Something new for today is...

#@!!%

2011-03-02T11:54:00.001-08:00

Long time, no post. I have been crazy busy for the last few months. Anytime I had an idea for a blog entry, I scribbled it on a sticky note. There were quite a few notes stacked up before they all got buried in work. I have now managed to clear my desk back down to the sticky note level, so I guess it's time to start posting.

I was going to ease in gently with comments on successful sitcom titles and Oscar nominees, but last night I read a script so painful, I have to start with a rant instead.

Out of every 100 scripts I read for my agency job, figure 10% are easy recommends. They might have a few issues, but the problems can be fixed and the good outweighs the bad. About 80% of the 100 scripts have something of value, but also serious issues. One has to decide if the problems can be fixed, and if the amount of good is worth the trouble.

Then there's the bottom 10%. These are the scripts written by people who do not grasp basic writing fundamentals. As in, people who have no idea what makes a story a story at a level one isn't sure can be taught. With these scripts, you want to tell the writer, "Stop now. You do not have what it takes. Do something else." Last night's script was one of those. And the f*cker had people and money attached.

Looking up the production company, I don't feel too horrified by the state of the industry. The writer owns the company – and he's planning to direct, too! It's possible the money comes from mom and dad. (Though if they gave it to me, I could put on a piece of performance art called "lazing around in front of my TV writing blog posts for the next twenty years" that would provide more entertainment value than their baby's script. But hey, it's their money.)

In honor of that script, and the Confidentiality Agreement that prevents me from going into details, I offer a new definition:

plot prod [plot prod]

–noun
1. An occurrence in a script clearly manufactured by the writer to drive the protagonist into an action he/she would otherwise have no reason to take, and without which the script would come to a screeching halt on page 11.

–antonym
1. plot point
The thing you should be writing instead.

Another pet peeve

2010-11-16T17:35:00.000-08:00

Dear Writer,

If you find yourself typing the words "true to form," or "typically," or "as usual," or "as one might expect," or any such phrase – consider that you might be writing a CLICHE.

Then don't.

Look Who's Talking to A Beautiful Mind

2010-11-09T14:31:00.001-08:00

Creeeeeepy baby...

As soon as she opens her mouth, the movie is over

2010-11-07T15:21:00.000-08:00

I love Cher. And I wish Christina Aguilera all the best -- yo, Staten Island! I also love Diablo Cody, Kristen Bell, Stanley Tucci, Alan Cumming and anything with sequins and fringe. But despite the fact that I have to be the target market for this movie, I am not going to see Burlesque on opening weekend. And possibly, not at all.

Seriously, I am the target market. But I've seen the trailer a few times and things don't look good. In the trailer, a plucky young ingenue heads to Los Angeles. She tries to get a job singing at a club. Cher, the club manager, blows her off. The plucky young ingenue gets onstage anyway. She's played by Christina Aguilera, so as soon as she opens her mouth, Cher is impressed. The girl gets the job and the movie is over. That's beginning, middle and end, right there in the trailer -- but not a compelling narrative filled with obstacles, conflict and stakes.

This is a problem with the entire awesomely-talented-but-somehow-still-struggling performer genre. It's one of the reasons many reviewers found Secretariat a bore. If you never saw the actual horse win the Belmont Stakes, watch the video now. For two minutes and twenty-four seconds, it's a gas. But who wants to watch the run-up to that race for two hours? I am also the target market for every horsey movie out there, but I still haven't seen Secretariat. The horse won the race in stunning fashion, but not in dramatically compelling fashion. Secretariat was an amazing horse with previous victories and terrific bloodlines from a successful stable. Everyone knew he was going to win the Belmont Stakes. A few other horses entered because money was on the line for place and show, but we're not talking real obstacles. To make this story dramatic, one would have to saddle the poor horsey with a drug or alcohol problem, an abusive stable mate or recurring nightmares of childhood trauma -- you know, the stuff we writers shove in such movies to make the stories of extraordinary talent rewarded slightly more compelling.

Perhaps there are real obstacles in Burlesque. There are none evident in the trailer, which seems to include the entire film. I hope this is another case of a marketing department screw-up and that the movie revolves around a different set of events never hinted at in the trailer. But I am dubious, and I will wait to see. Unfortunately, that might mean the film is gone from theaters before I make up my mind.

A great new use for Facebook

2010-10-22T01:11:00.001-07:00

I've been happily buried in three different projects, one of which involves considerable historical research about the Civil War. The Facebook advertising engine picked up on that research – they're watching our every move! – and suggested I "like" the daily updates from this site.

Damned if the advertising engine isn't right. I do like the updates. In fact, I think whoever came up with the idea of sending around a daily Facebook post on something of interest related to the Civil War that happened on the same day 150 years ago is freakin' brilliant. Way to go, unknown fellow historian!

This is not a Paris runway

2010-10-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

First casualties of the new season – Lone Star on Fox and My Generation on ABC. There were issues with the Lone Star pilot, but I didn't hate it. I could see they might be headed in interesting directions. I would have given it a second look. And yet – though I Tivo'd it, I didn't get around to watching the pilot until after the series had been canceled. I still haven't watched the My Generation pilot. I watch a lot of television, but neither show excited me enough to click play. Here's why –

The posters that adorned every bus shelter and many of the buildings where I live were some of the worst I have ever seen.

In the My Generation posters, pretty people stare at the camera with no expression on their faces. In the Lone Star posters, a handsome young man stares at the camera with no expression on his face. Why would I want to watch shows about expressionless people? If they aren't interested in their own lives, I won't be either. Not that the shows themselves – Lone Star at least – featured expressionless people. An early line of dialogue specifically points out the importance of the lead character's awesome smile. And the actor has an awesome smile. Why didn't they feature that in the posters? I might have watched the show sooner to find out what he was smiling about.

I think I know where the blank-faced trend originates. For some time now, fashion photography and fashion runways have featured expressionless models. Here's a note for television marketing departments: this is not because we like blank faces. It's because fashion designers want us to focus on the clothes alone. Most people don't watch television for the clothes alone. Not even Gossip Girl – though how awesome were the clothes in the Paris episodes? And Gossip Girl posters are some of the best out there.

Twenty four words you can't say in Final Draft

2010-09-28T20:32:00.000-07:00

One of the last things I do before I consider a script ready to send out is run a global search for my personal list of proscribed words. These words are not forbidden because they are naughty – it's a script, fuck that – but because I use them too often.

We all have such words. Most of them stand in for the pauses we add to our everyday speech. We want pauses in our dialogue, so we stick 'em in there too. Problem is, different readers use different words for their pauses, and most readers add the pauses in their own heads and don't need those words. Though we sprinkle our everyday speech with well's, oh's and you know's, a page of dialogue studded with those words causes pain. As I mentioned in a previous post, dialogue needs to sound like real people talking – only better.

Everyone has their own habitual vocabulary. That's one of the ways literary forensic types determine disputed authorship. Though you should make your own list of dangerous words, here's my version:

Actually, usually, a lot, like, always, very, well, here, yeah, hey, ok/okay, maybe, just, oh, pretty, guess, more, quite, bit, you know, right, even, of course, so.

Though I search for every word, I don't remove every instance. People use these words. Dialogue without them might sound strange. But it's eye-opening to skip from instance to instance and realize how often the words pop up. Though I don't remove them all, I remove enough. Sometimes I get a page less script for my labor. Hey, that's actually worth it, you know?

Here's another note. While running this search, do a quick scan of every incidence of your/you're and make sure you've got them right. No, you are not ignorant for mixing them up – it's something your typing fingers do without consulting your brain. But you LOOK ignorant if they remain wrong in your finished draft.

Technological dependency

2010-09-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

The ridiculously cheap envelopes must have been a Luddite Trojan horse, as my Internet connection has been down since I brought them home. I am now lurking in a Starbucks, sucking an ancient cup of coffee. Last night I circled the parking lot of a closed McDonald's, fishing for a signal. The Verizon folks say all will be well soon. But they said that two days ago. I now face a weekend without Internet and all is not well.

As a friend posted on her Facebook wall, "I love my computer since all my friends live there..." I want my friends back!

In related news

2010-09-19T16:10:00.000-07:00

I bought envelopes today for the first time in years. They were marked down to a ridiculously low price – two dollars and fifty cents for a box of two hundred and fifty resume-quality, rag bond, watermarked envelopes. I made the salesclerk check the price twice as I was sure she had made a mistake. She hadn't.

The marked down price makes sense, as I will probably not use two hundred and fifty envelopes for the rest of my life. I'm sure there were similar sales of audio cassettes, VHS tapes and typewriter ribbons in the last few decades, but honestly – who remembers?

In a burst of synchronicity, I will use those envelopes (okay, a few of those envelopes – seriously, two hundred and fifty?) to announce to the world my latest screenplay, Postal. Though, in an even more synchronous turn, I'm announcing it here, first. 'Cause I'm a product of the Internet age, and I can't wait for my own virtual reality headset. Facebook in 3D? Awesome.

Dude!

2010-09-17T17:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun video of yesterday's storm excitement in New York City. Several folks in the comment section suggest these young men cannot be real New Yorkers as REAL New Yorkers would never show that level of excitement about anything.

There's truth in that.

Back in high school, I was on a harbor ferry when it was hit by a freighter in a dense fog. The boat tipped way over, one side was clearly bashed in and the PA system sounded like very nervous adults in a Charlie Brown special. As far as any of us knew, the boat was going down.

We tramped out on deck and yanked life vests out of their wooden racks. That was fun, 'cause you got break the wooden lath that held the vest in place. Breaking stuff is fun, even for blasé New Yorkers. Then we realized that the outside vests were filthy, and tramped back inside to retrieve nice clean vests from under the seats. And then... we all stood around holding our vests at dainty arm's length, pretending that nothing exciting was going on.

Sure, the ship might be about to pull a Titanic, but that's no reason to make evident one's distress by actually PUTTING ON THE DAMN VEST.

I haven't lived in New York in some time, but I still have trouble visibly displaying the level of excitement in this video – even when I'd like to. I went to Comic Com and thought the people geeking out over their favorite stars looked like they were having fun. But I just couldn't do it. I am a fan, but I'm a fan who was born and raised in NYC. I scream on the inside.

As for these guys, native New Yorkers or not, they are a perfect example of why writers should write realistic dialogue – but never real dialogue. DUDE!? A tornado is touching down in Brooklyn and that's the best you can do? Well, yeah, in real life, that is about the best anyone manages.

Recessionary spending

2010-09-11T15:36:00.000-07:00

I just read a BusinessWeek article about the recent Burger King sale. Guess what? The chain's "razor-like" focus on their favorite male 18-34 demographic has proved disastrous while McDonald's attempt to woo a new market has been a stunning success. What's that new market... ?

Women.

Apparently, women make money. And in the current recession, they're doing a better job of it than young men. Ouch.

Hollywood, I hope you are paying attention. McDonald's didn't just throw out a couple of poorly-prepared options to keep the ladies happy. The company reworked the menu, the marketing and the restaurant decor to the point where I am proud to tote my coffee around, in public, in a McDonald's cup. And why not – McCafé coffee is pretty damn good. It sure would be nice to want to watch a recent movie as much as I currently want a Mickey D snack wrap and fruit smoothie.

Of course, the McDonald's market – even the new, money-making McDonald's market – just isn't sexy. Anyone coming to Hollywood in search of Entourage-style sex, drugs and more sex and drugs probably isn't too interested in appealing to such a market. Though at the moment, I bet there's LOTS more fun to be had at McDonald's franchisee conventions than at any such Burger King get-togethers. Scary thought for the future, huh?

Profitability. It's the new sexy.

Please nobody tell James Cameron

2010-09-06T15:28:00.000-07:00

The waitress handed Precious Nephew a 3-D puzzle toy. We put together the puzzle and Precious gazed at it, perplexed. "Where are the glasses?" he asked. "How can it be 3-D if there are no glasses?" Uh... crap.

I am not ideologically opposed to 3-D movies. In general, I am in favor of the March of Progress and all that. My sister recently found a 1950 shelter magazine that breathlessly suggested housekeepers could enjoy unexpected benefits from modern, office machines like... staplers. I have a stapler – and a 3-hole punch, tape dispenser and copy machine – in every room of my house in which I am likely to encounter paper. Though in a few years, the use of paper could mark me as old fashioned all by itself.

I like synced sound and color movies, too. My problem with 3-D movies is selfish. I am one of the 2-12% of the population who just doesn't see them in anything resembling 3-D. This makes me the annoying wet blanket on movie night. And for that, I hold Mr. Cameron personally responsible.

Of course, my insistence on good 'ole 2-D makes me a pleasantly cheap date. Though as an adult who buys my own tickets, that's not such a great argument.

No protagonist is an island, entire of itself

2010-08-22T18:46:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I described a common failure in the scripts I am asked to read – the script crammed with compelling supporting characters that features an oddly unfocused protagonist. I have since decided that an opposite problem also exists.

I recently read a script in which the protagonist was a beautifully detailed creation with a gaping hole in his life and choices looming ahead. But despite all that lovely story-engine work, the script remained stuck in place. There were needs, but no real obstacles. There were choices, but no real costs. The writer was only interested in the protagonist and had only bothered to develop the protagonist's story. Without equally needy and choosy supporting characters, the story lacked all conflict.

I would say this is an obvious point, but this is not the first such script I've read. Not by a lot. Perhaps it's obvious to me from my years as an actor. There's an old joke about the actor who played the doctor in the first production of Streetcar Named Desire. The character is barely a cameo role – the doctor only appears in the final pages to lead Blanche DuBois off to the nut house. Before the opening, a reporter who knew nothing about the play asked this actor what it was about. "It's about this doctor, see," the actor earnestly replied, "and he meets this lady who wants to depend on him. And he really wants to help, but he's torn, because..." and so on. You get the joke. There are no small parts, only small actors, blah, blah, blah. Trust me, when you're in one of those small parts, this joke is funny. But like many an old cliche, it's also true.

There are no small parts for writers, either – and we have to play ALL the parts. Every character must need something and must face choices. They must be the stars of their own little movies, so when the protagonist's movie gets in their way – hello, conflict!

And... I'm back.

2010-08-20T23:54:00.000-07:00

Been a while, huh?

