New Year's End

I can't be bothered with all that report card stuff, although other people's can be fun to read! What did I do this year? I worked as hard as I could. I studied as hard as I could. I tried to be as good a person as I could. What do I want to achieve next year? To do better in all of the above. As for the rest, it isn't up to me. 

I know this blog has tailed off a bit and it's possible that it/I have run out of steam with it. I'm not sure. 2013 is already shaping up to be an interesting year - full of changes - and it might just be that some of those mean I head in a different direction and when that happens sometimes other stuff has to give. One of those things might be this blog.

But in the meantime I want to thank everyone who has kept reading this year. To the 44 followers listed here for, er, following. And also everyone who has been kind enough to let me read their scripts and have appreciated the notes I've given. I hope I've helped.

Best wishes for the New Year. And I speak to myself when I say this: Focus on the things you can control, and don't worry too much about the things you can't.

Screenwriting and Storytelling

Always nice to give a shout out to a new blog on the block - so please check out Alan Denman's Screenwriting and Storytelling.

I've known Alan for many years. He taught one of the very first screenwriting courses I ever attended, and he's spent much of his time since then at the coal face of the industry in LA.

You can also check out my write up of his course about Breaking into Hollywood

The NBC Drama Challenge

The New York Television Festival and NBC have teamed up to offer aspiring TV writers and producers the opportunity to win $25,000 and a development deal with NBC.

Go here for all the information

http://nytvf.com/2013_nbc.html

Please note:


•The initiative is open to U.S. residents age 18 and over who do not have any contractual commitments preventing them from entering into an exclusive development deal with NBC.

The Writers' Couch

If you don't know about this then, well, you should definitely know about this.

All the details can be found in the link below but in short, this sounds like an exciting new opportunityy for writers, based purely on meritocracy, purely on the project, and not about who you know, what agent you've got, if you've even got an agent, and all the other rubbish that gets in the way of the thing that matters. The script.

http://www.cascade-pictures.com/couch.html

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/uk-film-start-up-creates-379953

CHANNEL 4 SCREENWRITING COURSE 2013

This has been running for a few years now - and all the details can be found at the usual place, over at Philip Shelley's gaff.

http://www.script-consultant.co.uk/channel-4-script-submit/

Shortlist's Sitcom Search

I have surfaced to tell you about this competition - one that I personally haven't heard about before, and just happened to come across as I picked up the Shortlist magazine as I stepped off the plane at Heathrow. 

The British sitcom is a strangely indestructible beast. No matter how many times it’s pronounced dead in fretful blogs and newspaper columns, it always comes back to life. Rising from the grave, zombie-like and marauding onwards into newly hilarious territory.

Alan Partridge’s latest bounce-back in Mid Morning Matters, successful new comedy-drama Fresh Meat, a clutch of critically acclaimed digital commissions; belaboured analogies involving the undead aside, you only need to glance at the TV schedules to see that there’s a comedy gold rush afoot. And, ludicrous as it sounds, you could be a part of it.

We’ve teamed up with Comedy Central UK, home of the funniest comedies on TV, and Big Talk (the powerhouse behind shows including Spaced, Friday Night Dinner, Threesome and Rev) to offer a cash prize and development deal to one triumphant reader-penned script. Interested? Read on – and check out the sample script and details of how to enter over the page.

THE PRIZE

The winning writer, or team of writers, in ShortList’s Sitcom Search will receive a truly monumental prize. As well as publishing an excerpt of your script in ShortList, we’re offering a £5,000 development deal with Big Talk and Comedy Central UK. This means that, together with the experts, you’ll work on your sitcom idea with a view to preparing it for production, and ultimately, broadcast.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean your gag-filled clump of A4 will languish at the back of a filing cabinet somewhere. Comedy Central UK has made it known: if it’s funny enough, it wants it on its channel. What’s more, each reader who makes it to the final four will receive a mentoring session with established comedy writers, and there’ll be an opportunity to blog about these sessions and talk about your script at Shortlist.com.

HOW TO ENTER

To be part of ShortList’s Sitcom Search, simply go here and submit your entry. This should include a brief one-page description selling your sitcom idea, your contact details, plus a correctly formatted original, unbroadcasted script of 3-10 pages (A4, sensible font, 12pt) that’s solely the work of you or your writing team. Entries from reasonably experienced screenwriters are welcomed, but we will not accept scripts from agents – they must come direct from the writer. You must be a UK resident over 18 years of age, as of 24 September 2012. The competition is open to both men and women.

THE JUDGES

The scripts will be judged by an expert panel including Kenton Allen, chief executive of Big Talk, Jill Offman, MD at Comedy Central UK, Friday Night Dinner creator Robert Popper and Martin Robinson, editor of ShortList.

THE DEADLINE

All entries must be uploaded to shortlist.com/sitcom by 11.59pm on 24 September. No entries by post or email. Any scripts arriving after this date, or not featuring the proper criteria, will not be accepted.

HOW IT WORKS

The competition will run over the next 12 weeks and consist of various stages as we sift through the entries before crowning our favourite script. The dates to look out for are below:

• After the initial script-reading process, the judges will reduce the list of scripts down to 40. These will be revealed in early October, so you can see if you’ve made it.

• The final 40 scripts will then be cut down to four. The writers behind these will be revealed in late October.

• For two weeks after that, our finalists will spend time workshopping their sitcom idea with an established comedy writer.

• After much deliberation, and perhaps the opening of a shiny gold envelope, we’ll announce the winner on a soon-to-be-revealed date in November.

Not worth the thin air it's written on

Did you read this blog entry from Piers, about the possessory (and frankly downright disrespectful) film credit 'A Film By' - and then enter the director's name. The post is spot on so I'm not going to repeat it, just read it there instead. The prevading disrespect in the industry to the work the screenwriter does is endemic. As Piers points out, it mainly arises out of self-interest. Namely from the director, but not always, for various reasons. That's not really an excuse, but at least we can understand where it's coming from. 

But what about when it's from people with no real self interest? For example award ceremonies like BAFTA not televising the screenwriting awards. Or movie magazines marginalising the role screenwriters play. Or film critics and reviews ignoring the screenwriter when something is great and then blaming the script when it's not?

Every Thursday my wife reads the new movie reviews from Roger Ebert. (She's American so we can forgive her for this.) And a few weeks ago she read about Bernie, the new Richard Linklater movie (see what I did there?) Here's a quote from the opening paragraph:

"Jack Black plays an east Texas funeral director named Bernie Tiede, and it is surely one of the performances of the year. I had to forget what I knew about Black. He creates this character out of thin air, it's like nothing he's done before, and it proves that an actor can be a miraculous thing in the right role."

I haven't seen the film. I haven't read the script. Jack Black is indeed a fine actor, it may well be like nothing he's done before and one of the performances of the year. Good actors can and definitely do bring an enormous amount to the role from what is written on the page.

But creating the character out of thin air? Really Roger? You don't think that maybe Jack was good enough to read the screenplay, co-written by Linklater and Skip Hollandsworth? 

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the script is bloody awful and Black literally had to make everything up as he went along. Didn't do that recent BBC One drama any harm did it? Oh wait.

Maybe we should stick to what we've always done then and have a really good script before we start, and just for a change acknowledge the people who came up with it and the ones who probably spent more time than anyone else working on the movie.