40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
Brace yourselves for a stunning 2-part article on who really decides what all of us see and hear in the media. Well, the Old Media anyway, because TVWriter™ still holds out one Acme Ton O’Hope for New Media’s independence.
Hope being the operative word. Anyway:
IMDB is going Youtube style and I’ve been selected to upload my films to their website. Now you can view two of my films in their entirety on IMDB.
I’m particularly fond of the films, Renounced and The First Time. And now I hope you can become just as fond of them as I am.
Renounced
…Yes, I mean your own work
Editing your own writing can be difficult. There’s a lot to pay attention to and there is frequently the ‘flavor of the week’ in regard to the continually evolving dos and don’ts and ‘forbidden words’. Most of the time I tell folks not to go crazy every time a new trend or a new word to be avoided is announced.
(Opening scene of the Little Miss Sunshine script (PDF dated 10.9.03) written by Michael Arndt.)
by Scott W. Smith
“I didn’t really expect that the script [Little Miss Sunshine] was going anywhere. I mean, I was hoping to get an agent out of it but I didn’t bother to register it just because I didn’t think anyone was going to see it. And then I had a friend of mine who was represented by the Endeavor Agency [nowWME] and that was sort of my one hope. She read it and liked it and said, ‘Can I give this to my agent?’ so I said, ‘Yes, please do.’ And like six weeks went by and I thought no one had read it and it had falling through the cracks. And I was really unhappy because I’d spent a whole year writing it and I thought I’d have to go back and get a day job again. It was a Saturday afternoon and I got a message on my machine saying, ‘We read your script, we really liked it.’ And I called them on Monday morning and basically they said, ‘We think we can do something with this.’ And I still have those agents today. They basically saved my life. I said it at the Writer’s Guild Awards, the thing that’s standing between me being up here and me being in my basement was this agent who read my script.”
Screenwriter Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3)
2007 talk at Cody Books (at the 33:31 mark of the FORA.tv video)
This has been a crazy week. A lot of ups and downs. Did four really awesome podcasts and radio shows (thank you Surfing Aliens, Geek Supremacy Project, Wide Open Radio After Dark and Comedy Girls!!) Also have some potentially really exciting news that I’ll share sometime soon. But one thing in particular stood out. I was contacted by a large online network. They said they loved my work and wanted me to drop what I was doing to animate (and help develop) a series for one of their top stars. Sounds exciting? Not really. What they offered in terms of compensation was, let’s just say this–I’d make more money being a Walmart greeter. With that in mind, this week I decided to put together this list:
FOUR BAD THINGS YOU’LL PROBABLY EXPERIENCE WHILE LAUNCHING YOUR FIRST WEB SERIES:
