Musings

Netflix’s has been providing me with season three of Galactica, and I’ve been mainlining them so I can get caught up and watch season four. And I’ve noticed something. Some shows mainline wonderfully — Buffy, Dead Like Me, Firefly, Veronica Mars. Others — not so much. Unfortunately Galactic falls into the later category.

There’s a lot I like about the show — the look of it, Colonel Ty, the relationship between Adama and Lee, the love between Boomer and Hilo (sp?), the fact that the people are wonderfully flawed and very human. It really is the anti-Star Trek, and I bless Ron Moore for that. But on the most fundamental level this show just doesn’t work, and when you’re watching three and four episodes in a row the seams and cracks really start to show.

For example, I sat through an episode where they had to go through a region of space where stars were being born, and they lost two civilian ships, and a pilot got killed, and I was supposed to care, and I didn’t because it was stupid. They have ships that can make some kind of FTL jump. Why didn’t they go _around_ this region of space. The explanation was that it was “really big”. _But You Have Ships that Can Jump through Space_ So it takes three jumps to go around or over, or under. Space is not a flat highway. There’s plenty of real drama in this show, they don’t need to manufacture it.

I admit the religious themes are starting to make me nuts. So, we’re on this planet with a temple that supposedly was built four thousand years ago, and there’s something about The Five which are like prophets for the humans, but the Cylons think the five are the hidden skin jobs. Huh? It can’t be both since the Cylons weren’t built four thousand years ago. Or is Lucy Lawless just a religious nut job? If so then please make this a good deal more clear.

And why all the scenes of Baltar in bed with two Cylon women who appear to be sleeping? Why are they sleeping? They’re machines. That’s a really inefficient use of time. I wish I didn’t have to sleep. Which brings me to the basic problem I’ve got with the show. The Cylons want to kill 99% of all humans, and sleep with the remaining 10%. Why? I cry plaintively.

Presumably the “Toasters” built the Skin Jobs. So, why are the toasters treated like second class machine citizens. Why doesn’t the bit jefe toaster kick the snot out of the Skin Jobs and make them behave, and tell them to stop creating nutty religions?

And please, don’t try to force a relationship between Lee Adama and Starbuck. There is no chemistry there. None. Nada. Whole minutes are given over to long, lingering shots of these two actors looking at each other. Please go back to drunken Ty, or the Chief, or Adama doing anything — I’d watch him pluck his eyebrows or read the phone book, I’d even watch _him_ sleep.

Okay, the rant is now over. But this does raise a very real issues for creators of shows and show runners. The way people experience television is changing profoundly. People aren’t waiting for a week to pass between episodes. Downloads and Netflix are a reality, and so you need to plot these show so they can be viewed in quick succession.

I don’t exactly know how we do this, but I think it’s a area for fruitful discussion. I’d love to hear other folks analysis of the issue.

And I have to address the derivation of the term “Toaster”. Walter Jon Williams used it first in a Wild Cards story about his robot character, Modular Man. I then borrowed it when I wrote The Measure of a Man, and applied it to Data. Ron has now brought it into the mainstream, but I wanted to give the tip of the hat to Walter Jon who coined the term originally.

This post is in answer to Sam Butler requesting that I reproduce a conversation we had back in November. Of course I have absolutely no memory of what I said, but according to Sam it was thoughtful, so I’m going to try and remember that, apparently, I was once brilliant.

As I recall this was in answer to why characters on television shows will make a choice that seems totally out of character, or against their best interests simply to keep them in a relationship, or on the island, or working as a cop when you’ve won the lottery, etc. Basically why television characters are static.

I think it’s a question of the need that television fills in our entertainment lives. Watching a TV show isn’t as intense as watching a movie. The events in a television series take place over weeks, months, even years. Most successful movies cover a very limited amount of time.

We don’t bond with movie characters as deeply as we bond to our TV friends. People tune in week after week, year after year to see if House ever stops being such a bastard and finds love, or if Buffy and Angel will ever find happiness, or Lee Adama will ever come out of his father’s shadow, etc. etc. Not that we every want House to find love, or Buffy and Angel move in together. We have an emotional connection to these people, and as viewers _don’t want them to change_.

Our lives are stressful and chaotic right now. It’s comforting to come back to a situation and a group of friends that are always going to be there for you. Tony Soprano isn’t going to become a priest and dedicate his life to working among the lepers. Buffy isn’t going to decide to go to work for Exxon-Mobile and become an executive.

Daniel Abraham www.bram452.livejournal.com has a theory that readers/viewers bond and identify with the first characters they meet in a book or a TV series. I think he may be on to something and that’s why it’s very hard to replace that first beloved character. When Linda Hamilton aka Catherine left BEAUTY AND THE BEAST the viewers never accepted the new leading lady. (Whose name I’ve completely forgotten. Indeed, I’ve forgotten everything about her. But god help me I remember Vincent and Catherine.)

