Travel: Sense and Sensibilities [Day XLIX]

Wherein I give network TV a fighting chance.

My sister Miriam is a huge Friends fan.

She has all the box DVDs and can faithfully quote Phoebe and Chandler's most rambling monologues.  Watching the show can pull her out of a slump - if I come downstairs and hear Jennifer Aniston's voice and a laugh track coming from the basement I know she needs to be on her own for a bit.  She knows the characters and how they'll behave in a given situation;  I think she sees the Friends as, well, friends.  Recently, she's shifted from a coffee shop to a neighbourhood bar, following another group of thirty-somethings in How I Met Your Mother, still running in its eighth season.

Conversely, I never really 'got' most scripted sitcoms.  I love TV, love the medium and what it offers in terms of character opportunities and chances for prolonged serial plotting, but the 'group of adult friends hang out wacky-style for twenty-two minutes' never really appealed.  Even Frasier, which does make me laugh when I've seen it in hotel rooms and airports, never caught on for me beyond the occasional rerun.  The shows I love try to build epic worlds only to die a painful, limping Death of a Thousand Nielsen boxes in their first couple seasons.  A few times, Miri has watched one of 'my shows' with me - she found the characters I adored unlikeable or unrealistic and the premises far-fetched.  Right or wrong, she's my barometer for public taste in television.

I think she will really enjoy Ben & Kate.  

And that's not a slur on Miri, and it's not a slur on the show.

I haven't talked much about the show itself in these entries because it seemed largely irrelevant, but today we had a table read* and the actors came in.  Hearing them bring so much energy to the lines, seeing the excitement on Dana and the other writers' faces as their show coalesced... I really felt a collection of people imagining something special together.

And it is hard for me to be objective now, even on the fringes of production, but the scripts make me laugh.  The actors - particularly Nat Faxon, whose last gig was as a screenwriter for the Descendants (he and his cowriters won the Oscar for it) - make me laugh.  The jokes make me laugh.  There's no question that Ben & Kate is situational comedy.  In some ways it's safe as houses.

But I'm going to watch it when I get home in the fall, even if I don't have a Nielsen box.

Notes from the 14 bus.

Wonderful Los Angeles.  A teenage boy got on the bus today with skate sneakers, low-riding baggy jeans, an unzipped hoodie that said Thug Lyfe on the back... and a pair of tzizit sticking out from under his t-shirt.

Cheers

Julia

* It's a meeting where the writers, producers and the main actors all get scripts and the producer reads through the entire script, with the actors running their dialogue while seated.  A regular table read of a half-hour show takes about fifteen minutes.

Travel: Dyed In The Wool [Day XLV]

Wherein I assist the masses.

I spent the morning today assembling baby quilt patterns on Etsy for Dana.  Apparently infants have very strong opinions on mauve.  Relatedly, and more excitingly, I have begun taking notes on conference calls when Katie (Dana's assistant) is out on errands, which means I get to be in the room for all of the network check-ins.  My quick typing, one of the three abilities I cite when other people ask what I'm good at*, has finally paid off.

The writers' room is kind of a dream for someone as nitpicky as me.  People usually don't like to go see films with me because rather than just say I enjoyed it, I think for about twenty minutes and then double down on what worked and what didn't.  It can kind of kill the buzz.  I try not to do it anymore.  But in the room, seven or eight people are doing the exact same thing at the development stage.  Even though I don't talk at all, I feel in such good company.

It's surreal to think that the show is actually going to go on air and that, for the first few episodes anyways, I'm going to have a lot of information about how different it almost looked, or why the characters are playing out the way they are.  

Notes from Avonlea.

Up at Dana's house yesterday, I was spearheading a campaign against The Room, Dana and Quinn's storage space cum nursery.  There were all sorts of things in there, from wedding memorabilia to old script notes to a large ziplock bag of free cosmetic samples, which Dana cheerfully handed off to me.  

Once I got home, I used one of the moist towelettes on my face.  It didn't sting too badly, and after a few minutes my skin began to feel very stiff.  It was odd, but I figured it was some sort of active ingredient until I threw the wipe away.  My fingers were stained a horrible orange-y tan.

I ran to the washroom in a panic and stuck my face in the sink.

My entire face was streaked with what looked like wood varnish - I felt like a very tall Oompa-Loompa.  Now I know how Anne Shirley felt when the horrible raven-black hair dye turned out green and she had to cut off all her hair.  Fortunately for Mary's bathroom tiles, I did not have to cut off my face: the stuff (which I assume was self-tanner) came off with some vigorous scrubbing and rubbing alcohol.  I have no idea what I would have done had it not: I looked truly ridiculous.

Maybe it would have been a talking point at the office.  I bet they don't get many Oompa-Loompas down here.

Cheers,

Julia

*the other two are spelling and the ability to love even the most awful of cats.

Travel: Taste The Rainbow [Day XXXVI]

Wherein swag is had by all and I give notes on a network television script.

Hold your arms out in front of you and make a circle.  Look down to about your waist.

You are looking at the approximate volume of the Skittle duffel bag that just came through the office in the arms of a man named Freddie.  The writers were very excited.  He was handing out packets to everyone at a desk, and I stopped him to ask what had brought on the sugar shack.

