Dorothy Parker's advice to aspiring writers

As an addendum to today's post on breaking in:  

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What's the best way to break into the business?

Here’s one of those Friday Questions that warrants an entire post.

It’s from A. Wayne Carter:

As a fellow alumni of your partner David Isaac's University of Miami, I was curious on your thoughts of the value of a four-year college degree if you want to be a scriptwriter in Hollywood. Or is it better to just write and get in on a low-level industry job as soon as you can. My ship already sailed on that front (I got the B.A. and started later) but for the benefit of the next gen, what are your thoughts?

School is great, but it’s not mandatory. If you want to become a doctor you can’t just watch a lot of videos and take notes. You kinda have to go to medical school, even if that means Mexico.  That’s not necessarily true when it comes to learning how to write for television.

That said, there’s a lot to be said for getting a great education. You save a lot of steps when you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. A good professor can save you years of making rookie mistakes. And more importantly, can inspire you.  As someone who teaches a course at USC (the above picture shows some of my kids) I certainly believe in the value of an advanced degree. 

Other advantages are being able to immerse yourself in the world of writing surrounded by a built-in support group of fellow students. Writing is a lonely endeavor. It sure helps to have friends who understand. Just having people you can hang out with late at night discussing the structure of this week’s MAD MEN is a God send.

But here’s the thing: to make the college experience really worthwhile, you have to go to the right university and have the right professors. And that can depend on your sensibilities. NYU might be great for some but not you. USC, UCLA, Emerson, Northwestern, Chapman, and Michigan I know offer great programs. I’m sure a lot of others do as well. The great thing about those colleges is that they’ve dumped a lot of graduates into the industry, which is great for networking. Sometimes contacts are more important than degrees.

But remember, just because you’ve graduated with honors at a prestigious feeder university, doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed entry. At the end of the day, it’s talent, desire, preparation, opportunity, and luck that propels someone through the door. It’s quite possible to attain all of those while skirting academia.

Watch thousands of hours of television and analyze it yourself. Write outlines based on what you see. Compare them and start to discover patterns. Read books. Even idiot bloggers.  Write spec after spec. Learn from your mistakes. Your fourth spec will be better than your third.

If you can break in by being a PA or writers’ assistant, jump at it. Again, it’s all about contacts and learning. Being on the inside, watching how a show is produced every week is invaluable.

Obviously, it’s easier to break in if you’re in Los Angeles. You can take extension courses at UCLA, meet industry types, create your own network of fellow aspiring scribes. It’s always better to be where the action is. You wanna build airplanes?  Move to Seattle.  You wanna write scripts for Mindy Kalin?   Head out West. 

But then again, even that’s not mandatory. People from Wisconsin and Tennessee break in by writing plays that get noticed. Or they make YouTube videos that go viral. Or win screenwriting or playwriting competitions. Or winning contests like the one NBC is having. 

If you ask 100 writers how they broke in you’ll get 85 different answers. So you have to decide what’s best for YOU. The good news is, if you don’t get into USC or NYU you don’t have to go to school in Mexico.

As always, best of luck to everyone. Make me proud.

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ORPHAN BLACK is the new ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK

Okay, I know I’m late to the party (by a year) but I finally discovered ORPHAN BLACK. Yes, yes. I am sooooo behind the curve. You’re probably surprised I’ve heard of LAW & ORDER.

Here in the colonies ORPHAN BLACK airs on BBC America on Saturday nights (but I found it ON DEMAND). And it is phenomenal!

Tatiana Maslany deserves not one Emmy for Best Actress in a Drama, but nine – one for each character she plays. ORPHAN BLACK is about clones, but it’s less sci-fi and more character suspense/conspiracy. It takes place in the present on planet Earth so right away it’s groundbreaking for science fiction.  If you can put up with a story that’s not set five years after the Apocalypse, with evil robots controlling the world, and everyone dressing like punk rockers and driving rusted 1998 Buicks you might enjoy this show.

