Buy My Book!

My geek-centric mystery thriller A MINT CONDITION CORPSE is now available for your e-reader from Fahrenheit Press.

USA https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01G6PB0PQ

Canada https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01G6PB0PQ

UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01G6PB0PQ

Australia https://www.amazon.com.au/Condition-Corpse-Kirby-Baxter-Investigates-ebook/dp/B01G6PB0PQ

Buy it, leave an honest review, and spread the word. 

The more copies that sell, the more likely I'll be able to write a sequel.

The Book Report: When Is A Contest Not A Contest?

Mysterious Press is a long running publishing imprint which is part of the Grove Atlantic Group. It specializes, naturally, in mystery and crime fiction, and is very selective about who it even considers publishing. To be looked at your novel must be submitted by an accredited literary agent, and I'm pretty sure that agent being someone they know and do business with regularly, and author having a publishing track record, probably doesn't hurt either.

That's why it surprised me to see them announce that they were having a contest. Writers could submit their novels to them and the winner gets published and a cash prize of about $25,000.

Sounds like a great contest, doesn't it?

Maybe, but it doesn't look like much of a contest to me. I'll get to that in a second, but first I need to give a bit of an explanation:

You see, to get published a writer needs to win the lottery, multiple times.

First you have to get someone at an agency or a publisher to read your work and like it enough to pass it along up the industry's food chain.

Second, you have to have someone higher up the publishing food chain like it and give it the green-light to be published, and not get what happened to me.  One time a novel of mine went right up to the publisher's desk, but he died suddenly, the replacement management lost it for 2+ years. Then an assistant editor found it and asked me to give them a second chance, I agreed, and I didn't hear from them again until 6 years and 11 months after I had originally submitted my novel. Then a bottom rung volunteer slush pile reader sent me a terse rejection letter that pretty much said that all my previous dealings with the company meant nothing, and those that had been promised to look at it, had never looked at it during all those years. And this was by a company that bragged about how respectfully it treated writers in their allegedly open submission policy.

Then your book has to be deemed good enough for them to market aggressively in the hope that it will find an audience. And let's hope that management or ownership doesn't change during this period, because the new regime might just dump your book for reasons that have nothing to do with quality or sales potential.

Then the book has to find that audience and sell well enough to open the door wide enough for the author to get another book published.

At each step a writer is basically buying a lottery ticket with their blood, sweat, and tears, and each ticket has about 1,000,000 to 1 odds against it.

Which is why when a publisher announces a contest looking for new novels the hearts of writers who haven't won any of these lotteries brightens a little bit.

Then they looked at the rules and wondered why they were calling it a contest at all.

You see writers, both new or established, cannot enter their novels into Mysterious Press' contest. The novels must be entered, both electronically, and in print, by the writer's accredited literary agent.

Basically, the contest is them operating as usual, looking only at the people they would normally be looking at who already won at least one of publishing's lotteries, and would probably give more attention to someone who won two or more. And the prize, when you look at from that way, looks like a pretty standard publishing advance.

Why call it a contest if the company isn't changing any of its procedures and only pre-existing winners need apply?

Contests for writers are supposed to be about beating the odds, and selling the myth that quality is all a book needs to be discovered, not pre-existing connections to the publishing world. This "contest" totally flops in that respect.

It reminds me of an institution in Canada that was started in the late 1980s by some up and coming Canadian film and television companies. It's mission statement was to foster NEW Canadian writers to write NEW Canadian films.

I called them and asked them what it took to qualify for the programs. Their answer was that to qualify as a NEW Canadian writer you had to have had 2 feature films produced in Canada by a company they recognized, and at least on screenplay under option with a Canadian company they recognized.

At the time there were about 2 writers in Canada under forty who might have qualified as "NEW" but even that chance was slim.

I asked an employee what they expected to accomplish with these guidelines and they just shrugged and said they didn't know. It did make the companies sponsoring this foundation look like they were doing something about the image that Canada's film industry was a closed shop run by a bunch of middle aged bureaucrats and near-bureaucrats who didn't give a toss about new people or even audiences.

This looks like that mindset has spread to American publishing.

Thanks

Just a quick note of thanks to author and critic Lars Walker of Brandywine Books.Net who gave my first novel JOE AVERAGE a very good review.

Thanks Lars.

Tell all your friends, family, relatives, and even your enemies.

I need the sales. ;-)

The free e-book giveaway's done, but JOE AVERAGE is still available for $2.99 from Amazon and the trade paperback edition is 17% off too.

Help support the blog and get some entertainment out of it too.

Thanks.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1006: Random Drippings From My Brain Pan...

A group of writers for the Joan Rivers' show Fashion Police have filed suit saying the E! Network show is in violation of California's labour laws and owes them over $1 million in unpaid wages.

Now I have only seen commercials for Fashion Police, and those commercials give the impression that it's Joan Rivers and a bunch of other catty self-professed fashion experts sitting in a cheap little studio making catty comments about what celebrities are wearing.

