I have one script left to finish converting.
Also, Jim_Hall of Slidecage is kindly contributing some high res 35mm scans of 1994 - 1995 era cast photos for me to digitally age to use as book covers.
]]>Kevin Smith on 'talent':
... there’s always people that will come up to me after the show, say very nice things. Uh, very cool things about like, “Oh, my God. It’s so… you’re so talented.” That’s the one that really fucking bugs me and shit like that. And not because I’m irritated by it. But when you say shit like “talent,” it makes people go like, “Oh, you’re special and this person’s not.”
I don’t agree with that.
I don’t really do anything that requires talent. I just kind of chase my dreams. Anything I wanna try, I give a shot to and stuff. Before I get out of the show, I always like to remind people, like, you can do that too. Like, at the end of the day, this doesn’t require fucking talent.
Invariably, somebody will say to me, before the night is over, “Oh, my God. It’s so talented how you can stand up there and talk for so long.” And I’m like, “That doesn’t take talent to talk and tell stories about my life. That just takes a memory. Like that’s… that’s it. That doesn’t require talent.”
My day job doesn’t even take talent. You think it takes talent to stand on a movie set and wear a backwards baseball cap and a trench coat and say nothing? That’s the exact opposite of fucking talent, man. I said I’ll take it one step further. It doesn’t take talent at all to work in the movie business.
You think it takes fucking talent to stand on a movie set and be like, “I’m Batman” -- ?! Ben Affleck does it, so I know it don’t take fucking talent.
Don’t let people use like a word like that to put shit between you and something you wanna try. This doesn’t take talent. It doesn’t take talent to talk about your fucking life. Over the course of your life, you’ve listened to people talk on the radio, or seen people talk on TV, and you’ve said to yourself or thought to yourself, “I’m smarter than these people. I’m funnier than this person.”
You’re probably thinking that shit right now.
And you’re probably right, man, but nobody’s gonna know unless you kinda go out there and express yourself in some way, shape or form. Share of yourself. Now, some people don’t want to ’cause they’re afraid that it might not work and shit like that. Like, “Oh, what if I fail?”
But there is no such thing as fucking failure. Failure is just success training. I know that sounds like a cat poster, but it’s fucking true. Like, nobody ever fucking gets something right on the first try and shit. Don’t be afraid of failure. Don’t let that keep you from trying something that you might wanna try and stuff like that.
Rather fail spectacularly than live your life wondering, like, “I wonder if that shit would have worked out.”
That’s how I’ve just kind of conducted myself for the last like 20, 25 years. And it’s led on this weird fucking journey. I know there are people in the audience that are like, “I kinda wanna do what you do.”
And you absolutely fucking can. I’m gonna tell you something that maybe like you don’t hear that much anymore, ’cause you’re adults and shit, and it’s our job to say this to younger people and shit. But this is the truest sentiment a stranger’s gonna fucking tell you this week, so fucking get ready.
You are smart and good. You’re all fucking talented. You all have something amazing to fucking say. So… find a way… Find a way to fucking share that.
- from Silent But Deadly
Shortly after this speech, Kevin Smith had a heart attack from which he recovered; he lived to direct THE FLASH another day.
]]>There's one curious thing that Jacobs mentioned. In the behind the scenes book DOCTOR WHO: REGENERATION by TV movie producer Philip Segal (with Gary Russell), Segal told a story about Matthew Jacobs saying that Jacobs' father Anthony was an actor who'd been in the First Doctor story "The Gunfighters" (playing Doc Holliday), that Jacobs had been on the set for filming, and that his father were estranged that father and son only made peace when Anthony was on his deathbed, and that Jacobs brought this sadness and longing into the script for the TV movie.
This is peculiar because in the interview, Jacobs said that this story about his familial estrangement was completely made up by Segal and not true. Segal made up this unflattering portrait of Jacobs' father and put it in a widely distributed behind the scenes book for Reasons. I wonder if Jacobs' documentary will offer any theory as to why and if it will offer a fuller portrait of Matthew and Anthony Jacobs.
