Just sayin’.
Time now for an interesting video, after which we will discuss Today’s Most Important Issue, mainly: “Who is the asshat here? Angus Jones? His parents for helping establish his career? His church for exploiting him in this vid? All of the above? None of the above?
We admit it. We kinda wish we were ’50s kids, living in a time when everything was simple and clear and black-and-white. Oh, wait…
So even though I refuse to watch the Walking Dead, I saw this on Pinterest today:
which spawned a little nine comment discussion on realism v. escapism. Your mission as a writer is to make your made-up story as “real” as possible. Some people, including a few folks on Pinterest, don’t think that’s necessary, while others get highly annoyed when something implausible occurs and takes them out of their suspended reality. This basically happens all the time in the action genre: the bad guys can’t shoot the broad side of a barn while the main character is always dead on accurate, for example. That’s become an action staple, so no one questions that leap in logic anymore.
Good to see that the Les(s) Man is finally facing reality:
USA Today reports that Les(s) Moonves, Chairman of CBS Corp – which means he controls CBS, Showtime and half the CW – now claims to have been waiting, waiting, waiting for the glorious moment when alternate programming like DVR viewing, online streaming, mobile viewing, etc. to dominate the television world…and now that time has come.
Hey, I can be as full of crap as the next guy, but not this next guy:
This really shocked me:
Um, probably none, right? Writer Stephen Falk wishes he could say the same thing. But instead we’ll just have to appreciate his insight and learn from his experience:
Advice To Young TV Writers (but really: What Happened To My NBC Show) – by Stephen Falk
Hey, you aspiring TV writers. It’s a hard job to crack into, but if you’re good enough and driven enough, it will happen for you. Don’t give up!
For if you work hard enough, someday you too may work on your own show for a year — from pitch to outline to script to pilot to the triumph of being picked up to series: the Golden Ticket. Then you might move across the country to actually make the show, hire a hundred actors and writers and crew members, and then in the middle of editing the 4th episode, get your show abruptly cancelled via late-night Friday phone call from Los Angeles. Then the fun part: you get to walk in shock back to your office — abandoning the confused editor waiting to lock the episode — and personally call all the actors and writers and crew and inform them the proverbial plug has been pulled and they no longer have a job, sorry. You will talk them through the tears and confusion — attempt to ameliorate the soon-to-be full-blown PTSD taking root already in them, all the while pre-knowing yours will go untreated and indeed sneak up on you weeks later. Do you clean out your office now? Do you wait — ? Shit! But first you better go see about that one prop for episode 5 you had to approve — oh, yeah. None of that matters. Everything has stopped. This is the moment after the 10.0 earthquake. Suddenly, nothing is the same. You don’t have a show anymore. Twenty minutes ago it was what took up 17 hours of your day. 24 hours of your mental real estate. It literally doesn’t exist anymore. The frozen people of Vesuvius had more warning than you did.