Write On

Hollywood is awash in blockbusters, huge-budget movies that bring in hundreds of millions of dollars from box offices around the globe. Film production in New York is at record levels, and studios will be rolling out dozens of big sequels, sci-fi adventures, comedies and star vehicles this year. But screenwriters are finding it more difficult than ever to make a living in this business. How could this be?

The major studios are owned by multinational conglomerates that seem stuck in an Old Economy way of thinking: minimize risk and maximize promotion; play it safe with product development and hope the market keeps absorbing what you’re selling. This approach didn’t work so well in the automobile industry, which learned the hard way that innovation and product quality are keys to long-term success. But the movie business keeps consolidating to the perceive security of conformism.

Don’t get me wrong. Audiences tend to be pretty smart, and many recent hits have been intelligent, well-constructed explorations of important cultural and political themes. Or at least they’ve been powerfully entertaining. But it is almost inevitable that the focus on mega-movies squeezes out films that are more intimate, independent, intriguing and innovative.

Many members of the Writers Guild of America, East, do very well in this context. Their genius for crafting stories that move and cohere, for developing characters with depth and appeal, is the foundation upon which big studio productions are built – and producers know it. Unfortunately, other Guild members find it increasingly difficult to work in the current environment. Studios are not spending nearly as much in development, so writers who do not present a sure, bankable thing have fewer opportunities to expand their ideas into complete projects. Financing for independent films has nearly disappeared, and the major studios’ emphasis on reliable box-office returns means that fewer and fewer small, more thoughtful films get from screenplay into production. Thus, opportunities for screenwriters are shrinking.

There was a time when Hollywood put writers on staff, paying them to develop ideas and to craft screenplays in order to feed a growing production machine. Now, virtually every film-writing job is freelance – that is, the screenwriter must pitch an idea to a studio or a producer; or must convince the producer that he or she would bring the just the right vision or chops to a project the studio has already decided to pursue; or must sell himself or herself as the perfect choice to rewrite or tighten up an already-drafted screenplay. And, of course, the screenwriter does not want to seem too demanding or uncooperative because that might make it harder to get hired on future projects. In other words, at each phase of the movie-making process, screenwriters increasingly devote themselves to self-marketing. This creates pressure on writers to offer more work for less pay—or even for no pay at all.

Perhaps classical economic theory would suggest this is a fine thing. And at some level of abstraction it is true that, when the supply of a particular service exceeds the demand, the price will drop. But that is more of an ideological construct than a description of the real world. If we want people to write compelling films that educate and entertain us, they need to be able to earn a decent living doing so; a race to the bottom, economically, would undermine the quality of what we watch. In any event, our research indicates that most of our members who are employed are paid significantly above the minimum rates negotiated by the union, and working members report that their “quotes” have been steady or have increased in recent years. It seems that getting a gig is more difficult than ever, and once you get the gig you have to work harder, but the pay has remained good. So much for classical economics.

People become screenwriters because it is their passion to create compelling films; to do that, they have to get hired (this includes people who bring complete ideas or scripts to the studio). And once they get hired, they want their vision to be realized on-screen – in other words, they want the movie to be made. This makes it very difficult to resist the pressure to write more for less compensation.  In my view, as the WGAE grapples with the new realities of the film industry, we need to think about how to address this underlying dynamic. How do we protect members from the pressure to work for free in order to get hired to work for pay, and in order to get their movies made?

It is against Writers Guild rules to write without getting paid – no free writing to get hired, no free rewriting. But I am not sure a successful strategy can be based solely on requiring individual members to risk that they will not get hired, or will not have their work produced. In 2012, we hope to generate a robust conversation among screenwriters to develop better strategies. Our project is to identify other methods of ensuring that people who have devoted themselves to the craft of film-writing can be rewarded for their work and can earn a decent living. Perhaps there is a way to insist that the studios increase development funding, or make resources available for smaller films, or provide steadier employment for more writers. We shall see what some creative thinking can produce.

