BECOMING RICARDO is the American dream – a web comedy series made by Hispanics (are we allowed to say that? It’s so hard to keep track of what’s politically correct when you only read entertainment sites), featuring Hispanics and done so well that whatever your background you’re going to identify with the characters and root like hell for them.
Especially if you’re a TVWriter™ type visitor and can fully appreciate the pull of a career in showbiz the way Jesenia’s character, Ricardo, does.
Speaking of DOCTOR WHO (well, sorta), as everybody who visits TVWriter™ knows, we’re huge WHO fans. Which means that we spend way too much time searching the web for little tidbits about the show, the people who made and are making it, and its history.
A week ago we stumbled across a review of a book about the series that we’d never heard of before. When we read the review, we saw why. JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner, by Richard Marson Miwk, goes into facets of the life of a man who may well be the Old WHO’s most beloved producer and is mighty strong stuff, especially when its obvious audience is a fandom where most controversies swirl around missing episodes and continuity errors.
by Travis RicheyGreetings, Inspectators!
In conjunction with our third standing-room-only panel at Gallifrey One, Siv-Art Productions is proud to announce that the web series that’s been praised by MTV, Entertainment Weekly, Nerdist, the AV Club and the Huffington Post, as well as named “the best of TV on the web” by USA Today, has a brand-new guest star!
The Seventh Doctor himself, SYLVESTER MCCOY (“Doctor Who”, The Hobbit) is joining the guest cast that already includes Robert Picardo (The Doctor in “Star Trek: Voyager”, “Stargate: Atlantis”), Chase Masterson (“Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”), and Mayim Bialik (“Big Bang Theory”, “Blossom”). They’ll all be joining existing cast members Travis Richey (Inspector Spacetime on “Community”), Eric Loya, and Carrie Keranen.
Oh that crazy, zany Chicago literary elite, why are they always so…right?
by Wyl VillacresWriting sucks. Seriously. And not in the Dorothy Parker “I hate writing, I love having written” bullshit way, either. I mean, the act of putting words on paper is shitty, and she’s right in that regard, but the things that come after are just as bad. Because when you’re writing as your form of art, the second half of the writing process is even worse. Or at least for me it is.
I want to start off by saying that I’m not going to come around to some fantastic conclusion about why it’s important to preserver and how practice makes perfect or even-if-you-fail-you-still-need-to-do-it because 1. I don’t know you or your life so how could I give you advice? 2. I suck at this whole thing, so I don’t have the resume to back any advice I’d give, and 3. I don’t even have advice for myself. This isn’t a place to find answers, because in the end, all I have are questions. But writing, hacking away in my apartment or in the coffee shop, between jobs or at absurd hours, starts to get horrifyingly solitary, and I need to be in public.
This past week has been intense. Aside from a lot of people who were all HUGE inspirations passing away (RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman, Maggie Estep, Sid Caesar), after finishing shooting and starting editing the footage with the celeb on the TOP SECRET PROJECT, my producing partner got a call from an even bigger celeb whom we had been trying to reach for a while. We had originally made plans about a month or so ago with this guy and they fell through cause a lot came up for him. My producing partner knows him, he happened to call, ask about the project and guess what? He’s in.
Which means, we’re now dealing with his incredibly crammed schedule and squeezing in a shoot in two days. Which also means I had to drop what I was doing (once again, Season Two of the Lele Show gets slightly backburnered *sigh*) and write some custom sides for him (sides for non-tv/film people are script pages). My producing partner loved them. So did the celeb. Only caveat? He doesn’t have time to rehearse. And his plans have been known to change on a dime. On the bright side, he’s doing it for free cause he believes in it (and probably cause he realizes I’m broke!)
So, this is the plan. I’m bringing the sides, both in script form and blown up like cue cards, so he can read/memorize section by section at the shoot. Yes, at the shoot. Welp. Also, my producing partner suggested I bring about ten questions and let the celeb ad lib. He’s REALLY funny and my producing partner feels the celeb and I (in character) can ad lib/improv a scene. And we can splice it together/create something in post.