SOME MONTREAL HAPPENINGS

Here are some writer-y things happening in my home town:

Tom Bauer's Montreal Screenwriters e-Group

Gryphon Writer's Group: The Gryphon Tea Shop, 5968 Monkland Avenue, N.D.G. (Villa Maria Metro, #103 or #162 bus direction west on Monkland, get off at Royal Avenue.) For more details, please telephone: 514-485-737

Invisible Cities Network

ELAN: The English Language Arts Network (ELAN) is a meeting place for Quebec artists (of all disciplines) who use English as their first language. ELAN celebrates and promotes that part of our identity that is rooted in the English language. ELAN also provides a forum to make common cause with the French-speaking community and our francophone colleagues by bringing together English-language artists from all disciplines and all parts of the province to forge new alliances, build new audiences and seek new sources of support. Quebec artists are invited to list their names/bios on the ELAN DIrectory.

MOHAWK DEMOCRACY

Interesting Times article on how the settlers probably absorbed Iroquois notions of democracy through representative government restrained by constitution. Sure, they knew John Locke and had the Athenian example. But the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy was as concerned with what government couldn't do as what it could -- and that's the killer app of US democracy. It is all but impossible to get all three houses of government on the same side, and that provides -- or "used to provide," I should say -- some protection against the "tyranny of the majority."

I watched three different fireworks last night, all from a beach in East Hampton -- we could see the Devon Yacht Club's fireworks up close, and Sag Harbor's, and Montauk's. Kind of cool to see everyone's fireworks all along the seaboard. It would have been cooler if I wasn't thinking of how much the question at the end of the Star Spangled Banner has really become a question: does that banner still wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave?

IMMENSELY MORE POWERFUL, THOUGH

While Final Draft has more of a Mac "look and feel," and therefore seems more intuitive, Screenwriter has immensely more options. For example, when you print a PDF in Final Draft, it uses the Mac OS to print the PDF as a snapshot of the script. That's good: it will look like the script you would have printed out. However, Movie Magic Screenwriter goes further. It turns each slugline into a bookmark, and if you like, it turns script notes in Screenwriter into notes in PDF, so that they don't print out, but they do appear when you view the script in Acrobat Reader. In other words, Final Draft is taking the easy way out, and Screenwriter is using the full power of the PDF format.

Throughout Screenwriter, you find similar options that don't exist in Final Draft 6. (I don't have FD 7.) You can cheat pagination. You can change one character's name throughout the script. You can watermark.

On the other hand there are some annoying features. To start dialog with a parenthesis (e.g. if you're indicating foreign language dialog) or indeed to put a parenthesis anywhere in dialog, you have to trick the program. You can't lock scene numbers easily in an outline. I don't see how to get AA scenes even in a locked script. I don't see how you can suppress page breaks on screen.

The issue seems to be a glitchy but intuitive program, FD, vs. a robust but idiosyncratic program, Screenwriter.

I'm frustrated. I really wanted to like the new program.

POSSIBLY THE BEST WE CAN HAVE AT THE MOMENT

People seem to think that Alberto Gonzales will be Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court. For my part, that's not a bad thing. Bush was never going to nominate an "out" middle of the roader. So the choice seems to be right wing political freaks, and cronies.

The nice thing about Bush nominating a crony is that no one knows what he actually thinks. He himself may not know. He's been Bush's lawyer for a long time, crafting whatever advocacy Bush seems to want. Once he gets on the Court, his career is at its pinnacle. There's nowhere to go up from there. There's nothing anyone can give him. He can't be fired. He can do whatever he feels like.

Supreme Court justices are not famous for gratitude to the presidents who nominated them. They can be political -- the right wingers grabbed the 2000 election for their guy -- but out of conviction, not because they have to be.

That's when people find out what they really stand for. Gonzales may be right wing. He might be a pro-business Main Street Republican. Fifteen years down the line he may be a liberal. Who knows?

Always nice to see the enemy splintering. Like the gays-in-the-military thing, it's a natural wedge issue. It's between the right wing fanatics and the President's loyalists -- and the people who are loyal to Bush do seem to put loyalty above all else.

THE MONEY OR THE CREATIVITY

When I met Elvis, he had a million dollars worth of potential. Now, he's got a million dollars.

Col. Tom Parker, Elvis's manager

Why Television Sucks blogs about choosing between the money show and the fun show. She feels her agents manipulated her into the show she'd make the most money on, not the show where she'd do her best work.

It's not surprising. Her agents get 10% of her take, but they don't get 10% of her creative joy in doing good work. So they want her to make the most money.

It's tough choosing which direction to take. This year I've been concentrating on pitching shows, which means I'm not beating the bushes for staffing jobs. In the long run, getting my own show on the air will be more lucrative and more creatively rewarding if I succeed before I go broke. On the other hand I've learned a lot any time I've worked for someone else; and you build up your credentials. You have to weigh everything.

Agents don't care about any of this stuff, so watch out. If your career goes to the next level, they may lose you to another level of agent. They will generally not tell you to sacrifice money for your future.

Remember, they work for you. Make your own choices...

