Lessons from the Script Pile

We topped out at 210 submitted scripts. For four slots. That's co-showrunner Chris Downey there, by the way, still maintaining the youthful appearance he had when we started as baby writers on Cosby. I am the bloated, angry drunk just O.S. right. All of these tomes were read, and 99% all the way through.

You can get just a hint of the "Wall o' Cards" behind the scripts -- we've taken over a spare office here at Electric Entertainment, and we've got our possible story beats and antagonists for each episode of Leverage scrawled on index cards and then tacked up with painter's tape on the big, empty white wall. Yellow for antagonists, pink for "clients" of our team, green for the enormous well of miscellaneous scams/heist techniques/ wild-ass impossible crimes, white for half-developed story ideas as they come together.

That's right. I am a 21st Century tech fetishist, and we're breaking off index cards. Sometimes the old ways are indeed the best.

We'll collect the following in some coherent manner later, but since I got in a 8am this morning, I want to dash these observations down before the staffing meetings start.

1.) Wow. There are a lot of really goddam great writers out there. I am seriously concerned, in a straight-on script shoot-out, I could not get hired on my own show. The general increase in the quality of television in recent years has led to an exponential increase in talented young writers choosing it as their medium of expression.

2.) Definitely want the double-team when submitting. One on-air show/one pilot. On-air to see how you adapt your voice to another show, a pilot to show what sort of tone and structure you dig when cut loose. I personally don't mind reading movies, but when facing a mountain of scripts they are generally wince-inducing. If submitting a movie, make sure it's got a helluva first act. A screamingly funny one-act play isn't bad either, and may even be preferable to the pilot when doing half-hour submissions.

Having now plowed through a ridiculous number of on-air specs, for what it's worth (and this is purely personal) I'd recommend writing a House. It's one of the few one-hours where you can show off your research and plotting skills, AND the characters are both joke-funny and engage the emotional issues presented by the case-of-the-week. Without a Trace is a fine show, for example, and we interviewed a couple writers of WaT specs, but the characters do not lend themselves to banter.

If you've been on staff, that second original work is important. We've been on staff, we know how the rewriting process goes. It's very hard to break out what's yours and what's derived from the mandatory template of the sow and your own particular show-runner's idiosyncracies.

If your on-air spec show has been off the air for two years, time for a new spec.

3.) If you are submitting a play: take your first play, the one where the protagonist is a thinly veiled version of you, and the antagonist is a thinly veiled version of your ex, and the "comedy" is you showing how shitty they were and how wronged you were for 90 pages -- and put that one down. Send the second one.

4.) Size of agency does not matter. Our first and so far only baby-writer hire came from an agency so small we have affectionately named it "the Yarn Barn". The agent was aggressive as hell, got the scripts in front of our face, and got the job done. Do not fixate on the big agencies -- not only do they have a ton of other clients to work through, some of them are less nimble when dealing with the new model/economics of television. Speaking of which --

5.) Your network quotes? Heh. You're adorable. It's the writer apocalypse out there, folks. The days of 12 person rooms, each person clocking in between $10-50k an episode for 22 episodes a year are GONE.

This isn't actually the End Times, it's more a re-alignment to how television worked in the 70's thru mid 80's. The context will be lost on you Spec-monkeys and baby writers, but the 80's/90's/00's were like the oil boom for writers. Tons of cheap energy distorting the economy. Those days are gone. We are at Peak Staffing.

On a separate note -- word on the street is NBC won't be developing pilots, CBS are shooting presentations only, rumor has it Fox is going to be doing the (pilot script + 2) development system. All these changes were coming (some of them welcome) but the strike accelerated their arrival. More discussion later about the full ramifications.

