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Onward and Upward Higher! — By Jack

27 Jun

…Continued from the post below. “What do you mean ‘you don’t talk to me that way’? I’m your fuckin’ CEO!” Max’s yell could be heard from his office, echoing through the bullpen. Donald stepped out of his office out into the open. He was going to make a show of it.

“You don’t call my assistants ‘your bitches’, you don’t call my sound mixers ‘incompetent fuck wads’ and you don’t call me–” Donald announced as if he were nailing a reformation on to the post schedule’s cork board.

Max stomped out of his office like a bully who just received a weggie from a chess club champion. He teetered on the edge of cool composure in the face of anger and going atomic. Then he stared Donald down which shut him up mid sentence. He was literally face to face. Noses no more than an inch away from one another.

Donald was a husky man, not quite thick enough to be called fat. Long gray curly hair that went down his back, topped off with a baseball cap. Mutton chops and a bushy mustache. He wore jeans, sneakers and a Spurs jersey. He was a man who had been bullied before, but couldn’t resist fighting back. Max on the other hand was never used to the push back. It dumbfounded and infuriated him. He had an Ari Gold style to match the temperament. Finely pressed silk-like khakis, French cuffed dark red shirt, a class ring on one hand, a Rolex on the other. And always perfectly trimmed hair. Everyday it looked like he walked in with a fresh haircut.

Max pulled away. “You know what? I was wrong. You’re not a shit stain. You’re a monkey. You don’t think I haven’t talked to people. Your crew? The network? The clients on location? You showin’ up late. 12 hour shoots that last 16 hours. Receipts for $300 dinners your crew says they never had. Footage that barely resembles the episode pitch. Hell I got editors working round the clock to fix the shit you told the DP to shoot. Makes me wonder what the fuck you’re doing. Then my brother sends me this.”

He pulls his phone to show him a video.


“And all I can think of is, that reminds me of Donald. It must be all you fuckin’ do in that office of yours. Because sure as shit nothing else is getting done.”

Donald is fuming. But he has no comeback. He knows he’s fucked up. The only person people bitch about more than Max is Donald.

“You need me to finish out the series, Max.”

“You know, I don’t think I do. I’m so confident in how worthless you are, I think I’m going to have…”

Max peers around the bullpen. He starts wagging his finger as if he was playing eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Finally he stops dead on me.

“Jack.”

“Seaver? He was a PA like three months ago. ”

“And he cast your whole show. He knows more about the companies than you do.”

“You can’t be serious! Max, bud!”

“I’m not your bud. I’m also not your boss anymore. Clean out your office and get the fuck out.”

Then Max walked off pulling out his cellphone to watch the Youtube video again. “I love that fuckin’ monkey drinking his pee! I’m going to call this the Donald video from now on.”

Donald couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. And neither could anyone else in the bullpen. Everyone was looking at me. Donald stood there for a second then finally turned to me and said, “Kid, you’ve no clue what you’re getting into. Good luck.”

–Jack Out

 
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Posted by on June 27, 2013 in By Jack, Writing

 

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Upward and Onward — By Jack

21 Jun

Meant for bigger things.

Lazarus Motors just pulled out. The crew is scheduled to land in Michigan two hours from now. And I didn’t get the location release ahead of time.

For anyone unfamiliar with television production, this is bad…very very bad. Without that release, a legal document agreeing to let us film the yacht builder’s facility, $600 plane tickets per crew member (of which there are 7) and 3 nights of $150 per night hotel rooms (also per crew member and also non-refundable) totaling $7350 dollars, will go to waste. That doesn’t account for day rates or travel expenses of those crew members or equipment rented or baggage fees. And when the airline doesn’t have media rates, a truckload of film equipment equals a shit load of baggage fees.

Long story short. I am fucked.

Back up nine months ago. Suffering 2 months of unemployment destroyed all my New York savings. I took a deli counter job. I was serving a chocolate cream pie when I made a joke to a guy on his third martini. I honestly don’t know what the joke was, but before I knew it the guy offered me a job at his documentary production company.

