Synthian Sharp, one of the nicest folks I met during the strike, took it upon himself to tape my Q&A in Rancho Mirage. He now has it online at Vimeo, where you can also download a much beefier 934MB version.

This talk was very much geared towards a general audience. While there were some film students, most of the crowd was over fifty. We spoke more about the career than the craft of screenwriting.

I showed five clips. Weirdly, I didn’t pick one from The Nines, but I did show one scene from Scott Frank’s Minority Report that had my fingerprints on it.

At 112 minutes, it’s quite a time commitment. If you’re skipping around in the video, here’s the rough order of what I talk about:

• How I got started
• Go
• DC
• Charlie’s Angels
• Minority Report
• Big Fish
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
• God (the short film on The Nines DVD)
• The Nines
• Audience questions

Thanks to The Friends of the Rancho Mirage Public Library, Palm Springs International Film Society, and moderator Deborah Dearth. And of course Synthian for putting this up.

That’s absurd, of course, spending 22 hours in the air just so I could sit around a small table with two other jet-lagged people. But it was an important meeting, a kind of reality-check on a project everyone wants to see done right. As a screenwriter, you quite literally need to make sure everyone is on the same page, so sitting down in person makes sense.

And sitting down in Paris is lovely. With my spare time, I took a Vélib bike across the city to check out a future apartment and encountered my very first grifter, whose gimmick (a found ring) was so smoothly delivered I almost wanted to tip him for the performance.

I woke up at 2:30 this morning, hoping to see the Oscars, but the hotel’s TV didn’t carry them. So I found myself following the action via Twitter (#oscars), letting a thousand strangers tell me not just what was happening, but how they felt about it. ¹ It’s like swimming in a giant stream of consciousness.

It’s exhausting. I only lasted an hour. But for those sixty minutes, I had effectively outsourced television watching. It was the next best thing to being there. “There” being a television in America.

In a less jet-lagged state, I could probably write more eloquently on the implications of this dislocation. But my hunch — my possible thesis — is that quick flights to Paris and text-watching the Oscars are markers of the same general condition: a frustration that we can only physically be in one place at a time. It’s an unsolvable problem, but the ways we try to compensate for it are telling.

For starters, we move faster. Broadband is ubiquitous enough that when we don’t have it, it feels like going back to outdoor plumbing. My husband was in Asia for ten of the last fourteen days, but our daughter saw him every morning at breakfast thanks to iChat. She is growing up in an age in which no one actually goes anywhere: Daddy isn’t gone; he’s on the computer.

But faster isn’t everything. An article in today’s International Herald-Tribune celebrates the Concorde, a plane I never had the opportunity to fly. I didn’t realize it was often twice as fast as today’s airliners: London to New York in three hours. That’s great, but it’s not really transformative in an age when so many things come Right Now. Given its price and relative lack of luxury, the Concorde was ultimately competing against email. Digital won.

Another way we compensate for not being places is through constant communication with folks who are. That’s what Twitter and Facebook status updates do. At an all-WGA meeting at the Shrine Auditorium near the end of the strike, leaders scolded someone in the audience for live-blogging what was being said. Just a year later, that already seems quaint. Of course people are going to be Twittering. Some people can’t be here; why shouldn’t they be included?

The TV show Lost is all about location and isolation. For the first few seasons, the survivors didn’t really care where they were, they just needed to tell someone off-island that they were alive so they could be rescued. That’s shifted in the past two seasons, with all the focus now on reconnecting with those left behind. ² The question of where the island is only matters once you’re off it.

The third and I think most dangerous strategy for coping with the place problem is simple denial. We psychologically stay home, even when we’re gone. I’m doing it at this moment, typing on my laptop while Paris awakens outside. My friend Dan moved to New York to produce a TV show, and says never really saw the city: he had thirteen nights free in four months. He was either on set or on the phone with Los Angeles the rest of the time, and came to see the JFK-LAX flight as a commute.

