Hollywood Babble On & On #1145: Shocking Showrunner Shortage

The networks and cable channels are putting together their new shows for the upcoming TV season and there's a scramble for the shrinking supply of show runners.

"What's a showrunner?" you ask furrowing your brow in a feeble attempt to understand.

Don't worry, I'll explain.

A showrunner is a chimeric creature that can be found in writer's rooms and production offices all over the world of television, it's part writer, part producer, and survives by consuming a steady stream of caffeine, greasy foods, and the tears of younger writers.

That make it any clearer?

Okay, I'll go into a bit more detail.

A showrunner, who usually has the title of Executive Producer, is the person in charge of getting the show written and getting it made. A sort of Chief Creative and Executive Officer for the show.

The showrunner is firstly a writer, and their duties begin in the writer's room. The writer's room is a long room with a long conference table that smells like coffee, junk food, and yeti sweat.

In this room the showrunner and the writers flesh out their ideas for characters and the season in general, pitch their ideas for episodes, then the episode ideas that are accepted are broken down into "acts" and "scenes" and writing assignments are handed out.

The showrunner then makes sure that the scripts are finished on time, handles or oversees rewrites, and then oversees the shooting of the episodes.

The shooting of the episodes involves budgeting, scheduling, hiring, casting, and the hundreds of other little jobs that need to be done when putting together a professional grade television show.

Now the showrunner will have deputies to assist with a lot of their duties, but when it comes to important decisions the buck, and the blame, stops at the showrunner's heavily laden desk.

So why is there currently a shortage of showrunners?

Four reasons.

1. APPRENTICESHIP: Showrunner is not a job that can be taught in school. It is a job that has to be learned through experience. To become a showrunner you must begin at the very bottom, working on different shows and under different showrunners, and hopefully you will learn the best writing and management techniques from them for when the time comes for you to run your own show. But they can't get people to come in to learn after the...

2. STAFF WRITERS SLASHING: About 10 years ago the studios slashed the number of "staff writers" that could be hired for each writer's rooms. 

Staff Writers are literally 1 step above assistant and are the lowest figures in the writer's room totem pole, but unlike assistants actually have a very slim chance at possibly writing, or at least contributing to an episode. The position is usually not paid for by the show, but by the studio, and has a small weekly pittance to keep them fed and sheltered as opposed to being paid by the episode. The purpose of the job was to foster talent by getting their foot in the door at an age when they can learn the business from the bottom and work their way up.

When those posts were slashed the few remaining staff writer jobs were used to fulfill diversity hiring rules, or passed on to friends of friends, or giving a boost to an assistant. Otherwise it turned down the faucet that kept the pool of talent full, something that's essential when it's being drained by…

3. CABLE TV: If a cable channel wants to find an audience it must do more than run cheap reruns and reality shows. It must produce its own dramas and comedies and they really have to bring their "A-Game" if they're going to be seen above the herd. All those shows on all those channels all require showrunners. It used to be that you'd just pass those duties on to the creator of the show, but there's a bit of a complication these days that I call the…

4. FEATURE FILM TO TV MIGRATION: A lot of  people who, ten years ago, would have spent their careers completely in feature films are now getting into television. 

If you're a feature person who creates a premise, writes and/or directs a pilot and that show sells and has a good run, you not only get a credit, but a paycheque for as long as that show is being watched by someone somewhere in almost any fashion.

That's a pretty sweet deal, and offers a level of creative freedom and financial security you're not going to get in feature films.

But there's a catch.

Most of the feature film people don't want to give up their feature film careers to become full time showrunners of a TV series. They need experienced and skilled TV people to do that job for them.

So, what can Hollywood do to solve this problem?

First bring back more staff writers, start training and apprentice programs for promising young people to learn the ins and outs of show running, and stop treating everything like a closed shop where you have to be almost born into the industry to get a job.

Then you might be able to start filling the empty slots. It'll take time, and until the market balances itself out Hollywood will have to pay through the nose for the top tier people, but it's their own fault.

