I Drink Your Script-shake

Came in dead last in the LEVERAGE Oscar pool, so you may wish to take any industry advice I give you with a grain of salt. (What, we're going to let Hal Holbrook die without his Oscar? You heartless bastards.)

I have, in front of me, 113 scripts to read. Well, virtually in front of me. We're using Box.net to upload the samples as pdf's, so the responsible parties can read them and funnel feedback to our redoubtable Writer's Assistant, who then collates the information on a cunning spreadsheet and schedules follow-up meetings accordingly. A good chunk of these folk are for mid-level and up, meaning they're starting with better credits than you. Assuming, of course, you got an agent to submit you into the pile. All this for 12 episodes on a cable network. Times have changed.

So how do you claw your way to, if not the top, the upper middle of this slab? I'm beginning to evolve a new bit of advice now that I'm actually on the receiving end. Write a spec show that's on the air for agenting, and a pilot for staffing.

Spec shows, if they're written properly, are painfully particular to the show in question. Your entire job when writing a spec episode is to show that you can learn and adapt to a show's specific rhythms, making you a valuable addition to any staff. (You never spec the show you're trying to get hired on. But you know that.)

The problem is, it's not ten years ago, and there's not a damn bit of guarantee that you're speccing a show the show-runner watches. Ten years ago, if you specced one of the top ten or fifteen shows, you were speccing based on some sort of roughly shared cultural canvas. Now -- once you drop out of the top ten shows, the next fifty or so all smear out to roughly a ten share. One in ten people watch the show you're speccing, odds are, and showrunners are often even more eclectic in their television tastes.

It doesn't help that many of the top one hours in particular, the CSI's etc, are all enemies of character development. They're elegant story machines, to be true, but I usually wind up pulling a writer in when they make me enjoy one reading of the procedurals despite myself, by slipping in a nice bit of character conflict under the Clue Machine.

These skills do convince fine Agenting Humans that you are employable, and are so valuable skills. But as soon as you have an agent and can reasonably write a pilot without making a total ass of yourself -- do so. This not only displays for some poor script-buried showrunner your raw tools, what you can do without both the constraints and bracing beams of an established show, but it's a cleaner reading experience. A whole meal, if you will. I now know what kind of stories you're going to pitch, what character beats you find amusing, what kind of dialogue you naturally gravitate to, what relationship dynamics you enjoy exploring ... this also helps if you're coming off a show, and you want to work on something a bit different. I never pass on a writer based on credits, but some people certainly move scripts up or down in their reading order depending on them.

Also, two samples is kind of the minimum cover charge for specs, these days. You want to show a bit of range, and just in case the pinheaded showrunner doesn't respond to your first opus, hit them with the change-up.

Oh, and one more note, for established writers -- it wouldn't kill you, if your agent's submitting a produced episode, to slide a character/plot summary page in there. Takes thirty seconds.

Good luck.

Vote the Goddam Issues, or I Will Release the Robot Bees Prematurely

Right then. As I've now had the 1476th person say "Sure Obama's a great speaker, but when's he going to talk about specific policy?" and I've managed not to strangle anyone, I will take a break from the sixty scripts sitting next to my desk and waste a millisecond of blog-time.

So you're saying you haven't seen Obama talk specifics in his speeches? Hmm, what speech exactly? The complete stump speech you saw on the nightly news? Oh, that's right, you never get more than 15 seconds of ANYONE'S speech on the nightly news. You haven't seen more than thirty seconds of McCain's stump speech either, I'll wager, and yet you don't doubt he's just chock full o'policies. He is Very Serious, as the whinging reporters with Daddy Issues will tell you again and again.

The Barack Obama "Issues" Page.

The John McCain "Issues" Page.

There. Make sure you click on the "Continue Reading" links for the good stuff. Policy recommendations to keep you going all night long. Sexy cap-and-trade chatter. And I will continue to link to them twice a week until the election.

For what little it's worth, when John McCain goes back to being the guy who opposed the Bush "tax cuts without spending cuts" in 2001 and 2003 and opposed torture, I'll begin considering him seriously. As long as he's in the "Tax Fairy" club, unh-uh.

Geekerati live podcast

For what it's worth, I'm doing an interview tonight here and they're taking call-ins at

Call-in Number: (646) 478-5041.

Feel free to harass with questions about, well, the usual stuff we chat about here. Except, errrr, pulpier.

Freak Angels

As I circle in on the Issus stuff Bill is talking about , a reminder that Warren Ellis is doing free on-the-internet comic craftmanship.

Class Act

That clean-cut "Barry" over middle-right in the lineup -- I remember when you were part of a magic comedy trio, mister. Doooon't get cocky. And the other clean cut guy, Tom, was the one for whom we invented the dialogue internal (AS IF TO CHIMP). One of "The Three Seamus's" on the COSBY staff -- myself; my co-creator on LEVERAGE, Chris Downey; and Tom. At one point Bill would want a writer on the set, and as we were interchangeable Irish guys, he would say [COSBY VOICE] "Send in one of the Seamus's!" [/COSBY VOICE]

Actually, there's a couple "kids" in there who I remember as young comics. Man, they managed their career MUCH better than I did.

Seriously though, it's nice to see your friends do well. I'm literally sitting here grinning. Good to have you back and on the side of frikkin' justice. Because Colbert is, in the end, our Paladin.

... and I Could Move the World

The main reason for the silence has been this --

TNT has given the greenlight to the thrilling, action-packed drama series LEVERAGE, starring Oscar(R) winner Timothy Hutton (Ordinary People, Nero Wolfe) and executive-produced by Dean Devlin (Independence Day, TNT's The Librarian) and John Rogers (Cosby). The series follows a team of thieves, hackers and grifters who act as modern-day Robin Hoods, taking revenge against those who use power and wealth to victimize others. TNT has ordered 13 episodes of LEVERAGE, which comes to the network from Devlin's Electric Entertainment. Devlin makes his directorial debut on the pilot, which was written by Rogers (Transformers) and Chris Downey (The King of Queens). LEVERAGE is slated to premiere on TNT later this year.

Not that I could work on it until the strike was over ("Hey John, we finished the final cut and we're going to testing! If you could see it, you'd love it!" " ... thanks.") but I knew the pickup was coming, and I was getting my shit in order so I could haul back to LA at the end of this week. Back to the day job.

Which, ironically, means more updates here, because I tend to blog-write when stuck on other writing -- writing I didn't do during the Strike but for the stabs at the Doomed Pulp novel. So come Sat/Sunday, some thoughts on the Strike resolution, some new media presentation software, and how the XBOX will be your home entertainment system instead of Apple TV. Also, I'll finish up my set reports from shooting the pilot, despite losing all the pics. Pity I couldn't do a behind the scenes on the pilot cutting and testing, but hey, Strikesylvania.

The tone of the show, by the way, is a bit lighter than it comes across in the promo announcement. We were very specifically aiming for a Rockford Files/Ocean's 11 vibe. We'll see what you think once we come up with 12 more impossible crimes and heists. Oy.

Welcome to the Biosphere, Kiddo

See, that's the way to do it -- go tech free for five days to decompress, miss all the Super Tuesday bullshit, and return to find that the indomitable Alice and her sidekick Cory have delivered unto the world a daughter, Poesy.

A kid whose Mom is a on-line game world expert and former professional FPS player, and whose Dad is, well, Cory ... I do hope when she's 20 and leading the cyber-enhanced wetware troops through hyperspace battle against the invading meme-bots, she looks kindly on we true humans who wished her well way back when. Luchy kis, and lucky parents.

Blogging resumes when my inboxes are cleared.