As a follow-up to the last post, my computer did not die permanently – but it was an expensive can of Fresca. My multiple keyboards and I soldiered on and the impossible deadline turned out to be possible. The draft is finished. The trusted readers have returned their verdicts. One more quick buff and polish and I get to put this baby to bed.

But first, THIS baby needs to go to bed. Tomorrow I will post something nice and long to make up for the drought. See you then.

When troubles come, they come in pretty blue cans

2010-07-27T20:40:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted in a few days as I'm under an impossible deadline – which caused me to knock over a can of Fresca and soak my laptop keyboard, because that's the sort of crap that happens as soon as you have an impossible deadline. I do not blame the Fresca. I blame the deadline.

It is every bit as hard as you might think to write a script without functioning DELETE and RETURN keys. The nice boys at the Mac shop were out of keyboards, of course. They swear a new one will be in tomorrow. In the meantime, I am the rock god of writing, with one keyboard plopped on top of another and hands everywhere. It's a terrible way to write, but I bet it looks cool.

I will be happy when this is over. And I may have news, to boot.

Darlings, dead

2010-07-23T17:41:00.001-07:00

Way, way back in the day when I first spun the idea that turned into the script I'm currently re-writing, I wrote a single scene. I don't usually start that way: I'm more of a beat/outline/draft writer. But the scene came to me in an insistent rush while I was out for a run (and did not have a piece of paper handy – why does that always happen?) and it seemed to contain the beating heart of the movie I wanted to write. I raced home and scribbled it on a sheet of paper. That scene became my favorite thing on the beat sheet, my favorite thing in the outline, and my favorite thing in every draft since.

Guess what I just cut?

Here's why I don't need that scene anymore: yes, it still contains the beating heart of the movie. But now, SO DOES THE REST OF THE SCRIPT. That once lovely scene is now freakin' obvious. Goodbye.

Oo – this feels good. Let's see what else I can cut...

Tour de narrative

2010-07-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

If one can recognize – and sympathize with – the protagonist as the person who gets dumped on in Act One, then Andy Schleck is now the protagonist of the 2010 Tour de France. Stage 15 is a little late for Act One, but at least I know who to root for in the stages that remain. Ride, skinny boy – ride!

Of course, the dumping upon is merely the situation that helps establish the protagonist’s status. We still need a story… what will Andy choose to do next? Will he dig in and claw back those precious eight seconds? Will he accept former friend Contador’s hotel room apology? Will he whine about it and drop further back – in which case, I'll stop rooting for him.

Speaking of which, someone should have offered Lance Armstrong a rewrite after his early stage disasters. He could easily have been the protagonist, but he ignored the clearly heroic choice laid before him. Lance might be out of contention, but teammate Levi Leipheimer clings to a spot near the top. How wonderful would it have been if the great Lance Armstrong had declared, as his farewell Tour slipped away, "This one is for all the teammates I've had over the years." The world would have set aside any reservations they ever had about the guy if Lance Armstrong had pulled a Bull Durham during his remaining two weeks in the sport, and sacrificed his own glory to drag Levi onto the podium in Paris. Of course, that hasn't happened. And perhaps the sort of man who can win seven championships in a row is not the sort of man who will EVER sacrifice himself for a teammate. But hey, it would have been nice.

Slate has an interesting article on our deep-seated desire to root for the underdog. Though the article offers several semi-scientific reasons, the writer suggests that part of our tendency to root for the guy who isn't winning actually traces back to the narratives all around us – a bit of self-fulfilling prophesy for us writers:

When you think about horse racing, which comes to mind first: Seabiscuit's underdog victory in the 1938 Pimlico Special or Cool Coal Man's unremarkable loss at the 2008 Kentucky Derby? … And consider all the other underdogs in our culture—from the Bible, from literature, and from every sports movie ever made. It's no accident that we remember the Titans...

Charitable horn tooting

2010-07-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

I'll be helping out with the annual Los Angeles Rabbit Foundation yard, gift, supply and bake sale this weekend, Saturday July 17, 10am - 3pm in West Los Angeles at 2499 S Barrington Avenue (on the corner of Pearl Street). Swing by, grab a cupcake, buy a MacGuffin or two, and chat about rabbits, scripts, or anything else.

It's not too late to donate to the sale! Designer clothes, small appliances, furniture, DVDs, books, jewelry, whatever you've got is welcome. Please contact larabbits@earthlink.net to schedule a donation time before the sale. (Los Angeles Rabbit Foundation is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to house rabbit welfare in the Los Angeles area. All the proceeds from the sale go to help the bunnies.)

If you would like to know more about house rabbit pets, please visit the website or come meet the bunnies at Centinela Feed Adoption Days, 3860 S Centinela Ave, LA 90066 every Saturday afternoon from 12:30pm - 3:30pm. See you there!

My day as a six year old

2010-07-14T14:54:00.000-07:00

I played hooky like a six year old yesterday and watched Toy Story 3 in the morning, Despicable Me in the afternoon and The Princess And The Frog on DVD at night. I would say my brain went on vacation for the day – but, dang, those are some thoughtful kiddie movies.

Now I'm going to make things worse by blogging about it all. So much for vacation. Minor SPOILERS ahead...

Despicable Me is a hoot through and through and features a funny and moving performance by Steve Carell as protagonist super-villain Gru. The performance is so good that... well, I'm not sure how much movie is left without the performance. Perhaps that's unfair. The end of the film is predictable – but there's nothing wrong with that. Macbeth is predictable, too. We know where most moral lessons are headed, and most moral lessons are still valuable.

Here's the real problem: ten minutes after leaving the theater, my mind was still churning over the movie I had just seen... three hours before: Toy Story 3. Perhaps if I'd reversed the order in which I watched the films, I might appreciate Despicable Me more. But not to worry: the target market for both films, Precious Nephew (age almost 5), was so thrilled by Despicable Me he never touched his popcorn. So there.

I enjoyed The Princess and the Frog as well. It has a nicely nuanced moral message -- neither fully pro wishing-on-a-star, nor fully against -- and the film is beautiful. I should have caught it in theaters. I will have to remember that for Tangled – Disney's upcoming Rapunzel reboot. Tangled trailers played in front of all three movies yesterday, though the version that played in front of Toy Story 3 and Despicable Me was an oddly male-centric cut. Hm.

The animation of Frog's Tiana and the few glimpses of Tangled's Rapunzel, make clear that Disney animation still does better than anyone else the thing it has done better than anyone else since Beauty and the Beast: animate female faces that are attractive, interesting and funny all at the same time. Those girls might be drawings, but they are d*mn fine actresses, too. Nobody does female faces like Disney.

And then there's Toy Story 3.

I can't say I walked out of this film happy, but at a full twenty-four hours later, I'm still thinking about it. It's clearly a great movie. Is it too deep and tragic for kids? Maybe... though I loved deep and tragic as a kid. Perhaps the folks at Pixar have simply decided to make great movies, and don't care if we call them kiddie movies or not. They've earned that right – and proved they can do it, too.

The end of the film is absolutely the right end, but it's a tough one for me. I gave away my vast, beloved Breyer horse collection when I went to college, and I still feel terrible about it – though I know I made two little girls insanely happy. I certainly don't know what I'd do with a room-sized plastic horse collection now. But here comes Toy Story 3 to make me feel even worse about my decision since I kept my Woody – my very first Breyer horse, who has spent many years now in a cardboard box in my dad's guest room. I hope he isn't too lonely. Eesh. I suck. Thanks, Toy Story 3!

Anyway, I found an early moment in the film particularly stunning. Teenage Andy must decide what to do with his old toys before he leaves for college. He scoops the entire collection into an attic-bound plastic bag. At the last moment, he pulls Woody alone from the pile and places him in a college-bound cardboard box. This is the moment that pays off Woody's extra burden of moral responsibility through the entire series. He secretly believes he's special – because he IS special. And as the special one, he will be called upon to make a sacrifice before the series can end.

I am reminded of sci-fi/horror gem Pitch Black. At the start of that movie, a space pilot played by Radha Mitchell punches a button to jettison her sleeping human cargo. The entire movie waves its hands around for the next hundred minutes to make you forget that you know Ms. Mitchell needs to balance that pushed button with a major sacrifice before the end. Toy Story 3 waved its hands around admirably. I really did not know how the movie was going to end – even though it ended where it had to end.

And I'm STILL thinking about it. In fact, I'm starting to tear up again. Crap. I need a tissue. And then, back to work.

Show and tell

2010-07-08T11:17:00.000-07:00

Show don't tell, show don't tell, yeah yeah yeah – we are all good little writers. We know this. We have it tattooed on our wrists for easy reference.

But here's a twist. Much of the time, when I watch television, I don't watch it. It's on, and I'm listening. I look up every now and then to check in, but I'm also sorting mail, washing dishes, reading magazines, or even – as right now – tapping away at my computer.

I read an article once that had statistics on this sort of thing. The article claimed lots of people don't watch watch television, they only sorta watch. I tried to find that article for your reference, because I hate it when people say, "I read an article once" as if that meant anything, but when I googled people who listen but don't watch television I got a lot of people bragging about how they don't watch television. I hate that, too.

Anyway... where was I?

Right. Watching television, mostly with my ears. The television in question is the Tour de France daily coverage on Versus. Lance Armstrong's new ad for the Nissan Leaf electric car plays heavily during the commercial breaks. Here's the voiceover script for the ad:

In twenty years of cycling, even when I was ahead, I was always behind. Behind cars. Behind trucks. Behind... those guys. Tailpipe after tailpipe, after tailpipe. Until now. The one hundred percent electric, no tailpipe, Nissan Leaf. Innovation for the planet. Innovation for all.

The ad is quite clear – when you see it. Tailpipes spew smoke and Lance coughs and one understands that "until now" refers to the tailpipes and the smoke and that Lance is still behind the cars, they're just not spewing smoke in his face anymore. But the first time I saw the ad, I didn't really see it – I only heard it. And I heard something quite different.

THE AD QUITE CLEARLY STATES THAT THE NISSAN LEAF IS SO DANG SLOW THAT A GUY ON A BICYCLE WILL NEVER HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT RIDING BEHIND IT AGAIN.

I think this is not what the good folks at TBWA/Chiat/Day had in mind. These are the people behind the Justin Long/John Hodgman MAC ads. These are good writers. And the Leaf ad is a good ad, as long as you watch it. Which I didn't. And according to that article I couldn't find, a lot of other people won't either.

So definitely show, but make sure you aren't telling something completely different at the same time.

Weekends? We don't need no stinkin' weekends!

2010-07-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

I dropped scripts off at the agency this morning. I dropped a friend in Manhattan Beach later this afternoon. At both locations, people wandered about in t-shirts and flip-flops with happy smiles on their faces. The sun shines brightly – June Gloom ended right on schedule – and everything seems in place for a glorious three day weekend.

During which, I will be chained to my desk trying to make the words happen good and stuff.

I have never experienced weekends and holidays the same way other people do. All the way up to high school, I toured with a children's theater company. We worked over the holidays – who doesn't want to see a puppet show on Easter, Purim, Halloween or Christmas? In college, Thanksgiving break got reserved for building sets and costumes. That happened a lot after college, too. I opened a Christmas show on the last weekend in November once and was stunned to learn that the other actors planned to skip dress rehearsal to head home for some kind of meal or something. Hello, priorities?

And now of course, free days are writing days. But you know what? I like writing. I also liked the puppet show, and building sets, and even dress rehearsals. Looks like I'm taking my holidays just the way I want them.

I hope you all have a wonderful July 4th as well!

Yo-ho-ho and a really good point

2010-06-29T18:21:00.000-07:00

Here I go linking to John August again. I was planning to comment myself on the not-exactly-upside but not-entirely-downside of Hollywood's rush to develop non-narrative property titles, be they board games, toys or theme park rides.

A title is not the most binding straitjacket around. A title might specify a genre or setting, but the story remains wide open. A movie based on a toy might seem silly, but it will only BE silly if the creators make it so.

For a master class on how not to make silly movies, listen to the writers' commentary track on the Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl DVD. The final pair of writers explain their process in great detail and one understands why the movie turned out so well – and how it could have gone wrong so easily.

Even if you aren't interested in why it was the superior choice to make Commodore Norrington a priggish good guy – but still a good guy – listen to the track anyway. Seriously, how freakin' awesome is it that a movie based on a theme park ride includes a writers' commentary track?!

[I've linked above to the Blu-ray edition. Amazon no longer lists the 2-disc DVD version on which I listened to the commentary track. Anyone know if the Blu-ray version includes the same tracks?]

Ouch

2010-06-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

I just realized I took the same easy road I've inveighed against time and again. The original sketch of my current project called for the hero to make a disastrously wrong choice at the end of act one. I backtracked almost immediately from that I idea. In my defense, I was encouraged to remove the disastrous choice to make the hero more "likeable." Screw that; I have no defense. I know better. Woody in Toy Story is not likeable because he's a good guy; he's likeable because he does something terrible – and fights like hell to fix it.

Every comment on my script since the change has involved some form of, "I don't get what the protagonist is fighting for." Of course you don't. He's fighting to fix the idiotic mistake he was supposed to make in act one.

I have now fixed the outline and I feel so much better... now that my protagonist feels so much worse.

Crying all the way to the bank

2010-06-25T16:03:00.001-07:00

Short and sweet, via John August: "The protagonist is the character that suffers the most."

I'm going to add my own footnote: emotional/existential suffering counts more than physical. A lot more – though it is nice to give your hero a good Indiana Jones-style beat down every now and then.

I've commented before that many otherwise talented writers seem unable to apply this to semi-autobiographical protagonists. In the latest flurry of script reading, I've noticed a corollary. Many otherwise talented writers seem unable to apply this to characters written for stars.

I recently read a buddy cop script in which one of the two leads was written for a particular attachment. The star role was clearly intended as a weightier, showier, more memorable part than the second lead – Riggs, not Murtaugh. Unfortunately, unlike Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black, who dumped piles of crap on Riggs, this writer tiptoed daintily around his star. The character got all the great lines and stood up bravely for all the right things, but nothing ever got to him. The villain threatened the star with a gun, but never with deep, heartfelt, I-just-can't-go-on-style loss. The guy got beat up a few times, but he never really suffered.

Go ahead and hurt your stars. Give Mr. or Ms. Above The Title something to love, then take it away. Be merciless. They won't hold it against you. Heck, actors love that stuff anyway.

