Having decided that Down To Earth (1995) would be their last series together, Esmonde and Larbey went their separate ways. Esmonde retired to the coastal village of La Herradura, in the Granada province of Spain, and concentrated on writing novels. "I haven't had one published yet, but being rejected makes me feel young again," he said.
The revival of Doctor Who sends the BBC into a well-merited orgy of delight, precisely because it inherits a known form and succeeds in regenerating it. It conforms, if you like, to the Trojan Horse model of drama, by taking something already familiar and cleverly smuggling in some exciting new ideas.
But with very few exceptions - inevitably, you think of Paul Abbott, the author of State of Play and Shameless - it is very hard to see the same commitment being brought to bear on wholly original work. The Wire and Heimat remain in their scale and ambition the two global television series the corporation seems least keen to emulate.
Record your sound separately
Seriously, this is the most important thing I learned. Always have a separate soundtrack.
I knew one sound guy, and he's no longer working in the business. I tried a couple of other leads, but time was getting short, and the DP swore blind that we could just run the sound from the boom mike into the camera and it would be fine.
Not having a separate sound guy is the worst mistake you can have.
Having grown frustrated by the limitations being put on them by executives and the like, the newfound friends decided to just go for it on their own. The traditional limits of good taste would simply have to be moved aside. "We had been doing TV pilots together," said Fleming, "that's how we met each other, we worked on two pilots together. And there were so many rules, so many people saying, 'Oh, that makes us uncomfortable.' "
" 'It's too far; you'll alienate the audience,' " chimed in Brady, mimicking an overly cautious exec.
"Smoothing it out, we said, 'Let's just do this on our own,' " Fleming continued. "It's for us; it will make us laugh. So we didn't censor ourselves at all."
It's possible that Sadie Jones just wasn't a very good screenwriter. After "clawing away" (her words) at the profession for 15 years, things weren't looking good – a "lovely romantic comedy", a thriller, and a "really nice coming of age story" all came to nothing. Then along came The Outcast, the film script of which became a bestselling novel, which in a twist of fate is now becoming a film script again.
"I often thought that if I could have given up, and done something else, I would have done," says Jones. "Retrospectively, I can see that I was learning all the time, but it was often difficult. I was employed sometimes, and I had things in development, but there were a lot of disappointments. It was not so much stubbornness, or even belief, I just carried on writing. To deal with disappointment, I had to write for the sake of writing, not some imaginary reward."
Speaking about his new novel, Deaf Sentence, he [David Lodge] said, "I find most writing therapeutic," adding that Graham Greene had once expressed bafflement that most people did not write, or paint, or do creative work of some kind as an outlet for anxiety.
Julian Barnes, on the other hand, expressed nothing but disdain about the writing-as-therapy notion when he spoke at the festival on Sunday. "In certain areas of misery-lit it might work," he told the audience. "You have a horrible life, you write about it, you make a lot of money; people start to love you; your life gets better. But it's just as likely to have the opposite effect. You have a miserable life; you write about it; nobody wants to publish it; you end up even more miserable."
Even if you are a huge fan of YouTube shorts, you have to admit that Google is going to have to make lots of tweaks if it is ever going to make YouTube profitable. Google understands this and is working on the transformation. Screening Room is a reasonable first step to start competing with products like Hulu. YouTube Annotations provides new capabilities that will make YouTube a more viable business tool. I expect more changes soon.The second article is about [Title Of Show], a new musical that built an audience on YouTube.
The [Title of Show] show never became a huge Internet hit, but with five to twenty four thousand viewers per episode it kept the musical fresh and built up a sizable base of new fans. Eventually a Broadway producer figured they would give Bowen and Bell what they were asking for. Last week [Title of Show] made its debut on Broadway at the Lyceum Theater.
The Internet giant will syndicate the new program using its AdSense advertising system to thousands of Web sites that are predetermined to be gathering spots for Mr. MacFarlane’s target audience, typically young men. Instead of placing a static ad on a Web page, Google will place a “Cavalcade” video clip. YouTube will also devote a channel to the material.
