“The cheapest [Netflix] show is $3.8 million an episode. ‘House of Cards’ started at $4.5 million and (executive producer David) Fincher took it way above that…The next series is ‘Hemlock Grove’ and they’re doing that for about $4 million an episode. ‘Orange is the New Black’ is just under $4 million as well. They’re huge budgets shows, doing things in a huge way.” CAA TV literary agent Peter Micelli Netflix Series Spending Revealed by Andrew Wallenstein Variety 3.08.13
“It’s hard to watch Netflix’s’ House of Cards’ and not get the feeling that it’s not only great programming, but also a seminal event in the history of TV….It’s the first major TV show to completely bypass the usual television ecosystem of networks and cable operators….If there’s any doubt about the venture’s success, competitors are already rushing to emulate it.” What Netflix’s “House of Cards” Means for the Future of TVby Greg Satell
Forbes 3.04.12
P.S. Netflix, an online rental service, was founded in 1997 and now has more than 23 million subscribers. It’s worth noting that fifteen years ago there was a healthy groundswell of people using DVDs, and about ten years ago there were 9,000 Blockbuster video stores across the United States (less than 500 remain today). Makes you wonder what the next 10 or 15 years of change will bring in the distribution system—and what kind of opportunities it will bring for screenwriters and filmmakers.
“It makes me sick, watching [my student loans] increase….There’s also the stress of how am I going to save for retirement when I have this bear to payoff.”
30-Year-Old Haley Schafer on her $312,000 student loans growing due to interest New York Times article The Vet Debt Trapby David Segal
The elephant in the classroom is student debt. A full-sized one right in the middle of the room surrounded by students.
It’s a dangerous situation.
I think most people see it, but we just seem to go about our business. Kind of like, “Well, gas is around $4 a gallon, what are you going to do?” Except there it’s simply a matter of budgeting more, driving less (bus, subway, carpool, walking, biking) or perhaps buying a vehicle that gets better gas mileage.
The complexity of student loans—and compounding interest—is it can follow you around for the rest of your life.
So what’s all this have to do with screenwriting? Money, that’s all.
Then today I read The New York Times article The Vet Debt Trapand that’s when then elephant metaphor popped into my head.
For the last few years I’ve had several college interns who’ve helped me out in exchange for the required 150 hours of real world experience and class credit. I was once a college intern and I try not to just make the internship a PA gig. They shoot and edit and we talk about business, psychology, sociology, creativity, movies, You Tube, tech stuff…and student loans.
Some of them are fortunate to not have any student loans due to parents/grandparents, scholarships, or employment covering the cost of education. But I’ve had other tell me things like, “Obama is working on a bill that will forgive student loans” (Ever seen Obama and Chuck Norris in the same room?) and ”If I don’t make that much I only have to pay the minimum.” I’ve heard and read other discussions about college grads being surprised that their student loan monthly cost after graduation is like a car payment—sometimes a house payment. Others go on about how it’s not fair that grads have to pay back the loans at all because they are trying to start careers and families.
What’s not fair is that there isn’t a louder national debate going on at the high school (middle school?) level warning students about the debt trap. So I’m just doing my part. And film school is not exactly preparing someone for a high paying career like brain surgery. And even doctors are complaining these days about student loans. More schooling, more debt. Plus not every medical or law school grad is weathly—or even employed. (Public defenders at the state level have an average starting salary around $47,000.)
But film school is far from a sure thing. One of the top MFA film program’s in the United States is said to confess that only 20% of their graduates will even have a career in film. Chris Terrio is one of those film school grads who survived “crippling, crippling debt” carving out $5,000 and 10,000 script sales and moving up the food chain before he paid off his student loans months before he received an Academy Award for writing Argo. A great success story. But not the norm.
Back in the ’80s when I was in film school that was one of the few places you could go to get your hands on equipment. These days you can buy a DSLR, some microphones, and a computer with editing software for less than a semester at most colleges. And I believe we all learn best by doing. I only made four films in film school—and that was more than most of my friends who just helped out on other films. Just four film in four years. Heck, I bet there are young people out there not going to film school who are making four films in four weeks.
