A faithful reader sends me the following info on where to find scripts:
University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)
Arts Library Special Collection
Young Research Library
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90024
By appointment only
310.825.7253
online: www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/arts/speccoll/speccoll.htm
University of Southern California (USC)
Cinema-Television Library
Doheny Library
University Park
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0182
213.740.3994
online: www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/locations/cinema_tv/
American Film Institute (AFI)
Louis B. Mayer Library
2021 N. Western Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90027
323.856.7654
online: www.afi.com/about/library.aspx
also, the WHA library is re-opening. for info: www.wgfoundation.org
Writer's Guild of America Library
7000 West 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90048
323-951-4000
Re-opens on June 10th
M-F
11 – 5 pm
11 – 8 pm Thursday
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
PPM
I was just told today that the whole page per minute thing doesn't apply to TV. True? Is it even within the same range? If not, short of getting my hands on an actual script from a show, how am I supposed to spec it?Well, you should be getting your hands on an actual script. I've blogged here and here about how to get actual copies of scripts.
On Charlie Jade our scripts were supposed to come in around 54 pages for about 41 minutes of show. I've seen West Wing scripts at 67 pages, and I'm told that Gilmore Girls scripts can get into the 70's. Depends on the show.
I've always wondered what a John Woo script looks like.
TROUBLE WITH IMPORTING INTO MMS
I'm starting to try out Movie Magic Screenwriter after Craig's huge recommendation.
It seems to be a well-thought-out program with more bells and whistles. I'm just getting into it, so this is just a first impression.
It has a Windows-y look and feel. I'm a tad uncomfortable how the script looks on the page, and there aren't a lot of view options -- in fact, no View menu at all. It feels like a Windows port rather than a Mac program.
I'm irritated that I can't import easily from Final Draft into MMS. You have to export in RTF from FD, and then import into MMS. Which strips out useful things like scene numbers and revision marks. Craig Mazin recommends cutting and pasting. That's simpler and just as effective, but still, you lose information.
You would think that the MMS boys could crack the FD file code pretty easily and come up with a patch that allows you to import and export seamlessly. That is, if they want people who are already using FD to switch. I don't want to have to painfully import every screenplay on my hard drive, and most shows I know use FD. Because of the loss of info, I couldn't use MMS on a show that's using FD. Couldn't switch back and forth easily. Don't wanna have to manually restore info every time I get or send a script to or from the World of FD.
The reason I was able to stay on Mac rather than having to go over into evil Windows, back in the day when you had to use sneaker-net, was that Mac always made it easy to read evil Windows firmy-disks. If I'd had to manually comb through every file every time I got a file from the Windows Empire, I'd've had to leave the beloved Vale of Mac.
So how about it, Write Bros? One simple patch, that's all I ask!
It seems to be a well-thought-out program with more bells and whistles. I'm just getting into it, so this is just a first impression.
It has a Windows-y look and feel. I'm a tad uncomfortable how the script looks on the page, and there aren't a lot of view options -- in fact, no View menu at all. It feels like a Windows port rather than a Mac program.
I'm irritated that I can't import easily from Final Draft into MMS. You have to export in RTF from FD, and then import into MMS. Which strips out useful things like scene numbers and revision marks. Craig Mazin recommends cutting and pasting. That's simpler and just as effective, but still, you lose information.
You would think that the MMS boys could crack the FD file code pretty easily and come up with a patch that allows you to import and export seamlessly. That is, if they want people who are already using FD to switch. I don't want to have to painfully import every screenplay on my hard drive, and most shows I know use FD. Because of the loss of info, I couldn't use MMS on a show that's using FD. Couldn't switch back and forth easily. Don't wanna have to manually restore info every time I get or send a script to or from the World of FD.
The reason I was able to stay on Mac rather than having to go over into evil Windows, back in the day when you had to use sneaker-net, was that Mac always made it easy to read evil Windows firmy-disks. If I'd had to manually comb through every file every time I got a file from the Windows Empire, I'd've had to leave the beloved Vale of Mac.
So how about it, Write Bros? One simple patch, that's all I ask!
WRITING FOR THE SOAPS
I like writing for episodic shows. I'm not big on stand-alones. So say I'm writing a spec for "Lost". Now that the season finale's come and gone, how much do I invent? For instance, should I go ahead and assume Charlie's back on the heroin? Some things you can get around discussing at all, but I worry about how my spec will go over when the show comes back on the air. Will my spec be useless if the things I've guessed about are addressed on the show?The good news is, now is a good time to write a new spec. In a few weeks people will have recovered from staffing season. That's the time to hit them for representation. There's just not that much for TV agents to do in July and August, compared to late Fall and Winter.