“I like you kid. You remind me of a really good shit I once took.”  He handed me his business card which, I swear, was made out of aluminum. Embossed in big letters was the name Max Luxburg. If I could have crumpled it up, I would have. But instead I gave him call the next day.

Before I knew it I was sitting in a cubical of a loud and hectic bullpen. Walls and floors made of marble echoed the chaos like a basketball court. But for the first time in my adult life I had an email address with my name followed by a company and weekends off. It felt good.

I started out as a production assistant, but instead of copying papers and making lunch runs, I was instantly given a short web series to produce.

“Knock it out of the park, penis head.” Ever since I shaved my head, I found I liked the bald look. But Max made no reservations about phallic comparisons. “You’re from New York. You know how to get things done.” Then he got on his motorcycle and drove out the emergency exit from his office.

To be honest, producing the show, a collection of short segments about pet stores around Los Angeles wasn’t that hard. It mostly involved calling stores and shelters, trying to convince them were weren’t trying to make them look crazy or stupid (which we were)  and figuring out how to make a schedule work between them and our “avant- garde” host Doggie Dave.

Max continued to throw projects my way and I kept doing what needed to be done. So then he bumped me up to assistant producer on Fill My Grill, a show about customizing BBQ equipment with Richard Karn.

Then one day I was at my desk when I heard Max knock over a bowl of jelly beans. The clash echoed through out the whole office, as the usual chaos came to a silent halt. What followed was a yell of, “What do you mean ‘you don’t talk to me that way?'” Something was up and someone was getting fired.

To be continued…

–Jack Out (Also I won’t drag this out like Jill. I’ll update it in a few days.)

 
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Posted by on June 21, 2013 in By Jack, Writing

 

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Meditations on Fools — by Jack

30 Nov

One after the other

Ed Wood, Derek Zoolander, Shaggy and Scooby, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Ron Burgundy, Donna Noble, Falstaff, and the holy trinity, Larry, Curly, and Moe. What do these cinematic and literary icons all share? Their ineptitude for logic and common sense. In other words, they’re fools.

I’ve begun work on a new spec scripts (finally) and decided to make the theme of the story centering on the archetypal fool. So in preparation I’ve begun meditating and ruminating. It seems that every comedy has a fool of some sort. In sitcoms, there’s usually the idiot character. Friends had Joey, Seinfeld had George Castanza, and The Simpsons may have the greatest fool of all time, Homer. In film, we’ll watch whole stories about Forrest Gump, Everette McGill, and Don Quixote.

Sometimes they exist to amuse us and make us feel better about ourselves. They dance through life, as random happenstance protects them from danger, completely unaware. (Think Baby’s Day Out)

But sometimes the fool is not so lucky. These ones are trapped by their short comings, doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again. I sympathize with this fool. Their struggle is a reflection of our own wrong headed but continued behavior. Ed Wood is a difficult movie for me to watch for this very aspect. I will point out that this fool is, many times, not a fool at all. But someone who views the world in such a new way, he is rejected. Moneyball‘s Billy Beane is a primary example. And although he is right, it doesn’t make him any less tragic.

Why is the fool a necessary part of our pop culture? Maybe it reaches back to when we were children. We were cruel to the fool in class. The crueler we were to them, the more we distanced ourselves from the possibility we could be one ourselves. We lacked the sympathy and compassion to do otherwise. As we grew older, we viewed our parents as the fools. (In many teen geared sitcoms, the parents are the bumbling idiots, completely out of touch with reality.) And as we graduated into adulthood and came to see the expansiveness of reality, some of us started to view ourselves as the fool. Taking chances we couldn’t possibly guarantee the success of. Or getting ourselves into complicated situations where, in the confrontation of the moment, we acted foolishly. While in retrospect, the wiser choice seemed so obvious.

Have you ever heard of candy floss?

Have you ever heard it called candy floss? WTF Britain?

