Funny Picture

This is going around Facebook tagged as John Cage's rules, but Corita Kent actually wrote them:

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.

RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined — this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.

RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: “We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” (John Cage)

HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything — it might come in handy later.

The AVClub talks about how David Mamet added exactly one scene when he adapted GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS from the stage to the screen.

I had a chance to attend a panel discussion on “Showrunners” at July’s Just for Laughs Conference with TWO AND A HALF MEN co-creator Lee Aronsohn and BIG BANG THEORY showrunner Bill Prady, moderated by Variety's Steven Gaydos. A few takeaways:

Lee likes to cast “people I can’t stop looking at.” Talent and charisma are two different things. You can’t teach charisma. But it’s not enough. You need talent and professionalism. Charlie Sheen might have been the star, but “the engine that is Jon Cryer” powered the show.

Some standups are terrible sitcom actors. On BIG BANG, there’s only a single standu, Melissa Rauch. Everyone else are professional actors, many with theater degrees, or who were child actors – all serious veterans. A day player can get by on charisma, but a recurring role needs chops.

(I cast a standup once. He could not memorize his lines for the life of him. And he wouldn’t rehearse, either. We had to make cue cards.)

Bill Prady says he lets his casting director filter actors, but he hires writers without a filter. “Sitcoms are made by writers,” he said, and agents are terrible filters. He told a story about an agent who insisted he put a script on the top of the heap. It was terrible. He called back and asked what the agent liked about the script. The agent couldn't answer. Because, you see, he hadn’t read it.

Bill read 400 scripts to make the BIG BANG THEORY room. He didn’t read them all the way through, of course. But he read each one enough to know whether he wanted to work with the writer or not. “Only I know what I’m looking for, and I generally find it in the first five pages.”

Lee Aronsohn said he’s also hired people into the room based on their standup act, or their plays. He hired a woman based on her blog once. 2 ½ MEN does “gang writing” – 9 people in a room at once – so not everyone has to be a structure person.

Bill Prady mentioned that he had been able to rescue a bunch of Chuck Lorre vets who had gone to “kidcoms” (e.g. iCarly) – which are functioning as a sort of farm team for sitcoms now.

The key to survival in a room, therefore, is to know “when to speak and when not to speak.” Don’t be the guy who alwayshas something funny to say, but only 5% of it is relevant to the part of the script you’re working on.

So standup is an easier route to staff writer than it is to performer.

Bill talked about the two pilots he shot for BIG BANG. He considered that a stroke of luck – almost no pilots get reshot, and even fewer get picked up after the first pilot fails. The network thought the pilot was bad because the actress cast to play Penny, Amanda Walsh, came off as too crass and “hookery. Only one scene worked.”

The writers realized the problem was actually that the role was written too crass. They rewrote Penny, and recast her, and this time the pilot worked.

Bill talked about the habit among successful show creators of getting a bunch of friends to punch up the pilot over a week, and “everyone gets an iPod.” This reminds me of the work that the Seth Rogen / Judd Apatow / Owen Wilson / Steve Carell mafia do on each other’s scripts. I think all our scripts would be better if we’d take the time to work on each other’s material. Wouldn’t they?

An audience member asked about submitting spec pilots versus spec episodes. Bill Prady wants to see both. A spec pilot takes him into your world. A spec episode proves you can work in his; but “it better be better than anything I see on the show.” Because the show episodes are written in two weeks, with production concerns, and he assumes that you’ve spent six months on your spec episode.

Another question was about demographics of the writing room. Bill Prady remarked that the BIG BANG writing room was the first one he’d ever worked in that was majority gentile. It is, of course, mostly men. He insists that he never looks at the title page until he’s evaluated the writing sample, so his room is “a true meritocracy.”

To some extent he blames agents, who send him many more scripts by young white guys than by women, minorities or 60-year-old writers. “Agents are not looking to represent 60 year old writers.” To get an older room, you may have to look outside agents.

Of course, he may just like what men do on the page better than what women do. Certainly BIG BANG is bound to skew male, since it’s about very smart nerdy guys and a relatively dim pretty girl.

“I will say,” he added, “that it is a rare member of a writing staff who is a Protestant who came from money.”

