How Do You Know if You're Moving Forward?

How do you know when something is leading nowhere?

It's one thing to blindly follow orders, but it's another to taken advantage of.

Working for free sucks. Working for free with no signs of your situation changing is worse. Especially since Visa doesn't care that things might get better one day.

I think the first question is: what are your choices? Everything is relative. A crappy job for money is usually better than a crappy job for free. A crappy job for free is usually better than no job at all. Only you can decide whether picking up the elephant dung at the circus is better than leaving show business.

You can only know that something is leading nowhere when you are putting everything you have into it. There's a proverb in bike racing: "leave everything on the road." If you're holding back, then you don't know if the job is leading nowhere or if you're just not following.

You know a job is leading somewhere when you start getting more responsibility, making new contacts, and learning how to do new things. If you're still doing the same tasks six months later (for an internship) or a year later (for a paid job), and you haven't seriously expanded the circle of people who recognize your name, then it's time to start asking your boss if there isn't more you could be doing, and how you could be doing it better.

Then, if you don't like the answers you're getting, you might consider looking elsewhere. Sometimes the process of looking elsewhere leads to new responsibilities, as people realize they're going to lose you. It will also often clarify for you whether you're forwarding yourself in your current job.

I'm not advocating threatening to quit. You have the conversation that makes clear that you would like know how you could be moving up the food chain. Then if you quit, you've warned them; and if you don't quit, you haven't burned any bridges.

But almost everybody understands that people can't work for free forever. (If they don't, they're not worth working for.) If you're in an internship, it's entirely legit to say, "I'd love to keep working here, but I'm running out of money. Whaddya say?"

Never Write Down

Q. I'm disillusioned with the writing for the current season of HEROES. Generic dialog, bad plot logic, etc. Now I don't know what approach to take with my spec. Should I write the show I *wish* it was, or do I try to copy what the writers have done? I'm worried that if I imitate the current episodes too closely my spec will come off as badly written, but if I veer too far, I'll end up with a fantasy spec!

I would write for the best version of the show. Try to identify each character's voice and write him or her as distinctly as possible. You don't get any points for bad plot logic, so use the best plot logic you can. After all, only a slice of the people reading your spec are current HEROES fans.

Bear in mind, HEROES is a comic book series, so make sure your episode is packed with cliffhangers and high-stakes plot turns. The situations need to be big and the stakes outrageously big.

Never write down. The people writing HEROES are writing the show as best they can; that's true of almost every show. (Rarely, having a tyrant at the helm makes people stop caring.) They may have network notes you don't know about, that have to do with demographics or other unanswerable non-creative demands. They don't mean to be writing generic dialog. You shouldn't either.

How Do You Format Songs

Q. In a screenplay for a musical, how are the songs formatted? Should I send a CD of the soundtrack (with just the musician singing) along with the script?

You probably need to send the artwork for the poster of the stage musical, along with the original cast soundtrack, and maybe box office numbers from the Broadway theater it's playing in. Tickets to the show would be good.

Original movie musicals are rare. Most movie musicals are stage-to-screen adaptations of hit shows: CHICAGO, A CHORUS LINE, CABARET and others that do not begin with C. Woody Allen's musical flopped. I'LL DO ANYTHING flopped so badly in previews -- in previews -- that James Brooks had to delete the songs.

There are all sorts of things that are almost musicals. SOUTH PARK: THE MOVIE had original songs. PRISCILLA: QUEEN OF THE DESERT had original costumes.

TV seems to be different. Shows about people singing seem to do well -- on kids' channels. HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL is a successful TV movie franchise. And then there's Hannah Montana, which I understand involves music, in a sense. And there's DR. HORRIBLE'S SING ALONG BLOG, which is a straight ahead musical serial on the Web. (Is it still on?)

But straight-ahead original live action feature movie musicals? Very hard to set up, and extremely hard to set up if you're not wired in.

On the other hand, it is very possible to get a musical produced on stage. Ask DMc, who's had several musicals produced and has made many tens of dollars from them. But if it's a hit, you will have a better shot at getting the movie made. You'll have refined your story, your songs, your characters, etc. And you'll have that poster and soundtrack CD.

(To answer your question, I would format the song lyrics like dialog, in all caps, maybe with slightly wider margins.)

Happy Thanksgiving Y'all

Show business is not full of contented people. Aspiring writers long to be pro writers. Emerging writers yearn to be staff writers, or produced feature writers. Veteran writers wish their show would go. Showrunners wish their show had a better time slot, and that their network executives would just love every script the way it is. When someone kicks over your castle, it's easy to forget to be thankful that they pay you to play in the sandbox in the first place.

Today's a good day to remember all the reasons we're lucky.

I am incredibly thankful that I get paid to write for a living. I have trouble believing sometimes that I am being paid to develop my own metaphysical drama for pay cable. If it actually goes, I, gosh, don't even know what I'll do.

(I'm grateful for my family's love, and all sorts of good things that happened to us this year, but this is not that kind of blog.)