And if you need extra incentive, remember how much they're going to earn from all that suffering you endured writing the thing.

Power elbows

2010-06-22T17:15:00.000-07:00

In an interview on the Prime Suspect 7 DVD, Dame Helen Mirren thanks a senior policewoman who advised her against smiling or folding her arms while in character as Jane Tennison:

"You can watch all 22 hours of Prime Suspect and I never fold my arms. It's a defensive act and while you might think folding your arms looks strong, you're actually putting up a barrier to defend yourself... For Tennison to have used such basic body language in her own incident room would have betrayed her instantly."

Michael Shurtleff gave us similar advice in class once, though with less nifty psychology and more straight-up ego. "Keep your damn elbows from touching your body," he said. "It makes you look small. On stage, you want to look big – so people will look at you."

I wish someone had given Joseph Fiennes that advice before he starred as an FBI agent in FlashForward. I like Joseph Fiennes. I'm one of the few people in Hollywood who thinks Shakespeare In Love deserved to win over Saving Private Ryan – and will say so out loud. But I hated Mr. Fiennes' performance in FlashForward. Dude had his arms clamped in front of his body – elbows touching shirt – in every scene. I wound up rooting for the slimy guy from Pirates Of The Caribbean to run off with Penny from Lost. That can't have been right. Joseph Fiennes' character was the series lead; I should have been rooting for him. I'm not blaming Mr. Fiennes for the death of the series... but these elbows didn't help.

Okay readers, where are your elbows right now? Think about it – then MOVE THEM. Do this in interviews. Do this any time you want people to take you seriously. And if you've got an actor on whom the survival of your entire precious series depends, tell him you want to see daylight inside those elbows, now!

Mixed company

2010-06-20T16:39:00.000-07:00

Many recent films about friendship take as a given that the friends will be all male or all female – think Sex And The City, The Hangover, Grown-Ups and the whole Apatow-esque genre. While I have enjoyed some of these films, I find the single-sex friendship assumption strangely old-fashioned.

I'm not talking about the dang kids with their mixed sex preteen sleepovers and such. I'm talking about me and everyone I know. I went to a co-ed school. I live in a co-ed neighborhood. I belong to co-ed clubs and work in a co-ed office. It would be weirdly anti-social to befriend only women, or for the guys I know to befriend only men. And it's not just my generation. My dad's book club seems pretty well mixed, and they're all closer to the Greatest Generation than X or Y, or whatever we're up to now.

Still, these movies make money. Some of them make A LOT of money. Maybe my life and my dad's book club are weirder than I think. Or maybe we all secretly long for a bunch of guys to do guy things with or gals to do gal things with, even though most of our friend activities do not involve bachelor parties and shoe shopping.

Or maybe – and this is the reason I find most likely – we are so well programmed to expect romance when two attractive actors meet in a movie, that a writer who wants to focus on friendship has to set up an artificial locker-room world to keep things on target. Friends fall into romance off screen, as well – and it does play hell with the storyline.

That last reason explains why television shows seem to feature more realistic mixed-sex friendships. Television characters hang around for years; we don't expect them to pair off every ninety minutes. Sure, nearly everyone at the end of Friends wound up in a couple. But it took two hundred and thirty six episodes to get there – plenty of time for the writers to explore other themes.

Speaking of friends – and Friends – I enjoyed the first season of Cougar Town. I loathed the name and had to be coaxed into watching it, but I enjoy the show and its depiction of mixed-sex friendship, romance and everything in between. And that friend who convinced me to watch it? A guy. We went shooting a few years back for my birthday. With like, guns. 'Cause when you hang with me, it ain't all shoe shopping.

Though, some of it is.

Steady as she goes, Mr. Sulu

2010-06-15T20:14:00.000-07:00

IT has arrived. The smartest-looking desk chair on earth. By the end of the week, I expect IT to be writing my scripts for me.

Anyone else think this looks like Captain Kirk's chair?

A little, right? The wide armrests, if nothing else. By the way, the original Kirk chair sold at auction for $304,750. Which makes IT seem almost cheap. Almost.

Moving targets

2010-06-14T13:00:00.001-07:00

As a reader, one often gets scripts in which an eager writer has specified the brand, and even the particular model, of every prop, car, electronic device and beverage touched by the protagonist. Here's a note to my fellow writers: don't do this.

First, unless the writer gives equal attention to character and plot details – which the people who write this sort of thing never do, preferring to use brands as a kind of hip shorthand – the script starts to resemble a catalog. Readers do not recommend catalogs for further development.

Second, though brand specificity shows that the writer has an "eye for marketing" – guess who else has an eye for marketing? Marketing departments. Though they might appreciate plot-important phones, cars and beverages, they aren't particularly fond of limited options.

Third – and this is the big one no one seems to think of – unless the writer is willing to track down every copy of the script every three months and update all the model names and numbers, that hip shorthand quickly deteriorates. Phones and bar orders that seemed cutting edge when the script was written, cause the reader to sneeringly check the copyright date a few months down the line. Consumer cool is an ever-moving target. Phones come and go, but well written character arcs, thorny choices and intriguing flaws are forever.

Surprise!

2010-06-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that the story I told in yesterday's post provides an example of another of ScriptShadow's twelve points. As a bonus, this point is one of my favorite things to see a writer pull off in a script.

Number 8 – SURPRISE!

Surprise applies to more than plot twists. It's also a powerful character tool. I love it when the wrong person surprises everyone and says the right thing – thereby making previously obvious choices difficult.

In The Piano, the heroine believes true intimates should be able to read each other's mind. The right man never manages the trick while his finger-chopping rival succeeds. The heroine is surprised – and forced to reevaluate her choices.

In Sleepless In Seattle, Bill Pullman's schlubby fiancé seems destined for dumping. He turns the tables, stands up for himself, and dumps Meg Ryan instead. Sure, Meg winds up with Tom at the top of the Empire State Building. But her once obvious choice is tinged with surprise – and a little bittersweet regret.

The otherwise mediocre film Waitress contains a wonderful, unexpected scene – worth the price of admission on its own. At the film's climax, the brutal husband learns that his wife has secretly plotted to leave him. The audience – and the wife – expect an abusive confrontation. Instead, the guy throws himself on his knees and tells his wife every tender word of love she has longed to hear. He's still the wrong guy, in a major way. But the protagonist's clear path is suddenly not so clear – which is unsurprisingly, exactly what one wants in a drama.

Two stories

2010-06-06T15:44:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed ScriptShadow's recent post on How To Write A Great Script. The twelve points seem like basic, obvious stuff. But most of the scripts I read fail on exactly these points. I guess they aren't so obvious.

One of the biggest issues I've found in scripts involves a combination of numbers 3 (a main character we want to root for), 6 (conflict), 7 (obstacles) and 11 (heart). Far too many writers resist making things difficult for their protagonists – they resist giving the protagonists difficult choices (7); they resist pitting those protagonists against equally compelling antagonists (6); they resist making their protagonists wrong at crucial moments – even though WE ALL KNOW that flaws are the best way to make protagonists more human-slash-likable (3); and in the end, they resist making their protagonists suffer the consequences of their mistakes (11).

I can't use examples from recent scripts I've read (confidentiality agreement, natch), so I'll offer a real life story instead:

When I was in college, I worked in the dorm kitchens. At one point, I was assigned to assist an older employee who had returned to her job after a stroke. I worked as hard as I could since the woman needed my help to keep her job and qualify for her union pension. When my time assisting the woman ended, she threw me a surprise celebratory breakfast, presented me with a family heirloom brooch, hugged me tearfully and told me that she thought of me as the daughter she never had.

Isn't that a nice story? It's also boring as hell. And uninformative. You learn nothing about me, the protagonist, from that story – and you probably don't care to. Now let's see what happens when we add a little 3, 6, 7 and 11 to the story (which is how things went down in real life, by the way):

I started the job with all kinds of warm, fuzzy feelings but quickly found out that the old lady was a BITCH. She was MEAN. She only had one functional hand, but that thing was a CLAW. When she wasn't grabbing me and yanking me around, she hit me with her cane. Seriously – she HIT ME. She hovered over me all the time, making derogatory comments about everything I did. Nothing was ever good enough for her. After a month of misery I could no longer drag myself to work. I went tearfully to the office and told them that even if the old woman might lose her pension, I still couldn't take the abuse. I begged to be reassigned, and, mercifully, they complied.

On the day I left, my tormenter turned into my fairy godmother. She threw that celebratory breakfast, presented me with the heirloom brooch, hugged me tearfully and told me that I was the daughter she had never had – and explained that if she had ever been hard on me it was because she knew I could take it and use it to achieve great things. She would be proud of me to the end of her days. Sniff. And CRAP. The old witch had a motive and everything. I still took the transfer, but every time I look at that brooch I feel like shit. And I kind of deserve to feel like shit.

But YOU like me a little more now, dontcha? :-)

Off on a dig

2010-06-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

I'm currently working on a page one screenplay rewrite. I did a lot of brainstorming last week, and came up with some exciting ideas. Those ideas led to other ideas, which led to other ideas... and suddenly everything connected back to themes and arcs that were already in the script. I never realized what they meant before. Even though I wrote the script.

My sister made the following comment, "Rewriting a story is like working an archaeological dig." I'm going to add a bit: Rewriting a story is like an archaeological dig; everything's in there – you just need to dig it up, clean it off and figure out what it is.

Of course, good acting and directing is archaeology too. I remember a Royal Shakespeare production of The Taming Of The Shrew I saw at the Kennedy Center in 2003. Most modern interpretations of the play wink at the "difficult," "misogynistic" text. Some work – I enjoyed Kevin Kline in an Old West version in Central Park years ago – but most don't. The RSC production played the text absolutely straight. And yet they found emotional connections and character motivations that made the play work in a way I have never seen before. Now this is a play I know well. It is the first play I ever saw performed live and I ran straight home and reenacted it with my dolls. I KNOW the text. Or I thought I did until I saw the RSC production, in which they discovered gobs of previously buried information.

The first time we meet him, male lead Petruchio mentions that his father has died. Most productions gloss over that information; they take it to mean that the guy has an inheritance and is looking to settle down. But Shakespeare didn't write a lot of accidental stuff. If he says the guy's father has died, he means the guy's father has died. Which should be important. It would be important to me. Maybe Petruchio is in, I dunno – pain? – the first time we meet him. Maybe he sees a mirror of his misfortune in Kate, a woman who lacks her own father's love... and suddenly, we're off to the races on a whole new, fascinating play, filled with all kinds of interesting, emotional stuff that Shakespeare left there for us to find. It only took the nice folks at the RSC a few hundred years to dig it out, dust it off and figure out what the heck it all means.

By the way, considering how many RSC actors have been cast to lead American series lately, how is it that Jasper Britton hasn't found a home on American TV? Somebody give that man a lab coat, stat!

The blank space at the center of your script is YOU

2010-05-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

After years of reading scripts, I have come to a stark conclusion. Though we are told again and again to "write what we know," many writers just plain suck at writing themselves. It is easy to spot an autobiographical protagonist, even if you know nothing about the writer. That self-representative protagonist is always the dreariest, least compelling, least appealing and least understandable character in the script. Even when the plot requires drama and difficult choices, somehow the self-representative protagonist sails through with little more than mild angst and a furrowed brow that could be mistaken for peevish indigestion.

Is it because we can't bear to inflict harm upon ourselves and therefore allow the characters that represent us to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – even though, dear g*d, that makes them dull?

Is it because we are too close to our own issues to understand that the difficult choices in front of us are difficult – or even choices?

Is it because we are so close to our character's issues and they're so freakin' obvious (to us) that they require no identification or explanation, even though they do? They really do.

Whatever the reason, please take warning. If you get back comments that the protagonist seems unlikeable and you love him, or comments that the arc isn't clear even though to you it's the whole point of the script, be aware that you might not be experiencing the script in the same way as anyone else. You might not think your lead character is all that autobiographical, even though he is a twenty-eight year old former fireman with commitment problems, and hey – so are you. Try the following exercise anyway. Write a sample page as if that fireman were the villain – or at least, someone who absolutely, positively isn't you. Change the race, the sex, the hopes, the dreams, anything, everything. Study that new character's motivations closely. You might find they are stronger – and closer to your own unspoken truth – than anything you could have written for yourself.

Cognitive dissonance

2010-05-24T14:59:00.000-07:00

I have been uploading the massive 170 CD box of everything Mozart – thanks again, Record Surplus – to my mp3 collection one careful disc at a time over a period of weeks. Why do I believe 170 discs won't overwhelm the collection if I upload them s..l..o..w..l..y instead of all at once? I'm still planning to upload the whole box. It's so well thought out, and so not rational.

I'm not sure what this has to do with writing, except as an example that otherwise intelligent people can believe silly things, even when they know the things are silly. Scientists can be superstitious. Insurance agents can play Internet poker. Doctors frequently smoke. It's also an example of what Michael Shurtleff (yes, him again) calls "opposites" – the thorny way most of us fight desperately for the things we need, while also clinging to the things that make the things we need impossible. I love my balanced music collection; yet I can't resist the acquisitive urge to grab all that Mozart, even if that means my shuffle play now includes way too much harpsichord.

I probably don't need a balanced music playlist or 170 CDs of Mozart; I just like the word better. Which reminds me of my cousin's two year old. She recently discovered the word "need" and decided it is always preferable to her previous favorite word, "want." Shurtleff would agree. Need is always a stronger choice. Go for it, kiddo!

What's in a name?

2010-05-15T11:51:00.000-07:00

I love this website. It's one of my favorite writing research tools. Few things date a character so indelibly as their name. We all know that certain names become attached to certain eras and certain ages. We live now in the era of Jayden and Emily. Jazz babies lived in the age of Walter and Lillian. Times change. One might want to avoid the obvious first few choices, but about halfway down the site's top twenty list for any birth year, one can find a gem of a name that places a character effortlessly in time.

