But I understand other people love her. And even for me, this is a gem: watch the unaired pilot episode of I Love Lucy.

And since it became one of the most enormously successful sitcoms of all time, you just know it had a rocky start.

Via Metafilter.

William

Here’s a thing. I do radio podcast show, it’s been very successful for me, getting into the iTunes top 20 of all podcasts in all categories, worldwide. Startling success. But it’s been going for a while, I’ve done over 160 editions now and I have been thinking it’s in the endgame.

Especially since we’re approaching the show’s busiest time. It’s a DVD review podcast but November is heavy with a poll of the year. I’m proud of this: I do not now or have I ever given a stuff that Indiana Jones gets X votes or sells Y copies, I publicly distort the chart by how passionate voters have been. The math is rubbish, the statistical analysis isn’t worth a damn, but we get ten DVDs that are each raved about by listeners. Ten DVDs that are their Sports Nights, their Battlestars.

And we do this list together, it’s has the feel of a conspiracy between me and the listener, with the aim that it comes out early, say December 10. It’s in time for us all to hear a top ten where every entry is there by passion and it’s in time for us to buy them for Christmas. I especially love DVDs that I didn’t like yet others adored. And then I get the most effusive, persuasive listener on to the show to make their case.

Couldn’t love that episode any more than I do.

But it’s also off the charts harder to produce than any other edition, and the ones that set up this voting aren’t picnics either. For lots of reasons I have been looking at whether it’s time to end the show and it’d make a tough couple of months easier if I dropped it now rather than later.

Only, this morning I watched the final Sports Night. And watched it again with the commentary, making me very late. And exactly as Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme were ending, I mean on the second of the last word, my iPhone pinged with an email from a listener saying how much they’d enjoyed my most recent edition.

You send these things out into the ether and though you obviously want listeners, it’s such a surprise when you learn there are any. I was talking the other night about the abusive emails I’ve had, we’ve all had, in journalism and how it feels as if the senders don’t realise there’s a real person at the other end. (Because oftentimes I’ve replied and got back nothing short of an embarrassed “um” kind of reply and an about-face on whatever the topic was.) But maybe I’m the same, apparently I’m the same: as much work as you put into something, the conceptual leap that it might actually get the audience you want is beyond me.

It’s much easier to end a show if you don’t think it’s being listened to. Equally, you can’t just extend something beyond its natural life because it has an audience. But equally 2, the sequel, you can’t go back. There’s a gag on that Sports Night commentary about now doing a movie of it, and for an instant there I wanted that. But I really don’t think you can go back: when it’s gone, it’s gone and anything else you try to do has to be its own self, it can’t ever be part of what’s gone.

It’s not like I don’t get quite a bit of email about the podcast. But this one, coming in a precisely that second when I was lamenting how there was no more Sports Night, it gave me a buzz.

So I don’t know if I’ll wrap up my show but I’m going to think about it more and not so casually throw it away.

William

My “Harvest Festival, PI” leads off the final night of the Carriageworks Theatre’s new writing festival.

That would be Saturday, November 1, so if you’re in Leeds, come wave. They’re saying tickets are selling fast, but that could just be to make me feel fantastic.

William

Entertainment Weekly in the States was asking for your vote on who should be the next President of the United States: Jed Bartlet, Laura Roslin, David Palmer or Mackenzie Allen.

I say was because I thought I was pointing this out to you while there was still time to vote: maybe there is but now I go back to their page, I get neither a voting form nor a table of results. Hopefully your mileage will vary.

If not, let me tell you that when I looked earlier today, The West Wing’s Jed Bartlet was winning, I think he had 42% of the vote compared to 32% for his nearest rival. Can’t remember who that was. But running third at the time was Battlestar Galactica’s Laura Roslin and I voted for her.

I’m wondering if I did that because she’s a woman. I think it’s cringingly embarrassing that America has never had a woman President and that the UK’s only had one woman Prime Minister. But then I completely ignored Commander in Chief’s Mackenzie Allen (Geena Davis). So maybe it’s that I never watched C-in-C, that David Palmer was President on 24 so long ago that I couldn’t remember his first name without looking him up. And that Roslin hasn’t let me down by being written by someone else after four seasons.

But C-in-C was an interesting example of what I think is quite a new phenomenon in US TV drama: the dizzying height and the dizzying fall, all done at speed. You’re used to shows dying, even especially being yanked off the air within a few episodes. But Commander in Chief came out like an instant hit – and then by the end of the first season, it was dying. Joan of Arcadia boomed into life and looked set for a long run which maybe it deserved but somehow nobody bothered tuning in for the second season.

I know that’s only two examples but I did have a third until this paragraph. Can’t fathom where my head was going. But is it too early to ask if long-running series have had their day?

Yes.

Okay, well, I only asked. You can be quite cutting sometimes.

I think Jed Bartlet is going to win and it was a joy to read Aaron Sorkin’s account of a fictitious conversation between Bartlet and Obama. (You’re going to have to explain to me why I used the word fictitious there: when only one character in a conversation is real, it’s either fictitious or time to phone for help.) If you missed that, it was in The New York Times.

