bad right now it hurts. Physically. I need to be challenged. I need to be put on the spot, and run things up the flagpole, and talk out possible arcs and see the looks on the faces of others when you've hit on exactly the right idea. That look is as good as sex. Depending on the sex, it's better.

The image of the lonely writer working alone is not a helpful stereotype. Not in TV. Yes, we're writers. So maybe we're weird, and we wear too many baseball caps and have too deep a closet of sweat-pant related attire -- but if you're going to invent a world, you need to be social, too.

And the simple reality is that working along side other writers simply makes you better. It makes you sharper. It means that you can't get away with ideas that "work well enough." It means that jokes will be funnier and more pointed, because you try to top each other. It means that four minds or five minds will shape and vet every story point so that the plot soars instead of plods. It means that when that script goes to the floor it's been thought through and checked by some of the smartest people you've ever met.

And that's what makes it good.

I keep having meetings with development executives where they talk about how they're looking for the "killer idea."

Let me tell you something. The idea never starts out killer. Hire the smart people, and put them together, and that's what makes it killer.

Lloyd Braun, a network guy, came up with LOST. But if you watch the extras on the LOST disc for Season One, there's no denying that the show didn't start to spark until Lieber met Lindehof and Abrahms.

I need a drummer. And someone who'll hit those sweet sax notes on Jungleland. And I need a woman who'll hear that the tuning up from the minor to the major note needs to be higher in the mix. If you want Born to Run, I need a staff.

And anyone who says differently doesn't understand how TV worth watching really comes to be.

Tramps Like Us

"For me the primary questions I'd be writing about for the rest of my work life first took form on the songs on Born to Run. What do you do when your dreams come true? What do you do when they don't? Is love real? Born to Run was the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom. It was the dividing line."

Over the weekend, I finished a script that I'm going to have a meeting on in about thirty minutes. I also dipped into the thirtieth anniversary edition of Born To Run, and especially the excellent documentary on the making of the record: "Wings to Wheels."

I found the doc incredibly moving, and I recognized quite a bit in it. I think Bruce Springsteen has always been a bit of a screenwriter. But it was in watching this doc that I started to realize just what it is about TV writing that I love so much, and how similar the process really is to putting together that album: and just why people who don't support the idea of "the room" as a way to craft superior drama and comedy are missing the point.

I'll write more about this later. Now I gotta hit the streets and do my little infinite monkey dance.

How Well Did You Know The Dead Body?

It's a lazy Sunday here in Toronto.

Normally, on a day like today, I'll spend hours looking out the window as I write. The floor-to-ceiling windows in my solarium offer a grand view of Lake Ontario, which I've always considered to be the friendliest of the Great Lakes. Don't ask me why.

A few months ago, a warehouse condo conversion marred the view somewhat. The old Tip Top Tailors building south of me was converted, and the puckish designers thought it would be cute to keep the old sign, but skew it at an angle on top of the building. Now it looks like a crooked painting you can never straighten. It pollutes the view, and irrevocably draws the eye. There are mornings when that distressed sign makes me wish for a shoulder-mounted missile. I feel dark and awful at this moment of aesthetic rage, and what it may mean.

Today, there's no such temptation. A heavy snow swirls outside the window. The lake is obscured. I take it on faith that it's still there. The Tip Top Lofts are also obscured from view, their rogue sign mercifully erased. The harsh weather offers cover to be lazy, sip coffee, read The New York Times, and reflect on other matters.

I'm an American living in Canada. That's not precisely true -- I'm a dual citizen now, and have been for nearly fifteen years. There's so much I love about this country, Canada, this starkly beautiful and modern and underrated place I came to as a child. But truthfully, when people ask, especially when people ask abroad, "Where are you from?" I will usually answer "I'm American."

Every year I spend in Canada makes me feel like more of an American. Part of that is a recognition that my temperament and my upbringing make it so. Part of it is the fact that there are quintessentially American characteristics, values, even -- that clash ever-so-subtly with comparable Canadian values, and I feel myself pulled more to the former over the latter.

