Monday 3 August 2009

Hollywood Babble On & On #339: Who Needs Writers?

The Writer's Guild of America is filled with righteous anger because the Emmy Awards decided to drop the scribe related categories from the telecast. Apparently they're just not worthy of ever appearing on the same stage as Kathy Griffin who will be accepting her award for My Life On The D-List.

The Emmy's argument is that the writers aren't telegenic. A lot of them are balding, hairy, overweight, underweight, too short, too tall, or just plain fugly.

Okay, that might be true, not all writers can be as devilishly handsome as yours truly, but the Emmys are not supposed to be about how pretty people are, it's supposed to be about giving ultimately worthless trophies for what a narrow group of Emmy voters consider paragons of excellence at the moment they fill out the ballot.

But try telling that to Emmy organizers and they'd call you crazy.

Why?

Because they think like Hollywood, and Hollywood thinks that all you need are the celebrities. The people who make their careers possible are just ballast on good ship Celebrity.

That's why actors who couldn't sell lead lined underpants in Chernobyl, let alone a film, get paid in the multiple millions, while a writer who scribed multiple blockbuster smash hits is considered lucky if they get 1/5 of that actor gets.

It's also why the networks love reality TV, it's everything they ever wanted. It turns people into celebrities without a whiff of creativity or talent, which costs money, and those reality stars rarely have any success outside their original show, and promptly disappear, to be replaced instantaneously by a new crop, so hardly anyone gets a chance to become expensive.

It's the diet version of fame, and if they had their way, all TV would be like that.

3 comments:

  1. I thought the problem was they nominated four Mad Men scripts.

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  2. If they let John Hamm accept the award for them, they'd get on TV, regardless of being a cable show.

    Though every time I hear his name I think of our grandfatherly former premiere of Nova Scotia, and not an actor.

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  3. The problem with TV is that the four nets combined (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) get 12.6% of adults 18-49. Period. That's pathetic.

    All the cheap reality tv won't fix the problem -- not enough hit shows.

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