The Basics: Making A TV Series...

The networks are picking up pilots all over the place for the next TV season, and since I explained the Basics of TV Pilots a while back, I'll take a moment to hop us to the next level.

Let's put on our imagination hats and imagine that you just sold a pilot to a major network, and now have the greenlight to take it to series.

What next?

That's a pretty big question, and the short answer is "a hell of a lot!" but I'll go into a little more detail here, so let's get started in no particular order...

1. CASTING: Most of the casting of the series regulars is done during the making of the pilot. However, when you're going to series, you have to make any changes that are necessary, and lock down the ones you want to keep with standard seven season network TV contracts.

2. STAFFING: It literally takes an army to put together a television series. In the technical department it's usually the department heads that hire their own crews, but when you're the executive producer/show-runner you have to hire the writers.

TV is a writer-dominant medium. In television directors are more or less disposable, since they usually have to imitate the visual and dramatic style established in the pilot*. However, it's the writers who give the show its voice, and narrative style. Since the show-runner also acts as the show's head-writer this part has to be very carefully done to get the best people for the type and style of show they're working on.

3. PLOTTING: While most new shows fail, some do succeed, and the networks fully expect your show to last at least seven years whether it does or not.

That means you need to know what the hell will be happening so that you don't fire all your best shots in season one. Having a great first season, followed by a formless, aimless, second season that drives viewers away. Remember, the key to success in television is to get enough seasons under your belt to have residuals coming in from the reruns into infinity.

This also goes hand in hand with a lot of...

4. PLANNING: As I've explained before being a producer is essentially a job planning and coordinating dozens, if not hundreds of factors. Budgets need to be  calculated, schedules worked out, actors, extras, facilities and equipment all have to be booked. Of course, all the planning in the world won't save you from lots of...

5. FIGHTING: Networks are large, bureaucratic institutions where there are only a handful of real decision makers, but dozens of people who think they know your vision better than you do, and they can make your life a living hell.

You have to do battle with them, or watch your hard-boiled procedural detective series get reworked into a sitcom about a sass talking robot living in suburbia. However, you need some strategy. You need to know who not only pulls the strings at the network, but who can cut them as well. You need to make allies in positions of influence, and you need the knowledge to pick your battles.

Not even success can protect you, just ask the show-runners for The Walking Dead.

You see, television is inherently risky. Every year the networks spend hundreds of millions of dollars on pilots, the bulk of which go nowhere. That means they need the shows that do make it to air, to really connect with an audience, and even that's a crap-shoot. Gold can sink, and shit can float, despite what the marketing people say.

And that optimistic note ends the basics of starting a TV series.

*If you direct the pilot of a successful & long running show, you get royalties & residuals from that show for as long as it's on the air somewhere.

Who Does What?: The Film Composer

Music has always had an important role in the history of film. Even during the silent era there would be live music playing alongside the movie, ranging from a full orchestra to just a guy and an out of tune upright piano. The film's background music or "score" is an essential ingredient of a well made movie and I'm going to take some time to try to explain who does it and how it's done.

Now the time a composer gets involved in a film differs with each film. The usual time is during the beginning stages of post-production, where movie's director discusses their plans and ideas for the film's music with the composer.

All worship the Mighty Ennio!

Sometimes a composer gets involved much earlier. A classic story involves Italian director Sergio Leone and his musical maven the legendary Ennio Morricone. In his later films Leone would give Morricone a copy of the script long before shooting began. Morricone would then write music for certain scenes inspired by the screenplay. Leone would then listen to the music while filming those scenes. Composing the shots and the action in time to the music.

But the usual practice is to get the musical ball rolling in the early stages of post-production. Once a rough cut of the film is ready the composer can begin spotting.

Spotting involves the composer, the director, and sometimes the producer analyzing and discussing the film. They lay out the tone of the overall film, as well as the specific requirements of individual scenes, including timing and which moments are more important than others.

