Dear Lord Argo - some reasons why I haven't written movie scripts.

I have to confess that I didn't watch the Academy Awards last Sunday. I tried, but I fell asleep while watching the red carpet. It was 3 a.m here, so in my defense I was too tired to watch the damn broadcast.

Also in my defense I was so tired that I was able to stomach some of those empty, superficial interviews that no one should probably watch or pay attention to.

Another confession that I have to make is that I haven't really seen those movies that got nominated. The only film that I've seen so far is The Silver Lining Playbook. The movie was okay, but the story didn't make any sense once you got past the first hour.

The dancing stuff didn't feel organic at all. Neither did the bookmaking part. It was just badly written. Yet, the acting was pretty solid and I didn't mind the ending. (didn't encourage me to write though)

So naturally I haven't seen Argo, the movie that won Best Picture. I think I have to watch it this week probably. Nevertheless, even though I can't say anything about the quality of the film, I have read about how little the movie has to do with reality and facts.

Everyone seems to be pissed off, except for the Hollywood elite and the mainstream press. Ben Affleck probably shouldn't be going to Iran anytime soon. Or to Canada.

Again, I haven't seen the movie yet, but what's the point in making a movie that portrays Iranians as evil doers and CIA and Americans as some kind of heroes? Isn't this something that makes the world a worse place than it was yesterday?

Unless it turns out that the movie is super entertaining, I don't see what's the point in making stuff like this. "Yay, golden statues". "Oh well, we're going to bomb iran.."

Now, I'm not saying that they shouldn't give out awards or something like that. It takes a lot of effort to write a 120 page screenplay and to make a movie out of that.

Truth is that it's very hard to write a great script. It's really hard to write something that is riveting and something that entertains the audience and makes us think.

But you should always try to represent honor and dignity. I don't see the point in pissing people off unless you're telling the truth. Argo apparently didn't give a damn about the facts so it wasn't worth the effort.

Telling lies and making people mad simply isn't the best combination that I can think of.  Maybe that's one of the reasons that I haven't managed to write movie scripts yet. Selling out like that...

For me, I don't think there are that many things that are scarier than being a cheat, getting paid for that, and at the same time making the world potentially a more dangerous place to live. Walking on the red carpet after all that would really be too much.

Another look at 'Girls'.

So, I thought about writing about Girls, because I haven't really written about the show before in any detail. I thought it might be good time to do it now since I just watched the latest episode that aired.

I have to say that I initially quit watching the show after I saw the first three or four episodes of the first season that aired last year. Those episodes were enough to convince myself not to watch the show anymore.

Nevertheless, once the show won some golden globes, I thought I'd have to give it another shot. Not because I wanted to like the show, but because I wanted to really not like it. The constant hype over the show really bothered me - and still kinda does.

So, I managed to watch episodes from this season and I have to say that the show still is not that interesting or funny. Nevertheless, I don't think it's really that bad. In fact, if you compare it to a show like The Big Bang Theory (r.i.p), I think that Girls is actually a better series. 

I'm not sure you can call it a comedy though. What basically happens on the show is that Lena Dunham gets naked in every episode and that's about it. I mean, yeah, that's about it.

A lot of people have complained  about how they don't like to see Dunham naked. But even though she's not in shape at all, I think I'd rather watch her without clothes than watch some other actresses on some other shows fully dressed. Like Amy Farrah Fowler...

A lot of the performances by actors on the show are pretty weak, the scripts aren't very strong and many of the scenes don't seem natural at all. There's also stuff that makes me roll my eyes, like that Glass-Steagall exchange for example. Nevertheless, that all is kinda okay.

I don't know, perhaps me not being that much against 'Girls' has something do with the fact that Roy from It Crowd guest starred on the show. I think Chris O'Dowd is a wonderful actor, so naturally any show that has him on gets me interested. How can you not like that guy?

But there has to be something else than just that. Maybe despite of all its more or less obvious flaws, there's something honest about Girls. For me it seems that's enough.

John F. Kennedy died almost 50 years ago (part II)

Last time I wrote about John F. Kennedy, I talked about the upcoming Tom Hanks & Vincent Bugliosi lone gunman Oswald-did-it-project that I thought would never go anywhere.