These two sides, the fanciful fool and the regretful one…I want them to meet. Set them at odds. I want to take the pained lamenting man and have him grab the dancing moron by the shirt collar and demand answers and ask confronting questions. I want these two to hash it out. And at the end I’ll have them reassemble back into one and see if the fool has changed. I honestly don’t know if he will. I’ll have to find out when I write the story. But in the meantime, I want to take a good good look at him and for a second pretend…

The image I see is of a man, hunched over in his bar stool cradling his pint. It’s a rare moment for him, or perhaps only a moment he has when he thinks he’s alone. I’m not sure if he can identify where his life has gone astray. I’m not even sure if he is even aware of it. He is on a path that he cannot change himself. When he notices that you are there, that he is no longer alone, he spins in his bar stool raising his glass. He pats you on the back or maybe playfully punches you in the arm. He tells you something and he’s so excited to tell it to you. To him it seems like an incomprehensible epiphany so profound that it must have been bequeathed by God himself. And you would be happy for him if you’d not heard it a dozen times before. You offer to buy him a drink. He laughs, dismissing your offer in an attempt to hold on to his dignity. You realize it is painful for him to accept your kindness. But he cannot afford not to. He tells you stories with inflated details and unlikely happy endings. He gives you unsolicited advice and improbably business secrets. And when it’s time for you to go he claps your forearm, pleading that it is far too early for a departure.

You want to comfort him but it is too much. The notion being that any help you render will not possibly bring any sort of lasting change. He now knows the time is at its end and release your arm. He gives you a smile and a thanks, then says he’ll get you the next time. You wish him luck. He swirls around in his bar stool another couple of times.

Just some thoughts.

You know what Mr. T pities.

Does he really need a sign?

–Jack Out

 
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Posted by on November 30, 2012 in By Jack, Writing

 

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And Ode to Whedon — By Jack

08 May

I know that praising Whedon right now is sorta jumping on the super geeky band wagon. TIME magazine did an article about him.  The Avengers just destroyed the record for all time opening weekend (not adjusted for inflation.)  And his horror/deconstruction film Cabin in the Woods has already achieved cult classic status. By the way go see it as soon as you can. So among all this Whedon hoopla and craziness, what do I have to add?

Nothing really. I’d just like to point out the things I love about what he does and how I will be stealing it in my work for years to come.

Brief history on the guy. Whedon wrote the original Buffy the Vampire slayer, you know the one with Kristi Swanson and Luke Perry. He then adapted it to television a few years later. Now when the TV show first came out, my reaction was pretty much what everyone else’s was. “Oh God, I can’t believe they’re making into a show.” It seemed so cheesy and  Hollywood, so I went back to reading my X-Men comic books. (Which Whedon has written a few of.)

But eventually I gave it a try. I started in the middle of season 2. I couldn’t stand Sarah Michelle Gellar. The monsters looked like bad Star Trek aliens. The plots of each week’s episode seemed too formulaic. But suddenly, Buffy decided to have sex with her vampire boyfriend Angel and he went insane. Due to some curse, her most trusted and intimate partner was now hunting her friends and drawing her as she slept. It was cold, it was dark, it was chilling. But then to end the conflict, in the season finale, Buffy has resolved to kill Angel once and for all.  Whedon didn’t stop there. He didn’t just make it a conflict between good and formerly good.  Right when Buffy defeats Angel, he snaps out of it (due to the efforts of Willow, one of the most charming characters in all of the Whedonverse.) Angel is restored, loving, confused. But it is too late. Whatever plot evil Angel had set into motion could only be avoided by his death.  Buffy kisses him one last time and impales him sending him to hell.

Wow.  That’s when I realized, this guy has balls. As I watched Buffy over the next 5 seasons I noticed other things come about. I never really gave a fuck about Buffy Summers, but almost everyone else in that cast became so robust. They changed and grew. The aforementioned Willow started as a dorky teenager, fell in love with another woman, mastered witchcraft only to succumb to it like a drug, and finally find some peace with her burden.

