Feedback

I got back a flip response to some feedback I gave someone. It boiled down to "I don't know why you would have that reaction to my script. I don't see that there's a problem where you say there is."

The general rule for feedback is: if someone tells you how to fix something, you aren't obliged to fix it that way. But if they tell you something is broken, you better fix it.

Your obligation is to figure out why your reader feels something is broken. You need to reread your own material through their perspective until you can see the flaw that they have spotted.

This takes emotional effort. Sometimes it takes a bit of time. It's not easy to shift out of your own perspective, from which your screenplay is just dandy.

But learning how to take criticism to heart is really one of the things that separates professionals from the perpetually aspiring.

It's a good idea not to respond to a critique at all until you can see the flaw. Otherwise you're just going to piss off your reader, who will wonder why you asked for feedback if you didn't want it. (For example, I'm kinda pissed off right now.)

When I get comment I disagree with on my own work, what I say is, "I'll take a look at that." And then I do. And, later, I usually realize the comment is right (if not the solution offered), I am wrong, and something is broken in the screenplay after all.

You can ask for a clarification -- "Are you saying that X is a problem, or do you mean that the problem is Y?"

But all feedback comes from somewhere. And that means that all feedback is true. Figuring out how it's true is the job of every good writer.

Register

Q. Should I copyright my spec with the US Library of Congress, or register it with the WGA?

There is no reason to register or copyright a spec episode. You don't own the underlying rights. No one would steal your spec 30 ROCK from you because they can't sell it.

They could, I suppose, pretend they wrote it, but I've never heard of something like that happening.

It wouldn't hurt to copyright your spec pilot, but bear in mind that there are not so many legit places to send a spec pilot, and your agent is likely going to send your spec to most of them. So if someone stole your spec pilot, they would likely be sending it to the same exact people, who will then say, "WTF are you sending me someone else's script for?"

If you don't have an agent, then you're probably sending your spec to agents in order to get an agent. Agents don't steal ideas, they represent writers with ideas.

And you can't really send a spec pilot to production companies without an agent. It's possible, though very difficult, to break into features without an agent. But I am not sure it is at all plausible to break into TV without an agent.

So bottom line, copyright your script with the Library of Congress if it makes you feel better. You can even do it online, I believe. But for tv scripts, it's probably not necessary.

Book Trailer

The publisher of my novel (THE CIRCLE CAST) wants to do a book trailer. 60-90 seconds. What would you want in a 90 second trailer for a young adult novel about Morgan le Fay?

I'm thinking magic and hotness. You?

Copyright

I find that some people say that to register a copyright with the U.S. office, as opposed to registering with the WGA, is frowned upon in the Hollywood industry, and that it makes you look like a paranoid amateur. They state that copyrighting is only something the production company does when they want to buy a script from a writer, and that having an already existing copyright can even sour a potential sale because the executives won't want to go through the hassle of having a lawyer do more work to transfer your copyright to the studio.

Writing "registered with the Library of Congress" might come off as a bit paranoid, but you don't have to tell anyone you've done so. At least not until you option your script. And at that point, should it come up, it's trivial (a one page document) to assign the copyright to a new owner.

Does anyone have contrary information?

Is there a Major Major?

I was also wondering if there's any particular university degree you would recommend for young people interested in writing for film and television?

No.

I have a double major in Computer Science and English. I would say that my C.S. major helped me at least as much in showbiz as my English major. Computer Science taught me how to write a script "top down." Also, having a C.S. degree, and French, got me my first full-time job in the biz.

If you're a writer, you'll write. That's why when I was at Yale, there wasn't much of a creative writing track. I did more, and better, creative writing trying to get fiction and poems into Zirkus, and The Yale Lit, than I did taking John Hersey's creative writing class. I did even more, and better, when I took a term off to hang around Columbia and audit Kenneth Koch's creative writing class for no credit.

I also learned more about screenwriting from Funky Bob Thompson's class "The Afro-Atlantic Tradition" than I did in some screenwriting classes getting my MFA at UCLA. "Master T" taught about how in West African and Southern Black cultural traditions, syncopation isn't an esthetic exclusively for music; it applies to quilts, to dancing, to everything. I learned how not to write in 4/4 time.

(And when I say, "Master T," think of the whitest guy you ever met, in a button shirt and creased pants. He was the Master of Timothy Dwight residential college until last year.)

So I don't really care what you study in college. And neither will anyone else in LA. They are if you're smart. They care if you know stuff. Mostly they care if you can deliver a hot spec. Whatever gets you there is what you should study. If that's History, great. If that's Electrical Engineering, also great.

Remember, the point of university (as opposed to a graduate degree) isn't to teach you stuff. The world can teach you stuff. Working will teach you stuff. University is to teach you how to learn; and to teach you to attack a problem from multiple perspectives.

So, really, study what you love. If you're a writer, you'll write.

Alleged Breach

When you sign a writing or option contract, you're asked to warrant (guarantee) that all your work is original. There is often a clause that says you are responsible for any "breach or alleged breach" of your warranty.

You need to get that "alleged breach" struck from the contract. You can't be responsible every time some idiot thinks you stole his idea. For example, some idiot is suing James Cameron because he thinks Cameron stole his story and made AVATAR:

Moore contends that he first came up with ideas that surfaced in “Avatar” in a pair of his own screenplays, “Aquatica” and “Descendants: The Pollination,” including “bioluminescent flora/plant life, unbreathable atmospheres, matriarch support of hero vs. heroine, spiritual connections to environment and reincarnation, appearance of mist in scene, sunlight to moonlight, crackling from gargantuan foliage, blue skin/green skin and battle scene on limbs/branches,” according to the gossip web site.

This is particularly stupid, as everybody knows that Avatar is heavily inspired by FERN GULLY.

You should be responsible if you actually breach the contract. But you can't be on the hook if somebody takes it into their head that your movie is based on their life, or that they invented Ewoks, or whatever. Even nuisance suits are expensive to get dismissed. Movies have that kind of money. You don't.

Over the Pond?

As I don't live in the US, I was wondering to what extent the need to be in LA applies to writers based in other countries. Is it better to approach one's own country's agencies and production companies first, especially if the screenplay is something set in that country that might qualify for government arts funding if produced there?

Overseas, and Canadian, writers are in a different boat. If you qualify for government arts funding, use that first. Then, when you've made a smash-o picture, go to LA to see if LA cares. If LA doesn't care, go back and make another homebrew movie.

Every country has its own production hubs. In Canada, a TV writer must be in Toronto, a game writer probably should be in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver or Edmonton, and a feature writer can be in a number of cities. If the government is offering you money to create culture, stay where you are and take their money, until something you've made hits in LA. Then go to LA and say, "that movie everyone's talking about? I made that. Want to rep me?"

That's What You're Bumping On?

Had kind of a depressing meeting where my producer was picking on some plot points in the script that have been there for many drafts. One is a coincidence that we've always felt was okay because it doesn't help the hero.

As I told him (which is why I don't mind putting it in the blog), when a plot point that has always been okay is suddenly no good, it could be just the first time someone has noticed it, but it's often a sign that something else is broken. For example, if you're bumping on the coincidence, maybe the emotional through line of the story isn't working at that point; and then people start to look for something to pick on to explain what's wrong.

So now we're trying to crystallize what really isn't working. My guess is it isn't the coincidence.

Who Are the Bomb Girls

I'm really looking forward to catching BOMB GIRLS on January 4th on Global.

Here's your homework. Before you watch the pilot, figure out how you'd do it. It's a show about the women who made bombs for the war effort in WWII. Who's your core cast? What kinds of characters would you put in there? And what sort of things need to happen in the pilot?

Then watch it, and see how close you are, and what you think of what they did.

Failures & Mistakes

Seth Godin:

A failure is a project that doesn't work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn't move you directly closer to your goal.

A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding.

We need a lot more failures, I think. Failures that don't kill us make us bolder, and teach us one more way that won't work, while opening the door to things that might.

School confuses us, so do bosses and families. Go ahead, fail. Try to avoid mistakes, though.

A mistake is when, really, you know better, and do it that way anyway.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned from my creative writing professor, the poet Kenneth Koch, was that there's no downside to writing a lot. You don't have a limited number of words that you can write in your life.

The corrolary is that you shouldn't be afraid to try and fail. Just make sure you learn from the things you tried that failed. I can't remember which scientist was known for his cheery response to experiments with negative results: "Well, now we know that doesn't work!" Every failure gets you closer to success, assuming you don't repeat it.

Regularly Means Once

One thing that happens when you take a story from pitch to a step outline is you notice all the places that you've shown passage of time. I'm reading a treatment that says "A and B drop by regularly," and my note to the writer is, "regularly doesn't happen in the movies." Regularly usually means once. Sometimes it means a montage, but usually it means one scene where it's clear that the same thing has been going on regularly.