]]>I got into DOCTOR WHO when it was off the air. My experience of DOCTOR WHO was the Eighth Doctor novels and audioplays; there was no TV show on the air during 1999 - 2005 when I discovered the series, but there were all the novels since 1987 and all audioplays from 1999 onward. The Eighth Doctor had only been in the 1996 TV movie, but his novels and audioplays made it feel like DOCTOR WHO was an ongoing, present day series. Slider_Quinn21 once remarked that I was unlike most scifi fans: I considered media tie-in novels and audioplays and comic books 'canon' and took them as seriously as the TV and films to which they tied in. This is probably why.
The Eighth Doctor had only one onscreen appearance in the 1996 movie and presumably regenerated offscreen when the DOCTOR WHO TV show came back in 2005 with the Ninth Doctor. But in 2013, for the 50th anniversary special, the Eighth Doctor actor and the 2013 series produced a canonical internet special, a short film called "Night of the Doctor" where the Eighth Doctor dies on his last adventure and regenerates into his subsequent self. In this short film, the Eighth Doctor prepares for death and names his companions. "Charley, C'rizz, Lucy, Tamsin, Molly -- " he intones, referring to all of his audioplay companions.
He doesn't mention his book companions. He doesn't mention his comic book companions. I wondered why, given Sam, Fitz, Compassion, Anji or Trix (novels) or Izzy, Destrii (comics) never appeared onscreen any more than the audioplay characters. The Big Finish audioplays had initially suggested that the Eighth Doctor plays were in a separate timeline from the novels, but after the novel line had concluded, a subsequent audioplay had an anthology where the Eighth Doctor had a single audioplay adventure with Fitz and one with Izzy, declaring that the novels were set in the past of the Eighth Doctor audioplays. Also unmentioned were Samson and Gemma, two companions who had only appeared in one audioplay.
Of course, actor Paul McGann could not have played a scene where he had to list off 14 separate companions; screenwriter-showrunner Steven Moffat had to choose a limited number. Five names was probably the maximum. It made sense for Moffat to choose the five most well-known companions of the Eighth Doctor.
Lucie had been in the BBC7 radioplays and was probably familiar to about 400,000 listeners. Charley had been the Doctor's first audioplay which probably had an audience of 250,000 fans (just guessing). In contrast, the Eighth Doctor novels sold maybe 25,000 - 50,000 copies each (according to one of the writers talking about his sales).
The audience for the TV DOCTOR WHO during this era was 12 - 13 million viewers. Most of them would have no idea who the Eighth Doctor had travelled with in novels, audioplays and comics. The companions with the biggest audiences had to be the ones whom the Eighth Doctor would refer to before he died.
There is possibly some rationale to why the Doctor spoke of those names. Charley vanished on him without a proper farewell (as far as he remembered because his memory of her was partially erased). C'rizz, Lucie and Tamsin died. Molly was separated from him and when he found her, decades had passed and she felt too old to have any more adventures with him. Perhaps the Doctor was referring to the companions with whom he felt he'd left things unresolved. Since the short film, the Eighth Doctor audioplays have added more companions (Liv, Helen, Bliss) and with this reasoning, none of these new companions can die.
There was no easy solution to this issue aside from simply not having the Doctor name any companions. However, when Paul McGann spoke the lines in 2013 that named the audioplay companions, he sparked a new interest in the audioplays and drew quite a bit of attention to this media tie-in product which made more sense than trying to spark interest in a series of 1997 - 2005 novels that had been out of print by 2013.
Whose names should the Eighth Doctor had named? Who would he have named if there weren't marketing and audience considerations? If it weren't for the writer trying to canonize the audioplays, would the Doctor have named any names at all?
It's a conundrum that will forever fascinate me.
]]>**
I find that in criticism of content, entirely too much criticism can be summed up with: "You didn't write what I would have written, so what you wrote is bad."
This is a cognitive bias and an error in judgement where one person declares that their subjective and personal tastes in fiction, a highly personal and individual set of likes and dislikes, are an objective standard and any content that doesn't match this one person's obsessions and distastes is flawed and worthless. This is not a perspective to which I subscribe. My belief is that content should be evaluated in terms of three questions:
What was the creator trying to accomplish?
Did they accomplish it?
Why or why not?
When we claim that a piece of writing failed because it was a historical drama and we prefer spaceships in our stories, we are not reviewing the material based on its attempted merits. It is arrogant to declare that the only material worth producing is the material we ourselves would write. It's entirely possible to simply say that we personally do not enjoy certain kinds of fiction.