6.) Sexy descriptions. I have read a disturbing number of character descriptions, particularly those of women, which go on for a full damn paragraph about how sexy they are, or describe how the camera lingers over them, or even explicit complements about their ass (I am not kidding) ... Okay. Listen. We are all in the Television Business. The Business of Televising. Are you somehow worried that without some Maxim-style adjectives ladled in, some misguided Network Exec is going to forget and cast ugly people in your show? This is the person who was cast as the geek-physicist in Global Frequency:



Jenni also happens to be a really good goddam actor. But, c'mon. We get it. All you're doing is creeping me out and making the actresses who read the script uncomfortable.

The following notes are primarily for the Spec-Monkeys and baby writers (although not exclusively):

7.) The "As you know ...": Indeed, it's fucking miserable to lay pipe in the tiny amount of page space you have in a TV script. That said -- NO. The only thing worse is --

8.) The Sibling Tag: "C'mon sis, don't be like that."

There was even one script with the double-whammy ...

9.) "As you know" with a Sibling Tag: "You know as well as I do, bro ..." Hey, I've written some crap. Some steeeeeaming crap. But this is an auto-fail.

Okay, back soon with some screenwriting book reviews, and I'll try to answer any questions you post in the Comments. Good luck all.

To All My Conservative Friends ...

... who for years nurtured a loathing of the Clintons I found both unnatural and inexplicable:


Oooooooooooooh.


Yeah. So ... yeah.

As you were.

JERICHO 2

I noticed in the Comments some people were going to check out Jericho Season 1 on DVD based on my previous post.  Be warned -- Season 1 is an entirely different beast.  The first half of the season often cannot decide what it is and so settles for "schmaltz".  Very soapy characters spot-welded into the sci-fi concept.  Lovely Wife already pointed out in previous post that the characterizations  of women were really, really awful.  It's not until Episode 14 "Heart of Winter", that the grimmer little edges of the show start appearing.  Yet you need all the setups from the first half of the season that are scattered through-out the soap elements for the sharp back half of Season 1 -- and this year's crackling Season 2 -- to make sense.

It may well be impossible to be a new fan coming on -- one may need the experience of putting up with the ramshackle bastard for that first season, with all the accompanying affection.

Just be prepared.

Jericho

So, there's this miniseries about how factions within the US government, paired with a major corporation in the military industrial complex, create a massive terrorist attack on US soil.

Then, taking advantage of the chaos and fear-mongering, fascist* elements within the government move to take control while the corporation uses its special no-oversight, no-accountability position to administrate the devastated regions -- both for their own profit and so they can control the population without any of the standard protocols of either the occupying military or local law enforcement. It's a become better plotted espionage thriller than 24 ever was on its best day.

It's also sharp commentary on the privatization of warfare, the cozy symbiosis of politicians and massive corporations, out of control contractors in Iraq, and the relationship between the US military and populations they're "administering". It does all this while still casting the US military in an overwhelmingly positive light. The Army = Good Guys. This series casts the "insurgents" as American revolutionaries rising up against unfair administration by an outside force. There's even a Stamp Act reference.

And their version of Paul Bremer shoots a teenage girl to death.

And it's on CBS in prime time.

I'm almost terrified to write about this, in the fear that at some point the buzz will motivate someone at CBS will turn on the channel and realize they're broadcasting perhaps the most genuinely subversive piece of entertainment in the last 8 years.

The pacing this year is incredible, the twists well conceived, the characters well-drawn (even the women, for once). Annoying Mom is gone. Science Gal is back. Skeet Ulrich cannot withstand the galestorm of manliness created by Lenny James and Esai Morales.

Good goddamn job. Jericho last year started poky and finished razor sharp. This season hit the ground running and hasn't had a wasted scene in four episodes. This, my friends, is how you do 8 episodes. Congratulations to all involved.





*(And I mean actual fascists, not merely authoritarians. Some people don't know the difference)

LA Artist Nat George

Hey, Warren does the whole artsy thing ... anyway, Nat George is a Canadian expat in LA, and I love the outsider eye she brings to her LA art. Although she does a mix of paintings and video installations, this piece is my favorite and will hang on the new office wall as soon as I can pry it out of her hands. Her official site is here.