Lisa and I started to watch SID AND NANCY, which we both saw when it came out. After about fifteen minutes of heroin-infused self-destructive craziness (and, yes, electric performances by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb), we just didn't feel like watching it any more. So we watched VEEP instead.

Many people claim that there's discrimination against older writers. And I suppose to some extent, some younger producers and execs would rather work with even younger writers whom they feel comfortable bossing around. But I think most of it is coming from the older writers themselves. Partly it relates to the process. Older writers are less willing to work for free. They are less willing to work late and on weekends. They have families and lives.

But part of it is creative. Some of drama is about people clashing about principles, but most of it is people doing unwise things. No one makes movies about rock musicians who have it all together and balance their professional and personal lives. I couldn't write an interesting movie about my relationship with Lisa. And, as you get older, you tend to accumulate wisdom, at least to the extent of seeing the train coming and deciding that, on the whole, it might be a good idea to step off the tracks.

So then, when you're writing characters in conflict, it becomes more of an effort to make them do damnfool things. You can do it, and you can even do it better. But it requires more of a mental effort.

Of course, people doing dumb things is not a plot hole. People doing things out of character is a plot hole. But people do dumb things all the time. The secret to filling plotholes is to show why your character is being such a jerk. What character flaw propels him into the open manhole? Pride, lust, anger, gluttony, sloth, envy or greed, or some combination? I'd want to get into why Sid was such a bag of pain -- not by means of a character aria, I try to avoid those, but by revelatory character moments scattered here and there that allow us to imagine our way into him.

Being an auteur is what we all dreamed of being, as far [back] as the films of the late ‘50s and ‘60s, when the idea of the auteur filmmaker arrived on the planet. And people kept using that term, and they do with my movies because I suppose they are very individual and they give me all the credit, so they say I’m an auteur. And I say no, the reality is I’m a ‘fil-teur.’ I know what I’m trying to make but I have a lot of people who are around me who are my friends and don’t take orders and don’t listen to me, but who have individual ideas. And when they come up with a good idea, if it’s one that fits what I’m trying to do, I use it. So the end film is a collaboration of a lot of people, and I’m the filter who decides what goes in and what stays out.

I was kindly invited to Etan Cohen's "Master Class" at the JFL, presented by the CFC and the Greenberg Fund. Etan Cohen, of course, is the screenwriter of, among other things, TROPIC THUNDER (with Ben Stiller), MEN IN BLACK 3, and a whole slew of BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD episodes.

A few random takeaways from Etan's conversation with critic Richard Crouse:

- Etan sold his first script to Beavis & Butthead while he was at the Harvard Lampoon. So, if possible, go to Harvard and get on the Lampoon.

- The Lampoon's style, Etan says, is sort of "anti-humor." If someone's laughing, you've sold out. He says that putting Robert Downey, Jr.'s character in blackface in TROPIC THUNDER was sort of the "platonically perfectly offensive" concept that the Lampoon would have appreciated; it came out of the question, "What is the most deeply wrong thing someone could do to win an Oscar"?

- It's a lot of fun to write with the actual actors in mind. If you don't have actors already cast, consider writing for someone in particular anyway. [As I've noted elsewhere recently, this is dangerous if your lines don't read as distinctively as they would if the actor were reading them. Make sure you've really recreated the voice of Will Smith, etc.]

- When there are a lot of stakeholders (as there are with a big budget movie like MIB3), check in with all of them to make sure they're all on board with the movie you're writing. Otherwise you'll wind up having to do it all over again.

[On smaller budget movies, I think you have two choices, I think. Either write for the person who hired you, so they'll hire you again; or write for the director. On most movies, the director is going to keep developing the script until he likes it. If you want to be the last guy writing, and you do, then make the director happy.]

- On MIB3, he was working from 6 am to 4 am some days. He did not explain how this is possible without really good vitamins.

- They had a writing room on MIB3, 'cause it's much harder to write comedy solo. "It helps to have someone laughing."

- On MIB3, he watched a lot of Clint Eastwood movies as inspiration. On a movie like MIB3 or TROPIC THUNDER, the plot is a straight procedural. The comedy comes out of the main characters' reactions to the awkward situations. Everyone else is playing it straight.