Watch out for "regularly" and "over the course of the next few weeks" and other things you cannot shoot in a movie. It's okay to put them in your pitch, but be aware that they're hand-waving and they'll have to come out later.

How Do You Look In Shorts?

My d.p. buddy Maarten Kroonenburg wants to direct a second short film. He's an accomplished d.p. with his own equipment company, and we're working together on a feature film, so there is a very good likelihood he'll shoot one early next year. Maybe yours.

The script should be no more than 7 pages long -- the film needs to be no more than 6 minutes long with credits. Small cast (two is ideal), no more than a few locations. Minimal special effects. Funny is good but not a requirement. The writer must be Canadian.

Check out a bunch of Bravo!FACT shorts for inspiration.

If you've got a script you'd like to see get made, email it to his intern, Patrick.

The Blacklist for Download

The 2011 Blacklist is available for download here. Link said it was legit, but who knows if it's true, so download'em before they're gone.

The Blacklist is the year's best unproduced scripts, according to a select list of execs. Forget the Nicholls. This is a script competition you can't even get into unless someone loves your script already.

God Bless The Child That's Got His Own

[Politics] Wow. Mitt Romney just offered to bet Rick Perry $10,000 that Perry was misrepresenting his book.

What this tells me is that Mitt Romney is a guy who thinks of $10,000 as pocket money.

I wonder if this will turn out to be as big a gaffe as when George H. B. Bush marvelled at the newfangled optical scanner technology at the supermarket, which gave everyone the impression that he had not been to a supermarket in decades.

Oh, I hope so.

Sue, Sue, Sue

Can a “ghostwriter” sue someone he’s written a script for if the script sells? Even though there’s only one name on the script, the one who paid the ghostwriter to write it for him? I know an agent can probably sue a writer if the agent suggests all these changes to the script and the writer puts them in, and if he could prove through emails that he did in fact help “co-write” it (I heard it happens in Hollywood all the time), but could a ghostwriter sue? If it’s his job to ghostwrite, he can’t sue, can he?

First of all, ghostwriting is forbidden under the rules of the Writer's Guild of America. If the WGA finds out that someone put their name on someone else's writing, they're in trouble.

Second, no, a ghostwriter can't sue, because there's a ghostwriting contract.

An agent doesn't get credit for suggesting changes. Actually, no one gets writing credit for giving notes. You only get writing credit for actually writing pages.

It is an agent's job to give notes to her writing clients. She doesn't get credit. She gets a successful client. A writer needs writing credits. An agent needs successful clients. It's win-win.

Mostly people don't sue. It's not good business. It's bad for your reputation, and it's a huge time suck. Life is too short.

Ghostwriting is a very bad business, too. It damages the souls of both people involved, not to mention their reputations if it gets out.

Don't ghostwrite, and don't take credit for someone else's work.

What You Tell Me, I Doubt; What I Figure Out, I Believe

The Brits were clever handling their double agents during WWII

The British put their double agent network to work in support of Operation Fortitude, a plan to deceive the Germans about the location of the invasion of France. Allowing one of the double agents to claim to have stolen documents describing the closely guarded invasion plans might have aroused suspicion. Instead, agents were allowed to report minutiae such as insignia on soldiers' uniforms and unit markings on vehicles.

What you tell the audience, it doubts. But if you allow the audience to figure something out, they are invested in it, and tend to take it more to heart.

What Do I Want in My Contract? A WGC Panel Discussion

I'm moderating a panel for the WGC in February at McGill on "What Do I Want In My Contract?"

What should you ask for when you option a feature film or a TV series? The Writers Guild’s basic contract (the Independent Producer Agreement) covers many basic terms, but others aren’t codified, including lots of ways veteran writers get paid on the back end, your right to write new material, and the crucial “Created by” credit in TV. Plus, what’s all this fine print?

We’ve invited an agent who reps writers to talk about what writers can and should ask for; a producer’s lawyer to talk about what’s easy for producers to give and what’s hard; and a representative of the Writers Guild of Canada to talk about what contract terms end up in disputes. The panel will be moderated by Alex Epstein, who’s worked both sides of the table. Audience members will be able to ask questions.

This event is aimed at professional, emerging and aspiring screenwriters, but filmmakers of all kinds may find it illuminating.

Check out the Facebook Event page.

Also, if you have questions you want me to bring up at the panel, please email me.

The Times They Have A-Changed

We recently watched THE COLLECTOR and ROSEMARY'S BABY, two movies in which women are victimized, and do a really horrible job of protecting themselves. They're gullible and passive, and panicky, and stupid. They do as they're told, even when they have every reason to suppose the people ordering them around are homicidal maniacs. I don't want to see them hurt, but I have a lot of trouble sympathizing with them.

I wonder, when these movies came out, in 1965 and 1968, were the female characters perceived as normal? Did women watch these movies and think, yes, that's what we're like? Or were the filmmakers making a point? I can't imagine any woman being this passive in a movie from the 1930's or 1940's.

On another note, it is remarkable how long it takes for ROSEMARY'S BABY to get off the ground. I literally fell asleep watching the first 20 minutes. (And then slept for 12 hours, so maybe it was the flu, not the movie.) It is not until about 40 minutes in that we have any reason to worry about poor Rosemary or her baby. The movie has a reputation as a classic, but it's because of the very alarming ending.

You couldn't do that these days. No one has that kind of patience any more.

Oscar Scripts!

You can download a slew of Oscar scripts from Ropes of Silicon, including MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE and BRIDESMAIDS. I wonder what was improv'd and what wasn't? I know what I'm reading this weekend.

New Development Funding Requirements

[Cancon] Elvira Lount has posted a Facebook Note objecting to the new proposed Telefilm requirements for development funding. According to her synopsis:

1. In order for Canadian producers to access Telefilm feature film development funds they will have to have produced a feature film in the past 5 years.
2. Producers will be graded using the new 3 point performance criteria of box office, festivals/awards and private funding as presented at the recent Telefilm public meeting. It seems that your grade will affect the amount of development funding you will be able to access -- in what seems to be a much expanded development performance envelope.
3. Telefilm won't be providing creative input. It will be up to the producers to handle the development.
4. Producers who aren't eligible - haven't produced a feature film in the past 5 years - will have to partner with a producer who is eligible. There is no info on which partner will control the funds, but most likely it will be the eligible producer since they'll be getting the money - I'm assuming. No info on whether they can be just an executive producer or have to be an actual co-producer with part ownership of your project. No info on whether your TV or service production credits will count, or whether if you've produced films without Telefilm involvement they will count or be assessed under the new performance criteria and render you eligible.
5. A producer can apparently apply for an exception exemption- for instance if you have feature film credits but not in the past 5 years -- you may be able to convince Telefilm that your should be eligible. But, that would be very limited - exceptional circumstances only.
6. There is likely to be a 1st & 2nd time producer development stream - but no indication of how much will be allocated, the assessment process etc. Given that most of the funds will go to the much expanded development "performance" envelope this stream is likely to be heavily oversubscribed.

Her main objection is that this will squeeze inexperienced producers out of development. Why would an experienced producer team up with an inexperienced when they have their own projects?

I'm not convinced the new regulations are a bad idea. Doesn't it make a whole lot of sense to evaluate a development money request not only on the strength of the script or story, but the producer's track record? If I bring a TV project to a network, they are certainly going to judge the project not only on its creative merits on paper, but on my ability to execute, and the producer's track record. Same goes if I bring a project to a studio. Why wouldn't the government be equally careful with taxpayer money?

I disagree that eligible producers will ignore ineligible producers. I spent about 8 years as a development exec before I made my living writing, so I have some experience in production companies. Bigger producers team up with little ones all the time. Why? Because it keeps their overhead low. If I'm E1, say, and a smart emerging producer brings in a project she's nurtured, then I've saved myself a lot of headaches. I don't have to sift through 1000 scripts to find one good one. I don't have to do a deal with the writer. I don't have to give the writer notes. And I have someone who will shepherd the project for me. All I have to do is leverage my relationships with distributors and beat up on talent agents, which is something I, E1, can do better than an indie producer.

Why do you think studios have producers on the lot? Because producers who have everything riding on the project are better at picking winners than employees are.

And, keep in mind that the 40% allowable producer fees/overhead on the development funds will have to be divided between the 2 producers/production companies (most likely 50/50) with the balance going to the writers and story editors. So, on a development budget of $25,000 that combined producer/overhead fee will be $7000 split 2 ways - $3500 per producer/production company - and with that you are expected to devote months or years of your life to developing the project that you no longer own or control and to run your office. Plus, of course you will need to pay a lawyer to draw up the co-producer contract -- so this is an additional expense that will eat into your $3500 share -- let's say it will cost you at least $1000 to make sure you don't get screwed by the other producer. So, now you're left with $2500 and you've given away half your project, or maybe even the whole project.

