This week, we backtrack a little bit. The responses and e-mails I’ve been getting about these blog entries are very gratifying and very illuminating (also a little tame; I worry that I’ve apparently not yet said much worth arguing over. How does anyone post two thousand words about anything on the internet and not get flamed by someone?), but I realize, for the benefit of those newer to or outside the comics biz, the terminology is a touch “inside” and I maybe should have laid more groundwork about How A Comic Is Created. Hence:
Comics stories start, like most everything else dramatic including half the breakup conversations I have ever had, with a script. Unlike the standardized screenplay format, there is no existing template for comics scripts. That’s primarily because comics is a uniquely collaborative medium. Some writers are their own artists and work it all out in the drawing; some writers break their scripts down panel-by-panel with dialogue; some describe simply the basic plot to the artist sans final dialogue, then add the actual words and captions once the art’s produced. I’m sure that last method sounds spectacularly backwards to our film and TV brethren—like crafting and looping in dialogue only after a scene’s been shot—but that’s the way many of the most classic American comics of all time were done. More on why this is in a moment.
Once a script is approved by an editor, it’s given to an artist who’ll illustrate it on (almost always) Bristol board. Some artists do finished, ready-for-print work; sometimes, to speed production, they work only in pencil and an inker comes behind them to add textures and shading and background detail with India ink to get the art camera-ready. Whether he’s doing finished work or just pencilling, however, the artist turns the writer’s words into pictures, and that is much harder to do well than most writers realize. Not only does a comics artist have to be able to draw anything from a herd of horses to a county fair to a Betelgeusean starship, all the characters have to be consistently on-model in every shot without fail, the storytelling has to be clear, and the images have to be dynamic. Tall order; some of the most phenomenal illustrators I have ever met are wizards in their own areas of expertise but cannot begin to juggle the multiple tasks of a comics artist.
This is why I say that artists are not helper monkeys; they’re not in it to visualize “your” story, because it stopped being “your” story the moment you engaged in a collaborative medium. From here on in, it’s also the artist’s story, and if you’re working with an illustrator who’s any good at all, you as a writer have to tamp down any control-freak tendencies you suffer under and relax into the process. Chances are, the artist isn’t going to draw that submarine hatch exactly as you’d envisioned it or angle that close-up exactly the way you saw it in your head, but as long as the story’s being told effectively, that’s okay. That’s what artists are paid to do: bring their own storytelling skills to the table. If they’re experienced, then more often than not you can give them a detailed story outline with first-draft dialogue, then craft your final draft around their drawings to add nuance, characterization and exposition, and there’s going to be an energy to those pages that’s present because the artist felt engaged and not simply dictated to. I always put my phone number and e-mail address on the first page of every script I write and encourage my artist to call me with questions, observations, or insights, particularly if they read a scene description and can suggest a clearer or more dynamic way of illustrating it. Again, it’s not “my” story anymore; it’s OUR story, and at some near-future date, we’ll go into specific examples of how my artists have improved my scripts immeasurably.
Beyond that, coloring is its own craft. Most comics artists work strictly in black-and-white line drawings, then scan the physical artwork so gifted artists-slash-technicians-slash-specialists can use Photoshop (industry standard) to add color. The letterer likewise uses his computer (alas, the days of hand-lettering are all but gone) to lay in the captions, balloons, sound effects and titles using (by and large) Adobe Illustrator. The coloring and lettering, once an editor has reviewed them for errors and corrections, are then wed into high-res EPS files and FTP’d to the printer. A few weeks later, printed comics are in stores. Rinse, repeat.
There are as many ways of mixing and matching these creative components as are mathematically possible. There are plenty of artists who do their own coloring and/or lettering. There are letterers and colorists who also write. Or draw. There are no union lines to cross. What’s important is that everyone’s telling the story.
Still too inside? If so, forgive my lack of perspective and feel free to ask questions.
Well, let's crunch a recap and a preview post together over the holiday weekend. We'll answer some questions, and offer an open thread after this week's ep answering anything you ask in the Comments here.
Speaking of thise week's episode, it is not The Wedding Job. It's The Bank Shot Job, and the preview is here.
This was the first episode actually shot, written by our infamous co-producer Amy Berg based off a pitch from Dean Devlin and directed (in six frikkin' days) by Dean. Yes, it is a lovely little cosy shop we have, and yes, it is better than the old way of doing things. Anyway, it's way, waaaay outside the usual format, but it's one of the TNT suits' favorites, so it got bumped up in order. The ratings have been pretty promising, so they seem to want to really push while nobody else is producing new material.
The first-season-order-shuffle is always a mixed bag. On one hand, I think the chumminess the characters evince in Two Horse and Miracle -- two episodes written to be mid-season -- kind of jump the gun on the emotional arcs seen in this broadcast order. On the other hand, the Nate/Sophie scene in Miracle really belongs that early in the season, and I'm glad we got Sterling introduced early in Two Horse. Again, luckily, we wrote these intended to be primarily stand-alones, and the order pretty much settles in as intended for the rest of the season. Oh, yeah, and we got an entire season of 13 guaranteed. Unlike every other rookie show on the air. So, you know, aces.
For what it's worth, the upcoming Chris Kane fight scene in The Bank Shot Job is my favorite. Well, this and the one in Wedding. Oh, and Mile High ... never mind. (Yes, I have a fight obsession, to the point of being mocked by my own staff.) It was the first one we shot and it sets the standard for the rest of the season. The fight in Miracle is more of a conceptual fight. The gun-waistband bit in Miracle is stolen from ... ahh, it's too painful. Let's just say the movie will never be made, and we use all the parts of the animal.
One thing about Miracle: I've seen a few comments about how Hardison's morality seems to be ... flexible. It is indeed. He rationalizes like a sumbitch, and the one thing cut from Miracle I miss badly is the flashback to a teen Hardison with braces, rocking the Kid n' Play look, while he adapted his Nana's moral code to hacking the Bank of Iceland. Once the suited humans have returned to their offices in January, I may try to pry that footage loose. Also -- DB Sweeney gets the ladies steamy. The shoot had a constant background hum of whispered "toe pick!", strangled giggling, and the scurry of footsteps off to dark corners.
Big congratulations to Christine Boylan, also a staff writer, also her first produced script. Another East Coast Catholic like myself, she took a ridiculous amount of care on the sermon. Yes, we atheist sodomite Hollywood-types spent hours laboring over our episode about faith. I assure you, we ran right out and had some gay socialized medicine afterward.
Right, questions from the last post, and we'll tackle any from this post in the open-thread post for Tuesday. Bloody hell, that confused even me.
Mike Cane:>>>There are 116 green screen set replacement shots. OK, you just managed to con ME. I just watched my time-shifted copy two hours ago (working on pimpage post) and didn't notice ANYTHING like that. I can usually spot them too! Is this seamlessness due to: 1) HD vid? 2) Dir of Photo? Both?
Having Mark Franco, our visual effects ... honcho? Guru? Resident genius? ... available to come and call angles for the best greenscreens is the key, and Dave Connell of course has a major hand in it. Shooting digital makes a big difference in the workflow for vfx -- which I have Mark buttonholed to explain here on this site sometime soon. We have guys basically inventing ways to do quick 'n dirty greenscreen shots at Electric.
For example, the church in Miracle? Never more than half full with extras.
Alon: Only semi-on topic, but just FYI, I cannot get the episodes that are up on the TNT website to play. Every time I try, it crashes my browser, regardless of which one I try to use. When I first went to the page in Firefox, it said I needed a plug-in, so I downloaded and installed ...
and
Anonymous: commenting late on this, but: you talk at length at various points in your history about 4th Generation Media and so forth, but still, when I try the options listed by you of how to watch this show (which I want to watch) and also send some money in the direction of the people that made it, I have no chance to do so because I happen to live outside the US. Utter stupidity again. So we return to the age-old saying: piracy, the better choice, or, as in so many cases, the only choice.