Marketing messages will be incorporated into the clips largely through “preroll” ads, but Burger King took its involvement a step further. In a rare example of one of Hollywood’s top creative powers working hand-in-glove with a marketer, Mr. MacFarlane created and animated Burger King ads to play ahead of “Cavalcade” clips.
Aspiring writers are frequently told that the quickest route to getting published is via an agent. Having been on the books of two, neither of whom got my book on the shelves, and then secured a contract with a publisher myself, I wonder if that's really true.
Nowadays, Italians and Spaniards remain popular heroes and at least one sheikh romance a month is published. Even Russian oligarchs have made an appearance.There's also a video guide to writing a Mills and Boon novel.
"As the world has become more globalised our settings have had to become more exotic, more luxurious and exciting. Where our heroes were once millionaires, now they have to be billionaires," says Clare Somerville, marketing director for Mills and Boon.
From Crackle:
The ability of “The Line” to attract name-brand talent reflects the increasing number of writers and actors who are showing interest in original Web video. “The Line” was the first straight-to-Internet series to be produced and financed by Broadway Video, the production company founded by the “SNL” executive producer, Lorne Michaels. But it won’t be its last: the company says it will produce other Web series created by and starring “SNL” cast members, and Mr. Michaels also intends to produce Web performances by Jimmy Fallon this fall, as that former “SNL” cast member prepares to replace Conan O’Brien on “Late Night” next year.
For the writers and stars of “The Line,” the Web was a proving ground. “We wanted to have an experience of shooting something on our own,” Mr. Hader said in an interview. “This is a good medium to do it in because it’s a very low-stakes medium.”
In The Guardian, Stephen Armstrong sings the praises of BBC TV drama series New Tricks (created by Roy Mitchell and Nigel McCrery). ...as New Tricks has tottered to its fifth series, adding roughly one million viewers each time - with most of the newcomers in their 30s or younger - it has become correspondingly darker and more unsettling. Lane has obsessive-compulsive disorder and is a recovering alcoholic. Halford spent series one to four pursuing the man who murdered his wife only to see the crook walk free. Plots have revolved around pension-fund rip-offs, incest, corruption and MI5 assassinations of 1970s trade-union leaders. And this can upset commissioners. A forthcoming episode exploring racism was nearly canned by a nervous BBC until the cast mutinied.
Executive producer Tom Sherry says the show is designed to subvert expectations, pricking the conscience of viewers through drama where documentaries might struggle. It may not have CSI's $3m-an-hour budget, but New Tricks isn't just our most popular show - it's proper genre-mashing cutting-edge Brit TV. Of the old school.
For the Writers Guild of America West, Denis Faye speaks to cardiologist D.P. Lyle who has a second career as an advisor to writers. What gaffs do you see in movies and on the TV that you roll your eyes at?
Several. One of them, I call the “instant death.” It's very hard to kill someone instantly, especially with a gun or a knife -- especially the guy who throws the knife across the room and it sticks the guy in the chest, and he falls down dead. Not going to happen. It's going to take hours, if not days, to die from a knife wound unless it hits something really, really vital and that's not likely. Same with a gun. Brain, heart or upper part of spinal cord, yeah, you can drop someone like a sack of potatoes. Short of that, they're going to bleed to death, or they're going to die of an infection.
How many times have you seen the guy shot, and he's written out of the script? Actually, what's going to happen is that he's going to be angry, and he's going to come after you. He's going to be bleeding, but now, he's going to take you with him.
The other thing is the “knockout punch.” You knock someone out, and they're written out of the script. In real life, think about the boxing matches you've seen. Guy gets knocked out and two minutes later, he's sitting on the stool in the corner saying it was a lucky punch. That's real life. If you knock someone out, they're unconscious for seconds or a very few minutes. They might be groggy for a few minutes, but after that, they're upset, and they're going to come after you. That doesn't happen in movies.