1. You possess a laptop, New Balance sneakers and a tendency towards self-delusion.

2. You feel you have too much control over your life as it is.

3. In Hollywood, no one will ever wonder if you’ve had work done.

4.  If you went to Harvard, you’ll easily score a plum TV writing gig. Oh wait—you would’ve scored a plum job anyway.

5. Fastest way to convert your 120-page diatribe about snakes on a plane into cash.

6. You’ll have plenty of downtime to play Words With Friends.

7. If you’ve seen the Hallmark Hall of Famer Riding the Bus with My Sister, you must have thought, “I can do that! I can write that poorly.”

8. In entertainment, you’ll be considered an intellectual.

9. You’re cool waiting 43 years to cash a pay check, because that’s about how long it takes Disney to deliver it.

10.  It’s your best chance to touch Halle Berry (at least your words might touch her).

Catie Lazarus is a writer.  ECNY awarded her “Best Comedy Writer,” and she currently hosts EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH at UCB, a talk show and podcast.

The French philosopher René Descartes is credited for whittling down what it means to be human to its barest essential: the ability to think. Word on the path was that Descartes felt more proud of discovering how much better potatoes taste fried than boiled. But centuries later the frog remains best known for penning the definitive catch phrase, “I think, therefore I am.”

There were, however, those who wondered if this “genius” had simply started a sentence and never finished it. Maybe they figured he’s a philosopher, so he’s more of an ideas guy. Or thought they could come up with better ending to: “I think, therefore I am… (INSERT phrase here).” These folks became writers.

Some of these writers felt particularly inspired and determined to come up with a decent ending. These visionaries believed they could also create original beginnings and middles. They were identified by their peers and, however insufferably, by themselves as authors. Much to the chagrin of Descartes, Parisian authors were particularly grating and referred to themselves as “auteurs”. They also referred to themselves in the third person.

Another faction of writers wanted to do as little work as possible. They gained footing under Louis XIV’s reign, starting with the King himself. Apparently, a scullery maid called her entitled boss a “son of a chien” and the prick thought she’d nicknamed him the “sun” king. He then ordered that “sun king” be monogrammed on every towel and tunic. He even gave them as gifts to his servants, which, of course, no one could then re-gift. Louis XIV decided this was a hilarious turn of phrase, and once this baboon called himself a writer, well, everyone and their mother followed suit.

Still, these writers, hacks, and auteurs had more in common with one another than with their fellow countrymen, who assumed all there was to life was churning butter and, occasionally, taking in a sword-swallowing show. Moreover, outsiders saw writers as one monolithic group who all “looked the same.” This was, in fairness, not a racial slur, as writers generally lack muscle mass. Writers were their own breed. They started to dress alike. Even female writers sprouted facial hair and wore Old Balance sneakers.

As with other minorities, they were often shunned. Like those who had forgone traditional fields like soil tilling, they paid the price. Parchment didn’t come cheap. If a writer landed a coveted staff writing position with a Lord, his highness could be cheap. Rumor has it that the Kings were almost as bad as Arianna Huffington when it came to paying their scribes. Fun fact, Martin Luther was one of the first writers to strike!

So writers started to band together. They formed unions, shared office spaces, and, for better or worse, started teaching courses on the art and craft of writing to aspiring writers. Sure, there were debates about the merit of this one’s declaration and that one’s fable, but by and large writers knew not to judge a scroll by it cover. Like they had any control over marketing experts back then either!

Instead, they knew that bottom line, or the only one a writer really needs, then as now, is that, “I write, therefore I am.”

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Catie Lazarus is a writer.  ECNY awarded her “Best Comedy Writer” and she currently hosts EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH at UCB, a talk show and podcast.