Tatiana Maslany is a revelation. She plays multiple characters, each completely distinct with unique voices, mannerisms, accents, and attitudes. I can only imagine Megan Boone from THE BLACKLIST trying to tackle this acting assignment. Nine wigs, one expression.

Series creators John Fawcett & Graeme Manson have devised an ingenious mystery and their storytelling is superb. This show moves like a bullet train. Things are always happening. There are most twists than in a helix. And along the way they actually ANSWER some questions. Yes, those lead to more questions but at least you’re getting some reward. (If LOST answered every question they posed over the course of the series the finale would still be airing.)

What’s amazing to me is that they’ve found a fresh way to tell a “you never know who to trust” series. God, we’ve seen a million of those. The good guy turns out to be the mole and the bad guy turns out to be the Pope. In this show they really keep you guessing. And because you care about the welfare of these cuddly clones you’re carefully trying to size everybody up. You’re watching for little tells. You’re thinking back to past conversations. Normally you’re saying – “Gregory Itzin? Bad guy. Next.“

Shows like ORPHAN BLACK also live and die by how good their villains are, and Matt Frewer is deliciously understated and evil. Who knew Max Headroom could be so scary?

The rest of the supporting cast is terrific too. My favorite is Jordan Gavaris as clone #2’s gay foster brother. (Or is it clone #3?) There’s a scene where he has to babysit a suburban soccer mom’s kids (clone #4 – wait, maybe she’s clone #2) and teaches them how to cross dress that is funnier than any sitcom scene I’ve seen this year.

Kudos also to the technology. There are some scenes where there are three Tatianas on screen at the same time and it looks seamless. (I only wish they were all watching PARENT TRAP and commenting.) Forget making Superman fly – clones even hand each other things! We’ve come a long way since THE PATTY DUKE SHOW.

ORPHAN BLACK is a series you have to watch from the beginning. But it’s not like one of those shows that starts off slow and you have to get four hours under your belt before it starts to click. The very first scene of ORPHAN BLACK hooks you right in. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

The show is produced in Canada. I hope the US doesn’t do its own version (with Megan Boone) or ANIMAL PLANET doesn’t do its version with sheep.

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My first radio job

I always contend that the only way I got respect in radio was by getting out of it. There was no Billboard Disc Jockey of the Year award for me in the early '70s. Most of the time there were no jobs.

I can’t say my aspirations upon graduating from UCLA were all that high back then. I wanted to play the hits. My ultimate goal was to do nights in San Diego. Not even Los Angeles or San Francisco. I thought with my voice even San Diego was unrealistic.

And of course, when you just get out of college your career planning is not really long range. It never occurred to me that introducing Cher records four hours a night for fifty years might not be the best use of my time or talent. I just wanted to land at a station with a good jingle package. (Another job well done by a faculty career counselor.)

My first real on-air job came while I was still in college. A friend, John was a disc jockey/chief engineer at the number two rock station in Bakersfield. KERN 1410. (Note: Any AM station 1300 or higher on the dial has the signal range of your WIFI router.) He called to say they had an opening – Saturday nights from 6-midnight for $2.50 an hour!! I gasped at my good fortune. Quickly I called the program director (who was on the air at the time... playing "Gypsies Tramps and Thieves"). He said send a tape. I had one ready to go. It was a composite of shows I had done at the UCLA campus station.

I asked if I could drive up there and play it for him. With such a plum assignment as six hours a week on a station no one listened to in the middle of nowhere in sweltering summer heat for minimum wage I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.


So on the 4th of July in Africa-hot heat I drove the 90 miles up to Bakersfield -- the Jewel of the Central Valley.

The station itself was a shack flanked by one tower in a giant empty field. The previous tenant was probably the Unibomber. I met the program director, your standard long-haired hippy freak/radio executive who took me into the production studio, which was the size of the bathroom in a Greyhound bus. I was very proud of this tape. It must've taken me twenty hours to assemble. He wound it on the old machine, and hit play. “It’s 6:00 on…” He shut it off. “Yeah, you’re fine. You start Saturday”.

I was ecstatic.

