Robson Arms Blogs!

Robson Arms is a mostly-worthy half-hour comedy-drama set in and around an apartment building in Vancouver. I found it to be a little odd, because the tone radically shifted in some episodes -- but it was very well written and acted, by talented and familiar Canadian faces.

They're shooting Season Two now, and there's a blog that's chronicling the process. Good for them -- getting it out there without futzing with the gatekeeper!

More on Rumours the CBC series...

I would link to the article in the Toronto Star that mentions it, but The Star has done some weird thing now that linking to their stuff is hard -- so screw em.

The new info contained in the article was basically this:

• Mary Walsh's Hatching, Matching and Dispatching is getting a new season, but Colin Mochrie's Getting Along Famously has been cancelled.
• Rumours, the show that's set in a Toronto Life - like magazine for women, is going to be Executive Produced by my old boss, Moses Znaimer. That should be interesting, at least. The show stars David Haydn-Jones as a sports journalist who needs a job, Amy Price-Francis as the editor and Jennifer Dale as the publisher.

Moses, ever the raconteur, is quoted as saying the show is going to be the anti-Corner Gas. Let's hope he doesn't mean in quality.

Moses, baby, you should really give me a call.

Heh heh.

I'm The Guy In Corner Quietly Judging You

Todd wrote something on South Dakota Dark that's kind of messing me up.

The Wizard Was Right

In response to my comments about CBC moving The Hour to their main network, writer PEI writes:

I love strombo.
He's everything you said he is.
fuck the writers, I wouldn't mind him just shooting the shit on tv for awhile just talking about whatever he wants to talk about cause he's that informed and intelligent to do it.
Just like Jon stuart [sic] or Colbert, I mean sure having 20 writers help but i don't believe it's truely necessary

I graduated PEI's comment to a post here for a very good reason, which I'll get to in a moment. First let's deal with the factual landscape he's talking about.

If everything is humming smoothly, it should look like that: like George is just being George. Like Jon Stewart is just being Jon. That's the magic of TV. You should believe that everything is just coming off the top of his head, and that the person looks good because they are just that naturally erudite and informed.

The reality, of course, is very different. No matter how informed or funny someone is, to get to a certain level and produce a good product takes an enormous amount of work. A standup comic hones and hones the same twenty minutes of material over and over and over, to a pinpoint delivery so that when they appear in front of an audience, there's the illusion that everything they're saying has just occurred to them, and you're the first crowd ever to hear it. In reality, if you watch films like Comedian, the Documentary Seinfeld did about his return to live performing, you can see that it's a painful, painful, long and labored process for a comic to build five minutes, then ten minutes, then fifteen, and so on.

In a large city like Toronto or L.A. or New York, one of the perks is that occasionally you can see professional comics working out new material on stage at new material nights. Some jokes bomb, some fly, and you can see them struggling to figure out if something didn't work because of construction or because it's just not as funny as they thought it was. This is a rare chance to see all the gears working -- and it can be both very instructive, and seriously humbling.

Now, add TV and five nights a week, and I don't care HOW talented the person is. If they're going to seem like they're on top of it all, they're going to need more brains. More brains to research. More brains to write jokes. More brains to keep the whole ball of wax moving. Take away the brains, and the wheels come off the train.

PEI, you may not be old enough to remember, but there was a time several years ago when any audience member could see for themselves how wrong you are about how great it was to see a guy like George " just shooting the shit on tv for awhile just talking about whatever he wants to talk about cause he's that informed and intelligent to do it."

During the last Writers' Guild strike, production shut down on films and TV series, but also on shows like Letterman, and I believe (as he was still hosting then) Johnny Carson. After a few weeks or a month or so off the air, Letterman returned to the air. Carson did too, but I wasn't watching him as much, so my memories of that aren't as clear.

Because Letterman didn't have his writers, and he couldn't replace them (that would be scabbing, and he, like every big network show, was a Guild signatory) the only way he could return to the air was to write everything himself, or he just had to wing it, as you suggest George is talented enough to do.

Though it was sometimes thrilling to watch, and it was sort of interesting in an intellectual way because you knew he really was making it up as he went along (kind of like the feeling you get when you watch Improv comedy, an art form to be appreciated rather than really loved) the fact remained that it wasn't really the Letterman show. It was a pale imitation. Less funny, less full of the stuff that made Letterman great in his heyday. Paradoxically, with the loss of the constructed reality of writers who made Dave seem effortless and off the cuff each night - the show seemed somehow less real.

"Late Night With David Letterman" was pierced by a labor dispute, and suddenly anyone could see that the show that looked so natural, so off the cuff, was anything but.

Similarly, I know that one of the great appeals of Reality Shows is that it looks like all this crazy stuff is just happening out of the blue!

But the reality of reality is that a lot of producers and yes-- writers -- are working hard behind the scenes to manipulate events, shape the material, and engineer situations and conflicts. It takes a lot of work to make everything look so spontaneous. One of the biggest looming fights in Hollywood is the fight to try and organize to get reality tv covered under the auspices of the Writers Guild of America.

So okay, PEI's wrong. So what? Did you really just reproduce his comment to take a couple of blog-swings at the poor guy?

No. Exactly the opposite.

I reproduced this because I think it should be instructive to writers. Remember when the Wizard called out, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?" Well, you're seeing that in the comment above. And it's fine. Wait, no. It's more than fine. It's exactly what we should be working for.

See, if you're going into screenwriting because you want the world to know your brilliance, give it up. It's not going to happen. So much of what we do succeeds only if we make it seem effortless. We are never going to get the general public to understand what we do. We are never going to change the perception that everyone could write if they had the time or that everyone has a great idea for a movie or a TV series.

In almost every case I can think of, writing for the screen that calls attention to itself is self-indulgent, and actually hurts the cause of quality. Aaron Sorkin's one of my favorite writers, but even he occasionally gets caught doing that extra-smarty-pants victory lap. And that -- just like a bad prop or a bad accent or terrible acting or a stupid camera move, can pop you right out of the action.

When we're really cooking, really, really cooking, the audience should not perceive that we're there. That we were ever there. Especially in things like variety, or talk shows, it's in our best interest to make sure that guys like Letterman or Conan or Strombo are just that funny off the top of their heads. Mike Bullard (a once-nightly talk show host in Canada) is a funny guy. But his show failed. Why? Because they did it on the cheap. Not enough talent -- not enough resources. Not enough writers or producers. Not enough material. The seams showed every night.

It's our job to make it seem like Clint Eastwood or Jay Leno or Craig Ferguson would be brilliant and funny and informed even if there weren't writers or researchers behind them.

So that means there's a lot of silly fights that we shouldn't waste our energies on. In Canada, there's a group that keeps saying we need to get the public onside in the fight for increasing Canadian content.

Never gonna happen. Why should it? They don't care. Nor should they. They're the audience. Don't blame them -- they just want to be entertained. Trying to make them more aware of what you do is quixotic at best, toxic at worst. They will never care about the plight of the artist as much as property taxes or schools or making sure that the city isn't going to dump garbage in their backyard. It's a waste of energy. This is not a path that should be pursued.

Similarly, all the stick that Ted and Craig take over at Artful Writer about "raising writer's profiles." Hooey. You know what? I'm never going to get a million hits a day on this blog and I wouldn't want to, either. If I wanted to, I could always put up fake nudes of Jessica Alba. It's not the goal toward which any of us should strive.

That being said...