When I pitch studio execs whose egos are inverse proportion to what they contribute to society, I try not to imagine them naked. (It would be more upsetting if I found myself attracted to them.) That said, I do wonder what it’s like to have everyone and your mother incessantly pitch you. What is the most absurd pitch? I imagine it goes something like this, and it’s probably already been being made……

*    *    *    *    *

Dear Mr. Rudin,

Congratulations on FISTULA: THE MUSICAL! It was so generous of you to fly that Sudanese woman in for the Broadway premiere. (Though crass of her lawyer to ask you to pay for tailoring her kaftan to fit a colostomy bag.)

So I wanted to follow up about WOMB BOY! My 3-D animated thrillerdy about a dude trapped in his mom’s womb. It’s a cross between THE CURIOUS CASE of BENJAMIN BUTTON and the real life story of Terry Schiavo.

When we meet WOMB BOY, he’s an All-American every dude, who happens to have never left his mother’s womb. (His mother just thought she was, like most Americans, obese). At first, WOMB BOY makes do. He enjoys free rent and meals, leeches off his mom’s wireless, and works out on the zip line, aka the umbilical chord. That is, until his mother decides to get her tummy tucked.

Enter the evil Dr. Heimlich, who sucks out her innards, including Womb Boy’s main source of protein: placenta. It’s during this invasive surgery that Womb Boy overhears Dr. Heimlich reveal how he then sells placenta on the black market to hair care companies. Womb Boy isn’t okay with Dr. Heimlich robbing innocent women and children of their prized placentas. But in salvaging his mother’s placenta, Womb Boy must cut the umbilical chord and come out of the womb. It’s not an easy journey, even for a super hero.

Anyway, I sent WOMB BOY to your assistant’s assistant! Thank you, again, for your consideration.

Otherwise, I’ll see you at Grandma’s for Hanukkah.

Love,

Your Mom

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Catie Lazarus is a writer.  ECNY awarded her “Best Comedy Writer” and she currently hosts EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH at UCB, a talk show and podcast.

The idea was to integrate my Big Media work life—executive producing television series—with my Hudson Valley domestic life. I’d base my next show here, run it from home in Ghent, making use of all the local places and people I’d come to know over two decades as a weekender.  I’d score financing in Hollywood, and bring the money and the production back home. CSI:Hudson.

