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Just fucking figure it out

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Re: Just fucking figure it out

#61

Post by jdietrich »

gamble wrote: post #27

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…

You want to know a dirty, filthy secret about the entertainment business? It's a business. Nobody wants to buy "good" scripts, because some abstract sense of quality doesn't pay anyone's bills. What the industry wants is commercial viability. They want safe bets, stuff that will be easy to market. They want sequels, spin-offs and derivative ideas that are familiar but just novel enough to be acceptable. That's what sells advertising, gets the viewers and puts money in the bank.

What writers don't understand (and what they'll rarely be told) is that paying your dues is largely a process of disillusionment. To put it kindly, the industry wants sensible, informed writers who understand how TV is made and know how to write scripts that are easy to shoot and suit the medium. To put it less kindly but more accurately, the industry wants cynical, desperate writers who will write whatever cheap nasty dreck pulls in the viewers.

Paying your dues is like a gang initiation, social proof that you're willing to crawl through Albini's trench of shit to get your script into production. Every menial chore that you perform, every late night you pull, every arse that you kiss entrenches you into the industry, further investing you in the payoff of getting commissioned. The longer you've been a dogsbody, the more confident a commissioning editor can be that you won't argue when they bring in a script doctor, when they ask for a few "tweaks", when they decide that a page one rewrite is in order. They know you won't argue over the casting or ask for too much money.

Entertainment is a shit business, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svCA3DJRgfI

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#63

Post by ShardPhoenix »

derefr wrote: post #54
apl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?]

Isn't that a market inefficiency just waiting to be exploited, then? Pick scripts on their merit => make better movies => make more money => starve out the studios with irrational practices?

Maybe, but what a serious screenwriter (or HN reader) would consider a good script is not necessarily what will be most likely to get Joe Q. Public, IQ 100, to pay for a ticket.

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#64

Post by digitailor »

rauljara wrote: post #32
gamble wrote: post #27

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 know nothing about the entertainment industry..." Then maybe you shouldn't speak about it as if you do. I have heard the same advice in this article from a number of people working as tv writers (either reading articles, or as part of my mfa in creative writing), and it does seem like the vast majority of them only got where they are by "working their way up". The idea that you can just make something good enough…

I'm in LA and in the industry and I agree with you. Take that menial job (although it is hard to work up from lowly PA, but not impossible). But here is the secret: DON'T BE A DICK. PLAY THE GAME BUT DO NOT COMPROMISE YOUR ETHICS TOO BADLY. DO NOT ACT LIKE A TYPICAL AMERICAN ENTITLED BRAT. BE RESPECTFUL.

I know someone who went from an assistant writing position to start in H'wood who is now co-producer of a network smash hit (Glee)... he did it by patiently building relationships and staying positive. I know "screenwriters" who sit at home all day and are supported by their wives... because they have poor social skills and feel they are entitled to money because they are smart. Don't fall into this trap, it's a dead end.

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#65

Post by derefr »

ShardPhoenix wrote: post #63
derefr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a market inefficiency just waiting to be exploited, then? Pick scripts on their merit => make better movies => make more money => starve out the studios with irrational practices?

Maybe, but what a serious screenwriter (or HN reader) would consider a good script is not necessarily what will be most likely to get Joe Q. Public, IQ 100, to pay for a ticket.

"Will make money" is basically what I meant by merit, presuming that the goal of the trade of screenwriting is to produce artifacts (scripts) that serve as force-multipliers for the success of the movies that use them. If scripts are not being selected by their merit, then, it is either because the studios are irrational, or because the screenwriters are using a bad definition of merit, and that in reality it is not that there is a surplus of good content, but rather a surplus of crap no one would pay to see.

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#66

Post by patio11 »

gamble wrote: post #27

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 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.

I get very, very worried when I see "contribute to OSS" as career advice, for exactly this reason. No, we won't pay you, but if you could grind out some boring glue code for the frameworks that our for-profit businesses use to make money, that would be great. Why, if it turns out that you're good at it, we might even look upon that favorably in an interview... some day.