I see it happening with this generation of college students. When I left Boulder to go to Drake, and when I left Drake to move to Los Angeles, I left people behind. Through phone calls, letters and visits home, I maintained relationships with a few close friends. But ninety percent of the people I knew vanished in the rearview mirror. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Through Facebook and email, it’s trivial to keep up with dozens of classmates more or less daily.

But is it really a good idea?

Your twenties are a crucial time, and I’d argue that it’s harder to discover yourself — or reinvent yourself — when surrounded by a vast network of people who already have a fixed opinion of who you are. I went to college and grad school not knowing a single person, and while it was a little terrifying, it was also liberating. Decoupled from my previous opinions and embarrassments, I was able to become the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of myself. I could only do that by going somewhere new. By changing place.

I’m packing up to fly home. Before I do, I’ll post this on the blog. But it occurs to me: I have absolutely no idea where the servers hosting this site are located. If I wanted to see the hardware, where would I go? That this question never occurred to me is also telling.

1. Twitter’s atomic bundling of opinion and reportage is new. If the telegraph had made it to individual homes before the telephone, we might have had a precedent.
2. As one might guess from The Nines, I’m partial to the Desmond episodes. The idea of a “constant,” while narratively murky, feels right: you need someone who knows you independently of the present madness or you’re screwed.

Since joining the guild in 1998, I’ve always read the candidate statements carefully — they come in a booklet along with the ballot — trying to balance two competing goals:

1. Who would think most like me?
2. Who brings a different voice to the board?

I score each candidate, then figure out my top eight (or however many are needed that year).

The ballot and booklet haven’t come out yet this year, but one candidate, Howard Michael Gould, has started a blog outlining his positions and reactions to events affecting the WGA and the community.

I first met Howard on the telephone, discussing a cinematographer he was considering hiring for his movie. Since then, I’ve followed him mostly through his work on the Negotiating Committee — you may remember his speaking at the big WGA meeting at the LA Convention Center. His positions haven’t always been in line with Patric Verrone’s, and I’ve appreciated his candor and thoughtfulness when talking about the strike and Where We Go From Here. In that way, he meets both of my criteria.

I think candidate blogging is a very good idea, one that I hope other candidates will emulate. I’ll happily link to anyone who does.

He said his casting people were having a hard time finding actors of a certain age, especially minorities, for episodic parts. These are the “day players” — roles in which an actor might have a scene or two in a given episode, never to return. Shows like Law & Order or C.S.I. require a bunch of these: witnesses, specialists, etc. The nanny who discovers her employer impaled on an icicle — that’s a day player.

Day players aren’t extras. There is actual acting required. Casting directors will bring in a few candidates to read for the part, and the producers/director will pick. A good day player can really elevate a scene. A bad day player is a disaster. ¹

In Los Angeles or New York, if you’re trying to cast a day player in their 20s (say, a car wash attendant), it’s easy. You’ve got thousands of people to choose from. Even if you need a specific characteristic — say, Russian-speaking — you’re going to have great candidates.

But what if you need an intimidating Chinese woman in her 60’s? Or a really, really old man you can believe is from Nigeria?

Well, you hope they’re out there. And increasingly, they’re not. (At least, according to this showrunner, and two others who concurred.)

So what’s going on?

At the risk of getting Freakonomics, it appears there’s a point at which it’s not economically viable to remain a day player.

Consider the career arc of an actor. In one’s 20s, almost anyone can afford to be an actor, by waiting tables or doing other piecemeal work in order to buy ramen and pay for headshots. At some point in one’s 30s, that lifestyle becomes less possible. Actors get married, have kids, or have other responsibilities that require a more steady paycheck. Which means getting a traditional job. At a certain point, you find many actors have become plumbers or teachers or dog trainers just to keep their kids in school and family in health insurance. ²

Luckily, there are some actors who are able to remain actors because they book just enough jobs each year. They’re not making much — probably scale — but it’s enough to keep them working in their craft. These actors have a sense of how many days of work they need to book in order to stay solvent.

So consider our Chinese woman in her 60’s. If she works a certain number of days each year, it makes sense to continue acting and living in Los Angeles. If not, she might as well move to Tucson, where it’s cheaper and closer to her grandkids.