“Hudson?” the studio exec said. “Where in New York is that?”
“Upstate,” I told him.
“Like Buffalo?” He knew Buffalo, because a bunch of writer-producers, like David Milch, come from Buffalo.
“South of Albany,” I said.
“Lots of snow,” he said.
“In the winter.”
“My son goes to boarding school up there somewhere.”
“Which school?” I asked.
He hit the intercom. “Call my wife. Find out where Buffalo goes to school.”
“Your son’s name is Buffalo?”
“Like Mailer’s kid,” he said. “Norman Mailer. The writer.”
“I know his work.”
“Hell of a writer.” He hit the intercom again.
“Put a call through to Norman Mailer, will you, Hon?”
“He’s dead,” I explained. He blinked. “I’m pretty sure.”
“That fucks that idea,” he said.
“NAKED AND THE DEAD, right. War series. Perfect if we go into Libya in a big way. Three theaters. They call wars theaters, you know that? Cool, huh? Everything’s show business. And just the title. You got naked. You got dead. Sex and violence. Who can go wrong with that? You sure he’s dead?”
He hit the intercom again. “NAKED AND THE DEAD,” he told his assistant. “See if the rights are available. Shoot L.A. for… Second World War, right? We build bars, whorehouses, backstreets, Paris, London, whole nine in a pocket, dark interiors.”
“THE PACIFIC,” I said.
“Shit. That’s easy. We’re on the Pacific.”
“My series,” I said.
“I love it. Small town. Big city cop retires, goes back home, small town upstate, runs their diddly-squat police force… We’re talking like a real close gene pool. Incest. Go to the county fair, everyone looks like they’re wearing the same mask. Lots of drugs behind the abandoned WalMart. High School date rape. Underage hookers. Meth labs in the woods. Everybody’s got at least three guns. Pit bulls. Dog Fights. Everyone hates the rich New Yorkers with their second fuckin’ homes. We get in bias crime. Muslim family runs the local 7-11. Son in rebellion, daughter, no way she’s getting the clitorectomy. Family strife, old fashioned kitchen sink drama. We go for Emmys. New York actors, trained actors. No pretty boys. Sexy yes, but soot-smudged faces, authenticity. No bullshit. I love it.”
“I can have a draft of the pilot in six weeks,” I said.
“You’re the man.”
“I’ll let my agent know.”
“Tell him not to rape me. I love this project too much.”
I stood up. “There’s an old factory in town,” I said. “Perfect soundstage. On 100 Centre Street, we built a production facility in a month for a million. Hudson’s cheaper than Queens. Most of the New York City crew comes out of Nyack. They just drive an hour north, instead of an hour south. Easier commute. So many actors in Columbia County, and south, Bedford, Katonah. We could probably use locals for half the cast. The rest of the cast—who wouldn’t want to spend a season in the area?”
“Love it!”
I put out my hand, which the exec grabbed and squeezed. “I wish every deal was this easy, “
“Me too,” I said.
I was at the door when he said, “You know…” I turned around.
“I got to level with you. You know me. No bullshit, right?”
“Right.”
“You got your New York City cop, right?”
“Right.”
“Retired, right?”
“Right.”
“Get some hard-body-going-nowhere in features, thirty-something, right?”
“He’s retired.”
“Got shot on the job. Disability. Retired early, good pension.”
“Okay…”
“But instead of upstate New York, he retires to Venice.” I looked at him.
“Venice Beach,” the exec said.
“Venice Beach?”
“Come on, guy, you film in upstate New York, all that cold, half the year the gals are bundled up in cable knits, parkas, you don’t see their titties…”

I wrote a novel instead.

DAVID BLACK is a novelist, journalist and screenwriter. For television, he has written episodes of HILL STREET BLUES, MIAMI VICE, LAW & ORDER and CSI: MIAMI, among others. His most recent book, THE EXTINCTION EVENT, was just published in paperback.

WGAE at Washington rally 10-2-10

One year ago this Saturday, in the early morning hours of October 2, 2010, I stumbled out of my apartment in Washington Heights and caught the A train downtown. I was headed to Canal Street, where a contingent of intrepid, sleep-deprived WGAE members and staff was gathering at 5:45 a.m. to board buses bound for Washington, D.C. Our destination: a large, labor-sponsored rally, which was meant to be the answer to Glenn Beck’s kooky Restoring Honor Tea Party event that had been held on the Mall in late August.

Huddled together on the darkened sidewalk along 6th Avenue just north of Canal, we had no idea our rally would have its thunder stolen by a different progressive gathering, the one that Jon Stewart had announced for October 31st, which he dubbed the Rally to Restore Sanity. So many rallies, so little time. And ours, alas, just didn’t have a catchy name (One Nation Working Together – sorry but that definitely needs a rewrite).

The 5½ hour bus ride to Washington D.C. was not especially memorable. I tried to catch up on my sleep, then introduced myself to some fellow scribes. WGAE staff did an excellent job of organizing: attendance was taken, sandwiches and beverages were handed out and the Guild’s red t-shirts were distributed.

The bus dropped us off in the parking lot of RFK Stadium, where we joined tens of thousands of other union members from around the country. It was a stirring tableau…until practical matters intervened and we were forced to wait for an hour in the mother of all lines to catch the Metro to the Mall. Kudos to Guild staff for providing us all with subway passes and keeping our contingent herded together.

When we reached the Mall, we trekked to a spot along the Reflecting Pool, about a quarter mile from the speakers’ podium in front of the Lincoln Memorial. It had turned into a beautiful autumn day and from that picturesque location we raptly listened to a succession of gifted, inspiring, progressive speakers deliver uniformly brilliant, impassioned oratory that would have given Martin Luther King a run for his money.

