51–60 of 90 posts
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You're so good.
No need for sarcasm. I was just making the point that getting something done requires commitment and often sacrifice.
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Because I don't believe that there are fantastic scripts out there not getting made. The crap we see is the best there is, sadly. (I have several friends in the movie industry.)
I read this in the article, " You have to be an amazing writer, the best writer people have ever read… and you have to have a large Rolodex of personal/professional contacts who will hire you, rehire you, support you, recommend you." Based on what I see on TV I have to believe that the Rolodex counts for far more than the writing skill because there's a ton of crap getting produced. On the bright side, there's way mo…
One of the directors basically said now that these tools were available, people who wanted to break into the industry no longer had an excuse to not make movies. "Lack of available time" might be considered a fallback, but as TFA points out, getting up an hour earlier every day, multitasking during your commute, or switching off the damn TV can work wonders.
So if somebody comes up with the greatest script on earth, but doesn't work 17 hours a day as a slave for some TV producer, his script will never be made?
Correct, correct, correct. Television (and music and film, for that matter) are hardly a meritocracy. What ends up on screens and CDs isn't determined by quality, at least not primarily. There are fantastic scripts out there, masterpieces that will never get made. Crap gets turned into two-hundred million dollar blockbusters. [EDIT: This gets voted down why exactly?]
Best advice in this article: stop driving and take public transport. This applies to hackers as well as writers--really, anyone who can do creative / useful work on a laptop. If a typical commute is 30 minutes by car or 1 hour by public transportation, you may feel like you are losing an hour a day leaving your car at home, but you are actually gaining an hour of time if you bring your laptop, assuming you want to sp…
Reminds me of something I read about the advent of cheap disk-based digital cameras with video capabilities and iMovie when they came out in the early to mid 2000s. The NYT or Rolling Stone or some other magazine interviewed a couple of documentary directors about how they were using these tools to test out ideas or do simple, short pieces. One of the directors basically said now that these tools were available, peop…
Telling people you're talented and showing them you're talented are two different things, and it's surprising how few people take that one step to get into the latter category. And sometimes it's not that difficult to actually do.
I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive. Either you can do something or you can't, and working as a dogsbody isn't going to impart those skills. This advice seems like the equivalent of telling someone who wants to be a game programmer to start in the QA department. Yo…
I just watched The Social Network, and it's a perfect example - slaving away as somebody's assistant, pumping your connections, doing something on the side, "meeting important people", you will eventually get into one of those exclusive finals clubs, and then live a life of secure mediocrity. Perhaps even at a very high level, making very good money.
If, on the other hand, you're actually obsessed about creating something great, you end up inventing facebook. There's a good chance you'll fail, too but at least you have followed your dreams and imaginations. I guess it depends on what kind of person you are, and what your goals are.
I assume that really great writers - or great anything -never did the connections thing.
Disclaimer: Everything I know about Hollywood I learned from watching Entourage... A big difference between breaking in to the script writing world and breaking in to the web app / internet startup world is the amount of effort required to evaluate your work. A new web app / start up can be evaluated in a few seconds. We do it all day long on this website ("Check out my new project..."). A new script for a movie or s…
But these industries are still mostly focused around big launches, because they have to completely reorganize with smaller budgets to attack the long tail. Music, comics, and writing have all made some progress towards this reorganization since both their production and marginal costs in digital form are low, so there's a great opening for the non-pop genres. Games are a bit less so, and video probably the least. But what's slowing this process down the most right now is that a niche audience has to be built from scratch, on a per-creator basis.
So either you work within the system and hope for a big door-opening break, or you go completely indie and bootstrap your entire business model, customers, etc. from nothing - which effectively means that even if you are indie, you still need to find a bandwagon to jump onto, or you'll probably never get a critical mass of interest.
I suspect that there's a business in providing aggregation mechanisms for untapped genres; I've just started building something along these lines in the last few days :)
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I read this in the article, " You have to be an amazing writer, the best writer people have ever read… and you have to have a large Rolodex of personal/professional contacts who will hire you, rehire you, support you, recommend you." Based on what I see on TV I have to believe that the Rolodex counts for far more than the writing skill because there's a ton of crap getting produced. On the bright side, there's way mo…
"Based on what I see on TV I have to believe that the Rolodex counts for far more than the writing skill because there's a ton of crap getting produced." Like, for example, "Reality Binge" or "Celebrity Drive-By"? Which happen to be the author's two shows ( http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1941257/ ).
Based on the titles, though, I would hazard a guess that they would trigger my Crap-o-meter.
But as another poster pointed out, "crap" depends on your goals. If eyeballs and ad revenue are the metric, maybe these shows are models of quality.
Discussions on "How to be Successful in $INDUSTRY" really need to clarify the meaning of "successful."
For some, the prospect of selling scripts so long as they are in the realm of low double-digit-IQ appeal may not be considered a win, while others might see that as hitting pay dirt. Either way, you should know before following someone's career advice where it will lead.