Television

This is Why Ken Levine Wins Emmys

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Ken Levine's blog post today isn't just a brilliant satire of Aaron Sorkin's distinct style…it's also great writing. I loved it. Here's a taste:

EXT. KAUFFMAN STADIUM — NIGHT

THE MANAGER, LEO, TROTS OUT TO THE MOUND TO TALK TO BELEAGURED PITCHER, DANNY (THERE’S ALWAYS A DANNY). THE BASES ARE LOADED. THE CROWD IS GOING NUTS. IT’S GAME SEVEN OF THE WORLD SERIES.

LEO

You can’t get a good lobster in this town.

DANNY

Last I checked we were in Kansas City.

LEO

4.6 billion pork ribs sold every year and 18.9 tons of beef consumed annually since 1997 –

DANNY

They like their beef, what can I tell ya?

LEO

But you’d think just for variety’s sake.

DANNY

I can still throw my curve.

LEO

For strikes?

DANNY

I’m not throwing enough?

LEO

I’ve seen more lobsters.

DANNY WALKS TO THE ROSIN SACK, GIVES IT A SQUEEZE, DECIDES TO KEEP WALKING. HE AND LEO NOW WALK OUT INTO CENTER FIELD.

DANNY

It’s just that…
LEO

What? Kathy?

DANNY

No. Cabs. There’s no cohesiveness on this team. After road games, 25 cabs for 25 players. There used to be a thing called “the greater good”, forgoing your needs for the betterment of the team and community who looks to us for their identity and self worth. When I’m trying to save a game I’m really trying to save a factory. If baseball is a metaphor for life, then responsibility is its first cousin simile. And Kathy.

LEO

That’s a “1” on your back and not a “2”.

DANNY

I can’t help it. She knocks my sanitary socks off.

“Before I was a TV writer, I was a street poet…”

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Screenwriter, novelist, and teacher William Rabkin reveals the method to his madness, and gives some good career advice to aspiring screenwriters, in an interview at Write On today. Here's an excerpt:

How important is diversification for a writer?

I’m a big advocate of diversification. Right now, all our markets are shrinking—not a great problem if you’re, say, the showrunner of Desperate Housewives. But for the rest of us, we’re watching TV staffs shrinking, original screenplay sales diving, publishing in serious trouble. We can’t know where the next opportunity is going to come from—so it’s best to make yourself available for as many opportunities as possible.

How can a writer best get his or her work noticed?

Write really well. Oh, and if you can show up in a sex tape with a celebrity, that would help, too.

A TV Truism

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Canadian TV writer Denis McGrath posted on his blog a simple TV truism that is nonetheless often taken for granted in this business:

The process of making a Friday Night Lights, or The Wire, or The Shield, is exactly the same process that results in Being Erica. It’s just as much work to conceive of, break story for, and execute a little confection like Ugly Betty or Reaper or Cupid as it is to make The West Wing.

No matter what the show is, whether it’s winning Emmys or going unnoticed, it still boils down to a showrunner and a bunch of writers in a room, breaking stories that can be told in four acts and shot in X number of days for X amount of money.

Diane Dives Into More Mind Games

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I was delighted to see in the trades today that Bruce Evans (MR. BROOKS) will direct DIVER, a thriller written by my friend Diane Ademu-John, with whom I worked on the TV series MISSING. The script is about an ex-cop who enters the minds of dead people to read their final thoughts and use them to solve crimes. Diane is no stranger to these kinds of mind games — after MISSING, about an FBI agent who has visions of missing persons, she went straight into several seasons on MEDIUM.

Congratulations Diane!

Hat in Hand

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The most interesting thing about Ken Follett's THE PILLARS OF EARTH mini-series isn't the international cast (Ian McShane, Donald Sutherland, Rufus Sewell etc) or it's location shoot in Hungary and Austria — it's the complex financing that had to be put together to get the German/Canadian coproduction made. As the press release notes:

TANDEM COMMUNICATIONS and Muse Entertainment's broadcast and home video partners on The Pillars of the Earth are ProSiebenSat1's German FreeTV Group, Canada's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Movie Network and Movie Central, Spain's Socable, Austria's ORF, Germany's Universum Film Home Entertainment, Hungary's TV2 and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment – to name a few. In addition, the financial entities involved were gap financier FIDEC, Germany's DZ Bank and The National Bank of Canada. Legal counsel for the project was Mathias Schwarz in Germany, Cari Davine in Canada, Randolph M. Paul in the USA and Monika Horvath in Hungary.

Did you notice that it says that those are just a few of the financial partners? And did you see that the deal-making itself is  such a big part of the production, that the producers feel obligated to thank their lawyers in the press release? Incredible. 

