Branding is your friend

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

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

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

'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

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!

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

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?

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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?

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.