I'm not a fan of the LORD OF THE RINGS movies because I don't connect to large scale battle scenes. I had the same issue with INFINITY WAR. I don't really gravitate to shows with male protagonists because I have trouble relating to men. I don't like vampire protagonists too many stories have them preying on innocent people and being presented as the protagonist. That doesn't mean people shouldn't write these things and it would be shockingly rude and dismissive of people's talents to claim that something is "creatively bankrupt" "100%" just because I personally would not read it or seek it out or enjoy it.
There's also the fact that writers are only human. Writers aren't omnipotent or omniscient even when creating worlds through typing prose or screenplays. Writers have gaps and limitations of knowledge. Writers have strengths in writing certain kinds of scenes and weaknesses in writing others. As a result, writers often have to choose what to emphasize in their work at the expense of other story elements. SHERLOCK prioritizes the semi-dysfunctional friendship between Sherlock and John over the actual mysteries. COMMUNITY prioritizes the interactions of a friend group at a college over actual academics. STAR WARS prioritizes one pilot's interaction in one conflict over the larger scale of the actual star wars. Now, someone might prefer a focus on mysteries or schoolwork or the larger interstellar conflict, but that doesn't mean those works are flawed on those grounds. Instead, the questions would be:
What was the creator trying to accomplish?
Did they accomplish it?
Why or why not?
If you dislike SHERLOCK, COMMUNITY and STAR WARS, these questions could still lead to a negative review, but it would be a negative review that came after engaging with the actual aims of the writing as opposed to saying it fell short of the reviewer's hypothetical projects.
]]>How to engage in healthy and productive teamwork
http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=8159#p8159
How to manage a project
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19GS … it?tab=t.0
How to lead
http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=9577#p9577
And also how to handle WordPress web building.
Transmodiar insists that he didn't teach me anything, but that he will reverse his opinion if I ever get a book deal and take 20 per cent of the money. I'll be happy to do that as I'm sure he really meant eight per cent (of the advance).
]]>"I'm actually pretty busy right now and can't read it right away. Why don't you take a couple days and see if you can get it from 'awful' to 'adequate'?"
One of the nicest and most productive things anybody has ever said to me about anything ever.
]]>Another clever loophole was in RISE OF SKYWALKER
You lost me right there.
]]>I find that most fantasy fiction involving battles between good and evil involve loopholes. By this, I mean a story will generally establish that the heroes are underpowered against an overwhelming force with no way to victory -- but then, it turns out the enemy's supposed invincibility had some caveat. The unstoppable Death Star has a weakness where one well-aimed shot can blow up the entire space station. Captain Kirk regularly encountered godlike entities whose power were dependent on some machine that could be exploded.
The most pleasing example of loophole victory I enjoyed recently was in SUPERNATURAL where Sam and Dean Winchester are two blue collar animal control workers who have been fighting evil for 14 years and whose villain for their 15th and final season is God Almighty himself, a being of boundless power who can erase Sam and Dean from reality on a whim and the boys defeat him by clever use of osmosis to siphon God's power into his kindhearted grandson.
Another clever loophole was in RISE OF SKYWALKER where Rey is told that if she kills the Emperor, his consciousness will transfer into her body and so when the Emperor attacks her with Force Lightning, Rey reflects the lightning back at him and he kills himself, sparing Rey from being used as a host -- which for some reason, IMDB seems to consider a plothole.
SLIDERS REBORN has a loophole at the end. The central conceit is that in REBORN, the multiverse is broken: the only branching point for parallel Earths now is the day of the first slide and there are no subsequent splits before or after that single date. Smarter-Quinn wants to destroy this damaged multiverse so a new one will replace it and Quinn has to stop him; at the end, Quinn and Smarter Quinn have the chance to choose a new branching point and they choose the very moment in which they are choosing a branching point, which repairs the multiverse to have infinite branching points and preserves the existing realities. Transmodiar said that this would have simply wiped out the existing multiverse and Slider_Quinn21 says it's extremely clever, and sometimes, if I've had a bad day, I re-read Slider_Quinn21's email saying it's clever and I feel better.
]]>I'm starting to observe that one of the worst things a writer can do to themselves is be contemptuous of other writers. It's not a an issue of decorum or conduct. It's more that writers who disdain the talents of other creators are impeding their own gifts and opportunities for growth.
