Reflections on the TV Summit

Well, we finally did it! From 2:30PM-6:30PM yesterday my friend and co-organizer, Noah Rosen, and I hosted a series of entertainment industry panels geared towards assistants who want to work in television and transition to writing full time. Per the previous posts, we had a panel with execs, a manager, and an agent —- “Navigating Your Writing Career” which I moderated. Next we had Noah’s panel, “Writers’ Room Support Staff” with script coordinators, writers’ assistants, and showrunner’s assistants. Finally, we had “Running the Show” aka the showrunner’s panel moderated by writer Julia Prescott.

I’ll be working on the recordings of the panels to share here and elsewhere. But in the meantime, I wanted to get my thoughts down fresh from the event. Things I learned… Showrunners have a total love-hate relationship with their job. There are so many challenges and difficulties and philosophical dilemmas (creatively driven) for them day in and day out. Our audience Q&A finally pulled out of them what they loved about their jobs, and once they got talking about it, it was like a whole new side of them opened up. Clearly they have thick personal shields and years of cynic-making experience though.

Nuggets of wisdom: (Courtney Kemp - Showrunner of Power) there are three things that come into play in this industry if you want to succeed, and you need at least two of them. First, great personality. Second, talent. Third, insane work ethic. If you have great work ethic and talent but a terrible personality, you will be successful enough that people will want to collaborate with you regardless. If you are a pleasure to work with and work extremely hard and reliably, but aren’t inherently a massively talented writer, they will want to help get you there, and so on.

From Henry Luehrmann, a drama executive at Amazon, he said at every meeting RE: a submitted project, they ask a certain set of questions. Why this story? Why are you the best writer for this story? And is this the best time in your career as a writer to tell this story?

From the writers’ room support staff: be bold. Find creative ways to get jobs. Then, find bold ways to pitch your stuff to the writers, and if the showrunner doesn’t want to hear your pitch - wait till he or she is out of the room and make it known to the writers that you want to help them. And make it known that you’re always writing. This was totally supported by the showrunners panel too. Also, always be asking questions — good creative questions that make you a better writer and make it clear that you are eager.

Personal lessons, it’s fun to moderate! Moderate every panel that you can. Also, the universe works in mysterious ways. We originally had three showrunners lined up, when it turned out that Courtney Kemp was working in her office across the street and heard about the panel from a showrunner buddy, Kelly Souders, (and also that her writers’ assistant Charles was participating on a previous panel) - and she straight up volunteered to join the panel 5 minutes before. And to be honest, she became the soul of the panel. She clearly cares a lot about mentorship and helping those below her to break in. More boring personal lessons: give yourself more time for clean-up, more volunteers is better than less volunteers, always have snacks for security and building managers the day-of as a thank you, an hour is the perfect max length for a panel (especially with a 10 min audience Q&A included after 50 minutes of conversation).

More to come soon!

A Hilarious Scam

I am relaying here a very silly experience I had today. The context: a long time ago I posted my resume to Mandy.com which supposedly helps connect production staff to jobs. Maybe it does? It certainly never helped me in any capacity. Until today, when it helped facilitate some entertainment in my life.

At around 7:00AM I received a text that, in mildly broken English, told me I am being considered for an opportunity to work on a project for Sir Alan Parker. You know, Alan Parker! Evita, Midnight Express, the list goes on - and you know, he’s been officially retired for over a decade. What’s more, they’d need me on set throughout the production and are willing to pay $1500 a day. Wow, good rates.

After a quick Google search, I found that apparently this is a rampant (and strange) scam on Mandy. They’ve apparently co-opted the names of tons of retired but living filmmakers for it. The idea being, you email them and get into a dialogue - and then it devolves into the usual crap. They send you a check, get your information, ask you to purchase something for them. By the time it’s done, the check has bounced, etc. etc. But I just find it so hilarious that this has become a niche scam. It’s as if they know how desperate people are to work in the industry that they’ll succumb to any modicum of hope that this is a real thing. What’s more, it kind of makes sense because there are no totally usual pathways in this industry. Weird people behave weirdly but then make great films. So, I guess it makes sense that someone might fall for this. Anyways, beware. And, have a good laugh.