Which raises the question: Just how lame are the people on that show that not only do they need writers to provide them with the cattiness they pretend is coming off the top of their heads, they work them to the point of owing them over $1 million in unpaid overtime?

I would ask Joan Rivers, a former writer herself, for a comment, but she is probably at a loss for words.

***

Both Paramount's World War Z and Marvel's Iron Man 3 are having specially edited versions released in China to appease the government's censors.

World War Z is reportedly removing scenes from the book that imply the communist country is the epicentre of the zombie plague due to a government cover up. However since the movie doesn't appear to have anything to do with the book, it might be a moot point.

Now I'm not sure what changes they have made to Iron Man 3, but I suspect that they're changing the name of arch-villain the Mandarin to the Englishman, and Tony Stark has a speech about the glories of Chairman Mao.

But seriously, this is a pitfall of what I call the Chinese Movie-Trap. China has a massive population, one that goes to the cineplexes to see movies far more regularly than people in North America and Europe, so it's a huge potential market.

However, like I always say, it is not a free market.

The Chinese government, despite recent market reforms, is still a dictatorship. It controls what people see, and how they see it, especially movies from the west, only allowing a handful to be released there each year. It also restricts the amount per-ticket that the studios can collect to some of the lowest levels in the world.

The Hollywood studios are facing declining numbers of theatre goers at home, and skyrocketing costs. Any attempt to reverse the negative trends in the west would require a lot of work and the challenging of some of Hollywood's fundamental shibboleths when it comes to their attitudes towards their own management practices and how they treat the audience.

It seems easier to just deal with a handful of elite politicians in China in the hope that they will provide the magic pill they need to save their jobs.

***

David Ellison, sibling of indie darling Megan Ellison, is expanding his blockbuster financier Skydance Productions into television.

Why?

Because that's where the real money is.

Sure, everyone likes to point at the hundreds of millions of dollars raked in by big budget blockbusters at the theatres, but those numbers are mostly an...

Because when a big budget movie makes big money at the box office the profits have a tendency to shrink into nothingness.

However, if you get a show on TV that has a long and healthy run you pretty much have a license to print money. You have the broadcast license fees, repeat fees, home video and streaming, merchandise licensing, and international broadcasting fees.

It all adds up to some sweet sweet greenbacks.

So if you're a producer it's just good business to get into television.

The Book Report: Thoughts On The Book Biz

If you want to find a business that is sometimes even more dysfunctional than Hollywood you need not look any further than publishing. A classic story about how the book business is run involves Stephen King going to meet his editor in New York. 

 

At the time King had exploded onto pop culture and was the #1 selling author in the world, literally moving millions of units in both hardcover and paperback, and was literally at least half of his publisher's profit margin. However, when he got to the publisher's office, literally no one outside of his editor had a clue who he was.

That's the equivalent of the people running Universal not knowing the identity of Stephen Spielberg while E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial ran rampant at the box office.

It happened because King, while commercially successful, was not a "darling" of the narrowly confined New York literary/critical social circle, and was to the people running the company at that time, just a name on a financial ledger that they didn't pay any attention to. King moved onto another publisher as soon as he could, and the publisher that ignored him suddenly had to pay attention to a massive dip in their ledgers.

Now that you know how the industry treated the biggest selling author in the world at the time, you can imagine how they treat new authors. From my own experience in dealing with agents and publishers I've dealt with a few egregiously unprofessional people who treat new authors with mind-boggling contempt, while the majority try to do their best, they are more often than not shackled by things beyond their control.

Now while the contemptuous unprofessional people are a taint on the industry, I can understand why the majority of agents and publishers are wary of signing new authors. 

 

New writers are extremely risky. 

 

The majority of the manuscripts that agents represent are rejected by publishers, and that means that their time, effort, and even money, is wasted with nothing to show for it.

And for publishers, they have author advances, editorial, marketing, printing, distribution costs, and general company overhead to deal with. For every J.K. Rowling that become global phenomena that sell in the tens of millions there are hundreds, if not thousands of titles whose greatest achievement is the amount of dust they gather on bookstore shelves.

So you get publishers and agents chasing fads, pissing away millions on book deals for "celebrities" that usually fail to earn back their advance, and stick with a small number of "elite" authors, even though their sales tend to go down over time while their advances go up.

 

But the rub lies in the fact that some of the biggest publishing phenoms haven't been of the past decade haven't been the literary lions, or the celebrity tell-all, but complete unknowns exploding onto the scene from out of nowhere, selling of millions of copies, and sparking legions of imitators.

So you have an industry that needs new writers to provide the new blood and new ideas that win readers, but the risks in finding these new writers is just too much for some agents and publishers to bear.

But things are not all hopelessness.

There is a way for publishers to find new writers, and agents to find new clients, and it's through the e-book.

The e-book doesn't have the heavy manufacturing and distribution costs hanging over it like printed books. Infinite copies can be shipped via the inter-webs anywhere in the world at a cost per copy that are too tiny to calculate.