First, what eligible producer is going to be willing to take on someone else's project for that paltry sum of $2500 when they can keep the whole allowable 40% fee by developing their own projects?

Here's the thing. The development overhead is not supposed to be how you pay the rent as a producer. It's supposed to tide you over. You are supposed to make your living producing movies. I've heard it said too often that many producers make their living developing scripts. Meaning, that's all they do. The Telefilm development money is not supposed to be there to support people working in the industry. It is supposed to support movie making.

I've often noticed that many producers, particularly in Québec, do not seem very interested in reading my, and other writers', material. What they want to do is develop their own pet projects. An exec friend of mine recently tried to forward an interesting script to a producer I've worked with. He wrote back, "What makes you think I'm interested in reading other people's scripts?"

And frankly, if you're an emerging producer, you ought to be able to negotiate a reasonable deal for yourself with an established producer.

Of course, I worked in LA for 10 years. There was a year where I was exactly an emerging producer with no credits trying to sell my projects to established producers. So all of this seems extremely normal to me, except for the part where the government helps people fund their projects.

I think it makes sense to get Telefilm out of the business of giving notes. I have many friends who are Telefilm analysts, and they're pretty sharp folks. They've often helped me make my scripts better. But doesn't it make sense that the notes should come from the person who lives or dies by the critical and/or commercial success of the movie? No Telefilm analyst was ever fired because their notes made a movie less commercial or less of a festival winner. If Denise Robert wants to make another potential Oscar winner, shouldn't she have the final say on whether the script is perfect the way it is? If Muse wants to make the next big dumb comedy, you know the analyst is not going to say, "we need more fart jokes." But sometimes you just need more fart jokes.

I guess the only quibble I would have with the guidelines is that 5 years might be short. It takes a long time to develop and produce a feature. I think you could be a very good producer and not necessarily have a feature in the past 5 years for entirely legit reasons. I think 7 years might be more reasonable.

Look, I'm as scared of the big bad Conservatives as anybody. And I keep waiting for some terrible drastic change to the creative landscape. But these seem like entirely reasonable and fair new guidelines.

Intern Sushi

Intern Sushi is a site trying to put interns and companies together. Has anyone tried it?

(Terrible name, incidentally. Interns are not dead cold fish!)

Synopsis?

Q. If you are still an unknown writer, should you provide a synopsis along with your query letter - or is this too much for the agent to read?

No, for three reasons.

One, it is very, very hard to write a good synopsis. One tends to write the plot. Characters don't come through well. Tone barely comes through at all. Comedy dies in a synopsis.

Two, very few people can read a synopsis. A script can read like a movie, but to properly read a synopsis, you have to really think about how the sentences are going to be fleshed out in the script. Most people don't take the time or effort, or don't know how.

Three, the point of a query letter is to get someone to read your script. If they don't like the query, they won't read the synopsis. If they do like the query, and you've sent a synopsis, they'll read that, and they might not like it. Why put any friction between the query and the script?

Of course your query really has to rock. As part of my script critique service, I've read queries that really don't sell the concept that's in the synopsis. Spend some time honing your query and making sure it really sells your script.

Sometimes you have to write a synopsis, because someone is insisting on reading one. In that case, don't write a synopsis, write a pitch. Don't write a ten-page beat-by-beat recap of what happens in your script. Instead, off the top of your head, write the story of your script, as if you're telling it to someone in a bar. Feel free to put things out of order if that sounds better in the story. Often a subplot is better told on its own. Try to avoid cutting back and forth in a pitch. Feel free to be real detailed about the setup and real vague about the ending. I would never send more than a 3-5 page pitch unless it's a requirement for some kind of application. Keep the beat sheet to yourself.

Viral Vamps

Holy smoke and mirrors! Our little teen vampire sex comedy YOU ARE SO UNDEAD is going viral on YouTube!

Adobe CS?

Anyone out there have an old, legit disc of Adobe CS for Mac that they're willing to donate (or sell me)? Hunter's art class badly needs one. (Really, they mostly need Photoshop.)

60-30-10

Telefilm has changed its definition of a movie's "success." Instead of gauging it 100% on box office, it's now 60% box office, 30% festivals and awards, and 10% how much it was financed privately rather than purely out of the government's pockets.

Personally, this seems to me like a step in the right direction. If Canadians are supporting a Canadian cinema, winning Cannes ought to count. After all, Canadian movies are cultural ambassadors, as well as cultural touchstones.

DVD sales will count, as well, at least indirectly. That's good. Most of the time English Canadians watch their own movies, they're on DVD. After all, Canadian budgets are low, and most people watch low budget movies on DVD. No Canadian movie can compete head to head against TRANSFORMERS and other spectacles.

So I'm glad Telefilm is setting more holistic benchmarks.

Climactic Warthog Attack Leaves One Dead

Daniel Martin Eckhart links to the documentary "Malkovich's Mail" about the unsolicited scripts and queries that John Malkovich gets. They track down the writers of some of these very original ideas ("cyborg dinosaurs!" "climactic warthog attack leaves one dead!").

My takeaway from this is that the "odds" against you aren't numeric. It doesn't matter if only 1 out of 1000 scripts, or 10,000, or 100,000 gets optioned, bought, or made. It matters where you are, compared to the 1000, or 10,000, or 100,000. If you're a reader of this blog, you're far more clued in than most of these people. If you've been following my advice, I bet you're a far better writer, too. It is entirely possible that the "odds" against what you're trying to do are 10,000, but you're in the top 10. Still tough, but if you keep at it you'll hit pay dirt.

Anyway, if you're a writer, it doesn't really matter what the odds are, 'cause you have to do it.

We Vulcans Have a Saying: Only Nixon Could Go to China

[POLITICS] The New York Times objects to Gingrich railing against cronyism and lobbying after making huge gobs of money being a lobbyist for the very companies (like Fannie Mae) that he despises.

Seems to me the logical tack for the Gingrich team to take is to own his past: yes, I got paid a whack of money as a lobbyist in a lousy system. In I know more about how lousy this system is than anyone else. Therefore I'm the guy to fix it. That seems like a stronger argument than his current "I just gave them advice, I never actually lobbied anyone" claim, which seems risky (someone could remember he lobbied them) and morally doubtful (really? you took their money but you didn't try to give them good value for it?).

After all, there are lots of rich liberals. Just because they don't think there should be tax breaks to the rich doesn't mean they won't take'em.

Who's In Your Pilot?

Q. When you do a pilot for a series, it seems only natural that you need to introduce all main characters, plus the most important recurring ones, but how much is too much?

I would try not to introduce the recurring characters. You want to focus the story on your core cast, so that you have time to introduce them properly, in action. Obviously if it's a procedural, you'll have episodic characters; and even if it's character-based, there may well need to be an episodic character to push them into motion. But the pilot is meant to show that your core cast have such interesting dynamics that you'll have no problem getting 100 stories out of them. If you need a bunch of recurring characters to get a good story, maybe you have the wrong core cast.

Contact Directly

As a screenwriting blogger, I get a whack of offers to review books from publishers and marketing people. As a book author, I've sent them out.

I've noticed I get much, much better results when I'm the one sending out my own publicity ("please help me get the word out") than when Lisa's sending it out as my publicist. (She actually is a former publicist.)

I also just noticed my own reaction when someone asked me to read their book. I liked the idea, and maybe I would have read it even if the email had come from a publisher. But I liked being emailed by the author more than I like being emailed by a publicist or a publisher.

So there you go.

Studios Be Touchy

Fox sued an aspiring screenwriter and part-time flower seller for $12 million for uploading 80 screenplays which were already available online.

They finally dropped the suit. But be careful out there, people. If they're going after the flower girls, no one is safe.

Stand By Your Man

[POLITICAL THEATRE] Herman Cain says his wife doesn't believe he's a sexual harasser, therefore no one else should.

I know this guy is toast anyway, but even supposing he could rememberc which side Obama took in the Libyan revolution, is this an argument that can possibly carry any weight? How would a wife have insight into whether her husband makes unwanted sexual advances? She obviously liked his sexual advances.

This is very different from the Clintons' defenses against Bill's "bimbo eruptions." When Hillary got up and said, "I'm not some little Tammy Wynette standing by her man," she basically told everyone, "I know he's a hound dog, I just don't care." By being a little snotty about it, she pulled the attention off Bill and whether he'd made unwanted advances to a job-seeking woman, and onto what a piece of work she is. (It helped that Gennifer Flowers claimed that Bill had propositioned her in a hotel that didn't exist at the time she claimed he'd done it.)

(Incidentally, if you need proof that the Tea Party is not fundamentally racist, you need go no further than the complete lack of racial undertones in a story about a black businessman making alleged propositions to white women.)