Then the "syncing" begins. The composer then goes through every scene making notes of the timing he must consider when composing the music. The old fashioned way is to use a stopwatch and a notepad, but nowadays a lot of composers use sophisticated software to lay out a sort of map for the music they will be composing.

Legendary film composer Bernard Hermann.

That 'map' is called a "click track" where the composer calculates the beats of each particular scene, and the cues that dictate where the music goes in and out.

Then the composer can finally do some composing, writing the music for the film in the tone and style that directors wants for the film. 

Once the score is composed it's then "orchestrated," or "arranged." This is where the members of the orchestra, or band that's going to play the music is assigned their parts of the score, and their cues.  Now a lot of the time this is done by a specialist arranger or orchestrator, but a lot of composers like to do their own arranging and orchestration.

Then the music is recorded under the direction of a conductor who is watching the specific scene being scored, and listening to a click track giving him the essential beats and cues for that scene.

Then the final edits and tweaking are done, and the completed film is set to be released.

Now it's a common practice for directors to use preexisting music as 'temporary' tracks to give composers a rough idea of the tone and timing they're looking for. However, this can backfire, like the case of 2001: A Space Odyssey when Stanly Kubrick rejected an original score by Alex North in favor of making his temporary track permanent.

An oddity in the history of modern movie music is Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. The film doesn't have a traditional film score, in fact the only music in the film comes from within the scenes, on radios, or being played on piano. Instead Hitchcock had his frequent musical collaborator Bernard Hermann to work with electronic audio pioneers Oskar Sala and Remi Gassman to "compose" the sound effects of the birds.

But that's a bit of a digression.

How To.... Adapt...

Today I'm going to take a moment to discuss the whys and wherefores of adaptation.

No, I'm not going to talk about how you can adapt yourself into becoming some sort of aquatic mer-creature. That's mad science, this is about Hollywood, which contains almost no science at all.

I'm talking about the process of adapting otherwise existing material into a screenplay, and a movie.

So let's begin where the process begins, at the beginning.

STAGE 1: THE SOURCE MATERIAL!

The source material can be anything, a novel, a short story, an article, a comic book, someone's life story, or even a song or board game if the producer/studio is particularly desperate. This source material is either owned by someone, or it's public domain.

If the piece is public domain, meaning the owner of the material in question has been dead and gone the right number of government sanctioned decades without a legally rightful heir properly renewing the copyright, then the material is free for you to do with what you will.

However, if someone or something owns the material, then the person who wants to make it into a movie is going to have to pay the people who have a claim on those rights.

Take for example a novel. Imagine you are movie producer with Furious Studios. Your assistant has just told you about a book their cousin read that has a really catchy hook that could make a great movie.  You find out the name of the novel's publisher, who then puts you in contact with their department that handles ancillary rights, as well as the management/representation of the author in question.

Then the negotiations begin.

Now the length of time taken up by these negotiations, and the price they ultimately reach are dependent on these factors:

1. How popular is the source material in question?

2. Who else wants the rights to the work in question and how much are they willing to pay?

3. How much are the rights-holders asking for?

4. How much are you willing to pay?

Now let's imagine that you've won the negotiations and got the rights for a reasonable upfront fee, and a piece of the net (ha-suckers!).  Now unless you move to...

STAGE 2: GETTING THE WRITER.

Unless you're going to write the screenplay yourself, you're going to need an ink-stained wretch to write the damn thing for you.

To find the right writer for your project you need to look for these qualities:

1. The writer has to have read the material in question and hopefully liked it.

2. The writer should be reliable and hopefully quick if you're adapting a really popular book.  Remember if the book's a best-seller, you want to get the movie out while the hype from the book is still relatively fresh in the minds of the ticket buying public. The Harry Potter movies wouldn't have done as well as they did if Warner Bros. took 15 years to adapt the first one.

Once that writer is found, we move onto the next stage.

STAGE 3: WRITING THE DAMN SCRIPT.

Now shift your imagination gears from picturing yourself as a producer, complete with tailored suit and luxury car, to imagining yourself as the writer.  So just picture yourself in a pair of ratty sweat-pants and a T-shirt for a band no one but you will admit to ever liking.

