Category: Opinion

John Ostrander’s Summertime Blues?

guardians-of-the-galaxy-movie-imagesby John Ostrander

About a million years ago when I was a kid, summer time was the entertainment doldrums. All the TV shows were in reruns (and we only had a few channels back then) and the new season wouldn’t begin until September, right around the time school began, limiting the shows we could see. Big new movies usually didn’t come out during the summer; the prevailing theory was people didn’t want to sit in a darkened theater (even if it was air conditioned) during the summer. They’d rather be outside. Drive-ins did good business because they combined both. My mother usually didn’t let us go to one because they were reputed to be make-out dens for teen-agers… and they probably were. Mother didn’t approve. Again, the fall started up the movie season.

We didn’t have VHS tapes when I was a kid, let alone DVD or Blu-Ray. No channels on TV devoted exclusively to movies or old movies or cartoons. Even our music wasn’t portable; vinyl records had to be played on large machines. Transistor radios were small enough to take with you and that gave you some music but it was always what the guy on the radio chose for you to listen.

I know. The Dark Ages, huh? Somehow we managed to survive. read article

How to Control Your Creative Process

process_begin1

by Diana Black

That blank page stares back at us…if we’ve had the good fortune to land an assignment and there’s a serious deadline involved, Holy Crap! Okay, we take a breath; confident in our knowledge and understanding of what the hell we’re doing and we’ve got a kit-bag of kick-ass skills at our side. Like our hero/heroine, we will prevail.

As artists, we are at some fundamental level, observers and explorers of the human condition. Our job/compunction is to observe and interpret human behavior. We perceive ‘a moment’ in time, intimately associated with either our own human experience or someone else’s – real or imagined. It fascinated/horrified us. We then lift that compelling ‘moment’ out of the day-to-day and embed it within a dramatic narrative in all its ugliness, beauty, terror, gut-wrenching sorrow or triumphant joy. When we’re ‘done’, we reflect it back to the society from whence it came – “See, this is who you really are and this is what drives you.”

While we’ve learned and mastered the mechanical skills necessary to construct a teleplay that should stand up under the subjective scrutiny of the gatekeeper – at least structurally, does that mean we have the insight to recognize the salient ‘moments’ let alone the creative ability to weave them into a compelling narrative? Let’s assume that we do or at least, the potential. read article

Why TV Is Not the New Film

Just yesterday we ran across this fascinating article. It contains a number of interesting and provocative and perceptive observations, and although it seems to be based on a basic assumption we don’t share (that film is inherently more artful than TV) it gave us a lot to think about that we’d like to share.

another madmen picby Mike S. Ryan

As much as I love Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men and Twin Peaks, as great and as groundbreaking as those shows were, they still are not cinema.

The recent explosion of quality long-form cable series has taken the TV form to a new level of artistry and craftsmanship. A show like Mad Men is not only thrilling because of its commentary on its era, but because of the zeitgeist energy created by everyone watching the show, talking about it and sharing opinions on social media. Today, perhaps more than ever, a new season of a quality show becomes a cultural event. Combine that with journalism‘s “recap culture,” in which newspapers, magazines and websites devote pages to summaries of the prior night‘s shows — all the while shrinking or even eliminating film reviews — and it’s pretty easy to understand why cinema feels somewhat inadequate in comparison. read article

Writing Software Review: A Love Letter to Scrivener

Nope, this isn't an ad for this store. It's a genuine testimonial for the writing software of the same name.
Nope, this isn’t an ad for this store. It’s a genuine testimonial for the writing software of the same name.

by Meredith Allard

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I had been struggling as I was writing my new historical novel. Nothing in the story seemed to be working, and for whatever reason I was at a loss as to how to fix it. In this post I talked about how I decided to give myself some time off from writing. It was the best decision I could have made since it allowed me to take the brain break I desperately needed. I’ve been writing long enough to know that the ideas would show up when they were ready, and I was right. Only this time I had some help from an unexpected source.

About two years ago I bought Scrivener as a screenwriting tool. I used it to write a couple of screenplays, and that was that. I saw that it could be used to write novels, but when I looked at the directions they didn’t make sense and at that time I didn’t have the patience to fiddle with it. For whatever reason I found the directions confusing and the buttons and other tchotchkes didn’t make sense. I ended up leaving the program to languish unused and hidden in my Applications folder. While I was taking a break from writing my novel, I kept reading these posts about Scrivener and how all these writers said the program changed their writing for the better. Kristen @ She’s Novel pins these Scrivener Tutorial Posts on Pinterest, and Joanna Penn from The Creative Penn offers a course about how to use Scrivener. As I read these articles, I remembered that I had Scrivener on my computer. I wasn’t sure if the program could help me through the fog that was my novel, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.

Before I go on, I should point out that I’m not getting any compensation from the nice Scrivener folks at Literature and Latte for this. I’m simply sharing why I’ve come to love the program and how it helped me write my novel after I had been stuck in the mud for some months. read article

John Ostrander Bids Adieu to Jon Stewart

Jon-Stewartby John Ostrander

It was a good show.

Jon Stewart ended his run on The Daily Show last week with an hour-plus long installment. It was a good episode and a good final episode. I’ve seen a few of these things – where a long time reporter or entertainer walks away, of their own volition, from their show. I saw Jack Paar (you kiddies go ahead and Google him or look him up on the Wikipedia) leave his weekly show, walking out through a series of spotlights cast on the floor. I saw beloved newscaster Walter Cronkite sign-off for the last time, telling us, “I’ll be away on assignment, and Dan Rather will be sitting in here for the next few years. Good night.” I saw Johnny Carson, the King of Late Night Television, leave The Tonight Show with his “very heartfelt good night.”

These kind of shows can be difficult to pull off. The episode can be too much, it can be too little, it can be awkward – as parodied brilliantly by Gary Shandling on The Larry Sanders Show. I thought Letterman’s exit from The Late Show was a little flat and Stephen Colbert’s exit from The Colbert Report somewhat over the top, even for him. read article