Chained To The Keyboard

Mr John Rogers, the fabled Kung Fu Monkey, recently launched a new meme into the cold void of space. It floated there for a time, before latching onto my psyche and forcing me to automatically type the following list.

The question?

Explain America to someone from somewhere else by giving them 10 movies to watch.

A quick explanation: With his list, John seems to be trying to cover all the bases - a film about war, a film about class, another about race, etc. I’ve taken a different tack, possibly because I’ve never been to America and therefore couldn’t care less about trying to comprehensively represent it.

I’ve simply listed the films that I feel build an image of a nation both beautiful and terrible. Here we go:

King of New York.

The Godfather.

Groundhog Day.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Apocalypse Now.

Forbidden Planet.

Star Wars.

Raging Bull.

Chinatown.

Dr. Strangelove.

And as an extra bonus feature, I’ve decided to add an optional portion to the meme:

Explain America to someone from somewhere else by giving them 10 television shows to watch.

The Twilight Zone.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The Simpsons.

Deadwood.

Twin Peaks.

Freaks and Geeks.

Star Trek: The Original Series.

Six Feet Under.

The X-Files.

The Sopranos.

‘Killing your children’ is a very over-used phrase in screenwriting. It is, however, still extremely apt, which I suppose qualifies it as a truism.

What I’m getting at is this: The feedback on my episode wasn’t as glowing as I would have liked. At first glance, I interpreted it as ‘cut out all your new ideas and subplots and go back to the outline we gave you’. This after the meeting in which they asked us - no, implored us - to ‘challenge’ them, ‘bring new ideas to the table’, etc. Apparently my new ideas weren’t quite what they were looking for.

I raged and I fumed a little bit. I complained to anyone who would listen that my artistic ideas were being ignored, but what the hell, I’d write whatever The Boss wanted. He’s my employer, I should just let go of my ego and get on with the job.

And you know what? I did it and I’m damn happy about it.

Once I actually sat down with a clear head and reread the feedback from the Boss, I could see exactly what he was getting at. He wasn’t saying ‘this idea is wrong’. He was saying Fine, but tighten this subplot, replace this character, trim out the fat and the whole thing works a lot better. And he was right. My rewrite became tighter, funnier, more coherent. That idea that worked fine in the breakdown wasn’t so great when implemented. By working to someone else’s specifications, my inner critic went into overdrive and cut out everything that wasn’t totally right.

So accountability is kinda fun. Writing for someone else can actually be liberating. Like a deadline or a bill that needs paying it makes you focus, makes you sharp, makes you ruthless. It takes you out of the blind reverie of creation that the lone artist immerses himself in. It’s a good thing.

Try it some time. Kill your kids. You’ll be glad you did.

Some Maintenance: Thanks to Red Right Hand and Shouting Into The Wind for linking to me, and Hello to anyone who just came over on those links.

And finally, today is the anniversary of arguably the most important day in history. Happy Constantine Day to you all!

Warren Leonard, of the excellent blog The Screenwriting Life, wanted to know about my TV job out here in Australia.

Well, it’s a long and tragic story, but what it really boils down to is this: The Australian film and television industries are irrevocably broken.

About a half hour’s drive from my house there stands a full, operational movie studio equipped with six enormous sound stages and miles of production office space. Local legend has it that Dino De Laurentiis set it up in the late 70s, then promptly abandoned it, leaving the state government with a gigantic white elephant of a site.

Ever since then, we’ve been stuck in a continuous cycle of rotating fortunes that goes something like this:

Phase One: Big American film production swoops in, takes over the entire studio complex and employs everyone in 100km radius for a few months. Our politicians opine to the media that this heralds ‘a new golden age of movie production for our state’.

Phase Two: Big American film packs up and leaves. The studios stand empty and silent for a year or so. Professional crew members get fed up and move to Sydney instead.

Phase Three: See Phase One.

And we don’t even get the decent American films down here. Far from it. In the last three years, our biggest claims to fame have been House of Wax, Ghost Ship and Peter Pan.

So what about our homegrown films? Well I don’t want to be mean or anything, but they’re uniformly fucking awful. They’re also completely unmarketable. At least British and Canadian films can actually be sold to the U.S. market - nobody likes watching films with Australian accents in them. Hell, even we don’t like them.

And the plight of the Australian TV industry is just as depressing. Just like the U.S., we’re hit with a constant cavalcade of worthless reality television. Unlike the U.S., we have no recourse to excellent cable channels like Showtime or HBO, just a continuous stream of valueless crap. Every time one of the braver networks tries to produce an original drama show, the premise is always something painfully provincial and yawn-inducing - like a sheep farmer and his three daughters and their dog called Bluey, trying to find their way in a sleepy Outback town, with lots of shots of Ayers Rock in the background - and it’s mercifully cancelled after two weeks.

This cannot go on. Someone needs to buck the system and break this trend of awfulness.

Which brings me back to my original point, and it’s about time too because you all fell asleep somewhere around ‘Dino de Laurentiis’. The show I’m working on is different. It’s so different, in fact, that it is the first children’s show in Australian broadcast history to reach the production stage without government funding. That’s right, it’s completely independent - a very gutsy move in such a tiny industry. The creator/showrunner tells the story of how he was actually physically attacked at a producer’s conference a few months ago by a woman screaming that she’d been trying to get her show concept made for 10 years, and how dare he come in and make his show before hers.

What’s more, there’s not a trace of Australiana in any part of the production. No landmarks, no colloquialisms, no nothing. The voice actors are actually using American accents, because that is the only sure way to make it globally marketable.

Perhaps another writer with a bigger patriotic (or idealistic) streak than myself would be having all sorts of ethical dilemmas right now. Me, I’m jumping up and down with excitement. The fact is, the creators of this show are beholden to no one but themselves (and their investors), which means that there is very little chance the show will get cancelled, and a very large chance it will go on to be a major success. Also, they can afford to pay me properly.

So how did I get this dream job, you ask? Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: If you’re trying to get on an animated kid’s show, send them an Invader Zim spec. Turns out most animation people are huge Zim fans.

UPDATE: Denis McGrath of Dead Things On Sticks addresses the subject of my previous post (yesterday’s) in a manner far wittier than my own. Clearly, he is trying to make me look bad.

UPDATE PART DEUX: A friend of mine recently addressed the issue of Australian cinema’s crappiness in a rather excellent essay. To give you a taste:

“Not one of these “issues” is treated with any dignity whatsoever: rather, they’re simply approached as checkpoints that need to be hit by filmmakers in order to obtain financing from our conservative government funding bodies. “Your film doesn’t have a token homosexual character in it? No autistic hobos? Nothing about Reconciliation? Well, then, no soup for you!””

Oh, snap. Yeah, he went there.