The point I made in that column below is still valid. Just because the public doesn't know what goes into making Strombo look brilliant (and don't get me wrong, he is brilliant. A natural interviewer, very sharp, very informed, and quick as hell -- he just isn't brilliant enough to carry it on his shoulders because NO ONE IS THAT BRILLIANT) doesn't mean we should let the people who should know better off the hook.

Stop chasing the approval of the public. You don't want them paying attention to the man behind the curtain.

Focus your energies on the people pulling the strings.

CBC Announces Its Fall Lineup

The first from the new regime. It's not anything particularly bold, but neither is it exactly more of the same.

The full announcement is here.

Some highlights:

The Hour, hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos, has been added to the main network at 11 p.m. and will be developed into more of a late-night talk show with a studio audience. It remains on Newsworld at 8 p.m.

I always thought The Hour was not as good a show as George Stroumboulopoulos was a host. Strombo is a good, solid, smart interviewer when he wants to be. He's dynamic and informed, and passionate. So far so good.

But here's the thing. Now we're talking a nightly show that's on every single night, over the air, after the news. So what does "developed into more of a late-night talk show" mean?

If anyone -- anyone at all -- was paying attention, I would ask them to watch Letterman, Leno, Kimmel, Conan, Ferguson, Stewart, or Colbert tonight. Check those end credits. Read the names. Read the number of writers...producers...researchers.

Canada always tries to do this kind of thing on the cheap, not just with less resources and less people -- that's a given -- but with so many less people that it's just stupid. You can't port a show from Newsworld to the main network unless you're actually going to pump something into it. Half assed won't do.

I'm not holding my breath -- 20 writers on the Daily Show...you could hire five or six at least on CBC and maybe, maybe get somewhere. But I bet if they have two they'll be lucky.

What about drama? What's new?

The new series are Intelligence, about present-day Canadian criminal and intelligence cases, and Rumours, a comedy about modern life inside a Toronto women's magazine.

Chris Haddock, the creator of Da Vinci's Inquest, is the writer behind Intelligence and Da Vinci star Ian Tracey plays a gangster who agrees to turn informant.

If they were smart, they'd sell Intelligence like MI-5. I shudder a bit about Rumours, but I guess we have to see how they execute it.

Jozi-H, the long-delayed Canada-South Africa copro set in a hospital in Joburg, South Africa, will also air this fall. I've got high hopes for this one.

There's also a docudrama series about the October Crisis, which will probably be shown once then pulled for offending separatists in Quebec, and a bunch of reality shows that we who support the CBC wish them well on -- but that I don't really care about very much.

All in all, baby steps. Baby steps. They want to bring people back to CBC. Will this work? Dunno. But I've got my fingers crossed. Leaving broadcasting entirely to the shopping budgets of the private nets doesn't serve Canadian viewers very well, either.

I Had a Message Once, But I Erased It

The Mad Pulp Bastard Philosopher, Bill Cunningham, has got himself a manifesto of sorts.

Now Bill, though he works in a different area of the business than I do, has got his head screwed on straight in a way that a lot of writers I meet, don't.

Tremble at his manifesto, a little taste of which I reproduce below:

There are so many "filmmakers" out there who are trying to put out an important message that they lose sight of why they are making a film in the first place. That's not to say that you can't have a message in your movie, it's just that's not the primary reason to make a movie.

The primary reason to make a movie is to entertain people by telling a story using the medium of film.

Amen, brother. It's the same with TV, of course. The problem is that in Canada, there's a whole level of mandarin and jury and culturecrats who practically pee themselves over the message.

Bill, it may surprise you to know that I have sat in front of people with (such as it is) power in the Canadian film/tv biz and heard the following things that go counter to your rules:

In a meeting where I was close, so close to getting a film made of my screenplay, then they got cold feet, and the stated excuse was: "we don't know what genre it is."

"It's a comedy."

"Yes, but what else?"

"You mean, what is it trying to say?"

"Yes."

"I don't know. Exploitation is bad? I was kind of just focused on making it funny."

"Yes, well, it is very funny. It's great. But we're a little concerned that once the audience laughs at the jokes, there really isn't much there."

(Stunned silence)

"Uh. Once they finish laughing at the jokes, aren't they supposed to be in their cars driving home?"

(sound of meeting going downhill.)

I have no problem with someone passing on something because it doesn't work, or because they don't like it, or because it doesn't meet their needs. I am not one of those writers who will polish a turd, and try to sell substandard work.

But if you tell me that my comedy is funny but you're passing because you don't feel it has enough of a message, then my head explodes. Splat.

Anecdote 2:

I was in a meeting, and amidst the handwaving said, "Well I think we can all agree that the most important thing is not to be boring."

The answer?

"Well, wait a second...not necessarily."

(Sound of meeting going downhill)

If you write for the screen at all, go read Bill. Pulp, TV, Film -- it's all the same. ESPECIALLY IF YOU'RE NOT SELF-FINANCING. (Hey Canadians: that includes taxpayer money too.) Yes, yes, Your message may impress execs or Telefilm bureaucrats or Film Majors or even D-Girls with beautiful skin, but do not be one of those writers.

We need our own hippocratic oath, we screenwriters.

"First, we entertain."

Live From Train 78 to Toronto, It's the Banff Guest Blogger wrap-up!

(10:37 p.m. This post was edited for clarity)

I'm really tired, and the beverage cart does not nearly have enough vodka. There comes a point in the scouting process where it just feels like wandering around. You know, like a college Saturday night when you've just had a great big hoolie.

Saw some interesting things, and talked to some interesting people in Detroit and Windsor. They've helped me to see my project in a new way, which is always a plus. There have been some shifts and some course corrects, and a bit o' inspiration just from walking the streets and seeing what's what.

The other great thing about getting out of the writing room and out from behind the computer, of course, is the fact that you get to interact and hear some really interesting things from people like Production Designers and A.D.'s. In production, I find it helps to be "idea neutral." A good idea is a good idea -- no matter who comes up with it. I'm continually surprised when I find people who don't work that way, but they are legion.

But boy, am I tired.

Anyway, enough about me.

My anonymous Banff blogger sends this final dispatch...and just to be contrarian, I'll pop in with little comments o'my own.

David Shore was asked about network censorship, and said there has been very little from Fox on House. But he recounted a story about working on Traders, where there was a line in the pilot (written by Hart Hanson of Bones, which Shore had rewritten – he thinks the line was Hanson's): "We should nail his balls to the wall, you should pardon the expression" or something like that. A producer asked Shore if the network had had any concerns with that line, but they hadn't objected to it. Producer person told Shore to call them up to ask them about it, to make sure, and while Shore figured that was a sure way to make them object, he reluctantly did. He said after waiting on hold for 5 minutes while a room full of execs discussed it, his contact came back and said they thought "you should pardon the expression" sounded too Jewish. Shore said he didn't fight that battle and changed that part of the line.

I love that anecdote like a cold beer on a hot day.

Terry David Mullgan was the interviewer for Shore's Master Class, and read out Shore's quote from the Maclean's interview about American TV being higher quality because writers are in control, versus films and Canadian TV, where they're not. He agreed with himself, saying while there are bad writers, and talented directors and producers, the best chance of having a cohesive vision of the story is by having a writer in charge. At the end, an audience member said Canadian TV has changed since Shore left, and that writers are more in control, and pointed to the success of shows like ReGenesis and ... other shows I haven't seen. He apologized if his comments were out of date (though reading this Dead Things blog, I'm not so sure ...).