You're sitting in front of your computer, there's a blank page on your Final Draft program, and you now must ask yourself...

1. What can I take directly from the book?  This could be anything as concrete as entire scenes and plot lines, to as ephemeral as themes.

2. What must I take indirectly from the book, since film is such a radically different medium?

2. What material from the book must I dump like so much flotsam and jetsam?

3.  How can I balance it all to make it an appealing film that won't offend or insult the fans of the source material? (This is really important if the source material is very popular with many vocal fans.)

Sometimes you have to be relatively faithful to the source material to be successful, like the Lord Of The Rings, and sometimes you need to be radically different from the source material like Blade Runner, in order to make a working film.

Each piece is different, and that means that each attempt at adaptation is different.  Some think that it's easier than doing an original screenplay because the story is essentially written.  I disagree, it's actually harder to adapt something else for the screen, because you have to get your voice to mesh with the original author's voice, and somehow find the middle ground that will make a good film.

Then begins...

STAGE 4: THE MAKING & MARKETING OF THE MOVIE

But that's the easy part, compared to all the rest.

Hollywood Babble On & On #859: CEO/Chairman/Shogun/Emperor

The fur is flying between Wall Street and Disneyworld because the Institutional Investor Service, is asking Disney's shareholders to vote "No" at making current CEO Bob Iger Chairman of the company, saying that he's already too rich and too powerful.  The new job will give him a bump in pay from $26 million to $30 million as well as more power.

 

Disney's reps are saying that Iger's worth the power and money, stating that $100 in Disney shares purchased is now worth about $171, and the company's profits are good and that he's “among the most successful and well-regarded chief executive officers in the media industry.”

Well that's all well and good, but there's something people are forgetting, and that something is that the CEO and the Chairman of the Board are different titles because in the grand scheme of things, they are two different jobs that are probably best held by two different people.

Which means that I have some explaining to do, and I'll start by explaining the jobs.  (And I will be using "Chairman" even though the post can be held by a woman, it's just quicker than writing "Chairperson" plus I'm deeply sexist.)

The CEO, or Chief Executive Officer, also called the Managing Director in the UK, is the organization's top administrator.  It is their job to handle the overall management, problem solving, and general running of any corporation or large organization.  The CEO is appointed to their position by the Board of Directors, which is headed by the Chairman.

The Chairman of the Board is the chief representative of the shareholders.  You see in any publicly traded company, the ownership is scattered among thousands of individual and institutional investors.  Without the voice of one owner they need to get the voices of all the investors together, in the form of a Board.  The board are elected by the shareholders to represent them and their wishes when it comes to the running of the company.  A chairman is elected from among the board members to be their chief representative, coordinating board business, and acting as their direct liaison with the Chief Executive Officer.

Now I like to use historical analogies when I try to explain things, and the closest one I could find are the roles of the Emperor and Shogun in Japan before the Meiji Restoration of the 1800s.

Japan is a constitutional monarchy now, but back in the olden days it was an absolute monarchy.  Not only was the ruler, the emperor, absolute in his power, he was also considered divine. This divinity began to mean that the emperor was just a little too elevated for a lot of the day to day administration of the empire.   Now when times were smooth, the job was handled by various imperial bureaucrats, but when the nation hit some bumps on the road that job fell on the lap of the Shogun.

Shogun's title originally started as the rank of the man in charge of defending Japan from foreign invasion, hence the full title's rough translation being "Supreme Barbarian Suppressing Generalissimo."  

Over time the title went from being purely military to encompassing the whole of the business of government.

I have no pictures of Shoguns, so here's movie bad ass Toshiro Mifune

At best the Emperor, like a good Chairman, stood as the final word, setting policy expressing the will of the gods, (or the shareholders) and letting the Shogun work out all the petty mechanics of implementing the policy.

But there were two traps in this system, one leading to another, and these same two traps.