If only.

The speeches I heard that October afternoon were not especially memorable. Unfortunately, President Obama didn’t make an appearance. A year later, I can’t recall a single speaker or what they talked about. The same was true the day after the rally!

After two and half hours of hanging out on the Mall, our WGAE staff minders informed us that it was time to head back to the buses for the ride home. The seven hour bus ride back to Manhattan was not especially memorable. My recollection is that we returned to our gathering spot in Lower Manhattan at about 10:30 p.m.

Superficially recalling that day a year later, I remember spending twelve and a half hours on buses and three hours on subways in order to sit on the Mall for a couple of hours listening to a succession of mediocre speakers at a now-forgotten rally that barely registered in the media. Dr. King’s 1963 March on Washington it wasn’t.

I probably sound like a grumpy curmudgeon and perhaps I am. But, honestly, I had a wonderful and memorable experience that day. It was truly exciting to trek down to the nation’s capital with union brothers and sisters and make our political views known. I relished the deviation from my normal routine and the fun and adventure that this journey provided.

And two of the seeming drawbacks of the day – the long hours spent on buses and the inferior quality of the speeches – turned out to have unexpected benefits.

The bus rides provided ample opportunity to spend quality time with fellow writers. Long conversations flowed. Old friendships were renewed. New ones were forged.

And the mediocre speeches allowed me to wander away from our gathering spot to take in the sights and sounds of the rally and photograph some of the unique and unforgettable characters who were drawn to it.

Like the guy dressed as the Grim Reaper who carried a huge, hand-lettered poster that read, “Death thanks the GOP for its stance on healthcare reform. You guys sure make my job easy.” And the elegant, gray-haired, octogenarian woman who held above her head a placard bearing the words, “Feed the Poor. Eat the Rich.” And the bearded, middle-aged man whose sign proudly proclaimed “Amnesiacs Vote Republican.” These signs weren’t written under a WGAE contract, but good writing is still good writing!

In retrospect, I am especially delighted that the Guild took it upon itself to organize this field trip, providing the buses and the meals and even the Metro cards. It seemed to signal a new, more activist bent to our union and I really welcome that.

I hope there is another, similar field trip in the Guild’s future. This curmudgeon would be more than happy to rise again at 4:30 a.m. to be part of it.

I just counted up the number of rejections I received last week, by email and snail mail, and the total was eight. This was higher than normal, so it was definitely a banner week for my work to be passed on!

All of these rejections were for stage plays, both full-length and one-act, that I had submitted to a variety of theater companies and playwriting competitions across the country. This got me thinking about how my attitude towards, and response to, rejection has changed in the 25-plus years that I’ve been writing.

When I first started, fresh out of USC Film School, each rejection I received was extremely painful, like a dagger aimed straight at my heart. I was exclusively writing screenplays then, and every time one of my scripts was turned down by a studio or production company, it affected me profoundly. My typical response would be a deep melancholy that would last for several days. The rejection and the disappointment that accompanied it seemed to seep deeply into the marrow of my soul.

In retrospect, a lot of this had to do with the fact that I was just starting out in my writing career and every script seemed precious. And it wasn’t just the script that was being rejected, it was me. Each rejection made me question whether I was really a writer or just another wannabe, a poseur.

In response to this crippling melancholia, I eventually evolved a different strategy for dealing with rejection – anger and dismissal. I built up a wall around my self-esteem by angrily dismissing whoever had rejected my script as an idiot or moron who was clueless about good writing. William Goldman’s famous dictum from ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE, “Nobody knows anything,” became my mantra. In hindsight, I don’t think it was much of an improvement to be walking around angry and bitter for a few days, as opposed to sad and depressed.

Fortunately, as the years passed and I continued to write, each piece became a little less precious, each rejection less a personal affront. I began to inure to rejection and to see it as an inevitable part of a writer’s life. Writing stage plays really helped to bring this into focus because they are more of a renewable resource. Unlike a screenplay, a play is not limited to a single production.