The showrunner told me that the studios are increasingly insisting that producers shoot out day player roles in fewer days, in order to save money. Episode-by-episode, this makes sense; why spend more than you have to? But in pinching pennies, the system may be squeezing out the actors it needs. And you really notice it in groups in which you didn’t have a lot of actors to choose from in the first place, such as minorities. If you write a role for a woman in her 60’s, and race doesn’t matter, you can cast anyone, including the Chinese woman. But if you write a role for a bossy Chinese grandmother, you really need that actress in town and available.

If you look at any one actor getting economically forced out of the craft, oh well. Sad story, but Hollywood’s full of ‘em. But when you apply that loss across a swath of your talent pool, suddenly it’s impossible to find that African man in his 80’s you need for your episode. So you’re stuck rewriting it for a white guy, or a younger guy. The product suffers, and TV gets a little more white and boring.

I bring up this anecdote because it’s the kind of issue you really wish the industry was addressing in their ongoing negotiations with the actors’ unions, but they’re not. Instead, we get a three-way shoving match.

Anticipating the first dozen comments on this thread:

• Please don’t send your Chinese grandmother’s headshot. I’m sure she’s a terrific actress, but the example above was purely illustrative.
• I’m not claiming this situation is causing a lack of diversity in television, but it makes it harder to combat. As writers, we can create rich, multi-ethnic worlds. But if we can’t find actors for those roles, it’s all for naught.
• Obviously, the same economic pressures apply to plain old white actors as well. But there are more of them to begin with, so you don’t notice their absence as quickly or as acutely.
• You don’t notice the problem as much in features because there’s so much more time to do casting, and (generally) more money.
• I don’t have a solution to the situation, but it’s almost certainly not DVD residuals. Bumping up scale minimums will help, but only to a degree.
• We can’t conflate raw numbers with talent. When a showrunner and her casting directors are pulling out their hair because they can’t find a Pacific Islander for a part, it’s not because there are no actors in that category. There may simply be none with the chops to pull it off. Doubt me if you want, but 95% of Americans could not convincingly say four lines of dialogue on Law & Order. It’s tougher than it looks.

1. One anecdote: We shot my first show mostly at stages in Toronto. We quickly learned to check any dialogue to be spoken by a Canadian day player to avoid the ooo problem, and beyond that, we found most of our day players to be terrific. Except for one. She had two lines of dialogue with Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and no force on heaven or Earth could get her to say them properly. It turned out she was drunk. Because she was nervous. Because she had a crush on Mark-Paul Gosselaar. The truth was charming, but she was recast on the spot.
2. Obviously, you could substitute “screenwriter” for actor in this thought experiment. But it’s not a perfect analogy. For instance, an actor can’t work on spec.

The email felt like it had been stuck in the Out box for several months, and had suddenly and unexpectedly been sent to membership. Some readers have speculated that the timing was somehow related to the SAG negotiation, but I can’t fathom how it was supposed to help. It was badly conceived and badly executed.

There are two issues involved, and it’s best to look at them separately.

The first is the decision to list the names. It apparently came about by a vote of the board(s) during the strike. I’m not privy to what the discussion entailed, but I have to assume the memory of the Hollywood blacklist came up as a significant argument against releasing the names. It’s a painful and dark mark in screenwriter history, and not easily forgotten.

The best rationale I can think of for naming names would be to end speculation and mythologizing about how many writers walked out on the WGA during the strike: it was in fact a very small number, consisting almost entirely of daytime serial writers. There was no great insurrection or profiteering by writers for film or traditional television.

I think there is a discussion worth having — whether making those names public helps or hurts the writers, the Guild and the industry. I can’t fault strong opinions on either side.

The second issue is the email itself, and that’s the real flashpoint of this debacle.

[T]his handful of members who went financial core, resigning from the union yet continuing to receive the benefits of a union contract, must be held at arm’s length by the rest of us and judged accountable for what they are – strikebreakers whose actions placed everything for which we fought so hard at risk. [...]