Sometimes in Canadian Television it helps to read between the lines. Writer-Showrunners in Canada are still seriously, seriously, seriously in the minority. That's as much to do with the fact that writers aren't trained up with the skillsets they need to run a show, as it is with the particular faults of anyone who is running any individual show. (I call this the no-fault defense.)

When you have enough shows that people can rise through the ranks, taking on greater responsibilities as they go, and eventually graduate to showrunner, then that's one thing.

As I've said before here, lots of times people get shows here who really don't have the experience to run them. And sometimes they're listened to too much. And sometimes they're listened to not at all. The fact that there are Producers who don't know writing really well running things can sometimes just be a function of experience. You won't get really well written shows if the show isn't run by a writer, but if the writer isn't someone who understands production, your show will never get finished. So what do you do then?

Of course, the thing that makes it worse is this old chestnut: everyone thinks their ideas are great and beautiful snowflakes; everyone thinks they can write. And everyone's willing to entertain auteur Directors in Canada, but beyond Haddock and Finkleman, there really are no auteur writers.

There may be five really great writing showrunners in Canada, but I'm pretty sure there aren't ten.

Shore's point is true, but it presupposes that there's a way to rise through the ranks. If you don't have that, then what's the solution, really?

Is the situation getting better? Yes.

Fast enough? Mmmm. Mmmm.

Sorry, they just brought Pringles.

Ali LeRoi, co-creator and showrunner of Everybody Hates Chris, reiterated what many other people said: "You can't write a hit show, but you can write a good show." He said a convergence of events have to take place to make it a hit, and for EHC, part of that was the dearth of good comedies, especially on UPN – in fact, he cited the dearth of anything good on UPN, so the publicity that came from appearing in an unlikely place: "It's a good show on a network that usually puts out piles of shit – that gains attention." He compared it to a nice girl coming out of a whorehouse.

About getting notes from the network, he said you "can't dismiss people who are giving you money to fulfil your dreams. It's rude." But he talked about the frustration of having execs try to make a script funnier, saying he knows how to make people laugh, and it's a skill like being a pilot. So when a plane's going down, you don't get a focus group together to see what to do about it.

He says a good sitcom has to have a central premise about conflict. With EHC, it's that Chris never gets what he wants. With Cheers, it was Sam Malone wanting Diane Chambers (and then Rebecca) but still wanting his former glory of being a famous baseball player/womanizer. He says Joey failed because there was no conflict.

Ouch. He's right. And no wonder he's running a show about the alter ego of Chris Rock. I an see why the two would get along.

***

Howard Davine of Touchstone Pictures (ABC) talked about costs per episode: $2.5 million per episode for a new network show, $1.8 million or less for a cable show. He said Bill Carter's book Desperate Networks was pretty accurate when it came to the story of Lost. That pilot costs something like $15 million to make, but they figured it was a worthwhile risk. He said if they had hard and fast policies or caps, Lost and Desperate Housewives wouldn't have happened. Warner Brothers giving away Desperate Housewives might have been a huge mistake in hindsight, but Davine said ABC's rejection of CSI was probably a worse decision.

He is annoyed at the sense that the three camera sitcom is dead, and single camera sitcoms are preferred, because he says the audience doesn't really know the difference – they just want to see something funny, and single camera comedies are more expensive. He said producers and writers are pitching what they think the networks want, and they think they want single camera now.

He gave stats like of more than 100 scripts in development, only 25 pilots were made.

But by far, my favorite anecdote from my guest blogger was this one:

I went to a product placement session that had what seemed to me a contentious premise, but there wasn't a lot of time for audience questions – some seemed very on board with it, but I heard rumblings that suggested some comments grated. One woman who represented an agency that puts together product integration deals for her advertising clients said that if writers complain about having to write specific products into scripts, and want to get more money for doing it since it's entering copywriting territory, they're going to be talking themselves out of a job. The moderator, who seems to work with a similar company, said he's doing writers a favour by bringing them ideas to integrate into their scripts.

I spent four years doing stories on advertising for a show called Media Television. I spent many, many hours talking to lots and lots of people involved in advertising and marketing. Some of them, of course, are nice people with mortgages and wives and husbands and adorable kids.

And some of them are Advertising Types.

And here's the thing: Advertising types really, really, really do think like this. Have you seen Thank You For Smoking yet? It's like that. Seriously. That movie was a documentary. If you take away the piles of money they make, it is this kind of attitude, I believe, that is the only thing that keeps true Advertising Types from fulfilling their destiny. When they go home each night and stare at their evil hack faces in the mirror, it's this attitude alone that keeps them from blinking through their tears and actually finding the courage to use that gun that they've got stuffed in their mouth. The one they take out of the drawer every night as they taunt themselves in their hacky, hacky bathroom mirror.

Go on, coward. Do it. Do it.

Paul Scheuring of Prison Break said he worked in features for 10 years prior to going to TV with PB, and he and his writing partner were paid to write 15 screenplays, of which one got made – A Man Apart. He called it a dreadful movie, and the worst of the 15.

Typical. Oh so typical. Everyone has a credit they hate. The day when it drops off your resume is the happiest day of your life.

Thanks again, guest blogger!

I Hear A Symphony

I've always known that Hitsville U.S.A was a house.

To be more accurate, several houses. Berry Gordy Jr. bought eight of them on West Grand Blvd in Detroit, Michigan, throughout the 1960's. He and his family lived in an apartment above Studio A. Studio A is a room in a house. Yes, there's the drumkit that Stevie Wonder played. There's the Steinway you hear on all the recordings. There's a fifty pound gown that Diana Ross wore, and the Temptations Jackets. You can stand under the great hole in the ceiling and hear the echo -- the echo that provided the "Motown sound" back in the era before studio trickery could make Britney Spears sound like Caruso.

Actually, Britney Spears actually sounds disturbingly like Caruso now that I think about it. Oh God. Best to file that.

To be there on that simple street, to look at those houses, to hear the story about Diana Ross answering the phones, and Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson helping to stuff 45's into sleeves; to stand over the pianos marked with the letters of the notes, so that if you picked out a tune and couldn't write music, you could at least write it down so that the Funk Brothers could replicate it...well, all that is pretty damn inspiring.

But not so much as something someone says in the video you watch as you sit just outside that studio at the Motown Historical Museum.

This is a paraphrase:

Gordy decided that Motown music was about telling stories -- simple stories that regular people could relate to.

I'd never thought of it quite that way before...but if you go back to those golden age Motown hits, from 1961 through to 1972, they are all story songs. The narratives are about dancing in the Street, or stopping before you break my heart, or begging the postman to bring a letter, or lamenting where love went, or even a mother warning her son that he better shop around.

They told stories. And maybe -- just maybe -- that's why those Motown songs were the first thing I remember hearing as a child that totally fascinated and enthralled me. The same way country music did when I was a kid in Florida.

(Go on, snicker. But I'm betting 95% of you know every Effing word of Coal Miner's Daughter or The Gambler.)

Motown songs are all character driven stories. The singers' personalities are the character -- but those lyrics -- they all go somewhere. It's why they endure. It's why we venerate those songs still. It's why those songs are hard to overplay, harder than a lot of other songs that radio has systematically ruined through the years.

Simple stories that regular people could relate to.

Soon as I get back home, I've gotta go find my old 45's.