If I were looking for a good R nominee, I would stay the hell away from a guy who's had two harassment settlements against him. If Cain made it to the general election, I'm pretty sure those settlements would somehow escape from their confidentiality clauses.

Argh.

So I read this article about the Facebook "Other Messages" folder. Did you know there was an "Other Messages" folder on Facebook? Yeah, that's the one they don't forward to your email address. Facebook explains it in its users guide.

You have read the Facebook Users Guide? Yeah, me, too. I also read all the fine print the banks send me every time they change their rules, and, of course, the User Agreements every time I install software.

Okay, so when someone you don't know sends you a message on Facebook, it goes in your Other Messages folder. Profile spam, event invitatins and ... job offers? There was a job offer from August 18 there. Eff. Eff, eff, eff.

Holy smoke, folks, please do not send me job offers via Facebook messaging! My email address is not hard to find. It is, in fact, on my websites. It is also on my Facebook Info page. My phone number is in the freakin' book.

Thank you, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Re-enactions?

Q. Is it legal to re-enact and film scenes from major motion pictures and television shows and broadcast online?Could this be possible grounds for the "rights"owners to sue?

Legally, this is a violation of copyright. Realistically, people do this on YouTube all the time. My guess is that the most that could happen is they ask YouTube to take the video down.

(I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.)

Herman Cain Can't Remember What the President Ordered

[POLITICS] I think I might start blogging about political theater again, as the race heats up.

Before you guys fill the comments with actual political arguments, I will stress that I am talking here about messaging, not who's actually right and who's wrong. I'm an Obama fan, but I'm going to write about how effective the two sides' campaigns are.

Herman Cain tries to remember why Obama's Libya policy was wrong and what he would do differently.

I'm not clear why the Republicans don't just give Obama the win on Libya. If I were running R messaging, that's what I'd do. It's going to be a tough sell that a policy that resulted in 0 American deaths, relatively minor expense, and the overthrow of a dictator, was the wrong policy, especially when overcommitment or undercommitment had such serious risks.

Instead, I think I'd push a message like, "It's great that Obama did such a great job on Libya. If only he'd spent that kind of attention on cutting taxes" etc. This election is going to be about the economy, so it's not giving up much.

When you attack your opponent for every last thing he does, it devalues your message.

I bet you the Dems aren't going to do that. I bet you Obama's going to be full of praise for Mitt Romney. Not just for Romneycare, which I'm sure he'll say all kinds of nice things about. But he'll probably say nice things about Romney's job running the Olympics. Because then when you follow that up with an attack, the attack sounds better.

It's been kind of shocking to see the Republican field implode. The Republicans seem doomed to settle on Mitt Romney, a candidate they don't actually seem to like very much -- a sort of Republican John Kerry. Why? Because all the loyalty oaths and pledges you have to sign seem to have chased off all the heavyweight candidates. They could still win it, of course, because the President is so unpopular. But an unpopular incumbent can win, if he can tear down the other candidate. That's why Harry Reid is still in office. (See Angle, Sharron.)

I'm kind of rooting for Newt Gingrich. For all his loose-cannon-ness, he's his own man. He's had original thoughts. He probably could name the President of Uzbekistan. And he wants three-hour Lincoln-Douglas-style debates. That would enrich our democracy, I think.

Walter's Christmas!

We just saw Le Noël de Walter et Tandoori, a 3D animated kids' movie Lisa and I co-wrote. Weirdly they are releasing it first in French, mais c'est ça le marché Québecois.

Anyway, we loved it! What fun seeing our words turned into goofy moving pictures. Especially the Bollywood number. Catch it ce weekend in theatres in Québec.

Step Outline

I’m working on a feature script. I got a bit of funding based on a 13 page pitch; now it’s on to draft.
But before I go to draft, there’s a small step to take: turning the pitch into a step outline. The different is just this: adding sluglines.

Surprisingly, adding sluglines provokes significant changes. In a pitch, you can write, “Suzie and Hans have been cocooning ever since they met two months ago.” But how do we know this? Is it a series of flashbacks? Is it a conversation? With whom?

Simply adding the time and place everything happens to a pitch makes you rethink how you’re telling the story. Should this argument take place at the airport? On the way to the airport? At home while packing?

The step outline is the last point you’re going to look at your story as a whole before you plunge into pages. So it’s good to look at each step and make sure you really need it, and that it’s as cinematic as you can make it. You can do that later, too, but it will cost you more work.

Episodes Have Hooks Too

Q. In a query letter for a screenplay, the letter needs to include a description of the material. Does the same hold true for a query letter concerning a TV spec script? In other words, should the query letter contain the log line for the script? (In this case a “30 Rock” script.)

I think so. It encourages them to read your script if they know what the hook is (and if it's a good hook). "I would like to send you my 30 ROCK script, 'Lemon Tart,' in which Liz accidentally becomes a hooker." Also, it helps them remember which one's yours.

Final Draft $50 off

Final Draft is cutting its price through its affiliates program, and since this blog is an affiliate, you can have FD8 for $50 off.

Some people swear by Screenwriter. I swear at Screenwriter, and prefer Final Draft. So there you go.

Blow Up Your Premise

Q. We wrote a pilot, found a production company who loves it and have a network biting at it, but they're not completely hooked yet. They seem to be responding to the writing and the humor and the characters, but they're resistant to the central set-up. It's slightly off of center. Truly not that far off, but they have this note of just changing the central set-up to something different, anything really. But changing the set-up will fundamentally shift the character dynamics. We're going to schedule more talks with our network contacts, before going in officially to pitch, to get a better sense of what they are thinking but in the end...

What? No. Don't go in until you've fixed it. Networks hate when you ask them to do your thinking for you.

WTF?! How do we convince them that this idea, as conceived, works the way it does because of the set-up.

No, it doesn't. Not for them. They just told you that.

Our production company is equally as baffled by these notes, so it's not just us. They want to figure out how to explain who she is and how it works in the story so that this idea can move forward to the next phase. Any tips of breaking this down for execs?

You don't CONVINCE a network of anything. You SHOW them the thing they want.

They have basically told you that they like the territory, but not the setup. You need to blow up your set up and start thinking in fresh ways. Take it in a new direction.

Blow it up. Make the girl a boy. Make the boy a girl. Make the dad a son. Make the rich guy poor. Add a character. Subtract a character.

Their note ("change this, we don't know how") may mean, "you don't really have a hook yet. Get one."

On a show we developed for TeenNick, we had a show without a hook, and the network note was "could she have an ability." Of course they didn't want the lead character to be Supergirl. What they meant was "you have no hook, get one."

On Naked Josh, we had a show about a geeky college freshman that they sort of liked, but not entirely. We made it a show about a geeky professor, and sold it. Basically we wrote the "sequel" to the series we were gonna do, and made Josh 8 years older. Instead of being a sexual loser, he was a sexual winner.

Never ask a network how to change something. They won't like it. You're supposed to make their job easier, not harder. You won't like it, either, because they'll tell you something that took 15 seconds to think of ("could she have an ability?") and you'll be stuck with it.

Instead, figure out what they're bumping on and then fix that thing. Radically. If you go too far, they can always reel you back in, but they'll feel you listened to them.

Part-Time Internship

My buddy Maarten Kroonenburg is a cinematographer who owns his own equipment company, and he's starting to direct. He just directed a comedy short we wrote together. He's going to direct another in the Spring. I'm writing a feature for him to direct.

Maarten needs some help with his projects, and is looking to bring on an intern to do things like research, promoting and submitting his shorts to festivals, helping to organize his next shoot, applying to funding agencies, finding scripts for Maarten to attach himself to -- all kinds of stuff that an emerging filmmaker would probably want to know how to do. The time commitment wouldn't be big except in a pinch.

The ideal candidate would be in Montreal, but it's entirely possible that he or she would be somewhere else. (Most of my own interns have been out of town.) The ideal candidate would be super-organized, with excellent communication skills.

Ideally, the candidate would be willing to do this as an unpaid internship, but it is possible that money could be found for the right person. Or access to his equipment truck to shoot your own stuff. College credit could also be arranged, I imagine.

If you're interested, please send your c.v. as a PDF, along with a personable e-mail introducing yourself, to Jennifer Mulligan.

Bridesmaids

We really, really liked BRIDESMAIDS. We were prepared to hate it, actually. All we knew was it's supposed to be the male HANGOVER, and there's a scene where one of the girls takes a crap in the middle of the street. The only reason we watched it is because the director of one of my scripts asked me to.

It is actually a keenly observed comedy with heart, about how women deal with each other (and, occasionally, with men).

(It is also a very good advertisement for being born a man. No wonder orthodox Jewish men thank God every day that they were born male.)