So, here’s my bottom line — television is comfort food. It’s a plate of pasta or a piece of chocolate cake after a really bad and stressful day.

This is a post that I’ve been meaning to make for a couple of weeks. It’s riffing off a wonderful post on Ian Tregillis’s blog www.iantregillis.com where he compared and contrasted The Sarah Conner Chronicles and New Amsterdam. Go check it out, because he makes some amazing points about good storytelling vs. trite storytelling.

I thought I’d amplify a bit as a long time screenwriter about how hard that is to accomplish. There are a lot of reasons you keep seeing the same scene (with different character depending on which show your watching) over and over again. The first, really nuts and bolts reason is money. When you are making a television show you have a number of permanent sets — the bridge, the bar at Ten Forward, Picard’s office. Giles library, Buffy’s house, the club. Well, you get the idea. As a writer you set as many scenes as possible in these already constructed sets because it saves time and money not to have to build a new set or go out on location. Also, the production is amortizing the cost of these sets against the budget.

When Ian and I set down to create our world for our spec pilot OUTPOST, we thought a lot about what would be standing sets. How often would we use them if we got lucky and the show went to series? Could we pick places that would be visually interesting.

The truth is your going to have scenes where information has to be transmitted to the audience. The captain’s office whether you’re on the Enterprise, or at NYPD headquarters is a standard, conference rooms, etc. As Daniel Abraham often says — the control of information delivery is critical to a good writer — and that’s true whether you’re writing prose or a screenplay.

There are techniques to keeping this kind of imparting of knowledge fresh and interesting. Sorkin in the West Wing used the “walk and talk” brilliantly. That sense of movement, people who are busy, sharp, quick dialogue got you over what could have been a turgid recitation of “what you need to know” in a very smooth and effective manner.

If the budget can afford it setting a scene in an unexpected place can also help. When the first cops talking in the bathroom scene occurred it was really cool and different. The director got to show of his/her chops by shooting using the mirrors, and you had guys unzipping their flies, etc. I don’t remember where I saw this for the first time. Hill Street Blues probably, but if somebody knows of an earlier incident, let me know. Anyway, it was different, it was new, it was cool and exciting. Now, of course, it’s as trite as the conference room. So, maybe you have the cops come to report to their captain while he’s taking his kids to the amusement park, and they’re talking while he supports his little girl who’s riding a carousel horse. (I’m not saying these are _good_ ideas, just examples).

Another trick that can help make a scene seem less boring and familiar is giving the actor some “business” to perform. They’re kneading bread while the conversation takes place, or hanging drapes, or feeding the cats, paying off the pizza delivery kid.

There’s a danger to “business” too. Sometimes business can undercut the power of a scene. Sometimes the actor’s faces and the words can carry a moment. I had a critical scene in one of the Reasonable Doubts scripts ruined by a less than good director. This was a scene where a rouge DEA agent is warning Dickie (Mark Harmon) that they’re going to kill Mark. It should have been a tense moment between two men who are threatening each other. Instead the director made it a scene about making coffee, because he had the bad guy busily putting in a filter, measuring in the coffee, pouring in the water, etc. etc. When I watched the scene in dailies it was as flat as a fallen souffle.

So, here’s my two cents added to the discussion begun over at Dr. Tregillis’s blog.

The studios buried me under DVD’s this year. I watched JUNO since it was nominated for Best Picture, and I liked it a great deal. I don’t think it deserves a Best Picture nod, but it is sweet and the dialogue just crackles and Ellen Page is entrancing and adorable. Every supporting performance is top notch as well.

Juno, like Knocked Up again proves my point that Hollywood is not this liberal place where American “values” are attacked. The Wretched Right loves to flog this dead horse, but a moment’s analysis shows how lame is that accusation. Hollywood is cowardly and traditional. Contrast these movies about women suddenly finding themselves pregnant who decide to go on with the pregnancy and find love along the way, with the bleak Rumanian film Four Months, Three Weeks and 2 Days. These are complex issues and they deserve more than just a candy coating and a “love will find a way” platitude.

Melinda

Sunday night I went and saw ATONEMENT. Each individual scene was wonderful, and there were some stunning performances, especially Saoirse Ronan who played Briony at age 13, but I found the pacing of the movie to be glacial, and rewind technique got old for me. I also felt like I was being miscued through much of the film. The writer and director seemed to be saying “This is a love story, this is a love story”, but it actually wasn’t, and so I felt emotionally let down because I hadn’t known where to put my emotional energy. Writers in every genre — books, short stories and movies have to be aware of how they signal the readers/viewers, but I think it’s especially critical in short stories and movies because of the compressed time frame of the experience. The movie was only two hours long, but it felt like I’d been in the theater for three hours.