It's something I don't talk about very much any more. My Canadian friends don't really understand it. And how could they?

To be Canadian is to spend a lot of your time thinking about the United States. A lot of time being frustrated by the United States. Canadians think they understand the United States, but what they understand they see mostly from the vantage point, and through the safe distortions of television.

I understand this distortion well, and forgive it. Sometimes I wonder if my stubborn love for the country of my birth springs from the same fount -- like my Irish brethren who'd keen for the land they left, do I keen for a land that never really was? Is the America I miss merely a set of ideals in my head, and not the messy reality on the ground? The last few years have made me think maybe that's so.

As in most countries today, there's a steady stream of anti-Americanism that flows just under the surface of Canadian life. It burbles up from friends and associates at odd times, and it surprises me, always, even after all these years. But the Canadian version of anti-Americanism is lazy. It's couched mostly in a brook of smugness that also runs under the surface of Canadian society. The truth is that Canada, more than most countries, benefits the most from some of the very qualities that they pillory in the USA. As the largest trading partner, closest neighbor, and most similar society, the protests of Canadian anti-Americanism have always struck me as something rarely to be taken seriously. More often than not, it springs from wanting to have your cake and eat it, too.

But in a growing number of countries around the globe, the Anti-American feeling has deeper roots, and roots far more justified.

I think it's the duty of every American to live abroad -- even if only for a while. It opens your eyes and makes you understand things from an international perspective, and in the century we've just entered, that's an absolutely essential skill.

And sometimes, you have to be prepared to hear the bad stuff.

This morning, I read the full text of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. Pinter is one of my writing heroes, a brilliant, irascible playwright with a surgeon's touch in language and a steamroller's feel for the dramatic. In his speech, he talked about his work, and there was some great stuff in there about writing:

"Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time."

A delicious insight. But of course, if you keep reading, or if you've read any of the news reports, you know that that was not the sum of the remarks Pinter made. There are few bully pulpits as rarefied or respected as that of the Nobel Prize. Pinter did not shirk from using the pulpit.

I love the America in my head. I love what it stands for. I believe in the City on the Hill. I have climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial four times, and I have always left with eyes wet and soul stirred. I've stood in front of a marble statue of Jefferson and said a silent prayer. It's this, more than anything, that haunts me still, that forever defines me as American, no matter how long I'm away, and no matter how much I disagree with the policies of my government. I hate that in their zeal, they have taken my flag from me. I hate that, though our ideas are better, we are losing because the men who rule now are not up to the ideals laid down over two hundred years ago when a nation was young and not quite so arrogant.

Mostly, though, I think it's time -- past time -- for every American to stop the bleating and echo-chamber bloviating, and take a good hard listen to Harold Pinter's speech upon accepting the Nobel Prize.

Contained within are two poems. One is Neruda describing the horrors of Republican Spain. To read this poem and, maybe, to view Guernica, is to know in a new light just what is being done in your name.

The second poem is Pinter's own. It will haunt me as I go about my day today. There are no body counts. There are no causalty counts. Every death we inflict is a sin against humanity, and if there is a God, we will surely answer for it.

Death
by Harold Pinter

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

The full text of Pinter's address is available here.

New Blogger with Serious Mojo

Ken Levine is an Emmy-winning sitcom writer in L.A. with some deadly credits. Like, oh...Cheers. And Frasier. And The Simpsons.

I haven't heard of any of those shows, but I hear they're good.

Levine also wrote for one of my favorite "never went anywhere" series: The Marshall Chronicles, and created Almost Perfect, the Nancy Travis vehicle from a few years back.

There's been a big black hole in the scribosphere ever since "Why Television Sucks" went dark. I really hope that Levine fills it. He says he'll be posting insider tidbits like the perennial fave what are the hot specs this very second? I'll be reading him -- so he's now in the sidebar. You should too.

Richard Pryor, 1940-2005

"I had some great things and I had some bad things. The best and the worst... In other words, I had a life.