The Most Hated Men in SLIDERS: It's not hard to find people in SLIDERS fandom who will declare that David Peckinpah, Bill Dial and Keith Damron were talentless. However, this simply isn't true. It takes talent to write and sell teleplays that are filmed and aired. Transmodiar once remarked to me that David Peckinpah was a good storyteller and demonstrated great skill in telling his stories; they just weren't the stories that SLIDERS fans wanted to see. I've come around to that and I see Dial and Damron the same way.
Visual Storytelling and Exposition: "Murder Most Foul," "Dinoslide" and "Genesis" show Peckinpah to be a highly capable TV screenwriter with an excellent grasp of immediate visual storytelling, quickly expositing a high tech Victorian theme park, a colony under threat by dinosaurs and an Earth under invasion within a few minutes of screentime. It's unfortunate that Peckinpah also used his writing skills to create violent sexual fantasies about former employees and add absurd backstories to his lead characters.
Subtly in Real Time: Bill Dial is considered the worst part of Season 5, rewriting the majority of the scripts to have characters standing around repeating the same information until the page count is met. But Dial's filibustering is effective in "Prophets and Loss" and "Asylum," both of which feature gradual, slow, character-driven conversations where characters find themselves slowly entrapped as a pleasant conversation shifts into an interrogation or a confrontation. Dial had a gift for unforced, subtle, seemingly naturalistic pacing and conversation, but he misused it in a lazy fashion to pad out scripts for SLIDERS' final season.
Confessional Writing: Keith Damron is one of the most hated SLIDERS writers, but isn't his Year Five Journal a compelling read as an exercise in devastating self-owns and unintended revelations of creative self-sabotage?
Contempt: There is an alarming tendency that I sometimes notice in amateur and apprentice writers: they are caustic towards other people's work in a shockingly insulting manner, attacking not just the product, but the intelligence of other creators. They dismiss the effort, craft, purpose and ability behind the work as well as the work itself. It's one thing to do this if you're simply a consumer of fiction. You're a customer, you wanted SLIDERS stories, you paid for cable to get SLIDERS stories and you did not get what you paid for.
Creators Can't Only Be Viewers: If you are or intend to be a creator, however, this attitude towards other people's work will not serve you. I'm not saying that if you want to be a writer, you have to think highly of David Peckinpah sending Wade to a rape camp or Bill Dial's stalling filler in his Season 5 scripts or Keith Damron's clumsy portrayal of addiction and computers in "Virtual Slide." But a writer needs to at least observe that Peckinpah was good at devising visual information and exposition; that Dial was capable in using dialogue to subtly raise a sense of threat; and that Damron wrote some highly revealing internet diary entries.
Taste Vs. Talent: Whether or not you liked the final product is a matter of personal taste. However, I have sometimes run into would-be writers who take the view that any project not written to their obsessions, their concerns, their worldview and their preferred approach to storytelling is a failure. That any such project is worthless, produced without any ability, interest, care or investment from the creators behind it.
Self-Limiting: For a writer, contempt for the talents of other writers is a deeply self-limiting attitude. No single writer is going to be skilled in every area of writing. A writer with an ear for hilarious dialogue may lack the ability to write physical conflict. A writer with a talent for crafting lively and memorable characters may struggle with science or politics. A writer with a firm grasp of espionage and conveying action and danger may have a limited sense of location and setting.
Be Interested: All writers have limits. The best way for a writer to work through them is to be interested not just in writing their own stories, but also in how other people write their stories. Writers should appreciate their colleagues' techniques. A writer does not need to enjoy the end result; but a writer should seek to know other people's methods and be open to being informed by them. A writer should be able to look at someone else's writing and observe the skillset put into it even if the skill were misused and the product wasn't to their liking.
Contempt for Craft: When writers are contemptuous of other creators, such writers are disdaining not only their colleagues but the craft of writing itself. A writer who dislikes a book, movie or show but then declares that the creators have no talents worth knowing or learning -- this is a writer who believes that they and they alone possess the ability to produce good work. They are declaring that their skillset is complete and whole. That they have no need for additions, revisions or expansions. That they are closed to any perspectives, techniques or abilities outside their own. That they have no interest in how other writers write their stories. And that contempt for writing itself will be palpable in their own work.
Know How Others Work: Good writers respect the talents of other creators even if they don't care for the final product. Good writers are interested in how other writers work -- not to imitate, not to mimic, but to be open, to be engaged in the disciplines of storytelling, and to see what methods they might adopt or modify to tailor to their own projects.