And really, I _wanted_ to view it legally. I have no moral qualms about downloading something when I'm basically told: you live elsewhere, so fuck you.
First, piracy is wrong. Wroooong. Look, everyone currently reading my blog with a law degree who also works for one of the large corporations with whom I do regular business, piracy is wrong!
Well, fair points all, but this is the nature of evolutionary change. It's already a bit mad that we have no studio. Distribution comes with a whole other set of issues. TNT (rightfully) gets the streaming window, and it's up to their fine web humans to rock that out. They pay a license fee, and nicely enough broadcast and promote the hell out of us. The foreign sales network people demand their windows for broadcast, or they won't buy the series, which means that we'll take way, way longer to be in profit. Which will curtail our ability to make more wonderful TV shows. Television is cash flow, something Dean could explain to you in exruciating detail while dabbing the fine sweat from his forehead.
Basically, we're pushing the envelope, but we're beating one problem at a time. We got "how to make a TV show based out of one old dog hospital in East Hollywood" out of the way. Next up is "being utterly independent of the distribution chains television has relied on for the last fifty years. " But we'll get there.
Emily Blake:am enjoying the show and particularly Christian Kane and , but I was wondering something. If I remember correctly, Hustle also did a racing horse switch episode. Do you guys watch Hustle? Do you think about ways to prevent your stuff from being too similar or do you just do what you do and not worry about it?
I watched the first two season, and then bailed. (I met Adrian Lester on an unrelated project. Great guy.) A fair chunk of my staff has seen every season. We have killed a couple ideas because they did something similar on that show. But at some point you just shrug your shoulders and say "Every caper show is going to have a card game/horse race gag/Big store/etc etc." It's a bit like working on Without a Trace and wondering if your "The wife you thought was dead is actually the killer" crosses over with any of the CSI's or Law & Orders. There are genre conventions, but the shows have a different tone, gang make-up, a difference in the number of explosions (advantage: us), and moral center - they are, as far as I can tell, never helping anybody, while that's our raison d'etre.
Toxic Frog:Love the show - I just introduced it to my family (we're all fans of heist/con shows) and everyone involved approves. I do have some questions and comments, though: - How did you get Gina Bellman on board? You didn't talk much about the casting, and when Sophie was introduced both my parents went "Oh my god! Her!" and are now pestering me to find out.
There's a little behind the scenes on casting up at TNT now. Which, conveniently, discusses Gina...
cont'd: ... - My parents wish to inform you that the circular-track camerawork in the opening of the pilot made them nauseous, and that you should stop it :)
You hear that Dean? You're hurting innocent MOMMIES AND DADDIES!! (sorry, private joke)
Vicki:BTW, is anyone planning to sell those nifty "Leverage" latte mugs anywhere? I need to have one.
... hmmm. I wonder if I can finance my day players with tchockes ... we'll see.
Kid Sis:Wow. This is all getting very Star Trek convention. You going to start yelling at bloggers to get a life and move out of their mom's basement??
I'm going to let it run until I see the Comic-con booth for "The Black Kings" next to the Browncoats, where Nate/Sophie shippers start throwing punches at the Sophie/Parker slashers. Then and only then will we blow the ref whistle.
lummox: BTW Leverage is a pretty decent show. Once it's either out on DVD or there's some other way us non-Americans can buy it, I'll be happy to do so.
I hope I didn't give a false impression earlier -- it will be broadcast, and soon, in most countries. Within a few months, unless I'm high or mistaken. You shouldn't have to wait for the DVD's.
Rght then, that's the mailbag for now. Toss any Miracle-oriented , or hell any other questions, into the Comments, and we'll get to them next week. As always, thanks for watching, recapping, and forum-posting. In the modern television landscape, we can't do it without you.
As we drove up Route 1, Lovely Wife dialed Michael Jackson's Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' on the iPod. This is not a song on my usual playlist. I was enjoying the flashback to junior year until the third chorus arrived:
I Said You Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' You Got To Be Startin' Somethin' I Said You Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' You Got To Be Startin' Somethin' It's Too High To Get Over (Yeah, Yeah) Too Low To Get Under (Yeah, Yeah) You're Stuck In The Middle (Yeah, Yeah) And The Pain Is Thunder (Yeah, Yeah) It's Too High To Get Over (Yeah, Yeah) Too Low To Get Under (Yeah, Yeah) You're Stuck In The Middle (Yeah, Yeah) And The Pain Is Thunder (Yeah, Yeah) You're A Vegetable, You're A Vegetable Still They Hate You, You're A Vegetable You're Just A Buffet, You're A Vegetable They Eat Off Of You, You're A Vegetable (copyright Michael Jackson)
"... You're a Vegetable"?
I'm sorry, what?*
This has consumed me. Four days in the Big Sur mountains, and I cannot stop thinking about it. I was humming the tune as I watched deer frolic. All because of this chorus. Please, in the name of God, someone explain this. Or, at least, add your own bizarre lyrics in the Comments. Bonus points for the 80's factor.
*You'll note the recent Akon remake seems to lack the "vegetable factor."
If you’ve set your sights on writing an original novel or a prose piece, you can generally type to your heart’s content. There’s no hard-and-fast space limitation. American comics, on the other hand, tend to be 22 pages. It’s a totally arbitrary number; since their invention in the 1930s, comic book stories have been as long as a hundred pages and as short as one. In the early 1980s, industry leaders DC Comics and Marvel Comics, factoring profits versus creative costs, arrived at 22 as their standard page-count, and other companies settled in at about the same, give or take. (As the E-I-C at BOOM!, I allow 22 pages for first issues and 21 for ensuing issues, leaving room for a “what has come before” text recap after the opening scene.)
Twenty-two pages is not a lot of space. Believe me. Having written a bazillion comics, I still find myself more often than nine pages into a script and realizing to my horror that I’m only about a quarter of the way through the story I wanted to tell, and the next thing you know, I’m making fresh coffee and tearing up the floorboards to rewrite.
The best tools in a comic writer's toolbox serve the cause of Economic Storytelling. Your foremost task is to convey the maximum amount of story in the minimum amount of space. Don’t misunderstand; “story” is not the same as “plot,” and I’m in no way suggesting that every page you write be weighted down with a hundred lines of dialogue feeding me more exposition than I can possibly digest. But a plot, as I’m gonna presume you already know if you’re reading this, is simply what happens. A story takes a plot and adds emotion, timing, style and mood, and as loudly as I rail against comics that spend an entire page showing a character filling a glass from the kitchen faucet, I’d still rather read a story that was involving but breezy for 22 pages than one that was dense but dull and unmoving for eight.
Shorter comics stories are even more of a bitch to script. Eight pages, six...regardless of length, you still need to show me a conflict and a resolution or else it’s not a story, and there is no time to screw around. At BOOM!, I get a l-o-t of eight-page scripts that, for no good reason, burn up the entire first page with a slow zoom into a New York restaurant kitchen. This makes me homicidal. If your story is about a chef and geography is incidental, just show me the damn kitchen. Tick, tock. I love RESERVOIR DOGS, but if you handed me a comics script that began with four pages of gangsters debating the merits of Madonna, I would not only reject it, I would break your keyboard.
In a 22-page comic, figuring an average of four to five panels a page and a couple of full-page shots, a writer has maybe a hundred panels at most to tell a story, so every panel he wastes conveying (a) something I already know, (b) something that’s a cute gag but does nothing to reveal plot or character, or (c) something I don’t need to know is a demonstration of lousy craft. Comics are expensive. Don’t make me resent the money I spend buying yours. Every single moment in your script must either move the story along or demonstrate something important about the characters—preferably both—and every panel that does neither is a sloppy waste of space. This is one of the reasons why Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ WATCHMEN is so revered; it’s a tour de force example of Economic Storytelling because there’s significance to every word and every image.