The first trap is the "Rubber Stamp Trap," this is where the Emperor/Chairman essentially gives up their role of asserting the will of the shareholders and letting the Shogun/CEO set the policy without much scrutiny.  This leads to the second trap which is the...

..."Fuzzy Line Trap."  This trap involves the further devolution of the split between Emperor/Chairman and the Shogun/CEO.  It happens gradually, with the CEO pawning off more and more decisions to underlings, judging themselves too "divine," "important," or "busy" usually playing golf, to do it themselves.  Usually the board is stacked with friends and allies, thus ensuring that any shareholder discontent is prevented from reaching the newly divine CEO/Chairman hybrid.

The problem is that without a clear voice for the shareholders, and a clear voice for the management, troubles will arise.  The right hand no longer knows what the left hand is doing, and vice versa, and things begin to gum up the works.  This happened near the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate with Shoguns forgoing their ground-level management role, for one of near worship as being near divine like the emperor.

That's why I can understand why ISS is feeling iffy about Iger being both Chairman and CEO.  No matter how good the person in question is at their job, it's usually more trouble than it's worth.

Hollywood Babble On & On #855: All About The Residuals

Today, I'm going to take a moment to talk about a part of the business we call show that is extremely important if you are working in it.

I'm talking about residuals.

"What are residuals?" you ask, furrowing your brow in a feeble attempt to understand.  Well the answer is simple.

These are residuals.

Yep, residuals are money.

However, it is not a share of the box office gross. Let's get that misconception out of the way right up front.  That sort of thing has to be negotiated by your agent.

Residuals are fees paid to the people involved in the making of a film or TV show when said film or TV show is sold to a secondary market.  These residuals are negotiated by the various unions, SAG, WGA, DGA etc., and they also manage their collection and disbursement.

Screenings on airplanes are not included for some reason, having been defined as part of the movie/TV show's original release.  That little tid-bit says a lot because everything involved in residuals depends on how the terms are defined. 

Things differ slightly between movies and television residuals, so I'll try to explain them to the best of my ability.

MOVIE RESIDUALS: Come from sales of films to television, and home video markets. These include pay cable, basic cable, and broadcast television, as well as DVD and online sales and rentals.  

Now you'd think that it's a license to print money.

Well, yes and no, and it all hinges on how the terms of the residuals contract are defined and how the rights to the movies in questions are sold.

Take writers for example. The contract between the WGA says that the credited writer(s) of a feature film deserve somewhere around 1.2% of the film's gross receipts from TV/home video sales and rentals.  Sounds good right, especially when sales and rentals can add up to the tens of millions of dollars.

Not really.

You see the studios define the film's gross receipts that actually pay residuals as the Producer's Gross Receipts from these sales. The Producer's Gross Receipts are 20% of the total of those sales.

So when you buy a DVD, the store gets a cut of the sales price, the studio gets the rest. The studio then pockets 80% of that sales price, and toss 20% to the producers to dole out to everyone else.

That means that our example, the ink-stained wretch who wrote the damn thing, only gets about 1.2% of the 20% the studios decided to let them have.

Then there's how the movie studios sell their films, especially to cable outlets.  Basically, they put a whole bunch of movies, both blockbusters and turkeys, into a big fat package, and sells the whole damn thing to a broadcaster for one fee. Thus the big hit, which should be worth more, gets the same amount in residuals that the bomb that no one wants to see.  So, unless there's some sort of bidding war for a specific film we're basically talking the scraps of scraps.

It is different for writers when it comes to internet sales and rentals.  Thanks to a contract negotiated by the WGA when the internet was still rather nascent, that 1.2% residual paid to the writer comes from the full 100% of the share collected by the studio.

So download like a bastard, because it will make the writers happy.

TV RESIDUALS: Follow a slightly different structure.  They are primarily built around reruns, but the most important things are how the show is rerun, and where.

If the network reruns an episode of a TV series, like they used to do every summer, they paid full fees to the people who made it and starred in it.  Pretty sweet money.

However, nowadays the networks try to avoid doing these "full reruns" and try to play games with what constitutes a rerun and such.