Paul Haggis at Banff

I've got a dispatch from a special anonymous guest blogger who took in Paul Haggis' talk at Banff yesterday. Here's what they said:


Paul Haggis was funnier than I expected, for the guy who wrote a couple of
the most depressing films ... not to mention Facts of Life. Very
self-deprecating sense of humour, used kind of as a way of pointing out that
he's not exactly the poster boy for how to succeed in Hollywood (except
maybe the talent thing). He makes it sound like he succeeded in spite of
himself – he's terrible at pitching, gave away his services for free at the
beginning of his career, tells producers he's probably not the right person
for the job, and talked about Crash being all Act 2, no Act 1 or 3.

He started on sitcoms, though that wasn't where his interests lay, after
offering to cowrite for free a script for One Day at a Time, for a writer
whose regular partner wasn't available and the script was due in a few days.
He didn't get money or credit, but the writer offered to give him something,
so he picked a ratty chair, which he still has in his bedroom and will never
get rid of it. He suggested (joking? Not joking?) that giving away your
writing is a good entrance into the biz ("my edge was that if I wasn't good,
I'd be free"). But that writer told the producers he'd cowritten the script
and it led to his work on Diff'rent Strokes (somewhere in there was a story
of him trying to persuade producers that he wasn't a sitcom writer, that all
his specs were psychological thrillers, but if they wanted to hire him
anyway, OK). He talked disparagingly of the work he did on sitcoms, but with
affection at the actual time of getting paid to do what he loved and getting
into the business. He moved to thirtysomething after asking the creators why
they wanted to hire him, since all his experience was in sitcoms ("I think
you're making a mistake, but if you want to hire me, OK.")

He said he pitched EZ Streets as "It's about moral ambiguity," then when the
studio wasn't convinced, said he was going to go write it and show them what
he meant. They tried to dissuade him but he did it and they bought it. He
wrote what's now going to be The Black Donnellys soon after that failed, but
it took 10 years (and I'm guessing, two Oscars) for NBC to get interested.
He said he's great at critically acclaimed disasters, and said The Black
Donnellys will likely "fail brilliantly."

At his In Conversation With session, he said a nightmare about seeing his
tombstone engraved with "Paul Haggis: creator of Walker, Texas Ranger"
inspired him to go into independent film to wipe away that credit with
something more substantial. With Crash, he knew he wanted to direct it
because he felt it had the potential to go very wrong. Studios rejected the
script anyway, and he went through several independent producers before he
found anyone willing to let him direct.

He said he wrote the script very quickly, just taking character moments and
building on them until they bumped into other characters, and not worrying
about plot. Though he wrote it quickly, he did a year of research as he and
Bobby Moresco revised the script. He conceived of it as a TV show at first,
it was rejected by CBS and HBO, and he decided to do it as a movie, but
didn't know how to plot it as a movie. The scene between Matt Dillon and
Loretta Devine as the HMO worker, where he tells her about his father, who
was a great man who lost his job and family when he lost a contract due to
affirmative action policies, came from hate mail Haggis got while working on
Family Law. ("I always respond to hate mail. I don't respond to anything
else. Canadian, you know. 'I'm really sorry, it will be better next
week...'")

He mentioned his unusual experience with Million Dollar Baby, his first film
with Clint Eastwood, which was filmed with no revisions to the first draft.
Haggis said about Eastwood's decision to do that: "I lost respect for him
immediately." He pointed out that it's possible Eastwood is just lazy. But
more seriously, he said that on Unforgiven, Eastwood had worked with writer
David Peoples on draft after draft, decided they were making it worse, and
went back to the original draft – which Peoples didn't know until he saw it.

He said people forget that it was kind of a sweet, funny story until the
twist that hit audiences upside the head: "I just like fucking with
audiences." He said that applied to EZ Streets and now The Black Donnellys
too – just when the audience loves a character, he gives them a reason to
hate them, and vice versa.

He recently finished Flags of our Fathers for Eastwood and Spielberg, after
telling them in the initial meeting that he thought he had about a 10%
chance of making a script out of the original book. (Apparently Spielberg
wasn't quite as sanguine about Haggis's neuroses as Eastwood, but Eastwood
convinced him Haggis was their man.)

He also did the rewrite on the upcoming James Bond film, which he says might
ruin the franchise for everyone for all time. When they called him to do it,
he says he wanted to ask if they had the right person, and what the fuck
were they thinking (I think we can guess his favourite swear word, if he
ever makes it on James Lipton). He said he wanted to explore how Bond became
an assassin and a misogynist, and took on the project because "I like to do
things that scare me."

His writing process: go to office, answer emails, make phone calls, see if
there are any more emails, around 1 p.m. he starts to feel guilty so starts
to write, but has to check to see if he's got any new emails. It's all about
planned procrastination: "guilt is what drives me." He said Bobby Moresco is
an ideal writing partner, he loves writing with him, because he's "one of
the most annoying human beings on the face of the earth" – he says you need
the sand in your shoe to make you better.

At the awards lunch earlier in the day, Haggis had mentioned that EZ Streets
is the show he's most proud of, and it set a record for brevity, premiering
on a Sunday and being cancelled on Thursday. He worked for 8 days rewriting
the pilot for Walker, Texas Ranger, which gave him a co-creator credit, and
the show ran for 10 years. "The gods of television are cruel motherfuckers,"
he said.

Hmm. I think it's time to change the headline quote on this blog.

Thanks, Guest Blogger! Enjoy the mountain air!

Getting Banffed and Taking in the Motor City.

Will Dixon is blogging about the Banff TV festival, as is Alex. Interesting bits from Will, especially, about Day One.

As for me, I'm sitting outside right now at a very nice restaurant in Detroit. I've split off from the rest of the people doing the scout for Across The River... I'll spend some time at the Detroit Historical Museum and Hitsville USA this afternoon -- (call it research...no..really.) Then I'll be doing something I never thought I'd do -- I'm going to take a taxi across an international border. Crazy!

This morning I got to stand on the pitcher's mound at poor, stately, sad, derelict Tiger Stadium. I could tell you why -- but that would spoil the surprise. (Actually, I'm not even sure I know 100% why yet. But it sure was cool being there.)

So to all you people trolling the flop sweated environs of the smoking patio at the Banff Springs, especially you gentle little lamb CFC types --

--this TV gig, if you persevere?

Cool beans.

The CBC Can't Buy a Break

Sometimes I really do feel sorry for the poor old CBC.

The latest from Canadian Press:

Historical inaccuracies have forced the CBC to pull the movie about the life of medicare founder Tommy Douglas from its future broadcast schedule.

The network has also halted both home and education sales of the film.

Tommy Douglas is the father of Canadian Medicare. He's also the only socialist to ever lead a government in North America. And for current Trivia buffs, he's the grandfather of 24's Kiefer Sutherland. Tommy Douglas is a big deal in Canada -- he was voted "The Greatest Canadian" in a TV special a couple years back. The movie, "Prairie Giant," was originally supposed to air in January, but the CBC pulled it because of the Canadian Federal Election (whilst still running a very anti-medicare documentary. Go Figure.) It finally aired in March, to almost a million viewers between the two nights (which is pretty good by Canadian standards...equivalent to about 30 million people watching in the USA)

So what went wrong? According to CP:

The decision was made after the family of former Saskatchewan premier Jimmie Gardiner and several prominent provincial politicians complained that Gardiner was villified in the movie...

CBC recruited an independent historian to review the film and found Gardiner's character was "significantly different" from his true personality.

Now, on a dramatic level, Gardiner was somewhat the villain of the piece. I'm sure he did plenty to try and keep "the socialists" at bay. One of the family's big complaints seems to be that he was portrayed as a thuggish drinker, when really he was a teetotaler.

In any case, it's certainly nowhere near the liberties taken in, say...Oliver Stone's Nixon.