Michael Grade, the chairman of ITV, said yesterday that it was prepared to abandon its obligations to show regional news and children’s programmes.ITV also wants the right to transmit more adverts per hour and to introduce product placement and Mr Grade said that if the rules were not eased by regulators he would do so unilaterally. “I want to retain our status as a public service broadcaster, but not at any price,” Mr Grade said. “I’m not sure that the regulator understands the urgency of the need for reform.”
Perhaps more than any other modern British playwright, other than his great friend and champion Harold Pinter, Gray was a chronicler of what is unsaid. His plays are full of highly educated, highly literate, professional people who find that words fail them and retreat into irony as a defence.
Peak Practice and Soldier Soldier creator Lucy Gannon has launched a scathing attack on the BBC, claiming that the Corporation’s drawn-out commissioning process is threatening the livelihoods of writers and independent drama producers.
Gannon, whose BBC credits include the series Servants, said the period between an idea being developed for the Corporation and then either commissioned or rejected was often as long as two years.
She said that this overlong process made it difficult for writers and companies relying on commissions to cope financially, and claimed the situation was being compounded by clauses in BBC contracts which prevent scripts being taken to other broadcasters for a certain period.
So my partner and I have written the script. We’re very happy with it. Been over it several times. It’s ready to turn in.
But first –
The 5-2 draft.
We always make one final pass and do the following – add 5 great jokes, take out 2 pages.
Congratulations to Guild member Gareth Miles who won the Welsh-language category in the Wales Book Of The Year award last month with his novel Y Proffwyd a’i Ddwy Jesebel.A young novelist is selling shares in his next book, to allow him to quit work and concentrate on his writing.
Investors can pay $2,000 (£1,000) in return for a 10 per cent share of the royalties of Tao Lin’s as-yet-unfinished second novel.
Tao posted details of his “initial public offering” on his popular literary blog last week and claims to have already lined up buyers for five of the six shares.
Coelho discovered the power of free when a fan posted a Russian translation of one of his novels online and book sales there climbed from 3,000 to 100,000 to 1m in three years. "This happened in English, in Norwegian, in Japanese and Serbian," he said. "Now when the book is released in hard copy, the sales are spectacular." So Coelho started linking to pirated versions of his books from his own website.
Walsh isn’t interested in writing about you or me. This is a man who, when hearing of the Josef Fritzl case in Austria, didn’t so much recoil in horror as proclaim a vindication of his dramatic priorities. “This is my territory,” says Walsh. “What motivates me in theatre has always been to get close to characters who’re on the edge of madness, or have entered it. It invigorates me to think that we’re all the same . . . The job of a playwright is to bring an audience close to characters they don’t want to feel close to.
Is self-published prose quite as stigmatised as it used to be? The old assumptions that attach themselves to books written, designed, printed and sold by one and the same person are ruthlessly one-tracked: nobody else wanted it; there must be something wrong with it; it’s that lower-caste untouchable, a vanity project. Increasingly, however, it seems that self-published novels can create elbow room for themselves in a market dominated by Tesco, Amazon, the three-for-two table and Richard & Judy.We'll be covering four Guild members' experiences of self-publishing in the next issue of the Guild's magazine, UK Writer, out later this month.
[Chalres] Boyle’s 24 for 3 has just won the 2008 McKitterick prize, awarded to first-time novelists over the age of 40, and is being brought out in a more ostentatiously jacketed hardback by Bloomsbury. And Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This, a self-published novel about an Anglo-Nigerian girl uprooted from London to the old country, recently won the best-first-book category for the Africa region of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. “I did the usual thing that most writers do when they first start out — sent it to agents and publishers,” Adeniran says. “I didn’t get the greatest response, but the response from friends and acquaintances was really positive, so I decided to do something about it.”
Predictably, McKee took a few verbal beatings in different sessions at the Screenwriters' Festival, but I like his book 'Story' - it has some useful practical advice, and it's clear and well-argued with good examples. I also loved the lampooning of some of his excesses in 'Adaptation' too. As, I'm pretty sure, did McKee himself.
I don't agree with anyone who says 'Don't read any of the screenwriting manuals'. Read them all: Vogler, Field, Parker, etc., etc. All of them. And ignore them all if you want, or ignore bits of them, and use other bits.
