Tag: People’s Pilot Contest

Dennis O’Neil: Why Fix What Ain’t Broken?

quickeraseby Dennis O’Neil

A naked old man squatting near a small fire on a barren hillside, surrounded by children who listen as the old man’s voice enters the stillness…

A scene from a time near the beginning of storytelling as a communal activity, or hear the end, a time when myth and religion finally reunite, or a time before their sundering.

Here’s a few words from George Lucas, of Star Wars fame: “Mythology is a performance piece that gets acted out over hundreds of years before it actually becomes embedded in clay on a tablet or is put down on a piece of paper to be codified as a fixed thing. But originally it was performed for a group of people in a way in which the psychological feedback would tell the narrator which way to go. Mythology was created out of what emotionally worked as a story.” read article

YouTube is Kicking TV’s Financial Butt

…This couldn’t be happening to a more worthy group of people…on both sides of the kick:

youtubefuture

by Ben Popper

For the last three years, YouTube has put on a series of increasingly extravagant parties meant to convince advertisers that the video platform is the best place to spend their marketing dollars. The fourth annual Brandcast took place last night at the Javits Center, and compared with previous versions, it was decidedly more self-assured. In the past, YouTube spent a lot of time assuring the brands in attendance that its content was safe, high-quality, and watched by more than just bored teenagers. This time YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki cut to the chase.

“Today, I’m happy to announce that on mobile alone YouTube now reaches more 18–49-year-olds than any network — broadcast or cable. In fact, we reach more 18–49-year-olds during primetime than the top 10 TV shows combined,” she said, citing data from a Nielsen study  of US viewers commissioned by Google. “At a time when TV networks are losing audiences, YouTube is growing in every region and across every screen.” read article

Stop Censoring Your Creative Work!!!

“To thine own self be true,” remember? Or as Our Beloved Larry, LB himself has said, “If your work doesn’t present the world as you see it, then you’re betraying not only yourself but your art.

Or, to put it a bit more helpfully:

braindamageby Matthew E. May

It’s one thing to reject the ideas of others…we do that almost automatically. But when we reject, deny, stifle, squelch, strike, silence and otherwise put ideas of our own to death, sometimes even before they’re born, it is the highest crime against creativity. It’s an act of pure tragic mindlessness. I often think of this self-censoring as “ideacide,” because it entails the voluntary shutdown of the imagination, the long-effects of which eventually kill off our natural curiosity and creativity. read article

LB: TVWriter™ University Schedule Spring/Summer 2016


by Larry Brody

Sent this out to everyone on the TVWriter™ email list yesterday. But even if you haven’t signed up for all our newletters and announcement, I love ya. So here ’tis again:

Gang,

How things stand: read article

Should We All Write at Starbucks?

Super writer-blogger Ken Levine gets to the heart of the matter – again:

coffeeshop

by Ken Levine

An interesting discussion arose from Sunday’s post – whether or not to write at Starbucks. It brings up the question: where do you write and why? For you non-writers, it brings up the question: why do you go to Starbucks at all when Dunkin Donuts has better coffee?

Usually I write with a partner and most of the time we dictate scripts to our assistant while I pace back and forth with a yoyo so a public coffee house is generally not the ideal workplace. It’s bad enough when the assistant says, “No, really? You really want me to put that in?” without total strangers chiming in the same thing. But when we’re just working through a story we’ll often meet at a Coffee Bean. Yes, there’s always that danger people will think we’re just posturing pretentious writers so we counter that by wearing priest collars. read article