Weirdly, show business turned out to be a safe industry. When I was in school, banking, real estate, and insurance seemed like the safe industries. Wow, I'm glad I went into showbiz! And no one is outsourcing screenwriters to Bangalore. And in a recession, people watch more TV. And there are more and more outlets needing shows. That may mean smaller budgets, but it means more writing.

I hope you all have a terrific Thanksgiving. Don't forget to be thankful for all your blessings!

Which Came First, the Theme or the Script?

Q. Should a script grow out of a theme, or should the theme grow out of a script? I got my degree in creative writing (prose), and my professors always said that working from a theme risks limiting a story, and making it pedantic. On the other hand, books I've read about writing plays assume that the first part of creating a play is deciding on a theme. What's your approach?

Whatever works for you. I tend to start with a story -- that is, a character with a problem. The character and the problem usually suggests a theme. I don't stress too much about themes because no one goes out to watch the movie with the great theme. They go to the movie with the great story.

But whatever works for you, you know? If you want to start with a theme, and figure out what story would address that theme, you may have a little extra work to get to an interesting character and an interesting problem, but you'll be on a solid foundation.

Some people seem to start with a character, and figure out what an interesting problem would be. I tend to start with an interesting problem and figure out who the character that best resonates with that problem is.

Laurence Olivier started with his character's nose. Once he got the nose right, he felt, the rest was easy. And John Boorman told me that Nicol Williamson couldn't figure out how to play Merlin until he got that funny little silver head plate. The rest of the character flowed naturally from that bit of costume.

So, really, start anywhere that gets you where you want to go.

Never Upgrade

[Computer tech]

Yesterday, I upgraded from Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) to 10.5 (Leopard). 10.5 has a fabulous automated backup system called Time Machine, and I bought Apple's nifty Time Capsule. It's a combination wireless router and 500 GB hard drive. So any of the computers at home will now automatically back themselves up on an hourly basis over the wireless network.

I was spurred into action by Lisa's hard drive crashing irrecoverably. Lisa is not as good as I am about backing up. Fortunately Gmail never throws anything out, ever, and everything she writes, she emails to me sooner or later. And we had a backup from August. Me, I've been backing up to a flash drive at irregular intervals, and I'm always sending stuff out for notes. Still, the idea of never losing more than an hour's work was pretty attractive.

I forgot the cardinal rule of systems, though: never upgrade. Just buy a new computer with the new system installed. Lisa's MacBook came with 10.5. The first thing the 10.5 upgrade did was lose my home directory. That's right. Every single bit of personal information on my computer, everything except applications, gone.

Which sort of defeats the purpose of getting 10.5.

Well, the home directory wasn't erased, just misplaced, and with help from my brilliant researcher, Webs, I was able to put the home directory where it belonged, and the people at Final Draft made no fuss about giving me another activation. Still, I did spend a good 3 hours recovering.

Probably should not have installed anything until I turned in my final drafts of my pay cable series, eh?

Time Machine looks really cool, though. It saves your computer's entire state hourly for 24 hours, then daily for a week, then weekly until it runs out of space and has to start deleting old backups. I doubt I'll need all its functionality. I tend to make a new script file every day, so I have dozens of old drafts of scripts available in case I want to find out how I did it before. I'll be happy just knowing that I'm safe if my computer dies or runs off with another writer.

Hook'em, Dan-o

In this post, OutOfContext writes:

Sometimes you've got to explain the 'world of the show', but often not as much as you think you do.

You don't need to put all your backstory in the pilot. Remember the Big Rule of Pilots:

The real purpose of the pilot is to get you to watch the second episode.

The Big Rule of Pilot Scripts:

The real purpose of a pilot script is to get them to commission a second script.

So only put as much backstory as is necessary to get them to commission a second script. It's TV, not features. You can develop the world of the show as you develop the characters, episode by episode. You don't have to do it all in the first script.

Effrontery!

Q. I had an interview scheduled for a job as an "assistant to the director". I confirmed that I could make the interview but I asked if it was a paid position. The guy replied saying that it was a paid position but because I asked he no longer wants an interview with me and canceled our appointment. He said he was looking for a passionate filmmaker who wants the job whether it was paid or not.

Was I in the wrong? Should I have waited until the interview to pop that question? I tried e-mailing him back to explain my case but he blocked my e-mail. So, should I just drop it and call it a day?

Asking about pay is always a perfectly reasonable question, even if the answer is "You'll be paid in slices. How do you feel about extra cheese?"

It is shocking to me how often people who have very nice houses in the hills get all snippy when people sharing apartments in the flats want to get paid.

Anyone who responds to a question about pay by freaking out is not someone you'd want to work with. I suspect they weren't planning to offer any money, and now they just want you to feel bad. Or they were planning to say there's pay and then fail to actually pay. In other words, they're sleazy jerks.

Any legit person in show biz understands that people need to get paid. They may not want to pay you what you're asking. But someone who objects to you even raising the issue not worth your time, period.