SINGULARLY ALONE

Ray Kurzweil makes an interesting argument that we are the most
technologically advanced society in our universe. Progress moves
exponentially. Therefore, between a society at our stage of
development, and one advanced enough to contact us, isn't a matter of
millions of years. It's a matter of decades. And contact moves at the
speed of light. (He actually claims that sufficiently advanced
societies -- by which he means the machine/biological hive mind he
expects us to reach in thirty years or so -- will figure out how to
move matter at near-light speeds, too. That seems unlikely now, but
it's the essence of the singularity concept that things that seem
unlikely now will become true in appallingly short amounts of time.)
Therefore if we are not receiving signals from advanced cultures, it
means that (a) we are not within the light-cone of any advanced
cultures, that is, we are so far from any advanced cultures that
light from them has not had time to reach us, (b) there are no such
advanced cultures, we're it, baby or (c) they're not talking to us.

I like this argument; though I credit (c) more than he does. We've
learned a lot about not interfering with primitive cultures. It tends
to destroy them, or at least, tends to destroy what is unique about
them. It's not hard to imagine that any sufficiently advanced culture
-- or the Federation of Planets -- knows about us, is observing us in
a myriad ways undetectable by our equipment, and is waiting for us to
find our own way off planet before they talk to us. They may also be
waiting for us to grow up and stop murdering each other. When Gandhi
was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said, "I think
it would be an excellent idea."

Possibility (d) of course is that sufficiently advanced cultures
develop advanced ways of destroying themselves. A Walkman filled with
plastic explosive blew up an airliner. What if the Columbine boys had
been able to fabricate a black hole? Or airborne Ebola? Will we get
sane before we can kill ourselves off? Or will we get too clever for
our own good before we get sane?

It's hard to imagine that we're the only game in town. But that's
partly because it's so frightening. Wouldn't we all like Ricky to
come home and straighten everything out?

SECONDARY CHARACTERS IN SPECS

Q. So basically...can a LOST spec involve an "Artz" as the A story?

Bumping up a secondary character to the A story is one way to pitch a LOST spec, I guess. You'd have to make what's happening with that character not only urgent to himself but also urgent to the main players. Because what you're showing in a spec is not how original you are, but how original you can be within the template of the show. You're showing that you can write the Skipper and Mary Anne and-- oh, sorry, wrong show. The most important thing is that it feel like a bonafide episode of the show.

If you look at the show, some apparently minor characters have got their own episodes, on their way to being more important. Hurley didn't seem like he was crucial to the plot until "his" episode. Then he became more central. So the template does allow you to promote minor characters.

Anyone else want to weigh in on this? LOST seems like a particularly awkward show to spec, yet it's a popular spec, I'm told. Has anyone written a LOST spec?

VELOCITY

I sometimes think I took up writing so my penchant for acquiring useless knowledge could justify itself. I once read Ernle Bradford's terrific book on the siege of Malta by the Turks in, if memory serves, 1565. A year later I was in a development guy's office on the Warner Bros lot, and he mentioned a project they were doing on the siege of Malta.

I said, "By the Turks? In 1565?"

The other day at the Dragon Dormant medieval camping event I was able to answer a question that had been nagging at me for some time. The musketeer at Jamestown, VA, told me a properly trained soldier in "his" time could get off one musket shot in half a minute. One of the medieval archers told me he could fire 8 shots in the same amount of time.

Why did anyone shift to muskets? Arrows poke holes in people just as well. And you can fire more of them. Sure, they require a tad more training. A musket is more complicated but requires less strength and less skill. But if I had a platoon of King George's finest bearing down on me with bayonets, my longbowmen could mow them down.

Same question with crossbows. Crossbows are slower. But a clothyard arrow can punch through any amount of armor you can realistically wear. So why go to crossbows.

The answer seems to be muzzle velocity. You or I can reasonably handle a 40 lb. bow. (That's the force required to draw it back fully.) A 40 lb. bow fires an arrow at 180 feet per second. A really strong archer could use an 80 to 120 lb bow. But his range was on the order of 200 yards. Not aiming. That's firing for effect, artillery style, in the general direction of a massed enemy, hoping your arrow hits someone or other.

A light crossbow you can draw with both hands, cock, and then load and fire. That means a normal person can use a 100 lb. crossbow. That fires a bolt at 360 feet per second. Now you've got almost twice the range. (Drag increases exponentially, so doubling the pull doesn't double the range.) Also, accuracy goes up because the trigger, not your fingers, releases the string.

A musket fires semi-accurately at only 100 yards. But it has a muzzle velocity of 1300 fps. A troop of soldiers with muskets firing for effect, artillery-style, can hit their enemy at 700 yards, I am told. Which means that my archers will get shredded before they can ever get close enough.

This is a much more convincing explanation than previous ones I'd heard, e.g. it's easier to train people to fire a musket than to hit anything with a bow. Though I'm not sure the "class" explanation is wrong. In military simulations, archers tend to decimate mounted knights, just as they did at Agincourt, especially if the archers are protected by pikemen. They're cheaper, too. But the rich guys running the show were mounted knights, and they didn't trust or like archers much. Probably bothered them that a commoner with a bow could knock them off their horse from 50 yards if he ever decided to. So they decided bows were unsporting, and kept up the cavalry charges up through 1898. Folly never goes out of style.

Anyway, that's the sort of question that nags at me when the writing is going well.

Boy, this is a great job.