Truman Capote said that he was like a semantic Paganini, that he could just throw words up into the air and they would come down in the perfect way.
Must be nice, huh? Like most mortals, I toss my words into the air only to struggle with them for hours after they've tumbled haphazardly across the page. I guess that makes me more of a semantic Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Even so, I learned how to consistently write well. Not brilliantly, but well. I have a sense of rhythm, cadence, and can usually put words on paper in interesting ways. My high school teachers and college professors always told me so, so it had to be true ('cause they would never lie). So, armed with the confidence they instilled in me, I spent those nomadic years following my college graduation writing numerous short stories and one very epic, very unfinished, novel. Yet, no one wanted to publish them. I couldn't give them away. So what was the problem? I knew how to write, had a decent grasp of English grammar, and knew how to operate the spell check. So why the hell wouldn't anyone publish my stories?
It's because they weren't stories.
They were, as one kind editor told me, just book reports. There was nothing there. Every rejection slip I received (that wasn't a simple form letter) said the same thing: you can write, but you can't tell a story.
At the time, for the life of me, I thought that they they the same thing. I mean, aren't they? Isn't that what writing is, telling a story? Obviously, the answer is an emphatic "no." It would be like someone claiming to be an architect when all they know how to do is drive a nail into a board with only three hits of a hammer. A good skill to have, but that doesn't mean you can design a bridge.
Most of you might be thinking to yourselves, well, duh. But for me hearing this was like a slap to the face. It never even occurred to me that writing and story telling were two totally different things. But now that I knew that they were, I had to ask myself a very horrifying question: "Do I even know what a story IS?" Again, the answer was an emphatic "no." Turns out, that when it came to telling a story, I couldn't write my way out of a wet paper bag with a needle-sharp number two pencil. I mean, what is this "conflict" you speak of? You're telling me that all my stories have to have fist fights? I was clueless. All the things that go into making a story were nothing but vague, abstract concepts to me. All those years my teachers and professors were teaching me how to write, no one bothered to teach me how to tell a story.
Fortunately, I've had some wonderful and patient people sit down with me and explain the basic elements of story telling. Now, I won't go into what makes a story here because, honestly, I'm still learning myself and there are others much more qualified than I who can give you a better understanding (you're reading KFM, so chances are you've already got a head start). But it's just something to keep in mind when you're slaving over your world building or fine tuning the description of your antagonist's handlebar mustache. Good things in their own right, but is there a story? It doesn't matter how detailed and well-crafted your world is, if there's no story, no one will care.
In which we answer your questions. And I think it'll be Thursdays. Want to give Waid a whole day of posting to himself.
Let's see what's in the mailbag ...
Red Dawn: I tried to watch the production videos but it requires a windows PC. Any chance TNT will make your show more accessible to mac users?
Working on it. I have to admit, they must be pretty sick of my geekery by now. There is, however, now a YouTube Channel for the show now. As a matter of fact, the next sneak peek is up ...
... hmm, a bit more serious than our usual sneaks. More clown killing, less baptisms! I hope more will be up there soon.
Joshua James: If you've told us already, my apologies, but can you make Leverage scripts (those shot and shown) available for readers?
Working on it. People get tetchy about copyright and stuff.
Matt: Good episode, but I've got to ask: was there any hesitation about using the "stall number switch" so soon after the "container number fakeout" in the last episode? While the mechanics of the scam were a little different, they both rely on people's tendency to not quite remember physical locations if they're given a numerical identifier.
There was a lot of hesitation -- which is why a.) this episode was originally scheduled to be broadcast five eps after The Homecoming Job, and b.) that's not how the original scam worked.
Welcome to the realities of physical production of television. The original scam involved a much more complicated bit of business utilizing the outside of the stables/stalls. Once we got to production, we wound up getting our locations for a very limited amount of time, and therefore had to use the interiors, and adapt the scam to that reality.
That episode? We were on the track for precisely one day. There are 116 green screen set replacement shots.
Even funkier, this one was written and shot before Homecoming, so I was essentially raiding our own kitchen when I used a similar gag in that episode. Now, what's weird is, in the scripts the numbering doesn't seem to be a big deal at all, it's a pretty minor part of the scam. But when you hear numbers spoken aloud, and they're the focus of the shot, they resonate.
All to say we were nodding and saying: "Yeah, they kind of overlap, but it's not like they'll be broadcast right next to each other."
Sigh.
It's also a lesson we learned along the way -- the final scam is the one everybody remembers. In Homecoming, we had a.) a three-person pickpocketing gag and b.) voice-controlled lock gag after which we c.) conned the opponents into hating each other by d.) stealing a bill on the floor of Congress on the way to e.) revealing a money-laundering scam which we ended by f.) not stealing most of the money using a number/location trick and g.) framing the contractor and Congressman with their own security devices on the way to h.) delivering a truck full of money that appears empty.
This is why television is the most fun. Evolves as you shoot in ways a self-contained story just can't.
Commish: One question concerning Ep 2... I understand now the process of thought that led to using a private hospital for this gi-normous anonymous donation, but wouldn't it still seem fishy since they're housing a vet who was "accidentally" shot by the contractors who just publicly revealed that they were trying to launder billions?
DON'T STOP THE FUN TRAIN!
(NOTE: Tongue is firmly in cheek here. That's an inside joke in the writers' room.)
Wait. That didn't come out right ... Let's just move on.
Jim Kakalios: And I love Sterling. I am already looking forward to the season finale, as I know that there will be a huge triple con that will deal with the crisis du jour, and finally resolve the Sterling issue simultaneously.
You don't resolve Mark Sheppard. Can you resolve the wind?
What I'm trying to say is, I seem to be stuck with the bastard until Javi writes another show and takes him off my hands.
adc1966: I hope you will make a recurring thing out of Parker's bizarre childhood memory flashbacks. All while holding that big stuffed bunny. And more Parker+Sophie. That scene last week with the zip-line in the stairwell was adorable. :-)
There's more Young Parker kicking around. And Mr. Bunny is still out there. Waiting.
Parker and Sophie do have tons o'fun coming up, although they tend to be working in different locations in the scam because of their different skillsets. That said: Hey, look Ma, we pass the Bechdel test!
Mary Sue: Rogers! When can those of us with no desire to hook up to the cable TV cash drain get to watch the show?! I'm chomping at the bit over here!
Available on Amazon the day after, and iTunes a week after that.
Joe Helfrich: Got to admit, this was my least favorite episode so far. It just felt like it tried to cram too much--horse racing information, character backstory, and a complicated con--into 44 minutes. Plus, until the tag, Badger (he will always be Badger) didn't seem the sort to have a long term plan. Before that, he just seemed like a petty guy who wanted to screw with his old co-worker. Did you write the tag, Rogers? Because it was a completely different feel.
Runtime's actually 42:30, sport. Welcome to the new age of television. And yes, sadly, there's a bit more Sterling plotting going on in the original script ... somewhere in the other ten pages that were cut. We definitely took a big chunk of the year figuring out how to pace these things. The kids wrote the tag, if I remember correctly.
someBrad: Did you film THJ in an actual hospital? What was the process to decide what medical equipment to use, if it wasn't just "We're in the hospital so we use what they have"?
That's a real hospital in Long Beach, in a real rehab room, with real vets in rehab. Jake's the only one in the scene who's not actually in rehab.
Keith: Gina Bellman does a perfect southern accent, too. That's not easy. Being from the South, I can pick out a fake yokel accent a mile away and hers was so good, I wanted to ask her what church her family went to.**If you're from GA, you get this. If not, well. it's not that important.
Weirdly this was the one where Gina was worried. Chris was around for some pointers, and we soon discovered the linguistic links between Southern and British accents ... as usual, she worried for no reason. Even got the Mandarin down, too.
