Buskers

This is a couple of guys singing Bruce Springsteen's "The River" on a street in Copenhagen.



Oh yeah. One of them is Bruce Springsteen.

What I love about this is you can tell the story. The other guy knows the harmony. He's good. So Bruce Springsteen must have been walking down the street in Copenhagen and heard the other guy playing his songs. And he thought, "Hey, he's good! I think I'll play with him."

Which kinda suggests that Bruce Springsteen walks around with a guitar. Which is kind of how I like to picture him.

Oh... moral of the story: be ready for your break. You never know when or how it will come.

I Thought Gore Won His Debate, Too

(Political theater)

Lisa and I had to turn off the American Presidential debate last night because it seemed to us that McCain was making much stronger arguments than Obama. Not arguments we agreed with, mind. Just making them much more convincingly. Obama was not jabbing back. I was thinking of a dozen things I wanted Obama to come back with, and he wouldn't. Obama was reaaaaaal short on specifics.

McCain made a very good point about how Obama's all about how we shouldn't have got into Iraq, which is a question the next president won't have to deal with. The relevant question is how we get out of it.

Silly me. No one was listening to the words! They were watching how McCain didn't look Obama in the eye. They thought he was "antagonistic." (You're not supposed to be antagonistic in a debate?) As the day goes by, it seems more and more like Obama cleaned McCain's clock, just by seeming calm and Presidential, while McCain blew his chance by talking to the audience in the room, instead of to the camera.

I thought Gore won the first debate, too, back in 2000. It turned out he sighed a lot. Apparently that's a no-no, even when your opponent is exasperating.

It just goes to show how much of politics is theater and how little is substance. As far as most people's reactions to the debates goes, they might as well have had the sound off.

Okay, I'm exaggerating. McCain also forgot to mention the middle class, and thinks that Pakistan was a failed state before Musharrraf's dictatorship. And he went on about earmarks too much, and made his "Miss Congeniality" quip twice, which was once too many.

But apparently what he needed to do was to be Miss Congeniality. Instead he was Mr. Why Do I Have to Debate This Whippersnapper.

McCain failed the Beer Test. Most people would rather have a beer with Obama after this, I think.

It's a silly way to elect a president.

But after all, we're only human -- and this is how we're hardwired to choose our leaders.

Dicker

Q. I've agreed to sell a script of mine to some producers for $5,000, because their movie is very low budget ($1 million). What else should I ask for?

First of all, $5,000 is still fairly lowball. WGC scale for a movie of the week (budget $1.2 mil) is on the order of $30,000. The producers are taking advantage of you. (Don't take it personally, that's what producers do if you let them.)

But sometimes you do a cheapo deal for experience and credit. I've done them.

First of all, you want a guaranteed credit. If they can only afford $5,000 for you, then they certainly can't afford a rewriter. You can ask for a guaranteed sole writing credit. Since that's the most important thing you're getting, and it's not a Guild deal, it should be guaranteed.

Second, if the budget miraculously increases, so should your fee. You could ask for an escalator -- 3% of every penny over $1,000,000 in budget -- budget defined as the bonded budget, if there is a completion bond, or the insured budget if there isn't. (Don't allow any budget definition that excludes financing costs, for example.)

You could ask for a co-producer credit -- you're "investing" in the picture -- though that won't be terrifically useful to you. I've got a couple of Associate Producer type credits; they haven't done much for me.

If they don't make the picture quickly, it should revert to you. Give them a year, extendable by a payment of another $2,500. After two years, you get it back free and clear, with any and all rewrites.

Since this is your idea, you should own the remake / spinoff / adaptation into other media rights. If they want those, they can pay scale. For $5,000, they should just get the right to make one movie, that's it.

In deals like these, think what you can ask for that doesn't cost money up front. They don't have money up front. An escalator is fair because it doesn't kick in until there's more money. Reversion is fair because you're giving up your script in the hopes it will get made -- if it doesn't get made, you've lost the benefit, so you should be able to sell it to someone else. Remake rights don't cost the producer anything now -- just some of his potential upside. And if he wants that, he ought to pay for it.

Alternately, you can grant the remake rights, but attach payments to them. You get $100,000 if the remake rights are sold. That gives the producer control, and it doesn't cost him anything -- the hundred grand will come out of the purchaser of the remake rights.

Remember -- you won't get anything unless you're willing to walk away. But if the producers won't give you a reasonable deal, they're probably not serious producers anyway, and you're probably wasting your time with them.

Party for the Arts and Liberal Fundraiser

(Canadian politics)

I'm organizing a small bash for the various arts communities in Montreal on Tuesday, October 7th, from 7-9 pm. We're trying to help stop the Conservatives from getting a majority by raising money for the Liberal Party. Our special guest is Justin Trudeau, who'll answer questions about his party's support for culture and the arts. If you'd like to come, please drop me a line, or go to our Facebook page and RSVP.

If you're not in Quebec, please give your money or time to whichever of your local candidates has the best chance of beating the Tories!

20 Aspiring Writers Walk Into a Room...

I've been sick as a dog for the past few days, plus organizing a Justin Trudeau fundraiser, so please forgive the silence.