Medicare and Tommy Douglas' legacy is still controversial -- and the people he took on -- doctors, insurers, have a lot of power. Add in the fact that health care is still a third rail issue in the U.S. and the subject around this film was bound to be fraught.

If you have any experience in TV or film, though, you're probably scratching your head right now and going, "wasn't this thing lawyered?"

Well, yeah. And that's where this case gets kind of interesting.

See, CBC has been in this position before. Years ago, a docudrama series called "The Valour and the Horror" aired. It was produced by two of Canada's most noted documentary producers, and it caused an absolute shitstorm, because among its more controversial elements, it suggested that maybe the view that we were sold of our WWII vets being totally heroic might be a bit spun. It pointed out that the campaigns of the Allied Commands' Bomber Harris could have been excessive -- even monstrous. WWII vets went crazy, and the attacks on the CBC came fast and furious. CBC eventually apologized, cut and ran, withdrew the doc, end of story. All for suggesting that maybe the firebombing of Dresden might have been, you know, excessive.

As Jeanette Slonoiowski wrote about this earlier controversy:

Publicly funded institutions are particularly vulnerable to attacks by powerful lobbies whose animosity can and does jeopardize their financial stability. The Valour and the Horror can be seen as a particularly acrimonious chapter in the continuing battle between a publicly funded institution and the taxpayers who support it. In this it is not unlike the battle waged in the United States between veterans and the Smithsonian Institute over the representation of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So how does the CBC keep finding itself in these situations? Do they just have the worst lawyers ever? Or lazy fact checkers? Or what?

It atually has a lot to do with Canada's libel laws. They work differently than in the U.S. and are a lot more restrictive. The legal principle at work here is something called a reverse onus.

That makes a libel suit way, way harder to defend, because the burden shifts to the defendant to prove that things are true. I believe the way it works in the U.S. is that the plaintiff has to prove, not only that the info was false, but that the defamation was deliberately done to damage the reputation of the wronged party.

This little difference in the law means that libel suits in Canada are very easy to file, and prove, and very hard, and difficult, and expensive to defend. It means that factually based Canadian stories will always go the safest route. And it makes the potential risk for anyone telling a true or based-on-true story nearly impossible if there's any chance of anyone taking issue with the portrayal.

See how libel chill works, folks? This is one of my least-favorite things about "The Canadian Way." CTV has got to be nervous about its upcoming Conrad Black film in light of this.

Anyway. It's a shame. It really was a great movie.

(If any of you law scholars out there want to expand or clarify my points here, I welcome it. I am not, nor have I ever been, a lawyer.)

Falcon Beach: The U.S. Market, She Shimmers, She Does...

You can tell that Falcon Beach premiered in the U.S. last week. Looking at my search stats, the vast majority of searches are for "Jennifer Kydd" "Falcon Beach" "How old" "where is it shot" and related terms.

It's an interesting reminder for we Canadian creatives: the pool is not just bigger down there, there's enough water to drown our market entirely. Think about it: more people watch a flop in the U.S. than watch our biggest hit up here.

Not to say that Falcon Beach is a flop. But the articles in Canada did always tend to focus on the fact that the ratings softened after a few weeks. And the reviews were middling. We'll see if the U.S. follows suit, but judging by a few reviews I've read, it seems worth noting that there is indeed a kind of "Degrassi Effect."

To wit: since Degrassi took off on The N, there's been this slow-growing idea idea that Canada is the place where we make teen-centred or teen-issue dramas that handle issues with sensitivity, not hysteria. This could be very useful to program makers; a niche, and a ready-made perception that we're good at this. Maybe it's time to focus energies on making more?

I mean, not like another Canadian spoof musical is going to sweep Broadway anytime soon. (Congrats to The Drowsy Chaperone, which picked up four Tony Awards last night. Guess Don McKellar's going to be extra insufferable now. Fantastic.)

Canadians are inveterate second-guessers. We may not have ever believed that any of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi, or that Saddam Hussein worked with Al Qaeda, but we also never seem to learn the lesson that often the perception of something is more useful than the reality. It certainly was useful when it came time for Dubya, Rummy, and the Che-man to fix the case for war.

Right now there's a perception that we can make teen dramas that tackle issues in a way that U.S. shows can't. Partly because the hysteria level down south is so high, and because the American Family Association organizes a phone tree anytime a character so much as looks at a condom -- but the why doesn't matter. It's out there.

Now, the skinny may tell a different story. Yes, The N has refused to run episodes of Degrassi, and run others out of order. To their credit, Degrassi resisted calls to cut or change content, (a lesson that should get Canadian producers thinking) and The N made the call on whether to show the stuff to their audience. (They also got roasted by their online fan base for choosing to re-order or omit some episodes.)

I've heard from a reader of the blog that Class, the recently-announced Global University-set one-hour, is destined for a U.S. cable sale -- following that emerging Degrassi Effect narrative.

It's time we Canadian creatives were aware of it, and started talking it up -- capitalizing on it as a reality. Up here, everyone talks about Degrassi in a vacuum. It's not in a vacuum. Like "runaway production" and "Canada is a haven for terrorists," we shouldn't let this narrative be entirely shaped by others.

You want fuel? Look to a couple of the U.S. reviews, like this one...from a Pittsburgh Paper.

"Falcon Beach" comes across as the more responsible show. The characters have more depth and are more sympathetic.

Press notes say "Falcon Beach" is set in New England, but the flags seen in the background say Canada (the series was shot in Winnipeg)...

Wake-boarding stud Jason (Steve Byers) and more nerdy best friend Danny (Ephraim Ellis) want to begin the summer with a rockin' party, but the location they planned to use -- an abandoned beach house -- falls through when its owner, Ginny Bradshaw (Allison Hossack, "Profit"), arrives with her uptight, bratty daughter, Paige (Jennifer Kydd).

Eventually Paige loosens up and Jason is torn between her and his ex-girlfriend, Tanya (Devon Weigel), a coke-snorting model who's returned to town and soon takes up with Paige's druggie brother, Lane (Morgan Kelly).

"Falcon Beach" shows the consequences of anti-social behavior and evinces greater wit. Danny has a seemingly endless supply of brothers, including one who's taken a vow of silence. Lane refers to Paige's past boyfriends, who all worked for their father, as "The Extraordinary League of Yes Men," a clever turn-of-phrase.

By nature of its Canadian production, "Falcon" is a cultural cousin to "Degrassi," which may explain why it's the superior beach-set summer sudser. It also helps that parents do appear in this series, so it's not so much kids-gone-wild-at-the-beach (although beach beer blasts are a favorite pastime).

It's noteworthy that the ages of the "Falcon Beach" young hotties are never specified. Are Jason and Paige out of high school? Are they college age? Are they of drinking age? In Sunday's two-hour premiere, "Falcon Beach" doesn't clue us in. But they're young, attractive and having fun, so you can bet the teens and tweens watching at home will want to emulate them.

Pssst. We know teen drama. Pass it on.

Off To Join the Deadwood Entourage

My cable box and my DVD player are cordial, but cold to each other.

They know the drill. During the long Canadian winter and short spring, the cable box and PVR hum like a little Dickensian child struggling to keep the gears moving with his tiny, tiny fingers.

But then the summer comes, and the Cable box is demoted, to a device that brings me live sporting events, and the occasional news report. On nights in, that DVD player takes pride of place, as I catch up and expand my viewing horizons.

They tolerate this relationship, because they know I have needs. But neither is too happy about it.

