The first 300,000 words you write are going to suck. The trick is to get to word 300,001 as fast as possible.
(I didn’t come up with this, and I’m embarrassed I don’t remember who did. Anyone know?)
Do snails think that slugs are homeless?
People who live in stone houses can throw all the glasses they want.
You can tell the size of a person's soul by the size of the things that bother them.
Holy shit, have you seen Big Mistakes? It’s from Dan Levy of Schitt’s Creek and shows that you can have six hard jokes per minute and also be about character.
#scriptsky #filmsky
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What creative process best suits how your mind works? Find the art form that uses that process, even if that art form isn't good yet.
So, eventually, you can be an expert at that art form when it hits its peak.
Instead of having to backdoor your way into an art form on the downslope, like I did!
I missed that gold rush, my young friends. I do eke out a living in legacy media but the dog days are over.
But what's the gold rush yet to come? Maybe that's where you should be building your skills.
And I wonder if there are people who are just starting their careers now, who see kinds of media that are in their infancy and aren't good yet, and they compare them against legacy media that is good but slowly fading away...
...and they might make the same dumbass decision I made.
I still love movies but I’m so glad that now I get to work in TV too.
But damn, when I think back to 1994 when I decided I was too good for TV, that was my Sliding Doors moment of dumbassery.
I was very lucky to get that job, and I loved it. I learned a fuckton about how the sausage is made, and since I left that gig a couple of years ago I’ve been in over a dozen story rooms which is the most fun anyone can have without recreational chemicals.
Oh but look! One of the three broadcasters in the country has a job opening for their commissioner of scripted shows! That’s like being a network exec in the US, but it covers drama and comedy and dev and current all at once.
But by then I was a late-40s average white dude with some feature credits and no access to TV people. And I had moved to New Zealand, where only about 50 hours of scripted TV gets made PER YEAR.
I realised that half of the 30ish feature screenplays I had written had been with partners, because I really like co-writing with people.
Plus I had a story brain and a business brain, which was not allowed in movies but is normal in TV.
Oh fuck, I realized, I should have started in TV.
I had been learning how to make feature films for like 15 years before TV got good. And TV got really really good.
And I started to realise how stuck-up and dumb I had been to turn my nose up at TV way back in the ‘90s.
BTW, if you want to know more about the gears and levers of writing for TV, the podcast CHILDREN OF TENDU is for you.
childrenoftendu.libsyn.com
Many thanks to these dudes for their service to the community
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Historically, television which is produced by writers delivers on time and under budget far far more often than film or TV which is not produced by writers. That’s a fact, jack.
People would start as assistants or staff writers, and each year they’d learn more skills and get more responsibility until they knew enough to run the whole show.
It was a whole system that evolved over time, and it worked really well.
Which brings me back to television and my dumb decision.
In TV (or at least how TV used to be in my home country) writer/producers are the norm. If you’re making 22 episodes a year, the people who have designed the overarching story need to have the authority to protect that story.
But lots of film producers couldn't seem to wrap their heads around that idea.
(Or maybe they just thought I was arrogant, or had bad taste, or the quality of my writing didn't justify the hassle of having to treat me like an equal. Any of those things could also be true.)
(which dovetails with this thread on the difference between being a partner or an employee)
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Eventually I started telling producers "Think of me as a fellow producer, who knows a good writer who will work for me for free. But when he works for other producers he needs to get paid."
Some producers got the point of that (I could be their partner or their employee) and we made cool stuff.
(Creative friends, trust me: producing is complicated and frustrating but it's effable. It's effable as fuck.)
Lots of producers would worry I'd start trying to tell them how to suck eggs, or that I wouldn't fall for the standard subtext that producing is so mysterious and ineffable that I, a naive and sheltered creative, would struggle to understand its complexity.
I have a writer brain and a producer brain, which in movies at the time was weird and unacceptable to the power dynamic.
Lots of film directors would get the willies by the idea of the same person being both their boss and their underling.
When I graduated from USC in 1994, movies were good and TV mostly wasn't. So I decided to learn how to make movies.
In hindsight, that was a dumb decision.
(a nostalgic thread)
#scriptsky #filmsky
Ooh, this looks cool. Bought!
"Truth springs from argument among friends."
~ D. Hume.
Two hairy animals, one of which wears glasses
Went to the home of some filmmaker friends to talk about a new project. Got lovebombed by the bestest puppy in the world.
WWJD?
JWSTFU.