I wrote earlier about director Paul Feig's Master Class and the "Bucket Brigade". YouTube's got an example of how Feig used improv in shooting the movie: it's a ten-minute bitchfest between Kirsten Wiig and thirteen-year-old Mia Rose Frampton (yes, that Frampton). Only half a minute made it into the movie, but what did was loose and convincing because it was impromptu. Feig and his colleagues (Steve Carell, Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, etc.) do a lot of "plussing" on each other's scripts. Maybe that's why they're all on top of the charts.

Note to self: do not be afraid of improv. And leave enough time in the schedule for it.

(If this YouTube disappears, check it out on the Blu-Ray disc, or Google "longest argument Bridesmaids".)

Show Me the Funny

I'm about halfway through SHOW ME THE FUNNY, by Peter Desberg and Jeffrey Davis. It's an intriguing concept for a book: take a nondescript sitcom premise ("recently divorced mom moves in with her ambitious daughter") and throw it to a slew of top comedy writers and see how they struggle with it on the spot. Then print the unedited interview.

They get interesting results. They get some of the solutions that make for awful, typical sitcom porridge ("throw in some funny neighbors"). Some latch onto a detail and try to build it into something. A few of them try to turn it into a feature. One of them, Dennis Klein, berates the writers for bringing him such a crap premise.

It's fun to see how all these writers bring something of themselves into the story. You get to see their process a bit, THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO-style. It could inspire you to take your own ideas in several different directions rather than just in the first direction that comes to mind. There are a few nuggets of fresh information here and there.

I can't help wishing it were a bit more compelling and interesting. I can't help thinking that if you brought such a bland premise to my peeps, you'd get more surprising results. I keep having a funny feeling about these interviews. These are top tv writers, and they are used to working successfully with network execs. They have learned not to say, "This is a crap premise," or "there is nothing here for me to work with." They are so used to being polite about bad ideas from producers or execs that they wind up hemmed in creatively, even here where there is no job available for them. After all, this will be published in a book. They don't want to get a reputation for being "difficult." Even Dennis Klein, who spends the entire interview ripping the authors a new one, calls back afterwards to say he was "doing schtick," when clearly, he was having an honest reaction.

Still, it is an interesting book, for showing you what twenty different "takes" might look like. Just think about that the next time an exec or producer asks you for your take on a piece of material.

Rango

What a strange movie RANGO is. The animation is for kids (and a lovely job, too). But the plot is a strange combination of an internal existential dilemma ("Who am I?" asks the chameleon) and a CHINATOWN-esque parable of water rights in the West. A lot of the dialog has gotta be way over kids' heads ("I once found a spinal column in my fecal material"). And yet it's made about $250 million, half domestic, half overseas. I think you have to call that a win.

If I had to draw a moral, I'd say, "Enough spectacle and it really doesn't matter what your story is," which explains the STAR WARS prequels and the over-one-billion box office take of the latest TRANSFORMERS movie. But maybe I'm just coming down with a cold.

Alex is a Video Game Character

While I was giving my talk at MIGS, Funcom artist Joel Akerman did this lovely sketch. I feel like I'm halfway to being a video game character!

MIGS Talk

So I gave my talk at MIGS about screenwriting tools for game designers, and I thought it went pretty well. If you missed the talk, here are the headlines

• We care about heroes when they have flaws; I proposed some mechanics and story telling approaches to giving a videogame hero a compelling flaw;
• Storytelling should be "pull" and not "push" and how to do that;
• Is there a way to give a player real choices with consequences without getting into the insane cost of binary storytelling?

I wonder if there's anywhere else I should give my talk?

@CraftyScreen at #MIGS2011

Just done with two very intense days at MIGS 2011, including my talk on Screenwriting Tools for Game Developers. Don't have a writeup yet, and I may never do, so I will tweet (@Craftyscreen) as my memories surface.

Not so klever Kalinda

'sfunny how one little logic glitch can scotch a big emotional climax. We've been watching THE GOOD WIFE Season Two.

SPOILERS, of course...

It's an odd season because the nominal main character, Julianna Margulies's Alicia Florrick, barely has a story line. It's as if they've given up on her as, y'know, kinda boring and frigid and self-righteous. But now that she's taken Peter back, and Will has proven himself a romantic coward, what is there to do with her?

So the season has become about Kalinda and her secret former identity. We just watched S2E18 (or so), "Foreign Affairs" in which Alicia finally discovers that Amber Madison wasn't the only woman with whom Peter cheated on her -- her dear recent BFF Kalinda did, too. And she finds that out just Peter wins the election.

But Kalinda's secret, frequently alluded to, and something on which an inordinate amount of plot hinges, seems to be that she used to work for Peter in the States' Attorney's office, and he helped her change her identity.

We're supposed to believe that clever Kalinda would change her name and identity, quit the State's Attorney office, and then go to work at a high profile firm that regularly defends clients from the State's Attorney office. Almost every episode, she's appearing in a courtroom.

How has nobody from the State's Attorney Office already recognized her?

Any sensible person trying to flee their old identity immediately moves to a new city. Kalinda would be wise to move to LA and pass as a Latina. They can always use detectives in LA, from what I understand.

This is a pretty gaping plothole. And it's spoiling our enjoyment of what is otherwise a beautifully-written show.

The problem is, it's very easy for writers on a show to convince themselves they can get away with a logical hole. "No one will care about that," you tell yourself. But once you betray the audience like that, it's hard to get them to go with you on anything else.

Of course, Lisa and I could be the only two people in the world who noticed this, in which case THE GOOD WIFE folks got away with it. But I'm guessing we're not.

The shame of it is that it's unnecessary. I've got a simple fix. Peter Florrick could have met Kalinda in another city, gone to bed with her, and helped her forge a new identity in Chicago.

It's often not hard to fix something, if you are willing to go to the trouble. I'm still impressed with Brad Ideas's fix for the painful Battlestar Finale.

I'll be interested in seeing what the details are once we get the full reveal. Maybe it'll all make sense in the end...

Stage 32

Stage 32 is "the social network for film, television and theatre creatives." They are free. They say they have "already hooked up dozens of struggling screenwriters with producers looking for good scripts." They have 15,000 members after two months; about 1/4th of those are screenwriters.

I don't know if anyone needs another social network -- I've got Facebook, Facebook fan pages for my books and novel, Google+, LinkedIn and the Twitter. And there have already been various versions of this idea. But it might be worth checking out if you're not already hooked in.

Negotiating Skillz

Slate is running a series of podcasts on negotiation. Negotiation is a big part of any showbiz career, even if your agent is doing it for you. Playing poker is a useful way to learn some negotiation skills, but this podcast series is excellent too. They're talking about how to figure out your walkaway threshold, how to start by schmoozing, whether to propose a number first or wait for a proposal...

Review: Deadheads and War of the Dead at TADFF

I went to Toronto for, among other things, the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, run by the ebullient Adam Lopez. They were kind enough to screen You Are So Undead Saturday night. It was Zombie Appreciation Night -- two bucks off if you're a zombie! -- so a sizable chunk of the audience were duded up in the their dead best. And their best was very good indeed. A fair number of them wouldn't have looked out of a place in a zombie movie.

So our sexy little vamps were sandwiched between two zombie movies.

DEADHEADS is a goofy, fun zombie romantic comedy. Mike Kellerman returns to consciousness in a freezer three years after dying. There's a zombie outbreak going on, so it takes him a little time to realize that he, too, is dead. Just, he's a walking and talking zombie.

And he wants to get back to the girl he loves. He's just unsure how it will go, him being dead and all. Fortunately, he quickly attracts a wingman, also talking-dead Brent Guthrie, who won't let him let himself down. Soon they're driving across the country, with badass government agents in hot pursuit.

What makes this movie work is the characters. Sure, there's action and slapstick and snappy banter. But this movie has heart. Mike and Brent are a great odd couple. The government agents are all fun, from the convict who's trying to win his freedom, to the obnoxious macho killer with the most ridiculous sideburns anyone's seen since 1895, to the huge moaning zombie, "Cheese," that the guys have decided to bring along as a pet.


WAR OF THE DEAD is an exuberant mess. It's a World War Ii zombie war movie. There's a bunker where the Nazis did secret experiments on Russian soldiers, and now there are Nazi zombies running around. There's enough zombie shooting for any Call of Duty: Black Ops fan. It's impressive how much production value you can get for a million euros in Lithuania. Nice camera work, nice set design.

What there isn't is much of a story. There's a plot all right. It's 1941. Inexplicably, an American platoon (I thought we weren't at war till December 7?) is fighting alongside Finns (I thought they were German allies?) against Russians (I thought they were our allies?) to find and destroy a secret Nazi bunker in Karelia (Russian territory till September 1941). There's some sort of German scientist who's made these odd little mechanisms with gears, that ultimately turn out to be nothing more than odd little keys. There's a girl who may or may not have been involved with the experiments. There's a young Russian soldier, an American captain and a Finnish lieutenant who's not telling everything he knows, and never does.

