A former writers' assistant tells stories of horrible bosses

GQ editor-in-chief Jim Nelson has written a very entertaining article about his time as a writers' assistant during the late '80s and early 90s.  This is a position highly coveted by those looking to work in TV because being an assistant on a show is often a stepping stone to getting a script assignment and then graduating to staff writer and beyond.  A great many writers have come up the ranks this way, which is something you might remember from my interview with writer Liz Tigelaar.

(Attn: showrunners with shows coming back next season - I'm available!  I know you're out there. Let's grab a nosh at Canter's one of these days and I can convince you I'm the guy you can trust for all your typing and lunch order needs.)

Nelson worked for the kinds of boss we all hope to never serve.  He's forced to console his employers at the funeral for a pet, which sounds like an insanely awkward task even if his bosses weren't tyrants who thrived on making other people feel small.  At other times, when he doesn't read back a transcribed joke with the proper inflection, he's accused of "ruining" the joke.  All in all it sounds like working for them was a generally unpleasent and weird experience:


At first, I should confess, I quaffed their Kool-Aid. At my interview, they flat out informed me that they were “hilarious,” a cut above most clowns. “Not like these fucking idiots in Hollywood.” I laughed at their audacity. They laughed at my laughing—the whole interview was like a coke party. They told me they would storm Hollywood and, if I went along, I could sort of storm it, too. It sounded like a great idea, and also I was broke.

I suppose I thought they would help me fulfill my dream to become a writer. If nothing else, I would get a comedy apprenticeship and witness the process by which funny ideas become fully baked TV series. Sitting at my desk, I plot out my bright future. They'll get a sitcom on the air; once it's in production, I'll become the writer's assistant on the show, slay everyone with my jokes, and graduate to staff writer. (Even today, this is The Plan for many aspiring writers looking for their big break. As one writer's assistant on the hit series Modern Family told me, the job “is like the best grad school you could possibly have if you want to be a writer.”) I just need to be vigilant, write my own spec scripts on the side, then my bosses will read them and see that I can—

ENHHHHH! The Comedy Alarm. A call from L—. What does he want? I can see him motioning from across the hall to pick up the phone. His irony fills the receiver.

“Uh, Jim? I need a ham on rye.”

I scramble for a pen. “Sure…ham on rye.”

“And could you make that cold. Very, very cold.”

“Okay, cold.”

“And then, uh, one more thing. Could you…sit on that?”

Comedy! I hadn't recognized it when it finally arrived. It is moments like this when I begin to worry that maybe I've hitched my wagon to the wrong comedy asses.

“I'll get that sandwich for you” is all I say. Then I give him a slight chuckle, because I know that's what he wants. I have only been here a few months and already I know: My job is to serve them and, more important, to humor them. I am regularly summoned into their office to witness the sparks of their genius, to hear a few bits of schlocky humor that, for the well-being of my job, I had better find uproarious.

There are a lot of good stories in the article and I found it rather amusing that as Nelson drops the names of several shows, he assumes they're long forgotten.  Should I be concerned I actually have pretty vivid memories of The New Leave It To Beaver, the Ferris Bueller TV show, The Powers That Be and even 704 Hauser?

You can find the whole article here.

Why THE PURGE can teach you so much about what not to do

Some of you might remember that last year I took on THE PURGE in a post talking about how certain concepts require a higher suspension of disbelief than others. As much as we'd like to think that an audience will accept our premises and go with them (and to a certain degree, I think that's reasonable.)  In general, an audience (and yes, even the dreaded readers) will be rather forgiving of certain elements if they are necessary to set up the story.

But like I said last year, when the characters or the premise act counter to basic human nature that threatens the suspension of disbelief. This is particularly dangerous when the setting is recognizable and familiar to the audience. They know human nature and they have a pretty good idea what a normal person would do in a situation that feels like their daily life. But if you have a seemingly normal person in a setting that's almost normal except for one MAJOR difference - the audience might perceive phoniness in the conceit and that often leads to an outright rejection of it.

I cited the trailer of THE PURGE as an example of where the buy-in appeared too great.  The film is set a mere ten years in the future, where all of American society has set aside one night where all laws are suspended for 12 hours.  You name it, it's legal, including murder.  The film tries to convince us that this one night of total indulgence is enough to get all the bad impulses out for the rest of the year.  As a result, crime has plummeted.