Ugh, post-production calls. Thanks for the questions. I'm on vacation for a few days, so bug Waid and Mike, and I'll see you next Tuesday.
Novelist walks into my office. Relatively famous, not as famous as Aforementioned Screenwriter, but a multiple award-winner in his genre nonetheless. And he’s immediately on my bad side because the comics script he has handed me is the dullest thing I have ever read, and I used to be a legal secretary.
It isn’t a bad story. To the contrary, the conflict is clear and intriguing and the plot moves along at a good clip. But the Ambien on the page comes from the fact that the writer’s a novelist. He’s accustomed to introducing his characters by writing hundreds of riveting words describing how they view the world, what their hopes and dreams are, and what’s going on inside their heads from moment to moment. But there is no room for that on the comic book page, so he just left it out, and now I’m holding a script starring a bunch of plot puppets who are indistinguishable from one another, who don’t reveal themselves through action, and who are interesting only in the writer's head.
Comics is a visual medium. That means the writer has to find a way to externalize the conflicts--literally or, with practice, symbolically--and not leave them locked inside the protagonist. I’m not saying punches have to be thrown--not every comic is or need be about Spider-Man--but if comics is the avenue through which you want to tell your story, it had better be a story that is, in its telling, visually interesting. If it isn't, you have chosen the wrong medium. I have been in awe of E.M. Forster's talent since I was fourteen, but I can imagine nothing more tedious than a graphic novelization of A Room With a View.
It sounds absurdly obvious, but I am so continually confronted with writers so in love with their dialogue that I'm going to say it again: comics is a visual medium. Bring every important character on stage by having him or her doing something--spinning a basketball, operating an electron microscope, taking a fistful of vitamins, anything--that instantly tells us something about them. When there's conflict, find a way to make it visual. Witty dialogue and clever repartee are priceless, yes, but probably more than in any other medium outside of, oh, mime, comics depends on the writer showing rather than telling. So give your artist interesting things to draw. Can this dramatic revelation happen in, say, a planetarium rather than in a hotel room? Can this confrontation happen on a Ferris wheel instead of a generic alleyway? Can these characters be acting rather than reacting?
One last time: comics is a visual medium. Use that. I am a huge, huge believer in page one of any comics story of any genre having an unusual image that will grab the reader and draw him in. It doesn’t have to be “super-heroey”--in the right story, a shot of a woman looming over an empty crib has just as much impact as, I don’t know, Superman punching a meteor--but by now, any comic book that opens up with four pages of guys in business suits standing around a generic boardroom is just death. D-E-A-T-H. Every issue, we have twenty-two pages, give or take, to tell readers a story that they paid good money for, so as a writer, I get very nervous opening with (or, once I’ve opened, spending more than about two pages on) something you can see on TV every day for free, without my help. Always think visually. Always, always look at your scenes once they’re drafted and ask yourself if they have more visual impact than two guys in business suits standing around a boardroom. If not, rewrite.
Chris Downey and I were marveling over the Madoff Ponzi scheme yesterday. Insanely, the biggest financial fraud of the decade is something we never would have used in the show, because it was too damn easy. A frikkin' Ponzi scheme? Our audience would figure that out in a second. The sad thing is, for every unbelievable con we pull, there's a real world parallel that we'd never have the stones to try to get past an audience.
Note that it's always "Ponzi scheme" as opposed to "Ponzi plan" or "Ponzi con.". No idea why.
Mike's recent post on "where do you get your ideas" gave me the idea -- my, that's recursive -- to do a short post on broadcast day about the genesis of that episode's crime plot. Not the overall inspirations for the show, but the eps. I won't go into anything not revealed in "next Week's Scenes" or the teasers on TNT.
To catch up briefly --
"The Nigerian Job" -- was inspired by a magazine article on Ryan Air and my own personal hatred of how every con show does The Sting con. If you look at the ending of the pilot, it specifically refutes that choice. The innocent bystanders really are innocent bystanders, and the cops really are cops. It's a con payoff that depends on everyone actually being who they claim to be. The law that Victor Dubenich is arrested for breaking is real, down to the relevant language. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is a bitch.
"The Homecoming Job" -- This sort of moved backwards as Dean and I broke the story. We wanted to do something a little bigger for the second episode, with some serious heavy opponents. I had the Vanity Fair article about the missing billions in my notes for a while, and the image of pallets -- pallets -- of cash somehow resonated with my teenage job in a supermarket, unloading pallets of groceries. It was a very tangible sense memory that hooked me into the idea.
The scarcity of cash came from another old aborted project, although I wound using an old 2000 estimate of $500 in cash for each American as opposed to the current estimate of a couple thousand dollars per American. Bizzarely, that research paper is by the father of David Feige, creator of TNT's Raising the Bar. It's a weird world.
Corrupt Congressmen plus contractors gave us two pretty big, unstoppable power centers to throw at our protagonists for their maiden voyage. The rise of small-amount donors in modern elections gave us a good intersection for cash + Congressmen, which brought us to our money-laundering scam. The hopper is real, too. Although I was so proud of us discovering that through research, only to have everyone I told about it answer back, "Yeah, I saw that in Legally Blonde 2."
The interesting thing was, we got to the victims last. We wanted someone who'd been in Iraq who could have seen the wrongdoing, who'd then been shot up by the contractors ... okay, wounded vet. Seeing as veterans' care is a personal priority of Dean and I, we dove in. Our representative corporal has a need, our guys are going to fill it.
But that led to a whole different set of writing hurdles. The Walter Reed scandal is the most notorious story of soldiers not getting the care they needed -- but (what most people get wrong) Walter Reed is an Army medical center. There was no way we could fiddle a big payout to that sort of infrastracture.
The next logical choice is a Veteran's Affairs Medical Center. Problem again -- the VA system is maybe the best medical system in America. They've done wonders dealing with the structural challenges of this war, despite not getting nearly enough funding. If we were going for versimiltude, a VA hospital would just be, well, wrong. If Corporal Perry is at a VAMC, he's getting the best health care in the country.
At this point we were considered jettisoning that version of the story, but I reached out to some KFM readers who are either serving or just back, and some family members. That's when the challenges of the reservists dealing with private hospitals came up. There are serious transportation issues for some reservists when it comes to getting to their nearest VAMC for long term care. Not the fault of the VA, of course, but an unexpected result of having so many National Guard people serving. The Army pays benefits to private hospitals for injured soldiers who can't get to a VAMC -- but those benefits run out after X months, depending on the case, and the difference between what it costs the hospital to do this sort of rehab, and what the VA can do it for, is substantial. Despite some great programs being place being run by truly dedicated humans -- like any system designed by man and administered by the government, some people were falling through the cracks.
Ahh. A private hospital. The sort of place that can take a large, anonymous donation. Maybe not as large as we were planning on making in the script ... but close enough, and relevant to the real-world problems of our representative victim. Done, sir.
All that to create the framework for a good old-fashioned "eff" "uh" "keh" joke. I can't even imagine the crap House writers go through.
"The Two Horse Job" -- Which leads us to tonight's episode, written by the Wonder Twins, Rieder and Glenn. Unlike a lot of the episodes this one didn't start with a villain or vic, it started with the setting. Melissa Glenn is a horse-racing enthusiast -- well just a general sports enthusiast, actually, as are Albert Kim and Chris Downey, who were both at earlier points of their careers sports writers. It gets very jock-y down that end of the long writer's table. My end is all Doctor Who and WoW, so we balance out.
While R&G went and lived at a race track and hung with a trainer for a week, the Room pulled an old scam -- which you'll hear explained tonight -- off the wall of ideas. When they brought back their research and laid out the ins and outs and the revenue streams of horse-racing and breeding, we glued the two concepts together. R&G went off and knocked it out of the park. First produced script, too.