You have to have lived some life. You've got to have paid some dues."

And a Twinkie shall lead them.

A great series-writing lesson from The O.C. last night.

(That's right. The O.C. Deal with it.)

Last night, they dropped early in the episode that Summer (the pretty airhead girlfriend to Seth "Mighty Brain" Cohen) scored 2300 on her S.A.T.'s

In a heartbeat, everyone's relationship to the character shifted.

Challenging what the audience and the characters in the show know about a character is one of the most effective ways to shake up and rejuvenate your series -- so long as its organic and believable within the context of the show.

In the case of The O.C. Summer has been "showing smart" for some time now. She's also a particularly American kind of smart: ie: innate intelligence combined with an appalling lack of actual knowledge or literacy.

It put me in mind of one of the things that I always found the most appealing about Seinfeld's Kramer -- the fact that this "hipster doofus" -- against all probability, was great with women.

Contradiction in a character is not bad. In fact, if it's done right, it's ooey, gooey good.

That 2300 S.A.T. score, I predict, will be the shot heard round The O.C. for the rest of the season.

The Scheduler as Ozymandius

UK writer Stephen Gallagher has credits that shame me in three mediums, including a stint writing Doctor Who, and an upcoming series he created starring Patrick Stewart called Eleventh Hour. Regarding my post on the "The End of The British Six Pack?" He writes:

"The six-pack was a great model. Once. When the UK only had two TV channels and there were no video recorders and the pace of life was such that six weeks went by like an ocean liner.

These days... a zillion channels, life far more hectic, most of our viewing timeshifted... six weeks is what it takes to become aware of a show, by which time it's over.

Right now the main obstacles to change here in the UK are the network schedulers, who are terrified at the size of the commitment involved in a 26-week run of standalone stories, and the producers, who baulk at the idea of stepping back while writers talk to each other.

The schedulers want someone to guarantee them that a show won't fail. Which can never happen. The US can meet this by making the shows just ahead of time so that cancellation only leaves you with a couple in the can.

The producers are used to micromanaging writers on a one-on-one basis and pretty much laying down what is and isn't going to play. In a roomful of writers, the non-writing producer is weakened. The US answer - structure the producing power within the room.

What the industry in the UK is hankering for right now is to make drama like HBO does it.

Memo to self: I have got to work on my brevity. Stephen just nicely encapsulated the major stumbling blocks that people like Jane Featherstone face trying to change the face of British Drama. And he did it in a few short paragraphs. Watch now, as I fail to do the same in my response.

Here in Canada, writers face a lot of the same obstacles, with a few peculiar quirks that are all our sweet own. But you do hear the HBO bogyeman trotted out with alarming regularity.

The problem with this idea -- both for UK creators and North Americans -- is that HBO works on an entirely different economic model than most of the commercial channels -- or even the publicly funded channels like Big Auntie Beeb and her sad, preemie little sis, the CBC.

At HBO they recruit top talent and they leave them alone, and get thirteen episode runs that rock. But. (There's always a but.) HBO is entirely a subscription service. They charge you 15 dollars a month, and they know that for a significant number of subscribers, intelligent, original series are the draw. But once they have your fifteen dollars, they don't even care if you watch. See, the series is the carrot. HBO uses ratings not to determine a program's success, but to determine if it's connecting with its subscriber base. It's more of a buzz-meter. All they care about is: will it get Emmy nominations (and thereby extend the prestige of the brand) and is it intriguing enough that it will help us retain subscriptions, and sign up new ones?

The HBO viewer is by no means an average viewer. They have more money, they're probably better educated -- and they're a way smaller pool. The Sopranos is brilliant, Six Feet intermittently so, and Sex & The City started a cultural quake: but though the ripples these series made is huge, the audiences that watched them were not. (It's not quite as cut and dried in Canada as the U.S. as Sex In the City, The Sopranos, and Six Feet have all played second run on either terrestrial or extended basic cable.) It's always struck me that chasing the HBO model show is a bit of a chimera. Instead, don't you need to develop from the bottom up? Ask who is your audience, and who would you like your audience to be, and how do you develop shows that would attract them?