All eight of the rejections I received last week were for plays that had previously been selected for production or for staged readings elsewhere. In other words, they had been winners of other competitions. One short play, ANYTHING ELSE?, had been one of six plays selected for production from 650 submissions in the 2010 Festival of One-Act Plays at Theatre Three in Port Jefferson, New York. I hadn’t change a word of the play, yet it was turned down without comment last week by two other festivals. How is this possible?

The answer is obvious – it’s all completely subjective and somewhat random. Every reader brings a different taste to the task of script evaluation. This particular lesson was brought home to me in dramatic fashion last year after I submitted another short play, a dark comedy entitled THE SURPRISE PARTY, to the Dubuque Fine Arts Players (DFAP) in Iowa for consideration in their National Playwriting Contest.

The play was not selected, but as part of the process the DFAP sent me the actual critique sheets of the two readers who evaluated my work. (These sheets are akin to the coverage that screenplays receive). Each reader evaluated my play on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being best) in 10 different categories, so the maximum possible score was 100.

The first reader gave my play a perfectly respectable overall tally of 70. But the second scored it with an execrable total of 12.5! That’s right – a total score of 12.5 out of 100, or an average of 1.25 out of 10 in each category. Reader Number 2 (I will refrain from calling him or her an idiot or a moron) obviously hated the play. Perhaps dark comedy doesn’t play as well in some quarters of Dubuque, Iowa as it does in New York City – THE SURPRISE PARTY was later selected from several hundred submissions and produced at the 2010 International Cringefest here in Manhattan. How to account for this? It’s all completely subjective and somewhat random. (This is my new mantra.)

I would be lying if I said that rejection had no effect on me these days. There is still genuine disappointment associated with it, but that seems normal to me. And it is usually brief, a matter of minutes rather than days. It is no longer crippling; it’s just a part of the process.

The gifted playwright and screenwriter John Guare gave this clearheaded assessment in a November 14, 2010 article in The New York Times:

“What a long career does give you, during the long nights of thinking and rewriting, is a healthy perspective: As writers, we’re always starting all over again,” Mr. Guare said. “That’s what I tell younger playwrights, that you have to learn how to live with despair, resentment, rejection and failure. Because if you can’t, you need to find another line of work.”

Sobering words, indeed, but somehow strangely inspiring. I have them framed above my writing desk.

__________________
Jeff Stolzer is a screenwriter, playwright and former question writer for Regis Philbin on WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE. He is a proud member of the Writers Guild since 1991.

I march on Labor Day because workers are under assault in our country. Corporations have been using their increasing power to try to bust unions and deprive workers of their basic rights to a living wage and health care benefits. Similarly, numerous state governments have recently cast their unionized workers as the scapegoats for their budget problems and have outrageously attempted to curtail collective bargaining rights. We need to speak out and fight back against these assaults.

I march on Labor Day because the gap between rich and poor has increased dramatically in the past few decades. We have witnessed wage stagnation for the working and middle classes while CEO salaries have reached astronomical, obscene levels. We are still the wealthiest nation on the planet and there is absolutely no reason why the share of the pie that goes to workers should be diminished. We need to make our outrage known.

I march on Labor Day because I know from past experience that it’s great fun. It’s joyful and empowering to take to the streets with fellow writers and union members and exercise our rights to free speech and assembly. These rights are only valuable when they are actually used – if we neglect to exercise them, we risk losing them. When we march, we become part of a noble tradition of expressing ourselves with our feet and our lungs that ties us historically to Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Lech Walesa and the leaders of this year’s Arab Spring. How cool is that?

Finally, I march on Labor Day because I spend too much time in my writing cave, parked at the keyboard, staring at the computer screen. My skin is too pale, my muscles risk atrophy. I need the sun and the exercise.