This is one of my favorite episodes because it does the job most of my TV favorite shows do: it takes the audience into a world they probably don't know much about, explains the intricacies of that world, and then exploits its pecularities for the plot.
It's also a favorite because it's the first appearance of Mark Sheppard as Nate's old rival Sterling. Some people, after the pilot, wondered how we would challenge such a (ridiculously) talented bunch of characters. Well, we wondered too. The recurring role of Sterling, the guy even Nate worries about, was introduced for just this purpose. And hey, when you've got a character required to deliver two and a half-page speeches in a mesmerising manner, you choices in television are essentially a.) Mark Sheppard and b.) Mark Sheppard.
This episode really lays out the template for the show going forward (although it wasn't written first. But that's the story for another time ...) -- They start with Plan A. Plan A goes wrong/requires Con B. Con B doesn't quite work out, or instead is really Con C disguised as Con B. At the same time this keeps our guys on their toes, it also set up one of the primary challenges of developing the show: we need to eat two or three heists/con jobs a show. Never mind the pain in the ass the five act structure is for this type of show.
That said -- man, is this a fun job. In the Comments, any process questions about the last few episodes, or your feedback on tonight's after you see it.
(NOTE: This is damned hard to do this without spoilers. Maybe we'll move it to the Wednesdays after)
I find Dawkins a bit of an asshat generally, but always a pleasure watching Derren Brown. Dawkins, for his documentary, interviewing Brown in six parts (h/t io9):
All six parts are on YouTube. My favorite Brown bit is actually this one:
I was 13 when I knew I wanted to be a writer. My dad had just finished reading Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords trilogy and passed it on to me, thinking that I might enjoy it. So while I was shuttered inside the house during a long Chistmas break, I sat by our wood burning stove and read all three books in the space of a week (for a hyperactive teen with ADD, three books in a week was a miracle).
It was the first time I had ever really noticed the magic of language and how clever turns of phrases made interesting and exciting scenes that much more magical. It was as if a light bulb inside my head was slowly beginning to glow. But it wasn't until I read the very last sentence of the third and final book of the trilogy that the light truly came on and it all finally fell into place. The first sentence of the first book and the last sentence of the last book were the same.
I remember grabbing the first book and opening it up to the first page and holding the two books side by side, examing the words. They were practically identical, yet the journey from point A to point B had given them completely different meanings. It was such a profound moment that I knew in that instant that THAT was what I wanted to do. I wanted to affect people the same way Saberhagen had affected me.
And I like to think that someday I will.
Yet of all the writing and storytelling techniques I've learned since that day, the concept of bookending still fascinates me the most. I always get excited when I see it. Alan Moore used it in Watchmen with the drop of red on the smiley face and again in "The Killing Joke" with the drops of rain falling in a dark puddle. The images or words may be identical, yet it's the story in between that gives each a separate meaning. It's the story that defines them (and I'm sure there are numerous other examples out there other than just these three).
As for my own writing, I've only used it once, with Fall of Cthulhu. Since it has been my longest ongoing series, I thought it fitting to use bookending as an homage to the story that infected me with the writing bug.
Which makes me curious about my fellow monkeys. At what moment did you know that you wanted to be a writer (or a musician, accountant, whatever)? Let's hear about it in commments.
Hello all. My name is Michael Alan Nelson and, as John mentioned in an earlier post, I'm the writer of the comic series Fall of Cthulhu, the upcoming Hexed, and the online novel Dingo (it's free so go ahead and give it a look). He has been kind enough to let me play here in his dojo and share some of my thoughts on writing, tech, and anything else that may be of interest to my fellow monkeys.
I figured I'd start out by discussing one of the most common questions I'm asked at conventions, during interviews, and even from beginning writers looking for some inspiration.
Where do you get your ideas?
It's a damn good question. I even find myself asking me that question from time to time. Where DO I get my ideas? I just wish I had a damn good answer, or at least a better one. Unfortunately, the only answer I have is EVERYWHERE.
Not exactly a mystical pool of creative enlightenment, is it? Sorry. But it's true. Don't get me wrong, there are tiny hidden vaults filled with the seeds of ideas scattered about that can jump start my imagination when I'm facing a wall, but I prefer to grab my ideas from what I see around me.
For example, the idea for the scene at the end of Dominion came to me while I was walking through downtown LA. Across the street were two well dressed men having a heated argument. Nothing violent, but they were clearly angry with each other. They continued their argument as they walked through the front doors of a nearby office building, their arms and hands waving in angry gestures as they disappeared behind the glass. As I stood at an intersection waiting to cross the street, I kept glancing toward the upper floors of that office building half expecting to see them in one of the upper offices still shouting at one another. I remember thinking that it wouldn't surprise me if the two men came to blows and tackled each other through the window, so angry with each other that they'd still continue their fist fight as they plummeted down the side of the building.
Then the idea of two men fighting and falling, completely oblivious to their impending doom, got stuck in my head. It was then just a matter of finding a place to use it.
I've come to learn over the past few years what most writers probably already instinctively know; much of writing is about observation. Ideas usually don't come to us in a vacuum. However, writing can be a very solitary existence so it's very important to get out of the house, interact with people, see and experience new things. You have a much better chance of generating ideas when you aren't staring at the same four walls day after day.
This past week, I visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology. It is...interesting (and admittedly, a little horrifying). The first display I saw when I walked in was a stuffed fox head accompanied by a recording of its howl. In and of itself, this wasn't terribly creepy (your definition of creepy may vary). But underneath the howls, I heard another recording coming from the far side of the room. It was a woman's voice saying, over and over again...
I was unfamiliar with bee lore so I had never heard this before. And even now that I do know the origin of the saying, I still find it unsettling. Which makes it a perfect idea. It's a good bet that you'll be seeing some iteration of this in one of my future stories.
Usually, though, ideas don't come to me quite so dramatically. I also find that when I do think of an idea while I'm out and about, I often forget it by the time I get home. So I've started carrying a moleskine notebook with me everywhere I go. That might not work for everyone, but I highly recommend keeping some sort of writing device with you at all times: notebook, cellphone, blackberry, etc. Anything that you find interesting: a line of overheard conversation, a sketch of an eye-catching view, write it down. It's a good idea to build your own warehouse of wonderful things. You may not use everything you collect or use it in the way you had originally planned, but it's nice to have a resevoir of ideas at the ready when you need them.
Hollywood's favorite unproduced screenplays of 2008 are listed, including, to my extreme delight --
... THE HOW-TO GUIDE FOR SAVING THE WORLD by BenDavid Grabinski “A loser discovers a book on how to stop an alien invasion and is thrust into action to stop a real one.”
BenDavid is another up-from-the-fandom screenwriter who I originally met in the blogworld. He's from Iowa. Iowa.
-- Episodes of Leverage will stream on TNT eventually, and be available for download on both Amazon (which means Tivo purchasing!) and iTunes within days. I believe the premiere's already up on Amazon. No word on Hulu or XBox.
-- Michael Alan Nelson will be joining us as our third team blogger. He's been writing the excellent Fall of Cthulhu series for BOOM!. I'm genuinely a fan of Nelson's work, and the recent trades of his run are well worth picking up. (Love the size of the BOOM! trades, btw). His new book Hexed manages to somehow be Juno meets Hellblazer meets Epic Win. I figured a horror/indie writer is a nice way to round out the team.
--Leno to 10pm? There goes another 40 or so writing jobs. The economics make sense, but if NBC was going to focus so much on talk shows, then I personally would rather see Chelsea Handler take The Late Show than Jimmy Fallon. Break up the White Dude Chorus Line a little, fer chrissake. The Lovely Wife introduced me to Chelsea's show last year, and now I'm hooked. But we both agree -- cut the bangs, Chelsea.