It turned out that I was mostly right, because one simply can't make a believable case, 'write a good story', about Lee Harvey Oswald killing John F. Kennedy. He didn't do it, so they had to abandon that project.

Instead, what we're going to get later this year is mostly damage control - Tom Hanks & co. trying to save their faces - by making a movie about the events at Parkland hospital that early afternoon.

All this because they simply couldn't admit that they were wrong and that JFK's death was as a result of a conspiracy. They couldn't let it go, so they had to come up with 'Parkland'.

I haven't read the script yet, but I can already imagine how little the movie is going to have to do with reality and truth. There's basically no way they're going to let the facts stand in their way.  What you'll get is lies, omission and distortions - and more lies.

You won't hear anything about how the throat wound was an entry wound. You won't hear anything about how JFK's back of the head was gone - which means that he was shot also from the front and not just from behind.

You also won't hear about the numerous people who took a good look at the limousine outside the hospital - and saw a bullet hole in the windshield - a bullet hole that later 'vanished' but meant that more than three shots were fired.

Furthermore, you won't hear about the real story about that pristine magic bullet CE 399, that was planted by the conspiractors and was found on a stretcher outside the elevators - after the chain of evidence had been broken - right after the stretcher had been left unattended.

All this of course will tell us more than what we want to know about the entertainment industry. These are the people that I think we're supposed to look up to and yet they're going to fail us.

Truth is that they had 50 years to get to the bottom of it and the only guys who stepped up to the plate were Oliver Stone with his masterpiece JFK and Chris Carter with X-Files (to a certain extent).

What were the rest doing? It seems that they were doing nothing. Not that doing nothing is the biggest crime ever, but Tom Hanks & co, what the hell are you thinking? You're supposed to do better than this.

Ps. Coming up later this year, my Boston Legal JFK spec sripts.

Monday Mornings - pilot review.

 So, I decided to watch the pilot episode of 'Monday Mornings', a show about medical surgeons. It's created by David E. Kelley, who's best known for his lawyer shows, like The Practice and Ally Mcbeal.

After I watched it, I thought the pilot was actually really well made, but I'm not sure I'm going to keep watching it regularly. Maybe I will, maybe I won't.

I mean, it's not exactly a secret that I'm a massive fan of Kelley, but at the same time I'm not that much of a fan of medical shows. For example I didn't pay that much attention to Chicago Hope either, a show that he also created. (I guess I like ER the best)

Drama shows are usually about life and death, so naturally you would think that it would make sense to write about something that directly deals with those issues. After all, you need to have high stakes situations in order to keep the audience interested.

Yet, the problem sometimes tends to be that when a show handles these two issues, it turns out that the show is too much about death and not enough about life.

That's how I kinda felt about Monday Mornings. When I watched it, I felt it was a bit too depressing and didn't tell me anything that, well, I really wanted to know. The show tells us that surgeons make mistakes, patients die, and then a head honcho, in this case the great Alfred Molina reviews these mistakes in front of an audience.

David Kelley's shows have always been about showing compassion and about his insight into humans. I guess Monday Mornings is about those things. But every great DEK show has also been pretty absurd, like Picket Fences having cows giving birth to human beings or Ally Mcbeal having dancing babies. Monday Mornings isn't absurd.

There's of course nothing wrong about show not being absurd, but that part has always been Kelley's biggest strength as a writer. Monday Mornings is so serious - I guess the subject matter dictates the tone of the show - that we don't get to see him at his best. This stuff just seems too safe, whereas for example on Ally Mcbeal he decided to be himself and took risks, like he's supposed to.

What I'm trying to say here is that at a lot of other showrunners would be really lucky to helm a show like this, but we're talking about David Kelley here. In all honesty, based on the first episode, I'd probably rather watch a flawed absurdist Kelley show like Harry's Law, than Monday Mornings.

Writing a third Modern Family episode: more storylines.

In my last post I wrote about the storyline involving Mitchell and Claire. I thought it was a great idea, but we still need at least two more storylines. This time let's concentrate on those and hope that we can come up with stuff that makes sense.

This is going to be my third script and since my first two didn't have anything to do with Luke, I thought it would be about time that I'd write a storyline that gives him a chance to do something that's hopefully worthwhile.