I’m not saying don’t go to film school, or even film school isn’t worth it. Just don’t ignore the elephant in the room.
P.S. I recently read where someone said something like, “If you never want to be out of a job, major in computer science.” I’m waiting for a rock star coder to write a script and make a movie that challenges our whole concept of where filmmakers come from. (Maybe that’s already happened.)
I decided to round out the week with another Sidney Sheldon quote. Along with his best-selling novels, his Tony award, and his Oscar award, he was also the producer and creator of I Dream Of Jeannie. While it may not be the pinnacle of TV production, it’s still is a fan favorite more than forty years after the show’s five-year run ended. But more importantly, the reason I chose to end on this program is the setting for the show was the area I just moved to—Florida’s Space Coast.
While most of the production took place in California, Sheldon visited the area and sometimes they shot in the Cocoa Beach/Cape Kennedy where the Larry Hagman character lived and worked. In fact, there is a remnant of the show just a few miles up state road A1A from where I live. In Cocoa Beach there’s a short road named I Dream of Jeanie Lane. Actually, not far from the Kelly Slater statue I wrote about last summer.
Notice in the video above of the show’s first episode that it only took Sheldon a couple of minutes to set up the show. In 1967, Sheldon did receive an Emmy-nomination for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Comedy.
“To create comedy you have to have a conflict. If he’d played the part of a salesman who’d found a Jeannie there’s no conflict, it’s not funny. But to have the master as someone who’s in the military and has to subscribe to certain rules, and can’t be seen as doing anything outrageous without being thrown out of the service—that becomes funny. So I made him a member of NASA. They’re very strict. And we shot some of the scenes, some of the backgrounds in Cocoa Beach. The astronauts were big fans of the show—some of them came to the wedding in the fifth year…I had so many credits—it was created by Sidney Sheldon, a Sidney Sheldon production, copyrighted by Sidney Sheldon, written by Sidney Sheldon, I was embassesment—usually in Hollywood you fight for credit, I was fighting to get some of my credits off the screen.” Sidney Sheldon Archive of American Television
P.S. Am I only one who thinks a young Larry Hagman looks like New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady?
“I found myself seeking shelter against the wind.”
Bob Seger/Against the Wind
“Run, Forrest! Run! Jenny in Forrest Gump
Many of you weren’t even born when Bob Seger’s album Against the Wind was released in February of 1980. Some of you have never heard the title song on the album. And since this blog has a global audience, there are others who have never even heard of Bob Seger—or his Silver Bullett Band. But I don’t think there’s been a human being anywhere in the world, anytime in the history of mankind, whose heart would not resonate —to one degree or another—with the core experience of running against the wind.
If Adam and Eve heard this song—once they were banished east of Eden—they’d have been just as moved as I was when I first heard it as a high school senior the year it was released. And every decade of my life this song has taken on new meaning. And if I make it to age 80 in a retirement home, I’ll be the one in the corner listening to this song cranked up in my ear buds on my retro iPhone 14 (just like I did with those jumbo Koss headphones at age 18) and I’ll still be seeking—probably more than ever— shelter against the wind.
The kid in the inner city Chicago, the businessman in Singapore, the factory worker in China, the mother in the favilla in Rio, the president of Pakistan, the actress in Hollywood, the computer programmer in India, and the farmer in Iowa—all know what it’s like to run against the wind. It’s a universal and primal.
In fact that screenplay you’re currently writing should have a protagonist who’s running against the wind. Indiana Jones, Jason Bourne, Erin Brockovich, Luke Skywalker, Ellen Ripley, Rocky, Superman, Batman, Bambi, Nemo, Dorothy, and more recently Django all spend a lot of movie time running against the wind. No conflict, no drama.