The folks at Tandem obviously had to go, hat in hand, all over the world to get the money for this. Even more surprising is that the mini-series doesn't even have a U.S. or U.K. broadcast yet. This illustrates just how difficult it is to raise financing for TV productions these days…and how global the business has become. Tandem's managing director Rola Bauer says in the press release:

"The fact that we have been able to raise the production financing in these economically challenging times is testimony to the enduring strength of fictional television Event programming […] and could not have been achieved without our international networks as well as our financial and production partners."

Scott Free TV president David Zucker told the Hollywood Reporter that putting together such a complex deal and going into production without a U.S. broadcaster is  "the new world order."

"Yes, there is more risk at the top, but there's more latitude on the creative side. It's not dissimilar to the indie film biz in this respect. Given how difficult the economy became here, we decided to plow ahead and get funding and casting done before trying to do a licensing deal in the States."

Zucker said there was "a lot of interest" among yank broadcasters, cablers and pay cablers but did not specify how close to a deal the producers were.

For what it's worth, the last big mini-series that Munich-based Tandem put together, LOST CITY RAIDERS, ended up on SciFi. 

Living on TV’s Death Row

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Writer Josh Friedman, the showrunner of TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONCILES, blogs about his final days on the series…and what it's like to be cancelled. 

Everyone says having your show cancelled is like a death but I've been dead before and at least when you're dead you don't get thrown off the Warner Bros. lot for haunting your old parking space. They probably mean it's like the death of a friend or a family member but that shit only hurts when it's YOUR friend or family member and even then it's mitigated by age, lifestyle and whether that person was a Hollywood friend or a real one and whether that family member left you money.

Losing your show is more like a surprise divorce where you get served papers in the morning and your (ex)wife is fucking Human Target by three in the afternoon using the same time slot your child was conceived in and also where she did that one thing that one time on your birthday.

People say the bright side to losing your show is gaining time to spend with your family but I'm pretty sure that waking up next to your ex-showrunner spouse whom you haven't seen for two and a half years is pretty close to waking up next to that special someone you met the night before at Carlos n' Charlie's in Cancun on Spring Break.

His lengthy post is very funny, bitter, and oh-so-true. I've been in his position, feeling many of the same things that he did, more times than I care to remember…and it never gets any easier or less uncomfortable. 

Check Twitter Before Meetings

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Twitter-logo Last Tuesday, I had a meeting with a showrunner about filling an open writer/producer position on his new series. I learned yesterday, a week later, that he was going with somebody else. That's no big deal, it happens all the time. But here's the twist… it turns out that an hour before my meeting last week, the showrunner tweeted that he'd just made an offer to a guy I'll call "Producer X" and that he was "crossing his fingers" that the offer would be accepted. So when I had my meeting, the showrunner had already decided to go with someone else…and had announced it to the world…but not to me. He was seeing me as, at best, a back-up in the case the other guy passed…which would be fine, if he hadn't already announced publicly that he really wanted somebody else.

But wait, there's more. Last Wednesday morning, the day after our meeting, the showrunner tweeted that he'd just hired Producer X.  But he didn't get around to telling my agent it was a pass until yesterday…a full week later. He couldn't wait to tell the world his decision…but blew off my agent for a week.

The moral of this story? I'll be checking Twitter before and especially after my meetings…and so will my agent. 

Deep Dudu

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Let's hope frustrated U.S. writers, producers and actors don't follow Israeli TV star Dudu Topaz's example when it comes to dealing with rejection and bad reviews. The LA Times reports that the once top-rated TV host hired thugs to beat up two network execs who rejected his pitches for new shows and an agent who gave up on his comeback bid.

Topaz is accused of hiring three former security guards involved in the beatings over the last seven months of Shira Margalit, a vice president at Israel's Channel 2 TV; Avi Nir, a Channel 2 director; and talent agent Boaz Ben-Zion in Tel Aviv. Margalit, the most recent victim, was hospitalized a few days last month with a broken nose and fractured bones in her face.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the four suspects, all in custody, were identified through telephone wiretaps, witness testimony and surveillance video.

At least two other media executives were on the entertainer's hit list, police said: a newspaper editor who had turned down his offer to write a regular column and a Channel 2 producer who once worked with Topaz and now produces the unscripted show "Big Brother.[…]He once attacked a TV critic for a scathing review and broke his glasses, famously declaring, "He doesn't understand what he sees anyway."

Seven Weeks

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UK-based Writer/producer Stephen Gallagher takes you step-by-step through the seven weeks between the initial conception of an ELEVENTH HOUR episode idea and the start of filming. His experience is typical of American episodic television production…and very, very different from the way things are done in the UK…where the same process can take months, if not longer.

Here’s the nub of it. It looks fast and scary. But for the writer, the actual amount of work in turning out an hour-long script for American TV barely differs from that involved in creating script for a UK hour. The difference is that the US system edits out the soul-destroying longueurs between stages, while your script sits on someone’s desk or some executive disappears on holiday. It’s the same act of writing, but you get to do it in real time; and because of that, you don’t run the risk of anyone – you included – falling out of love with what you’re doing.