But here comes a blip. Mmm. For the next several weeks, Sunday nights are going to be a stay-in or set the PVR kind of night.

Deadwood and Entourage are back.

I tremble a bit at the thought of more disquisitions, profane and true, from philosopher-prick Al Swearengen. I shudder to think what's going on with James Cameron's Aquaman, now that the strange flirtation with WB-pilot synergy is over with on that project. And what of Drama and Turtle? Will they ever get over crossing swords that one time in Sundance?

I read articles about the great David Milch like this one, and I'm ready to engage in a most unmanly swoon.

Entourage is a show that just caught fire in its second season. It wasn't just that the writing was cannier (when you add that many top talents to your staff, that's to be expected) or that the showbiz cameos (James Cameron! Mandy Moore! Malcolm MacDowell!) were sharper, it's that the stuff between the four guys -- the stuff that has nothing to do with showbiz, was just so... money...Finally, a show about male friendships in your twenties that actually feels right. Making Turtle smarter, Giving Eric some edge -- all of it just cracked. I got to the end of each episode of Entourage and I was already jonesing for the next one.

Here in Canada, the CHUM group stations have bought the first two seasons of Entourage, and will be playing them over the air. You can do that here in Canada, where we don't freak out over the occasional S-bomb or a slipped nipple. I think it's going to do gangbusters for them.

Deadwood and Entourage reminded me of the shows that made me want to be a TV writer in the first place. Of the shift that happens when you stop being a viewer and say, "that's great...I want to make something like that." So often, I watch tv and I can't turn off that critical sense. These shows make it easy. I'm just a fan.

There's something to be said about a great new TV show in the summer.

When there's only one or two a week -- it just seems sweeter.

Okay, Mr. Wu. I'm ready -- say that word -- the way only you can say it.

I Think I Actually Give Up

I took a break from pounding out the outline I'm on right now to go and take care of my carpal tunnel issues. I broke down and bought the Ilap. It was a bit of an odyssey finding one. First, the place I went to pick up my new computer bag was out. For some reason, every time I go to pick up more than one thing from this store, they're out of something. I have bad store mojo. All my life. It's my curse.

So then I trundled off to the Apple Store in the huge tourist trap downtown mall, The Eaton Centre. They didn't even stock it. I called two more stores and they were out and finally took three buses to find an Apple dealer with one in stock. (By now I was committed.) Right now I'm sitting in a lovely, mostly empty bar. The guys from the kitchen are freaking out over the World Cup match on the Telly right now...I'm chortling as I read about England managing to eke out a win through no apparent effort whatsoever, and my laptop is gloriously supported. My posture is much better. This rocks.

So why do I give up?

While I was in the Eaton Centre, I happened to wander into one of our chain bookstores, because someone I know was working there. I browsed the magazines a bit, and noticed that in front of one rack there were women, about a dozen of them, stacked four deep, all reading multiple copies of one magazine. People Magazine.

A dozen women, gathered to see Brad and Angelina and their baby Cletus, or whatever its name is. I watched this for about five minutes. The minute a People went back into the rack, there was another woman to snatch it up, fingers trembling as she flipped to the photos.

Pre-internet, a boy of a certain age could sometimes be caught in a variety store surreptitiously flipping through a Playboy with the exact same expression on his face.

For every woman that bought one of the People magazines, ten more just wanted to browse. Eventually, after a few minutes, the magazines were gone. And so were the women.

But then the stock guy brought out more. And within a minute, there was a whole new crowd of women, five or six, gathered 'round. I can't be sure, but I think a few of them were carrying gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

I give up. I officially do not get it anymore.

Bonus points: At a film industry gathering Monday night, I was talking to a woman and she asked, "You were in South Africa for a while, right?"

"Yes," I said.

"That's near Namibia, isn't it?"

"Uh, yeah."

Her eyes glazed over.

Guess what she wanted to talk about next?

I give up.

How Much Time Do You Spend Thinking About Gender Justice as it Relates to The A-Team?

Jaime J. Weinman's blog is one of my favorites, (see the sidebar) because we share a lot of the same cultural obsessions (Hello, WKRP!) but also because there's plenty of room where we diverge.

Writers are weird, and we tend to like weird things. Developing a writer's worldview, I believe, has to involve being on the fringes, or feeling on the fringes, and developing a dispassionate passion for something that others wouldn't give a secont thought about.

Even when it does intersect "mainstream" culture, writers bring a level of detail and attention that can only come from an outsider. Friday Night Lights chronicles how football is more important than anything else in a Texas town, but it took Bissinger -- not one of those people involved -- to bring it to the nation, first as a bestselling book, then a movie, and in the fall, a TV series.

Al Gore is a weird geek, so we get a great movie about Global Warming. George W. Bush was a popular fratty coke-snortin born again Christian silver spoon legacy jock, so we get the worst President ever. Life's funny that way.

We writers are all the product of our obsessions. I find Weinman's obsessions endlessly fascinating. See if you do, too.

Canadian Pay TV: New Series Offerings

Movie Central (west) and TMN, (east) Canada's equivalent to HBO, have announced their 2006/2007 lineup of domestically produced TV series. There are two new ones:

Durham County

Six hour miniseries, produced by Laurie Finstad-Knizhnik, Janis Lundman and Adrienne Mitchell of Back Alley Film Productions. It's about a detective who moves his family to a peaceful town hoping for a new beginning. (Sounds a little Everwood-y, no?)

Then the serial killer shows up.

Eeep.

ZOS

Eight part series, produced by Whizbang Films, with exec producers Paul Gross, Frank Siracusa, Mario Azzopardi and Malcolm MacRury

(Yes. Thanks to Canadian Television Policy 434195-9-T, Paul Gross (Due South, H20, Men With Brooms) is now required to be involved with everything.)

Set in the near future, follows peacekeepers trying to keep the peace in an UN enforced ceasefire in a fictional Balkan town split down the middle between Christian Serbs and Albanian Muslims. Sounds like this one might be dark comedy -- I certainly hope they go that route rather than maudlin drama. Canadian series often have a surfeit of earnestness. If they can resist that impulse, this could have some promise.

Other programs include a three part thriller Bon Voyage, a 90 min Just For Laughs special, The Nasty Show, and a third season of ReGenesis from Shaftesbury Films.

Can Sitcoms Be Funny and Real?

A reader writes:

Is there anything inherently wrong about bringing in real current events to a sitcom? What's wrong with having the cast of Corner Gas discuss equalization payments? Or Chandler Bing realizing that he can't run away to Ireland because of a new Homeland Security squeeze? Is there any room for the real world in the sitcom world? Standup seems to incorporate the two quite well (to the point that some standup loses its edge after only a month or two) - couldn't the same success be achieved on the set?

Hmm. An interesting question. My instincts say no -- but before we get to why, let's take a short look at the traditional place of the half-hour comedy.

Half hour comedies have been the engine that drive television for a very long time. Even when, as now, they're in a cyclical trough period in terms of popularity or heat, they're still hugely important.

That's because they're repeatable; and way more marketable. Even a middling half hour comedy with enough episodes to syndicate makes far far more with off-prime syndicated sales to local stations, than even the best one-hour drama. Also, when they're repeated in prime time, they do far better than repeated drama episodes.

(I would love to see how they compare in DVD box sets sales; my guess would be beyond the major hits like Friends, or Family Guy or Simpsons, that generally hour boxes do better, but that's a hunch not backed up by data. Anyone have the data?)

