for tv and movies,
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and political theatre.
Dead Things on Sticks: Denis McGrath is on fire in Toronto.
Jane Espenson wrote Buffy. She worked with Joss, baby. And she's all about screenplay craft.
Kung Fu Monkey: John Rogers is one of the top writers in LA.
Kay Reindl From the heart of Tee Vee.
Jill Golick blogs about pilots.
By Ken Levine: Top sitcom dude (M*A*S*H, Cheers, Simpsons, Frasier). He knows.
The Artful Writer: Thought-provoking posts for pro writers from a WGA honcho.
What It's Like by Lisa Klink. Credit list as long as your arm.
How to Buy Art. Lisa Hunter blogs intelligently and wittily about the art market. And you can ask her questions.
Victoria Lucas is one of the rare development people who understand how scripts really work, and can show you how
to make yours structurally better. I treasure her insights. You will too.
Social Security Administration: Most popular names by year.
Name Trends: Uniquely popular names by year.
Doris Egan's LiveJournal. House, Tru Calling, etc.
Creative Screenwriting. Podcasted interviews with fascinating screenwriters.
John August: Screenwriter of Charlie's Angels and Big Fish.
DISC/ontent: blogs about direct to DVD movies. Bracing.
Ni vu ni connu: Martine Page is a working Montreal screenwriter
Danny Stack, chipping away at his keyboard across the Pond.
The Thinking Writer: Jon Deer went through pretty much the same mill I did, and has a lot of helpful stuff to say.
Fun Joel: Joel's a professional script reader. In other words, he'll be reading your script. So listen to what he says.
Chad Gervich's Script Notes. Writer's Digest-sponsored site from a veteran development executive.
The Legion of Decency. A producer's blog!
Alligators in a Helicopter by Scott the Reader.
Shouting into the Wind. Showbiz news'n'gossip.
Screenplay Europe: Reports on festivals, grants, and other Euro bon-bons.
Scrivenor's Error: Legal issues involved in writing.
The Futon Critic: What's in development? What's on TV?
TV Tattle: Thought-provoking articles about TV gathered from all over.
TV.com: Episode guides and cast and crew lists.
TV, Eh?What's doing on Canadian TV.
EntertainmentCareers.Net: Looking for a job in the biz?
ShowBizJobs.Com: Ditto.
Amanda the Aspiring Writer. Amanda works at an Agency. Go Amanda!
101. My intrepid assistant's blog.
Bluestocking LA - The Life and Times of a Writer and New Mom in LA Andy Coughlan is writing screenplays and producing short films. Scriptland: series in the LA Times. The Onion AV Club and its archives.
Famous Films Re-Enacted by Bunnies in 30 Seconds Andy Diggle. A great entertainer, a great humanitarian, and a personal friend of Johanna Constantine.
Justin Gray. A great entertainer, a great humanitarian, and a personal friend of Jonah Hex. Er, if anyone is.
Kody Chamberlain. Nice, really gruesome art.
Glenn Hauman, assistant editor on Grimjack and others...
David Bishop, who is trying to make the leap to the screen...
Reverse Dictionary Search: "What's that word that means....?" Most Popular Baby Names by Year, courtesy the Social Security Administration Baby Name Voyager graphs baby name frequency by decade.
American Amazon:
Friday, December 16, 2005
We're breaking story on a few possibilities for our second script. This is not necessarily meant to be our second episode, though it could be. Since the network wants our show as episodic as reasonably possible, it should be able to work as ep. #2 or ep. #5.
We have four stories broken from our bible to choose from. But while they're convincing episodes, and all explosive in their way, they may not make great second episodes. I feel that the job of the second episode is to prove the template. The first episode proves the series concept: yes, you can make a hell of an hour of TV out of this concept. The second episode, I think, needs to prove that you can take the characters and venue you've chosen, and make another convincing hour of TV.
Many of the stories we have in the can involve new core characters, or old core characters thinking about leaving the biz (and hence the show). Two of them take main characters home to their families. These are high stakes stories. But not the kind of episode you can do every week. We would probably want to punctuate the season with them.
So we came up with a new story that doesn't rely on any new characters.
And a B story that does rely on a new episodic character, but that's okay: if you are not a soap, you'll need to bring in episodic characters to motivate your stories. On procedurals, you always have episodic characters: the clients on law shows, the crooks on cop shows, the patients on medical shows. And Lucy always met the nice man who was going to sell her new pots and pans, or whatever. So if we're not a soap, we're more like a procedural. So new rule: a second script shouldn't introduce any new core cast, but can introduce a few episodic characters as needed.
As opposed to a second episode, which might introduce any core cast you didn't get a chance to introduce in the pilot. On the show I co-created, for example, we didn't introduce Hunter until halfway through ep. 2. There were some arguments about whether that was a good idea; some thought she needed to be foreshadowed in ep. #1, others successfully insisted we didn't need to foreshadow. Of course, our American network changed that decision around by airing episode #2 first!
Let's see what the network thinks!
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I was interviewed on WNYU.
And on CKUT.
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