1000 True Fans

I am genuinely stunned I got this up before Bill. Via Boing Boing:

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans...

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

Link.

Pretty much mandatory to link it with this: Nine Inch Nails makes at least $750,000 from CC release in two days.

Thank God

For several terrifying weeks the possibility of a whole NEW decade of Baby Boomer politicians and pundits working their personal shit out on the national stage was imperiled. But the dream lives on. Daddy issues! Inexplicable lingering resentment of hippie culture! Wahooooo! Rock on! Whoomp! It is over there!

For what it's worth, in my personal electoral calculations:

(Clinton's Domestic Policies) > (Obama's Domestic Policies)
(Clinton's Foreign Policies) < (Obama's Foreign Policies)

but

McCain's Domestic Policies = WTF?
McCain's Foreign Policies = ("One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,") = (Sweet. Jesus.)

... so I don't really have a dog in this hunt. I might lean one way or another, but come November, I'm pulling the lever for the non-crazy policies. However, I am somewhat wistful for the possibility of some new figures on our national Mummenschanz stage. It would be lovely if my Dad and I could have some new political arguments rather than just recycling the ones we had when I was in college.

Any argument that the primaries are indicative of general election electability are absurd, by the way. I'm sure Sen. Clinton carrying Ohio is a dead-on guarantee that she'll carry it in the general, just as Sen Kerry winning Iowa in the primaries guaranteed he could carry ... oh.

Hmm, looking at 2004 Ohio primary/Ohio general ... that's an interesting bit of math ... I'm going to go read twenty more scripts and then do some research on the lunch break.

Supervillain

John Robb -- whose book Brave New War is crucial, fascinating, and too damn short -- today posts on the alleged leader of the Nigerian economic rebel/profiteering ring MEND. Henry Okah could well be one of the primary reasons oil is now $100 a barrel, and he did with with 21st Century super-empowered rabble and cell phones.

This stuff fits into a blog post about the generational change necessary in our own political views, but that's not even half-baked enough for my usual poor servings. Soon though.

Robb's also worth reading for his brief on the surge, (well, he's plainly just worth reading all the time, to tell the truth) and led me to a spiffy new blog which will be sidebarred right away, Defense and National interest.

Crows using Vending Machines

From TED 2008 liveblogging, cool stuff about brainy tool-using crows. Like this ain't going into a script. (h/t Boing Boing)

In the Comments, if it amuses you, your favorite spooky smart animal story. Lovely Wife had a cat that could identify specific engine noises in the neighborhood cars. Specific as in "ignore all other VW bugs, respond only to the Smith family's VW bug". He'd listen for the cars arriving home on the street, then go beg for food from the appropriate suckers, matching arriving car with appropriate house/family.

Be Kind, Rewind

A masterpiece. For me, anyway, and in the end that's all that really counts. There are infinite stories out there. Find the ones that move you, and don't worry about the rest. I've offically arrived at the "life's too short, enjoy what moves you" stage of my half-assed critical framework.

I heard some people bitching on the way out in front of me -- they were expecting the trippier Gondry. Madness. I'll take a straight, unironic shot to the heart any time over artistic but emotionally sterile surrealism. It may be odd to say, but Dave Chappelle's block party -- his actual block party, not just the movie Gondry shot -- plainly influenced Gondry's writing and shooting here. Kind of a weird recursive loop. Gondry, in shooting the raw emotions of the block party, discovers/creates footage that then plainly echo in Be Kind. That sounds weird, but seeing as the first is a pseudo-documentary, I think the phrasing's appropriate.

It may also be that the story has particular resonance for anyone who tells stories for a living. There are some genuinely subversive moments in here, and some lovely subtle little writing ... for the lack of a better term, sleights-of-hand, but I mean that as a compliment to their apparent effortlessness and subtlety than any connotation of trickery. Performances are great all 'round, with Jack Black managing to rein it in a bit, while Mos Def continues to knock me on my ass.

Go tomorrow, and bring a friend.