We have to surmise from this that people are far more willing to see an episode of a sitcom that you've seen before. Rather than the reaction you have watching a drama, "I've seen this one, damn," the reaction is more like, "Oh man, this was a good one." I don't care how many times I've seen the Seinfeld episode "The Contest," if I flip by it, I'll watch. When Ross shouts out, "We were on a Break!" it's still as funny as the first time I saw it. Then add in The Simpsons, where the first act usually never has anything to do with the rest of the show, and you're nine minutes in before you realize, "oh, right, this is the monorail episode!"

So the question of topicality in sitcoms faces an uphill battle right from the start. If you reference what's going on in the world in anything but a general way, you're going to ruin repeatability. You can see this for yourself if you ever see old episodes of All in The Family. It's a show, viewed through the lens of a few decades' space, that's easy to admire, but hard to love. Most of what they reference directly is so tied to the politics of the early 1970's (like jokes about Nixon, and the ERA) that it seems a bit impenetrable now. Compare that to a show that's more than ten years older, like The Dick Van Dyke Show, and it's strange to see that a show that's even older can seem a bit fresher -- because it sticks to its world and doesn't try to stick a foot into ours. (I'm not talking about things like fashion or social convention here...those things do seem dated, but somehow they're more acceptable than a character who's concerned about something, really concerned, that is barely a footnote now. And you don't need to go back to D.V.D. or Archie Bunker to see dated stuff - check out some of those first season Friends eps.) You seem to acknowledge this point near the end of your question, so I'm not going to belabor it.

The second reason why I think too much topicality in the sitcom is bad has more to do with the form itself.

We've talked several times before about comedy characters and how they're different than dramatic characters. I go back again to paraphrase comment a writer acquaintance of mine made on a panel a few months ago: Your average comic character takes about six seasons to change as much as a dramatic character does in one.

Sometimes this is structural. That 70's Show got 8 seasons or so out of the years 1976 - 1980. Happy Days did the same thing with the 50's. I'm hardly the first to note that M*A*S*H ran three times longer than the war it portrayed. (And became a drama in the end, anyway.)

The point is that a comic world is a very careful construction. It's like a souffle, and you don't want to introduce anything into it that might ruin the recipe. Introducing elements of the real world in anything but an offhand way threatens to create a dissonance between your characters' insistence on pursuing their blind obessions and never changing, and the realities of the world outside of Dog River, or Wisconsin, or Cheers, or KCAL radio, or Cafe Nervosa. People seek out comedies for escapism. You want to laugh with, or at, the antics of the characters in their constructed worlds -- not see how they react to the crushing or trivial elements in ours.

So while there's nothing wrong with Corner Gas characters complaining in a general way about taxes, equalization payments would be a stretch. (And a little out of character, too, no? Aren't they mostly concerned with what happens in Dog River, and maybe that other place -- Wolverton? (spit)) If Friends was still on, I suppose you could have someone date someone from Homeland Security, but that would have to be funny -- they couldn't be on the phone Jack Bauer-ing a couple of terrorists.

Finally, if you look at what people are really concerned about these days -- pictures of Brad Pitt's baby, whether Jen is still happy, Britney's bump and dropping the baby issues -- well, if they're not following the news in the news, do you really think they'd accept it more if it was coming out of Grace's mouth?

Or...shudder...Jim Belushi's?

Hand Waving & The Gun In the Drawer

ON THE PROJECT I'm deepest into now, we've reached a point where we have an overall arc for the episodes. We're still adjusting on the fly as we write outlines, because that's what you do, and also because good ideas keep coming and you want to integrate them.

The show has a complicated weave, and a lot of different things to track. One of the most challenging things about it is tracking what the audience knows when. In some cases, the audience is ahead of our characters, but there are some key facts that the audience doesn't know -- that they won't know (hopefully) until we reveal it to them.

That requires a deft touch, because the contstruction issues are daunting. There's a lot of choices you have to make just because of the demands of the form. For instance, you need to play time cuts, because you have anywhere from 41 to 47 minutes to tell your story. (We're writing for 47 and I think it's still tight.) You also have to play the story in such a way that you never see the conversation where the characters learn information that the audience already knows -- because that's dull for the audience and objectively you don't have the space.

Yet there's no getting around the fact that there's a whole lot of hand-waving in TV drama. People having conversations to convey exposition, people talking, talking, talking -- you try to make it as interesting as possible, but when you compare a standard TV show which shoots anywhere from 6 to 10 pages a day with a movie that shoots 1/2 to 1 1/2 pages, you can see that the scenes you pump out are just going to be different.

Right now one of the things we're working through is how you hide the solution, or hide the twist.

A lot of the hand waving that comes in tv writing is the writer's attempt to get you to pay attention to something here, while we try to slip something past you there.

There's an old theater saying, which I'll paraphrase, which basically amounts to, "If you put a gun in the drawer in the first act, it has to go off in the third."

That seems self-evident, but the truth behind it is this: you have to get that gun in the drawer in the first act, then get the audience to forget about it so that by the time someone goes for it in the third, it is a surprise on some level -- even though the audience supposedly knew it was there.

See? The game of chicken we play with viewers is this: we're going to show you stuff. And if you pay attention in the right places and make the right connections, you'll figure this out way before we show it to you. But we're betting you won't.

When, as writers, you win this game of chicken, people are entertained.

When you lose, people figure it out too early, and they say that your story was boring and predictable.

So why hide the shit at all? Why show the gun? Why not have it come as a total surprise?

Well, here's where it gets really nasty, chickens. If you just have the gun, or the murderer, or the secret rune or the letters of transit come out of nowhere, without setting them up, then it's a deus ex machina ending, and the audience will feel cheated and hate you -- way, way more than if you had crafted a predictable story.

Psychology is fun, isn't it?

Working back from your reveal, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to figure out how to leave clues that won't be obvious, but will add up to something meaningful. This is where throwing red herrings come in, too. You tease the audience, you lead them down a couple of paths, some false, some true. And hopefully, by the time you take the gun out, it's a surprise.

A lot of the time this is going to involve coincidence. All stories are based on coincidence in some way. Cinderella happens to drop the glass slipper on the stair as she leaves the ball, and it doesn't turn back into a rat or whatever so Prince Charming can find her. That's lucky, isn't it? Pretty coincidental.

In a romantic comedy, of COURSE the two characters run into each other after a year in the same cafe in New York. There are people I dated who live less than a kilometer from me and I never, ever run into them, but sure, why not. Cafe. New York. Sure.

The basic rule is that your story can weather some degree of coincidence, so long as that coincidence does not provide the solution to your story. (I think I wrote about this before once.)

What I'm finding now is, another way to think about it is: you have to get that coincidence as far away from your solution as possible.

If someone meets someone in passing who will become important in the end, that's coincidence, sure, but it's forgiveable. But the closer you get to the end, the less that coincidence will hold up to scrutiny, the more forced it will feel, and the more chance you have that the audience will reject it or figure you out too early.

You have to make peace with coincidence, and have a clear internal sense of how much is too much. (If you're like me, CRASH is too much. And yes, I know, that was the point.)

When you're giving notes on a friend's script, it's not enough to point out coincidence or a convenient story twist. You really have to drill down and ask yourself, "is this an acceptable coincidence, or are you asking the audience for so much here that it will threaten suspension of disbelief?"

I know writers who won't accept any coincidence in their stories, and almost universally, this results in flat storytelling that has way too much exposition, or much character histrionics that disguise the fact that there isn't a lot of forward plot momentum.