Though here's an interesting warning: audiences seem to prefer heroes and heroines with names popular in their own era – not in the era when those characters would actually have been born. Stephanie became a HUGE name in the 70s and 80s – remember Saturday Night Fever? But when the character Stephanie in that film would have been born, say in around 1960, the name barely cracked the top 100. Of course, popular characters and actors can catapult otherwise unpopular names to the top themselves. I read an article once that suggested the catalyst of the final switch from masculine to feminine of the name "Kim" came after Kim Novak became a star in 1950s Hitchcock films. Checking the SSA site... hey look, masculine Kim peaked in 1955, then pretty much dropped out of sight. Might be something to that theory.

So yes, you can completely ignore the actual popularity of a name, and create a wild sensation with something unique and different – or something already popular in your era but totally out of place for the actual character. But go forth with a warning. You can succeed ahead of the curve, or right on the curve, but don't ever wind up behind the curve. If you call the present day 30 year old protagonist's mother "Edna," you are waving a giant red flag. You are no longer writing a real person, but rather a character based on an elderly stereotype. Which is to say, not just the character is elderly – the stereotype is as well. Edna peaked in popularity in 1912. Moms in the 1950s may have been called Edna, but I don't want to see any 1950s moms in your present day script. Okay? (Unless you're writing a script about 1950s moms in the present day, and that's a whole other thing.)

Sun to snow in less than two hours

2010-04-21T19:24:00.000-07:00

I had family in town all last week. We journeyed to see the desert in bloom at the Antelope Valley Poppy Preserve – an amazing show after a particularly wet winter.

Afterward, we mobbed the lone ice cream truck on a sweltering strip of highway and looked up at the snow-covered San Gabriels in the distance. We decided to be THERE instead. Soon after, we were – with snow crunching underfoot and everything. Ain't Los Angeles grand?

We started the day a mere two miles from the Pacific Ocean, to boot.

Coming home, I experienced a ginormous Bass Pro Shop in Ontario, California. I read a post-apocalyptic script once that specified a Bass Pro Shop as the location for a scene. At the time, I found the specificity annoying. I don't need to know exact brands of product or retail locations from the scripts I read. Marketing departments do, but their needs shift and change – why limit available opportunities?

Now that I have seen the crazy over-the-top hugeness of the store in Ontario, I get it. A scene of post-apocalyptic travelers camped out in a camping goods store the size of a forest – and designed to look like a forest – is pretty freaking funny.

Michael Shurtleff meets the Captain

2010-04-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I told you all to read a book by Michael Shurtleff, my favorite acting coach. I find the book even more useful now that I'm a writer. One might assume a book called Audition is about neat tricks to use when you don't have time to study the freakin' lines. Yet Michael's approach is remarkably text-based – possibly the most text-based acting approach floating around our Method-loving world. And as the people writing the text... seriously, read the book.

Shurtleff tells us to imbue each character's choices with life or death importance. It was his Prime Directive, if you will. That might seem a bit extreme. Not every scene is Hamlet, surely. But here's a stunning example of how well this works, even with truly dopey material.

In a recent GQ interview with Andrew Corsello, William Shatner explains his take on the Priceline Negotiator's unique motivation:

When they were writing it, they didn't quite know how to handle this new campaign they were doing... Then I realized: The Negotiator is insane! ... His very life depends on his ability to convince you that you ... have to get this bargain!
(my emphasis)

This is why there is and will always be, only one Captain for me.

This message brought to you by America's Next Crazy Model

2010-04-09T17:57:00.000-07:00

It is impossible to step out of the box.

You must leap out of the box. You must run headlong out of the box. You must launch yourself so far past the edges of the box into far, far away crazy land that the area between you and the box starts to look normal – even though it's still out of the box.

My favorite acting coach, Michael Shurtleff (if you haven't read his book, Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part
and you are remotely involved in story creation, stop reading my blog and go read his book) used to call this "making a horse's ass of yourself." His theory: if you do something so stupid right off the top that you have no hope of being "right" or "safe" or "what they're looking for" or any of those other timid terms, you leave fear behind. And fear is the death of all things great. And great is what they're looking for.

A spectacular example of this went on display in this week's America's Next Top Model (season 14, episode 5). At the top of the episode, model wannabe Jessica told the camera that she wanted to get "out of the box." Isn't that sweet? They always say that, and they never do. They make some teeny-weeny little step that isn't even visible from my couch and – boom – off the show!

But Jessica went for it. Her nightmarish 2-minute "let's get nekkid" tram trip with prim photographer Nigel Barker was such a jaw-dropping episode of horse's assitude that it ran in the trailers all week. It was honestly a little hard to watch. One clucked and shook one's head and assumed the idiot child was not long for the competition.

Ha. Jessica won the next two challenges in a walk. Fearlessly. She'd already embarrassed herself on network television; what the h*ll else did she have to lose?

I hear you clucking and shaking your head. You don't have to be an idiot in public to be fearless! Ha, again, I say.

Here's an example that even Shurtleff didn't get at the time. Michael was a casting director. He finished off a lecture once by telling us all the things we actors must never, never do in a casting session. The worst example of all was some dingbat "committed" actor who read for a serial killer role and never once broke character. The fool even pulled a knife and leaped across the table to threaten the casting assistant. Michael didn't need to tell us this was a terribly stupid thing to do. We clucked. We shook our heads in amazement. And then a tiny voice piped up from the back of the room, "Did he get the part?"

You know the answer.

I'm not encouraging anyone to pull a knife during an audition. Please, please don't – especially now that I'm on the other side of that table. But if you hear any timid "rights" and "what they're looking fors" creeping into your vocabulary, get yourself the h*ll out of your box. If that means not listening to me, do that too.

Speaking of the other side of the table, this advice applies to writers. If I'm stuck at any point in my writing I pull out a fresh sheet of paper, scribble "No Idea Too Stupid" at the top and let fly. Aliens. Witches. Time Travel. Evil Twins. Everything is fair game, and bigger is better. Those first few ideas don't have to be good, they have to get you out of the box. Once you're out there floating free – usually about halfway down the page – something wonderful will happen.

A voice from the past

2010-04-07T14:20:00.000-07:00

Dear Jane Espenson,

It's good to have you back!

Good book

2010-04-02T18:51:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of software company 37signals. I highly recommend the book, and the company's blog, if you're planning to start your own business, work for someone else's business, or just get up in the morning and do stuff. It's that good.

I thought that even before I reached the awesome wonderful fabulous chapter, Hire Great Writers. Here's an excerpt:

If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off.

That's because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking.

Would you believe that holds true even if you want to hire... a writer?

I sound like I'm joking, but I'm not. I work as an agency reader. It's a big name agency, so the scripts I read have cleared a high Hollywood hurdle. Yet most of them are terribly written. I know it's not my job to correct grammar. I know that poor sentence structure will never show up onscreen. Surely compelling stories and imagination should trump mere spelling and grammar?

Absolutely.

And yet... they never do. The ability to put together a good sentence has proved a spot on indicator of the ability to put together a good story – and vice versa. As the book says, clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. You might not need grammar and spelling to construct a dramatic story in a visual medium, but you still need thought.

The opposite of irony

2010-03-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

For about two hours, I was unable to research my script about a worldwide data center snafu... because of a worldwide data center snafu.

The flip book movie of your life

2010-03-12T15:05:00.000-08:00

I've been playing with the new features in iPhoto '09. (Instead of polishing the latest draft of something else, I know.)

When you drag the cursor across one of the images on the Face cork board, it flips through the tagged photos in date order. If you've taken a lot of pictures, this flip sequence makes a little movie of your life.

It's particularly fun with kids. I just watched a flip book movie of Precious Nephew changing from tiny baby to gawky five-year old. Cool. For me, anyway.

In years to come, the parents of kids who grew up with digital photos will be able to massively embarrass their kids not with a few snaps, but with a flip book record of their precious darling's baby face gettin' older and older and older -- complete with bad haircuts and facial hair and wrinkles and everything. Hee-hee.

Past and future imperfect

2010-03-03T14:03:00.000-08:00

Enjoyable article in Slate yesterday. It's always fun to look back and cluck at how wrong we were fifteen years ago about technology advances today. Of course, "we" fifteen years ago are also "we" today. It's likely that I'm missing retrospectively-obvious game changers in my current fiction. Uncomfortable thought, that.

The immediate past can be a problem, too. One link in the Slate article threw me for a loop: YouTube has only been around for five years. How is that possible? I remember five years ago. It all seemed so normal. And yet... jeez, how did I manage without YouTube?

This kind of myopia for the last decade must drive the production designer of Lost nuts. The flash sideways episodes are set in 2004, near enough to seem perfectly normal. And yet, I noticed flash sideways Jack Shephard had one of those ancient flip phones. Apparently, ancient = FIVE YEARS AGO. In my mind those phones seem decades old. But of course, five years ago I had a honking great computer sitting on my desk. With a monitor. Remember those???

Nope.

The library elves head up the Amazon with lots of paddles

2010-02-20T11:22:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of the Los Angeles Public Library online catalog. I order books and the library elves race around this enormous city picking them up. The whole passel gets delivered to my local library and all I have to do is stroll in and check them out. It's so civilized!

I noticed this week that the catalog has a new addition. Each book's listing now includes a link to that book's Amazon reader reviews. Interesting...

I know there are those who consider Internet phenomena like Amazon reader reviews, Wikipedia and the dreaded news blogs bad things, dismissing them as "group think" that stifles "real" creativity. They claim the reviews and blogs offer dangerously unsanctioned opinions and should be avoided. I am not one of those people. I was a history major in college, with a special focus on the seventeenth-century -- the Golden Age of the Pamphlet. Every loon with a few pence got a printing press and went nuts on a street corner, passing around copies of whatever crackpot idea struck his, and occasionally her, fancy. As with today's blogs, some of those loons really were loons, and some of those crackpot ideas really were crackpot. But other crackpot ideas seem less cracked today: democracy, religious freedom, stuff like that. Dangerously unsanctioned ideas can be a very good thing. You never know who's doing the sanctioning.

Anyway... I asked the LAPL Webmaster when they made the addition and what kind of discussion they had on the subject. Here's the reply.

"We added this feature in October of last year. We did have discussions about it, and while some possible concerns were raised, in the end we felt the benefit to our patrons was the most important thing."

That's a politic reply, and I don't blame him. But wouldn't you love to hear some of those discussions and concerns in dirty detail? The next paragraph was more interesting...

"The system uses the ISBN number to make a request to an Amazon server for reviews. If there are none, the patron is invited to make one when they click the link. If there are, the last 5 are brought back from the server when the patron clicks the link, and another link is created to link back to all the reviews. It is using an API Amazon makes available to other web sites."

The entity driving this rather remarkable change is Amazon itself. One might think Amazon and libraries are natural enemies in the world of book delivery, but of course, they aren't. I often buy a book on Amazon after reading the library copy. And if the library system now takes me directly to Amazon, and shows me a bunch of reader reviews, it's even more likely I'll simply buy the book in the first place. The library elves are fast, but Amazon Prime's free two-day delivery is even faster! Plus, I can sell the book -- again on Amazon -- when I no longer need it.

Dang, that's one smart company.

I'm on a horse

2010-02-18T19:06:00.000-08:00

The Old Spice Superbowl commercial is wonderful. This is even more wonderful -- an interview with the ad's creators describing how the seamless transitions were produced. It's a longish video, but worth watching.

I draw two major conclusions:

1. I just love in-camera effects. And apparently, other people do too!

2. There are many wonderful, awesomely talented people on the technical end of things without whose efforts a bunch of silly words on paper are just a bunch of silly words on paper. And I say that as someone with deep respect for silly words on paper.

A picture is worth how much?

2010-01-04T10:55:00.001-08:00

Even brilliantly written scripts can stand to lose a line or two once they're on film -- was anyone feeling peckish before reading the sign?

Nepotism

2010-01-01T10:33:00.000-08:00

One last Precious Nephew post... 'cause it's a good one.

Precious Nephew loves the appalling plastic Gormiti figurines -- but the Italian toys have disappointingly little accompanying narrative video. Yesterday, Precious Nephew interrupted my sister and me to describe the convoluted plot to a Gormiti movie. I assumed this was a real movie, like the Transformers and Bionicle movies he spends hours describing. But no. My sister informed me that there is no movie containing the plot elements he was describing. Intrigued, I asked Precious Nephew if he was writing the movie and he said, "Yes. I am the author." I asked him if he wanted to be a screenwriter -- a person who writes movies -- when he grows up. And he said, "Yes. I will be a screenwriter. I will write all the movies."

He's four now. Considering he's already asked how to make Youtube videos, in a few short years, this kid might be writing all the movies. I'm looking at some kick-ass nepotism from Generation Underpants. Bring on the (literal) baby writers!

Sorry Michael and George, but I call the franchise

2009-12-13T21:20:00.000-08:00

The latest narrative gem from Precious Nephew:

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, the evil Transformers sent a bad guy to earth and his name was... Hitler."

Where does he get this stuff? Oh, wait. I remember -- EVERYWHERE.

From the mouths of not-so-little babes

2009-10-07T11:29:00.000-07:00

I visited Disneyland yesterday with Precious Nephew. He is four and Space Mountain was the only ride he requested by name -- which says something about the marvelous ubiquity of Disney marketing. How does a four-year old who lives in Virginia know about Space Mountain in Anaheim??

We thought the roller coaster might be a bit much for him -- he's tall and made the height requirement, but was clearly the youngest kid in line. But Precious Nephew insisted: Space Mountain or bust. We briefly tried to convince him that the rocket ship kiddie ride in front of Space Mountain was Space Mountain. He laughed at our foolishness, "That's not a mountain."

In the end, we needn't have worried. Precious Nephew clutched his mommy the whole way, but I screamed more than he did. I think next year we may need to up the thrills and visit Six Flags. Yikes.

Anyhow... here's a bit of marketing insight for anyone questioning the wisdom of Disney's Marvel purchase. As we left the park, Precious Nephew caught sight of the Lilo & Stitch image on a plastic ray gun. He turned to us and declared, "I used to love Disney Features... when I was little. Not any more."

Quick -- somebody buy that kid a comic book franchise!

A summer secret

2009-09-25T22:26:00.000-07:00

Now that it's officially fall - too late for anyone to profit from this little nugget - I want to share a piece of wisdom from my current job. Submit your spec scripts to agencies in the summer. Yes, it is true that nearly everyone is on vacation in the summer. That person who isn't on vacation? That would be the lowly script reader.