He asked me what name I wanted to use. This threw me a little. Couldn’t I just use Ken Levine? “I dunno, “ he said, “That sounds almost Jewish.” (Almost Jewish???) He suggested instead “R.K. Olsen”. (RKO owned a lot of big stations back then like KHJ, KFRC, and WOR. It was an inside joke for six people on the planet). We settled on Ken Stevens. Who knew I’d be going through Ellis Island in Bakersfield?

Still, this was unbelievable. Our campus station only went to the dorms. This station I could hear in my car! At least for the first six minutes driving back home at midnight.

For three months I commuted every weekend to Bakersfield. My radiator blew twice, my car overheated numerous times, I got a flat tire, snapped three fan belts, and one weekend I received two speeding tickets from the same cop at the same spot coming and going.

But it was worth every dollar I had to borrow to keep this glorious job.

And then they gave me Sundays from noon to six to go along my Saturday night shift. I did that for about a year, sleeping every Saturday night on John's threadbare couch.

At first I was terrible on the air. No tapes exist. But eventually I got comfortable. In other words, I started doing more comedy (LOTS more comedy). The program director left, replaced ironically by my friend, John. He really whipped the station into shape. And the next summer when the ratings came out (they only came out once a year in Bakersfield) KERN amazingly beat the longtime powerhouse KAFY despite their massive signal and better jingles.

And my ratings on Sunday afternoons were staggering. Believe me, I owe it all to the comedy. Otherwise I had no pipes and no real style. Still I wonder – if I had gone by the name Ken Levine, would my share have been slightly lower? Maybe 40? Or 8?

Update:

Thanks to Johnny Mitchell, my PD at KERN for holding on to the ratings.  They're just too good not to share.

From the April/May 1972 ARB report for Metro Area shares for KERN:

Sat. 7-M Teens 52.4
Men 18-34 57.1
Women 18-34 43.8
Men 18+ 36.8
Women 18+ 21.9
Persons 12+ 36.3*

Sun. 3-7 Teens - 47.5 Men 18-34 - 29.7
Women 18-34 16.0
Men 18+ 19.5
Women 18+ 11.4
Persons 12+ 21.0

* The highest 12+ rating in any time period ever recorded for KERN. (The next closest was
27.6)

Thanks again, Johnny.  I owe you lunch and a new couch. 

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Don't forget Neil Simon

A number of years ago at the Daily Grill in Brentwood I was waiting at the valet for my car and there was Neil Simon waiting for his (a nicer one by the way). I mentioned to my kids, who were quite young then, that Mr. Simon was one of greatest writers in America and my son said, “Then how come we’ve never of him?” I laughed of course. Everyone knew who he was. Then.

But now I wonder: how many people today do know who he is? From the 60s through the end of the centry Neil Simon was the king. Name me a comedy writer who got his name above the title of any play or movie he wrote. Or a screenwriter who the studios and directors were forbidden to rewrite. You’ve got to be pretty good and pretty successful to achieve that kind of clout. For God sakes, the man has a Broadway theatre named after him.

Today Neil is in his advancing years and his output of material has slowed considerably. Thus it’s quite conceivable that many young people don’t know who Neil Simon is.

So for young writers hoping to break in and just fans of mirth in general, I say don’t forget Neil Simon. Yes, he’s from another era. And I can’t imagine him ever writing SUPERBAD or FAMILY GUY. But any serious student of comedy will find much to learn (and enjoy) from studying the work of Neil Simon.

His jokes are all so well-crafted and all come out of character. Just once in my life I’d like to write a joke this good: From THE ODD COUPLE when slovenly Oscar confronts fastidious Felix –

“I can't take it anymore, Felix, I'm cracking up. Everything you do irritates me. And when you're not here, the things I know you're gonna do when you come in irritate me. You leave me little notes on my pillow. Told you 158 times I can't stand little notes on my pillow. "We're all out of cornflakes. F.U." Took me three hours to figure out F.U. was Felix Ungar!”