Some publishers are starting e-book imprints that specialize in short fiction and/or novellas in different genres. Some are even opening the door for new writers, which is a position I applaud. It allows them to get to know the work and style of new writers, and hopefully find the next Stephen King or JK Rowling in an environment that has relatively low risk and the potential for high reward.

Now if only we can get them to stop wasting money on overpriced celebrity book deals they might start making sense.

Hollywood Babble On & On #823: Sometimes It's The Execution

Today I'm going to start with a little story.

About 10 years ago, in the early days in the interwebs I joined a screenwriting website where people would read and review each others scripts. One of the scripts assigned to me was for a thriller.  The main plot was that a Hollywood agent was being threatened by a disgruntled ex-or-rejected client, and a former actor turned police detective has to investigate and things get complicated when bodies start popping up.

That was the gist of it.

The script was extremely serious, and you could tell that the writer wanted to create a sexy thriller like Basic Instinct, however, it wasn't particularly sexy, and it wasn't thrilling.

However, in keeping with my standing as the sweetheart of the internet* I decided to not just say "You suck!" and move on.  There was a struggling young writer's hopes and dreams wrapped up in all this, so I tried to be constructive.  I broke his script down to its basic elements, and created detailed notes for each element on how to turn his non-thrilling thriller into what I believed to be a pretty sharp satire of Hollywood, fame, the temptations and tribulations that lie therein, and the sheer inefficiency of the whole system.

Well, the script's writer did not care for my assessment, or my advice.  He responded by calling me three kinds of idiot who wouldn't know a good script if it bit him on the ass.... yadda.... yadda.... yadda....

Shows what he knew, I'm not three kinds of idiot, I'm a smug internet know-it-all. The poor guy also didn't know was that he was sitting on the first draft of what could have been a good comedy, but his execution of the story as a thriller was a failure.

I was reminded of this incident by seeing other examples of something that had a germ of something that might have worked, but was sunk by the execution of the idea.

Take for example NBC's recent disaster The Playboy Club.  It had one good thing going for it, the setting of Chicago in the early 1960s.  It's a great setting for an ongoing serial drama, because it had politicians, bagmen, gangsters, cops and the women who loved them all vying for power both political and personal in a setting that seems exotic to our modern eyes.

Call it Windy City, and get some good writers working on it, and it might have caught on.  You could have even had some scenes set at the Playboy Club, because the real club was a popular hangout of certain big shots of that era.

Sadly, an opportunity was missed.  Instead of making the series a wide open drama of crime and politics they, be it the creators or the network, opted to make it extremely limited in both scope and potential.  They did this by centering the on one place that itself is centered on a brand, Playboy, that's more of a pop-culture archaeological curiosity than an audience winner.  They thought "Mad Men Meets Sex & The City With Girls in Bunny Outfits" and expected a hit.

Instead they had a bomb. 

It's not the first time I saw this happen.  A while back NBC (do you see a trend forming here) had a show called Kings.  It was set in an alternate reality where America was the absolute monarchy of Gilboa.

That's actually a very good idea for a show.  It allows you to take the familiar (translation: inexpensive present day settings) and remake it into an exotic feast for the imagination.  Plus, royal houses are rife with salacious soap opera story-lines and monarchical treachery. There's also literally centuries of material, called history, to draw inspiration from.

And that's where they made their mistake.

Instead of looking into European Royal courts, the Roman Empire, or the Byzantine antics of the... well... Byzantines, the creators went to the Bible, specifically the story of King David in the Old Testament.

I'm not knocking the Bible as a source of drama.  What I am knocking is the baggage that comes with using it as source material for what isn't an explicitly religious show.  One side of the audience would see the soapy goings on as trivializing their faith, and stay away, while the other side would hear of its Biblical roots, assume it was going to be a lecture in the guise of TV drama, and stay away.  Which both sides did.

You see, it was a good idea that was hampered by its execution.

So how can one avoid this trap?

Well, it's really hard to do.  Sometimes we get so caught up in how we see a project, we can't see the potential of viewing it from another angle.  I guess the best way is to view every idea with an open mind, and try to see it from as many opposing views to watch out for any creative landmines and pitfalls that might await you.

*"We don't know why he keeps calling himself that, he is neither sweet, or in possession of a heart in the romantic/sympathetic sense, and hence this blog claim has no basis in reality." 

-- Furious D Show Legal Dept.

Hollywood Babble On & On #717: Desperately Seeking Scribblers

Hollywood is not a good place to be a writer right now.

It was never a great place, don't get me wrong, but right now it's never been harder. The major studios are making fewer movies, many of them sequels and remakes of blockbuster franchises, and appears to be hiring only the members of a rapidly shrinking circle of writers to do the screenplays. New talent with new and original screenplays that doesn't already have membership in the club, can pretty much forget about joining.