To me, this is the real brilliance of the US networks. A FOX show is not a show that would appear on any other network. The WB took some early chances when everybody was ready to write off the idea of a fourth US net as a pipe dream, and it paid off. For years, NBC had a touch for developing comedy that no other network could match. This, I think, comes from knowing who your audience is and coming up with shows that can reach them. So, in everything but quality, when I start hearing the bleating about developing "HBO-like" series, my question is not, "aren't you aiming too high?" but "why are you aiming so low?"

When it comes to The Scheduler, the Canadian problem is a little more comical, or sad, depending on your point of view. The fact of it is, there really isn't a lot of indigenous production to schedule here. What schedulers from the networks do here is go down to the L.A. screenings, and cherrypick the best of what the U.S. nets have developed. So they get to bask in the reflected glory of creative risks taken by people other than them. Then they come back and schedule those shows, usually at the same time as their American network counterparts. That way, they get to piggyback on U.S. network publicity and magazine covers and promos and such. Then -- and here's the truly magic bit -- the CRTC (the Canadian telecommunications regulatory body) allows them to substitute their signal over the U.S. network signal for the duration of the simulcasted program. So their ads get double exposure! Yayyy! So, in other words, even their role as "scheduler" is a misnomer. Their job is to follow the US lead.

Yet...these people walk around Toronto like superstars. Because they're good shoppers. Seriously. I've been at the same parties, seen them up close in their natural habitats. It's like me expecting applause and praise for picking up a few choice items at HMV.

And it's kind of hard to argue against them, because broadcasting in Canada is a very profitable business. It's way cheaper to schedule US shows than it is to produce Canadian ones. And Canadians want to see these shows. And if it's doing absolutely nothing to slow the steady stream of talent to the United States, and doing nothing to actually develop a distinct culture of your own, well...so what? "Did you see the numbers CSI: Miami did last week? Aren't I brilliant?"

Um..well...maybe Les Moonves is brilliant. You just had a gold card.

There are signs of change here...there are LOTS of network people I have talked to here who are really committed to having homegrown hit shows. Corner Gas has made an impression. For years there was a shrug and a "Canadians don't want to watch Canadian shows." Now, once a week, one out of every thirty Canadians watch Corner Gas and prove that's a load of hooey. But the people who are toiling to try and find great scripts and develop a good show do not have the power in the organization that the shoppers do. Nowhere near. And in this system, with its anemic production culture, Canadian producers don't have a lot of power, either. Very little, actually. Strangely (and I know this is counter-productive to my goals) that almost makes me like them more.

The most positive change to come about -- and this is only in the last couple weeks -- is that the funding agencies here are switching to something called an "envelope system" for drama. Time was, you would get a go-ahead from a network, then apply to the Canadian Television Fund for financing (or part of your financing) and you could get turned down. So the network wants you...but you don't get your money because a bureaucrat decided your show wasn't "Canadian enough." (Don't get me started on that one.)

But now the system has changed. Henceforth, the networks will be apportioned a certain amount of money, and they can spend it as they wish -- so long as it's on drama or comedy. Which means that creators no longer have to do two sets of documents and proposals...you just have to sell the network.

Will this help? I don't know. Remains to be seen. It can't be worse than the current system. And it will do nothing to shame or clip the reign of the white wine sipping schedulers who stride high because they have the ability to buy American creativity at wholesale prices.

CBC, god love her, has her own problems. But the Schedulers there, too, walk around like mighty Ozymandius.

And they've made some colossally bad scheduling decisions lately. Like taking a comedy show that they launched last year to great fanfare called "Rick Mercer's Monday Report," and moving it to Tuesday.

I wish I was kidding.

Jai guru deva om

Twenty-five years.