Screenwriter walks into my office. Famous, one of the two or three whose name is as instantly recognizable to movie fans in Iowa as it is to us Left Coasters. And he’s immediately on my good side because the first words out of his mouth are not “so I have this pitch for a supernatural western,” but, rather, “I know how to write for film but I don’t know how to write for comics, and I presume there’s a difference.” You would be astounded at the number of professional writers who mooch off my expense account and don’t know even that much. Here’s what I told him:
The single most important difference between a screenplay and a comic book script is that a comic story is made up of frozen moments. Screen stills. Snapshots. While there is no “right” format for comics scripts (and we’ll get into the specifics of formatting later), they generally look something like this:
* * * * *
PAGE THIRTEEN
PANEL ONE: GREEN LANTERN AND AQUAMAN DESCEND TO THE OCEAN DEPTHS. LANTERN’S IN A SMALL RING-GENERATED BUBBLE. AQUAMAN’S SWIMMING, BUBBLES SPILLING FROM HIS MOUTH WHEN HE SPEAKS. ARTIST NOTE: OVER THE COURSE OF THIS PAGE, THE WATER GETS MURKIER AND MURKIER.
1 AQUAMAN: Can you HEAR me? 2 GL: My ring’s translating your UNDERWATER SPEECH, if that’s the question. Guess if you can LIVE underwater, you can TALK there... 3 GL: Lead the way. I’ll take point once we hit bottom. Then I’ll need you to--
PANEL TWO: AQUAMAN FROWNS AT GL.
4 AQUAMAN: Why are you always giving ORDERS? 5 GL: Because I’m the team LEADER.
PANEL THREE: AQUAMAN STARES AT GL BLANKLY. NO DIALOGUE.
PANEL FOUR: SAME EXACT, EXCEPT AQUAMAN EXPLODES WITH LAUGHTER, CLUTCHING HIS SIDES. GL’S COMPLETELY BAFFLED.
6 AQUAMAN/dwindles: AH ha ha ha ha ha ha ha 7 GL: What? What’s so FUNNY? 8 AQUAMAN: YOU’RE not the leader of the Justice League. FLASH is the LEADER! 9 GL: ... 10 GL: What?
PANEL FIVE: AQUAMAN SWIMS ON, BARELY VISIBLE IN THE MURK. GL FOLLOWS.
11 AQUAMAN: The REST of us talked about this WEEKS ago! It’s OBVIOUS to US! 12 GL: Then why... 13 AQUAMAN: Why does Flash let you boss us AROUND? We just figured he was letting you be YOU.
PANEL SIX: GL, WITH SOME CONCERN, NOTICES HIS BUBBLE CRACKING. WATER’S ALMOST PITCH BLACK BY NOW.
14 SFX: krkK-KK-K 15 AQUAMAN: Careful. We’re at the deepest spot on EARTH. Pressure’s UNCANNY. Pump up the WILL POWER... 16 AQUAMAN: ...“leader.” 17 AQUAMAN/small: Heh.
* * * * *
Frozen moments. No artist can illustrate, in one panel, “Tiffany gets up from her chair and answers the door” or “Vito sniffs the rose and puts it in his lapel,” or even “He blinks.” This isn’t a medium for fluid motion. You’re collaborating with an artist who can convey (generally speaking) one action per panel, no more. If you can’t imagine what a photograph of the moment would look like, neither can your artist envision it and force it out of his pencil. Frozen. Moments.
The second most important difference is that the comics page uses space the way film uses time. On your TV screen, the Battle of Trafalgar and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich are the same size--27” (or whatever) on the diagonal--and what indicates their relative significance to the story is how long the camera lingers on them. In comics, artists instead tend to indicate the importance of an image (a moment) by how large it is. An establishing shot of an alien-world landscape that’s supposed to be fascinating and breathtaking and jaw-dropping in its detail and splendor needs to be big, maybe a single image across facing pages. Conversely, unless that sandwich is the crowning punchline to some incredible dramatization of The History of Sandwiches, it probably doesn’t need to take up much room on the page. Even if it’s somehow, against all odds, a plot point (“PANEL TWO: IN A PANIC, THE MOBSTER STABS HIS HAND INTO THE BROWN PAPER BAG. PANEL THREE: CLOSE ON HIS HAND AS HE WITHDRAWS NOT A PISTOL BUT, RATHER, A PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY SANDWICH. PANEL FOUR: AN EXPRESSION OF HORROR DAWNS ON HIM AS HE REALIZES HE GRABBED HIS SON’S LUNCH INSTEAD OF HIS OWN CAMOUFLAGED GUN.”), really, how big does that one image need to be to hit the beat? Not very; certainly not compared to the following moment where the defenseless mobster, armed only with a 400-calorie lunch treat, is gunned down by the time-traveling team of John Wilkes Booth, Squeaky Fromme, and Robot Al Capone 3000. (That’s a full-page image.)
There are at least forty other things vying for “third most important difference,” and we’ll get to those soon, but those are the big two.
Welcome to Trainee Day here at Kung Fu Monkey. Your host, John Rogers, has been kind enough to let me take his monkey out for a spin and get a feel for blogging on a regular basis each Wednesday.
I’m Mark Waid, author of the graphic novels KINGDOM COME, SUPERMAN: BIRTHRIGHT, EMPIRE, JLA: TOWER OF BABEL, and somewhere just short of nine hundred comics stories over the past twenty years. For the past eighteen months, I’ve also been serving as Editor In Chief at BOOM! Studios, an up-and-coming comic-and-graphic-novel publishing company (www.boom-studios.com) that you may have heard of every time John brags about his resumé. And in between, I’ve been at various times a publisher, a line editor, a colorist, a letterer, a designer, a liaison with toy companies and outside media, a proofreader, an artist...I’ve been involved in every phase of comics production short of being the guy who staples the things together. That, I’m saving for my old age. Right now, while I’m still young enough to type, John’s been kind enough to lend me his forum on a regular basis so I can talk craft (and history) (and process) about comics and pass along what I’ve learned about How It’s Done. John swears there’s a demand for this. John also liked Down With Love, so we will see.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing with you excerpts from the various university lectures and how-to’s that I’ve formulated during what I bemusedly refer to as “my career,” as well as throwing out some points for fierce debate (as if the internet consisted of anything else). I’ll also be happy to answer questions as time and space allow. Remember, though, I’m new at this form of communication, so be gentle with m--
Ow.
Goddamn it, somebody already threw something.
And John refuses to let me put up the chicken wire.
From the Blagojevich indictment (h/t Gawker). After you watch tonight's ep of Leverage ... you will marvel in our psychic powers. As our story editor Albert Kim just e-mailed me: "The cartoonishly corrupt governor of Illinois might as well be writing dialogue for us."
Which does hammer home something -- every crime we have a bad guy commit is based on a real, suited bad guy. It's not like we're out manufacturing wrong-doing, or even the excesses of these antagonists. We're just covering aspects of crime and corruption previously left unplumbed, as most crime shows on TV are busy with serial killers and rapists.
Of course they do so because that is a successful formula -- and their success can be explained by Harlan Ellison and Joseph Campbell. Which is the subject for another post.
Yes, it wasn't a bad Monday, particularly the 18-49 numbers. Although now, of course, you have to wait for the live +3 numbers, which don't come in for a week. All our metrics now are ... tricksy. It's worth noting that when I started in this industry, pre-ad-supported cable, anything under a 15-share was instant death.
Anyway, tonight's the regular time-slot, so if you dug the premiere watch us new at 10pm tonight. It was intended as a "soft relaunch" to establish the regular location of the show -- Los Angeles -- the crew's cover story/offices, etc. Tonight also has a spiffy Apollo-Robbins choreographed three-person pickpocket done all in one continuous shot.
Alert viewers will be able to trace most of the writing inspirations from current news events. All the veterans in the hospital scene are actual vets, btw, including our guest star Jake McLaughlin, who was stop-lossed for his fourth year in Iraq. Jake's a ridiculously good actor with a great, quiet presence, and I look forward to being able to brag I hired him early in what will be a very fine career.