And there are lots and lots of Nazis, especially undead ones.

It would have been nice to have a theme. Or a main character to root for. Maybe then I would have cared how it came out.

I'm not sure about the point of doing a zombie war movie. Zombies are among the least impressive of the undead. (Like, 2d6, tops.) They're scary if you're armed with a cricket bat. If you've got a tommygun and enough ammo, they're not nearly as dangerous as actual German soldiers, who were pretty deadly.

Nice music, though. And nice production values. And the audience seemed to enjoy it.

I seem to be tweeting...

I now seem to be on the Twitter as CraftyScreen, so now you know...

Writer Mafia Judecast

How did I miss this? The awesome Jude Klassen's video of the 5th Annual Writers Mafia Party at TIFF last month:

Bloody Hallowe'en Prom!

YOU ARE SO UNDEAD is opening for PROM NIGHT (the 1980 slasher film at Blue Sunshine, "Montreal's Psychotronic Film Centre," 3660 Blvd. St. Laurent, on Friday the 29th. I'll be there -- hope you will too!

Frustrated with Dark Meadow

I spent about five or six hours yesterday hacking through monsters on my iPad in Dark Meadow. For me it was a very frustrating experience. Dark Meadow is really two games. One is an interesting game in which you explore an abandoned hospital, trying to piece together mysteries -- who are you, how do you get out, and should you trust the creepy guy on the intercom? The other is a game where every two or three moves, a monster comes down the corridor. You shoot it with your crossbow, and then hack at it with your sword. As you level up, the monsters level up, and you get more gear. Because this is a video game, there are bags of gold lying around randomly. You need them to buy more gear.

It's not a terrific combat game. The combat is fairly elementary - just a lot of stabbing at the iPad with your finger, really, and a lot of dodging. I am not very good at twitch, so this was frustrating to me, but to, say, Hunter, it would be fairly trivial, not to say tedious, since the monsters' combo moves are programmed and telegraphed.

It might actually be a good mystery game. But I didn't get to find out, because every two or three moves, I had to fight a monster. This got tedious fast. The monsters have almost nothing to do with the story. You don't learn anything about the mystery from fighting the monsters. They're just an obstacle. When I wasn't fighting monsters, I was reduced to poking at cabinets for money (they replenish themselves) so I could buy better gear. I was longing for a "Tell Me a Story" setting, where I could skip the monsters and just follow the mystery.

In the end, I got so irritated at the game, I killed off my save game, so I wouldn't continue to play out of sheer need for closure. It stopped being fun. I was just playing to get to the end.

In a good story, the obstacle has something to do with the hero and his goal. The obstacles are reflections of the hero in some way; they mean something to him. The obstacles are inherent in the goal; they arise out of the goal in some way. Otherwise you're just hurling monsters down a corridor at the player in order to stretch out the gameplay.

Phone Number?

Q. Do you recommend putting your phone number on title pages for scripts?

Only if you want people to call you after they read it. Also, only put your email address on your title page if you want people to email you.

At Last It Can Be Blogged

Bravo!FACT has released YOU ARE SO UNDEAD onto their site, so up it goes here. Enjoy!

Best seen in 720p HD video, fullscreen. The image quality really is superb.

Diversify

The WGC and Bell Media are calling on writers in eastern Canada to apply to the Bell Media Diverse Screenwriters Program. This session will run in Toronto in the Spring of 2012. The program is free-of-charge to selected writers, and offers emerging and mid-career writers from diverse backgrounds the chance to hone the skills they need to become successful professional screenwriters. And one writer will come out of the program with a paid internship on a Bell Media TV series. The Deadline for eastern Canada applications is December 2, 2011. For more information and application materials, please visit www.wgc.ca and click on Bell Media Diverse Screenwriters Program. It's an amazing opportunity!

Hang Your Plot on Character, Not Happenstance

We blitzed through THE GOOD WIFE Season One, and we're deep into Season Two. It really is a beautifully written show, very subtle and nuanced and true.

At the beginning of Season Two, though, the show does something that is perilously close to a sitcom plot move.

(*Spoiler* for the end of Season One.)

At the end of Season One, Will declares his feelings for Alicia, our heroine. And she, beautifully, doesn't say "yes" or "no," but "I need a plan." At the beginning of Season Two, he calls back to leave a voice message, saying "You're right, I don't have a plan, forget it." Then he leaves another voice message, taking the first message back. He loves her. If she loves him, she should call him back.

Unfortunately, she's handed her cell phone off to her husband's campaign manager, who deletes the second message, because it will make the election harder to win.

So for something like 6 episodes, she assumes that Will's first call ("forget it") was his only call; and Will assumes that she is intentionally ignoring his call.

Okay, so why is this relatively lame plotting? Almost everywhere else, the characters of THE GOOD WIFE are really smart. It takes Peter Florrick moments to tell when someone's wearing a wire. Kalinda, the mysterious private eye, figures out that Alicia's had a moment with Will from just her tone of voice; and while she says nothing, we can read it in her face.

But this is not as smart. It is a little hard to imagine that someone as smart, and correct, and self-righteous as Alicia would hand her cell phone off to anyone, ever. Certainly not to her husband's campaign manager. Certainly not moments after getting an adulterous phone call.

And it is a bit lame of Will to leave two voice messages and then never follow up on them, not even to say, "Did you get both my voice messages?" Especially after a fervent declaration of love. I have made a few fervent declarations of love in my day. I did not leave them on voice mail, and if I had, I wouldn't have let them sit when the lady in question worked at my own office.

And how lame that, having left his fervent declaration, he ends it by saying "If you agree, call me," rather than, say, "I want to talk to you about this in person and I won't take no for an answer." Which, given her "I need a plan," he's entitled to say.

But how likely it is, is not really what bothers me. People do unlikely things all the time, especially under stress. No, what bothers me is that the plot is suddenly hanging, not on character, but on a misunderstanding. How THREE'S COMPANY is that?

I think the best dramatic plots hang entirely on character. You have the feeling that what happens, happens because of who the characters are. If it didn't happen today, it would happen tomorrow. There is surprise, but there is inevitability. You think, "Of course, that had to happen."


When the plot hangs on happenstance, to me it can't help feeling a bit convenient. The writers have decided that Alicia will never say, "I got your message," and Will will never say, "Both my messages?" in the four months it takes Alicia to figure out that she's been informationally shortchanged.

Why did they do it? Because they wanted to milk the Dave-and-Maddy mutually-unrequited-lust angle for all it was worth before moving on.

That's a natural desire for TV writers, especially when they're using the episodic-A-plot/long-arc-uberplot template that the best broadcast shows love so much. In TV, you don't want to get anywhere too fast in your uberplot because you'll run out of plot twists. Once Alicia knows Will's feelings she'll have to decide how she feels; and there is only so much back and forth the audience can take.

But how much better to hang the whole question on character? What if Will had indeed only left one message? What if the six episodes were about Will wishing that he could take it back, wishing he could declare his love, but knowing that, in fact, he has no plan, and he's asking Alicia to destroy her family when he himself isn't risking anything?

You'd get the same will-they-or-won't-they. But it would hang on character, not on the clever ministrations of Eli Gold, who is oh so handy with a cell phone.

Skip College?

Q. I'm a high school student who wants to pursue a career in TV writing. I've been working my way up to writing some specs, and also I've been doing a little bit of playwriting, as it's just easier to find youth classes devoted to that than any other media writing outlet. What do you recommend for a kid right out of High School

In Crafty TV Writing, you advise all prospective writers to get an internship/assistant position at a literary agency in L.A., or if you can on the staff of a TV show, but I felt this advice was given with "adults' in mind, and I wasn't sure if this was the optimal path right out of high school.

Would it be better to go through NYU's Dramatic Writing program (which I was not accepted to, though a friend of mine was) or to do as you say and get a job inside the business and save a degree for later? As you may have guessed, part of my hesitation stems from the whole stigma against not going to college--a stigma which I am ready to ignore in pursuit of a TV writer's position. But I just wanted your genuine opinion as to what a high school graduate should do to become a TV writer.

I would never tell anyone not to go to college. No one ever made much of himself without finishing university. Except, you know, Steve Jobs. And Steven Spielberg. And Bill Gates. And Thomas Edison. And Shakespeare.

I would still never tell anyone not to go to college. The facts you learn in college are rarely useful in themselves. No one is going to offer you $100 to compare Dante to Milton over the weekend. But you learn how to learn, and you learn how to think at a problem from different angles. And you learn to read deeply.

Also, you make a slew of friends who may be useful to you later. And if you're writing plays, it's a hundred times easier to get them produced at university than they would be out in the cold hard real world. It is a real pain in the ass getting a play produced at an Equity Waiver theatre. At college, they will produce your play for you, and offer you cake. (See "Sorkin, Aaron.")