I write to you with a new monitor on my Mac. Just wanted to share that.

William

I just like the term, I want to share it with you and since I thought it up, I want to say it like this: criticism on toast(TM).

You’ve had praise sandwiches, we all have. If you’ve just read the worst script imaginable, and you’re obligated to comment helpfully, you find a few good things to say at the top, a few good ones to leave to the bottom, and you try to make the filling in between helpful but thin. When the script is so bad that you just have to get out fast, you use a praise sandwich.

I’ve been sent many a sandwich. It shouldn’t work: as soon as you read an opening line that goes “Your typing is immaculate”, you know you’re in trouble. Perhaps it’s just me, and how I’m a sucker for being praised for my typing (oh, if you only knew I was serious there), but I read this opening line of death and I am simultaneously aware I’m in for a beating but also mollified.

Once I read a script so bad I had to go take a two-hour bath to think up something good to say about it for the bread in the praise sandwich. And I still failed. In the end, I made up something: I said the opening was just like XXXXXX and then I went on to praise XXXXXX for a paragraph instead.

But the other day I got my first of a brand new type of script report, a type I am going to call criticism on toast. Because it went straight in on this doesn’t work, that doesn’t work, what were you thinking here and this is rubbish. Then it ended with comments about great gags, it praised me on the way out. Without the slightest doubt, this praise at the end was as false as the praise I give at the top and bottom when I don’t like something. But because it came last, I liked it and let myself believe it.

If I were cleverer, I’d have written this entry criticising you at the top and then building to the praise you so thoroughly deserve at the bottom. But I’m not, so I didn’t.

William

This coming Sunday’s UK DVD Review is probably going to be about comparing Grosse Pointe Blank with what’s being called its spiritual sequel: War, Inc.

As I understand it, a spiritual sequel is a sequel in all ways bar any financial or legal ones. And yes, if you watch this new DVD you cannot doubt that its DNA is in Grosse Pointe. Unless you haven’t seen the earlier film, in which case you can doubt all you like, doubt with gusto. But I do very strongly recommend that you watch Grosse Pointe Blank recommend you watch it; not so much so that we can discuss and debate, but just so that you can have a good time and not spend your money on War, Inc.

Ooops, given away a bit of the review there.

But for reasons I may jabber on about in the show, I’ve spent a lot of time analysing and comparing the two films. And I don’t want to share any of that with you.

Except this. Because this is about the writing of the earlier, better film. It’s something that won’t come up in the podcast, but it’s something that I’ve often kept in mind when writing. First, let me explain that this is the story of a hitman going home for his ten year high school reunion and that the film came out in 1997, now let me quote you from the revised first draft of the screenplay, by Tom Jankiewicz, DV deVincentis & SK Boatman & John Cusack:

INT. GYM – NIGHT

Martin and Debi enter and pause to take in the entire scene… Alumni are dancing.

ARLENE: Welcome back! I’m Arlene Oslott-Joseph.
MARTIN: I’m Martin Blank.
DEBI: Debi Newberry.

Debi heads off into the gym, smiling back as she strands Martin. Arlene rises. They have little to say. Martin wasn’t part of her crowd.

ARLENE: Marty, you haven’t changed a bit!
MARTIN: Don’t say that.

Arlene gives him a NAMETAG. As a special torture, the tags have YEARBOOK PHOTOS. Martin looks at the name tag uncomfortably.

ARLENE: We had pictures put on, that way everybody knows who everybody was!

I don’t like this segment. Part of it is unquestionably because it’s not what’s in the film and, by whatever mysterious process it is, things that were not in the final cut always read poorer than things that were. Mind you, oftentimes that’s why they were cut.

I don’t have a later draft of the script so I can’t compare the stage directions but if you’ll allow me, I’ll write my own sufficient that you can see what’s going on. Here’s how that same scene played out in the final film.

INT. GROSSE POINT HIGH SCHOOL

Enter Martin and Debi.

ARLENE: Welcome back Pointers! It’s Arlene Oslott-Joseph!
MARTIN: Hi!
DEBI: Hi.
MARTIN: How are you?
ARLENE: I’m good…

Awkward pause: she doesn’t recognise them.

MARTIN: Martin. Blank.
ARLENE: Oh, Martin Blank, yes. [PICKS UP HIS PICTURE NAMETAG] My, you haven’t changed a bit.
MARTIN: Don’t say that!

Awkward pause: she does recognise Debi.

ARLENE: Hi, Debi, just love your show.
DEBI: Oh, thanks, well, you’re our demographic.
MARTIN: You got married, Arlene.
ARLENE: Yes I did, and three children. It’s really neat.
MARTIN: Yeah.
ARLENE: I had the yearbook pictures put on so everybody knows who everybody was!
MARTIN: Special torture!

Lots going on there that wasn’t before, some of which you’re not going to get from reading a segment, but what was a flat scene has some life and blood in it.

And most important of all, it takes that “special torture” line and puts it where we can see it.

The very first script I wrote got this comment from Alan Plater (hey, if you’re going to ask advice, start from the top): he said that he had laughed aloud at the stage directions but the audience never sees those. When I managed to move the gags into dialogue, he called it a great step for writerkind.

