Difficult actors on TV shows whose characters are killed off

[Darren_Garrison]

@solost

Huh? Care to enlighten another relative SDMB newbie (only 15 years)? So, J. Michael Straczynski was a former occasional poster to this board, and he and RealityChuck would get into it over some topic, with JMS landing some sick burns on RC? Is that what I’m picking up?

This post.

Ridiculous portrayals of professions on TV

Ummm…no. No on several levels. SFWA did not say that I was not a real writer in terms of writing short stories and fiction. Second, I was a member of SFWA for some time, so I met their technical requirements. But that did not, and does not, mitigate against the inherent prejudice against TV and film writers that was rampant at that time, the late 80s. Specifically: Harlan Ellison, DC Fontana, Michael Cassutt, David Gerrold and I and many others were lobbying for the restoration of the Nebu…

[solost]

Ah, thanks. Not even before my time actually, though I was new here in 2011 and didn’t really visit too much or know my way around yet. Will look forward to reading further into that exchange later.

[RealityChuck]

@solost

@Darren_Garrison

I wonder how long it took for poor RealityChuck to get out of the burn ward?

Huh? Care to enlighten another relative SDMB newbie (only 15 years)? So, J. Michael Straczynski was a former occasional poster to this board, and he and RealityChuck would get into it over some topic, with JMS landing some sick burns on RC? Is that what I’m picking up?

I didn’t see that as a burn. My point was simply that, at the time, screenwriters weren’t eligible for membership. JMS went off an a separate tangent about the Dramatic Nebula.

Also, his characterization of the attempt to reinstate the best Dramatic Nebula was wrong. The big objection was that we gave awards to writing, not directing and the rest that goes into a dramatic presentation. But it only received the normal debate that occur when someone proposes changing the Nebula rules, and once it was changed to “Best Script,” those objections were overcome. There was still opposition, of course, but that’s how debate works, and debates in SFWA back then often grew heated. I personally was in favor of adding the script Nebula (and I didn’t become treasurer until after the award was reinstated).

But going back to the post that prompted my original response, screenwriters were not eligible because the interests of screenwriters were different than that of novel and short story writers and SFWA couldn’t adequately represent them. It’s categorically untrue that fiction writers were being vindictive about screenwriters due to jealousy – which I pointed out in the post JMS objected to.