There are two soft-cover collections of Neil Simon plays. Even though they may seem dated (since they are from the ancient 60s when dinosaurs still roamed the earth ), check out the early ones. BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, COME BLOW YOUR HORN (his first play), and the incomparable ODD COUPLE. Notice the rhythm, the pace, how each joke moves the story forward, and how each joke just seamlessly flows into the next.

His later work adds drama and depth and of those plays I would suggest BILOXI BLUES, LOST IN YONKERS, and THE SUNSHINE BOYS but there are two or three others you might like even better. He doesn’t get the credit he deserves for his more serious work but hey, that’s the cross all of us yuckmeisters have to bear.

And again, read the plays. Sometimes the movies don’t do the properties justice. Obviously, aspiring scribes should inhale every script of COMMUNITY and 30 ROCK and MODERN FAMILY that they can find, but also add some Neil Simon. There’s pearls to glean from a guy who can write…

Oscar Madison: I know him. He'll kill himself just to spite me. Then his ghost will come back, following me around the apartment, haunting and cleaning, haunting and cleaning, haunting and cleaning...

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Friday Questions

More Friday Questions comin’ attcha.

Liggie starts us off:

When screenplays are sold in collectible stores (three brad-bound, Courier font, etc.) or in a book format in bookstores, does the screenwriter get a royalty from that?

No. When actual shooting scripts are sold on remainder tables in bookstores (or on the streets in Manhattan), no one involved in the production from the studio to the writer are compensated. Technically, these merchants are selling stolen property.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about this issue. On the one hand, others are profiting from my work. On the other, these scripts generally sell for just a few bucks and when I was starting out, the only access I had to a television script was through these bookstores. I bought an ODD COUPLE script and a MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW script and learned to write by studying those two scripts.

If a script I wrote can inspire or instruct others then I feel I’m paying it forward. That’s worth more to me than the few cents I'd be making from the sale.

As for scripts of mine included in a published book, the studio owns the copyright so I have no say. Our “Room Service” episode was included in a book of FRASIER scripts. It would have been nice to share in the royalties, but honestly, it was an honor just to be included. There have been some damn fine FRASIER scripts over the years.

Rob Larkin queries:

I'm curious as to how you and your writing partner David Isaacs pitch an idea or story. Do you decide beforehand who will do most of the talking or is it spontaneous?

For some reason I usually start the pitch and then we do it together. David will pick up the ball for awhile then toss it back to me, etc.

I hear stories of writers carefully rehearsing their pitch, even memorizing it. We never do that. We have a beat sheet that has the main points we need to convey and generally a few jokes, but beyond that we’re spontaneous. We’re having a conversation with someone, not delivering a slick sales pitch.

And as important as pitching is, we try to make sure the idea is worth pitching. Ultimately, that’s what sells a project – the idea.

blogward wonders:

Ken, what's your take on Tom Lehrer? It came up on the web recently that he couldn't give a damn about copyright on his songs, or performing at all. This is the man who lick-started the UK satire boom.

I love Tom Lehrer. For those not familiar with him, he was a mathematician and taught political science at M.I.T. in the '60s and in his spare time composed and performed satiric songs. He developed a huge following, record albums followed, and his songs were quite popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In the early ‘70s he quit show business and resumed his academic career at U.C. Santa Cruz. God bless him, he is 86. 

I always found his material to be hilarious, so smart, and so unique. He came along at a time when folksingers were taking themselves and the world sooo seriously. He was a breath of fresh air.

Here’s an example of Tom Lehrer:


From Garrett:

Last night's Big Bang Theory seemed to have a dozen people between the written by, teleplay by and story by. Does that mean it was just a bad story that need intensive care?

No. It means that the writing credit is meaningless. Every BIG BANG THEORY script is room written, and since the WGA forbids you from listing fifteen writers for one writing credit, they rotate credit among the staff. So the writer who got shared story credit and the writer who got shared teleplay credit did as much or as little as the other dozen writers who received no credit that week.

What’s your question? Leave it in the comments section. Thanks.

