My friend Javier Grillo-Marxuach, supervising producer of LOST, has a wonderful, brutally honest post on his blog about his experience writing and producing pilots. The post is nearly a year old, but the wisdom and bite of his story hasn’t dimmed.
so anyway – pilots. the one question i hear most is “i have a great
idea for a pilot, what do I have to do to get it see/produced/on the
air?”the stock answer to this is “move to los angeles and spend
ten years making a name for yourself as a television producer with an
established track record that will make a studio and network believe
that they should trust you with forty-four million dollars of their
money to produce twenty-two hours of television.”however,
things have changed in television, and now it is easier than ever to
get a pilot on the air without establishing a track record as a
producer……and I say that in the same way one might say “now
it’s easier than ever to put an orbital mind-control laser in a
geosynchronous orbit over your mother-in-law.”
You’ve got to read the rest. It will make you weep.
Love Javier’s post.
Question: Is there anyway of getting a cheatsheet to translate his roman-a-clef’isms?
I got lost somewhere around “lunar justice” and “frodis”