It's a little hard to believe. Still. Unlike the bloviating baby boomers who you'll mostly hear from today, I knew him as a child first -- and, funnily enough -- as a fellow New Yorker. Through words and interviews and snippets and those beautiful melodies I learned sarcasm and wit; passion and compassion; frailty and fault.

It's always pleased me that most of the fiction that's tried to capture what he's about: plays, Broadway Musicals, Films, and television -- have all fallen so incredibly, comically short.

Sometimes the artist just needs to speak for himself.

A lucky man, who made the grade, indeed.

The End of the British 6-Pack?

Heh heh. I don't know why, but the idea of the "British 6-Pack" amuses me. Face it, we have to get a new joke -- the-making-fun-of-their-teeth thing went past the sell-by date years ago.

In this article at The Guardian website (yes, registration is required. but it's free, stop whining.) British TV Production Exec Jane Featherstone opines that the UK may finally have to move away from the six-pack... "We are going to have to start producing longer-running series," she says. "We are going to have to start the shift to US-style 26-part series..."

Here in Canada, of course, CBC is in love with the six-pack (cause, you know, that's what they do in the UK.) Featherstone's other point is that you have to make shows with broader appeal, that could sell overseas, even -- to make up the difference in budgets. That seems to be going in the opposite direction of CBC too, but who knows, now that a British person has suggested something different, things could change awfully quick here, too...

I think longer seasons are definitely better for building and maintaining writing careers, because as it stands, the UK is a lot like Canada in the sense that short runs of episodes tend to mean they only employ the writers who've created the shows. That's not good for training, and it's not good for building a larger community of professional writers. (I believe the situation, believe it or not, is actually a little better in the UK, since there is some support there for professional theatre. In Canada...not so much.)

How can building a series of sets, crewing up, and starting a whole production for six episodes really be economical, anyway? Your advertising costs for promotion are still pretty fixed -- what, other than raising the budget, is the downside of producing 13? Or 18? Or 22? Or hell, even 8?

I hope it happens. If the UK recognizes that short run series aren't the most viable model, then maybe the anglophiles here will finally be forced to wake up and smell the international market -- and not in the bad-old-days way of crappy industrial action-adventure stuff designed to ape a U.S. syndie market that went south years ago.

Everyone in Canada talks about a U.S. sale, and then goes out and makes product that would never in a million years sell there because of how completely it reeks of provinciality. Note to creators: Corner Gas is universal. Slings & Arrows is universal. Within its niche, so is Trailer Park Boys. But Eleventh Hour (the Canadian show, not the UK version) and Hatching, Matching & Dispatching aint. You can be specific to a place, and still be universal. But it means you have to think about the audience, and stop being quite so self-indulgent.

That being said, there are plenty of people, professional people, who get it here in the former British North America...So, UK Producers -- if you're going to make a go of this 22 episode thing, and if you need a co-production partner to make up some of those budgets, may I humbly suggest Canada? We're like the U.S.'s slutty little sister who likes to smoke pot and drink strong beer and hang out with married gay boys and dykes while we take our aspirin with codeine. We don't have to watch hockey. We just like to. But we can get past that. And look -- that's Queen Liz on our money, too! Yayyy!

Featherstone's production company, Kudos, is probably best known on this side of the pond for A&E's MI-5 (which shows in Canada on BBC Canada under its original British Title, Spooks.) If you've only seen the show on A&E, I'd highly advise picking up the DVD's of Season One and Two (and soon, Three) as A&E cut out up to fifteen minutes per episode for commercials.



I always liked Spooks/MI-5. I thought it was a bracing and refreshing look inside the world of Intelligence -- again, with a non-Amero-centric spin to it. Plus, the sexy American CIA Babe they had on the show, was, well...hot.

The Guardian article has a lot to say about the show that's quite illuminating. And one bit that flew right over my cultural head, but is remarkably cool -- and shows just how pressure cooker the TV game can be.