Then there are the reruns in both syndication and cable.  If you are the studio/producer who owns the show, you're golden, it's all gravy.  If you're a writer and actor, it can become problematic, especially if you have a deal where a cable channel buys all the reruns to your show.

Ever notice that when a basic cable channel airs reruns of a series, they play living shit out of it.

There's two reasons for that. 

1. It fills up air time without buying or producing original content. 

2. The more a certain show is aired, the smaller the residuals paid to contributors become.

So it's very possible to be a writer, director, or star of a successful and long running series get a residual check for 5¢ for all their work while the network and the cable channel, who are often part of the same conglomerate, continue to make millions.

And let's not forget that residuals count as income, so you have to pay taxes on them too.

However, all is not bleak.

If you have a prolific career, with a wide range of material, it can all add up, and can make the difference between making a living, and destitution.

Now this all a very glib and superficial explanation of an extremely, and needlessly, complex issue.  If you want to learn the specifics, please check with the various creative unions, like SAG, WGA, and DGA, who make available a lot of information on the issue on their websites.

Who Does What?: The Distributor/The Exhibitor

Two of the most important entities in the movie business are the distributor and the exhibitor.

As I always say, any idiot can make a movie, but what's a movie worth if no one can see it?  To get a movie seen you need a distributor and an exhibitor.  These two entities have a strange form of symbiosis.  They need each other, but they are often in conflict, which I will try to explain here.

DISTRIBUTOR: It is the job of the distributor to take your film and put it in theaters.  A little trick of Hollywood is that the major studios are, in fact, two technically separate entities.

One wing handles production of films. Once the film is finished it then goes to a independently incorporated company that handles distribution. Now most of the time they have the same name with maybe a little variation, except for Disney, where the distribution of movies used to be handled by their Buena Vista Distribution company until they retired the brand 2007 and renamed it The Walt Disney Motion Picture Company.

Now this is so the distribution company part of the studio can charge the production company part of the studio a fee for the privilege of releasing their movies. This amount can be whatever they damn well feel like, and usually is more than enough to ensure that nothing gets anywhere near a net profit.

Okay, I just explained how the distributor is used to screw up Hollywood's finances, let me explain what they do.

It's the job of the distributor to handle the release of movies. They book screen time with the exhibitors, they then have to pay for all the marketing and the advertising. 

This means TV/radio ads, billboards, web ads, and even newspaper and magazine spreads.  Then there are the costs of transporting and housing celebrities for overseas premieres and publicity events.

It's expensive, and time consuming, and a distributor really has to know what they're doing to avoid just wasting money and time.

Once the movie is screened, the distributor then has to collect the money from the exhibitors.  This money is called the "rental" and is technically the fee the exhibitor has to pay to rent the movie for the screening. The actual amount can vary widely, depending on the agreement between the distributor and exhibitor.  The rental can be anywhere between 40% to 50% of the ticket price.

EXHIBITOR:  "Exhibitor" is basically a fancy two dollar word for theater owner.

Before 1947 the studios owned the theaters that showed their movies. However, that changed when the federal government decided that studios owning theaters was a monopoly and had the court order them to break up.

Now there's a case to be made that the court was wrong, and vertical integration is the way to go, but that's a topic for another day.

 

Since the 1947 the studios have had to deal with a new partner, the exhibitor. This partnership is often strained due to frequent conflicts.

Distributors want nothing but the best when it comes to exhibiting their movies. They want the best quality projection, the loudest and clearest sound, and even the comfiest seats. However, these things cost the exhibitors money, and since they depend on box office to cover their overhead or "nut" and sales of popcorn and soda for their profit margin, they don't want to pay for them.

Exhibitors say that if the distributors want everything upgraded then they should be able to raise the ticket price to pay for it.  Distributors don't want ticket prices raised if they're not getting the money, because, well, they're not getting the money, and if the price goes too high, there will be fewer bums in seats.

