Gang,
The 150th TVWriter.Com Advanced Workshop ended last week, and next week we’ll start the 151st.
As things stand, I’ve got an amazing 3 places to fill. It’s very unusual to have this many openings, so I hope that you’ll take advantage of the opportunity. (Well, I’m hoping that 3 of you will anyway.)
John Steed died a few days ago, but my longtime and very dear friend Patrick Macnee, lives on.
I know obits of great actors are supposed to be written the other way around. “The man is dead, but his character goes on forever.” But to me Pat could never, can never, will never die – because he has lived his life more fully than any other human being I’ve ever known.
Pat wasn’t a brand, like so many other big names today. Hell, he wasn’t even that big a name.
Jules Feiffer is the comic genius who got me through high school. I was a huge fan of his early book of comics, Sick, Sick, Sick, his Bernard and Hue comic strips in both newspapers and – OMG – “Playboy,” and utterly blown away when I learned that he’d “assisted” (read “ghosted”) many of the episodes featuring what I to this day believe was the finest comic book character ever created, The Spirit.
The simple truth is that while I wanted more than anything to be like Denny Cold, the hero of The Spirit, I knew damn well that it was more than likely that the character I’d actually grow up to be was the inhibited, neurotic Bernard.
(I think I escaped Bernard’s fate ultimately, but not the ethos behind him.)
…And even though I’m almost clueless about what Epix is – except that they’re a “premium cable network” and seem to do a lot of streaming over the web – I absolutely would watch (as in try out) their upcoming series GRAVES, starring Nick Nolte “as a former President of the United States…who twenty years after his term ends…begins to think that his policies have damaged the country…[and] goes on a Don Quixote-like journey to fix things.”
Oh, and it’s a single camera, half-hour comedy, in case you couldn’t tell from my abridged longline…not that I could tell from their longer, tedious logline the Hollywood Reporter ran a few days ago.
The creator-showrunner is Joshua Michael Stern, who wrote something I haven’t seen called SWING VOTE, and Oscar winning producer of THE HURT LOCKER (which I thought was naive in its “gritty reality”) Greg Shapiro is also on board as an executive producer. For all I know, these two men are the funniest, most creative individuals on the planet, but I’ve got to be candid here. I’d rush to watch this thing even if it was from the GILLIGAN’S ISLAND gang because Nick Nolte being Don Quixote? C’mon!
Hank Isaac, writer-director-producer (sorry but for me the producer always comes last) of LILAC, the web series, just got in touch to say that – well, hell, let him tell it:
=&0=&– “Getting the Point Across,” has become an official selection of the 6th Annual Phoenix Comicon Film Festival.The Festival is part of an active pop culture convention which takes
place this year from May 28th to the 31st at the Phoenix Convention
So all you LILAC fans near Phoenix, you know what to do that last weekend in May, right?