And since this blog celebrates storytelling and regionalism, this song and Seger’s Michigan roots (Lincoln Park, Ann Arbor, Detroit) fit right in. Seger spent fifteen years on the Midwest club circuit—with limited national success—before hitting it big nationally in 1976 with the song and album Night Moves. Seger is a study in persistence. And here we are fifty years after he first hit the Detroit music scene and he’s getting ready to tour again this month performing in many of the Midwest cities where he honed his act in the early years; Toledo, Grand Rapids, Dayton, Green Bay, St. Paul, Fargo, and of course, Detroit.
I saw Seger in concert the summer of ’78 at what’s now The Florida Citrus Bowl in Orlando, Florida. Few things were as magical and captivating in my teenage years as sitting in the dark with around 60,000 other people watching the flickering glow of lighters throughout the outdoor stadium and listening to the raspy voice of Seger.
Happy Valentine’s Day—in a melancholy sort of way.
Against the Wind
Bob Seger
Seems like yesterday But it was long ago Janey was lovely she was the queen of my nights There in darkness with the radio playin low And the secrets that we shared, mountains that we moved Caught like a wildfire out of control Til there was nothin left to burn and nothin left to prove
And I remember what she said to me How she swore that it never would end I remember how she held me oh so tight Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then
Against the wind
We were runnin against the wind We were young and strong we were runnin
Against the wind
And the years rolled slowly past And I found myself alone Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends Found myself further and further from my home and I Guess I lost my way There were oh so many roads I was livin to run and runnin to live Never worried about payin or even how much I owe
Movin’ eight miles a minute and for months at a time Breakin all of the rules that would bend I began to find myself searchin Searchin for shelter again and again
Against the wind Little somethin against the wind I found myself seekin shelter against the wind
Well those drifting days are past me now I’ve got so much more to think about Deadlines and commitments What to leave in, what to leave out
Against the wind I’m still runnin against the wind I’m older now but still runnin against the wind
Well I’m older now but still runnin against the wind Against the wind Against the wind Still runnin Against the wind Against the wind Against the wind…
P.S. Against the Wind did appeared in the movies For Love of the Game and Forrest Gump. Other Seger songs have been featured in movies over the years, but one of the most iconic scenes in modern American films is when Tom Cruise slides across the floor in Risky Business and dances to Seger’s Old Time Rock and Roll.
P.P.S. Against the Wind is Seger’s only number one album on the Billboard 2oo charts, and knocked Pink Floyd’s The Wall album out of the top slot after it topped the charts for 15 weeks.
Peter Guber has not only produced or executive produced 50 Academy Award nominated films, was once the studio head at Columbia Pictures, and currently is CEO & Chairman at Mandalay Entertainment Group, but he’s also been a full professor at UCLA/School of Theater, Film and Television for the past 30 years. Couldn’t find any of his UCLA classes online, but here are a few short videos he did for the University of Phoenix.
I don’t know what the odds are for one of your sons becoming a head coach of one of the 33 NFL football teams, but there odds of having two sons as NFL head coaches has to be pretty much against you. And the odds of those two sons coaching opposing teams in the Super Bowl has to be on par with dropping a football from an airplane from a few thousand feet and a dog catching it with his teeth.
So it wasn’t historic enough that brothers Jim and John Harbaugh both became NFL coaches, or that they even faced each other when the Baltimore Ravens (John) and the San Francisco 49ers (Jim) played each other in 2011. But this past Sunday they faced off again with the stakes a little higher for Super Bowl 47.
The parents said they were neutral on who they wanted to win, but I’m sure they were proud of both of their sons. In case you don’t follow football the Ravens defeated the 49ers in a game that wasn’t decided until the final two minutes when the 49ers couldn’t score on the Ravens five yard line.
I wanted to do a post on this before the game but was traveling and had limited time and access to Internet. While I was packing to move last month—and doing some house cleaning—I came across a photo I was part of a photographic team with Yary Photography that took the photo below of the 1986 University of Michigan football team that played in the Rose Bowl when none other than Jim Harbaugh was the starting quarterback. I’ll file this one in the “It’s a small world after all” file. (Jim wore #4 at Michigan and is in the top right area of the photo.) I didn’t even realize I had that photo. It was just rolled up in a tube in my basement and had suffered a little water damage.