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#67

Post by mechanical_fish »

DannoHung wrote: post #46
rauljara wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I know nothing about the entertainment industry..." Then maybe you shouldn't speak about it as if you do. I have heard the same advice in this article from a number of people working as tv writers (either reading articles, or as part of my mfa in creative writing), and it does seem like the vast majority of them only got where they are by "working their way up". The idea that you can just make something good enough…

> The amount of good content that is generated by writers is overwhelming and, in fact, incredibly easy to ignore. Not saying you can't point to success stories of people who produced their own stuff. You can just point to more stories of people who lost a lot of money producing their own stuff and have nothing to show for it. Building relationships certainly seems to be a more reliable way to go about breaking into…

As many famous screenwriters have been at pains to point out, a movie is a very, very large collaborative enterprise by at least a dozen departments full of people, the leader of any one of which can make or break the results.

What this means is: There are a lot of bad movies made from good scripts. Don't assume that the quality of the average finished film is representative of the quality of the average script, let alone of the skill of the average writer (who is, after all, operating under many, many constraints).

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#68

Post by Natsu »

dabent wrote: post #50
gamble wrote: post #27

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 honestly reminds me of two talks from Startup School. One from Tom Preston-Werner of GitHub. He talked about "luck" and how part is chance and part is you. He moved himself to Silicon Valley to improve his luck. He also talked about the basic steps he used to "work his way up" to a success: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178966 The other was from Brian Chesky of AirBnB. He and his co-founders basically did…

> We may not start out by fetching coffee for Paul Graham's 3nd assistant (I doubt he has one), but we do all have to start from somewhere and make whatever moves we have to in order to move up. That may involve toiling at night, moving to SF or elsewhere, or whatever. But it still just needs to get done. Enough said, I've got some coding to do this Saturday night.

I know what you mean. I spent part of my free time this weekend teaching myself how LadderLogic works so that I will be more helpful in debugging a certain faulty machine next Monday because I'm not sure we can rely on the folks they're going to call in to give us any kind of fix.

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#69

Post by palish »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #11

I've always sort of admired people in the entertainment industry for their ambition and determination. Someone who is taking time off studying CS at Stanford and trying to make a company work is not taking a risk of remotely the same magnitude as someone dropping out of highschool, getting a GED, and working in the music industry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesha#Childhood_and_youth ). If you're a programmer, you…

Kesha described herself in an interview as being "very studious" in high school; she would drive to Belmont University to listen in on Cold War history classes after school and achieved "near perfect" SAT scores.[7] However, she dropped out at age seventeen and earned her GED afterward.[9] She left school after being convinced by Dr. Luke and Max Martin to return to Los Angeles to pursue a music career. They had received Kesha's demo after Pebe passed it to Samantha Cox, senior director of writer/publisher relations at BMI, and were impressed.

Why would she pass up that kind of opportunity? If it didn't work out, she could always go back to college.

Re: Just fucking figure it out

#70

Post by nostrademons »

patio11 wrote: post #66
gamble wrote: post #27

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 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. I get very, very worried when I see "contribute to OSS" as career advice, for exactly this reason. No, we won't pay you, but if you could grind out some boring glue code for the frameworks that our for-profit businesses use to m…

I think the main reason to "contribute to OSS" is to learn (and demonstrate!) new skills that you would not otherwise be able to learn on the job. Businesses generally are not in the habit of paying people to do something for which there is no business need. So unless you work at Google, you are very unlikely to have an opportunity to build a webserver. Unless you work on the compiler team of a big company (almost all of which require prior experience with compilers), you are unlikely to have an opportunity to build a compiler or interpreter. Unless you work for Google or Bing, you are unlikely to have an opportunity to build a search engine.

But if you contribute to Apache or Lighttpd, you're building a webserver. If you contribute to Python or create your own open-source language, you're building a compiler/interpreter. If you contribute to Lucene, you're building a search engine.

All of these teach you skills that can be very valuable if you start your own company. If you can take your server count down from 27 to 1, that's money that goes straight to your bottom line. If you can spend 3 hours writing a script that fixes a problem throughout your codebase instead of 3 months doing it manually, that's time that you can use to innovate instead. If you can index the contents of the web efficiently, you'll know how to index lots of other things efficiently, and there's bound to be a startup idea in there somewhere.

I don't think "writing some boring glue code for the frameworks our for-profit businesses use" is all that much of a resume boost anyway. Writing Mongrel or Factor or Rails, however...

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