Well, 20th Century Fox is going to attempt to buck that trend. They are starting a new writers program. The purpose of this program is to find new "emerging" writers that they traditionally ignore, and hope that they come up with the sort of fresh original material that can become the remakes of the future.

Which begs the question: How will they screw it up?

Don't get me wrong, if any studio was going to try this, Fox has the best chance of success. The management philosophy is to never do anything that doesn't have any chance of a concrete return on their investment. This is the company whose Fox-Searchlight division is still chugging along while almost every other "indie" division is long gone.

However, this is the company that started Fox Atomic, lost focus of what it was supposed to do, while slapping it with a weak "B-Label" brand, only to have to fold it.

So you can see, that while they probably have, if not the best intentions, at least as much good intentions as a major Hollywood studio can have, their execution could result either into a whimpering, simpering fizzle out, or a complete disaster.

Let's look at what they need do to make this program work.

1. A SYSTEM TO FIND THESE WRITERS:

The old standby of asking agents who is new and novel in the world of screenwriting is not going to work as well you might think.

Agents, especially the ones from the big powerful agencies don't look for new writing talent, they poach writers from the smaller agencies who do, after said writer has made a few sales, meaning that they aren't as fresh as Fox is looking for. These big Hollywood agencies also have bills to pay, and are not going to burn major calories, and money only to take a risk on some who is untested, and most importantly unsold, where even if they do make a sale, it won't be near the money the more established scribes get.

They have to protect their own interests in the Hollywood shark tank, and many can't afford to take the risk.

So Fox is going to need a new system. One that comes to mind is the sort of Triggerstreet/Authonomy style system, where thousands of people gather on-line to read and criticize each other scripts, and hopefully the cream will rise to the top.

But here there be dragons, as they would say on old maps.

Often getting to the top of the heap relies more on the winning writer dedicating their lives to gaming the system, usually trading good reviews with other members, than with the actual quality of their writing product.

I use to be active in a similar system but made the mistake of being honest with my reviews. One script was presented as a "sexy thriller" but it didn't work that way, and I told the writer that he needed to rewrite it as a satire of Hollywood, and this pissed him off. It could have been a great satire, but he took it as a personal attack, and made a snippy comment about my "ignorant" review.

If Fox is going to do it right, they are going to have to go old fashioned, and burn some shoe leather. That means hiring professional readers, usually bitter unsold writers themselves, giving them a stack of unsolicited scripts, and giving them a stamp for what file they go into: Must Read File, Might Read File, & Circular File.

But this only after sifting through all the entries that don't use the right format, are written on toilet paper, or written in blood. It's a lot of work shoveling through dung, but it's the only way to reach the diamond.

Thanks to the internet Fox can recruit pro-readers from all over the world to work without stepping foot in the Axis of Ego. They could use a pay-per-report deal, using overlapping assignments to help weed out the scammers faking it, and toss cash rewards to readers who find quality scripts that get the green-light, and a bigger reward if it becomes a success.

2. THE NERVE TO TAKE RISKS & THE BRAINS TO MITIGATE THEM:

Showbiz used to be the domain of gamblers. Men who regularly risked their jobs, fortunes, and reputations to make movies. Making movies is, was, and always will be a risky business. You might believe with all your heart that you have a sure-thing, but it could easily go down in flames taking everything you have with it.

Movies have become extremely expensive to make and market, mostly because of the studio's own piss-poor business practices. This has made the major studios extremely risk averse, and putting them on their current path of remakes and overpriced tent-pole flicks.

When it comes to the new, the novel, and the unproven, there is usually a tremendous failure of nerve on the part of the studios.

It doesn't have to be this way. When you're an outfit as big as Fox, you can mitigate those risks, and here's how:

1. Aim low. Look for the middle ground that most studios are ignoring. Smaller scale crime/action films, horror movies, comedies, etc., that have commercial appeal, but don't require huge stars, big FX, and long shooting schedules.

2. When you've found the golden goose, don't beat it. This means that you treat your new writers right. Pay them on time, pay them what they're owed, and don't go around playing the silly ass games with their money and time that makes writing screenplays such a pain in the ass.

Basically make it so that the writers who do good work will consider working for another studio a major blunder. Make them want to stay and do business with you instead of anyone else. Sure a studio may offer them slightly more cash and points in their proposition, but if they know that a deal with you is as good as having that money in the bank, there's a damn good chance that they will opt for security.

Now all this will take a hellacious amount of labor to accomplish.

Is Fox ready to do what it takes to make it work?

We will have to wait and see?

I Think I Was Visited By The Ghost Of Stanley Kubrick

Welcome to the show folks...

I have to tell you about this absolutely weird coincidence. I didn't know that today was the 12th anniversary of the death of director Stanley Kubrick. I went out to get my hair cut, and was walking home when I stopped at a discount store on the way. This store isn't much different from any other discount retailer except it has an eclectic DVD rack. This rack doesn't have the usual box office bombs filling space like at a Wal-Mart, but instead has a mix of cult films and old classics at serious discount prices.