Most fun during the shoot? Robert Pine plays one of our villains. That meant CHiPs stories. Wild, wild CHiPS stories. Peyote and a naked Erik Estrada wrestling a bear ...
I'm talking to TNT later about maybe releasing scripts, for the Spec Monkeys and educational purposes. Also, Downey and I shot some two-minute "From the Writer's Room" bumps that ought to be up soon. We're not as interesting as the actors, but we ... squint more. No, seriously, I can't imagine why you'd watch them, but apparently people do.
P.S.: There's also an online game, with a $100,000 grand prize. That money was supposed to pay for my swank office, so I'd like to see one of my readers win it to at least partially justify why I ate lunch in my car for four months. Go get 'em.
Long story short, after watching a friend of mine school yet another newbie comic writer, I got on him about the whole new media thing. Basically: "You are rather good at this, and express your ideas clearly. You should broaden your audience. By which I mean start posting on my site so I can keep my site traffic up while I'm off running TV shows."
Foolishly, he has agreed.
In the next couple weeks, Kung Fu Monkey adds another voice to the site. And seeing how you've put up with my half-assed theorizing, this is a treat. A guy with twenty years of experience in literally every job in comics, a great storyteller in any medium, and a rocking singing voice -- Mark Waid will be posting here as the whim suits him.
This is frankly just cool. First post should be up soon.
An article on how we shot Leverage on the Apple Homepage.
Yes, we made 13 prime time episodes of television with stuff you can buy at your local Apple store. Well, not the 34Tb server. And, of course, the Reds. Odds are, however, you will not be shooting 3 cameras for 14 hours a day.
I will say, however, that lacking the Reds you could do a hell of a lot worse than the Sony XDCAM EX1. There are a quite a few shots in the series shot on this camera, and odds are you'll never notice the difference. They're harder to get now that the EX3 is out (it takes digi-primes) but they're gems.
Apparently Amazon orders are shipping. In my ceaseless quest to become Jack of All Trades, Master of None, I wrote the Feywild chapter for this game supplement. Interesting exercise -- basically creating factions, characters, and locations which may interact in some way in a narrative, but in no predictable pattern. A novel without a protagonist, basically.
Anyway, the WOTC folks seemed happy with my work. If you're of the d20 brethren, the link is below. Oh, and Andy Collins gave me a genial chewing out, so I'll leave the link over in the sidebar for a bit.
Thank God an unelected figurehead appointed by another unelected figurehead from a whole other country managed shut down the entire government of a sovereign nation before things spiralled out of hand and erupted in a mess of, of ... violent parliamentary motions. Why, there could have been shouting.
[Canadian hat] Why we don't reclaim that land, raze the building and build a public park, I have not a goddam clue.[/canadian hat]
On the other hand, I have to sincerely admit -- way to work the refs, Harper. I never liked it when people called him Bush Lite. He was and has always been way, way smarter than President Bush.
Slumdog Millionaire: I don't care how long the drive is. Go. And particularly for screenwriters -- this thing is a swiss watch. Regardless of how you may wind up feeling about the film as a whole (I loved it), there is not a single moment in the story where you don't desperately want to know, have to know, what is going to happen in the next ten seconds. "Open with a mystery", indeed.
Netflix on 360 recommendation-- Planet B-Boy. International break-dancing and father issues.
Yes, the streaming Netflix is my new obsession. Their available films are a weird mix to say the least, but all is forgiven when you discover that they have every season of The Rockford Files available for streaming.
I can watch any episode of Rockford. At any time. Sweet Jesus.
In the Comments -- your most recent best rental/indie viewing pleasure.
The LA Times Hollywood Backlot photo shoot is up. Chris Kane and Mark Sheppard fans in particular will be delighted. The shoot is from the season finale two-parter, "The First David Job" and "The Second David Job".
The Entertainment Weekly review is up, and although I appreciate the B+ grade, anyone who can watch Gina, Beth, Kane and Aldis and not chuckle (the Klingon bit, Ken, the Klingon bit!) has a little dark spot in his soul.
(Yes, I know they choke in Firefox, particularly on Mac. Explorer or Safari will stream them just fine. Considering how extensive the TNT promo has been, it would be petty of me to keep harping on my streaming video obsession. )
I've written before that consoles are the stealth players in the coming media landscape. For the vast majority of Americans, the console is a box attached to your TV, and the computer is a box in the room over there. This has been particularly vexing of late because the house I've moved into in LA is way, way waaaay smaller (and therefore only twice as expensive) than the house I was living in in Ottawa. Among other things, I want to rip my DVD's and leave the physical artifacts in my storage unit. This is not to mention the addiction I've developed consuming TV online (I LIKE three ad-breaks a show).
I've been using PlayOn to stream Hulu and Netflix from my BootCamped iMac to my XBox 360 -- you still need bloody Windows XP for that functionality. However, the new update in the 360 allows direct streaming from Netflix. It's dead simple to set up. As in, "watching my streaming queue movies within four minutes and fifteen seconds" easy. There's a limited amount of TV on Netflix right now, but when/if people smarten up -- or Microsoft cuts a deal with Hulu -- then the "broadcast" landscape is only going to get more chaotic.
Considering the licensing and royalty issues involved, that problem isn't going to get solved soon. However, I'm constantly buffaloed when I talk to fellow Hollywood types about "when the techology arrives". The tech is here. The only thing stopping the consoles from ruling the entertainment landscape is, as far as I can tell, a general unwillingness to get involved in an industry far less profitable, with far more headaches, than their own.
The tone of voice when I talk about these things tend to be a disdainful "Well, sure but how are we supposed to monetize this?" Right question, wrong tone. We. Don't. Have. A. Choice.
All this to say, streaming digital entertainment from your Windows computer to an XBox was always pretty simple but if you had a Mac you had to deal with Connect360. It's a fine program, but the menu system is a bit primitive, and I personally ran into some connectivity issues. So I'd like to recommend Rivet. It installs in a flash, it's about $20, and it works off the internal file structure of your Mac -- so however you arrange your media on your Mac, that's what shows up on the XBox. Managed to set it up within a few minutes, possibly even easier than the Netflix setup. Was watching my ripped Inspector Lynley mystery in no time.
The Somali pirates were the centerpiece of my Pirate Tale for Boom! a couple years back. Studying the fringes of functioning society now, for writing ideas ... well, you know how Gibson said "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed"? That's usually taken as a bromide about Good Shiny Tech. The Somali Pirates are part of the future, too, and it's worth considering how, if and when they might be coming to a neighborhood near you.
Obama's just-appointed FCC transition team co-chair Kevin Werbach has been recognized as verifiable "virtual worlds nut" and World of Warcraft Level 70 Tauren Shaman Supernovan Jenkins ...
... and as right thinking players, he is for the Horde.
The Xbox generation is coming faster than you think.
Fun Fact: At one point in this season of Leverage, you will hear "For the Horde". Un-ironically.
You know, the expansion's out just as I hit hiatus. I guess loading it up again, just trying out the new build wouldn't hurt ...
Occasionally new, worthwhile charities cross my email account. Survivor Corps is dedicated to creating locally-based community support for returning veterans who are dealing with emotional issues after the end of their deployment. Physical injuries are one thing, but it's crucial that we help men and women who have seen and experienced the unimaginable re-integrate successfully back into their post-deployment lives.
There's a tragic culture of shame around suicide and depression in this country, making it very hard for people to reach out for help without feeling as if they've failed in some way. The idea that veterans will be dealing primarily with other veterans with shared experiences is a great way of mitigating that vulnerability.
Not everyone needs this help, of course, but those who do need it desperately. I know that times are tough, but if you can, please swing by and toss the price of a large pizza in the pot for them. Thanks.
