NOTE FROM LB
A true story about a visit – a long time ago! – that never should have been made, built upon a premise that first appeared here just a few weeks ago. When I’m being deliberately poetic (and, maybe, obtuse) I think of this as “An Ode to Divorce.”
The other day I saw a woman I once loved.
Good morning! Time for TVWriter™’s Monday look at our 5 most popular blog posts of the week ending yesterday. They are, in order:
Hey you. Yeah, you. The sleep-deprived indie filmmaker who just tried to film 25 script pages in a single day. Things seem bleak, but there’s a silver lining to this whole mess of a process- you could be making your passion project AND getting fit at the same time!
Here’s how!
What are YOUR Get Fit Tips for indie filmmakers? Tell me in the comments!
Who needs a button when we have ourselves?
Last week I applied for a position at BOOM! Studios. Here is my cover letter:
Dear F K,
Jenji Kohan, creator of Orange is the New Black and Weeds, plus a ton of other (mostly) TV comedy hits, has a lot to say about TV, the TV biz, and the place of women in that particular workplace. Her story is one we should all know, regardless of gender and all those other diversity, um divergences:
Devon Shepard met Jenji Kohan, the creator of “Orange Is the New Black” and “Weeds,” twenty-four years ago, when they were writers for the NBC sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” Shepard, a former standup comedian, got into the business serendipitously, after he clowned on a square producer at a black barbershop in Los Angeles. Kohan, who had recently graduated from Columbia, was a rung down from Shepard—a “baby writer,” in Hollywood lingo. But “she was fun, a whole lot of energy, a sponge,” he said. Kohan wanted to learn dominoes—the “loud and outrageous” street version—and they began playing bones in an office they shared, trading stories about growing up black in South Central and Jewish in Beverly Hills. “I made the room cool,” Shepard said. “People were, like, ‘What’s going on in there?’ ”
This was in 1993, a year after the L.A. riots, and at “Fresh Prince,” which starred Will Smith as a Philly street kid sent to live with rich relatives, the writers’ room was a toxic mess. The staff—which included Smith’s bodyguard and his cousin—kept crazy hours and fought non-stop. There were cruel pranks: someone peed in a colleague’s bottle of tequila. Kohan was one of two female writers, and the only white woman. Her nickname was White Devil Jew Bitch. Shepard was one of her few allies.