Then last night I watched the new episode of the Terminator show, and it hit a real button for me. The message seemed to be that science is dangerous, scientists are irresponsible and think less about people than their work and research, if the team at Los Alamos had all been killed we would never have been afflicted with The Bomb, which is just moronic. I’m okay with the fact that Sarah Conners might feel that way, but I’d like to see her paranoia balanced with an argument for the other side. Technology has caused problems, yes, but advances in science and technology are going to help solve many of our problems.

In a country where people are putting more credence in crystal power and guardian angels, and we rank at some dismally low place in terms of kids and science scores, I hate to see popular culture pushing an anti-science message. So, end of this morning’s rant. Time to get back to work on the book.

Melinda

Before folks read the script I wanted to explain why Data gets laid. It wasn’t my choice or my preference, but it had been established in the first season that Data was “fully functional in every way”, and in a meeting to discuss the story outline it was decided that Data and the heroine had to sleep together. This was agony for me because trying to get a totally logical character into the sack was not an easy task. It took many wanderings through Rickie and Han’s office going “so what it he says this, and she says this and that logically leads to that.”

Unfortunately I think the sex scene is what ultimately sunk the script as written. Some people viewed it as making Data emotional (which it didn’t), and meetings ensued. People went to Michael Wagner, then the executive producer of Star Trek, but he refused to rewrite my script. It turned into quite a fight, and Michael ended up quitting the show. I don’t know if my script was the only reason. I hope not.

And now you are wondering who in the hell was Michael Wagner. Michael was our executive producer for about six weeks in the third season. He was a lovely man and a wonderful writer, an alumni of HILL STREET and other shows. He was a complete science fiction fan and this job was the dream of a lifetime. Tragically Michael died from a brain tumor when he was 44 years old, and he has been written out of the Star Trek histories.

It’s two am and I’m going to bed now. Too much thinking makes it hard to sleep.

Melinda

Last night Ian and I stopped at India House for dinner and then went on to see Charlie Wilson’s War. I had been interested because Sorkin wrote the screenplay and Hanks, and Philip Seymour Hoffman are wonderful. (I could tolerate Julia Roberts with that line up).

Well, this a terrific film, and Mike Nichol’s direction has perfect pitch. The movie starts light and fun, but even in the first “hot tub with strippers and blow scene” you begin to get a sense that there is a lot more to this man. As the film moves on the intensity and power increases reflected in also in how it’s lit and the use of the music. Hoffman’s performance is stunning, and Hanks manages to make a womanizing, boozing Texan completely charming. (Given that I am totally sick of boozing Texans — I’m assuming Bush isn’t womanizing because I can’t imagine a woman wanting to touch him — Hanks had an uphill climb with me.)

The critics have slammed the movie for making it this cheerleading, go us, feel good movie without addressing the fact that all those arms and guns we went to Afghanistan went to train Osama ben Laden. All I can say is the critics are idiots and weren’t paying attention. In a number of small ways Sorkin and Nichol’s signal what was coming was brilliant, and the next to last scene has Hanks and Hoffman on a balcony with the CIA guy telling the Congressman “You blew it” while airplane sound whines overhead. You never see the plane, you just hear it. It’s mixed so that the plane and the dialogue hold equal weight.

Was it subtle? Yes. Was that good? Actually brilliant. No, they didn’t rub our faces in 9/11, why should they have to after the past six years of Bush/Republican fear mongering. But the warnings were there of the rise of Islamic terrorism.

I highly recommend seeing this movie.

Melinda

On Wednesday night I drove through the snow into Santa Fe to see The Golden Compass with Ian. It looked fantastic. Amazing visuals, particularly the architecture. I thought the costuming was terrific, and the young girl playing Lyra was splendid. Now the bad news. They were trying so hard not to offend anyone with Pullman’s themes that they ended up making a movie that wasn’t about anything.

Frequently I complain that a movie is too damn long. This movie wasn’t long enough. It felt breathless it was so rushed, and they committed a nearly unforgivable sin (at least for me). We had a “once out of the well moment” that I think was the result of not having enough time to let the story unfold. They also cost themselves precious time by repeating information.

When Lyra first meets the armored bear he gives us his entire tragic story that will explain why he is a drunk. Then we get to the climactic battle between the bears and we hear again everything that we heard earlier. They could have held the reveals until the moment Iorek challenges the king. I also think the studio made a terrible mistake using Ian McClellan as the voice Iorek. Every time he talked it pulled me right out of the movie, and I found myself looking around for Gandalf.

I did love the daemons and I want one. Of course mine would probably be a horse, and it would be hard to get it into buildings. Still that was wonderfully realized. I haven’t checked to see how this film is doing at the box office. I suppose as a S.F./Fantasy writer I want it to do well, but I hate it when they gut something and leave us with nothing but skim milk.

