Travelling ...

Laissez les bon temps roulez.  

John Adams on HBO is quite magnificent.  There's an economy of screenwriting in it that's impressive as hell.  We'll take your recommended history books, biographies, or even documentaries, in the Open Thread in the Comments.  Stay safe, and will be back soon.

Staffing: Jargon Watch

Another 8 am-ish post, clearing up some of the questions from the last show post. Nicely enough, not even a lot of typing necessary -- my Very Smart Commenters handled most of this for me.

From Mike Cane:

What is a showrunner? I've heard that during the WGA strike. Is it like Line Producer? Do they have a Producer credit? Or are they like Script Editor? It seems like He Who Must Be Obeyed, but I don't know what specific title they have and what duties. (Yeah, sorry for the 101!)

answered better than I could by commenter Maestro:

The term showrunner came about because it succinctly describes the duties of the position. i.e. the showrunner is the person who runs the show. He or she is responsible for overseeing literally everything--every aspect of the show: the writing, the production, the budget, hiring (directors, writers, department heads, actors), etc. Sort of like a CEO in a corporation. And as opposed to a Line Producer who is "only" responsible for overseeing the physical production of the show. (To continue with the corporation analogy, you could say the Line Producer is the COO to the showrunner's CEO.) In a nutshell, the Line Producer (who often gets a "Produced by" credit) is responsible for making sure things go smoothly on the set. Whereas the showrunner is responsible for making sure things go smoothly on the show.

Oh, and the showrunner is almost always credited as one of the Executive Producers, but not all credited EPs are showrunners. (e.g. Jerry Bruckheimer is credited as EP on all of the CSIs, but he doesn't run any of them. That would be Carol Mendelsohn, Ann Donahue, and (creator) Anthony Zuiker on CSI, Miami, and NY respectively.)

I'd add that once you are a showrunner, you are always in the club.  You're often brought in to help out on shows created by less experienced writers.  Every now and then you'll see the credit "Consulting Producer."  This is generally someone who could showrun, but is hanging about a few days a week for less money, helping out on breaking stories and smoothing the bumps.

This is one of the reasons I found all the condescension from our libertarian professional pundits so annoying during the Strike (and assumptions by conservatives that Hollywood is full of flighty liberal artistes).  We are in the Business of Show, and run multi-million dollar "companies" in one of the most highly competitive marketplaces in the world.  I'll trust the business acumen of the showrunner of Diresta over another think piece from a Vassar grad any day. 

Ahem.  Moving on.

What are Network quotes?

I think we tackled this once, but rather than hunt it up  -- all financial systems crave order.I'm not going to go into Econ 101 here, but valuing insubstantial qualities like "creativity" is tricky.  Is this writer going to give me $8000 of value an episode?  Or $10,000?  Relative to what exactly?  Other writers who worked in wildly different work structures on wildly different shows?  Network execs had to wrestle with this ambiguity while they tried to staff dozens of writers on dozens of shows and dozens of pilots every year.  In such madness, the invisible hand reaches in, and execs find themselves asking "Well, what did someone else pay for [X]?"    

Your "quotes" are what you earned on your last gig.  Establishing your quotes are crucial, and your agent is constantly looking to get a bump up on each job.  Quotes in television and movies are structured differently.  In television, they are generally associated with your title.  This is because, through another forces-of-the-marketplace evolutionary loop, the titles on television shows are almost as stringently laddered as military ranks.  For the last twenty or so years, your career path would proceed almost precisely along these lines --

Staff writer (paid weekly)

Story Editor

Executive Story Editor

Co-producer

Producer

Supervising Producer

Co-Executive Producer

Executive Producer

Each rung on this ladder, depending on the marketplace at the time, had a rough per-episode salary associated with it. Like all codified systems, this one eventually rotted: weak writers could squeak out some bumps, move from show to show before their reputations could catch up with them - remember, this was when there were dozens of scripted shows, and 8-12 writers per show -- and suddenly you'd find yourself with a Supervising Producer making $30,000 an episode who can't actually write worth a damn.  (Thank good financial institutions such as banks and hedge funds are immune  to such rot!)

Movie quotes are based on the specific kind of work you're doing.  A first draft plus one set of revisions is one price for me, a full rewrites is another, a "polish" is yet another price.  Because of the emergency script doctoring I've done, I also have quotes for weekly and daily rates.

The reason I was mocking people's television quotes -- well, it's a lot like the housing bubble out here right now. A lot of writers spent years building up equity in their career, and haven't quite wrapped their heads around the idea that cable and reality TV have devalued the neighborhood.  Capitalism's a bitch.  On the other hand, those prices were boom-time inflationary, so ...

Wow, it IS the housing crisis.  Weird.

Whoops, Chris walked in.  Need to get to work breaking stories.  I'll get a few of the other terms later today.

Lily Allen's "Smile" in Simlish

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.