I enjoyed the rants against product placement as hands are reaching for Heinekin and Snickers…
Heh, Sorkin must be reading this board…
Based on the few seconds we’ve seen, I had assumed Peripheral Man was an animated character like Ambigously Gay Duo.
Maybe Peripheral Vision Man is like Captain Universe.
If it were animated, Cal wouldn’t have been able to tell Ricky and Ron to stretch it another 45 seconds in the pilot (and we’d have been deprived of his great line.)
“Tell Ricky and Ron we need Peripheral Vision Man to be 45 seconds longer, and I’m sure that was the missing element making it funny.”
And West Wing.
Can someone explain the “30 min format” thing? How the fact that the show ran 37 seconds short led to the realization that R&R were writing a sitcom?
Yeah, good question. As soon as the show ended I decided I’d ask about it the next day on the SDMB, then promptly forgot. 40-second page? 42nd page?
I would guess it has to do with the amount of commercial time alloted. There would be different amounts of commercials in a half-hour show as compared to the amount in the one-and-one-half-hour S60SS. Length of the sketch is based on the number of words in it. So three one-half hour shows would have a different on-air length than one hour-and-a-half show. So my vote is for “40 second page” instead of “42nd page.”
Well, whatever it means, I find it odd that nobody noticed it until the end of the live show. Table read? Script check? Run-through? Tech rehearsal? Rewrites? The show is timed down to the second, and nobody noticed a 37 second gap until the moment Jessica Simpson went on to do her final end-of-show thank you’s?
Am I the only one to notice Harriet had a great set of abs?
Anyone? Anyone? Beuler?
No, you’re not. I nearly posted the same thing yesterday.
And She Spies. Which, turns out, was pretty funny… at least, that is, for the few episodes I caught late at night.
I’m not involved in the entertainment business, but my understanding is that scripts are written in a fairly rigid format so that each page is supposed to indicate an equal amount of airtime. This allows the total length of a production to be easily assessed just by the length of the script. Part of this, apparently, is using a specific size font. Ricky and Ron would normally be using only whatever font is standard for writing 90 minute sketch shows. When it was seen that they had been using the font that was standard for thirty minute sitcoms, insiders like Danny and Matt would quickly understand the implications.
… but you’d think that would mean that the font used for R&R’s script was three times the size of the standard one, and people might pick up on the fact that, hey, today’s script looks a little large.
Scripts are always written in 12 point courier font. The non-word based differences between script formats are in things like margin sizes which aren’t necessarily as obvious to someone who isn’t paying particular attention.
I came to the thread solely to say that I would like to see much more of Sarah Paulson. She looked damn good nearly naked.
I watched it with closed-captioning on and it said 40-second page. So does that mean each page represented forty seconds of airtime?
Yes Dewey, that is correct. TV and radio scripts are usually done for a fixed amount of time per line and per page. This is often done by using a fixed font with fixed margins, like **jacquilynne ** says. Although movie scripts are done in courier, (like the one I’ve got in the mail yesterday for Inside Man it’s not always the case. Advanced software will now time your script as you write it, and you can print it in whatever font and format you want, but there are certain standards eg. anchor format, control room format, editing format, etc…