During the fall, winter and spring, agency readers are busy, busy, busy with piles of lovely submissions. In the summer, not so much. But we still need something to read. So the agencies, bless them, put out the nets and find scripts somewhere. And a lot of those scripts are (saying this gently) not very good. And it is just barely possible that - in the face of all that not very good - a normally critical reader's standards could slip. A script that might otherwise get a "no" gets a "maybe," and a "maybe" gets a "yes," and a script that's actually good gets a reader singing and dancing down the halls demanding that somebody make that sucker right now!

I exaggerate. A little.

Still, if you've only got one person you can strong-arm into giving you an agency recommendation to get your precious, precious baby over the transom and into my bin - consider doing it in the summer. If you write that script in readable English, I will love you. In the fall, I make no promises.

Branding is your friend

2009-08-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

I had a good meeting with a television literary agent last month. We talked about what the business is currently looking for in a new writer. Which is not what we're taught to expect.

I think we all know by now that original material is gold. Maybe you need a series spec to get in the door, but after that, it's all about your personal voice. So you write that spec pilot. Great. Fabulous. Then what -- another spec pilot? Sure, why not. And since last time you wrote, say, a procedural, this time you're going to write a high school comedy, or maybe a sudsy drama, or a sci-fi actioner. Gotta show range. We've all heard horror stories about writers getting pigeonholed at the start of their careers and nobody wants that to happen. Right?

Wrong.

As far as this agent is concerned, don't think of it so much as a pigeonhole as a BRAND. And yes, you DO want a brand. You want to be a salable, marketable, instantly recognizable entity: this is what I write; this is what I will bring into your writing room and produce, reliably, again and again and again. Don't worry too much about pigeons and holes -- once the industry loves you, there will be plenty of time to show them that you can do sudsy high school procedurals in space just as well.

Okay. So this is one agent's opinion, right? Weeeeell -- this is also the message I got from the Disney/ABC Writing Fellowship interviews. Every question they asked came back to: who are you as a writer, what is your singular voice and what can a room rely on you to provide. Every question. For three days of interviews.

It took me three days to figure out the answer. I didn't get the Fellowship (SO close - agh!) Learn from my mistake. Know your brand.

It's either a job interview or a psych experiment

2009-07-18T01:57:00.000-07:00

Apropos of this, one friend of mine, who is now a studio executive, got his first industry job as a PA on an old syndicated television show. The job interview was simple, and sneaky as hell. They left the group of wannabe PAs in a waiting room. In one corner of the room, there was a water cooler. In the water cooler was an empty bottle. On the floor near the water cooler was a stack of sealed, full bottles.

That was the interview. The first wannabe PA who felt like a drink and went ahead and replaced the bottle without being told to do so, got the job. Game over.

My friend got the job.

Not so friendly new directions

2009-07-08T00:17:00.001-07:00

I just finished watching Warehouse 13. I'm not going to talk much about the show because -- well, I'm just not.

But I am going to talk about one aspect of the show which I found disturbing. Very disturbing. Disturbing enough that even though I probably shouldn't say bad things on a public blog -- I have to.

This show is supposed to be part of the new "woman-friendly" direction for the SyFy channel. And yet --

One. The female agent is your typical professional woman in a television show or movie so she must be a tight-ass. Okay. The male agent is your typical catnip to hot naked chicks. Whatever. When they wind up working together, the male agent condescendingly tells the female to "unbunch her panties." Yup. He said that. And he's supposed to be irresistible to women -- because we LOVE it when guys say stuff like that to us? In professional situations?

Okay. They are trying to find a new audience and it's possible the sort of woman who used to hate the SciFi Channel does like to be condescended to. I wouldn't know. I used to love the SciFi Channel. Ah well.

But it gets worse. Much worse. Inexcusably worse...

Two. A young woman is viciously beaten by her boyfriend. The Warehouse 13 agents investigate the case and the male agent's first assumption is that the young woman must be a gold digger who knew exactly how to push her boyfriend's buttons so he'd beat her up and she could sue his family. Umm. Okaaay. That's so terrifyingly not female friendly. Do I need to explain why? I don't, right? I'll just move on...

Three. The young woman drops all charges against the abusive boyfriend and reunites with him while they are dressed in lily-white Romeo-and-Juliet outfits. They kiss. It's sweet. It's romantic...

NO IT ISN'T. The girlfriend does not know that her boyfriend is under the malicious influence of Renaissance headgear. As far as she knows, she's gettin' back together with the dude who beat her up. Because she lurves him. And we're supposed to be happy about this: Aww, ain't it sweet. They belong together.

No. No they don't. No! Stop.

It's almost not even worth going to four. Which is: lay off Lucretia Borgia already. Her daddy, the Pope, started marrying her off for political reasons when she was thirteen. She was hardly a scheming "cougar." She was even worse off than the girlfriend above.

Oy. I am bummed. I want The Sarah Connor Chronicles back. Sarah would have killed anybody who told her to unbunch her panties in a heartbeat. Boom. Dead. We would never even have gotten to two, three and four.

Precious Nephew Photo

2009-06-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

'Cuz sometimes I'm just a doting aunt. Though, slightly funny story here. When my dad joined the Navy, they "fixed" his ears -- surgically pinning them back. I guess they thought he might attract too much enemy fire with those big old Menes scoops. It looks like my nephew might have equally awesome bug catchers.

I'm guessing the Navy isn't so particular anymore. (Though Precious Nephew would much rather be a "shoulder" and live at the Pentagon anyway.)

When to hide your Emmys

2009-06-12T20:51:00.000-07:00

My sister checked out some real estate a while back. At one posh home, the seller had his three (!) Emmys proudly on display. My sister was duly impressed.

Then she got home and looked up the name on the Emmys. She found out the guy -- one assumes the homeowner -- had just finished a nasty divorce and might need to unload his house quick. At whatever price.

The real estate agents aren't kidding when they tell you to hide personal stuff...

Vindication!

2009-06-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite parts of the whole coverage process is writing that one-sentence premise: trying to boil down exactly who and what the writer has been going on about for the last 90-120 pages.

Early on I figured out the basic rule. Who's the protagonist? That's the subject of your sentence. What does he spend the movie doing/figuring out/choosing between? That's the verb. Frequently I get scripts with old coverage attached. And it surprises me how many times the last coverage writer got this wrong. Dead wrong. Really, really stupidly wrong -- dropping the protagonist off into a prepositional phrase and featuring some supporting character as the subject.

Yesterday my brother -- who went to the University of Chicago and attended their famous Little Red Schoolhouse writing classes -- informed me that the number one rule of good argument writing was exactly this. The subject of your story/argument/paragraph is the subject of your first sentence. What he/she/it does is the verb.

Wa-hoo. And I didn't even have to move to Chicago to learn this.

Speaking of rules

2009-06-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

A subrule: If there's a nifty classical term for your rule-breaking, you might be okay.

From Wikipedia: Hyperbaton. A figure of speech in which words that naturally belong together are separated from each other for emphasis or effect.

Happy this makes me.

If it's what they want, why do we resist?

2009-05-26T13:23:00.001-07:00

I watched Role Models again last week. How great was the moment when the boys arrive at the LARP (ahem, LAIRE) battlefield dressed as "warriors" from KISS -- in the fire-spewing Minotaur truck? It's a real stand-up and cheer moment -- largely because it is also the fully realized payoff to all the KISS and Minotaur truck references sprinkled throughout the earlier parts of the script. And who doesn't love a satisfying payoff?

Writers, apparently. I've been reading a lot of unproduced scripts lately, and the satisfying payoffs are few and far between. Sometimes the setups are still there, but it feels as if the requisite payoff has been removed from the script out of sheer perversity.

Is this intentional? Does, somehow, giving the audience what they want make us feel -- dirty? Is this an attempt to avoid those nasty little rules of structure that bring authorship dangerously close to mere craft and away from the simplicity of pure art?

Get over it people. Writing is both craft and art. And many rules are there because... those are the rules. Writers have been writing for a long time. Some things work and some things don't and, well -- we kind of know by now. Right? You want your script to move out of the unproduced pile and edge just a teensy bit closer to the produced pile? Then if you show me a fish in act one, I better see that fish again in act three. Them's the rules.

The comings and going of TV 2009-2010

2009-05-18T19:40:00.000-07:00

Still too much to process... some pilots I've read; many I haven't read yet. But it is time to bid a fond farewell to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, now officially dead.

It was a classy show; I still can't figure out why it so completely failed to click. My Tivo will miss it next year (though my Tivo and I may have been part of the ratings problem.)

I apologize for the infrequent postings lately. After noting the slowdown in postings around the writer blogosphere and attributing it to an uptick in the job market, I went out and got a job myself. I didn't expect the call -- it was from a resume I sent in two years ago. But there's hope for that uptick; the person who interviewed me said she hadn't touched the pile of resumes in two years and was only now, finally, hiring. So there. Uptick away!

But I can't act that

2009-05-03T13:36:00.000-07:00

An old cardinal rule of acting... you can't ever have as your goal in a scene, getting the heck out of that scene. It just doesn't work. Unless each character has something they are fighting for that forces them to be there, things get dull quick.

Last Friday night's Dollhouse ran smack up against this problem. SPOILERS AHEAD...

The Alan Tudyk architect character didn't ever want to be in any of his scenes. He didn't want to let FBI agent Ballard in. He didn't want to accompany him to the Dollhouse. He didn't want to show him how to break in. He didn't want to actually go along with Ballard into the Dollhouse. He didn't want to walk past the security cameras. One assumes he didn't want to hack the computer either, though he certainly did it pretty quick. And yup, it got dull.

Now I know he was supposed to be doing this to prevent agent Ballard from turning in his pot farm. But, c'mon, an FBI agent has already seen the pot farm. That game is over. Wouldn't running away be a better choice?

So of course the architect turns out to be evil super-villain Alpha. Who didn't see that coming? I sure did -- possibly because I knew this ep was written by someone abso-effin-lutely talented who wouldn't have left that character twisting in the wind for so long without some reason for him to be there.

Still, that leaves an awful lot of dull episode before the reveal. And how much more interesting would it have been if the architect had some reason of his own -- not hard to imagine, the guy is a disgruntled former employee, right? -- to want to get into the Dollhouse himself. If we were all invested more in that character, wanting him to get over his agoraphobia or whatever that was and win his little victory, we would all have been actually devastated by the reveal. And not just mildly relieved.

Though that still leaves another problem. I get why Ballard needed the architect to break in. But if the architect really is Alpha, why in heck would he need Ballard to help him break in? No reason I can tell.

Where are the writers writing?

2009-04-19T21:38:00.000-07:00

I follow a number of other industry blogs, mostly of other writers. Many of whom update their blogs on a regular basis -- far more regularly than I've ever managed. Lately I've noticed that hasn't been the case. Anyone else notice the marked slacking off around the writer blogosphere? Is this a sign of exhaustion... or of an uptick in the "real" work market?

Let's hope for the latter!

The pressure never ends -- but when does it begin?

2009-04-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

So precious nephew loves "shoulders" (soldiers, a frequent sight when you live on the same Metro line as the Pentagon) -- and firemen, and construction men, and garbage men, and pretty much anyone who drives anything large and motorized for a living.

So I asked him, "Do you want to be a soldier when you grow up?"
"No," he said.
"Do you want to be a fireman?"
"No."
"Do you want to be a construction man?"
"No."
"Do you want to be a garbage man -- ?"

"LEAVE ME ALONE ALREADY!" he wailed.

I only recently discovered what I want to be when I grow up. Precious nephew is three and a half. I should have known better. Sorry.

Catching up with my DVR

2009-04-12T12:35:00.001-07:00

I've been traveling for a few weeks and my Tivo has gotten rather ahead of me. So here's a few notes as I catch up --

I'm enjoying Castle, mostly because the relationship works so well between the two leads. They need to be careful though: in the last few episodes the Castle character has come up with entirely too many brilliant (though a tad obvious -- the wife did it, duh) case-breaking observations that somehow never occurred to Beckett. They need to keep the relationship balanced. Yes, Fillion is the reason I started watching, but Fillion + Katic is the reason I keep watching. Beckett must remain equally smart or the show devolves into Castle Explains It All For You. Which doesn't sound nearly as much fun.

I've held off on reviewing Dollhouse. Partly because I didn't want to say bad things about a show put together by so many people whose past work I admire so much. But also partly because, though I didn't like it, I couldn't stop watching it. There was something there... but what?

I watched the "game-changing" episodes (6 and 7) with interest. But still, the show didn't quite click. We found out Echo's big secret past identity... and she was a whiny student activist. Yawn.

But I kept watching. And got rewarded for my patience with episode 9 ("Spy In The House Of Love"). Aside from the fact that Olivia Williams finally got the chance to remind us that she is a wonderful actress and not some ice-queen stereotype, this episode also changed my perception of the show.

I always assumed this would be a show about Echo trying to find her true identity. And when we found that identity -- so early on and so uncompellingly -- I was disappointed. But maybe that was the whole point -- to tell me that my assumption was WRONG. I'm not sure what the show is about, but maybe I'm not supposed to know yet. Keeping the audience guessing this far into a short season is playing a long, dangerous game -- particularly on Fox Friday nights -- but I've never liked shows that lay it all out for you in episode one and then keep repeating the formula for years. So count me in for the ride. Even if that means I'm getting hooked on another serialized show about to get yanked off the air and leave me hanging...

Speaking of which, Fox folks: please give Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles another season! Yes, things got a tad baroque this year, but man did they pull it together in that cliff-hanger of a season finale. I really, really, really want to see where they're going. That was some high-class genre acting, plotting and writing. As for the complaint that it's too "charactery" and not "actiony" enough: who's making that complaint? No one I know. And no one who loved character-heavy Terminator 2, one of my fave movies of all time. And not for the explosions.

That's all for now. More to come as I work through the backlog...

And when I'm wrong I'll say it

2009-03-18T15:38:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching NBC's Kings -- and I liked it. I didn't like the script when I read it months ago, but apparently a big, flossy soap opera plays better with good acting and grandiose visuals than it did for me on the page. I'll try to remember that the next time I read a big, flossy soap opera. (Though I suspect there's a flip side -- that big and flossy plays even worse when it's poorly produced. Call that the Uwe Boll effect.)

