House of Eratosthenes

The Twentieth Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award goes to Bullwinkle, commenting on something I care nothing about and neither does he…

Striking Writers Guild member Steve Young:

“There’s a belief in Hollywood that at 28 the brain starts to die and you’re no longer funny or hip. If you’re waiting for the phone to ring when the strike is over, it may not. A writer is like an NFL running back, it’s a short career,” Young added.

That’s why I couldn’t be forced to make myself care at gunpoint. By the time 28 episodes of what the vast majority of these writers turn out I’ve managed to miss 28 episodes. I have the feeling that anyone who watches 28 episodes of nearly anything was braindead long ago.

Here’s a novel idea for the striking writers –

You want more money? Write something worth watching. Your last strike was a miserable failure and this one probably will be too. Striking is basically holding your product for ransom and it only works if someone misses what you produce. Kidnappers rarely send their demands to the victim’s inlaws. [emphasis mine]

That is such a strikingly perfect description of my own sentiments about television in general: Like those of a father whose daughter married the wrong fella. Son-in-law is someone who is just kind of…there. I tolerate him. And if the women of the house are around, there’s going to be a social order that demands, among other things, that I put on this charade of liking him. But maybe I don’t. And if he gets kidnapped and a ransom note shows up? Heh.

It’s been a week or two since I’ve seen any situation described so aptly. Writer’s strike…pfeh. These are the same folks responsible for that jackrabbit-pace dialog in CSI, Law & Order, Gilmore Girls and West Wing?

I just rented my pilot episode disc from Netflix for Heroes; it is my latest half-hearted “attempt” to stay up-to-speed with what all “the guys” are talkin’ about, a social endeavor that has received nothing beyond the most casual attention from me since the fifth grade. And I’m not even putting out an attempt here, really. All that office banter finally got my curiosity going. The guys were asking my take, and I had to report that while the acting and directing were superb, the writing left a great deal to be desired.

But this says something about the writing profession in general. I didn’t expect too much in the first place…I did, however, expect my imagination to be captured. The bad writing just got in the way.

Maybe I’ll give it another shot down the road. For now…the subject turned to some exciting stuff happening in the “now,” and then one of the participants politely interrupted it for my benefit because “spoilers” were about to be discussed. I waived my privileges to this injunction and let them proceed. I could tell if I ever started caring about this show, it would be quite aways down the road.

I really hate bad dialog. A lot. I understand people in real life talk to each other in ways you aren’t going to see it done on the boob tube. They interrupt, cut each other off, pursue parallel monologues, misunderstand each other…throwing that into a TV show or a movie, would add nothing.

But I would simply suggest, if you’ve got a couple of characters, and the purpose of a scene is to reveal two things about one of them…or three things…or four things…go ahead and make the scene longer than thirty seconds. Because otherwise, bad dialog becomes something unavoidable.

“You’ve got to come to terms with the fact that Dad died, and stop beating yourself up with it!” “I can’t help it, because I have nightmares every night for the last seven years, ever since my wife left me!” “I know, man, it’s like your Dad’s ghost is haunting you and you can’t find peace, but you got to try!” “Well I know one thing, I’ll never rest until I fulfill his dream of finding a cure for the disease that killed my sister when I was nine and she was six…even though I hate him so much, even in death!” “You see her in your daughter’s eyes, don’t you?” “Only when that bitch lets me. Supervised visitation and all. Well, gotta go, my AA meeting is in ten minutes. I’m 180 days clean tonight.” Ugh.

You know that scene where Michael Corleone tries to buy out Moe Greene? I clocked it once — it’s over five minutes long. In screenwriter land, that’s like an eon. That’s like Charlemagne, to yesterday. Was it boring? Anybody feel like skipping out in the middle of it for a potty break? Maybe that was the perfect time to fish another cold one out of the fridge? Didn’t think so. Did it sound like real people talking to each other? You’d better believe it. How many things did you learn during those five minutes about Moe, about Fredo, about Michael, about Vito…about the relationship between the Corleone family and the rival families in New York, and elsewhere?

Well, that isn’t fair I guess. Five minutes is quite impractical, and for reasons stated above you can’t always have everything resemble real life. So how about…the two scenes where Belloq starts psychoanalyzing people? Not realistic dialog by a damn sight, but certainly excellent dialog nonetheless. Motivations are established. Feelings are manifested. Characters are built. The story…proceeds.

See, it can be done.

Gosh, that’s a rambling for something I’m not supposed to care about; actually, that’s not what it is at all. I do care. I’m writing about the fella she should’ve married.

I agree in general, although (and I probably have to take my “Man” card out and show it before I say this or it might be taken the wrong way…) I actually liked the first two seasons of the Gilmore Girls. I thought the dialogue was great. It was the soap opera plot that eventually killed it for me. Bleah!

Yeah, my wife sucked me to it when she started watching it, and — well, it didn’t hurt that the two main characters were, shall we say, … uh… oh well, no point in trying to dance around it … hot. But the dialogue was the best thing about it. The story line, not so much.
I haven’t seen it in years and I don’t miss it.

Frankly, I don’t give two hoots about the writer’s strike in that it does not affect me. My favorite shows on TV are, to my pleasant surprise, a new breed of reality shows (as in, NOT The Real World, NOT Survivor, NOT any show designed mainly for us to watch people bicker at each other — oooooh, the conflict!) but things like Survivorman.

And even with that, frankly, I wouldn’t be terribly upset if TV in general went away altogether. Even movies. I like TV well enough. I like movies, too. But I have other things to do. I have a guitar. I have books. And a jillion things around the house that need doing. Friends. Food. Beer. The things that matter in life. No writers required.

That being said, as far as the writers go, I say go for it. If more money is being made off of your product you have a right to re-negotiate the terms of your work and maybe get paid a little more. Might not work. Might even backfire. But go ahead and try. Tell me how it turns out.

I’m going to get a sandwich and a beer. Call my buddy and see if he wants to go build a fire and smoke a pipe.
- philmon | 11/08/2007 @ 11:04
I think that commercials and censorship are the two most limiting factors preventing more good writing on T.V. Segments of shows have to be written to fit into artificial windows between ads, so no long segments are practical. The sponsor has to agree with everything in the show, so no free speech. No language deemed objectionable can be written, so little in the way of realistic dialogue. Also, I wonder if writers try to make the shows so lousy that the commercials will look good and draw more attention. The Geico Lizard is a better character than most others I’ve seen on T.V.
- hungrymother | 11/08/2007 @ 11:33

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Best Sentence XXThursday, November 8th, 2007

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Thursday, November 8th, 2007