Q. I'm in several screenwriting groups on Facebook, and saw a post about someone who is looking for a group of young screenwriters to write a script for their 1 hour feature. I've enclosed the entire post below -

"Myself and another director are shooting an hour of feature film drama and we want to do it very differently and try to help people in the process. We want to get a group of young screenwriters (20-30 or so) to collaboratively write the script for the film.

We want to give young unknown talent a chance to get some experience and some credits, as well as experiment with the wisdom of crowds to see how it makes the storyline evolve. The idea is to invite everyone to hold up at our studio for an all-nighter and write the thing in 24hrs, as well as modifying it online together. Everyone involved will get shared copyright, credits and be associate directors.

This sounds like an enormous waste of time for several reasons.

One, faster is not better. A good story takes time to take shape. You have to look at it from several angles. You have to work it. Every now and then you read or hear about how someone wrote a script in three days. They didn't. They thought about it for several months, until they knew exactly what story they wanted to tell, then wrote a draft in three days, then reworked it for several months.

Two, twenty heads are not better than one. A good story does not go down the predictable path. Storytelling by committee will get you the obvious ideas, not the clever ones that start out feeble and need nourishing into something surprising and spectacular.

Writing rooms do gather to break story and, later, to punch up jokes. But after you've broken the story into acts, you send one writer (or maybe a writing team of two, that functions as one writer) to beat the story out. And the showrunner story edits the beat sheet all on his own. There needs to be one controlling intelligence telling the story. Otherwise you just get a mishmash of ideas that might be good on their own, but which muck up all the other good ideas that other people have.

UPDATE: Lisa thinks this is a scam. If they ask you to contribute money as an "associate producer," run.

Con Brio But Without Logic

FRINGE is losing me fast. And I'm its core audience.

(Ep. 2 SPOILERS)

When you have a science fiction show, it's the ordinary drama aspects of the show that will kill you. I can, for the sake of argument, accept that some kind of genetic flaw creates a baby that grows to an old man in 6 hours, even though that violates the law of conservation of mass. (Where did the 8 lb. baby get the extra mass to become a 100 lb. old man?)

But I can't accept, in any television show, that a creepy guy can walk into a strip joint, make friends with a pretty woman who works there, get her to go home with him, and then convince her to go into his abandoned warehouse. Are you frakking kidding me?

At that point, the show ceases to take place in the same universe I live in.

(And even if she's hooking -- an abandoned warehouse? I don't think so.)

I'm also disturbed that the show is establishing a template where they will solve the mystery, in every third or fourth act, by some science-fiction deus ex machina. In the pilot, Agent (should be Special Agent) Dunham goes into an isolation tank, drops LSD, has a spinal hookup to a guy in a coma, and comes out with a face. In this episode, it turns out you can take the images off a dead person's retina.

I wouldn't mind the latter in the first act; I'll accept most anything as a premise. But not in the third or fourth act, where it's helping the heroes. That's going to alienate the audience. Why get involved in the mystery? In act three or four, Dr. Goofyhead is going to explain how you can use Google Maps Beta to locate the characteristic heat signature of an empathic metamorph, and hey! There she is in Harvard Square!

I think there's a lot of bad, sloppy writing in FRINGE, and there's no excuse for it. It's all visual and cool, but I can't get involved, because the show is insulting my common sense.

At least HEROES is coming back. See, I have no problem with HEROES, even though it violates most of the laws of physics -- because the characters more or less make sense. The only insults to my common sense are the science fictiony ones. You can break the laws of physics. But don't break the laws of character or story.

Spec What You Love

Q. The material I like to write is mainly sci-fi/fantasy stuff. I've written one screenplay about vampires, and I'm working on two others - one set in space and one based around magic. If I'm thinking about getting an agent, should I be writing various things, apart from my preferred (and my strength) sci-fi? Should I write a very down-to-earth drama to display what else I can do? (Although as of yet, I have no idea whether I can do that sort of thing.)

In features, spec what you love. That's what you'll do the best job on. When someone is writing something they don't love, the script always seems half-hearted.

After you've written a handful of speculative fiction stuff, then consider stretching out into new territory. Identify your weaknesses. Are your plots flimsy? Write a tightly plotted thriller. Characters weak? Write a straight drama. Scripts too talky? Write an action movie with great action.

But always find a story in those genres that you can love.

Personally, I find I can fall in love with a lot of different sorts of stories. I'm a speculative fiction fan, and I consider myself blessed that the series I have in development is spec fiction. But the show I co-created (NAKED JOSH) was a comic drama, and I'm known best for my work on a buddy cop comedy feature, BON COP BAD COP.

You may find after you've written a few speculative fiction feature specs that you have a hankering to write something new. Follow that hankering. Your speculative fiction scripts will presumably have elements of drama in them; if you can write drama in space, there's no reason you can't write drama here on Earth.

Le Phoque, Or Why I'm Terrified of a Tory Majority

This hysterical spot explains why those of us in the arts are terrified of a Tory Majority. It is almost certainly incomprehensible to anyone outside Canada. It is probably incomprehensible to anyone outside of Québec. But if you're assez bilingue, it is just very, very funny.