Without concern for their colleagues, they turned their backs and tossed the burden of collective action onto the rest of us, taking jobs, reducing our leverage and damaging the guilds for their own advantage.

Clearly, de-mythologizing was not the goal here. If anything, it’s a call to unsheath swords once again, this time to fight enemies among us. As the archives will show, I supported the strike strongly, both in miles walked and moments blogged. But guys? It’s over. And trying to reignite the flames of guild fury over 28 names is ridiculous. It makes the guild look as crazy as the AMPTP tried to portray us.

Over the past two days, I’ve heard the term “tone-deaf” a few times in reference to the email. But I think that’s too soft a criticism. A tone-deaf singer at least has some idea what the melody is supposed to be — he can hear it in his head, even if it sounds like cat disembowelment to us.

This email, however, is the wrong song at the wrong time. It’s Sussudio at a funeral. It feels like it came from a parallel universe in which the strike was still happening and Spock had a beard.

If there’s any silver lining, it’s this: If you were ever going to blunder, now is the time. For the first moment in quite a while, nothing’s at stake. The WGA is not in war mode — at least, it shouldn’t be. A frank discussion of how the guild conducts itself, publicly and privately, should be embraced. And emails like this should be the first topic of discussion.

Remarkably, it was the first conversation I’d had about the strike in over a week. After three months of talking (and blogging) about nothing other than the AMPTP, the NegComm and picketing schedules, it’s surprising how completely the strike has vanished off the radar.

With the official contract ratification results due today, it feels like a good time to take stock of where various projects have ended up in a post-strike universe.

The web series

We’re finishing editing on the web pilot I shot at the start of the month. Once it’s done, the financiers will go off and look for distribution and advertising partners. If we can find the right combination, we’ll aim to shoot a block of episodes this summer.

Shazam!

I spent the weekend barricaded at the Disney Grand Californian working on the next draft of Shazam! I’d gotten the studio and producer notes just before the strike, so this was my first chance to address them. It was great having a three-month break from the script, because it meant I could look at it with fresh eyes.

There are some web reports out of WonderCon about a possible title change to something longer and more Harry Potter-ish. Nothing’s decided yet. Obviously, one of the challenges with the property is that an audience will automatically assume that the hero’s name is Shazam, when it’s not.¹

Dreamworks project

When the strike began, I was halfway through the first draft of an unannounced project for Dreamworks, with a major star and director involved. Without being too specific, Something Happened unrelated to the strike which made it very unlikely that our movie could (or should) get made. So one of the first conversations I had after the strike was with the producer and director to figure out whether or not to proceed. After about 15 phone calls, many involving agents and executives, the decision was made to kill the project.

It was the right choice. While it’s hard to walk away from 55 pages, finishing the next 55 while almost certain that they could never be filmed would be even more dispiriting. As I write this, it’s not clear whether I’ll segue into a different project for the studio, or just write them a check for the money they’ve already paid me. Either way, I feel better getting to work on a script that is much likelier to become a movie.

Heroes: Origins

My hunch is that this spin-off series will stay in the deep-freeze for a while, maybe never to be thawed out. Tim Kring has said in interviews that the priority is getting next season’s plotline (“Villains”) ready for launch, as it should be. If Origins is resurrected at some point, I’d be happy to direct my episode.

1. Shazam is the wizard who bestows his powers; the guy in the cape is Captain Marvel. For legal reasons, the movie can’t be called Captain Marvel.

Voting today was my last chance to see some of the WGA staffers I’ve gotten to know during the strike. Some were hired on just to manage specific areas (like picketing), and will be laid off in the next few weeks. I had the chance to thank a big group of them for their tireless work at a meeting two weeks ago, but for the folks I missed: thanks. Your devotion to a fight that won’t directly benefit you was remarkable. I’m sure there is a political campaign out there eager for your expertise.

The extra two days have been something of a blessing, allowing for a gentle re-entry to industry madness. There haven’t been any studio folks on my phone sheet yet, but there were several crucial what’s-still-standing conversations with agent and producer-types. I have no idea what movie I’ll be writing tomorrow afternoon. It’s a strange but exciting time.