Click here to RSVP
Saturday, Sept 10th
44th and 5th Avenue
9:15am
Look for the red WGAE banner

__________________
Jeff Stolzer is a screenwriter, playwright and former question writer for Regis Philbin on WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE. He is a proud member of the Writers Guild since 1991.

I can feel all independent webseries creators slowly notching their arrows in my direction. How could Kickstarter/IndieGogo possibly be bad for webseries? It’s often the only way webseries can get funded!

Well, yes. That’s true. Often it is. And I have nothing against either operation. I use them both and have supported friends stageplays, records, films and webseries. In fact, I have sat on a panel with Kickstarter’s kickstarter, Yancey Strickland, and found him a great guy with a lot of great motivations and a really fantastic success story. He and his colleagues are doing wonderful, altruistic work for many, many people. Much better work than me, in fact, so I should probably just shut my damn mouth, right?

But what I’m most interested in is quality of web video. Let’s try that filter out.

It used to be (in the aulden dayes of 2008 and before!) that if you wanted to make a webseries, you either had to find some sponsor willing to pay for it (in which case, most of the time, it turned out crappy), or you did it yourself on credit cards (in which case, most of the time, it turned out cheap). Today, everyone can get their shit together, put together a pitch, and send it out to 100+ friends.

Everyone can do this. That is the benefit, and that is the problem.

ISSUE 1: Kickstarter pretty much funds everything. Because it’s social. If you are reasonably popular, you sell your pitch reasonably well, and your friends are not all reasonably homeless, you can count on milking 10 or 25 bucks from them each to do pretty much whatever you want. Extend that to your colleagues, your Facebook friends, the people on Twitter, and probably a couple of older and wealthier relatives, and you can pretty easily get your $5,000.
But just because your friends are willing to support you doesn’t make it good. (In fact, experience has taught me that sometimes folks are willing to fund projects just to get their creators to shut up about it already). The money is now available – for everybody. Which means people who were too timid to spend money, too afraid of taking a risk, or too unsure of the quality of their ideas are now jumping in. Because what’s to lose? It’s not my money, and it’s not real money. Right?

I don’t mean to be aggressive or Randian on anybody here. But I do think that if you have a good idea, you know you have a good idea, and you do whatever it takes to make it. If it crashes and burns along the way, congratulations: you’ve failed, the most important step in success. If it doesn’t crash and burn, then congratulations: you’ve just taken one massive, exciting step towards your next failure.

With crowd-sourced funding of yet-to-be-produced projects, there is little natural weeding of poor ideas. It used to be a little easier to separate the wheat from the chaff, webseries-wise, in that there was just so little of either. Now there’s a lot of both. The meritocrats believe that good content will naturally rise to the top. I don’t believe that anymore. I believe that a glut of chaff will continue to hide most of it, and we keep shoveling in that chaff.

(At least until we have better filtering, which will be the subject of several future entries).

ISSUE 2: These sites are unwittingly setting the standard rate of production for webseries. It seems to be, most people are asking for $5K to $10K for a 6-to-10-episode season. With most webisodes clocking in at 3 minutes these days, let’s do some terrible math and estimate that we are producing our webseries for a rate of about $300-$500 per produced minute.

Now, I’m all for low-budget video. I haven’t really done anything but. My highest budget for an actual webseries (excluding commercial projects) was a half million; yet, that was for about five and a half hours of broadcast-quality content (roughly 3 feature films). I love low-budget, and nothing makes me more angry than “directors” who think they can’t shoot a single frame without a crane, gib arm and pyrotechnics.

Except for being undervalued. That makes me madder. And I’m starting to get afraid here. Because we were producing The Burg for $100 a produced minute, and no one got paid. We shot 60 pages in 3 days for All’s Faire. But that’s supposed to not be the case anymore, in 2011. This is supposed to be becoming an industry. Kickstarter/Indiegogo is setting a potentially dangerous precedent here: 1, you have to have money, but 2, it should only be a little money. If this is defining what webseries are and which ones get made, then should we be concerned about the motivation for more professionals to really get into the business (and thus, real audiences)?

