Month: October 2005

Take Me To The Pilot

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Paul Guyot talks about why he never leaves behind a "leave behind" when pitching a pilot. I’ve heard both sides of the argument.

LEAVE THEM NOTHING. No treatment, no "Leave behind." I firmly
believe that you greatly reduce your chances of a sale when you leave
them something that they can pick apart and overanalyze.

The idea of leaving them with something is archaic.  That was the
way things were twenty years ago, but not now. And the reason so many
[Aspring Writers] think they should do this is because they’re reading books and
taking classes from writers who haven’t worked in TV in ten or twenty
years. 

Frankly, I’ve always left a leave-behind. I guess that makes me a dinosaur — or it explains why I haven’t sold a pilot yet this season. I’ve got another pitch coming up, maybe I’ll try it Paul’s way this time…

Giving the Self-Published Some Hope

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It’s stories like this from BookStandard.com that give self-published authors the motivation to keep writing those checks:

Touchstone Fireside, a division of Simon & Schuster, has
paid a six-figure sum for the publishing rights to Pamela Aidan’s Jane
Austen–inspired trilogy “Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman.” The first two books,
An Assembly Such as This and Duty and Desire, have sold some
40,000 copies through Aidan’s website—initially in digital form and then as
print-on-demand titles—according to Amanda Patten, a senior editor at
Touchstone, who acquired the book from Lloyd Jassin, of the law firm The Jassin
Office. (The third title in the trilogy, These Three Remain, is available
this month, according to the website Austenesque.)

“The idea is to hit an audience outside of this world of Jane Austen fans, who
discovered Pamela through a ring of Austen websites,” said Patten, who added
that the strength of the books’ print-on-demand sales made the deal especially
attractive.

This is the one-in-a-million success story that drives the unrealistic hopes of most self-published POD  authors.  Those aspiring authors miss this important fact: Aiden didn’t attract a publisher until she’d sold 40,000 copies of her book, well over 100 times  more copies than most self-published titles will ever sell. And even with those sales, she still opted to go with a traditional publishing house rather than continue her POD self-publishing efforts. Why? For the money, ofcourse, as well as the wider distribution, publicity, and brick-and-mortar sales a traditional publisher offers.

For all the talk about the "advantages"  of self-publishing from vanity press novelists, the fact remains, not matter how much they say otherwise,  that attracting a  traditional publisher is still their ultimate goal.

What Sunk SeaQuest?

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Seaquest2032_a_1Media critic Herbie J. Pilato, author of books about the TV series KUNG FU and BEWITCHED,  does a very good job dissecting what went wrong with SEAQUEST. In short, just about everything:

The changes were manic. Too much to swallow. SeaQuest suffocated in a sea of too
many ideas. Too many DeLouises from one Dom. It reached for whatever might keep
it above water. It’s like someone unplugged the cork at the center of the sub.
It sunk. No one paid attention to the simplest, yet most essential answer: they
should have bailed out, as soon as possible.

"SeaQuest will not be remembered as a television classic," Goldberg concludes
" It will be
remembered technically as a ground-breaking show for computer animation, and
creatively as a hugely expensive mistake."

Flashbacks

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I got this email today:

Hello. How do you show flashbacks/dreams in teleplays – and transition out of?
I’m specifically referring to "Cold Case" – a show that’s full of scenes where
the characters relive stories from the past. Thank you very much.

I haven’t seen a COLD CASE script, so I don’t know how they do it, but there are many different ways. Here’s one approach:

EXT. HOUSE – DAY

Mark stood in front of the ramschakle house, the windows broken, the lawn choked with weeds. And as we PUSH IN on Mark’s eyes, we CUT TO:

EXT. HOUSE – DAY (FLASHBACK)

as it looked on the day he moved in, fresh paint, manicured lawn, flowers in bloom. The colors are so outrageously vivid, it’s a tough call whether what we’re seeing is the way it really was, or the past as romanticized in Mark’s mind. We END THE FLASHBACK and GO:

EXT. HOUSE – BACK TO SCENE

Mark shakes himself out of his reverie and goes inside the abandoned home.

Another Bond Movie

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Variety reports that Warner Brothers is making another Bond movie…only this one will be about 007 creator Ian Fleming.

"Fleming," meanwhile, tells the story of how the author’s own experiences
with womanizing and spying shaped his signature secret agent creation.

