Category: Resources

40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.

Interview with HAP AND LEONARD Co-Creator Jim Mickle

Ever wonder how novel adaptations end up on our television screens? Here’s the story of one of them, Sundance Channel’s interesting new series HAP AND LEONARD:

Warning: This series is not for the faint-hearted...which is a cool thing, yeah?
Warning: This series is not for the faint-hearted…which is a cool thing, yeah?

by Fred Topel

Jim Mickle’s movie Cold in July brought Joe R. Lansdale’s writing back to the big screen. The only previous movie adaptation was the horror comedy Bubba Ho-Tep, but Mickle, along with cowriter Nick Damici, captured Lansdale’s hard boiled southern crime thriller. Now that team is bringing Lansdale to series television with Sundance Channel’s Hap and Leonard.

James Purefoy plays Hap Collins and Michael K. Williams plays Leonard Pine, two out-of-work men in the ’80s. When Hap’s ex Trudy (Christina Hendricks) brings them the location to a sunken stash, Hap and Leonard agree to help her find it. And everything goes according to plan and they part as friends, right? We sat down with Mickle before Hap and Leonard’s panel for the Television Critics Association to discuss the new show, which premieres this week on SundanceTV.  read article

LB: The March-April TVWriter™ Advanced Workshop has 3 Openings

lbwriterbiggerA quick Word to the Wise that the 157th TVWriter™ Advanced Online TV & Film Writing Workshop will start in about a week and a half, on March 30, 2016.

As of this announcement I have room for a whole passel of students. Well, 3 more anyway, so if you’ve been thinking about joining us, or were in the Workshop but left and now want to come back, hey, now’s a good time.

This running of the Advanced Workshop costs $140 and meets every Wednesday night for 4 weeks. There’s probably a whole bunch more that you want to know, but I’m keeping this quick, so head on over to the Advanced Online Workshop Page or email me ASAP so we can clear up your questions.

19 essential books about TV

A great article for fans, pros, writers, actors, students – oh hell, for anybody who loves TV and wants to know more, more, more about it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re absolutely sure that Larry Brody’s classic Turning Points in TV would have been on this list, but, sadly, it’s out of print. Why didn’t you guys all buy it while you could!?

tv-book-holiday-gift-guide-2014by Erik Adams, Les Chappell, Danette Chavez & Noel Murray

Among its 100-plus lists, the 2009 Inventory book (now available for the low, low price of a penny!) contains “TV Guides: 5 essential books about TV.” The books it highlights—The Late Shift by Bill Carter, Live From New York by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, Total Television by Alex McNeil, The Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison, and The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family—are undisputed classics of the genre, but they’re not the only worthwhile small-screen reads. TV has been celebrated and decried in print since its inception; the medium’s ongoing Golden Age has fostered an audience eager to read about its favorite shows after the credits roll—and a cohort of critics, authors, and scholars prepared to satisfy that appetite. That means there might be more vital books about TV on the shelves by the end of 2016—until then, try supplementing The A.V. Club’s previous TV reading list with the 19 titles that follow. read article

SMASH Creator Proves There’s Life After Showrunning

Theresa Rebeck made the transition from playwright to TV showrunner and got cancelled and canned by NBC for her trouble. But is no longer writing TV really a major disaster? Or even a minor one?

smash creatorby Mitchell Sunderland

n her home office, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright—and creator of the cult hitSmash—Theresa Rebeck holds a figurine of small, anthropomorphized bears, all seated around a miniature table. The male animals look like TV writers; one even holds a pencil to his mouth.

“This is my table of dudes,” Theresa says. “It expresses my love and terror of the whole experience.” read article

Larry Brody has yet more to say about characterization

Did you know that John Huston called Jean-Paul Sartre "the ugliest man alive?"
Did you know that John Huston called Jean-Paul Sartre “the ugliest man alive?”

The TV Writer on TV Writing
Characterization Part 3
by Larry Brody

F. Scott Fitzgerald, not exactly known as an action writer, said it best: “In movies, characters are what they do, not what they say.” This is the most important thing you can keep in mind when writing any script for film or TV, and believe me I know how hard it is to remember. After all, we’re writers, aren’t we? Eschewers of the deed who live and die by the word.

In a novel, we get into our protagonist’s mind. We know his or her thoughts. In a stageplay, the flow of spoken dialog is designed to both propel the story forward and illuminate the psyches of the speakers. But in a teleplay or screenplay the only way we can know what a character is thinking is by how he behaves. We never hear his thoughts, and the only time we hear him talking is when he’s in conversation with other people, to whom he could easily be lying.

Action, then, is what gives us our characters’ states of mind. An angry character throws a chair, breaks a mirror. A loving character holds a dear one tenderly. A character who can’t face life literally turns away. Whether the action is large or small, it has to come from within, driven by the needs of the character and therefore illuminating them at the same time. read article