Category: Resources

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

Troy DeVolld: Change is Good

EDITOR’S NOTE: LB pal Troy the Boy imparts some vital information for both reality and unreality writers:

Troy-DeVolld-bannerWorking vs Making
by Troy DeVolld

I’m proud to say that the last three years of my career were spent churning out five seasons of a number one hit for VH1, two of another number one hit for the same network, and a game show that sort of changed everything for me.

I’d forgotten how much fun it is to be in over my head on something I’ve never done before. When I took Hollywood Game Night for NBC this Spring, I had no game shows on my resume. Reality competition galore, yes, but straight-up game shows, no. Zero. Zed. Naught. Nary a one. read article

Why I sued Hollywood on behalf of unpaid interns everywhere

TVWriter™ is proud to present this fascinating article by Eric Glatt, the bane of exploitative employers everywhere:

What? Oh, no, no, no, no, LB. Of course we aren’t referring to, um, you.

natalie_portman_in_black_swan-hd-1by Eric Glatt

When Fox Searchlight Pictures‘s $300 million-plus grossing “Black Swan” sought to control its production budget, in part by staffing with unpaid intern labor, it was contributing to the normalization of a practice that has no defensible basis in ethics or law. It took advantage of people’s desperate need to distinguish their résumés and the acceptance of this commonplace if peculiar fact of the youth labor market. Somewhere along the way, a laudable idea that work experience could have academic merit metastasized into an ad hoc free-for-all in which there is little consistency in policy (whether among employers or colleges), little governmental enforcement, and every reason for exploited young workers to cross their fingers and hope that they’re expected to labor for free for only a brief period. read article

13 Tips for Aspiring Writers

We love it when we find a great new writing site. New to us, that is. Writerightwords.com is such a site. Here’s a sample of what we found there:

7532999776_eb4057734e_b-300x224by Erin Feldman

A few weeks ago, I was asked if I had any tips for aspiring or new writers. Two things immediately came to mind: read a lot and work with a mentor. I then decided to work on a list because I knew two tips weren’t nearly enough.

  1. Read. Read a lot. Read genres with which you’re unfamiliar. Read authors you think you hate. Read authors you love. Develop, as Dean Young says, a critical sensibility. Ask people, especially other writers, you admire for a reading list.
  2. Write. Write a lot, too. Write for yourself first and others second. Write without stopping. Write without worrying about how good or bad a piece is. Let the work reach a conclusion before passing judgment.
  3. Find a mentor. Find someone who will criticize your work but will do so in a way that causes you to grow. Listen to your mentor. Let that person or people guide you. They often see what you can’t.
  4. Imitate. Forget about style and imitate for a while. Your style and voice will begin to emerge as you do the work.

Read it all

Leesa Dean: Adventures of a Web Series Newbie

a3c_laurelsChapter 30: A3 C!!!!!
by Leesa Dean

Sunday morning, 10am I fly down to Atlanta for the Chilltown screening at A3C and I am officially THRILLED! And yes, that means I have to be up at 5am so I can get dressed/to the airport on time. As an official late night person, the fact that I have to be up that early and it doesn’t even phase me let’s you know exactly how excited I am about this.

I reformatted Chilltown so it’s now HD (perfect for a big screen) and strung the episodes together. They wanted to show all of Season One. Since it’s a semi-serialized show, the story arcs extend through the Season so it lends itself naturally to being seen that way. The guy who’s running the film part of the festival, Charles Judson, is also the artistic director of the Atlanta Film Festival and A3C is affiliated with it. It really feels great that somebody of his stature loves the show.

A few nights ago, I did an interview with Jah Prince who has a hip-hop radio show in Atlanta and has been promoting the festival a bit. It was my second time on the show. He’s a big Chilltown fan. After the interview, we chatted and he’s coming to the screening and will bring some people. read article

For TV Shows, It’s a Seller’s Market

The title above is also the title of a Wall Street Journal article that was published a couple of weeks ago. We hadn’t mentioned it before cuz we were waiting for WSJ to rethink what they’d said and, well, correct it.

Clear as mud, right? Well, here’s the skinny:

tv-show-articlesby Amol Sharma and Keach Hagey

Broadcast TV networks used to get first crack at all the best scripts in Hollywood. Nowadays, they are mere participants in a mad scramble. read article