Cord Cutters News’ Luke Bouma gives us a heads-up about what not to expect – and not to do – when you move forward into what appears to be the inevitable future of Home Electronic Entertainment.
By which we mean the home entertainment medium formerly known as – yeppers! – TV.
Harsh but true words all writers need to heed.
Bang2write is known for being honest in its feedback. Note that doesn’t mean brutal, vitriolic or cavalier. Writing is tough and writers have to make all kinds of sacrifices to get words on the page. Nothing winds me up more than readers and feedback-givers who don’t exercise due care. Every piece of work is an expression of someone’s hopes and dreams. I take this very seriously.
LB’S NOTE: The following Seattle Times article appeals to me for a couple of reasons.
Okay, so that’s five reasons. But now it’s time for you to read what’s inspired me to carry on here sans sarcasm or snark.
Once upon a time, TVWriter™ had a frequent contributor who called himself the “Impatient Showrunner,” AKA IS because he was indeed a showrunner and also a notoriously impatient man.
The other day, LB got a call from his good friend IS, and this TVWriter™ minion could hear the Showrunner’s rant all the way from my digs in London.
“What the hell is wrong with everybody?” IS demanded. “I keep getting email after email from total novices with addresses proclaiming their very own ridiculously named production companies? How can they form production companies if they’re still at a point where they’re asking me baby questions about what production companies even do? And people call me impatient?! Egads!”
In this excerpt from his book, Generation Friends, Saul Austerlitz meets the past of successful TV writing and discovers that it’s the present and future as well.
Every writer knew the sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. David Crane would enter the room, toting a script full of notes scribbled in the margins. He would sit down in his chair and begin drumming his fingers on the table before announcing, “All right, we’ve got a lot of really good stuff here.” The assembled writers would silently groan, knowing that this was Crane-ian code for a full script rewrite. Everything was out, and it was time to start again.
“Good enough” was not a concept Crane, or Marta Kauffman, understood or accepted. One day during the first season, writer Jeff Astrof approached Crane with a proposal. “Look,” he told Crane, “right now we work one hundred percent of the allotted time and we have a show that’s one hundred. I believe that if we worked fifty percent of the time we’d have a show that’s seventy-five, so maybe we work seventy-five percent of the time and have a show that’s like a ninety.” Crane instantly rejected the proposal: “Absolutely not. The show has to be one hundred.” There might have been a faster way to get the work done. But this was Marta Kauffman and David Crane’s show, and their room.