The Sincerest Form?

Sometimes I wonder…

Television executives, whoever and whatever they are, keep throwing new series at us.  Something worked once, so they change it slightly, and put it up again.  Cop shows are popular?  See ten or twenty copies come up.  Doctor shows?  All TV is falling sick with exotic diseases.  Private eyes?  You’d think half the population had a license.

And the sad thing?  This is not new.  Sketch comedy shows were big from the late 40’s through the 70’s, with Your Show of Shows, Texaco Star Theater with Milton Berle, The Jack Benny Program, carrying over from radio, Burns and Allen, Garry Moore, Red Skelton, and Carol Burnett… Westerns, once a staple of Saturday matinees in movie theaters, dominated early TV, with shows like Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Wagon Train, Wanted: Dead or Alive, The Rebel, Branded, Rawhide, Bonanza, High Chapparal, The Big Valley, and so many more.  Dragnet, another transplant from radio, led the police parade starting in the 1950’s, along with other shows like The Naked City, M Squad, Burke’s Law, and their private eye kin like Hawaiian Eye, Surfside Six, 77 Sunset Strip, and Checkmate,ringing the changes.

For every show I’ve mentioned above, I’m sure there are probably six or seven I’ve missed.

As I said earlier, imitation is a way of life in television… network executives want it “the same, but different“.  Series are sold, premiered, and, if they don’t get traction with an audience immediately, cancelled.  A series getting picked up for a full season’s worth of shows these days is news because of the infrequency of its occurrence.  The trade papers are full of stories of a series getting “the ax” after three episodes aired… and one was even cancelled before its first episode premiered.

Market research, focus groups, “target demographics”, the “Q” rating (a measurement of a performer’s “likeability”), and other quantifications are attempting to objectify the highly subjective field of audience taste.  These methods have been moderately successful, at best, mostly in providing the broadcast and cable networks with a means to set their advertising rates.  The highly coveted “18 to 49 male” demographic, supposedly the group that spends the most money, is the group at which most of the programming is aimed.  (No surprise.)  So, there are action-filled shows, adventure, sports, scantily clad women, and things on the order of “X-Games”, “Wipe-Out”, and “American Ninja Warrior”.

Since research is now showing that females are becoming more of a desirable audience, based on “purchasing power”, we have shows like “The Real Housewives of Wherever”, “The Bachelor/Bachelorette”, and nighttime soap operas which show both men and women in various stages of undress.  This, too, is not new; witness the 70’s and 80’s phenomena of Dallas, Dynasty, and Falcon Crest.  Today it’s Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, Revenge, or True Blood.

This fractionating of the audience because of the proliferation of “new media” has also been going on since the beginning of our perceptions of media… The “legitimate theatre” begat vaudeville, which spun off burlesque… Movies arrived, silent at first, then gaining a voice and raiding theater, vaudeville, and burlesque for talent, as did its main competition, radio.  When television came into view in the 1940’s, the movies, reacting to losing some of their audience, came out with big gimmicks like stereophonic sound, Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision, Techniscope, Technirama, Todd-AO, and other forms of wide-screen panorama projection… Sensurround, Dolby Stereo, THX from Lucasfilm, 5.1 and 7.1 stereo systems, and so much more became the buzzwords buzzing in our heads.

And all of this in the service of putting YOUR entertainment dollars into THEIR pockets.

And what are the net results of all this maneuvering, jockeying for position, and technical innovation?

I think one song sums it up… “500 Channels and Nothing’s On”.  In my opinion, there is precious little worth anyone’s time out there… and even with the growing trend of “rolling your own” with the now-ubiquitous portable video recording and editing equipment, which also started back at the beginning of movies with home cameras and projectors, is not a guarantee of anything worth watching.  (Think about it… the most popular things to see on the Internet are cat videos and pornography.)  The taste of audiences is a fickle thing; rapidly shifting, difficult to pin down.

It always was.

So, I still wonder…

The Oscars Are Coming! The Oscars Are Coming!