If I were writing a Lost spec, I would write a stand-alone episode in the middle of the last season that focused on a character we know but don't know that well. The storyline would be tangential to the big what's-in-the-hatch uberplot. It would be an episode that could fit anywhere in the back 9 of last season.
The danger of basing an episode on Charlie being back on the smack is, by the time your spec is set to go out, the writers might have taken an entirely different direction. And then your ep is wack. You can't write a second season Lost ep without knowing what they're going to do with the show and its characters.
Sorry 'bout that.
By the way, an "episodic" show is a show full of stand-alone episodes. As contrasted with a linear show, aka a "soap." 24 is utterly linear. Lost is semi linear, semi episodic. Law & Order is highly episodic.
IT'LL MAKE YOU GO BLIND
None of the news articles about Viagra causing blindness mention whether the effect is temporary or not. What happened when the guys stopped taking the Viagra.
They did stop taking the Viagra, didn't they?
They did stop taking the Viagra, didn't they?
THE REAL DEAL, FOR EXAMPLE
Here, for example, is a writing contest worth submitting for, the ABC/Disney Writing Fellowship. This sort of thing will get you a small amount of money, but much more importantly, get you in the door.
Courtesy of author and screenwriter Lawrence Ross, the inglewood rude boy.
Courtesy of author and screenwriter Lawrence Ross, the inglewood rude boy.
SHELLEY ERIKSEN, PART FOUR
Here's the fourth part of my interview with Shelley Eriksen:
AE: How do you know when your draft is ready to turn in to network?
SE: When my deadline is past. Whenever I'm happy enough with it. Go with your gut. Know your network.
AE: Chris Abbott says you have to get the showrunner's voice, the voice of the show, right.
SE: There is room for different voices on a show ... Obviously the characters have to sound lke themselves. New characters are where an outside writer gets to shine. But speaking out of my experience as someone who's been writing to the showruner's vocie and now is the showrunner ... I worked for one guy for six years. I could read him and do him. Didn't mean that I was any less original, I got, I heard the voice of the show and that's my job ... make my stuff sound like that show. He said to me once, he was pointing at a script, at the writer's name, and he said, that guy didn't write this episode... The show wrote the episode.... if all pistons are firing, Cold Squad is writing Cold Squad. I find that for me it's .... mouth feel. When they talk about food, how it feels on the tongue ... I have the same feeling about script writing. Does it feel right on the tongue? Would my lead ever say that? Something as simple as whether or not he uses contracts to what kind of metaphors would he use, or not.
Even as a showrunner, you can't say what a character would say in any situation, but you know if it's right or it's wrong.
A writer who works for a show ... I have a friend who wrote one or two Deadwoods. He's embarrasssed to have his names on those scripts. But Milch wanted him.
AE: Why? It's going to come out Milch in the end.
SE: He gets ideas. When you read your own script, you always say, oh god it's the work of genius. You read someone else, and it's so easy to see what isn't working. That's what the outside writer does for you. You have more to bring when you see somethng you haven't come up with yourself. That's how MOW's work up here. The first writer is creating out of a blank plot. And the producers are always saying, okay, now that I've seen your script, I know what this movie isn't. You're refining your vision by having something to react against. Milch saw the way that the writer didn't quite get it ... isn't that a key component of creativity? Thesis, antithesis, synthesis? You have to read somebody else's stuff and then you can go, Well, I would have done it like this.
In conflict lies genius.
AE: Sometimes it's more fun to rewrite a script than to write it in the first place, because it's less angsty.
SE: Yeah.
AE: How do you know when your draft is ready to turn in to network?
SE: When my deadline is past. Whenever I'm happy enough with it. Go with your gut. Know your network.
AE: Chris Abbott says you have to get the showrunner's voice, the voice of the show, right.
SE: There is room for different voices on a show ... Obviously the characters have to sound lke themselves. New characters are where an outside writer gets to shine. But speaking out of my experience as someone who's been writing to the showruner's vocie and now is the showrunner ... I worked for one guy for six years. I could read him and do him. Didn't mean that I was any less original, I got, I heard the voice of the show and that's my job ... make my stuff sound like that show. He said to me once, he was pointing at a script, at the writer's name, and he said, that guy didn't write this episode... The show wrote the episode.... if all pistons are firing, Cold Squad is writing Cold Squad. I find that for me it's .... mouth feel. When they talk about food, how it feels on the tongue ... I have the same feeling about script writing. Does it feel right on the tongue? Would my lead ever say that? Something as simple as whether or not he uses contracts to what kind of metaphors would he use, or not.