- The hardest part of writing MIB3 was the middle. They had the ending and the beginning all along. They wound up taking a three month hiatus while the middle part was reworked -- re-engineered, in fact, from the ending.

Tragically, he did not have an opportunity to explain how he came to be a Yiddish major, and how that could have influenced his comedy stylings.

I've been going to the Just for Laughs Comedy Conference the past few days. I dropped in on an interesting little panel discussion called "Are YouTube Celebs The Future of Comedy?" They had EpicLLOYD of "Epic Rap Battles of History," which my stepson adores; Grace Helbig of Daily Grace; Shane Dawson, and the head of programming for YouTube, Ben Relles.

It immediately struck me how young some of these cats are. Shane Dawson is 24; he got picked up as a YouTube partner at 18. Grace Helbig is 27. If I wrote my notes down correctly, he had been making videos for a while before that. Wikipedia says "Dawson's career began when he and several friends would turn in videos instead of homework in high school. Dawson's first videos on YouTube were old assignments that he turned in during high school."

The point here is that there is a whole generation of kids coming up for whom video making is as natural as writing. Steven Spielberg made a lot of 8mm movies when he was a kid, but that was pretty rare. 8mm was a horrible pain in the ass to edit (the film is literally 8mm wide), and building a soundtrack is -- well, I don't even know how you would do that. These days everyone is making videos. My stepson had a couple of high school assignments where he was required to make a video. Because obviously everyone has a video camera and an editing program on their computer.

The old barriers to entry for video have dropped off the map. Anyone can shoot video on your phone, edit on your computer and throw it up on YouTube.

The new barrier to entry is just that YouTubers apparently upload as much content every 72 hours as has appeared on all the networks, ever. But it's hard to imagine a more merit-based world. Every video has a chance to go viral.

One takeaway I have is that if you are just starting out, you must get out there with your camera and shoot a bunch of videos. I think more and more, people are going to get hired based on what they shot rather than what they wrote. I am not a fan of the auteur theory. (I don't actually know any professional writers who are.) I think the collaboration between producer, director and writer can take a creation far beyond what any one of them could create. But this is what is happening now.

I was struck by a conversation I had last night with a sound designer friend of mine. We were talking about the Quebec student protests, and their failure to communicate what they want. There are a few videos of marches, and lots of videos of cops misbehaving. But where is the equivalent of the hilarious Culture in Peril spot from the last election. Where are the clever, viral spots that will convince people who don't already agree with them that education should be free?

I struggle a bit with this model. I'm used to a bigger production. We made my own viral teen vampire sex comedy, YOU ARE SO UNDEAD, with a $20,000 budget and a RED camera; my amazing producers at Cirrus, Anton Cozzolino and Melissa Pietracupa, probably brought in another $80,000 in favors. We had three days of color correct for the effect where Mary Margaret drains Jo of blood and she turns pale. I probably wouldn't consider shooting something without union actors unless I was drunk.

But that means I'm making one short a year, and fighting to put together a feature, and these guys are making one a week.

I don't know if YouTube celebs are the future of comedy. They are certainly a growing part of the present of comedy. They will tend to squeeze out some of the long-form higher-budget comedies, but probably only the really crappy ones. There will always, I think, be room for another BRIDESMAIDS. There are just too many stories that demand extras and things that go "boom."

But there's a lot of room for viral videos. Maybe some of them will be yours!

UPDATE: Incidentally, YouTube has a lot of information on how to make a good video.

7. TRACK THE AUDIENCE'S MOOD

You have one goal : to connect with your audience. Therefore, you must track what your audience is feeling at all times. One of the biggest problems I face when watching other people’s movies is I’ll say, ‘This part confuses me’, or whatever, and they’ll say, ‘What I’m intending to say is this’, and they’ll go on about their intentions. None of this has anything to do with my experience as an audience member. Think in terms of what audiences think. They go to the theatre, and they either notice that their butts are numb, or they don’t. If you’re doing your job right, they don’t. People think of studio test screenings as terrible, and that’s because a lot of studios are pretty stupid about it. They panic and re-shoot, or they go, ‘Gee, Brazil can’t have an unhappy ending,’ and that’s the horror story. But it can make a lot of sense.