TV Summit

Today is unfortunately not going to be a super creatively focused day. Lots of errands, reading a friend’s script, and mostly preparing for the TV Summit we have going on Saturday afternoon. I will say, just by way of reflection, that it seems every “fire” that threatens an event comes up in the week leading up to it! Insurance questions, badly timed fire alarm schedules, people trying to get in without having purchased tickets, panelists dropping out, etc. etc. I’ve learned a lot in the process of organizing these panels, and will probably learn twice as much during the day-of. But I’m still really excited. And at the end of the day, every person I talk to who is attending this event is thankful and excited too, and that’s all I could ask for. Will be excited to post the recordings here afterwards!

Reflections on Series Documents

A couple production companies recently expressed some interest to me in regard to a pilot I wrote. They liked it, but didn’t get a strong enough sense of where the series goes (or how continuing seasons might unfold). So, they asked for a series document - if I had one. Well, I just finished writing it! It’s the first one I’ve written in a while — not since I put together a doc for my sample pilot Harpoon (this is a link to the series document, the pilot can be found in the TV sample section of this website).

To me, a series document should feel like a mix of pitch doc, series outline, and general passionate diatribe of the writer about his or her show. Interestingly, my doc for this new pilot ended up requiring a much longer series doc (a whopping 18 pages, much longer than Harpoon’s). The most important part, I gather, is the episode beats - which confirm to the executives that you actually know how you want the show to unfold. Now, I’ve seen a ton of series docs or bibles or whatever you want to call them - and many of them don’t have these episode beats. My general feeling is maybe I’ll get to a point one day in my career where, as part of the pitch process, I won’t need episode beats — they’ll just try that I have the story-telling chops and get a general sense of where the show goes otherwise. For now, it actually serves as a really interesting exercise. If in some absurd dream scenario, this show were to get made — well, what comes out on the other end would look nothing like the episode beats I just put down. I can say that confidently, having now seen two series documents and then worked on the actual shows that followed. So really, it’s just an audition.

But for me, as long as someone is taking the time to read your series document - to dive headlong into the world of your show, your dream version of the world of your show - you should pour all your passion into it and make it apparent. So, I include histories, setting description, character arcs, backstories of the characters, etc. etc. One day maybe I’ll be able to share this new one and you can compare and contrast! I certainly will do that to try and understand why they turned out so differently from one another.

The Rudderless West

Sharing a striking and well-written NYT op-ed on the state of Western politics in the world today.

“The West is now rudderless. To be rudderless puts you at the mercy of elements. The elemental forces of politics today are tribalism, populism, authoritarianism and the sewage pipes of social media. Each contradicts the West’s foundational commitments to universalism, representation, unalienable rights, and an epistemology built on fact and reason, not clicks and feelings. We are drifting, in the absence of mind and will, toward a moment of civilizational self-negation. …

Why worry about the health and fate of liberal democracy when its triumph was inevitable and irreversible? Why teach the benefits of free markets and immigration — or the dangers of socialism and nativism — when history had already rendered a verdict?

And why do the tedious work of preserving the foundations of free government when it is so much more interesting to reinvent it?

Complacency breeds heedlessness. Liberals were heedless when they wrote off moral character as an essential trait of a good presidency. Conservatives (like me) were heedless when we became more concerned about the state of democracy in Iraq than in Iowa. Liberals were heedless when they embraced identity politics without ever thinking it could also be used against them. Conservatives (again, like me) were heedless when we downplayed the significance of the populism and scaremongering infecting the movement via talk radio and Fox News.”