Another stress in the relationship comes from the whole booking process.  In the old days the studios used to engage in what was known as "block booking." If your theater chain wanted the sure fire hit with Cary Grant, you had open up some screens for the less sure-fire movie starring some chick the studio head is scoring with.

However things have changed. There is now no longer such a thing as a guaranteed hit. Big, heavily promoted films with top stars can sink like stones, while small, poorly promoted little movies with no stars can soar like rockets to blockbuster sales.

Neither side knows what's going to sell and what doesn't. They try to hedge their bets, but the old paradigms they used to rely on so much, are crumbling. Both sides are looking out for their own best interests, and while they should be copacetic, in the confusing and convoluted world of movies, they are often in conflict.

Who Does What? : The Host

No, I'm not talking about someone who is carrying a sinister alien parasite that will one day burst out to rule the world. I'm talking about people who host TV shows. They come in many varieties to cover the varieties of TV shows that need hosts. Today I'm going to do one of my glib and superficial overviews of hosts, what they do, and how they do it.

VARIETY/EVENT HOST- The job of this form of host is to essentially act as the master of ceremonies for any broadcast that features three or more performers, either in direct competition against each other, or as just pieces of a whole bundle of different acts.

It is not the job of this kind of host to be the star of the event. That role is to be taken by the acts they introduce. A good variety host knows that, and when they step on stage they need to perform these tasks:

1. Restate the identity of the last performer for the viewers that missed the introduction.

2. Take care of any important business, like giving viewers the numbers they need to vote for that supporter, plugging where they will be performing next, or consoling and/or congratulating the performer and/or contestant.

3. Usher that performer off the stage, and bring the next on in.

4. Do these tasks within the time prescribed by the event's director so that everything can move smoothly between commercial breaks and the audience never learns what a dog's breakfast of chaos the backstage work really is.

As you can see, it's not an easy job, and surprisingly few people can actually do it well, usually sunk by a desire to be the center of an attention that really shouldn't belong to them.

LATE NIGHT HOST-  The job of the late night host is different. This sort of host has more of a starring role in the show, but like the variety/event host, has to step back to let others have their moment, because that's what good hosts do.

The tasks of the good late night host are:

1. Do an opening monologue or comedy routine that is topical and funny, reflecting the opinions and/or concerns of their audience.

2. Smoothly introduce the guests in a manner that makes the guest look good.

3.  Conduct a short conversation with the guest that enables said guest to plug whatever they're selling, and hopefully have an amusing story to go along with it.

4.  Most important is that the host really has to listen to their guests in order to draw out the most entertaining elements of the chat for the audience.

And that's one of the reasons I find most of today's big late night hosts to be lacking. Some are only there to mark time and cash paychecks, some feel they're too important for their job and handle it, and their guests with an element of disdain, and only a couple seem remotely interested in trying to be the sort of all round entertainer/gracious host that the job requires.

JOURNALIST HOST- Now this type of host is the kind with more of a background in journalism than show biz. The trademarks of a journalist host is a minimum of "glitz" associated with their show, and longer, more involved interviews with their guests about topics more serious than selling their movie.


A sub-species of this kind of host is the "pseudo-journalist" host. This kind of host puts all the trappings of the "journalist" type interview, including dedicating an entire episode to a particular guest or topic.  However pseudo-journalist hosts tend to stick to the shallow waters, so to speak, and doesn't really burn many calories doing research or digging too deep with their questions.

DAYTIME HOST- Now there are two types of daytime talk show host. There is the "Uplift" host who at least pretends to be unlocking the secrets of losing weight, improving your life, and generally being a better person. Then there is the "Lowbrow" host. This type of host is the kind who goes for the lowest common denominator, dealing in double-dealers, deviants, and deadbeats.


Both types of daytime hosts are obsessed with sensationalizing whatever topic they're discussing in order to win ratings and sell copies of the latest fad diet or lurid expose.

GAME SHOW HOST- The job of the game show host is fairly straight-forward. Introduce the contestants, lay down the rules of the game, and present the questions and/or challenges in a way that keeps the audience interested, and to build suspense when needed. 