So, I did come up with a pretty good idea about Luke, Alex and Haley, but there was a potential problem with the storyline.  What I mean by that is that the episode that aired two weeks ago also had a storyline about Luke getting a girlfriend - a coincidence indeed.

At first I thought that, meh, I have to say goodbye to the whole thing, but since the execution (S4e11) wasn't really good - Luke was uncharacteristically rude in it - I reconsidered and decided that my idea was still decent enough. The writers certainly didn't get it right and let's not forget that the backstory for Luke was missing too.

In my Luke storyline, he is supposed to go on a date, but because he doesn't apparently have much experience, the girls want to have their say too. Alex and Haley will try to help him as best as sisters only can. Of course helping in this case means complicating things and confusing Luke to the point that he doesn't know who he is anymore.

The one special thing about this storyline is that it's supposed to be an homage to one of those classic episodes from 'The Simpsons'. Well, to be more precise, an homage to a classic moment on the show - that you might not remember.

But still, we need at least one more storyline for the episode. One that includes Jay, Cameron, Phil, Gloria and/or Manny. So many possibilities and yet it's not that easy to come up with stuff that would have some kind of a connection to the Mitchell & Claire storyline.

In a way I'm tempted to go for another Fizbo that would involve Phil and Cameron, but I have to make a decision on that once I start writing. I'm also thinking about writing a storyline for Jay & Gloria in which they try to agree on where they should go on their vacation. But those are just possibilities that I'm not so sure of.

Another possibility would be to put Cameron and Jay together and give them a problem that they would have to figure out. Maybe it would have something to do with exercise. Or maybe they'd go to a race track.

In that case this would leave us with Manny, Phil and Gloria. Another episode with Phil/Gloria and sexual innuendo? I'm not sure I want that to happen. I think we have seen enough of that already so perhaps I have to come up with something else.

Who really created 'Two and a Half Men'?

Oh my, I managed to find this absolute gem from: http://www.natpe.org/natpe/images/pdf/2003pilotbible.pdf

You know what's so awesome about this? It seems to confirm the widespread rumor in Hollywood that the real creator of 2 1/2 Men isn't the person or persons that we're being told.

Remember that 'officially' the show is created by Chuck Lorre and Lee Aronsohn. They are the ones that get the big money from the syndication deal, since they are the 'creators'.

The problem here is that according to this official  press release from 2003, the pilot was written by Eric Lapidus. If you write the pilot, then you're basically the creator of the show.

So, how is it possible that the guy who wrote the pilot didn't even get a shared created by credit for Two and a Half Men?

I think someone should ask Chuck Lorre. Since he's probably still reading this blog: Chuck, what's going on in here?

Writing a third Modern Family spec script.

I thought I'd write one more Modern Family script because I don't really have anything meaningful to do at the moment. I haven't figured out all the storylines yet, except for the one that has to do with Claire and Mitchell.

In my opinion one of the most interesting storylines so far has been in episode s01e07, 'En Garde', in which it was revealed that Claire and Mitchell used to be figure skaters (in pairs) when they were kids.

Now, I don't know about you, but I liked Claire and Mitchell bonding so much that I thought it would be nice if we'd be able to revisit that subject matter again.  We haven't seen these two together much after that, have we?

So, in order to make this storyline interesting and relevant, I thought it would be really nice to write in the guy in the picture above, Brian Boitano. Mitchell and Claire were figure skaters, Brian Boitano the olympic gold medalist still is one.

This could be so much fun - and at the same it could be a really serious storyline too. Maybe Boitano actually knew our 'fire & nice' couple 25 years ago.  Perhaps it's time catch up on things and see how life has treated these people.

I think the storyline is almost bound to be funny and relevant because almost everyone knows the South Park song 'What would Brian Boitano do?' I'm sure we could find someone to sing it. Cameron & Mitchell might want to give it a go for example.

But the story could also be down to earth and give the characters more depth. I'm pretty sure our figure skating star would be proud of our environmental lawyer Mitchell and home mom Claire. Perhaps he would feel a bit sad about his own life (for the sake of the story).

As I said, I haven't figured out the other two storylines yet, but this one idea seems so good that I think I have a responsibility to write the script. It almost feels like the idea is too good to be true... 

Anyway, here's the song if you haven't heard or seen it before.