On Sunday evening, at about 4:00 PM Pacific Standard Time, which is about 7:00 PM here in Detroit, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present the 85th Academy Awards® at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood.
Back in the mists of time, when I was just a youngster, the show was the ultimate in what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to be one day. Now, after several decades, and roadblocks galore, I find myself no closer to that goal than I ever was.
The only thing in my way now is myself; I have learned the technical tricks to get a film made, and some of the ways to promote it so it’s seen. I have the tools, I (supposedly) have the talent, but it remains to be seen if I have the WILL.
Could I win an Oscar®? Sure. Anything can happen; events have proven this over the years.
Will I? That will depend entirely on whether or not I can get the motivation together to get out and DO something.
To DO… or not to do…
THAT is the problem.
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More later…

Is It Just Me?

This being Sunday, our normal routine is to read the paper, watch our favorite Sunday morning program (CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood), eat a leisurely breakfast, get the trash out of the house for Monday collection, and generally ruminate about the week gone by, and the plan for the week to come.

(Such plans, as you may have guessed, rarely survive first contact with reality.  Such is the way things go…)

Yesterday, we were one of a group of vendors at a comic, toy, and collectibles show not that far from us.  The sales were lackluster, but we made good contacts and had interesting conversations with people, and that makes up for quite a bit.  We all agreed that the events in Aurora on Friday cast us (as people “out of the mainstream”) in a bad light.

We wear costumes.  For the most part, we’re not interested in “real” things, like sports, cars, and girls/boys.  We aim for Man to reach the Moon once more, to move on to Mars, and perhaps then, to the stars themselves.

And they laugh at us, call us “geeks”, “nerds”, “losers”, and the like.  The mainstreamers, the “norms”, as My Beautiful Wife called them, hold someone who can throw or catch or hit a ball in higher esteem than most politicians.

Is it just me, or is the priority system of society bass-ackwards from how it should be? The intelligent, the imaginative, the ones who will, more often than not, formulate, or develop, or write the code for, or design what our future will look like, more than likely be the ones who were ostracized or laughed at as a “geek”, a “nerd”, a “loser”, or a “misfit”.  The jocks, or their toadies, the “jock-sniffers”, will quite often be the frustrated, helpless-feeling middle managers, mired in the muck of corporate life, hating where they are, but unable or unwilling to  strike out on their own to try something they want to do.

I feel sad, and angry, and helpless, and wanting to do something… anything… to bring this madness to an end.  I want to make someone see as I see… feel as I feel… so they can know at least a small part of what I know.

Words can be so inadequate… and moving pictures, the same.  But, absent telepathy, we have no better ways to do it.

So we just keep on muddling through…

If It Ain’t On The Page…

My screenwriting class this term is more along the lines of the organic development of story, rather than the mechanical following of invariant paradigms.  This is a good thing, since story develops from character, and character is formed by the actions of the story.

Circular reasoning?  You might consider it so, but no less an authority than Henry James codified it.  “What is character,” he observed, “but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”

When you write a character, you end up knowing her or him better than your spouse, better than your kids, possibly even better than you know yourself.  You must be psychologist, anthropologist, sociologist, demographer, accurate recorder of events, able to extrapolate human behavior (or, at least, depictions of human behavior) from inadequate information, to intuit surprises from information that leads a dispassionate observer to expect a totally different outcome.

It’s not an easy job.

Also important is the realization that writing a screenplay is a severely limited form.  There are only two things you can use  in order to put the story on the screen, its ultimate home… what the audience sees, and what the audience hears.

That’s it.

When you do it wrong, you get some piece of dreck like Dude, Where’s My Car?  When you do it right, you get something like The Godfather.

A hard target to hit… but worth the attempt.  If it wasn’t worth it, nobody would do it if they didn’t have to.

“I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.”  Noted writer (on almost every subject in the Dewey Decimal System catalog) Isaac Asimov said this when asked why he wrote.  I am of the same opinion.

This is what I do.  This is who I am.