Unfortunately, no one -- not even me -- was there to watch the big, flossy premiere. Now I watch everything and was totally planning to watch Kings. But, even though I have been assured they promoted the heck out of that premiere, I still missed it.

Ouch.

Here's another problem when you program for margins at the expense of actual audience numbers. When you do spend a lot of money on a show (and they did, and you could tell -- thank you!) there ain't nobody out there to watch it.

Hopefully things will get better. I'll watch next week. When does it air again...?

A Welsh semi-conductor manufacturer?

2009-03-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

If it weren't so sad, this would be funny.

Aw, hell. It is funny, sad or not. Apparently NBC-Universal's Sci-Fi Channel will celebrate the end of all the quality shows that made them special by incomprehensibly -- and unpronounceably -- rebranding as the Syfy Channel.

Heh?

Mocking the new name is almost too easy. Really -- how do you pronounce it? Did no one tell the brain trust at Landor Associates that a "y" used as a vowel in the middle of a word does not carry the same pronunciation as the "i" in Sci(ence)? Is it Seefy? Sewfeye? Sifee? I can't help thinking of the Welsh word "tydr" -- pronounced "tudor" -- as in the actual Tudors. Surely Sufee is not what they had in mind?

But the idiotic name itself is only the tip of the goodbye-channel-I-once-loved iceberg here...

“The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network.

This was the problem, for which the new name...

"...made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise."

Ahhh. They hate their audience. Now if I were a sci-fi loving guy, I'd be real insulted right about now. As it happens, I'm a sci-fi loving girl...

Guess what? Still insulted.

But then, NBC-Universal leadership are the beautiful people who brought us the “mean, ugly nerds” quote when referring to the striking WGA writers. And who made such a badge of honor of their lack of comic-book knowledge while they drove Heroes into the reef of its-a-genre-show-it-doesn’t-need-to-be-good dumb choices.

Why don’t they just re-label it the PROM Channel and be done with us? They’ll lose their entire audience, but hey – they’ll be cool.

And no, I didn’t go to my prom. I went to a geek high school. No one went to prom. I may have compounded the error by playing D&D with my (mostly male) friends on that night instead. Or maybe we were watching Star Trek re-runs. ‘Cause yes, I like my Fi with a little Sci.

But I am not such an uncomplicated (and clearly unwanted) demographic as the suits at NBC-Universal might think. I also loved the Sex & The City movie. I watch Grey’s Anatomy. Clueless is my go-to all-time favorite I-could-watch-it-on-an-endless-loop fun time. And sometimes I watch that makeover montage in The Devil Wears Prada where she gets to wear all the pretty clothes over and over and over again. Pretty clothes... sigh.

In fact, I like LOTS OF THINGS. Quality things. Well-done things with character and imagination and something important to say (even if it’s just “awesome boots can pick you up when you’re feeling blue”).

So marketing guys, this is ME: I earn money. I spend money. I am susceptible to good advertising. I love well-done Sci-Fi. AND I AM NOT THAT UNUSUAL. Or uncool.

Except, apparently, on the new SyFy Channel. Though, as of this Friday, I'm not sure what I'd be watching on that channel anyway.

Guys, you don't need a new name. You need new shows. And no, your much-hyped entry (Moonlighting plus The X-Files plus Indiana Jones) does not sound particularly good -- or remotely hip, cool or cutting edge. I haven't read the pilot. Maybe it is. I hope it is. But just from the description I can kinda see the show already in my mind. And I'm kinda over it.

On a final, personal note -- when I was first told of the new name from a Facebook friend, I thought it was a hoax. I should have known better...

Some years ago I worked for one of these expensive re-branding firms in New York. The big client was Woolworth's, as it turned out on the hunt for a way to turn a slow, downward spiral into a free-fall plummet. I wasn't actively working on that account, but I remember seeing the materials laid out for the final client pitch -- the name "Venator Group" highlighted on one of the boards, among a number of equally silly made-up words. I laughed, thinking this was the "stupid choices" board after which they would show the client the real, "correct choices" board.

Joke was on me.

Don't you think Woolworth's missed an enormous opportunity to rebrand as... Woolworth's? They could have staked a claim as the "real thing" -- a more upscale Target-type store for the urban masses with a cool vintage feel and a gen-u-ine soda counter in every store. Plus all those awesome downtown Deco locations...

The Venator Group was not long for the world. Let's hope the Syfy channel rethinks before they follow suit.

One good line

2009-03-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed the premiere of Castle. Sure, it's derivative of the Mentalist, which was derivative of... lots of other shows. Successful shows, so.

And I agree with at least one reviewer's assessment of Castle's home life -- do we really need another precocious teen daughter on television? But...

It was one of Alexis, the precocious daughter's, lines in the written pilot (that I was happy to see make it into the show that aired) that had me sold on the script:

CASTLE... It’s all become so goddamn predictable. Like this party. 'I’m your biggest fan' 'Where do you get your ideas?'

ALEXIS... 'Can you sign my breasts?'

CASTLE... That one I don’t mind.

ALEXIS... Yeah, um, FYI - I do.

Finally -- a precocious daughter who wants her father to act like a father and not necessarily be cool all the time. Maybe even hang onto a little childhood herself while she can. This may be the one precocious daughter I can actually tolerate.

Musical confusion

2009-03-09T21:29:00.000-07:00

I'm watching a lot of reality television this week. It's research on a project I'm working on. It's not like I'd be watching ANTM if it weren't, right? (Okay, wrong. I've never missed an episode -- I love Tyra Banks and all the wacky photo sessions.)

At this moment I am watching a show I have never seen before -- Dancing With The Stars. And I am completely baffled. I love ballroom dancing. Okay, not the weird competition stuff, but actually doing it. So I know a cha-cha-cha when I hear one. And not one of these couples is dancing their cha-cha-cha TO a cha-cha-cha.

Why not??!

I understand "updating" the music for a modern audience, but it's clear from the music they are dancing to that the intended demographic is awfully long in the tooth. How much further back do you have to go for... Xavier Cugat? (Who is the only real reason to EVER cha-cha-cha IMHO.)

I am going to try muting the program during the dancing and insert Ritmo Tropical instead... hot, hot, hot!

A screwy perspective

2009-03-01T17:21:00.001-08:00

I love the Budweiser commercial Jake the Clydesdale except it really bothers me that the horse, who one assumes was born in this country and is now three generations distant from Scotland, still speaks with a Scottish accent.

It doesn't bother me that it's a HORSE speaking.

A minor peeve that's rapidly becoming a pet peeve

2009-02-18T17:39:00.000-08:00

What's with all the television characters talking to ghosts and imaginary people lately? Does everyone in times of stress acquire a helpful dead dude (preferably someone from their past with guilty unfinished feelings attached) with whom to hash things out?

When I'm stuck on a page at three in the morning and the deadline looms ever closer, where's my helpful dead dude? Never seen him. Not once.

But I think "stuck on a page at three in the morning" may be the reason we're getting all these dead dudes in the first place. As in, "it's sooo hard to write a scene where my lead has no one to talk to... waah."

Suck it up, guys.

Think how much more exciting the last Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles would have been if Sarah had had to -- I don't know -- break down and confide in the guest-star doctor instead of some dude who was SO NOT Michael Biehn. Of course she wants to talk to her dead lover. And she really doesn't want to talk to the doctor she's holding at gunpoint. So if she HAD to talk to that doctor, which she kind of did anyway -- so why did we even need dead not-Michael Biehn?

I thought one of the things they were questioning on the show was how John Connor will get to be such a great leader of men if his mom's distrust of everyone keeps him so isolated. Wouldn't an episode where Sarah has to break through her lack of trust, and maybe find her trust rewarded, be interesting?

Some writer's dead dude wasn't doing their job at three in the morning on this one.

A genre pet peeve and the application of Moore's Law

2009-02-14T14:22:00.000-08:00

I've been watching the 1995-6 series Space: Above and Beyond a lot lately. I still love the show, but I've been reminded of a pet peeve I have with lots of future-set genre shows, this one included: the constant thematic use of 20th century popular music.

I don't mind the suggestion that people will still enjoy music from other eras in the near future. I have very eclectic tastes myself, and I believe people's tastes are only going to get more eclectic as time goes by and Moore's Law makes the storage and easy portability of ridiculous amounts of pop ephemera the norm. But if space marines in 2063 head off to battle listening to 19th century classical, mid-20th century Patsy Cline, and late 20th century punk rock, shouldn't they occasionally also listen to mid-21st century mind-click-phono-folk-pop-weirdness? Or whatever is actually being written and performed in 2063? Surely not everyone on board the Saratoga is a vintage music junkie?

I love the way Lost tweaked the use of pop music in genre shows, even though it's not (mostly) a futuristic show. They won my absolute devotion in an early episode that closed with a dreamy montage of beach life over a pop song, complete with lyrics. Then abruptly, the song cut out. Hurley reached for his disc player, shook it and said "oh well, I guess that's that." And that WAS that. No more unexplainable pop music -- at least not until they found all those records in the hatch...

I've been trying to figure out how much "earth archive" materials my own future explorers will be able to access in Savages. Well, duh, Betsy -- they'll have EVERYTHING. Probably on an iPod the size of a finger nail inserted subcutaneously somewhere in their heads. They'll have the entire, searchable, Library of Congress and then some.

Crap. Moore's Law is a bitch.

But I promise, if I ever have them enjoying a thematic moment of popular music, some of it will date to 2258.

Birthday wishes

2009-02-12T10:45:00.000-08:00

Happy birthday, Abe Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

In an odd fit of synchronicity, I have both a book about Lincoln and On The Origin Of Species sitting on my bedside table right now. 'Cause in an even odder fit of synchronicity, Lincoln gets killed off early in one of my pilots, and Darwin is the inspiration for a twenty-third century cult in another. If only Marc Rich and the AVMA were born on the same day, I'd have a clean sweep of pilot-y weirdness.

An attempt to parse network scheduling

2009-02-05T10:47:00.001-08:00

So Life On Mars returned to the schedule in its new slot last week with an episode that was... not very Life On Mars-ish. Kind of more Grey's Anatomy-ish what with all the cute cops and workplace sex with oops-inappropriate people. I assumed this was a case of script jetlag -- that this episode had been part of a new direction for the series intended to make it gel better with Grey's and implemented before the move to the post-Lost slot was finalized. It seemed an odd choice to kick off the much-touted new pairing: a cop show with a heady, deep mystery joining the most mysterious show on television and premiering with a burn-off episode utterly lacking in mystery. But such can be the way of script jetlag. I assumed things would return to spooky-wonderful in future episodes.

After last night's showing, I'm confused. Clearly, last night's episode was meant to run BEFORE the episode that ran last week. It picked up the strings of mystery and show mythology left hanging in the fall and ran with them. WHY DIDN'T THEY SHOW THIS EPISODE LAST WEEK?

I think I know. And it worries me.

I sense network nervousness about the failure of the mythology-heavy Invasion that once followed Lost. I sense that -- though the whole point of pairing Lost and LOM is that both are mystery-heavy shows -- the network is trying to step way back on the mystery. That first-week-back show might not have been a burn-off of a now-jettisoned "new direction," it might BE the new direction this show is going to take.

I love Grey's. I really do. But I don't want LOM to turn into cops-lite with cute sex and bad polyester suits. If anyone out there is reading -- keep the mystery, guys! We love the mystery. We watch for the mystery.

A conversation about Facebook

2009-01-21T15:27:00.000-08:00

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about why we both love Facebook. Not that I am much of a Facebook user -- I'm at best a dabbler, posting updates in little fits and starts. My friend is a much more reliable poster, bubbling up to the top of my wall regularly with remarks and updates on her daily life.

Now this friend and I would be friends no matter what, but we are separated by most of a continent and several time zones and have been for nearly a decade of divergent life. And that is true for a lot of the people I've had friendships with over the years, even very close friendships. It's just the way the world works now: my college was nowhere near my high school, my first job nowhere near my college, and so on.

Of course, the Internet is hardly new. And the phone before that. And the post office. We've all had the getting-back-in-touch-after-a-long-time experience with an old friend: the excited first note; the longer note after they respond; condensing the highlights into one life-revealing letter -- THIS is who I am and what I've been doing. How about you? Kids? Family? Career? Life? Tell me everything!

But then...

How many friendships really continue after that first exchange of letters? You're here and they're there and it's not that you don't still have whatever you had in common that made you friends before, it's just... too hard, somehow.

Because even really intimate friendships are mostly made up of thorougly non-intimate conversations. Maybe 95 percent ordinary to every 5 percent intimate. Maybe 99 percent -- maybe more. There's a whole lot more "this is the shit I put up with today" than anything else even when you're 'til death BFF's. Especially when.

But it's hard to send a note to the friend you haven't seen in ten years just to say, "guess what happened to me at the post office this morning?" Even though THAT kind of trivial shit is what the friendship needs to remain a real friendship.

Unless you're both on Facebook. 'Cause trivial shit is exactly what you are prompted to post on Facebook. And I say HOORAY.

I have Facebook friends I have not seen in even longer than I am willing to publicly admit. But I know what they did last Thursday, and if they are ever bored at 3pm in the afternoon. And as long as I remember to post enough to -- the term my friend and I decided on was "inoculate" (though I think that might have slightly more negative implications than we intend) -- the friendship on my end, then those people will actually BE my friends when someday I need them for one of those treasured intimate conversations.

Writing plans

2009-01-13T14:08:00.000-08:00

I've got plenty of re-writes to do, a pilot take-away to put-together, a book proposal to finish and, of course, tons of glorious return calls and follow-ups that desperately need to be called and followed up on.

Which is why I'm here contemplating my next project instead.

I had an idea for a character I liked, and a couple of scenes burbled up around the guy so I wrote 'em down. There might be a fun, dark, twisty procedural in there somewhere. I'm not sure yet. We'll see when my dozen LAPL books-on-hold come through.

And it's time to write another spec. I have a folder of Life On Mars ideas from when the original show aired on BBC America and I bizarrely thought it might make a nice alternative to everyone else's House. I took the "sane" route and chose a less wacky alternative, or so I thought at the time. Then that show got cancelled, and Life On Mars made it to ABC. Shoot. I'd have a pretty cool spec right now. (Unless somebody wants to read a kick-ass Veronica Mars episode. Anybody? Hello... ?? Didn't think so.)