]]>Writing In Reverse: Inexperienced murder mystery writers have been misled into thinking that murder mysteries are written by coming up with a cast of characters, then a setting, then a mystery, then some clues, and then a method for committing a murder that matches everything they wrote before. This is a mistake; a murder mystery must be outlined in the reverse order with the murder created first before coming up with anything else.
The Audience is not the Author: This might not seem to be the case to viewers. CASTLE isn't about the murders as much as Castle and Beckett arguing. The murders are just to give the characters something to work on so that they're not standing around in a plotless vacuum trading quips or barbs.
The Sequentially Written Murder Mystery: As a result, many first time murder writers understandably think that there is no need to put thought or attention into creating a murder mystery. That one creates the character arcs and set pieces first and then throws in a murder as an instigating event.
The Result is Not The Process: That's what these first time writers see onscreen, after all. They see that TV procedurals don't devote much screentime to the reason for the murder, the method of the murder and the means of concealment. They see that these elements serve merely as inciting incidents and seem almost an afterthought. In the writing process, these writers then treat the reason, method and concealment as an afterthought as well, as the last thing to create.
Struggling for Revelations: This is a deeply counterproductive approach to writing murder mysteries. Writers who work this way concoct random clues in a fit of inspiration, but then struggle to create revelations that match the previous information and come up with strained convolutions to make their answers meet the the previous discoveries.
Circling: Most writers who work like this often get stuck, unable to explain how and why their murderer did it. They are pilots flying an underfueled plane with nowhere to land. TV gives the false impression that murder is merely a plot device that isn't important and can be created at the end of the writing process because the murder is explained at the end. This is an illusion.
Murder Mysteries Come in Two Parts: An effective murder mystery writer starts with outlining the murderer's story, working out how and why the killer did it and obscured their guilt, as well as all the groups and individuals in proximity to the murder whether physically or situationally.
Facts Before Theory: Our effective writer then produces a second story outline, the story of the detective solving the murder. In most mystery stories, it's the detective's story that is most present in the final product, but because it is plotted out after the murderer's story, any clues, suspects, victims, red herrings, false trails and genuine truths will be consistent with the solution -- because the writer has already drafted the murderer’s point of view.
Screentime May Not Correlate: Much of the preparatory work might not appear in the final draft. One of my favourite episodes of CASTLE, "Fool Me Once," opens with a victim being murdered live on webcam during a stream of his crowdfunded North Pole expedition which turns out to be staged in an apartment for the web stream. Questions abound: who was this man if not really a North Pole explorer? Who killed him? Why?
The episode doesn't actually devote too much attention to how the victim was a con man of multiple schemes, one of which was planning to marry an heiress and flee with her money. Or how he genuinely fell in love and no longer wanted to rob his heiress. Or how he wanted to finish his last scam and go straight. Or how his partner, furious at losing the con man giving up a payday, murdered the con man during a web stream so that witnesses would assume the body was in the North Pole.
Foreground: The episode is more about Castle's increasingly ridiculous theories about how this con man may have been a spy, about Castle's latest mystery novel and how it has racy scenes that irritate his associate, about various blind alleys and false leads from Castle's theories -- but these most visible aspects of the story are possible because the writers first worked out the plot of the murderer, the victim, the motive and the means -- creating a solid framework in which they scripted Castle's shenanigans.
Labour: A murder mystery can be a triviality within a story. But it is never trivial to construct a murder mystery. Even in a TV procedural where the murder mysteries will be the least important thing onscreen, creating a murder plot itself needs to be treated by the writers as the most detail-demanding and labour-intensive plot element to create.
Write the Murder First: Murder mystery writers need to start with creating the murder; then they have a clear set of parameters for their suspects, evidence and revelations existing within a chain of cause and effect.
When mystery writers create mysteries first and solutions second, the evidence is invariably random and the solutions are inevitably mismatched. Most writers don't even manage to find a solution and end up paralyzed, searching for answers that should have been written at the start.
It is pointless, stressful, self-destructive and self-immobilizing for a writer to conceive a mystery and then try to create a murder that matches the mystery. It is much easier to create a murder followed by the mystery that obscures it until the detective unravels it. Writing the mystery first is not a healthy or productive way to write a murder mystery.
]]>