A fella in Texas has put together a handy website resource about how to format your script, in particular the weird issues like foreign language subtitles, freeze frames and what not.

I don't hold with all of his rules. (For example, I like to put foreign language dialog in parentheses so that the reader is graphically reminded that the dialog is not in English. I stole that from Garry Trudeau.) But he has a consistent, well thought out approach, and he may be able to solve some of your problems. Feel free to check out the site.

I was listening to one of Steven Dubner's Freakonomics podcasts, "Bring on the Pain" with Daniel Kahneman, an economist who studied pain vs. the memory of pain in colonoscopies.

Kahneman had people rate the pain of a procedure while they were undergoing it, minute by minute, and then asked them to rate it afterwards. Kahneman discovered two critical factors in how painful people remembered the procedure to be:

• Peak pain: people remembered the procedure as being as painful as its worst moments; and
• Final pain: to a lesser extent, people remembered the procedure as being as painful as the last few minutes. Doctors could reduce the memory of pain of the whole procedure simply by slowing down the last few minutes of the procedure to bring the probe out more gently.

I've been dipping into Peter Bart's INFAMOUS PLAYERS. It's the story of Peter Bart's tenure at Paramount. He was hired solely on the basis of being a smart New York Times reporter, at a time when all the old rules were being thrown out and no one seemed to know what audience wanted.

Bart, who later headed up Variety, is willing to own up to his mistakes -- fiascos he saw coming and didn't stop, or didn't see coming. He also takes some credit for some major good calls, like pushing LOVE STORY when no one wanted it.

It's a book of war stories. I don't know that anyone actually needs to know what Hollywood was like in the 1970's. But if you're in the biz, you're expected to be able to talk about the old days, even if you weren't there for them. It shows respect to the culture of the industry. It also reminds you that every movie legend has his share of flops and bad calls. And everyone in showbiz experiences ridiculous amounts of frustration over their career.

That last is worth dwelling on. I got a "no" from a funding agency this week, and went around in a blue funk for a day, even though it's been a banner year so far. I had to remind myself how many famous movies started by bouncing around unwanted from studio to studio. A book like this one helps you remember just how much of a mess everyone else's career was, if only you knew it from the inside.

I watched a bit of Kevin Smith's Hulu series SPOILERS, 'cause I'm in the States (on St. Jean Baptiste!) and I can't watch it in Canada.

The first half of the show is Kevin Smith asking an audience of normal people (the "spoilers") what they thought of a movie. Then he has a guest on. In this one the show was PROMETHEUS. I dunno. Why do I want to watch a handful of random people talk about what they didn't like about a movie? I love the IMDB ratings, because after a couple of thousand people have rated a movie, you can get a pretty good idea of how well it pleased its audience. Between the IMDB and Rottentomatoes, I can get a pretty good idea whether I'm going to like a movie. But this is just a few people.

I think it might be a stronger first half if there were editing -- if Smith asked every member of his audience for their feedback, and then edited in the most insightful answers. But this is uncurated.

The second half is wayyyyyy more interesting. In the episode I watched, Smith had PROMETHEUS's writer Damon Lindelof on the hot seat (an intentionally ridiculously large throne with golden lions). Lindelof has interesting things to say, including the importance of wearing the right t-shirt to your interview with a showrunner, and how he pitched the rewrite on PROMETHEUS.

You can learn a lot from an interview with a guy like Damon Lindelof: how to think about movie stories, sure, but also how to present yourself, how to talk about the guy you're rewriting.

So I recommend the second half of each episode of SPOILERS, if you can get Hulu.

You can now download the audio from our WGC-sponsored panel discussion on What Do I Want In My Contract?. It's an exploration of the terms that the WGC's Independent Production Agreement doesn't cover. Many of them apply whether you're in the US or Canada, and whether you have a Guild agreement or you're on your own.

We went to see the Steins Collect exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's based on the stunning collections of modern art that Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo assembled in the first half of the 20th Century. There are the paintings they bought, and the paintings they looked at but couldn't afford, and paintings of them.