Writing Process

Today I sit down speed write a series document for a slightly old pilot, as fast as humanly possible. Amidst this situation, I’ve realized something about my process. It feels like there are some subconscious mental mechanics at work here. Namely, that when I have all the abilities, inspiration, and knowledge beneath the surface - almost ready to be deployed and just write the damn thing - there is a hold-up. I guess that hold-up is anxiety or something akin to one form of writer’s block. More specifically, it is a block that is taking up energy to sustain. So I end up, inadvertently - as I try to write this thing, finding ways to tire out my neuroses to the point where my block is worn down (but hopefully leaving myself with still enough time and energy to get to the task at hand). I do things like: write this post (it’s still writing, and it’s vaguely therapeutic), or read the news (that’s mostly just tiring), or I focus on other industry-related tasks that aren’t quite as creatively demanding - or it’s just watching a TV show or film. These things are seem to divert my energies in one way or another, and allow me to begin to focus on - in this case - the series document. Sometimes there is a beautiful serendipitous sort of day where you wake up early, are just tired enough to not have started the anxiety-train, and can dive right into the work uninterrupted. I think my career as a writer will depend on training myself to have that clear-eyed mindset every day I go to work. I imagine it’s mostly practice that will get me there. Practice, and external validation from the people who (ideally) pay me :)

Beauty in Nature

I’m taking a writing break to explore a NYT Magazine article that caught my eye - can read it here. And as part of the deep-dive, I ended up finding this magnificent video of the Bowerbird dance. I felt compelled to share it here. The dance (and the pupil-manipulation) is spellbinding.

Here’s a quote that delves into the core of the article: “According to this theory, ornaments evolved as indicators of a potential mate’s advantageous qualities: its overall health, intelligence and survival skills, plus the fact that it will pass down the genes underlying these traits to its children. A bowerbird with especially bright plumage might have a robust immune system, for example, while one that finds rare and distinctive trinkets might be a superb forager. Beauty, therefore, would not confound natural selection — it would be very much a part of it.

… Now, nearly 150 years later, a new generation of biologists is reviving Darwin’s neglected brainchild. Beauty, they say, does not have to be a proxy for health or advantageous genes. Sometimes beauty is the glorious but meaningless flowering of arbitrary preference. Animals simply find certain features — a blush of red, a feathered flourish — to be appealing. And that innate sense of beauty itself can become an engine of evolution, pushing animals toward aesthetic extremes. In other cases, certain environmental or physiological constraints steer an animal toward an aesthetic preference that has nothing to do with survival whatsoever.

… There are really two environments governing the evolution of sentient creatures: an external one, which they inhabit, and an internal one, which they construct. To solve the enigma of beauty, to fully understand evolution, we must uncover the hidden links between those two worlds.

…Unlike natural selection, which preserved traits that were useful “in the struggle for life,” Darwin saw sexual selection as exclusively concerned with reproductive success, often resulting in features that jeopardized an animal’s well-being. The peacock’s many-eyed aureole, mesmerizing yet cumbersome, was a prime example and remains the mascot of sexual selection today. “A great number of male animals,” Darwin wrote, “as all our most gorgeous birds, some fishes, reptiles and mammals, and a host of magnificently colored butterflies have been rendered beautiful for beauty’s sake.

…Prum thinks the evidence for the heritable benefits of choosing a beautiful mate is scant because such benefits are themselves rare, whereas arbitrary beauty is “nearly ubiquitous.” Over the years, the more he contemplated runaway selection, the more convinced he became that it was a far more powerful and creative evolutionary force than natural selection, which he regards as overhyped and boring. “Animals are agents in their own evolution,” he told me during one conversation. “Birds are beautiful because they are beautiful to themselves. … Some of the evolutionary consequences of sexual desire and choice in nature are not adaptive,” Prum writes in his recent book. “Some outcomes are truly decadent.

SUMMARY: The environment constrains a creature’s anatomy, which determines how it experiences the world, which generates adaptive and arbitrary preferences, which loop back to alter its biology, sometimes in maladaptive ways. Beauty reveals that evolution is neither an iterative chiseling of living organisms by a domineering landscape nor a frenzied collision of chance events. Rather, evolution is an intricate clockwork of physics, biology and perception in which every moving part influences another in both subtle and profound ways. Its gears are so innumerable and dynamic — so susceptible to serendipity and mishap — that even a single outcome of its ceaseless ticking can confound science for centuries. “

Overall, the in-depth article seems to illustrate the battle between two philosophies: one that says beauty functions as an extension of natural selection (the beautiful creature having spent extra energy and risked its life for beauty - thus proving its resilience) — while the other philosophy says that beauty exists purely for beauty’s sake, it is entirely unto itself and affects natural selection in a myriad of ways, or not at all. The writer concludes that beauty is too complex in nature to be able to understand, for now.