Today, on the 12th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's death, I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, deluxe edition DVDs selling for 2 for $10. With tax, it came out to just a bit under $12.

I came home, checked my Twitter, saw that Stanley Kubrick was trending, and then realized that it was the anniversary of his death.

SPOOKY!

Hollywood Babble On & On #646: Miscellaneous Movie Media Musings...

Welcome to the show folks...

OPRAH'S LEAVING ALL HAIL THE ANTI-OPRAH

Anderson Cooper will be starting a syndicated daytime talk show and will be replacing the exiting Oprah Winfrey in many markets across the USA.

You can't really get more un-Oprah than Anderson Cooper, let's look at the stats.

Background:

Oprah Winfrey, female, poor working class, African American, from Mississippi, who went to Tennessee State University on a scholarship while working in local radio.

Anderson Cooper, male, rich and privileged (a Vanderbilt), ultra-white (even his hair), from New York City who went to Yale University.

Personality:

Oprah Winfrey presents herself as warm, sensitive, friendly and hyper enthusiastic about things she likes.

Anderson Cooper comes across as cold, aloof, un-emotional, almost robotic.

Weight:

Oprah Winfrey has struggled with her weight for decades and in public.

Anderson Cooper looks like he was born thin.

Career:

Oprah Winfrey, started in local radio, and got a spot hosting a local talk show and took it from the bottom of the ratings to the top of the ratings and then national success in syndication and a media empire which includes magazines and her own cable network.

Anderson Cooper, went into journalism over a career with the CIA, and became a major figure by hosting a prime-time show on what was then the biggest cable news network in the country and watched the ratings for his show, its network, and the importance of both dwindle against the competition.

The only thing they appear to have in common is that both are subject to speculations about their personal lives. Personally, I don't give a rodent's left butt-cheek about the private lives of either.

So the question is, after watching Oprah for decades will they watch her exact opposite?

IMAGINE IMAGINES WRITERS WORKING IN A NEW-OLD WAY

Ron Howard and Brian Grazer's Imagine Entertainment Company is starting what they believe is a radical new experiment that they hope will evolve the creative process.

They're calling it a special "Writer's Lab" and in it writers will be brought together for a year, put on salary and given other financial incentives to create movies and television shows together.

Now maybe it's just me, but I don't think this is all that radical.

Back in the golden age of Hollywood writers would be brought in from all over the world, put on a generous weekly salary for the time, put in offices, and then put to work on creating scripts for the studio. There would also be extra money to be made rewriting each others scripts, and if two or more worked together to create a script they didn't have to split a single pay-check, because they were both on salary.

Sounds to me like a bit of history repeating.

AND NOW, A PALATE CLEANSER

Hollywood Babble On & On #637: Amazon Is Full Of Piranhas!

Welcome to the show folks...

Amazon, the good folks who put your local indie bookstore out of business, are looking to get into the movie business. They are holding a screenplay contest with the promise of all kinds of great prizes and an open door to Hollywood and a bright future.

Except some writers are a little disgusted concerned about the terms of this contest.

Here are some of the things that concern them, and me:

Amazon Studios invites filmmakers and screenwriters from all over the world to submit full-length movies and scripts, which will then get feedback from Amazon readers, who will be free to rewrite and amend. Based on reaction (“rate and review”) to stories, scripts and rough “test” films, a panel of judges will award monthly prizes... You agree to be automatically entered into any future contests for which your work is eligible. The specific contest rules for future contests will be posted on this page when they are announced.

What do you see wrong in that little picture?

First: The fact that this contest is run by Amazon is kind of fitting, because this contest is essentially tossing a hunk of raw bloody meat (AKA your screenplay) into a pool of hungry piranhas (your new "writing partners").

Literally hundreds, if not thousands of people are going to be "revising" and "rewriting" your script, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it, because you essentially forfeit all rights and control over said script as soon as you enter.

Amazon says it's okay in their FAQ:

Can I make it so that no one else can revise my original work?

No. But if someone makes changes that are bad, their version is not likely to get a lot of attention. And if someone comes along and makes your work better, you’re more likely to win a prize and get your project made. Sometimes other people can bring a different viewpoint or a different set of skills that take the story in a new direction or add new elements that make it even more compelling.

Of course, if your script is particularly heavily nibbled, the judges, and their infinite wisdom may never get around to seeing your original work, because your script is in the midst of blood and thrashing carnage in the dark, murky, and muddy water of the Amazon.

Now the folks at Amazon think they're doing some wonderful new and novel "crowd-sourced" creative endeavor that will make everything beautiful, unicorns will prance down Sunset Boulevard and Zooey Deschanel will show up at my door and declare--- anyway I digress.