Now before anyone accuses me of being mean, elitist, needlessly antagonistic, or just a douche, I want to make it clear: I am indeed doing the online equivalent of throwing a bunch of darts into the air at the holiday party, and hoping they don’t hit me. Everybody loves Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and they’re making a lot of great stuff happen. I’m just asking questions.

Nor do I have alternatives to suggest. Although I do have interest in a different kind of crowd-sourced model: the audience-supported one. By which I mean, the actual audience that you know you actually have, because you made the first season on your own and built it up. Anyone But Me is the constantly cited example of this, but they’re not the only ones. Reason I like this is it combines the feel-good-social-video model (which we all love to embrace in theory) with the hardcore-objectivist-meritocracy model (that’s what actual business runs on). I, personally, think that’s a more viable longterm trend for web video.

Disagreements? Darts? Throw ‘em my way.

The numbers for online video consumption in the U.S. came out from comScore (basically, the internet-video version of Nielsen, but site-specific). I found out about it through Marc Hustvedt’s great online video resource, tubefilter.tv.

Two key takeaways:
- 6.3 BILLION viewing sessions. Everybody is watching internet video, and watching more and more of it.
- The average video duration is 5.4 minutes. It’s been climbing steadily from December 2007.

Think about that second stat for a second. If you’re coming from TV land, 5.4 minutes doesn’t sound like much screentime. But if you’re coming from web video land, this is huge.

When my partners and I started The Burg way back in 2006, comScore wasn’t even around, but online ‘common sense’ was. This common sense told us, nay, SCREAMED at us, that a minute and a half was an ideal video length, and anything longer than 3 minutes was suicide. This frightened us, as a typical episode of The Burg was anywhere from 14 to 22 minutes long. So, we played it safe. We began to create shorts of anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes (yes, even our shorts were longer than most people’s ‘longs’.) We interspersed our normal eps with our shorts. We fully anticipated looking at our viewcount and having much less views for our longer eps.

The exact opposite happened. Our views actually went down every time we posted a short. Why? We don’t know exactly. But after talking to fans, we have a pretty good idea: they were outside the chronology of the story. They were little jokes, standalone scenes, things that didn’t fit in the tightly plotted and structured episodes of The Burg. And so, people didn’t care as much. I knew right then that we had something good. People were hooked on the structure and the story and didn’t mind the length.

Ever since then, I’ve rigidly maintained that length should not be the top deciding factor when you’re creating your content. I’ve been mocked for this, as there are many creators who believe otherwise. In the early days, there were a lot of 90-second episodic thrillers. For me, even when well produced, the story jolted and jittered, because 90 seconds of a thriller is enough to get you to a cliffhanger, but usually seems to stop short of great character development. When working with other online portals, I’ve had to cut 5 minute shorts to under 3 minutes, and in the process, lost some of the best moments because they just didn’t fit. (This is not to say you can’t make a great episode in 90 seconds – of course you can. I just think you shouldn’t have to.)

I get why this happens in TV. You have a fixed inventory of time. 22 minutes for your sitcom once commercials are factored in. It becomes a surgical process (and to a degree, it should with all content). But on the internet, there is no such restriction. Yet content creators and programmers decided to all limit themselves to one anyway. It seems cynical, arbitrary, and a big underestimation of viewers’ tastes.

Well, it seems that common sense was wrong in this case. People are now, officially, measurably, watching longer and longer video. And 5.4 minutes is the average. Meaning, many people are consuming video that’s much, much longer.

As Hustvedt states, “If the same trajectory were to be taken forward a few years, which is probably a conservative estimate given the current market, we’d expect to see average online video duration at 10.4 minutes by 2014.”

Which means, by my shoddy estimate, people are going to be ready for The Burg by… let’s see… May 2017. Hm. Oh well. Better 11 years early than too late.