Obviously, you have to be a voting WGA member in order to cast a ballot. I’m looking forward to it as a small act of closure.

If you don’t feel like trekking over, you can vote by proxy with this form, which can be faxed in. I’m doing a proxy vote for one friend, but please don’t list me. If you’re voting yes, Patric Verrone is a much better choice. If you’re voting no, well, Jake Hollywood will be happy to have company.

While the woman’s pin was technically correct — the vote to end the strike will be counted Tuesday night — I hope she reprogrammed the message during the 2.5 hour meeting. “WE WON!!!” might be a choice. “WE ACHIEVED MEANINGFUL PROGRESS IN KEY AREAS RELATED TO NEW MEDIA” would be more honest. But that probably wouldn’t scroll as well.

The focus of the meeting was to read through and explain the four-page deal summary. To their credit, the guys on stage did a good job explaining the victories and the concessions, and the logic in ending up where we did. They called it the best contract in 30 years, while pointing out its obvious gaps. Was it kind of dull? Yeah. But I was happy to be bored.

One of the most important areas the new contract defends is separated rights, which I suspect will not be well explained in mainstream news reports about the deal. So here’s my very brief recap.

Remember a couple of months ago, when I explained Why writers get residuals? In it, I described the weird legal judo writers and studios do to assign copyright and authorship to the corporation rather than the creator. Well, there are certain rights that the writer has traditionally been able to keep in this arrangement. For example, turning a TV series into a feature film. Or using a character created in one show (Frasier Crane, in Cheers) as the basis of a new show (Frasier).

The new contract needed to establish that even if work is created for the internet (rather than TV or features), the same principles of separated rights apply. If a webisode becomes the basis of a new TV show, that’s separated rights. It’s a unique, writer-only issue that doesn’t have a parallel in the DGA or SAG deals. There are loopholes and potential issues, but the framework is now in place.

I went to the meeting dreading the open mic format, but the first few questions from the floor proved to be explanatory rather than inflammatory. For example, in contract terms, “dramatic programs” isn’t a genre, but rather a means of distinguishing scripted programs from other formats. (Thus, a sitcom is a dramatic program.)

There are some writers who don’t like the deal, and intend to vote against it. But the vast majority of people in the room, and online, have already reprogrammed their internal LED displays in preparation for the post-strike period.

So here it is.

There is only one question to be answered: Is the deal good enough to accept?

YES   NO

Pick one. Everything else is irrelevant, and emotion should play no part in the decision. Unlike screenwriting, in which the journey is the story, a deal is strictly about where you ended up. The path is irrelevant. The past is irrelevant — and the future has to be reasonably discounted for its vast uncertainty.

So is this deal, today, good enough to accept?

Yes.

It’s a yes for me. And I suspect it’s a yes for most writers. Some would shout yes emphatically, with a victory dance around a giant picket bonfire. Others would mutter yes with a forlorn shrug of their shoulders, deeply dissatisfied yet not able to rationalize a no vote. I’m somewhere in-between. I don’t think it’s great — hell, it’s not even “good” — but it’s honestly better than I thought we’d get.

Let’s take a few minutes to list a few of the most natural (if sometimes unspoken) objections to the proposed deal in anticipation of the meeting tonight.

But the DGA got a deal that was almost as good, and they didn’t have to strike!

Irrelevant. They had leverage because we were out on strike, and used it to get a better deal than they would have otherwise. There’s an emotional component here as well: it doesn’t feel fair they get as much as we do. But as a thought experiment, take the DGA away and pretend that we’d reached the same deal without them. Would it change your perception? Remember: the deal is where you ended up, not how you got there.

But the AMPTP have been such dicks!

Emotional and irrelevant. (I agree, by the way. They have been dicks.)

But what about SAG? They could still strike!

Irrelevant. They’ve been very supportive, but ultimately have their own decisions to make. I’ll happily carry a picket sign for them. But I’ll be even happier to send a nice note if they reach a deal without going on strike.

But they’re holding a gun to our head!