But I have learned from my Mars/Mars experience and will wait for further renewal info on any show before writing a spec script. The folder will have to sit a while longer.

What does that leave to spec NOW? Burn Notice? Bones? The Mentalist? Or should I take the wacky alternative this time and write a stand-alone Doctor Who... ?

Hmm. I need to think more about this. And maybe return a few of those phone calls.

A big ol' 2008 to 2009 omnibus post

2009-01-10T13:35:00.000-08:00

I got behind on my posting over the holidays and a whole lot of things have passed without comment. In no particular order, here's comment...

1. There will not be a SAG strike.

SAG was the first union I joined, right out of college. I am no longer in any way active as an actor, but I will always treasure my old SAG card. The union meant a lot to me. I have read the AMPTP proposals and there probably should be a SAG strike, or at least a sturdy and undivided YES vote authorizing a strike. Such a vote might be the only way to force some sort of meet-in-the-middle provisions that could be acceptable to SAG.

But that vote will never happen.

SAG has been a hopelessly, viciously divided union for many years now. There is no way the current leadership could get enough votes from the opposition for a strike authorization. And though it is true that this leadership brought the hatred of a large proportion of the union on themselves by denying the merger with AFTRA in 2003 on political (if our side didn't propose it, we ain't gonna approve it) grounds, well -- get over it, people.

SAG is a great big powerful union. They should be able to speak softly to the AMPTP while holding one hell of a big stick in the threat of an industry-halting strike. Problem is, everyone knows there's no stick. So the current stalemate might drag on, and on, and on.

I don't know how this is going to end. I just know, there will be no strike.

2. NBC's managing-for-margins strategy is dead wrong knowing what little we know about the future.

The one thing we know with pretty damn good certainty is that consumers in the near future will have many more choices in where, when, how and what they watch. I've already said bye-bye to network schedules and television screens and hello to my DVR and Slingbox. The even-younger generation will laugh at the very idea of scheduled entertainment. My three year-old nephew gets super pissed-off when he can't rewind or pause something, or call it up out nowhere whenever he feels like watching it.

Which does not mean that networks won't matter. When faced with a widening array of choices, people are going to want some kind of gatekeeper -- a BRAND they trust -- as a starting point when making decisions. Everything in the future is going to be about the brand. Define it NOW. Polish it. Ensure that people know, "When I want to watch a quality show like XXX -- I need to tune to YYY.beamedstraightintoyourhead.com."

The cable channels are pretty good at this. The networks have made some weird decisions lately, but I still know, mostly, where to tune for what I like.

And very little I like is on NBC.

It's not that I don't like their choices. I don't expect everyone to program for me. Sometimes a premise isn't something that interests me. So what. I respect the quality of lots of shows that I don't myself watch.

But the premises of lots of the new NBC shows did interest me. I just didn't like the shows. Some of them might have passed muster on the old Saturday afternoon syndie Action Pack. But the quality wasn't even close to what I expect from a network show. They were made on the cheap and oh boy could you tell. So now, in my mind, the NBC brand stands for cheap, lightweight shit.

NBC claims to be crying all the way to the bank: cheap is good and the margins are working for them. I say, FOR NOW. A once-phenomenal brand is shedding lustre nightly and I'm not sure they'll have time to polish it back up before the whole television-watching paradigm shifts and leaves NBC behind.

Maybe NBC will surprise us with a slate of innovative quality programming for 2010. I hope they do. This network gave me Law & Order. All of you who think it's old-fashioned now, remember that when it started, Matlock and Murder She Wrote were on the air. And ER -- watch that first season again and remember nothing remotely like it had been seen on television before. And Friends, and...

Aargh. If NBC were doing Friends today it would be shot on the cheap as a Belgian co-production about five guys and the stripper they sometimes hang out with. But that's a whole other issue I have with NBC right now. Don't get me started.

3. The January season is upon us -- hooray! There are so many new and returning series out there. My Tivo and I are giddy with excitement.

I am, of course, looking forward to Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Or hoping to look forward to it. Really, really hoping. Hoping SOOOO hard. But not expecting much. I know a lot has changed since the pilot script I read, but to me the changes sound like they've made the basic problem I had with the old script even worse.

A show about a personality-free character who takes on a lot of different cool roles makes for a neat hour-long script. And it was a NEAT script: short, sweet, exciting, full of lots of fun twists and great dialogue. But it's not a series. Imagine watching a second episode about a personality-free character who takes on a lot of different cool roles. And then a third. And then ten more. And then twenty-two next season...

The script hinted that they were moving toward lead character Echo developing her own personality and trying to find the truth about herself as the series progresses. I would have loved to see A LOT more of that in the first episode. But what I hear about the series now is that we're going to get even less -- and more about the Dollhouse itself and Echo's actiony adventures. Yawn.

There's no way I'm going to like a series about a lead character with no personality. It's just not possible.

Though, if ANYONE can make the impossible happen... I'm still hoping.

4. The Disney/ABC Fellowship

See how I buried the lead? Hmm. Wonder what that means...

I'm not a fellow this year. Sort of. Yet. At all. I don't know... I'm an alternate. If one of the actual fellows fails their background check I might get a call. If I do, I will not bury that lead.

One does wonder what a writer needs to do to fail a background check. Lying about a criminal background is the usual. But for writers -- is it more likely to be lying about HAVING a criminal record when in fact you don't? Didn't some writer just get in trouble for claiming gang-banger status when she turned out to be an honors student from Beverly Hills?

Whatever happens, the ABC people were quite wonderful and have promised that they will be in touch as they are planning to include me in some of the upcoming fellowship programs.

So, here's to lots more to write about in 2009!!

Seasons Greetings

2008-12-24T21:43:00.000-08:00

I just looked up from my desperate wrapping and it's 12:43 am here on the East Coast. So --

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

I followed the news reports of miserable ice storms on this cold side of the country and packed accordingly: every warm sweater and silk turtleneck I could find. Of course it was a mild 55 when I got off the plane, though every indoor space is still heated as though it were 20 degrees out. I'm going to die. If this weather holds I'm going shopping the day after Christmas -- and buying T-SHIRTS.

A Scrooge moment

2008-12-22T01:03:00.000-08:00

Ken Levine had a fun post today -- things he hates that everyone else loves.

I read the first few lines and my mind immediately jumped to the thing I most hate that everyone else, particularly at this time of year, goes nuts for.

It's A Wonderful Life.

It may be a wonderful life, but it's a horrible movie. I loathe it. Our hero is a banker who manages to lose money backing mortgages during the post-WWII housing boom??? This man is an idiot. This man should never be allowed near anyone else's money. At the end when they all give him MORE money I just want to scream.

As I continued to read Mr. Levine's post, I was thrilled to see he hates the movie too. Hmm. I wonder how many other people secretly harbor fantasies of Mr. Potter winning and turning the folksy little town into Las Vegas?

An ID badge

2008-12-08T21:53:00.001-08:00

Exciting news

2008-12-05T15:20:00.001-08:00

This weekend I'm getting ready for final round interviews for the Disney/ABC television writing fellowships. Send good thoughts my way on Monday morning, later Monday evening, and again on Wednesday... !

SAVAGES

2008-11-23T23:29:00.000-08:00

Details here. Gonna go sleep now.

Pictures pictures pictures

2008-11-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

Forgot to post these from my last trip...

A cheer

2008-11-17T15:39:00.001-08:00

I finished the first draft of a pilot last week. It was an idea I loved, but in those last hours of writing I began to experience considerable story fatigue. I gave the script to a few trusted friends and put the thing away over the weekend.

This morning I re-read my draft, and I'm quite pleased. I've already made some changes to tighten and focus things and I think I can have a REAL first draft in another day or so. And what's most important? I'm excited about the script again -- and I still love the idea.

Bye-bye, story fatigue. Hello, new possibilities...

An overstuffed mailbox -- and DVR

2008-11-06T13:16:00.000-08:00

I just got back in town from a long trip. There was much research, much writing, and some other work as well. Now I'm slogging through the enormous pile of mail, papers, magazines and trades that piled up in my absence.

I notice Entertainment Weekly had an article on five ways to fix HEROES. And boy does that show need fixing -- it's another thing that has been stacking up in my absence: all those unwatched episodes clogging up my DVR.

I used to love this show. I used to wait eagerly for each weekly installment. Yes, last season was bad, but the few episodes I saw this year were slightly improved. There were even moments of the old brilliance. But I'm still not watching. Why not?

I think the problem lies in those moments. They remain moments. Moments that are never developed further. Moments that give way far too quickly to other, less interesting (though perhaps more explosive) moments. A show cannot be made of moments, even exciting ones.

Take for instance the scene where Claire discovers her father is working with (gasp!) -- Sylar. That's a great moment. But then a second later we move on to daddy trying to kill Sylar, then on to Claire trying to save him (why, exactly?), then on to... something else entirely.

I wanted that first moment back. I wanted it developed. Hell, I wanted an entire episode about the relationship between Claire and her father and their former mortal enemy Sylar and how they can possibly forgive and move forward -- or not. I would watch that.

Note to Heroes: LET YOUR MOMENTS BREATHE.

I learned this myself recently. I packed a pilot outline I was working on with so much dang plot that I was giving myself a headache. Luckily, wiser heads prevailed and I removed and stored away great gobs of plot for the rest of season one, and maybe even some of season two (there was A LOT of plot). Now my characters have room to breathe. To interact. To react to and from the plot I have left. I actually have scenes and arcs now, and not just moments.

Second note to Heroes: ABANDONING THOSE GOOD MOMENTS IN FAVOR OF NON-STOP ACTION REEKS OF DESPERATION.

Nobody wants to watch a desperate show. It's embarrassing. HEROES was always a fantastical show, but it was a confident fantastical show. Now all the flipping around between stories and plots just seems nervous. Like a kid jumping up and down and shouting 'like me, like me, like me.'

I want to like you, HEROES. I really do. Just relax already, and tell the stories you've got. If I like them, I'll stick around. If not... throwing in six more stories I don't like either isn't going to help.

A change of heart

2008-10-28T08:47:00.001-07:00

What a difference a week makes. I watched the second episode of MY OWN WORST ENEMY and I must have missed some important information in the pilot. Are Edward's handlers going to keep sending him on missions knowing every time he'll turn into milquetoast Henry? Really? I figured Edward and Henry were going to have to hide that information, not just whine about it to the boss.

So I'm back to agreeing with the conventional wisdom: it's a ludicrous premise. But that's not the reason I won't be tuning in next week.

The second episode -- the title of the episode even -- deals with Henry's issues about Edward sleeping with his wife. I have no arguments there: these are important issues. In the similar series JEKYLL, even going near the wife and family was the uncrossable line for the mild-mannered doctor. In ENEMY, super-spy Edward seems to be having wild sex with wifey pretty much every night.

Which quite properly bothers Henry. Though, oddly, he's not bothered that a dangerous stranger is sleeping with his wife, the woman he's supposed to love. He makes no effort to warn her, or whisk her away to safety. Though he tries to devise a password-protection system with some doctor he knew twenty years ago, he makes no such attempt with his own wife and family. In fact, he doesn't seem very bothered by Edward's presence in the family home, or bed, at all.

He's only bothered that the stranger is better at sex than he is.

Talk about your breathtaking level of self-involvement. Did no one anywhere down the line on this show (or up the line) find that a teensy bit disturbing? Not to mention fatal to the premise of the show: we have to like Henry for the show to work. Edward is already a cold-blooded assassin -- who's gonna cry if he gets whacked? Henry -- even if "unreal" -- is the one in danger of losing the real life and real connections he's built. Henry is the one in danger of getting erased.

If he's just another preening jerk? Feh. I'm done.

Another announcement

2008-10-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

JAWBONE is now a FINALIST in the tvwriter.com Spec Scriptacular competition.

Another review

2008-10-20T17:01:00.001-07:00

I'm bucking the word on the street and admitting I liked the pilot for MY OWN WORST ENEMY. Thought it was fun. Thought it was nicely performed. Thought it had some genuinely interesting moments.

I'd say original moments, except I did notice a lot of the nifty bits involving communication and interaction between the two guys inhabiting one body seemed kinda similar to equivalent bits from Steven Moffat's JEKYLL. Really, really similar, even.

Though, lest you think "aw, she just prefers everything British," I actually didn't like Jekyll. I thought it had serious tone problems -- as in some minutes it was a straight-up comedy and some minutes a psychological drama. Now I love a little comedy in my drama and a little drama in my comedy (chocolate in my peanut butter, peanut butter in my chocolate), but this was like two different shows sharing the same commercial breaks. Hmm. I guess that was intentional. Appropriately Jekyll-and-Hydish. Just not much fun to watch.

An announcement

2008-10-20T16:56:00.000-07:00

JAWBONE has now made the semifinals at the tvwriter.com Spec Scriptacular competition.

A slight emendation

2008-10-10T11:56:00.000-07:00

Re-reading what I wrote yesterday about David Kelley's first draft script of Life On Mars, I seem to have said that I believe Mr. Kelley has a hang-up with his own perfection. That's not what I meant. Though with his history of uber-clever, successful writing, he'd have damn good reason for thinking highly of himself.

So, no offense to Mr. Kelley personally. Or to any of his previous -- and one hopes future -- wonderful shows.

But his script was still a miserable adaptation. Though I have heard that the Kelley script that was actually shot (and discarded) was a later version that hewed more closely to the original BBC show in tone and character. I hope so. Everyone's allowed a crappy first draft. Though even the later draft clearly wasn't what the network wanted. And what they wanted was pretty darn good.

Maybe even super-talented writers just can't write something they don't at heart agree with. David Kelley's best work is about lawyers. And Life On Mars isn't a lawyer show. Not just in its subject matter -- in its philosophy. It argues that the kind of elegant thinking and reasoning -- seeing both sides of an argument, and protecting the intangible rights behind the laws even at the expense of the person immediately in front of you -- while GOOD THINGS (can't argue with that), can also lead to deadening of the instincts, and even of the soul.

Deep stuff. But it's cop stuff. Not lawyer stuff.

Still, I have to give credit to Kelley for bringing the show to ABC and seeing it got made. Thanks, man.

Now go write some awesome lawyer stuff.

A review - and a long post

2008-10-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

I watched Life On Mars.