At the time, I allowed for the fact that I was only basing this off of seeing the trailer and that it was possible that the movie itself made a more convincing case for this occurrence.  Here's what I said at the time:

"The hurdle for me is that I can't wrap my brain around a society that would say, "Hey, for one night a year, anything goes! Murder, rape, robbery... and then come sun-up, we're all cool with it." I reject the idea that a functional society would even attempt such a thing.

"And then, to put forth the notion that somehow this one night of blood lust apparently gets all of this out of everyone's systems so much that the rest of the year is a utopia? It's hard to imagine human nature working that way. So I don't buy that people would be on board for this, and even if I did, I don't buy that it would work."

Well, I finally watched the movie last week and I have to say that there was nothing else in the film that nullified these issues.  I could probably spend 10,000 just tearing apart the foundation of the premise, but I don't want to waste all that time because I can't see anyone trying to mount an intelligent defense of this hook.

Part of the problem is that this world looks too much like our own world. It's not far enough removed where we accept that the mores of the time will have changed that much.  If I was writing this I'd have pushed it at least fifty years into the future, probably further.  There needs to be room for society to evolve so that basic human values could have been corrupted on such a massive level.

Amazingly, the film really screws the pooch in the attitudes of a lot of its characters towards the Purge.  Guess who the ONE character is who thinks this practice is brutal and barbaric?  The ten year-old kid.  Honestly, if ANYONE should be the most corrupted by the values of this world, it would be the kid who hasn't known anything else.  Ethan Hawke, his wife, their neighbors... they all are old enough to have come of age long before the Purge.  Hawke is about ten years older than me, which means that since this film is set ten years in the future, his character would have been in my classes all through school.  Do we really buy that someone who was in his 30s when the Purge was adopted wouldn't have ANY moral compunctions about it?  And their neighbors are even older!

But the 10 year-old kid who's probably sat through years of classroom lectures about the glory of the Purge, whose seen it held up as society's crowning achievement... HE's the one to have moral misgivings about it.  I don't buy it. At all.  The youngest generation would be the ones mostly likely to accept the progression of society for what it was.

It would also help if the people extolling the virtues of the Purge didn't all speak like some sort of brainwashed cult members.  Rhys Wakefield plays the leader of a group trying to break into Hawke's house and I'd call his performance cartoonish if it didn't make me think Daffy Duck might have made a more nuanced choice for the part.

Later, Hawke's family is saved from the home invaders by his own neighbors.  The twist is that the neighbors decided that once that family's home security was breached, they had an opportunity to "cleanse ourselves" by slaughtering the family for... well... basically just "thinking you're so perfect."  The performance of the actress called upon to sell this speech is mind-numblingly bad. You can't totally blame her, though because she's been tasked with selling a plot twist about as bad as any I've seen in a long time.

And this again makes me doubt the basic premise. If you live in a neighborhood where your neighbors butched an entire family basically out of envy, are you REALLY going to trust those people for the next 364 days until the next Purge comes?  And during the next Purge, won't you be tempted to get in a preemptive strike on them, thus perpetuating the cycle of violence?

The way the conclusion plays out, Hawke's wife, played by Lena Heady, decides there's been enough kiling this night and once she has the upper hand on her attacking neighbors, she forces them to all sit in silence and wait out the Purge.  On one hand, yay for her for not getting her hands dirty.  On the other... are you really going to continue to live next door to these people who were salivating at the free pass of taking your life?

Basically, the Purge should turn everyone into George Zimmerman, carrying a gun everywhere ready to use it on anyone who looks like they "don't belong." Honestly, if the film really confronted that head-on, it might have had some real meat to chew on.  Let's say an Archie Bunker-esque neighbor has been bothering a Middle Eastern family that moved into his neighborhood.  What if during the Purge, they decide to kill him as pre-emptive self-defense?  And how does THAT impact how their neighbors react to them even after the Purge is over?

The wide acceptance of the Purge just doesn't hold water on a macro or a micro level.  I'm sure there are some defenders who will argue the film was merely attempting to be satire, and then mutter some vague statements about how it's a commentary on classism.  First, I don't think the tone is pitched right to pass as satire.  There are certainly moments that feel like it's trying for that sort of theme.  However, they happen in isolated pockets and while some actors are playing the satire, others are playing it straight.