What this project does is take the worst habit of the major studios: Taking scripts and passing them around to multiple writers like a doobie at a Phish concert for rewrites, and not only multiplying it at an exponential level, but also my second point--

Second: There are none of the protection for credits, residuals and anything else that might make joining this contest worthwhile for the guy who actually wrote the winning screenplay. If it gets sold to a studio, someone else could do a rewrite, and completely eliminate the original writer from the credits.

The studios have to follow strict guidelines for credits and payment because of decades of legal wrangling and labor disputes forged those rules. They aren't perfect, but they're the best the extremely flawed system can get at this time. Amazon's contest doesn't even offer you that.

And what this about entering your script into future contests where the rules haven't even been decided on?

I mean that's disturbingly vague, wide open for future abuse of writers by Amazon. Whose to say that future contest doesn't involve just taking the winning screenplay and giving the winning writer a flaming bag of dog-shit and a swift kick in the nuts as their grand prize?

And like the unsolicited rewrites by strangers, there doesn't appear to be an opt out feature.

That's not good, not good at all.

Why did Amazon go all James Frey on this contest?

The answer is simple, they got too clever.

I'm sure they sat around the conference room, looking for ideas to justify their continued employment, and someone piped up with the screenplay contest idea.

Then they started coming up with great ideas to "improve" on just having a screenplay contest. They looted the latest hot buzzwords like "crowd-sourcing," and then passed it all over to their lawyers, who then had to justify their employment, by tossing in all sorts of what I call legalistic bend-overs.

Basically, they decided to do something "different" from the Hollywood studios, by then taking all that is bad about doing business with the studios, and amplifying them into the realm of the ridiculous, while dumping all that's good, namely money, credit, and career advancement.

It's a shame, because they could have done something good with this, but instead, they screwed it up royally.

My Apologies

Sorry for not having anything new today folks. It's been a busy, and extremely hot day here at the ranch, and the showbiz-biz news hasn't exactly been blowing up my kilt with excitement.

Hopefully something will pop up tomorrow for me to rant and rave about.

Until then feel free to peruse my archives and see just how far I've come since I've started this blog.

Hollywood Babble On & On #536: What To Do With The Writers?

Welcome to the show folks...

Warner Bros. has announced that they will now be strictly enforcing their deadlines on writers to turn in their drafts. The studio says that they have to do it because they go and sign up directors and stars to their movies, but then have to wait sometimes months for a completed draft to come in. They used to be more comfortable with waiting, wanting quality over speed, but now they want more speed because time is money, and the economy is cutting back on everyone's time.

The writers case is that they often have to wait months to get paid, even the precious "commencement" payments that are supposed to keep them in gin and nacho chips during the 12 weeks usually contracted for a first draft. They are also forced to take on multiple assignments at the same time, partially because of the chronically late payments, but also because studios force them into something called a "One Step" deal. A one step deal basically means that they have one crack at the bat to get the script done the way the studio likes, and if they don't, the job goes to someone else. If they're desperate to stay on the script, they can do a free pass, but they usually still get hosed in the end.

The studio's logic is that they don't want to get hung up on someone trying to rewrite their way out of a hole, and want to replace that person with someone else who can do something new and quick. Many times studios assign multiple writers on the same project at the same time, and then pick and choose the bits that play best with the focus groups the studio marketing department picked up in the parking lot of the Home Depot. The recent A-Team movies went through 11 writers that we know of. You don't need 11 writers for a movie version of the A-Team.

However, the chickens are coming home to roost. Ticket sales are down compared to past summers, and the biggest complaint among moviegoers is that big feature films aren't delivering the stories they want, and cable TV is.

It wasn't always like this. During the Golden Age of Hollywood writers were under contract to the studios. Then they were paid a very good weekly salary for the time, they worked in an office in the "Writer's Building" on the studio lot, dividing their time between adaptations, and their own original work. If someone was stuck, story problems were handled more collaboratively by people more directly involved with the project than today. Today's version of studio-producer-writer collaboration usually consists of a bunch hastily scribbled notes from some producer or executive with little or no real connection to the project, usually contradicting each other in everything except the demand for more fart jokes.

People complain that it was an era of "slavery" and in some aspects, it was, but it was also an era where there were a hell of a lot of well written movies made back then.

So let's look at some major facts about writers:

1. Writers thrive on deadlines. Most writers find deadlines invigorating, it gets the adrenaline pumping and compels them to stop surfing for videos about Japanese nurses being naughty and get to work. The great majority of writers meet their deadlines, because it shows to their employers that they are reliable, and available for other assignments so they can achieve their dream and make their dream-project about the sass-talking robot that learns about love from an orangutan addicted to Kraft dinner.

2. Writers thrive on collaboration. It's a lonely business, and there's nothing more invigorating than being able to hash out ideas with other writers without fear or favor. You'd be surprised what can come out of such gatherings.

3. Writers thrive on security. You'd be amazed how much a writer can get done quickly if they're not worrying about paying the rent on their grotty little bedsit apartment, or can buy real groceries instead of living off ramen noodles.

What can we do with these simple basic facts?