PUNDIT/PANEL HOST-  Now you would think that the job of such a host would be to present lively and entertaining debate, but usually it involves agreeing with those they agree with, and shouting down those they don't agree with.

EDUCATIONAL SHOW HOST- These hosts come in two varieties. The "Teacher Host" and the "Student Host." 

The "Teacher" type of host is best for shows aimed at kids. They're job is to present an entertaining, and interesting voice of authority and expertise.


Now if you're trying to sell an educational show to adults that goes beyond a straight documentary, then you might be better served by a "Student Variety" of host. Someone who is not an expert on the subject at hand, but is both interested in it, and willing to learn.


You see adult viewers of such shows would find an expert host condescending, and unwilling to ask the stupid and obvious questions that viewers would like to see answered.  Such a host would have to be able to do their jobs with a certain amount of charm and humor, but without resorting to maudlin sentimentality or clownish mugging.


And that is my glib and superficial explanation of what hosts do.

Who Does What? #6: The Editor

Film editors are among the more unsung heroes of the film business. The job is not glamorous, the odds of traveling to exotic locations, doing red carpet strolls, and having hot young starlets willing to have sex with you are pretty slim when you're an editor. 

Early moviola editing machine.

Directors get attention as "auteurs" and for their "vision," cinematographers get kudos for making people and places look good, and even writers get the occasional pat on the back when they're particularly clever.

Editors though, work mostly unknown to the outside world, in cramped little offices doing some of the most important drudge work in the movie business.

That drudge work is to take all the footage shot by the director, and put it together in a way that the film makes sense.

You see, shooting a film, taking out the reel or videotape out of the camera and sending it directly to the theaters as some sort of finished product will probably get you laughed at.  To make a professional quality narrative film pretty much requires things be shot out of sequence for sheer practicality. All the scenes shot at one setting have to be done together if you can, then shoot all the scenes done at key locations, and even then you have multiple takes of every shot, etc... etc...

Once shooting is done you literally have a mess of what used to be film, but now digital data, that has to be sorted, put together, and then trimmed, adjusted, and just plain fiddled with to create a coherent and entertaining film.

Back in the wonderful pre-digital age, of which my film school education caught the tail end, you actually had to review the film on either a moviola or Steenbeck style editing machine.  Then you had to physically cut the film with a razor shop cutting device, and then tape or glue the film of the shots you want to keep together to create a first cut of the film.

The first cut is not a finished film.  It's just a beginning of the post-production process.  The work print is a base to begin working from.  It's then reviewed by the interested parties, the director, producer, studio executives, and the executive's aromatherapist, to see what changes will be made from that.

There will be changes, that's inevitable. The editing process is not considered finished until the person who is contractually blessed with the power of "final cut" decides that it's finished.

Eventually, sound effects, special effects, titles, and all the other elements are put together to create something called "the work-print."

But even then you are not finished.

In the pre-digital days the reels of work-prints are then taken to the film lab where the "negative cutters" take the original film negatives of all the elements of the film, and puts them together.  This edited version of the negative is then used as a master, creating prints to be released into theaters.

Nowadays things are much simpler for the editor.  They no longer have to wrestle with strips of fragile film and constantly jamming equipment.  Everything is now digitized, and computerized, and now all the picture & sound editing, and special effects, for a pro-grade feature film can be done on a single computer running off the shelf software.

However, while everyone can edit, and everyone who wants to direct films should have a hand in editing, not everyone should be a full time editor. The job still requires incredible patience, a nit picker's attention to minutiae, and strong sense of narrative structure.

The Steenbeck film editing table.

Now you might think that directors should do all the editing on their films, and while it may sound lovely in a perfect world, in our imperfect real world, you need an editor. You see sometimes when you're a director you may feel compelled to keep something that made you feel oh-so brilliant while shooting, that just doesn't gel with everything else while you're editing.  That's why an experienced, impartial, professional editor needs to convince the director to kill their own darlings for the good of the finished film.

And that's my glib and superficial explanation of what film editors do.