Many reviews lamented that this film sets up a wild premise only to waste it all on a home invasion story.  I take exception to two points of that statement, which actually makes the film sound a lot better than it is.  As we've discussed, this actually is a pretty terrible premise.  It's laughably bad.  MANOS THE HANDS OF FATE has firmer internal logic behind it than this.

The second point is that this film is really a home invasion story.  Sure, but can you still call it that if it takes until minute 58 of an 85-minute film for the invaders to actually breach the place?  That's basically the end of the second act.  Up to that point, there's a lot of time-killing, mostly involving a homeless man whom the young boy has let enter the house.

This needn't have been a fatal mistake.  The tension could have been raised had the characters been fleshed out and actually had some internal conflicts amongst each other that came out as a result of being trapped in this pressure cooker for 12 hours while Rome burns outside.  Gene Hackman supposedly once said, "The best acting takes place in confined spaces."  Vivid characters. Conflict. Tension.  Bottle that up in a room and let the characters bounce off of each other.  Build up enough real drama among the cast that it alone could have sustained the film. THEN you add the home invaders as the icing on that cake.  Because now you've got a movie that's about something.

I'll give the filmmakers one "thumbs up" - in a film where all manner of violence is on the table, I was shocked that at no point did the movie become "rapey."  This is no small feat in a feature that includes a teenage girl who spends the entirety of her screentime in a schoolgirl outfit.  I've seen many a horror thriller that played that card gratuitously and so I spent much of the film dreading the inevitable scene that would have her at the mercy of one of the invading guys.  I figure that's worth about half-a-star out of a possible four stars.

That point aside, it's easily the worst movie I saw from 2013.  If I was a film professor, I think I could conduct a multi-day lecture on everything wrong with this film.  Maybe I should start with the fact that it made $89 million worldwide, which also relates to the question "How did this shit get made?" Easy - it only cost $3 million.

Beware the sleazeball fake writing gurus

This excellent post from Lee Goldberg highlights why I urge people to be skeptical when dealing with writing gurus.  Always do your homework on people proclaiming to be experts - especially when engaging their services is going to cost you money.

Lee's post begins with this warning about a so-called professional writer named James Strauss:


James gets gigs teaching screenwriting courses based on his experience writing episodes on the TV shows HOUSE, DEADWOOD, SAVING GRACE and ENTOURAGE. The problem is, according to the Writers Guild of America and writer/producers on those shows, James Strauss never worked as a writer on any of those series. So beware. If you run across any conference or seminar programs where he’s fraudulently claiming those credits in his biography, please alert the organizers and have them contact Lesley McCambridge in the WGA West credits department.

Read the rest of the article for the in-depth story about how Lee impeached this expert and reported him to the WGA.  Most disheartening of all is that it was incredibly easy for Lee to see this guy for who he was with just a simple Google search.  Yet he had been a guest at several conferences and seminars that merely took him at his word.

Do not trust that guests at these events have been vetted.  Do your own research before you plunk down money to hear these charlatans.  And if you come across seminars that regularly host these creeps, spread the word.  These organizations have tied their credibility to these sleazeballs, so if they fail to audit the people associated with them, they deserve to be tarred with the same brush.

Amazon fan-fiction program lets Vampire Diaries author reclaim her storyline

This is kind of an amazing story from the Wall Street Journal.  Last year, Amazon announced a new program called Kindle Words, which made it permissible for writers to sell their own fan-fiction of licensed characters owned by other writers and corporations.  This is only possible with certain franchises that Amazon made their deal with.  Anything owned by Alloy Entertainment is fair game, which includes The Vampire Diaries and Gossip Girl, among others.

I have to admit, I have a generally low opinion of fan fiction.  If you really want to write, you'll learn a lot more by trying to tell your own original stories where you have to build a universe out of whole cloth instead of piggy-backing onto someone else's work.

The interesting wrinkle in this is that it has opened the door for a previously-fired writer to continue telling stories in the series where she was replaced.  Around 1991, a writer named L.J. Smith was hired by Alloy to create a series of vampire books for a young-adult audience.  This was the origin of The Vampire Diaries, which would go on to spawn several books in the series and get a resurgence when the CW created a TV adaptation of the novels.

Then, as the article notes, she was abruptly fired about a year ago.  Yet, the series continued under a ghostwriter, with L.J. Smith's name still appearing prominently on the books.  I'll let the article take it from here:


After she was let go, Ms. Smith shifted her focus to her other teen series—she publishes three popular fantasy series with Simon & Schuster, which have some three million copies in print—and a new post-apocalyptic novel. But the unfinished plot of "The Vampire Diaries" nagged at her. She missed writing about the characters.