Anyway, like screenwriters, I don’t believe people are born NFL coaches. I imagine both Jim and John had many influences in their lives that helped put them on the path to being head coaches in the NFL, but I’m sure their parents played a key part. In fact, in a much reported story that goes back to when Jim and John, their sister Joan were little kids and lived in Iowa with their parents, their father would shout, “Who’s got it better than us?” In unison they’d shout, “Nobody!” “At the time they lived in a tiny two bedroom-house in Iowa City, where Jack was an assistant coach at University of Iowa. Sometimes they had a car. If not, they were walking — what a terrific opportunity to work on basketball dribbling skills! Jack convinced the boys how great it was that they could bunk together in a tiny bedroom and talk philosophy and share each other’s dreams.”
Ann Killion Sports Illustrated.com
Do you really think that when Jim and John shared each others dreams that they ever dreamed they would be coaching against each other in a Super Bowl? Sometimes, somehow there are times when you can’t dream big enough.
Don’t be surprised if next year Jim leads the 49ers to a Super Bowl victory making both brothers Super Bowl winning coaches in a feat that will probably not be reached in your lifetime.
P.S. In case you wondered where my blog was yesterday, I don’t usually posts on weekends and holidays—and the day after the Super Bowl is one of the most called in sick days of the year so I think “Super Bowl Hangover” is like a holiday. Where people stay home to clean their houses the day after the Super Bowl, of course.
Yesterday I drove through French Lick, Indiana. It’s not a big town—under 2 square miles and under 2,000 residents. But it is a town I wanted to visit for several decades now as it’s the hometown of Larry Bird. The great Hall-of-Fame basketball player isn’t a screenwriter, but he does strike at a major theme of this blog—talent comes from everywhere.
And Bird did just rise up from a small town in Indiana to excel playing professional basketball for the Boston Celtics, according to Wikipedia, “he is the only person in NBA history to be named Most Valuable Player, Coach of the Year, and Executive of the Year.” And though he retired more than 20 years ago from playing, he still has an impact on the world as the second incarnation of the Twitter bird was named “Larry the Bird”, in honor of Larry Bird. Once nicknamed, “The Hick from French Lick”—he’s done okay with his small town roots.
From French Lick, Indiana. Technically, he played high school in French Lick, but he was born in the next town over West Baden, IN. Below is a photo from West Baden Springs Resort which has the most amazing atrium I’m ever seen in a hotel. It was once called the eighth wonder of the world.”
“Here’s to plain speaking and clear understanding.” Sydney Greenstreet’s character in The Maltese Falcon Based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett
“Hammett made the detective story fun to write, not an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues.” Raymond Chandler
Just as Raymond Chandler influenced other writers, other writers influenced him. And one of those writers was Dashiell Hammett (1884-1961) who The New York Times called ‘the dean of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction.” It’s interesting to note that Hammett was born before—and lived longer—than Chandler. But as I noted in a pervious post, Chandler was late bloomer and didn’t begin writing until he was into his 40s. Hammett was raised Catholic on a farm in southern Maryland and served in the US Army before writing the novels he is known for: The Thin Man, Red Harvest, The Glass Key, and The Maltese Falcon.
He once said, “All my characters were based on people I’ve known personally, or known about.” What follows is an excerpt from an essay by Chandler that was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1944:
“I doubt that Hammett had any deliberate artistic aims whatever; he was trying to make a living by writing something he had first hand information about. He made some of it up; all writers do; but it had a basis in fact; it was made up out of real things. The only reality the English detection writers knew was the conversational accent of Surbiton and Bognor Regis. If they wrote about dukes and Venetian vases, they knew no more about them out of their own experience than the well-heeled Hollywood character knows about the French Modernists that hang in his Bel-Air château or the semi-antique Chippendale-cum-cobbler’s bench that he uses for a coffee table. Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to begin by getting as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing. He wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street.
Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements. They thought they were getting a good meaty melodrama written in the kind of lingo they imagined they spoke themselves. It was, in a sense, but it was much more. All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech. Hammett’s style at its worst was almost as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything. I believe this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to anybody, but is the American language (and not even exclusively that any more), can say things he did not know how to say or feel the need of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill. He is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”
Raymond Chandler The Simple Art of Murder
P.S. Hammett had one of those complicated lives that artists often live. He consumed mass quantities of alcohol and cigarettes and had other health issues. He got married, had kids, got divorced, and fit in a 30-year affair with playwright Lillian Hellman, joined the communist party in 1937, lived his later years as a hermit with his typewriter untouched, and died of lung cancer. He’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He did work for a time as a screenwriter and many of his stories and characters were turned into movies and TV programs.
“I had no notion of becoming a writer,” is how writer Walter Mosley describes his life before reading the following two sentences:
“He was looking at me and neither his eyes nor his gun moved. He was as calm as an adobe wall in the moonlight.” The Long Goodbye,written by Raymond Chandler
“It took Raymond Chandler to show me something that I already knew but had never been aware of. Adobe walls in the lunar light of the southern California desert had the most passive demeanor—they were the ideal of peacefulness. Then the writer contrasts this nearly absolute tranquility to an armed and dangerous man … For the first time I understood the power of language to reach beyond the real into the metaphysical and into metaphor. Those 24 words alerted me to the potential power of writing.”
Author Walter Mosely who’s published 34 books and won the O Henry award, a Grammy, and PEN Lifetime Achievement Award The Two Raymond Chandler Sentences That Changes Walter Mosley’s Life written by Joe Fassler in the Atlantic
“Everyone knows who Raymond Chandler is and I began reading him in the late ’40s when I was writing westerns. And I remember thinking, ‘why don’t I switch over to things like the kinds of stories that Raymond Chandler’s doing?’”
Author Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty)
On receiving the Raymond Chandler Award
“He wrote like a slumming angel and invested in the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a gusto and imaginative flair.” Reference about Raymond Chandlerby crime fiction author Ross Macdonald who created detective Lew Archer (The Moving Target)
“What [Quentin] Tarantino may be most renowned for is his focus on highly stylized modes of speech. Greatly influenced by the likes of film noir/pulp fiction writers Dashiell Hammond, Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard, Tarantino elicits vivid responses from his audiences by incorporating mundane banter about ubiquitous popular culture subject matters.”
Michael Peters An Analysis of Quentin Tarantino and His Films
“Your clothes should be jazzy, very jazzy indeed, Steve. To be inconspicuous in this town is to be a busted flush.” Raymond Chandler, The King in Yellow
A short story by Chandler, and worth noting because the name author John D. MacDonald called the famed houseboat in 21 Travis McGee private detective novels was The Busted Flush. (Though the character McGee won the boat in a poker game, some consider it a nod to Chandler by the writer MacDonald.)
And here’s a different kind of Chandler influence from the trailer for Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) written and directed by Carl Reiner and starring Steve Martin:
That’s just what I could come up with in a breif search online. Do you know of other writers who were influenced by Chandler?
“Ian Fleming was massively influenced by [Raymond] Chandler. So someone like Bond is a reflection of Marlowe because he’s dry, he’s ironic, he’s the drinker, he’s the lone wolf. These characters are still with us, they still live on. And they are so totemic in their style that they will never ever age.”
Actor Toby Stephens
Back in 2011 the BBC dramatized many of Chandler’s novels including The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and Playback with Toby Stephens playing Marlowe in a series they called Classic Chandler. (You can purchase that series on iTunes.) It’s interesting to point out that the character Philip Marlowe first appear in print back in 1939 in Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep, and James Bond first appeared in print in 1953 in Flemming’s Casino Royale.
And here’s a short clip where James Bond author Ian Fleming says he “simply stole“ the name James Bond. (A great example of what I wrote about in the post Where Do Ideas Come From? (A+B=C).