1. Keep the deadlines, but do what it takes to help the writers meet them. Robert Towne wrote Chinatown, which put him eternally in the pantheon of screenwriting legends. But he is notoriously slow, and tended to overwrite projects to an epic degree. When he started out working for Roger Corman, the legendary exploitation auteur used to lock him in a room with a sign on the door reading: "You May Feed The Writer, But Don't Let Him Out Until He Delivers His Day's Pages." I know it sounds harsh, but remember, 99% of writers don't need those sorts of drastic measures. For the majority, all you have to do is...

2. Promote collaborations. Like I said earlier, it's a lonely business. So regular meetings of writers working for a given producer and/or studio to hash out problems on each others projects might prove to be very helpful. Especially if such meetings are held in a non-competitive atmosphere where they can speak freely about their work. If you need rules to guide these meetings to keep them from turning into brawls, then compose some, it's not that hard. If chemistry forms between teams of writers, then get them working together.

3. Promote writer comfort. Most writers write because they have to, not just because they want to. If they don't have to worry about their bills, food, clothing, or shelter, they will be more productive. So pay them what they're owed on time, in full, and stop playing silly bugger games to pinch some pennies out of their pasty, pimple-dotted hides.

Maybe then Hollywood might get back to what made it great, making good stories and selling them to the world.

Hollywood Babble On & On #454: Miscellaneous Movie/Media/Money Musings

Welcome to the show folks...

JAMES CAMERON TO WRITE AVATAR NOVEL

That's right, Cameron's taking his war against plot and character development to a whole new front by announcing that he is writing a novel inspired by his film Avatar.

Since it took Cameron 15 years to make Avatar the movie, the quickest route is to take the novelization of Dances With Wolves off his Kindle and doing a "search & replace" so that "train" reads "spaceship." He still won't explain what unobtainium is supposed to do, because he probably doesn't know himself.

And the really sad part, apart from actually reading it, will be that he will get a huge advance, a massive marketing blitz, sell several million copies, 90% won't be read past the first chapter, and several thousand better writers, with actual stories to tell with actual characters in them won't get published, let alone similar treatment by publishers.

Plus Amazon won't let them charge an extra $5 bucks to see the text in 3D.

SOME FILMS HAVEN'T SOLD YET... WHY?

Two scripts with "big names" attached haven't sold yet. They are Abducted, which has the soon to be omnipresent Taylor Lautner attached, and Contagion, from Stephen Soderbergh, Participant Productions and has Matt Damon, Kate Winslet and others attached.

So let's look at the reasons these films haven't sold yet.

ABDUCTED

This script pretty much all rests on the appeal of star Taylor Lautner, and the major studios currently have the screaming thigh sweats for him, but this frenzy could end in two ways:

1. They discover that Lautner's appeal is completely entwined in his role in Twilight, and that he cannot sell tickets to lifeboats on the Titanic outside that franchise.

2. Lautner does have appeal outside of Twilight, but his target audience quickly becomes sick of the sight of him because of overexposure.

It's actually about time that someone takes a wait and see approach to see if the young man is worth the money, and how to avoid strangling the golden goose before it lays a few golden eggs.

CONTAGION

This is supposed to be one of Soderbergh's "commercial" films like his Ocean's 11 movies, a thriller about a killer disease, and an all-star cast. Of course that's what they said about his last film The Informant! which was marketed a wacky crowd pleasing comedy about corporate malfeasance, and only became an "art film" when it failed to make back its prints and advertising budget at the box office.

Also Participant Productions was created by its billionaire founder to be a "politically activist" film company. That is pretty much telling everyone that is hoping to make some money off of this film that there's going to be some sort of heavy handed political message in this "commercial thriller," and recent history shows that most attempts Hollywood make at being political fail unless its buried under tons of 3D CGI and big battle scenes.

CRUISE & PARAMOUNT'S IMPOSSIBLE MISSION

As reported everywhere else on the planet Tom Cruise is back at Paramount, and planning to return to the Mission Impossible franchise that's dominated his career for the past 15 years. However, Cruise is not getting the usual "dollar one gross" deal that he had with the last movie.

For the uninitiated a "dollar one" deal means that on top of his $20-25 million up front fee, Cruise also got 22.5% of the money made by MI3 at the box office from the very first dollar to the last. With the film's bloated development, production, and distribution budget the film made $400 million internationally, Cruise pocketed $80 million of that money, but Paramount barely got the bills paid.

That deal is the perfect embodiment of what I call the self-fulfilling idiocy of Hollywood. The big studios used to offer a piece of the net, which meant that folks like George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and several major actors made a lot of money when their films hit it big. However this big blockbusters attracted big corporations who absorbed the studios as part of their new media conglomerates. The new conglomerates decided that they wanted to keep those net profits for themselves, and suddenly they mysteriously disappeared into the arcane realm of corporate bookkeeping.