I'm not sure you need a dramatic writing program in college. I was a computer science major; Yale didn't have creative writing, really, except one course with Harold Bloom. (I actually spent a semester hanging out in New York auditing classes at Columbia to circumvent this. I just did the work and no one seemed to mind I was just auditing.) I worked on a literary magazine at Yale (Zirkus) and founded another one (The Trumbull Review), and there was no shortage of poems and stories. A buddy of mine wrote plays which were performed at Yale. Neither the writing nor the performing were for credit. If you're a writer, you'll write. No writer ever needed a writing class. But you can't really study James Joyce on your own and expect to make anything out of Ulysses. And learning how to unpack some crazy Modernist's styles will develop your analytical muscles that you can then apply to figuring out the template to THE GOOD WIFE or 30 ROCK.

You can get part-time internships when you're a student. You can't come into an agency part time when you're 22, but you can when you're at UCLA. Everyone understands that you can't be full-time. So in some ways it's easier to break in as a promising student than as one of many underemployed adults. You could intern at an agency, but part-time, and without having to be a messenger. If you actually got offered a writer's assistant job, you could drop out of school, and then if it led nowhere, you would return to school.

Finally, there is nothing preventing you from writing TV specs while in university. I wrote lots of stories and poems at college when I wasn't debugging programs; and Computer Science was a ridiculously hard major compared to English. Your typical college student has a ton of time to write, if that's what he wants to do. Actual jobs are much more tiring. College gives you an excuse not to go get a job.

College gives you an excuse to be wet behind the ears. If you aren't in college, even if you're the same age as a college student, people expect you to be a grownup. People are much more forgiving of college students for tripping over things, or for offering their opinion when no one wants it.

I think it's great that you have a strong opinion about what you want to do. I wouldn't consider college an impediment, though. If you work it right, it can be a platform, or even a diving board.

"Show Runner"

I was just interviewed by SLATE for an article about the origins of the word "showrunner." Google Books traces the word back to 1991, and my friend Lee Goldberg things it goes back to at least 1988. But it doesn't seem to go back any further than that. Nor does anyone seem to have consciously coined it.

It's a funny title, because it isn't a credit. You don't get a "showrunner" credit, you get an exec producer credit, and so do some other people who aren't the showrunner. That's like Head Writer, for which the actual credit can be anything from Exec Story Editor to Supervising Producer.

Does anyone know any lore about the origins of "showrunner"?

QWF shortlists The Circle Cast

I am proud to tell you that the Quebec Writer's Federation has shortlisted THE CIRCLE CAST for Best Children's and Young Adult Literature, along with my friend Alan Silberberg's MILO and Geneviève Côté's WITHOUT YOU.

Spectacular Optical

In which I am interviewed by Ariel Esteban Cayer about YOU ARE SO UNDEAD for Spectacular Optical, the magazine of the Fantasia Film Festival.

Upcoming: YASU screens at Toronto After Dark on Saturday, October 22, at 9:45 PM, just before War of the Dead.

Insanely Great

Just read the sad news that Steve Jobs is dead of cancer at 56.

Steve Jobs probably did more to make my life better than any stranger I can think of. I've been a Mac person since before there were Macs; I programmed on the Apple II+. I've had iPods and iPhones and now I even have an iPad.

It's worth remembering that Jobs and Wozniak made the first personal computer that really scored. There were personal computers before the Apple II, but you had to solder them together. There might have been others that you could buy off the shelf, but you didn't. And then, suddenly, there was a computer that you didn't need to have a computer science degree to use. (I actually did have a computer science degree, but I was never a hardcore hacker.)

It's worth remembering that before the Apple II, IBM didn't think anyone needed or wanted a personal computer. The Apple II forced them to go build the IBM PC, and license a crappy operating system called DOS from a guy named Bill Gates, who'd bought it from somebody else. It turned out everyone wanted a PC, of course, and the IBM name put an IBM, and not an Apple, in everybody's office. (No one ever got fired for buying IBM.) But before the Apple II, there was no IBM PC.

And then, the Mac. I remember the 1984 Olympics ad for the Mac, and then buying a Mac. Before the Mac, you had to know an awful lot of stuff to use a personal computer. Before, you had to know the exact name of a file in order to open it, and the exact name of the program you wanted to open it with; after, you just pointed at it on your desktop and double-clicked, and the Mac knew what program would open it. If you wanted to do something, you had to know the name of the command for what you wanted to do; after Mac, you had menus at the top of the screen. Jobs didn't invent the mouse, or drop-and-drag, or the trash bin, or the graphic user interface. Jobs and Wozniak more or less lifted that from Xerox PARC. But the boys at Xerox PARC weren't marketing it. Jobs and Woz put it in a computer anyone could buy.

Before the Mac, you had to print things out to see what they would look like printed out. Usually quite a few times. After Mac, you could see on the screen exactly what it looked like, and there was suddenly this thing called "desktop publishing."

Can you imagine?

A little later (after taking time out to found Pixar and redefine animated movies), Jobs and his company invented the iPod and iTunes, before which it was almost impossible to carry your entire music collection around in your pocket, and after which, it was a thing that every college student considers the bare minimum that her phone should do.

I don't think I have to tell you what the iPhone does. I'm not even sure anyone knows what the iPad will do.

Jobs didn't invent anything that couldn't have been invented sooner or later, maybe not as cleverly or as elegantly. (Windows is the proof of that: Gates took the Mac OS and had a version of it crafted that was less elegant and more user-abusive; he's now worth $56 billion.) What he did was shape the connectivity of our lives into something seamless and fun, by making electronics that were, in his famous phrase, "insanely great."

Every day, I sit in front of a Mac. If I go out, I carry my iPhone. There are so many things I don't have to think about; they just happen. My iPhone syncs with my computer. I can shoot a picture of someone I meet and attach it to their number and email in my address book, and somehow when they send me an email, I get that picture of them on the email. When I get in my car, it talks to my phone, so that if someone calls me, the car knows to kill the music I'm listening to (which is probably on my phone) and put the call through to the car's speakers.

Jobs didn't do all of that. But he pushed my world in that direction. He wanted everything to work smoothly and seemlessly. He had an esthetic that a hacker would enjoy. There's a story that, early in the design of the Apple II, Jobs spent a night redesigning the entire motherboard so that there would be half as many things to solder. It wasn't because soldering adds cost. It was because it would be more elegant to have fewer solder points.

Steve Jobs made technology cool. He brought the future to me, first in beige, then in black, then in polished aluminum, and finally on a glass touchscreen.

I love that man. I love his work. I'll miss him a little bit every time I flip my computer open to start my day.

What Secret Circle is Doing Right

On my other blog.

Monkey Points

Q. On page 239 you mentioned that writers usually get 5% of the net profits, which is sometimes called “points”, and that points are practically never worth anything, which is why they’re sometimes dubbed monkey points. Can you tell me what you mean by points not being worth anything? Are you saying that most movies don’t make profit at the box office and therefore there’s not extra money to pay the writer this bonus? That most movies made break even at best?

If you get a Net Profits definition in your contract, it is generally formulated so that you will never see a cent. Basically the studio takes a big overhead percentage, and then a big distribution fee, out of the film's revenues, and then set the remaining money against the film's cost, plus the marketing cost. (In other words, thanks to the distribution fee, they get paid twice for marketing the picture.) Many movies that obviously made money for the studio have never gone into net profit.

Q. Then what can I do?

Get something better than a Net Profits definition. We generally ask for an Adjusted Gross, which means the producer recoups the cost of the movie, and then we're entitled to start seeing money.

It's all about what contract language you negotiate, which is a function of how much clout you have (how much they want you), and how clever your agent or lawyer is.

WGC members also get a "distribution royalty" as part of the IPA. I have no idea what it is, but it can add up to a very nice chunk of change if your movie gets some decent play.

Terra Nova

We were very disappointed by Terra Nova; we got through the first hour but bailed shortly after. It bothered me that I didn't actually like any of the charactes. It bothered me more that the main character looks like he's going to be a cop; of course, it's a TV show, every TV show has to be about someone who solves crimes. It bothered me most that they're sending a colony of people from a ruined Earth to a pristine, Cretaceous Earth... and the script made that seem banal, ugly and tedious. I was not once surprised by something that happened. None of the characters were interesting, or seemed like they'd reward further watching. Nothing about the Terra Novan society surprised me. Nothing about the science surprised me. There was just nothing new in the show, after an hour.

I want my SF to surprise me. Wah.

Choices in games

I'm working on my MIGS talk, N+1 Screenwriting Tips for Game Writers. The part I'm working on is about allowing players to make choices that have consequences, particularly to the ending of the game.