Ms. Smith began publishing Vampire Diaries fan fiction through Amazon's Kindle Worlds in January. Amazon and Alloy get a cut of the sales and control many rights to the stories. 

Then, last fall, Ms. Smith's tax attorney and friend, Julie Divola, emailed her about Kindle Worlds and noted that Alloy was allowing fans to sell stories based on "The Vampire Diaries."

In January of this year, Ms. Smith started publishing her fan fiction on Kindle Worlds. So far, she's released two books: a novel, "Evensong: Paradise Lost," and the novella-length story "The War of Roses," for $3.99 and $1.99 respectively. Amazon won't disclose the sales figures for L.J. Smith's fan fiction or any other fan fiction.

"Evensong" picks up after "Midnight," Ms. Smith's last official Vampire Diaries book, and continues the story as though books eight through 12 never happened. It features the same cast of characters: the long-suffering heroine, Elena; her dueling love interests, the sexy vampire brothers Damon and Stefan Salvatore, the werewolf Caroline and the psychic medium Bonnie, among others.

Ms. Smith says that when she began publishing her Vampire Diaries fan fiction on Amazon this past January, she wasn't aware that she was giving up the copyright to those stories, too. Nor did she realize she'd be giving Alloy a cut of earnings from the new stories. But had she known, it wouldn't have deterred her, she says. "It wouldn't have stopped me," she says. "I didn't do these books for money. They're entirely a labor of love."

Amazon's fan-fiction program is allowing an author to make a little money finishing off a series she can't contribute to officially.  That's pretty cool.

Now if only we can work out something similar for Revenge so that Mike Kelley can finish out that story his way, I'll be really happy.

An oral history of Mystery Science Theatre 3000

One of my favorite shows during my middle and high school years was the Comedy Central hit Mystery Science Theater 3000.  It's such a simple concept for a show that you both can't believe it hadn't been done before and that it could have sustained for so long.  The hook: a guy named Joel has been shot into space as part of an experiment to see how many bad films he can endure.  To try to keep his sanity, he built robot friends Crow and Tom Servo, who join him at the screenings and make them bearable by talking back to the screen.

(You have no idea how difficult that was to summarize without just quoting the very catchy theme song.)


I have a lot of fond memories of watching the show each week.  In particular, I'm amused as I recall my father's reaction went from "What is this crap you're watching?" to "Is 'Sampo' on this week?" (The first movie he saw was The Day The Earth Froze, where "Sampo" seems to constitute half the dialogue) to "You have GOT to see this part in the movie they're watching with Sean Connery's brother!"

A huge part of the appeal for me was the show tended to have more arcane references than a Dennis Miller act.  (That in itself is now an arcane reference.  This was back when Dennis Miller was actually funny, witty and one of my comedic heroes.)  There's a special kind of laugh that comes from hearing an obscure reference, recognizing what it draws upon and connecting it to the action on screen.  It's what's known in the biz as "a two-percenter," a joke that only two percent of the audience would get.  I love unexplained two-percenters... when I get them.  MST3K was chock-full of them.

Wired has recently honored the show with an excellent oral history.  Some excerpts are below:

Creator Joel Hodgson on the earliest inspiration for the show:


It was an idea I’d had tucked away in the back of my mind since high school: On Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album, there are illustrations in the liner notes. And for the song “I’ve Seen That Movie Too,” it’s got little silhouettes watching a movie. I remember going, “Someone should do a show like that. Run a movie and have these people in silhouettes say stuff.”

Writers on what makes a good MST3K movie:

Bill Corbett (writer-performer): When we watched the movies, we were looking for a bunch of things. It couldn’t be god-awful in terms of sound and picture, although we did a bunch of them that were borderline in that regard. And the ones that were just boring and really, really talky—where we couldn’t find any space to get any jokes in—those were rejected pretty quickly. We also tended to stay away from super­violent or NC-17 stuff.

Kevin Murphy (writer-performer, producer): There was one submission called Demon Rugsuckers From Mars, or maybe just Rugsuckers From Mars. [Ed. note: It’s actually titled Over-Sexed Rugsuckers From Mars.] It’s about vacuum cleaners. And there was a scene with this dorky bearded fellow making graphic love to a vacuum cleaner. That was the one time I thought, what the hell am I doing with my life?