Even as a showrunner, you can't say what a character would say in any situation, but you know if it's right or it's wrong.
A writer who works for a show ... I have a friend who wrote one or two Deadwoods. He's embarrasssed to have his names on those scripts. But Milch wanted him.
AE: Why? It's going to come out Milch in the end.
SE: He gets ideas. When you read your own script, you always say, oh god it's the work of genius. You read someone else, and it's so easy to see what isn't working. That's what the outside writer does for you. You have more to bring when you see somethng you haven't come up with yourself. That's how MOW's work up here. The first writer is creating out of a blank plot. And the producers are always saying, okay, now that I've seen your script, I know what this movie isn't. You're refining your vision by having something to react against. Milch saw the way that the writer didn't quite get it ... isn't that a key component of creativity? Thesis, antithesis, synthesis? You have to read somebody else's stuff and then you can go, Well, I would have done it like this.
In conflict lies genius.
AE: Sometimes it's more fun to rewrite a script than to write it in the first place, because it's less angsty.
SE: Yeah.
Monday, May 30, 2005
THE LIST
John August writes, "Building relationships with people who love your writing is much more important than a six-figure sale."
I have to disagree. I spent years in LA going to meetings with very nice development execs after each of my specs went out. And they were good, fine, fun meetings, at the right companies (Blue Tulip, Trilogy, Sandollar, Great Oaks, Dreamworks, Spring Creek, Bubble Factory, Douglas Reuther, Capella, 1492, Propaganda, Mandalay, etc.), and I often left feeling that they liked me, and I can't tell you how many times I heard that they loved my writing.
But I never sold a spec. Not complaining about that -- some of them got close, and some of them had bad hooks, and some had bad timing, and so on. But because I hadn't sold a spec, I was not on the List. My agents repeatedly told me I needed a spec sale to get anywhere in the feature writing business, and so did other writers.
So ... a six figure sale, unfortunately, is the winning lottery ticket, not because of the six figures, because a few hundred grand doesn't go very far in LA, but because it validates you. I met some very nice not particularly talented writers who stayed employed because of their one big spec sale.
And that, boys and girls, is one big reason I'm writing TV now...
UPDATE: Now the funny thing is, after reading John August's response to my comment, I realized that I implied I never got hired to write anything while I was in LA. And when I wrote the comment, that's what I had in mind. Actually, if you add them all up, I probably did about a dozen commissioned scripts and rewrites. Just, none of them were WGA jobs. All were for "independent" producers (by which of course we mean that they were "independent" of having any money.) So somehow, they didn't count.
Weird.
On the other hand, for the legit development people, none of those gigs did count, in the sense that having a credit on a Gary Busey movie did not put me in the real running to rewrite the next studio zombie horror video game adaptation, even if my spec did get me the meeting on it.
I have to disagree. I spent years in LA going to meetings with very nice development execs after each of my specs went out. And they were good, fine, fun meetings, at the right companies (Blue Tulip, Trilogy, Sandollar, Great Oaks, Dreamworks, Spring Creek, Bubble Factory, Douglas Reuther, Capella, 1492, Propaganda, Mandalay, etc.), and I often left feeling that they liked me, and I can't tell you how many times I heard that they loved my writing.
But I never sold a spec. Not complaining about that -- some of them got close, and some of them had bad hooks, and some had bad timing, and so on. But because I hadn't sold a spec, I was not on the List. My agents repeatedly told me I needed a spec sale to get anywhere in the feature writing business, and so did other writers.
So ... a six figure sale, unfortunately, is the winning lottery ticket, not because of the six figures, because a few hundred grand doesn't go very far in LA, but because it validates you. I met some very nice not particularly talented writers who stayed employed because of their one big spec sale.
And that, boys and girls, is one big reason I'm writing TV now...
UPDATE: Now the funny thing is, after reading John August's response to my comment, I realized that I implied I never got hired to write anything while I was in LA. And when I wrote the comment, that's what I had in mind. Actually, if you add them all up, I probably did about a dozen commissioned scripts and rewrites. Just, none of them were WGA jobs. All were for "independent" producers (by which of course we mean that they were "independent" of having any money.) So somehow, they didn't count.
Weird.
On the other hand, for the legit development people, none of those gigs did count, in the sense that having a credit on a Gary Busey movie did not put me in the real running to rewrite the next studio zombie horror video game adaptation, even if my spec did get me the meeting on it.
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