The plots of most individual episodes were still nothing spectacular, but Whedon was a master of laying the ground work for incredible story arcs that spanned seasons.  This guy really knew how to get you involved.

But through out it all, there was always a mind to the formula. He knew when the show was getting a bit routine and it was clear he always wanted to be above that.  Sometimes, it was merely a sarcastic comment to draw attention to it. In the case of Cabin in the Woods, he has the whole end of the movie spiral out of control to spite the formula. And sometimes he’d fuck the formula by killing someone that by all story telling logic made no sense. It left you in a head space that no one in cast of characters was safe.

Granted they guy doesn’t have a perfect batting average. The first two season of Angel are pretty bad and I’m not nuts about Dollhouse. But then there is Firefly. All the complaints about Buffy (weak main character, individual plots kinda lame) are absent as you have an incredibly perfect cast and a flush sci fi western world. The show got cancelled far too soon, but it did finish things off with a film, Serenity (one of my favorite movies ever.) And everyone should Youtube Dr. Horrible.

And it’s because of all I’ve listed above, Avengers works. It doesn’t just work, it’s an accomplishment. It is fun. Balanced. Knows how to raise the stakes. And unlike so many summer action movies the ACTION feels fresh and specific and clever. It’s by no means perfect, but it is a hell of a lot of fun.  Go see it. And watch this video of the master talking at an Equality Now conference. It’s pretty inspiring.

 

 

–Jack out.

 
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Posted by on May 8, 2012 in By Jack, Reviews, entertainment, etc...

 

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Jack’s TV Writing Notes! — By Jack

25 Jan

If you remember a while back I did a post on TV writing. That was from my first class which basically focused on how to write a TV spec script. Essentially you write an episode of an existing TV show.  Now I’ve picked back up with TV writing II: Electric Boogaloo…I mean writing a pilot.

I could explain to you what a pilot is, but I think I’ll turn that over to my friend Jules…

Thanks Jules. Now in case you don’t like Pulp Fiction or that video has been taken down or SOPA/PIPA/ACTA got passed and I’m in jail, I will explain what a pilot is after all.  When developing an original idea for a TV series you sell the first episode of a show to a production company and/or (not sure if it’s either or both) a network. Let me clarify, you don’t sell quite yet. You option your pilot script.

When you option the show you get a certain amount of money and the production company has a window of time to make the show. Then if they film the pilot episode you get more money. If the pilot episode is successful and a network makes a second episode that’s when the real money comes in!

So how do I sell my show? I need my elevator pitch! An elevator pitch is a short 30 second – 1 minute pitch I could rattle off if I were in an elevator with an executive or whoever could get my show made. Not that any of us will be so lucky. But when pitching the show I need to distill what’s important about my show and what’s most attractive to get someone’s attention.

What do my targets need to hear?

  1. Distill the essence of my show.
    -Depending on which network I pitch to, my script will have to subtlety change.  A pitch to MTV better be a bit different than a pitch to HBO.  No matter who gets the show, changes will be insisted upon. What in my idea  must I hold on to that makes it different from every other show? If I can be as specific as possible on this, I can hold my ground on what I need and change everything else that’s not so important.
  2. What THEY need to see.
    -The production company (people physically making the show) needs to see that the show can last 100 episodes. Around that time a TV show goes into something called syndication. I.e. it goes to TBS or channel 32 and it shown at 6:00 pm then again at 11:30 pm. When that happens everyone who makes the show really gets money. Every time the show airs, you get money, but when it goes from once a week to 5-10 times a week, that’s 5x -10X more money a week. When a show’s on network, it will only airs as long as it’s being made. In syndication it could run for decades.
    -The network  (the people airing the show) needs to see it appealing to a massive audience and possibly attracting celebrities. They don’t care so much about it going into syndication, they want it to have as many people watching it at one time for the sake of ad revenue.
  3. The type of pitch. Depending on the type of show, my pitch needs to be different.
    a) Title Show pitch. (Seinfeld, Cosby, Louis C.K.) For these shows I’m pitching the character.
    b) Circumstance pitch. (Northern Exposure, Raising Hope) Guy X is taken from big city and moves to small town.
    c) Concept pitch. (LOST, Battlestar Galactica) Most appropriate for sci-fi, you have to sell a concept about the world of the show.
    d) Theme (Modern Family, Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives) You guessed it, you’re selling a thematic idea for the show and how your characters revolve around that theme.