And Kevin Murphy on why the Sci-Fi Channel Years were more of a pain:

It began getting difficult when USA Network started exercising more control over the Sci-Fi Channel. And then we picked up these fucking production executives from the network. We had these bitter, dry, humorless trolls in charge of our show. And they were giving us notes. And they were insisting on our having a story arc. What the hell do you want with a story arc? This is a puppet show.

Check out the whole oral history here.

See MILIUS on Netfix Instant

Would you enjoy the experience of sitting down with a number of titans of filmmaking as they all share tall tales of a larger-than-life peer?  Then rush off to Netflix and look up the documentary MILIUS in their streaming category.  The real-life Bill Brasky in question is John Milius, the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of Apocalypse Now.   He's also the writer-director of Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn.

Milius came up at USC alongside George Lucas and Randal Kleiser and as such, was among the filmmaking brotherhood that included Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg.  Unlike the majority of his peers, he was a conservative and the documentary contains many tales that revolve around his love of guns.  (A particular favorite involves him taking a loaded weapon to a notes meeting with a studio head, laying it on the desk and saying, "Just so we all know where we stand.")  Despite the tales that paint him as a confrontational bear of a man, Milius clearly has a big heart.

It would be a crime to spoil many of the great stories offered in this documentary.  Though many tales paint him as a force of nature, there's also little doubt that few have a way with the pen as he does.  When a producer needs someone to write "bigger speeches" to convince Sean Connery to sign onto a film, Milius's name alone sways the actor's opinion.  When Milius is on his game, the pages seem to flow out of him like water over Niagara Falls.  And when the writer falls on hard times, you feel the weight of that tragedy.

Milius's large personality and outspoken politics led to him falling out of favor in Hollywood for many years.  At one point, it's recounted that he was in the awkward position of begging David Milch for a staff writer job on Deadwood.  When Milch balked at putting the legendary wordsmith in a mere staff job, Milius responded, "I've got a kid going to law school."   Rather than hire Milius, Milch pays for the screenwriter's son's tuition.  A few years later, Milius sends him a check for the full balance.  Spielberg recounts that Milch's reaction was "The sonofabitch is the only one who's ever paid me back!"

Directors Joey Figueroa and Zack Knutson have weaved together a compelling, entertaining and ultimately moving portrait of a self-described "Zen anarchist."  Even if you don't know John Milius's name, chances are you've seen something he wrote. (The "Indianapolis speech" in JAWS is his draft of the scene, trimmed down by actor Robert Shaw.)  If you have any interest in screenwriting at all, this should be at the top of your "Must Watch" list.

Links: Oral history of THE GIRL NEXT DOOR and Eric Heisserer's twitter talks

Today's a day of links:

First up, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR is one of my favorite guilty pleasure films and I've long thought it's much better than it gets credit for.  (For one thing Timothy Olyphant's line reading of "How do I do it?... It's like a gift" has to be up their with one of my favorite deliveries in a film.)  I get why it didn't connect with audiences - the whole porn thing made a lot of people squemish.  (And if you think about it, the relative ages of everyone in the story means that Elisha Cuthbert's character either became a porn legend off of a VERY short career, or there's some Traci Lords-ish scandal in her past.

But if you can get past that, it's a pretty entertaining film.  That's why I was very entertained by this surprisingly comprehensive oral history of the film's making.

Also, I tweeted this out, but it occurs to me it might be a good idea to archive it on the blog. Screenwriter and director Eric Heisserer has begun to make a regular habit of tweeting out long twitter speeches of advice and insight into the writing biz.  A lot of them are in the vein of one of the most popular posts on this blog, "Screenwriter Eric Heisserer lifts the curtain on the studio film development process from a writer's perspective."

Well Tim Wainwright has taken all of Eric's twitter rants and compiled them here. You can also access them individually at the links below.

1. TV Pitches (4/8)
2. Loglines (3/28)
3. Feature Pitching (3/15)
4. Details and Continuity (3/12)
5. Screenwriting in general (3/11)
6. Challenging Yourself (3/7)
7. Screenwriting advice (Drafts, Parentheticals, Respect) (2/28)
8. Minimalism (2/18)
9. Real or fake script notes? (2/1)
10. Female Protagonists (9/5)
11. On Output (8/18)