While I haven’t seen official confirmation, the tentative deal is apparently contingent on suspending the strike. That’s dickish, but it’s ultimately irrelevant. If we accept the deal, the strike is over. If not, the strike goes on.

But we need more time to decide!

Take all the time you want. The elected WGA board has the power to suspend the strike at any time. They’re seeking member opinions because it’s the right thing to do.

But we didn’t go on strike for just these small gains!

We went on strike to prevent major rollbacks, which we did. Do you remember “profit-based residuals?” Sure, it was probably just an inflammatory, ill-conceived ruse on the AMPTP’s part. But it’s easy to forget just how heinous the original terms were.

But these will be the terms of the contract for the next 20 years!

I will fully cop to helping perpetuate the notion that strike gains and losses last 20 years. They don’t. The contract runs three years. If the terms are unacceptable in 2011, we do whatever it takes to improve them.

But we didn’t get an increase on the DVD formula! What if SAG gets a bump?

DVDs were taken off the table before the strike began. You may disagree with that decision, but the fact is they were never the focus of the strike: new media was. If SAG gets more than we do for DVDs, then good job SAG. They’re buying the next round. Still doesn’t change the deal on the table.

But we could strike longer! We could shut down the Oscars! We could tank the next TV season!

Yes. There’s no limit to how long we could strike. Each week we’re out hurts the studios — and industry workers, including striking writers. At some point, the net damage exceeds the net gain. If you think that point is still months off, and believe the AMPTP would agree to a significantly better deal at that moment, vote no.

But I’d ask you to test your powers of prediction: did the strike go exactly the way you thought it would? Probably not. So why do you think the next few months would go according to plan?

But the guild is strong!

Yes. And there’s considerable value to ending strong.

I want to stress that in addition to what I have listed above, there are valid reasons for rejecting the deal. You may believe that the terms aren’t good enough, and that the consequences of rejecting this deal are absolutely worth it. If so, speak up at the meeting tonight. But defend your points through logic, not emotion. Explain what you’re willing to lose in order to win.

I’m turning off comments, but I’ll be back with an update tomorrow, after the WGA meeting.

At lunch, I gave my sincere thanks to a crew I really enjoyed working with. I’d long taken it as a given that production is stressful, but this honestly wasn’t. Yes, we had a bit of padding in the schedule, but we weren’t dawdling. It felt most like shooting Part Two of The Nines: a small, nimble crew and the freedom of constrained expectations.

Now we move on to editing. We’re cutting on Avid, but I’ve been using Final Cut Pro to check out footage as well. So far, I’m a fan of the P2. If we were shooting multiple episodes, we would need to find a slicker workflow, but our dumping-to-MacBook worked fine for this.

I’d hoped to make it to the picketing at NBC yesterday, but the cold I’d been medicating for the past few days took over. In the age of the internet, being sick doesn’t keep you from working, but it makes it hard to muster enthusiasm for much. I’m alternating DayQuil and Diet Coke in hopes of attending the WGA meeting tomorrow night, but that’s on the bubble.

Talking with writers last night, there was widespread belief that the end of the strike is approaching. And yet it doesn’t feel like the end — or more specifically, it doesn’t feel like what an end is supposed to feel like. There’s a profound lack of closure. Bob Fisher will shave his strike beard. I’ll have beer with my Van Ness crew. But you can’t throw a parade when there’s so much work to be done.

It’s going to be brutal trying to get the town started up, figuring out which movies are still happening, which TV shows are going to try to finish their seasons. You know when there’s a big evacuation — fire, hurricane — and the residents are finally allowed back to their houses? It will be like that. The first few days will be just about finding out what’s still standing.

I have six features in various stages of production and development, all of which will need tending in the first few days after we get back to work. Three months is a long break. I haven’t read a word in these scripts, or jotted a single note. I’ve forgotten half the phone numbers I used to be able to blind-dial. So going from stand-still to sprint is likely be rough.

1. I realize how weird it sounds to call an actor in a short a “guest star.” The point is that if this were a series, he wouldn’t likely be in future episodes.