TWO CHINESE BOYS

How is it possible The Dormitory Boys haven't been on Leno yet, Ken?

AN, IN OTHER NEWS...

[POLITICS] In other news, Bush doesn't veto laws. He just adds a presidential "signing statement" saying he doesn't have to abide by them.

Obviously, y'all Democrats are horrified. But you Republicans: I mean, doesn't this bother you? A President simply deciding that he doesn't have to obey the law? Uh, when you let the man in charge get away with breaking the law, isn't that called "dictatorship"?

HOW LONG TO TELL YOUR STORY?

Q. I have begun trying out your recommended "tell your story out loud to others" technique, and I would like to ask for further guidelines on how to do this - especially as you say that this is the most important tool we have at our disposal.

For example, I am wondering how long should my story-telling session to others be? If it is a feature should it be more like 3 minutes or 20 minutes? (In some situations there will simply not be the time to tell someone a 20 minute story without 'stretching the welcome'.)

First of all, congratulations on trying out the technique. It's hard to do, and you're being brave.

I think you should be able to tell a feature story in, oh, 8-12 minutes. Shorter than that and you are probably describing your story, not telling it beat by beat. Longer than that and you're probably getting into too much detail.

Try pitching Star Wars to yourself:

A giant spaceship is chasing this smaller spaceship. And it grabs the small spaceship with its tractor beam and pulls it in. While the soldiers in the small spaceship get ready to be boarded, there's a princess is on the small ship, and she records a message in a little robot that works for her. Meanwhile storm troopers from the big ship are attacking and killing everyone. The little robot has a hysterical friend who's also a robot, who's waving his arms around terrified, but the brave little robot, who talks in beeps, makes him get on an escape pod with him...

You get the picture. Include motivations, dreams, setups, anything that's part of the story:

We cut to the planet surface. There's this kid, Luke, who dreams of being a starship pilot. But he's working on his uncle's farm. He doesn't know what happened to his father, and his uncle won't tell him...

Mostly, though, you'll find that if you're actually telling what happens in the story, instead of describing what the story's like, your natural storytelling skills will give you the right length. If you feel you're stretching your welcome, just omit details and speed up. If they're eating it up, paint the scene. Above all, have fun! If you're having fun, odds are your audience of one will, too. If you're not having fun, your audience probably won't either.

NOT AN APPLE MAIL GLITCH AFTER ALL

[TECH SUPPORT] I had problems with Apple Mail 2.0.7 hanging. Wouldn't let me quit (I had to Force Quit), and stopped sending my junk mail to the junk mail folder. Wouldn't even recognize my previous recipients.

Turned out the problem wasn't really Apple Mail's fault. The problem was that the mail server on one of my mail accounts wasn't operating properly. It was glacially slow, but not slow enough to time out. The reason Apple Mail wouldn't quit was it was still trying to download mail from the bad mail server. The reason it wouldn't send junk mail away was that it waits until all the mail is downloaded before doing so, and all the mail was never downloaded.

Now that I have disabled that particular mail account, Apple Mail operates properly. Tragically it's my "@craftyscreenwriting.com" account. But what can you do?

Q. WHEN IS A POLISH NOT A POLISH

A. When a producer says all he needs is a polish.

A producer wants me to do a polish of his script. He's got a completed screenplay, but he needs someone familiar with the period and the culture of the time to do a polish on the script for authenticity. How much should I charge?

In my experience, every single time a producer has asked me for a polish, the script always needed a rewrite. Producers simply don't want to pay for rewrites, which cost about four to five times as much as polishes under the current WGC agreement. So they call a rewrite a polish.

Under these circumstances you would probably want to confirm that the producer does indeed have money available before you read the script; otherwise you're wasting your time. Then read the script and see what kind of work it needs.

I put a nifty formula in my book Crafty Screenwriting explaining what I think you should charge as a non-Guild member; obviously as a Guild member you must charge at least scale, or you're screwing your Guild brothers and sisters, and you can, and deserve to, get a serious trouble. A reasonable fee for a rewrite by a non-Guild beginning writer is on the order of $5,000 to $15,000. At those rates you won't get rich but you will have more money in the bank when you stop writing than you did when you began. Just make sure you're only guaranteeing two drafts and a polish at most, or, if you prefer, a six month cutoff date at which they cannot expect further writing services for the price. At less than $5,000, you're probably taking a loss on the script. Which is okay, if you're considering it a learning experience. I once wrote a script for $800. I don't regret the $800; I only regret that I agreed to ghost write.