"Nothing, really.  Skittles is hoping this will brighten your day."  He left me with a bag and sauntered out.

I am suspicious.  What if these Skittles are a bribe, sent by the network in order to prevent Dana from airing the upcoming episode where Tommy, Ben's black best friend/sidekick, explores race relations and self-distances from his black identity in order to fit in better with white friends?  Or the one where little Maddie gets hold of a Judy Blume book and questions the nature of sexuality?  Disastrous.

Okay, so maybe not from the network.

But there must be some nefarious force at work for so many Skittles to have been amassed for no transparently visible reason.  I blame the patriarchy.

They are tasty though.

Notes from a red tongue.

Yesterday, Dana gave me the preliminary script for the second episode - which she wrote - and asked me to give notes.  My head exploded.  I cannot give notes to this woman.  She is an insanely successful screenwriter and I am a ex-college student who missed the last two sessions of my Professional Development class.


Obviously.

I ended up pretending I was writing the notes for an alternate universe version of Dana whom I would never have to see again once she read them.  It worked fairly well, except that when I handed over the script this morning, she did not - upon touching it - shimmer away into another dimension as I had hoped she would.  Life is full of disappointment.


I have had too many Skittles.


Cheers
Julia

Travel: Mix Master [Day XXXI]

Wherein writing is rewriting in music, too.

When pilots get made, the producers don’t have to worry about clearing the soundtracks, since nobody’s officially making money off the show yet.  Once they have a series order, though, the pilot gets sent back through the post process so the mixers can replace the ‘temp music’ with cleared, licensed stuff.

The familiarity of the processes are a strange comfort to me.  I sat in the mix room for four hours with Dana, the director Jake Kasdan (Lawrence Kasdan’s son! Fangirl moment.), and a couple of sound techs as they trudged through every cue.  Maybe it was just hunger, but it gave me flashbacks to four months ago, when we mixed our own infinitely tinier show. 

Sure, there are more people here – the console of blinky lights is slightly larger, and they didn’t have any problems licensing Take On Me for the party scene.  But there’s the same amount of surreptitious eating at the console, the same arguments about whether the levels on the cue should come up five percent or go down ten, the same laughs at the lines that only seem to get funnier the sixth time.  The mix is a slog, but there’s a sense of excitement too – like marathon runners coming into the stadium for the last lap.

They stuck with the composer who did the temp music for the series proper, so he had to rewrite - and slightly tweak - his own compositions for the airing version.  “Do you think it’s too close for comfort?” Jake said as they listened to the temp soundtrack against the one we were using.  Dana didn’t seem too worried.  “It’ll squeak by.”

I asked Randy – the line producer – who had ended up with the rights to the composer’s temp music.  “The Fox conglomerate.  If he so much as tries to demo anything else with one of those tracks, they’ll have a lawyer on him faster than you can say shark.”

“Even if he’s replacing his own music on one of the shows they run?”

“Especially then.”

So not quite like we do it at home, then.

Cheers

Julia

Travels: One's Lot In Life [Day III]

Wherein I take the bus in the wrong direction and Darth Vader presides over Fox.

I often wonder how a studio set functions without occasionally acknowledging the tension of twenty minions politely waiting for their big break... while working for the person whose job they would like.  Bad sentence, but I'll come back to it later.  Point being, at school we all know we're competing, but at least we can kind of do a friendly jostle here and there and there's an understanding that eventually anyone who works hard and has a reasonable balance of good luck to bad will make a stab at it.  Not so at Fox.  I met a good fifteen people today: they would all like to be in the writers' room.  They are not.

I was walking around the lot with Dana's lovely assistant Kate when she circumspectly referred to this weirdness.  I asked her for advice about the summer.  The lot has large murals painted on several of the buildings - the one behind Kate showed a vaguely anemic Luke Skywalker doing battle with Vader.

"Don't be pushy," she said.  "Don't be too smart.  I mean, be smart, but not about the writing.  Make friends who write.  Be smart with them, get your lines out at your dinner parties.  I'm still working on the balance."  We looked up at the mural.  Poor Luke, about to have his hand cut off by the Force.  Stuck up there forever.

"Does Dana ever show her scripts to you, though?  In private."

Kate beamed.  "Dana's really nice with me, actually.  I'm lucky.  One of my jokes made it into the pilot; I called my parents, I was so excited."  I asked her what the joke was, but she wouldn't tell me.  "It'll seem like bragging," she said.  "I don't know you well enough for bragging yet.  Try again next week."

On the way home from the lot, I took the bus in the wrong direction and ended up at the Santa Monica airport.  It's as close as an airfield can get to cozy, with little carts puttering around on the tarmac.  I bet the air traffic controllers there are happy with their jobs - they don't want to eventually get into the cockpit.

Lucky air traffic controllers.

Notes from a stucco workplace.

Any flat surfaces in LA which are not regularly cleaned acquire a thin layer of chalky black dust.  Mary says it is from the big ships that come into the harbour; it makes me feel like the volcanic apocalypse is approaching.

I may come back to this later, but shredding Mary's old patient notes is killing the writer in me.  Every file is a real character - you'd never need to come up with a backstory again!

Cheers

Julia