Born into a privileged English family, Fleming began as a comparative
underachiever until a stint as a journalist covering the Soviet Union led him to
begin spying on that country for the Foreign Office. Fleming was the mastermind
of numerous clever spying schemes, some deemed too outlandish to use. He dreamed
of becoming a daring secret agent and adapted his own womanizing feats and the
stories he heard to craft the Bond novels.

Daniel Craig is Bond?

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The London Evening Standard is reporting that Daniel Craig has been picked to be the new James Bond.  This is not the first time this has been prematurely announced — and subsequently denied — by the Bond producers. But I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s been widely reported over the last few months that Craig has been one of the three or four top contenders for the license to kill for some time now. Variety reports that a decision will be announced this week.

Becoming a TV Writer

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Paul Guyot has an excellent post today about becoming a TV writer and what it takes to stay in the game. Here’s a taste from his very long, very informative post:

Starting out you must have skin like a Rhino. You could get lucky and land on
a show with a very smart, very secure showrunner like I did – one who encouraged
the writer’s original voice, one who liked to teach, one who wanted to get as
much of the writer’s words into the show.

Or you could land where I’ve also been – on a show where you’re seen as a
threat, an outsider, someone who hasn’t proved themselves – and in their eyes
that means someone who didn’t go through the same shit they went through. It can
be like fraternity hell week… only lasting a whole season. You can be writing
your ass off, knowing you’re doing good work – better than others – and still
have your work slammed. Still be completely rewritten. To the point where, when
the show airs, you’re almost embarrassed to have your name on it. Not because
it’s so awful, but because there’s not a single word of yours left.

But you shut up and take it. You do your job.

My friend Paul moans all the time about shutting down his blog, but it’s because of fantastic essays about the biz like this one that I hope he never does. Keep’em coming, Paul!

 

WhyDo So Many Movies Suck Lately?

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…Jim Warren had lunch with a couple of film-makers and left with the answer:

How can these guys expect to make great movies if they’re basically unfamiliar
with what has come before? And it’s not really their fault, either; they’re both
bright and talented young men. They’re victims of a society that does not reward
substance. We’re immersed in a culture that puts a premium on novelty rather
than on creativity, one that places a higher value on the breadth of trivia than
it does on the depth of knowledge, one that prefers spectacle over vision, and
videogame hand-eye coordination over book-perusing eye-brain comprehension.

Looking for the Short Cut

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I got this email today:

Hello Lee,
               My name is Mark Coulter, pen name M.W.C. Coulter. I recently
wrote a book and got it published through "Publish America". I have been on one
book signing and have two others upcoming. The book is called "The Folding of
Time", about two astronauts on a first deep space mission, they encounter an
anomaly, wormhole, that takes them on a journey through time and alternate
universes.I would like some advice of how to contact studios’ on making this into a
series or movie. Can you give me some advice on how to do this?
                                                        Sincerely
Mark.

First off, you never should have gone to PublishAmerica. You were looking for a short cut and this one leads to a dead end as you’ve undoubtedly discovered. You could contact various studios and production companies, ask for the names and addresses of their development executives, and send them your book.  Ordinarily, you’d have a one-in-a-million shot of selling the movie or TV rights. But since it’s a self-published, POD book, your odds against  interesting any studio in it have probably become one-in-a-billion.  I don’t know if your book is good or bad, but unfortunately, no one in Hollywood is going to take PublishAmerica title (or any vanity press publication)  seriously. 

On the other hand, if you can sell 10,000 copies, get some great reviews from respected publications, and get a bunch of newspapers and magazines to write profiles about you, that could change. That’s what happened with ERAGON... and the movie is in production now (of course, ERAGON wasn’t a PublishAmerca, iUniverse, or xlibris POD title, either).

UPDATE (10-12-05): I got this reply. My reply follows.

Well how about if I write another manuscript, on a movie idea not associated with the
book, and send it in raw and unpublished? Would I stand a better chance of
getting a read?

Nope.  Studios buy hot novels (ie bestselling and well reviewed) and
they buy scripts. They buy pitches, but only from established screenwriters
which, I assume, you are not. So, if I were you, I’d write a script. Even then,
though, you need an agent to submit it to the studios on your behalf.  They certainly aren’t going to read a raw, unpublished manuscript from an unknown writer…at least not without a powerful agent, producer, director or actor attached to it.