Unfortunately, coincidence and its proper use can often be the motor oil that keeps the gears of your story working. Remove it entirely, and you're left with an inert substance. To mix a metaphor, coincidence is like baking powder. A little goes a really long way.

On Demand North of the 49th

Checking over the blog lately, I notice that I've had a lot of Cancon. So this one maybe I'll try to keep shorter.

The Canadian Upfronts are happening this week, and it's hard to conceive just how in front CTV is. They dominate every night of the week. Seventeen of Canada's Top 20 shows are on CTV. Worse, a couple of CTV's homegrown shows are even in the Top 20! It's like they can't be stopped.

So now they're innovating again. CTV announced that effective immediately, they'll be making shows available on an on-demand basis, as ABC has done with Desperate Housewives and Lost.

Initially, they'll feature sports, news, and mainly Canadian shows such as Degrassi: The Next Generation, Instant Star, Corner Gas, Canadian Idol, and the new, big budget Whistler, but eventually they might be able to start licensing Canadian On-Demand rights for U.S. Shows.

The shows will run on demand with commercials, which you can't fast-forward through -- which I think to most people is a totally acceptable compromise. Hey, if you never have to miss a show again, and all you have to do is watch a couple ads, why not? If you don't want to watch the ads, tape the show and fast forward, same as usual.

This is going to be GREAT news for Canadian Shows, which often suffer from being punted around the schedule. Canadian networks, because they depend so much on U.S. shows, are at the Americans' scheduling mercy, and Cancon gets caught in the crossfire. Maybe now, CTV at least can start to grow the appetite for homegrown product. It's hard to hate the top dog when they seem to be doing so much right.

Which brings us to Global. Global used to be on top, with the powerhouse U.S. shows, but that's slid in recent years in the withering competition from CTV. Global announced an aggressive schedule with a lot of new buys, which you can find out about here.

By the way, I didn't just link to that Sun article for the announcements, but to show you the attitude. One of the features in the reporting of all the upfront presentations is that the articles written about them dump any mention of anything homegrown right to the end. Bill Brioux, who takes a faux populist stance in most of his TV writing, goes one better:

Oh, yeah, Canadian shows? Just as at the CTV upfront, nothing we haven't seen or heard about before. More Falcon Beach, more ReGenesis, more Debbie Travis.

What a maroon. And here's a shocker, kids. He's lazy and wrong.

Global did announce more Falcon Beach. But it also announced more Jane Show, and two other new one hour dramas which I know nothing else about:

Class is a university-set show, and Quill follows the adventures of a counter-terrorism operative.

There are lots of problems in the Canadian industry that have to do with US - writers, creators, producers, that we need to solve. But idiots like Brioux, who bring a standard issue Canadian-complex-defeatism to their writing, well...Houston, we got a problem there, too.

(If anyone involved with Class or Quill reads this blog, get in touch by email. I'd love to hear a bit about your shows -- and I know considering the dearth of non-press release driven entertainment reportage in this country, I won't read any articles about the shows in the papers. Not whilst the Bill Briouxs are doing such a bang-up job on the beat.)

Co-Writing and Gang-Breaking

In my trolling-for-inspiration question-solicitation mode, W.C. Dixon writes:

Do you find it easier to break a story on your own or with a group in a writer's room?

That's a no-brainer. I think the room is the way to go. You get a bit of Stockholm Syndrome with yourself when you're breaking: you will convince yourself that you've got a solution all worked out when it really is still crunchy. And then when you go to outline, that will bite you in the ass. If you're in a well-put together room, there will always be someone there to say, "wait, wait. I don't buy it, what about this?" And then you fix it.

Working alone -- to geek out for a moment -- is like having a single processor trying to crunch story. The room, you get all those brains crunching at once -- bam -- instant parallel processing.

I find when I break alone, I also tend to get off track easier, and get bogged down in fridge logic issues.

(digression) For those of you who don't read John Rogers, or haven't seen his excellent posts on Jargon Preservation, Fridge Logic is a piece of inconsistency in a story that doesn't really impact the audience's enjoyment: ie: it's something they won't bump on, so you don't really need to worry about solving it. The most famous piece of Fridge Logic ever is probably the letters of Transit in Casablanca. When you think about it, the idea that there are these letters that can get anyone out of Casablanca --because they can't be questioned -- by Nazis -- well, it's ridiculous. But if you think of that at all, it's a half hour after you've enjoyed the film, and you're standing at the Fridge looking for the Snapple and you go, "you know..."

Geek fanboys, when they talk about the inconsistencies in Star Trek episodes, 99% of the time they're complaining over fridge logic. (Sci fi fans are fueled by fridge logic...they'll find inconsistencies where there are none.)

The story logic you have to worry about is where you do something that really is going to make the person bump, or is too convenient, or violates something you've done before (ie: on Star Trek, they establish that you can't beam through shields. If they do that in an episode, that's not fridge logic. That's a mistake . Bump. (/digression)

Aside from those things, there's also some psychological comfort to breaking as a group. You don't own the success 100 percent -- but TV is collaborative, so you never do. But you don't wear the failures yourself, either. The story is our problem to solve, not your problem to solve. And you get to be with people, and though it's hard work, it can also be fun.

Breaking a story by yourself isn't fun. Is never fun. It's just a pain in the ass.

Which brings me to co-writing...have you had success co-writing with anyone or prefer to write solo?

I'm co-writing something right now. It has a lot of advantages and a lot of drawbacks. I firmly believe that once you do have a story, someone has to be the conductor, and move it forward. Most people I know who cowrite regularly have a system where one person takes first pass, one person takes second pass, and they go on like that. I co-wrote a play like that last summer. It can be an interesting process. Generally, when I co-write, it's a project where I was not "the primary" ie: it's not mainly my idea -- a lot of the initial ideas come from someone else. I tend to have very proprietary and solid ideas about how to execute ideas that I come up with myself. In order to have the necessary malleability to make the co-write work, I just find it's better if I'm not the originator. But that's probably a quirk that says more about me than about the process.

There's another common way to co-write tv, which is one person writes Act 1 and 2 and the other writes Act 3 and 4, and then they put them together and try to harmonize voices. I know that sounds horrifying at first blush, but it can really save a lot of time. If you are in sync with your writing partner, and you're working off a good outline, there's no reason in the world why you shouldn't be able to do this. I've done it in production a couple times, though more commonly as a rewrite of a freelancer script.

I remember years ago interviewing William Gibson (or maybe it was Bruce Sterling) about the book they wrote together, The Difference Engine. Apparently their rule was to rewrite over each other and the rule was -- you only saved the current version, you could not change anything back to the way you had it. Sounds like an interesting way to work -- this is in the age of trading disks back and forth. Now I guess you'd just shoot emails back and forth.

I know there are people who actually sit down, looking over each other's shoulders, and write together. I also think this is what most people think of when then think "co-writing." I can't imagine doing this for the life of me. Although I suppose if you're really in sync that could work.

I've only written like this once -- years ago, when I was in University, I co-wrote a sketch with a friend of mine. It was exciting to come up with stuff and get it down right away, right there. It was great to have the instant validation. It turned out to be a great sketch. That sketch probably marks the time when I stopped writing to have something to perform, and realized I took more pleasure in the writing of it.

That writer's on Corner Gas now, by the way. I know the good'uns.

The other thing that I notice about writing partnerships is that a lot of them seem to end acrimoniously. Hardly surprising, I guess. But if my heart's going to get broke, I suppose I'd rather have it be because my heart's broke, not cause an intimate work relationship got wrecked. But again, that might just be me. Your mileage might vary.