Some day I should get a copy of War, Inc and see if they ignored his advice as much as it seems.

William

Earlier this week I recorded my first narration for a DVD documentary. Can’t tell you what it is yet because I don’t think the DVD has been officially announced; as soon as it is, I’ll get you a link because hopefully you’ll want to buy it. And if you do, of course it’s going to be because of me, not the title itself.

I can tell you, quite seriously, that the documentary is first class. I had a really good time playing back an almost-final assembly of the thing and then I had to go ruin it by talking all the way through. Don’t you hate people like me?

But if I shouldn’t tell you what it is (and I’m going to be honest here and say there is a Very Easy Way to find out and it involves a judicious use of the @ symbol), I can tell you that it’s even harder to narrate than I had expected – and I’d expected it to be hard. By the end of the recording, my teeth felt looser, vibrated out of kilter. And I can tell you that of course it’s immense fun: could you imagine my finding it dull?

I especially like how I didn’t write the script, there was no writing involved at all, my only contribution was my voice. So the other day I get a little success from my photography, then I got news of another play being put on, then I’m a voice guy, and in a kind of mix of prose and picture research, I was today commissioned for a Doctor Who Adventures feature. Am I multimedia or what?

But you’re wondering about the subject of this blog. And it’s just this. Despite this being a vocal gig, despite all this other non-writing work, a great joy was found in coining a new phrase. I was asked to be more peppy but not hammy so I did it pepperonily.

Feel free to use this term wherever you may.

I’m in a blathery mood this week, aren’t I?
William

Call him Harve.

A new short play of mine is being staged at the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds in a festival of new writing on the theme of harvest festival. Two nights: 31 October and 1 November.

This is the theatre that did Manhattanhenge for me earlier in the year and I was invited to contribute another piece. It’s a smaller event than Innocence but good to have another piece in production – and where the last one had audiences choking a little, this one’s (so far) making people laugh.

And though I’m not billed on it – none of the writers in the festival are – I get a poster!

They were going to be online here but now, not so much. I first got into Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night because I’d got into his The West Wing but I did also read some scripts that were unofficially released online. That’s happy for me. And every once in a while when I’m back in a Sports Night mood, I’ll rewatch the episodes and invariably head for the Sports Night script site.

Until the new DVD came out. Well, no, I headed for the site alright but the site was gone. For weeks now, it’s been gone. But today, right now, this second in fact, and of course after I’d found a cunning way to salvage most of the scripts off there, that site is back.

The scripts on it range from early to late or shooting drafts and, especially if you know the series, it’s fascinating to see the progress of the stories and the characters. And from a production perspective, to see how huge chunks of story moved around the series before ending up in the episodes they did. The clearest example, and done for the most obvious reason, is the second half of How are Things in Glocca Morra? This is the first-season episode that was being filmed when Robert Guillaume had a stroke in real life. The entire final half of the script moved to a second-season episode instead.

If you’re less familiar with the show, I obviously think the scripts stand up as stories on their own but I do recognise that they’re harder to read than the average. In every episode there are scenes where two characters, Dan and Casey, are presenting a TV show and are in front of cameras while up to eight other speaking parts are in the control room and any or all can be going between the two. Plus anything the control room people say can be heard by the Dan and Casey if a mic is switched on; anything Dan and Casey ever say can always be heard in the control room. So conversations roam across the two rooms, some dialogue is for broadcast, some is not, it flows gloriously on screen.

And the way Aaron Sorkin and his many co-writers get this on the page is… by ignoring it. You’ll see long unbroken scenes where who is talking to whom and who can or can’t hear is only rarely covered.

It doesn’t help that this script site’s formatting of the screenplays is confusing when you’re used to real ones. So, what the hell? I managed to get one of the scripts, I spent some time making the formatting readable, lemme show you one anyway.

This is from the second season of Sports Night, it’s The Cut Man Cometh by Bill Wrubel and Aaron Sorkin. There are hardly any differences between this draft and the aired version but who cares? It’s one of the funniest and also one where I felt the most because it took me right back to disastrous nights in radio.

William

This month there were 800 new book titles published. One of them was Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook: it’s a truly beautiful edition, a world class idea and a superb read but I choose to leave everyone else to rave about it because I’m not in it.

Whereas I am going to be in Metal Clay Beads: Techniques, Projects, Inspiration.

You’re going to have to look quite closely because the truth is that I will get one teeny byline. But it’s a photography byline. And this is a US book so I am again published internationally and for my photography.

You don’t get to do this kind of thing without help. In front of every great jewellery photographer there is a great piece of jewellery. And I feel like walk-on extra telling you The Crucible is about the guy who brings in a glass of water for the judge because of course this isn’t about me, it’s about Angela Gallagher. The book is by Barbara Becker Simon but it contains a gallery of the finest jewellery (and photography, come on, throw me a bone here) and Angela’s Heath Robinson piece is included.

Fancy a peek? This is how good you have to be to get international recognition in jewellery-making.

Click for a larger image. And to keep you going before the book’s published early next year, you could, go on then, do no better in all this land than buy Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale.

William