Melinda

So we were out on the picket line at the College of Santa Fe where they are shooting BROTHERS this morning. It was bear ass cold — 29 degrees and the wind was whipping — but we had an amazing turn-out. I had no idea we had so many screenwriters in the area. We flirted with getting arrested — the college was claiming that we were trespassing on private property which is not true. They are running a commercial operation with a movie theater that caters to anyone in Santa Fe, and a film studio, but we’re getting a ruling from the City Attorney so that can’t keep us out. We still managed to get in and hour and a half of picketing, and gave some teamsters are strike info so they may start honoring the line.

The cops suggested we move out in front of the big sign for the college on Cerrillos Road which actually worked out well because a lot of people saw us, and honked and waved and showed solidarity.

After it ended George, Parris and I told folks were were going to Tecolote for breakfast/lunch, and three people joined us. One was one of our strike captains, Tracy Kelly who wrote for the Bold and The Beautiful, and the other was a young man, Andrew — unfortunately I never caught his last name. The final person was Ed Khmara who wrote LADYHAWK and ENEMY MINE. It was a real thrill to meet this man, and he was so modest. George had asked him what he wrote, and he said something to the effect of, “Well, I wrote a few movies, but you probably haven’t heard of them because they came out years ago.” Then he gave us the titles, and stared at us quizzically as we went nuts. We’re going to try and get him down to Bubonicon next year. Wouldn’t that be the coolest thing?

Tomorrow we are picketing in Albuquerque, and I’d driving down. We’ve got to win this one, and we’ve got to stick together.

Melinda

I know I should be finishing up my trip report about New York, but I feel compelled to take time to bitch, moan, complain, vent and generally hurrumph.

Could somebody please put HEROES out of it’s misery? After the third dull episode I’d vowed not to watch again. Putting aside the fact that the show was boring, there was the big cheat of having everybody who’d been dead at the end of first season suddenly be alive after all. Don’t ask me for an emotional response and then say “gotcha”!

But I still hadn’t removed the season pass for HEROES off my tivo. And I suppose it’s curiosity because I’m back writing in a superhero universe so I kept tuning in week after week. Well, I think tonight they have finally managed to drive me away for good.

Guess what? The cheerleader’s dad has superpowers too! And he has the same power as his daughter. He just recovered from being shot in the eye. And guess who shot him? The kindly doctor because Dad was about to shoot the man who had kidnapped his daughter. Little out of character? Don’t get me started on the doc. He’s infiltrating the evil company in order to take it down, but then he confesses to the creepy head of the company that he’s working with Claire’s daddy to destroy the company. I have no idea why. The concept of motivation seems beyond these people.

The telepathic cop has daddy issues. Hates his dad, but has decided to act just like his dad. And the mysterious killer of the older generation turns out to be the drunken Englishman that Hiro met in Samurai Japan. Why is he killing them? Because they locked him up because he was “dangerous”. These people have never hesitated to kill each other, but they decide not to kill him? Huh? But he can heal, you might say. Well, let’s see him heal from being dismembered and cremated. And if he can’t be killed he’s a god, and there is no consequence to any of this. But there is no consequence because _nobody will stay dead_.

And stupid. Why is everybody in this show so stone stupid? Creepy company guy kidnapps Claire and after they free her she and her boyfriend go back home to cuddle on the bed while mom pets her dog, and nobody _gets the hell out of dodge because the company is trying to kidnapp Claire_! I swear if anyone in our gaming group played this stupid Walter would have killed us so dead.

Sorry, I’m back now.

Then there was the book that I finished reading last night. THE GEOGRAPHER’S LIBRARY by Jon Fasman starts out great. It has a fascinating narrator with a distinctive voice, and this author has a gift for description that had me sighing with envy. Consider this description of one of the journalists at the paper. “He resembled a human pinwheel: tall and thin, with a perpetually surprised expression, a loping, reeling gait, and a shock of clumpily wild red hair.”

But the structure — oh my God. The book has alternating chapters between the past where people in different eras are searching for rare objects that are necessary for the art of alchemy, and first person chapters written by this young journalist who is trying to write an obituary for this mysterious old professor.

I was loving this book, but I kept thinking that all these chapters in the past really needed to pay off and be part of the solution of the present day proble. If they didn’t this book was going to fail. Well, they didn’t and the book failed. It ended up feeling like the author really wanted to write a historical, but was afraid that wouldn’t sell so he hungit on a thriller (a la the DA VINCI CODE) framework.

Aside from promising me something and not paying it off, the author also disappointed me because this wonderful hero he created ultimately has no effect on anything. The problem is solved by outside agents, and our hero goes home to live in his mom’s basement and sulk.

I’m going to read QUEEN FERRIS and at least there are two more episodes of Torchwood before the season ends.