Hollywood myopia

Julian Friedmann

This article is based on a talk I gave at the Screenwriters’ Festival in Cheltenham in October 2009.

As television seems to be continually going through momentous changes both in the way we view programmes and from a technical point of view (video-on-demand, TiVo, iPlayer, HD, PCs, mobiles), there’s often much debate about whether high-quality drama and comedy can survive in an increasingly-fractured, multi-channel industry. With television commissioning becoming more risk-averse and with budgets being cut as advertising revenue and viewing figures for single programmes decline, screenwriters cannot afford to miss out on other avenues for creating stories that can reach audiences.

1) Agree with your colleagues about what you’re all attempting to do.

Dominic Minghella

I agreed to talk about ‘Showrunning – a thing of the future?’ as if I were some kind of expert on showrunning, which I'm not, and as if I might know whether it really were a thing of the future, which I don't. So if you want to break early for lunch ...

So what is showrunning? At the expense of sounding like an O-level essay, I think talking about what is meant and what is intended by showrunning is actually important.

As a female script reader, I receive many scripts with female protagonists. Often the writer will insist their character was conceived as a ‘strong woman’, yet by the end of the script I remain unconvinced. This isn’t about the gender of the writer either – I read one woman for every five men who send me their work. I also receive many scripts from female writers now because they want a woman’s viewpoint (I suspect my gobby opinions regarding gender on my blog has something to do with this development).

I had several long phone calls this week being leant on by a producer who wanted to pay far less than the going rate for a script by an established client because the producer had used much of his development budget on another writer who failed to deliver a usable script.

Most reasonably experienced writers get hired from time to time to fix failing scripts or to do a page-one rewrite. In some cases there is underlying material and the new writer does not even read the previous draft.

I was thinking about blogging about the BBC’s apparent changes when I saw Bernie Corbett’s incisive thoughts in the WGGB weekly newsletter. I couldn’t say it better so I would like to spread the wisdom and common sense that makes the WGGB an organisation well worth supporting. Are you a member?

I gave a talk at the SWF in Cheltenham and many people who did not get into the room asked for a copy to be provided, so it is up as a TwelvePoint article. I was going to do a blog about the subject but decided to put the key points of the talk and article into a blog. Here it is.

I am suggesting that writing prose is a serious and complementary activity for scriptwriters.

Yesterday I had one of those conversations with a client and then with his producer that made me wonder about the manipulative nature of what agents do. Not necessarily bad manipulation, more like the golden oil that ensures that your car starts smoothly.

The writer is anxious the producer won’t understand what he is trying to do in this draft of the script. The producer has issues with the draft.

I had an interesting meeting with Jen Segaio (sp) this week as she is helping organise Mark Travis’ influential workshop, The Solo Workshop, in the UK later in the year. In this Mark works with a limited number of writers on a project of theirs: in essence it is to find out what the story is really about. http://www.markwtravis.com/

This reminds me of the dictum I have always loved: what happens in a story is not what the story is really about.

I am doing the research for a book on writing for television and came across this quote (in a tweet): 'Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self'. Cyril Connolly

I re-tweeted, commenting that what Cyril Connolly is saying is rubbish. It is simply not true for 95% of the thousands of writers I have met over the last 40 years. It is cute but makes assumptions about the purity of being a writer that suggests pure self-indulgence.

There are some writers who genuinely do not care if no one ever reads what they write.

The Writers’ Guild blog has an interesting and important debate over the assertion that the BBC Writers’ Academy favours its trainees so that other writers get less of a chance.

After all the stress of travelling, life returns to normal and problems that seem to be a hill of beans suddenly loom too large to forget them when I leave the office. Today’s was dealing with a producer (producer 1) who commissioned an adaptation, paid the commencement and (eventually) delivery of the first draft, only for us to discover that he didn’t have the rights to the underlying book.

He had warranted in the writer’s agreement that he did have those rights. After lots of discussion with various parties including producer 1 we were no further.

The suitcase and passport are packed away, I have no travel plans for the rest of the year. This is not really much of an achievement since we are nearly one week into December. But there are no trips planned for January (yet) either. After the Frankfurt Bookfair, the Cheltenham Screenwriters’ Festival, The World Conference of Scriptwriters in Athens, a terrific wedding in the north-west of England and the Black Nights’ Film Festival in Tallinn, all in about 6 weeks, home does not seem to be where you lay your hat.

This is further confounded by December being a short month.

Sorry the blog has been irregular: the last two of five trips in as many weeks are coming up, then I am around for a while. But interesting things keep happening, the latest of which is repeated every few months as a negotiation takes place or a producer tries to vary elements of a contract after the contract has been signed.