The obvious recent example here is HEAVY RAIN, where your success or failure on missions leads you to a bunch of different possible outcomes. But I'm not a huge fan of HEAVY RAIN, which, as I am not the only person to have remarked, can seem more like a "choose your own adventure" than a game with excellent gameplay.

In DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION you can save or fail to save certain characters, and you can decide how to play (stealthy, non-stealthy pacifist, typically homicidal game hero). But the story really doesn't change except at the very end when you can choose one of four buttons to press to decide your values.

What are some emotionally powerful choices that you've been able to make in games that affected the outcome?

Chapters reading October 22

Looks like I'm going to be giving a reading of my novel THE CIRCLE CAST: THE LOST YEARS OF MORGAN LE FAY, at the Chapters Bayview Village, in Toronto (well, North York, really), on Saturday, October 22, at 2 pm. That should be fun! If you're in Toronto, come hear me read!

(I'm also screening my five minute teen vampire sex comedy, YOU ARE SO UNDEAD, at Toronto After Dark, that night at 9:30 pm!)

Premieres

What network premieres are you most looking forward to?

Question and Answers

As I observed to a young colleague just now: when you ask your boss a question, try to always include a plausible answer. If your boss gets in the habit of saying, "Yes, do that," you will find yourself in a position of responsibility, and possibly even authority, that much faster.

After Dark

If you have not seen YOU ARE SO UNDEAD yet, we're screening at the Toronto After Dark Festival, at 9:45, Saturday, October 22nd.

We will also be at the New York International Children's Film Festival. Which kinda troubles me...

In Appreciation of THE GOOD WIFE

We finally got our DVDs of THE GOOD WIFE and we've been watching steadily. Just finished S1 disk 3 last night. What a deftly written show. You almost wouldn't think it was on broadcast. I love a TV show that's written for an audience who's ready to pay attention. Nothing is said twice, and many things aren't completely said.

Of course, it's inevitable that it's essentially a detective show. These days, you can have any kind of hero on TV, so long as they solve crimes. You can have a lawyer show or a doctor show, so long as they solve mysteries.

There's almost a template for a high quality broadcast show. A TV show wants to delve into its characters, and that means story arcs. But viewers want to be able to tune into any one episode and get 45 minutes of entertainment. How do you square the circle? The way VERONICA MARS did. Every episode has an episodic A story that entirely begins and ends over the course of the episode. It has an interpersonal B story that gets resolved by the end of the episode, too, but is part of a longer dramatic arc. And there are a few beats allocated to the show's uberplot -- in this case, the political and legal battles of Alicia's husband.

Within that template, the show is subtle. Alicia Florrick is intentionally hard to read. Does she want her husband back? She doesn't seem too sure. She'll defend him against an outsider but will barely give him a smile when they're alone. What Alicia and the other characters leave unsaid is at least as important as what they say.

Nice work.

2nd Time Through

Weird. My first time playing through DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION, it felt too hard, especially the bosses. It took me five hours (!) to beat the first boss on easy, and I didn't even try on the second. I turned her over to Hunter. I kept getting into shooting matches with squads of guards, and I'm a terrible shot.

Now on my second playthrough, on hard, it's almost too easy. I've learned how the guards' AI's work. They never look around corners. My character has 7 seconds of invisibility, which is enough to go almost anywhere safely, and with a few candy bars he can stretch that to 21 seconds. So now I never get into shooting matches. My character has learned the Importance of Not Being Seen. And that means the nasty shooty robots never even come out of their closets. Playing as a stealthy pacifist is so easy, I'm almost considering stopping playing.

(If I were designing a Give Me Deus Ex hardness setting, I'd just have the guards walk around a little more randomly. Or walk past the corner instead of just short of the corner. As is, the setting only makes guards harder to kill. Which, if you're never killing them, is irrelevant.)

Now here's the weird thing. Even though the game isn't, strictly, a challenge, I still have the urge to keep playing. It feels mildly rewarding to keep beating the guards, even though it's not hard. I like winning the little hacking minigame. Partly it's that I'm enjoying the world more -- actually reading all the e-books scattered everywhere, and paying attention to all the corporate politics. But most of it is, I think, just my lizard brain enjoying all the random rewards.

So I'm torn between quitting the game, and playing right now, in the middle of the day.

I recognize that as addictive behavior, so instead of procrastinating by playing a video game, I am procrastinating in a slightly more productive (and much less time-consuming) way by blogging. The thing about addictions is that the feel more like need than fun. Am I really enjoying DE3 right now, or do I just hunger to play it? I can't actually tell how much I'm looking forward to it, versus how much easier it would be to fall into the game than try to get my 5-10 pages today.

At least I'm not this guy...

Manager?

A young writer friend of mine has someone who's offering to manage him. She wants a 2 year contract. Various friends of his (including lit managers) are shocked by that -- they don't sign contracts with their clients. I find this very odd. I can't imagine a manager not wanting a contract. How else do you ensure you get paid when your client breaks in?

The only odd thing about the contract to my mind was that there was no escape clause if he doesn't get a bona fide offer over a period of 4 months.

Anyone want to comment?

Game Pitch?

What exactly does a game pitch look like when someone's bringing a game idea to a company? Does anyone have one I could look at?

Manage Your Manager

I've written various posts on how to agent your agent. But I was having a chat with a dear friend of mine who was complaining that his boss waltzes into the office, riffles through everything on his desk, and quizzes him on what he's doing. He feels disrespected. In previous jobs, he had some autonomy and people assumed he knew what he's doing.

I told him that his boss probably doesn't know what he's doing. That may be his boss's fault -- his boss never takes time for a sit-down meeting -- but what he really needs to do is manage his manager.

I suggested he bombard his boss with information on what he's doing. Send lots of memos. Keep his boss constantly updated. Eventually his boss will say, "Fine, I get it, you know what you're doing, enough with the emails." But til then the boss will feel like she is being kept informed.

You have to manage the information flow with your boss. The less time they have to think about managing you, the better. For example, if you have a question or a problem, try to present it along with your best guess at the solution. That way, if you guessed right, they can say, "Yep, do that," and you're done.

Some bosses like an email with 15 points that they can go through and respond to. Some guys are prone to latch on to item 3b, give an in-depth response to that, and ignore everything else. For those guys, one question per email.

Make it as easy as possible for your boss to delegate responsibility and authority to you, and they will.

Panel Discussion February 6

On February 6, I'll be moderating a panel discussion at the McGill Faculty of Law on How to Read a Contract. Basically, what are the sorts of contracts screenwriters have to deal with, what do the different clauses mean, what terms should you make sure are included, what should you ask for, and what should you not bother asking for 'cause you won't get it.

Mark the date!

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I beat Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the first time last night. "The first time," because I immediately started replaying it on the highest difficulty level. It is that good.

The first way through, I was still mastering the game, which is my first stealth game. One of the beauties of DE3 is that you don't have to play it as a stealth game. It plays perfectly well as a MASS EFFECT-style crouch-and-shoot game. But for me it's a lot more fun sneaking around and knocking out enemies without being seen.

(And I feel better, too. I don't like killing security guards just because they're working for an evil corporation. Don't mooks have families too?)

(Oh, and you get lots of XP for Not Being Seen. And if you can get through the whole game without killing anyone, you get an Achievement. So I sort of feel the game is meant to be played that way. Hunter, however, prefers shooting mooks in the head with his silenced pistol. To each his own.)

One reason Deus Ex is such a lovely game is there are multiple ways to do missions. To get into that room, you might be able to sneak past the guards if you time it right. Or, discover the vent that takes you past them. Or, stack boxes so you can get over the fence on the other side. Or, get that enhancement that turns you momentarily invisible.

Another reason is there are consequences. At the beginning of the game, you're told there's been a break-in at a manufacturing facility; you're needed to resolve the situation before Detroit SWAT charges in. In most games, that situation will wait while you explore the world, do side-quests, etc. In DE3, you have 15 minutes to get on the helicopter. After that, there's no mission. The hostages are dead and your boss is not happy with you. Needless to say this adds a great deal to a feeling of verisimilitude

Another reason is that dialogue is gameplay. In most games, dialogue is only part of story. There may be dialogue options, but no matter what you say, if you need information, you can keep clicking on the Non Player Character until you get all of it. In DE3, you can talk your way past a guard, or you can fail to, in which case you may have to go through the sewer.

Clausewitz said "war is a continuation of diplomacy by other means." In DE3, dialogue is a continuation of combat by other means.

All of this takes a great deal of work in development and production. The story has to make sense whether you save the hostages or not. It takes much longer to playtest scenarios in which the hero can shoot, sneak, jump or talk his way somewhere. Kudos to Lead Game Writer Mary DeMarle for her awesome work, and to Eidos for giving her the authority to do it right.

But everything about the game is first class. Programming (I've only run across two glitches), rendering, the richness and density of the world... I think I'll hang out here for another little while.