One of the favorite moments that made me sit up and take notice in MI-5 early on was a gruesome scene where someone was tortured using a deep fryer. It was raw and surprising as hell. What I didn't realize is that, if you were watching in the UK, it played as even more of a surprise, since the actress they killed was the biggest star in the cast...

The effect was spectacular: 334 viewers complained. Messageboards all over the BBC website continued to buzz even two weeks after the event. Some people thought Faulkner would return from the dead. Others suspected she had a twin sister. What seemed to have shocked them was not the brutality of the death - not especially graphic in the normal run of TV drama - but that Spooks did what television almost never does. It killed off one of its leads in the second episode of a long-running series. And in mainstream TV you just do not do that.

Jane Featherstone, joint managing director of Spooks production company Kudos,laughs and looks a tiny bit guilty. "The Lisa thing actually came about because David Wolstencroft was writing the outline for episode two and we just couldn't get it right," she admits. "We really needed the series to get the green light and the strongest story we had was in episode 13, where a woman got her head set on fire. We'd seen Lisa but we weren't sure we were going to cast her, the best story we had was the climax, we needed the commission, so what were we going to do? I said, let's move the most dramatic thing you've got to episode two and kill off the only actress the audience recognise and then you've got them hooked. We hoped ..."

There's two things that are really interesting there. First, the idea (that just didn't play here) that they killed off a big name (in the UK) in the episode made the show even more shocking for the home audience. I think that's brilliant. The American equivalent was probably the first episode of The Shield, where Vic Mackey's bonafides were forever established by the way he took out Reed Diamond -- a face who fans of the genre recognized from Homicide.

The other interesting bit there, at least to me, is the way that the pressures of the medium constantly force you to move things up. The creator of 24 is on record as saying that in that initial season, they had every intention of having the assasination attempt on David Palmer happen in the finale. Instead, it wound up coming halfway through Season One.

I've said it before. Lord knows I'll say it again. TV is a beast. And the beast must be fed.

Great article. Great series. Thanks to Lee Thomson's blog for the tip.

Keepin Downloads on the Down-Low & Other Tales From the Magical Land of Commerce

So I see Itunes has added NBC wares to their download store. Interesting, but, of course, ultimately useless to someone not living in the continental 48. (Okay, maybe Alaska and Hawaii can play too.)

But this reminds us all that, for all the hype surrounding the idea of downloading TV legally or not, the route to change is rapid. It's just not necessarily well-distributed yet.

In the UK, it seems, they're way further ahead with the idea of downloading TV. BBC has made announcements about having far more of its program archives online. Now they're squabbling over details - and here's an interesting twist - about how long it will be free (yes, free) or available after the broadcast...

That's right, USA, someone's further ahead. (The link is to an article at the Guardian Unlimited website, and I think registration is required...but it's free and that shouldn't be a hardship since it's a pretty great paper anyway. Especially you Americans. Get out. Live a little.)

For my take on the subject, look here.

In other revenue-stream news, the Christmas party episode of NBC's The Office aired last night, and in the midst of it there was a plot that revolved around the giving of an Ipod Video.

Now -- this was obviously a product placement plant by Apple. I mean, come on, the same week of the Itunes launch of ... wait for it ... downloadable Office episodes they feature an Ipod in a Secret Santa plot for the office party? Who'd a thunk it?

The thing is, in this case, it actually fit really well. The Ipod is a desirable gift. And in the context of the episode, the product featured really well both as an object of desire (so the sponsor's happy) and an object of conflict (so the show is served.)

I know that some pros and organizations are antsy. What does this mean? How can you ask writers to "work in" products? Should there be extra compensation for doing so? These are indeed important and thorny creative questions. And after long and careful consideration, the official position here in Sticksville is this:

Gimme.

I'll write it in. Whatever you want. Give me one. You got it. That should be the official WGA/WGC standard. You want a plot with an Ipod? Great. Send 'em over. There's four of us in the writers room.

Ford F-150, I'm talking to you, too.

Tampax?

Whatever. A man's got friends. Send over a case and we'll work it out. It's all good.

Now, where's my new Ipod?