The same day I'm reminded that our version of Blue Beetle is the first co-star with Batman in the premiere of the funky new animated series Batman: The Brave and the Bold, premiering tonight at 8 pm --
Wow. It's almost as if basing your entire business model around a series of must-buy big event crossovers in a market with limited purchasing resources hurts your midlist.
Although I've gotten some outraged e-mails from fans, I have to say this isn't unexpected. Both DC and Marvel are in a weird place right now -- are they publishing companies in a dying market or IP companies in a growing one? The answers to these questions demand different strategies, neither of which are necessarily the best circumstances for the creative participants.
Time to go creator-owned, and digitally distributed. Because that's the only solution that makes sense for our side of the equation.
There's a reason I like comic books so much, and plan on working quite a bit on digital distribution in the upcoming year. It relates somewhat to this essay by Cory Doctorow, discussing how new media forms are evolving from the net. Cory focuses primarily on video, and how commercial structure often bends stories into forms which don't necessarily serve to best tell the story. Although I'm pretty comfortable working within that structure, no TV writer will deny that he's said "Dammit, I wish there wasn't an act break here," only slightly less often than "Jesus, did that PA go to fucking Vegas to pick up lunch? I'm starving."
On the business side, there are a million great stories out there that aren't being told, because of a.)the high cost of breaking into the business of storytelling in mass media and b.) the high cost of producing and distributing those stories once you've broken in.
My point being -- a lot of those great untold stories make the best sense told in a serialized nonstandard page length, with accompanying art. When I was working on BlueBeetle, the final two issues originally plotted out to 50 pages. A tight fifty pages. They had to fit into 44. Now, setting aside that it's always better to edit, we can still ask -- was the book better for losing those six pages of character and story? I don't know. But it seems damn silly to bend storytelling to a format sold almost exclusively in low-attendance, often creepy specialty shops scattered across the nation.
Even if it's a fool's errand, I'd rather bend my storytelling to fit boxes that almost everyone has in their living room or back pocket.
Will you get even the paltry tens of thousands of paying customers that comics now get? I don't know. But without the publishing overhead, you may not need that many. Let's put it this way -- stripping out distribution costs and our share of the rent for those nice DC offices in Mahattan, BlueBeetle could have cost fifty cents an issue at its worst sales level, and still paid Rafael and myself more than we made on the run of the book.
Blah blah, just start wrapping your head around the Coasean Floor, while we start poking around with format and distribution. My goal here, by the way, is slightly different than most peoples. I don't want to figure out a way to build a company around this format. I want to figure out a way for a writer in Arkansas and an artist in Cairo to tell stories for a living.
In the Comments, your beefs with comics and your bright thoughts on non-traditional storytelling - including "Why there's no way this could work." Bonus points for bringing up hostage-ware and a patronage system.
The writers' board on the last day: Two-part season finale, 225 scenes*, 100 pages shot in 14 days over roughly eight multi-set locations. The season finale is ... biggish.
Yes, that is Mark Sheppard yelling at a couple hundred extras outside an art gallery we built from the ground up in Pasadena. Because that's how we Rolo.
Once I'm through all 2000+ emails in the mailbox and my bodyclock jams back (night shoots, bloody hell), we're back to normal. Thanks to all the subscribers and readers who put up with the brown-out. Hopefully soon I'll be adding a new contributor or two here to keep volume up on the whole new media/geek culture conversation.
And, for the record, since it's popping up on IMDB anyway, and people are getting it wrong -- the first episodes before the New Year break are:
"The Nigerian Job" "The Homecoming Job" "The Two Horse Job" "The Miracle Job."
* That sound you hear is every television 1st AD in Hollywood throwing up in their mouth at those numbers. Our 1st, Paul Bernard, is a god among men.
Second: wardrobe was strangely retro today, very 40's French Resistance Fighter and Cigarette Girl. Or as the photo's known around here -- "Bill Cunningham, you're welcome."
One of my favorite little Chunks o' History is The Great Disappointment. Short version: William Miller uses hints from the Bible to predict a specific day for the return of Jesus -- October 22, 1844. Thousands of people waited, some climbing up on their roofs so as not to miss the Arrival...
Unfortunately, Jesus decided to hit Skybar instead. His movement ridiculed, his followers dispersed into other sects (including the Seventh Day Adventists), Miller coined this day "the Great Disappointment."
I bring this up only because I've recently received batches of e-mails asking how I can be compliant in the coming socialist/Marxist government of Barack Obama. That's odd enough, but the McCain campaign has actively used the idea that Obama is some sort of closet Marxist, or open socialist. Not only that, a lot of the rhetoric by mainstream conservative leaders has been about how America will be fundamentally changed if Obama wins. I don't think I'm far off in pointing out that a lot of the mainstream conservative rhetoric here is downright apocalyptic. A lot -- not all, but a lot -- of McCain/Palin supporters are utterly convinced that Barack Obama's America will be the socialist wasteland they've been fearing their entire adult lives.
So what happens when ... it doesn't happen?
Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein can disagree all they want, but when push comes to shove, most of Obama's policies are magnificently boring. I had a friend just today say "But John, you're in that top 1%! Your taxes are going to go up!" To which I replied: "Strangely, I can live with the idea of my taxes going from 36% to 39.5%. That's not exactly nationalizing the means of production."
Obama's health care plan was the most conservative of the three major Democratic candidates' plans, the only one that left the insurance companies not only intact but with a major role in providing guaranteed coverage. If you have employer-based health care, your life will not change one jot. As noted, taxes will go down for the middle class and jump to from 36% to 39.5% for the top -- and frankly, that ain't gonna fund the re-education camps. His proposed capital gains tax rate is lower than Ronald Reagan's.
Supreme Court appointments will probably insure Roe v. Wade survives, but that's just a stasis from the 70's. Gay rights will remain the provenance of individual states. I personally wouldn't mind harsher prosecution of churches that blatantly violate the separation of Church and State, but frankly that's unlikely. Evolution issues will continue to be resolved at the state court level ... in short, barring unspeakable terrorist acts or some sort of natural disaster, the next four to eight years are going to look a lot like right now, but with more science guys hanging around in government offices and nominally fewer closeted-gay sex scandals in politics.
All to say -- what happens when the Socialist Nightmare never arrives? I mean, it's been a useful shadow threat for years, a lurking monster that lost a little power after the fall of the Soviet Union, but still had some spark thanks to several generations raised with a primal reaction to the very word. It was the last big wrench in the toolbox, and not one you wanted to pull out ot often.
But the best monsters are always the ones just offscreen. In their thrashing for purchase against Senator Obama, Senator McCain's campaign may have over-reached. An awful lot of conservative leaders have declared that an Obama presidency is October 22, 1844 in the great battle of freedom versus socialism. Interesting to see what happens when the people who've been fed a steady diet of terror images -- state-run medical care with month-long waits, abortion kiosks in the mall and forced gay-friendly kindergarten education -- encounter instead a higher minimum wage, guaranteed health care, and the occasional bit of science-based policy.
This, indeed was why McCain's campaign could never score a serious hit. Despite the cries of "Marxism" and waving the bloody shirt of 60's radicalism, Senator Obama has cultivated a studiously boring policy presence. Chris and I were talking in the writer's room the other day, about the 30 minute ad buy that aired tonight. Chris was wondering what it was supposed rto accomplish.
"Nothing," I said. "In the best possible scenario, it's so boring that people turn it off halfway through. He's already got the people he inspired. What he has to do now is get people who used to be uncomfortable with the idea of a black president, and make them so comfortable that they're even bored with the idea."
" 'Obama's not like those other black people.' He's like Rob down in Accounting.' "
"Precisely."
I think the same thing will happen now, with the Socialist door the McCain campaign opened. Eight years from now "Socialist!" will be met with "There you go again."