Except this happened to coincide with the age of super-salaries for the A-List. So any stars and agents with clout started asking for huge up-front payoffs, and the dreaded "dollar one" deals for the really big players expecting to get screwed. Then the studios saw costs skyrocket, their net profits disappear for real, and their gross profits shrink into nothing, while they ended in a futile chase for a steady stream of blockbusters that needed to break records just to break even.

Cruise's deal is now for a big upfront payment and a piece of an "adjusted gross." Adjusted gross means that the studio gets to have the film's bills paid before they have to start paying Cruise his cut. Now one can hope that Cruise's reps have negotiated a deal where the numbers the film has to reach these adjusted numbers are set in stone, because the studios will take advantage of the slightest vagary to get the whole self-fulfilling idiocy rolling again.

Hollywood Babble On & On #441: From The Fevered Snakepit of My Brain!

Welcome to the show folks...

A LITTLE PERSONAL NOTE

Today I made my last payment on my student loan.

Huzzah!

My degree is finally 100% mine.

Now maybe it might be worth something.

Anyway, you don't want to read about me, you want to read me ragging on people way richer than I am, so away we go...

LENOPRAH

Jay Leno will be sitting down with Oprah Winfrey to tell his side of the whole NBC late night debacle. It will be followed by a visit to Dr. Oz, who will retrieve Jay's nuts from the jar in Jeff Zucker's office, and try to reattach them, and attempt a dangerous integrity implant.

A FAMILY GUY GUILD AWARDS

Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane will host the Writer's Guild of America (West) awards this year.

His monologue will consist entirely of him saying: "You know this reminds me of the time..." and then someone will act out a lame visual gag involving Kathy Griffin farting.

WEINSTEINS WANT THEIR BABY BACK

And I'm not talking about baby back ribs. Though I can understand someone wanting to get their hands on some slow smoked baby back ribs...hmmmmm.....drool....
Oh, sorry, where was I?

Right! The Weinstein Co. wants to spend some other people's money buying back the name of their first company Miramax from Disney. Right now old Miramax is as moribund as a dodo, and TWC thinks it could bring back some of the old 90s magic to their beleaguered money pit.

I for one think it would be the corporate equivalent of painting the porch on a haunted house.

However, who am I to judge?

Oh, right, I'm an obnoxious internet know it all!

I judge everything!

Hollywood Babble On & On #433: Some Movie-Media-Money Musings...

Welcome to the show folks...

Been a busy day, and I'm running late delivering the blogging goodness that you crave like the salivating dogs that your are. So sit back, and let my words make sweet love to your brain....

STILL MORE LATE NIGHT STUFF...

It looks like Conan O'Brien has an exit deal to leave NBC. Personally, I won't believe it until Conan's people makes a statement and he's got the money in the bank, because the longer it takes to make it all legal and official, the greater the chance old Jeff the Jolly Jester will thrust himself into the situation and Zuckerfy everything back into the stone age. If he chooses to do so at a Pro-Coco rally, it might get ugly.

Folks are already wondering about the gangly comedian's future. Some think he'd be happy and more at home at Comedy Central. Which got me thinking.

Comedy Central is connected to the Paramount/Viacom empire, which also own CBS in one form or another, which is the home of David Letterman's Late Show. Now if Letterman wasn't a baby boomer, and thus unwilling to retire until about 5 years after his own death, he'd recruit Conan to do a show for Comedy Central as a Worldwide Pants/Conan Co-Production. Perhaps a show fostering new comedians and bands. Then after a few years, when Dave finally admits his age and young interns and viagra lose their charms, Conan would step in on the Late Show.

He could even have Conan step in as a regular fill-in host during vacations and sick-days. Something Jay Leno wouldn't have done in a billion years. (Something Jay will find even harder, because who will believe his promises of eventually inheriting the show.)

Wouldn't that put an onion in the NBC ointment. It would burn even more if Conan beats Jay, who will probably still be there.

But like I said, there's still a chance to Zuckerfy everything. Considering that one of the few remaining sticky points is who gets custody of the Conan characters and skits. Now outside of totally petty desire to avoid seeing Conan succeed elsewhere with the things they could have had, they have no real use for that material.

Unless.... Zucker's planning a Pimpbot 5000 and Masturbating Bear sitcom for the fall 2010 TV season. But NBC would never go for it. People might actually watch it.

GOLDEN GLOBES....

Skipped them.

Probably skip the Oscars again too this year.

AS IF WRITERS DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH PROBLEMS...

Hollywood studios are now becoming more closed to new writers than ever, citing fear of litigation if someone submits without an agent.

Ironically, Hollywood agents have a similar policy, being unwilling to look at anyone they haven't poached from another agent.

Besides, it's all moot anyway since from now on all Hollywood films will be written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

Sure, you think I'm kidding, but look at the reports of who is writing what. They're the only writers working these days.

Here's the roll call for the 2011 Writer's Guild Annual General Meeting: "Bob you here?" "Here. Are you here Alex?" "Yep. Roll call complete."