Martini Shot

I'm teaching a writing class this semester at a large local university. Just one semester. Just one class.

When I started working in Hollywood, in the early 1990's, people were still talking about a movie called Howard the Duck, which was a comedy about a duck, named Howard, that was produced by George Lucas, and released in 1986 to an astounding and undeniable thud. Howard the Duck was a big flop, and years later people still used it as shorthand to describe a movie's performance, as in: the picture didn't do well, but we're not in Howard the Duck territory...

When you don't have any information to go on, the only thing you can do is make some up. That's sort of the way the brain works – when it faces an unknown, grey area, it just fills in whatever seems to fit. We try to make logical sense out of things, like the weather and traffic and network television pilot orders, when there may not be any real sense to be made...

The dating website OK Cupid is run by nerds. Very very nerdish nerds, who like to analyze the huge amount of data a site like that generates -- clicks, likes, messages between members, attractiveness ratings, etc. That swirl of data gets crunched and processed and discussed in their excellent blog, and the results are never less than fascinating...

A friend of mine has a pilot script at a network that was developing three scripts that dealt with the same basic subject.  So there was no way they were going to order all three pilots – everybody going into the deal knew how it would shake down: the three scripts would come into the network, and they'd choose which one they were going to make, and then put on the sad-encouraging-upbeat tone of voice and call the other two writers with the news...

Not too long ago, I was shooting on location – well, that sounds rather glamorous: the location was West LA – but the whole company was out there, shooting in some nondescript house on one of those streets in west LA that seem to rise up out of nowhere, between a Nails by Yuki and one of those not-Jamba juice chains...

This town shuts down for the holidays, someone told me years ago, around the end of October. Which isn't really the holidays – unless you've got a thing for Columbus Day, but the point was this: get your pilot scripts in early, because the town shuts down...