We are going to have to agree to disagree on that one. My reasons for thinking that are going to be the time I have spent working with people in Hollywood and friends that I have who are working as writers in the industry, or failing to do so depending on who I am talking about.
There are a lot of complicated reasons why people make it in Hollywood, but actual ability to do the job is a major consideration. Most people don’t actually have that ability. Networking abilities just define your levels of success. You have to have the baseline skills to even get in the door.
Theodore Sturgeon edited an SF magazine during the “good old days”. After wading through unsolicited submissions (the worst part of the job) he coined Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of science fiction is shit.” Quickly followed by Sturgeon’s corollary, “90% of everything is shit.”
No matter how bad the crap is on TV, keep in mind it is entirely possible to do much worse, even by “professionals”. Just watch some episode of something or other from the 50’s or 60’s… or from foreign media.
While I don’t dispute your point, I believe you are wrong about the context of Sturgeon’s Law and the point he was trying to make, which was about published science fiction.
[QUOTE=Theodore Sturgeon]
I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.
Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.
[/QUOTE]
You forget, the skill of TV writers is measured by how skillfully they can work “The Latest Agenda” into the script.
I remember when every show and movie on TV pushed cigarette smoking. Even game shows gave cartons of cigarettes as prizes. The host and guest stars smoked like locomotives during the entire show.
In the seventies, the message on TV was “there is nothing wrong with drugs”. George Carlin, the Smothers Brothers, Cheech and Chong and countless others ruled the airwaves and the thoughts of a generation.
The message on TV nowadays is sex, blood and gore. It takes highly skilled and talented writers to work sex, blood and gore into EVERYTHING on TV.
[del]Cite?[/del] Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
I’m not in the biz, but it seems obvious to me that, to be a full-time professional TV writer, it takes more than the ability to produce better material than the “horseshit that gets put on TV”: it requires the ability to consistently and dependably produce material that fits a given show, its characters and its format.
I do not have evidence for it, but I also don’t think there’s any evidence to suggest the contrary either. We simply can never know how many great writers are out there toiling in obscurity, unpublished, who never have a shot and will never be known. I think it’s pretty much the same as the world of music. Nobody in their right mind would ever suggest that the few bands who are lucky enough to get radio airplay and music video slots and therefore become famous and popular are better than all of the obscure bands playing in cities and college towns all over America that nobody has ever heard of except for a small contingent of local fans.
Diogenes wrote a script but people in the biz felt that it was among other things, too short and needed a lot of reworking. Diogenes decided that when he set out to prove that anyone could do the job of a tv writer, what he really meant was that anyone could write a script and that he therefore won the bet. I’m sure it wouldn’t take a lot of digging to find the thread but I doubt it will enlighten us very much.
TV writing (really, any writing) is more than just having a great idea, it’s about having an idea that fits into a usable format. Even for your basic crap sitcom episode, you have to:
a) start with a situation that can be resolved in 22 minutes
b) within established production standards and budget
c) using existing characters with defined personalities and mannerisms
d) consistent with the overall direction of the show
e) with enough flexibility that it can be adapted for last minute contingencies, and
f) on a deadline.
And the ability to do that more than once is what separates professional writers from “great writers.” It may not be what you consider to be “talent” but it’s definitely a skilled craft and not something that you can fake simply with “networking, making connections and hustling.”
The writers for major, major TV shows have proven over, and over, and over again that they are quite frequently unable to do the things listed above. I can’t even begin to count the number of episodes of TV shows that I have watched that have had shit-sloppy writing with all kinds of loose ends, uncharacteristic behavior from characters, and totally pointless plots that went nowhere.
There are enough incentives out there in Hollywood that almost anyone who thinks they have a serious shot at being that good is likely to try. Oh, yeah, there might be a handful of people who never make it just for unfair reasons, but it’s not going to be very many.
Have you ever had to write something month in and month out over a long period of time? Anyone can have great ideas for two or three shows. It takes a professional to have even a good idea somewhere in the middle of season 3. When you are on a deadline, you can’t afford to wait for brilliance. It is not just TV - often the latter books in a series of mystery or sf books suck.
I don’t write scripts, but I do do a column 6 times a year and have for 15 years, and some days you go with something you are less than thrilled with.
Plus, I’m not sure Sturgeon was ever an editor. I have at least a few issues of most of the magazines that got published in the '50s, and I don’t recall his name. Damon Knight, Pohl and even Harry Harrison edited at one point or another, but I don’t think Sturgeon.
That, and I seem to recall reading that they were having schedule issues then. Since they had just started, they seriously underestimated the time required to film and to do the SFX for such a relatively complicated show.
Sorry, but that’s just not true. I have never seen an unpublished writer who wrote any better than a published one. Writers are unpublished for a reason: they’re not good enough.
I took part in an online writers group for several years. Good writers got published. Bad ones did not. I have never seen a case where someone was a good writer and couldn’t get published somewhere.
It’s the complaint of an amateur that it’s hard to break in. If you’re good enough, you can break in as a writer. The issue is always that most writers just aren’t good enough. I doubt there’s more than five writers “toiling in obscurity” and producing top quality work without getting it published. And those five just haven’t found the right markets for their work.
More nonsense. Only once have I ever seen a small, local band that was good enough to get a recording contract*. There are plenty of good bands, but there’s a difference between good and worth a recording contract.
I can see it with several groups I like. I have, for instance, a liking for swamp rock. There’s a group I enjoy called Bliggins and Goines. Very nice, but they put out all their music as MP3s – no records. Then I listen to The Rev. Peyton’s Big Damn Band. They put out CDs on a minor label – and you can tell immediately that they’re better than Bliggins and Goines. Then there’s The Siegel-Schwall Band, which recorded on major labels. Even better.
And, yes, the bands making records now are better than the obscure bands in your home town. But they’re playing different music – something you don’t like (neither do I). They are far more accomplished in their realm than a local band is in theirs.
Your argument is the aspiring writers lament. 99.999% of the time, a talent does not success simply because they’re just not good enough.
*They were named 805 and put out a single, failed album. But they were head an shoulders above any live act (without a recording contract) that I had ever heard.
Isn’t it barred by contract to use non-union writers to make any alterations to a union-written scrip? IE a studio/production company can order a bunch of rushed scrips in anticipation of a writer’s strike, but once the strike starts they have to film those scripts exactly as written, without even being able to make minor changes like the dialouge, or not at all?
I’m not a frustrated amateur writer though; what I am is a frustrated television watcher. Most of the stuff on TV is absolute trash. First of all, less and less of it is even written by anyone nowadays; so much of it is in the “reality TV” format that has so infected television. But most of what is written is crap, and that includes even the elite, top-tier shows on premium channels like HBO (Big Love, for instance, which I hold up as one of the worst examples of TV writing ever in its last two seasons.) I am unwilling to believe that if the morons who wrote this show went on strike, it would have ended up any worse if HBO had just hired some semi-talented amateurs.
RealityChuck, you seem to be talking about the world of books; when I mentioned that writing is difficult to break into, this is undoubtedly true of book writing but it has to be even more true of television writing.
None of that is incompatible with surface professionalism, the ability to network, having gone to Harvard, or having grown up as a kind of superficial garden-variety class clown somewhere in the tristate area. All those are positive boons if you want to write for teevee. OTOH, actual talent’s got nothing to do with it.
IE a studio/production company can order a bunch of rushed scrips in anticipation of a writer’s strike, but once the strike starts they have to film those scripts exactly as written, without even being able to make minor changes like the dialouge, or not at all?