HAD ENOUGH?

[BLATANT PARTISAN POLITICS] Joel, you can ignore this post.

I've been reading a lot about how the Democrats can't win the House this year because House seats are too heavily gerrymandered. 98% of incumbents won their seat again in the last election.

But there are races that will give us the House back -- in 2008. The state assemblies and the governorships. The state governments are where the House districts are gerrymandered. Once the Republicans won the Texas state assembly, they were able to give themselves 7 new safe seats.

Even if the Democrats can't win the House this year, if we pour our energies into the state assembly races, we can win a few. Where we hold (or pick up) a governorship, we can grossly and undemocratically gerrymander the heck out of that state's House seats in our favor. Where the Republicans hold the governorship, we can at least prevent them from grossly and undemocratically gerrymandering the heck out of that state's House seats.

This approach also blunts the local-hero advantage the Republicans have. While most people prefer the Democrats to the Republicans these days, most people like their representative personally, and will vote to keep him on. But most people have no clue who their state assemblyman is, and don't particularly care. I doubt they have strong feelings about their State's Secretary of State either; yet we all know how Katherine Harris in Florida and Ken Blackwell in Ohio made sure that blacks would have a hard time of it voting in the past two elections. If we can convince people to vote Democratic for state posts, then they can vote for their House rep next time, but he won't be around after November 2008.

Obviously, this is an argument for pursuing a 50-state campaign, as many have suggested, rather than only contesting swing states.

The best part of this plan is that if the Democrats win the House through gerrymandering, the Supreme Court will be forced to address the issue. They might actually ban gerrymandering if it turns out to be a tool the Democrats can use successfully as well as the Republicans.

THE SPEECH I DIDN'T GET TO GIVE

This is a little presumptuous, but I'm a presumptuous guy, or I wouldn't be in this business, so I thought I'd post the speech I would have given if I had won a Canadian Screenwriting Award on Monday. (I didn't.) I had it all written out on tiny scraps of paper and all:

I'm honored to accept this award. Thank you.

I'm doubly honored because this is the third nomination for our series Naked Josh. I'm not sure which I'm happier about, winning this award, or the fact that this year our show got two out of the three nominations in our class. That’s almost like working on Corner Gas.

I have to share that part of the honor with my co-creator, Laura Kosterski, and our producer, André Béraud, who never accepted less than our best. I'd also like to thank Tara Ellis of Showcase for her outstanding vision in putting her money where our mouths were.

I also feel particularly honored because not only is the Canadian Screenwriting Award given by your peers. But it is one of the few awards in show business that’s based on the work the writer did, and not on what the director and editor and actors did. The Canadian Screenwriting Award is about nothing but the script. Which is a recognition that it all begins with the script. I'm not sure what my point is, but I think it has something to do with a nightmare I had where there was nothing to watch but Canadian Idol five nights a week. And the judges were making up their own jokes.

Finally I'd like to thank you all for letting me be part of our union. In the past few years I've asked the WGC to go to bat for me many times, and each time it's been the difference between a fair outcome and an ugly one. So I am honored simply to be part of this Guild, without which none of this would be possible. Thank you.

And I mean it. Even if I didn't win the award.

NO BANFF FOR ME

I spent a big chunk of today establishing that the Banff Worldwide Television Festival is hideously expensive ($2100 registration, $650+ airfare, say on the order of $600 in hotels), and probably not necessary for me to go to. While it seemed like a good idea to various people while I was in Toronto, the same people agreed that I could probably accomplish almost as much in another visit to Toronto. (Visit to Toronto: $400 in train fare if I go first class, stay at friends' places, no registration.) While at Banff you can hang out and get drunk with network execs, but I just met with four out of five networks, and it looks like my stuff will be going to some American cable nets as well.

So, not going to spend $3500 to fly to the mountains of Alberta after all.

I'm a little disappointed, but also relieved.