So that’s pitching and I have to develop my idea enough to have a sound elevator pitch for class next Monday. Come back next week for another exciting installment of Jack’s TV Writing Notes!

-Jack Out

 
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Posted by on January 25, 2012 in By Jack, Writing

 

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What douche bags: part 2 – by Jack

13 Oct

I’ve found my script, an old 10 minute play called Stick Up. It was the first thing I wrote when I quit marketing to do writing. The rules to the Naked Fairy Tales website insist it only be 10 pages, and Stick Up is closer to 14 pages, but I figured a way to format it. I called them just to be clear on specifics. The girl told me to come with two copies of my play to the reading. Watch the play readings, then submit mine at the end for next week. Sounds wonderful.

I read through my play and timed it and it was about 9 minutes long. I thought I’d be fine. Only thing was I don’t have a printer. No problem, just stop by a Staples or Kinkos (now FedEX office.)  Sure enough there was a Staples around the theatre. I wanted to conserve paper so I had two pages printed per sheet. You know, so it reads like a book. Like so…

I go the show and boy did the plays sucks. There was only one that I didn’t hate. The rest of them had no conflict, no stakes, and insufferable pauses. Granted it was reading so the actors didn’t know the scripts but the plays died none the less. I don’t know where this “under 10 minutes” thing went because they went through 5 or 6 in the whole two hours.

Finally, the plays all done. People dispersed to the bar and it once again became a social environment. I looked for the two emcees to whom I was to submit my script. I find one of them and he’s talking to someone, I wait patiently back. In conversation with the other guy, the emcee stops, mid-sentence and addresses me, “What?.”

Startled, I presented my script. “I brought this for next week. My name is Jack.”

“It is 10 pages?” he jumps to.

“Yea, less, it’s 8.”

“Why’d you format it like this. You see my gray hair? I can’t read this.”

“It was to save paper. I can email it to you.”

“Why do you have two copies? You just need one.”

“I called ahead, the girl told me to bring 2 copies.”

“Well you don’t need two copies. Just one.”

And then he turned by to the guy he was talking to and we were done. Fuck that place.

–Jack out!

 
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Posted by on October 13, 2011 in By Jack, Writing

 

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What douche bags: part 1. — by JACK

05 Oct

Mack came into my room at 4 in the morning.

“Buddy! There’s this thing you gotta go to.”

He was pretty drunk. Getting woken up happens a lot. Rarely does he bust into my room though. Usually he just makes toast and slams doors. But last night I had to know about this “thing.”

“I’m at Ellen’s birthday party. You know Bourbon Street bar or whatever. I go to borrow this chair from another table and the guy’s reading Hamlet. I’m like why are you reading Hamlet at a bar?”

I chimed in, “Mack? Does this have  a point? ”

“Yea, well he’s an actor and we got to talking. Turns out his theatre company does play readings every Monday. You should send something.  It’s called ‘slutty pixie fairies’ or something. Google it. You want some toast?”

“I’m good,” I replied.

Now that couldn’t sleep I decided to look it up. Slutty pixie fairies yielded some wikis, a funny youtube video, and a bizarre fetish site. But nothing to help me get any of my plays read. Finally I found what most likely was what he was talking about; a theatre company called Naked Fairy Tales. They do, in fact “promote new and emerging playwrights” with readings every Monday night. I looked over a few of my plays, but I knew what I was going to submit. I watched a Futurama episode and tried to go back to bed. Zoidberg rules.

—Jack out!

 
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Posted by on October 5, 2011 in By Jack, Writing

 

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