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May Day (Malone)

With this being May Day, I thought I’d focus today’s post on Sam “Mayday” Malone (not that I haven’t mentioned him 46 times already this year).

First off, as I’m sure you know, I greatly admire Ted Danson, both as a person and an actor. So I’ll skip the two paragraphs of fawning that would otherwise go with this profile.

Some things you may know; some you may not.

As originally conceived by the Charles Brothers, Sam Malone was a former football player for the Patriots. Fred Dryer was more who they had in mind. And he was a finalist for the role (along with William Devane).

Ted however, was so charming and there was such chemistry with Shelley Long that they decided to cast him instead. But Ted as a football bruiser is only slightly more believable than me as an NFL lineman so they made Sam a baseball player instead.

The supposed photo of Sam in uniform at the bar was really Red Sox pitcher Jim Lonborg.

To prepare for the role Ted went to bartending school.

Over the course of eleven years he must’ve cut up 18,000,000 lemons. Actors always like to have some “business;” something to do. The obvious thing for him would be to make drinks all the time, but then the waitresses would have to get them, deliver them to tables, etc. Cutting lemons was an activity that required no further logistics. (I jokingly used to say that Sam should sell the bar and become a sushi chef.)

Ted really struggled finding the character in the first season because in real life he’s so unlike Sam Malone. He’s not a womanizer, not a jock, not vain, and not a recovering alcoholic. The fact that he appears so convincing and so effortless is a real testament to just how excellent an actor he is. (Again, jokingly, I used say it was okay if he wanted to model the character after me.) 

Over the course of the series Sam became dumber, a decision that offered more room for comedy, but I never liked it. Most characters grow and evolve over time. Personally, my favorite version of Sam Malone was the one in the pilot.

Ted never threw his weight around as the star. One day the Charles Brothers, Jimmy Burrows, David and I, our line producer and editor were in Les’ office going over a roughcut. Ted wandered in and sat down. Glen hit pause, Les politely told Ted that actors were not allowed to sit in on editing, and Ted apologized and ducked out. I can think of ten other stars who would have reacted quite differently.

Ted was always protective of the other cast members, guest cast, and extras. Oh wait. I said I wouldn’t fawn.

Ted never watched the show when it was on the air. He felt he would be too self-critical and would tinker with his performance – possibly ruining it.  Years after CHEERS ended Ted finally began watching, and guess what? He really liked it.

How accurate is testing? In one of the later seasons Sam’s arc was that he was trying to get Rebecca into bed. We had him do some of the most horrible deceitful things. Audience testing came back and Ted ranked the highest. He was most likeable – seen as a father figure to everyone at the bar. What show were they watching? (Meanwhile, Frasier tested the worst.)

Ted rarely complained about the material. And when he did, he was always respectful. And most always right.

CHEERS ended after eleven seasons because Ted decided he no longer wanted to do the show. Many blame Whoopi Goldberg (his girlfriend at the time). They felt she swayed his decision. I think he left for another reason. I’ve never discussed this with him, but my feeling is he knew that at a certain age the character would border on sad. The slick player might seem very charming in his 30’s but a little pathetic in his 40’s. I think he left because he was protecting Sam Malone.

A few years later, he reprised the character on FRASIER – an episode my partner David Isaacs and I wrote – and we tried to address that by getting him engaged. Ultimately, the wedding was called off, but we wanted to convey that Sam was aware of his situation and was actively trying to move on. Even with that, I still got the sense Ted was somewhat uncomfortable playing Sam Malone again.

BECKER was a spec script written by Dave Hackel. The main reasons why Ted responded to it was (a) it was very well written, and (b) the character was so unlike Sam. Ted wanted to distance himself from Sam and play something very different and age-appropriate. For that I give him so much credit. How many sitcom stars have you seen who continue to play essentially the same character in series after series, even after they’ve long since outgrown that character? (Who remembers LIFE WITH LUCY?)

And finally, Ted truly found his soulmate in Mary Steenburgen. If ever there was a perfect match it’s those two. Sam & Diane could only dream of such a marriage.

Happy May Day. 

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