I was going to sleep on my thoughts and re-watch the show tomorrow with both the old David Kelley script and the original BBC script open on my laptop. But I don't think I need to. And I don't think I can sleep until I get this all written out anyway.

I'm going to compare the series to the BBC version. And somewhat to the Kelley version that DIDN'T wind up on your screens tonight. I know that's not really a review. But there are going to be a million reviews out there. I'm more interested in figuring out what the heart of the original series was, where the ABC version -- or the Kelley version - got it wrong. And where they fixed things, got them right, or even improved them. Cause that's what we try to do as writers. Figure out what's important. Make mistakes, sure, but then figure out WHY they're wrong. And desperately try to fix them before the cameras roll. (Or in this case, after. Yeesh.)

The teaser begins in the modern world...

The BBC version took a lot more time establishing Sam's modern life. That's easier for them to do, of course, they HAVE more time. But it was nice to show how different, and technological, and politically correct police work is now versus was then. It was also nice to see Sam Tyler as the clear and decisive head of his unit, as problems will ensue when he is subordinate to Gene Hunt in the past.

So, score one point for the BBC. But a very small point.

I don’t dig the it-wasn’t-the-perp-it-was-his-identical twin stuff. I never like the identical twin trick. (After reading something similar in the Fringe pilot script I have yet to bring myself to actually watch the Fringe episodes on my DVR.) And unless they’re varying significantly from the BBC plot, it’s also not necessary. So that’s score two for the BBC. (Oops, writing now from the end: they DID change the plot significantly. I’m rethinking as I type. The score may change. Stay tuned.)

Continuing on…

WHOA. ABC has a MUCH BETTER TEASER FADE OUT. I cried. Couldn’t help it: a stunning revelation of the Twin Towers standing, new, beautiful and full of hope, beats a billboard for an expressway overpass any day. BIG point scored for ABC.

The 360-degree “only so many details” shot of 1973 lower Manhattan was nearly equally stunning. Awesome set decoration. The Manchester shot was great too, so I’ll give that a tie. (Though I’m from New York and I’ve never been to Manchester, so the ABC version edges ahead for me.)

Moving into the meat of the show…

I loved the BBC’s Gene Hunt, Philip Glenister. But now I love Harvey Keitel just as much. I gotta score a dead tie there. But I’m going to give an extra point to ABC for realizing they had it wrong the first time, firing the original actor, thinking of Harvey Keitel and making that happen. Nothing against poor Colm Meaney. I’m sure he’s a fine actor, but the only thing he had going for him as Gene Hunt was a slight physical resemblance to Mr. Glenister. And I’m tired of that kind of casting.

Actually, I think the Colm Meaney casting was part of a more serious problem with Kelley's whole take on the series.

Kelley’s script's theme seemed to be: modern-day people like Sam (and us) are better, more competent and more moral than their benighted 1973 counterparts. Always. In every case. In his script, Sam Tyler is a saint and Gene Hunt is an evil joke. No way Harvey Keitel would ever have taken the part as written in Kelley's script. And no way I'd watch it for very long. "I'm right and you're wrong" just doesn't make for a very interesting show.

So what was the BBC show about? Duh. It's a BUDDY COP show. Straight up. Two completely different guys from completely different backgrounds (and ERAS) who HATE each other right off will eventually grudgingly accept that each one has something the other lacks and together they will make one amazing policeman. This is not earth-shattering. We've seen this show before. And it worked before. Hell, MOST SUCCESSFUL DRAMA includes some element of this-one's-partially-right and that-one's-partially-right and if they could only figure that out and get together... Okay, not just drama. Most rom-coms and comedies work on some version of that dynamic. Most of our RELATIONSHIPS in the real world work like that. Or don't. Maybe because, like Mr. Kelley, we're a little too hung-up on our own perfection.

Pats on the back are nice, but do not make for appointment television.

The BBC version accepted that many things ARE better now. Miranda warnings are a good thing. Videotaped interviews are a good thing. So are warrants, and lawyers (sometimes), and all that pc stuff. But the BBC show worked on the principle that, though Sam was usually technically right, Gene was always EMOTIONALLY right. With all of his sensitivity training, the modern cop is less in touch with his “feelings” than his 70s macho counterpart. Gene Hunt has much to learn from Sam Tyler. But Sam Tyler has just as much to learn from Gene Hunt.

And there’s your series.

And this new ABC version gets that. Somebody at the studio saw the Kelley version, said "hold on a minute" and made the fix. Some studio suit. Who is that guy? I want to work for that guy. And I’m having to rethink my whole position on studio notes.

Which brings us to the scene that made me stand up and cheer. In the original BBC version of the Mrs. Raimes interview, Sam – eyes on the investigation – doesn’t see that his justifiably intense questioning of the witness is NOT HELPING. So Gene steps in, gets the woman a cup of tea and a biscuit. Gets her to relax and chat. And gets the information they need.

In the Kelley version, evil Gene is bullying poor Mrs. Raines, and Mr. Perfect Modern Cop Sam steps in to save the day. Oh, and there’s a cutesy lawyer thing that made me want to hurl. (Note to David Kelley: NOT a lawyer show.) So, yet again: 70s Gene is wrong, modern Sam is right, and we are all better than our parents. Woo-hoo. And yawn.

In the new ABC version, they go back almost word for word to the BBC version. Down to the fabulous over-the-table-leap at the end of the scene where we see Gene and Sam are suddenly, finally a team that WORKS. Together.

I stood up and cheered at that shot when I saw it the first time on BBC America. And I stood up and cheered tonight again. So, I give this scene a tie.

But for fixing something that was terribly wrong, at great expense and risk of negative publicity (how often does THAT happen in Hollywood???) I give extra points to ABC. And again, to that miracle suit. Who IS that guy?

And then suddenly we’re at the end. All kinds of stuff from the BBC version is just gone. And the scene – that never really rang true – where Annie’s ex-boyfriend tries to get Sam to risk suicide as a way to “wake up” – has been replaced with Sam staring down a gun and misreading (maybe…) the killer’s ramblings as a suicidal way out of his nightmare. So much better. Color me impressed.

And then the BIG change. There was a marvelous scene in the BBC version where Sam is faced with a choice: betray his ideals and destroy a key piece of evidence, or pass the evidence on, knowing that it will allow the killer to go free in 30 years and take the woman Sam loves hostage. Sam makes the choice: he trashes the evidence. And Gene says: welcome to the team. And he doesn’t mean it in a good way. He means it in a Faustian way.

It’s a killer scene. And it’s just gone. The kid, Colin Raimes, becomes the modern-day killer instead. Hence the whole awkward (but apparently now necessary) twin thing.

And I’m okay with that.

Because this is an American series that is going to have to sustain 22 episodes a year, possibly for years. As opposed to a British series that will be over and out in two series of 8 episodes each.

We have plenty of time to watch Sam struggle with difficult choices. We have hours and hours and hours ahead. (I hope - were you watching? Watch.)

At the end of the episode, instead of a killer all neatly tied up, we now have a future serial killer running around as a red-headed tyke. Creepy stuff to mine in episodes to come. As is having Sam consider killing that child instead of just destroying evidence...

So I take away my earlier demerits. And I call this a tie. I know my math is off - but I do have to give the BBC version points for being ORIGINAL. Besides, a tie is a win for ABC, 'cause after reading the Kelley version, I NEVER thought a tie would be possible.

I’m excited to see what they do next. And where they go when they’ve run through the sixteen British episodes and have a chance to stretch (or tank) this thing on their own.

I'm excited. Which I haven't been much so far this season...

An exhortation

2008-10-06T19:48:00.000-07:00

I just gave blood. And you should too. It's not so bad. Yes, the needle is HUGE. But it goes in quick and comes out quick: the vampires at the Red Cross are very good at what they do and the whole thing is no big deal.

I did make the nice lady nervous by insisting on watching super closely as the needle approached my arm and went in. It's a minor hang-up: I don't mind sharp objects and needles as long as I am watching their every move and nobody's sneaking up on me.

I promised her I wouldn't faint. And then asked: how many people actually do?

At my location, because it's a Red Cross office and not a one-time blood drive: not many. At mobile blood drives, about one an hour. At mobile blood drives at high schools: all the freakin' time.

Do we get less tweaked by the sight of blood as we get older? Or is it a simpler explanation: all those people who were mightily embarrassed in front of their high school friends know better than to ever try again.

Not that that's any excuse for YOU: the nice lady said she could bring you right out of a fainting fit in seconds, no harm done. And the office is nice and quiet, so not much embarrassment either.

An announcement

2008-10-06T18:11:00.001-07:00

Which you already know if you are reading this -- welcome to my new, actually a blog, blog site! Ever-more-glorious writing updates and discussions of the Fall 2008 season to come soon!

An update

2008-09-30T18:00:00.000-07:00

Working on that pilot. Why does so much good stuff occur to me in the last few minutes before sleep and where do all the pens go that I used to have ready to record such thoughts?

I'm planning more research travel in the next month. That the travel might coincide with Hallowe'en again has nothing to do with anything. It's all research, baby, research. And some actual work-work on a book project that needs to be well underway before Christmas. So I'm busy. I'd love to spend some time discussing the new television season as I go through the digital mountains on my DVR. Soon. Right now I'm digesting on the fly.

Though I am looking forward to (god, I hope loving and not trashing) Life On Mars. The original was stunning. And though I had severe doubts about an earlier draft I read of the US version - much of the best, most thematically meaningful stuff removed and a bizarro cutesy lawyer added in its place - two of the greatest words I heard all summer were "Harvey" and "Keitel." Yeah.

Another announcement

2008-09-03T18:00:00.001-07:00

THE CLOSER:Absalom made the semifinals at Scriptapalooza TV. And I'm over the oh-god-oh-god-it's-never-going-to-work hump and closing in on a spiffy new draft of my latest pilot - details to come soon. After which I get a victory lap shopping trip to Record Surplus on Pico. They've got to have some new Legacy International recordings that I don't own yet. Maybe one of those German beer garden collections I've been looking for? Polka 'til you drop!

I can, you know.

After which I absolutely promise I will do something about getting this blog-that-isn't a blog into some honest-to-blog software so it really IS a blog. And both of you reading can post comments. Yowza.

An announcement

2008-08-18T18:00:00.000-07:00

JAWBONE has now made the semifinals at the 2008 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards.

A cool picture

2008-08-17T17:01:00.000-07:00

Here's why I'm traveling.

The fact that my trip back east coincided with precious nephew's third birthday had nothing to do with it. I am here to talk with guys like this one. And I have. So now I can finally go home. And figure out how to put these entries into real blogging software so I can really, you know, blog...

An apology

2008-08-17T17:00:00.000-07:00

8/17/08? It's 8/17/08???

I knew I wasn't going to hack the blog-a-day thing, but I did think two or three a week would be no problem.

I've been traveling. A lousy excuse as of course I have internet access. And a nifty new Slingbox hooked up to my Tivo. (Throw in my MacBook Pro and how's that for product placement?) So, yeah, I am just as connected here as I would be in my office back in LA. I've even been watching the Olympics in the tv-free guest room in which I'm staying. Probably more than I should: if my blogging is suffering, think what must be happening to my writing.

As for the Olympics - can you believe the commentator who said the games weren't just a big step for China, they were "a great leap forward"??? So, thirty or forty-odd million people are gonna die of starvation? And some might even eat each other? Talk about tone-deaf.

I think the poor dude really had no idea what he was saying. He (or his writers, aagh) had heard the phrase somewhere and knew it had SOMETHING to do with China, right? God, our education system sucks.

An article

2008-07-23T17:00:00.001-07:00

This, from today's Washington Post. I had no idea. Really. I just assumed... younger, blonde, second wife, typical Washington hostess, you know...

No assumptions already! I'm a freaking writer, I should know that.

An amusing way to spend five minutes on the web

2008-07-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

By way of this article in Slate, I give you the work of the St. Andrews University Face Transformer applet. This would be a nice, normal (if you could see it you'd agree it was pretty) original photo passed through the (from left to right) (a) Botticelli, (b) Modigliani and (c) Masculiniser transformations. I think (cough) whoever this is makes a hot guy, though unsurprisingly, alarmingly like my brother...

An update

2008-07-19T15:30:00.000-07:00

Still working on the new pilot project. Gassed the wasps (sorry, everyone, had to think of the USPS). Sucked into watching, and caring about, the Tour de France yet again. Still haven't forgiven this one, but I can't stop rooting for this one: four awesome sprint finishes with no one even close. Beautiful. He better not be cheating.

The sad part of rooting for anyone in cycling is that you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. The only time you know for sure if your guy is really clean is when he's eventually proven NOT clean. Has it come to that? Hell, it passed that years ago.

I'm using this as a heart-break trial run for the Olympics next month. They are going to be UGLY.

But I will still watch: I love sports. Particularly team sports. I even co-founded a team in my competitve days. Go Empire Speed! 'Course, I always thought our tiny little sport was safe from cheating. I mean, how much money and glory is there in inline speedskating? I'm pretty sure the sum total of my winnings didn't come near the deductibles alone on my injuries. Apparently, I was wrong.

Sheesh.

An announcement

2008-07-14T15:30:00.000-07:00

JAWBONE just made the quarter final list at the 2008 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards.

A picture from my garden

2008-07-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

This isn't really of my garden, it's of my front door jamb - and of the young ladies who have established a new home therein.

I was out of town for a few weeks and this is what I found when I returned: a growing nest of paper wasps. There are actually three of them - queen number three is on the back side of the nest and not visible in this picture.

It has been over a week and I still can't bring myself to destroy the nest. Instead I duck past it coming and going several times a day. So far un-stung. I wiki'd the wasps and found out they weren't "aggressive" - unless they feel their nest is threatened. At what point will they decide a slamming door an inch from their nest is a threat?
There are still only three of them, but they are working hard, as you can see, to make more. At what point will my mail woman refuse to approach my door?

Soon, I think.

So why haven't I killed them? These are WASPS - practically in my house. I can gas 'em with a clear conscience.

I guess it's some kind of bizarre feminist thing where I think it's too cool that three sister queens cooperate to build a nest together. And it IS cool. Even everybody's favorite super-cool bees don't do that.

Though I should probably read the wiki a little further. I bet after the baby wasps start hatching, one of those queens is gonna EAT the other two...

Feminism be damned.