Gertrude Stein is famous as a modernist author; as Picasso's first champion and collector; as the gal who helped Hemingway develop his style; and as someone whose Saturday evenings gathered some of the most promising painters and art fiends in Paris in the 20's.

But what is striking about the exhibit are the many times you read about how she had to sell her art to support herself; or trade some old paintings she loved for a new painting she couldn't afford; or how she sold art to publish her books.

Gertrude Stein was a big self-promoter, writing to publishers that she was the first new thing in American literature since Henry James. But she must also have felt like a terrible failure. She must have felt frustrated that publishers wouldn't actually pay her for her books. She organized an exhibit for Picabia in Chicago that sold exactly one painting. She must have wondered how many of those people showing up at her dinners were coming for the food or to use her connections.

The thing is, when people look at you, they see your successes. They see the Gertrude Stein that was right about Picasso, and whose AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS brought Paris in the 20's back to life (and inspired Lisa and me to go to Paris and be writers). They see the Terry Gilliam of BRAZIL, not the director who couldn't get DON QUIXOTE off the ground.

So when you look at your own works, count your successes. Learn from your failures, but don't judge yourself by them. Anyone who's trying to do something new will have periods of failure. It's the peaks of your accomplishment that set you apart from the people who never risk anything.

I listened to an interesting Fresh Air interview with Francis Coppola. Among many interesting things he said, he encourages filmmakers to get married and have kids early. He says that yes, kids take up a lot of time. But when you have a family, you focus much harder on getting stuff done than when you're a carefree single guy going out on dates.

I will confirm that I did not get more written before I had kids. Having kids forces you to be serious about your work.

Technically, Coppola only urges male filmmakers to get married; he urges female filmmakers to stay single, so they don't have to take care of some guy and his kids. But he's from another generation. There is no reason that a female filmmaker can't marry someone who will take care of her and her kids.

1) When speaking to an actor off-camera, look into one eye and stick with it.

2) Film acting is, in large part, reacting and listening.

3) While rehearsing something with a fellow actor, if a crew member can come up and recognize you’re rehearsing vs. having a real conversation, then you aren’t doing it right.

4) An actor relaxes in front of the camera by concentrating, and knowing that you have no enemies on set, everyone’s on your side and doing their best to make you look your best for the movie.

5) The camera catches everything you do, so don’t be afraid to play things subtley.

6) If you’re going to smoke on-screen, you must plan it absolutely perfectly, don’t mess up the continuity.

7) All actors steal certain gestures and behaviors from other actors — but the best actors make these gestures their own. Steal from the best, and make it your own.

8) You can make four pictures as an actor in the time it takes a director to make one — so if you’re an actor planning on becoming a director, consider the financial aspect.

9) A majority of movie acting is relaxation. If you’re knocking yourself out, you’re doing it wrong.

10) Theater acting is an operation with a scalpel, movie acting is an operation with a laser.

From Nofilmschool

"The rehearsal is the work. The performance is the relaxation." -- Stanislavski, quoted by Michael Caine in the NPR Fresh Air podcast.

I listened to Fresh Air's podcast of Ira Glass's interview of Philip Glass. 3 great takeaways.

1. Philip Glass's dad Ben Glass owned a record store. They could return up to 5% of the records for breakage. Philip Glass's first job was jumping up and down on records, breaking them so they could be returned.

2. Ben Glass started as an auto mechanic. So, he had to learn to fix radios. Then he got rid of the cars and fixed radios. Then someone suggested he sell records in the radio store. Eventually he wound up with a record store with a bench in back for fixing radios.

3. Ben Glass would take home the records he could sell (and Philip couldn't break, I guess) and listen to them very carefully to try to figure out what was wrong with them. Soon he found he really rather liked Shostakovich. He wound up becoming a champion for difficult classical music, convincing his customers that they should like Shostakovich, too. It's not hard to see how hearing a lot of ground-breaking music -- and a convincing explanation -- allowed Glass to make ground-breaking music himself.

As I observed to a young colleague just now: when you ask your boss a question, try to always include a plausible answer. If your boss gets in the habit of saying, "Yes, do that," you will find yourself in a position of responsibility, and possibly even authority, that much faster.