Here’s another lesson from the great TV showrunners: make sure every single element of the creative process is under your control.

Or don’t.

Many of them wanted to make sure they steered each and every element of the production to the screen. Mathew Wiener of Mad Men was particularly obsessive, making sure all the period pieces were perfect, but also maintaining a tight rein on the characters (he admonished one of the writer producers for allowing Don to brush the dust of his jacket sleeve in a certain way). I guess this makes perfect sense: if you have conceived of a vision for a story and all its constituent parts then you’d probably like to make sure all those parts turn out as close to that vision as possible. In the position of showrunner you have one of the few modern opportunities outside of a Woody Allen film to make this happen.

But most artistic endeavours are collaborative processes, and you could look at that collaboration as either a help or a hindrance; a series of improving contributions or a damaging chain of dilution. And the truth is either way is possible depending on how good you are at selecting the contributors and how adept you are at getting the best from them. So the questions are: how much control are you prepared to concede, and how good can you make the parts you have to let go?

This is an interesting question in advertising where you can certainly have total control over a press ad (client input notwithstanding), but if that works for you, how comfortable would you be when a director, DP, music composer and set designer turn up to demonstrate the extent to which your vision chimes with theirs?

From a personal point of view I like spending my spare time as a novelist because I can control every part of the final work. Sure, I’ll take suggestions, but it’s up to me to incorporate or decline them. Then the book succeeds or fails almost entirely because of me. Does that make me a megalomaniac? To a certain extent I suppose it does, but more often than not I’ve been disappointed with the contributions of collaborators (that doesn’t mean they were bad; I just wanted to see how a closer approximation of my original vision would have turned out).

So maybe the grip, maybe the freedom. But whichever you end up choosing, the fun part is that you’ll never know what the alternative would have been.

I’ve just finished reading Difficult Men, an analysis of the great cable TV series of recent years and the ‘difficult’ men behind them.

It’s a fascinating insight into the creative and development processes that have brought us these ridiculously good dramas, from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad, via Mad Men, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Deadwood and several others.

There were so many aspects of them that seemed interesting, or applicable to other areas of creativity, that i thought I’d look at each angle in turn until I ran out of them.

The first is a question that I’ve asked and discussed many times and in many different contexts over the years: do you have to be something of an arsehole to be a great creative?

The entire theme of Difficult Men suggests that you do, as many of the showrunners (the people in control of the artistic vision and central idea of these series) are indeed ‘difficult’: arrogant, manipulative, ruthless and perfectly happy to sacrifice niceties to protect what they perceive to be necessary parts of the creative process.

But (sadly inconsistent with the title of the book), two of the showrunners, Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad and Alan Ball of Six Feet Under and True Blood, are very nice people indeed. Their writers rooms are places of happiness and harmony, but in no way has that compromised the quality of the output.

Ball says: ‘I understand being passionate about your work but I’m not a person who wants to control every element. Nothing makes me happier than watching a show come together in a way that surprises me. Or getting a script where I don’t have to do anything to it. I want this to be fun. Maybe I’m just lazier than most people.’

(The hard grip vs loose rein is another point worth exploring in greater detail.)

So the evidence is there: you don’t have to be an arsehole to create greatness. But having said that, some people do have to be arseholes to do their best. For whatever reason, be it insecurity, fear, daddy issues or a megalomaniacal streak, some people can’t do what Alan and Vince do and still be sure that they will produce classically brilliant work unless they exert the kind of control that pisses off those around them. Then again, they might not be intrinsically mean people, but the wide variety of skills the job demands could lead to discrepancies that create problems: they might have filled their writers room with the wrong people, they could be under a different kind of pressure from the station suits, they may just be great writers but not inspirational leaders. But whatever it is, their attempts to weave a thousand disparate threads into a perfect quilt may not be perfect in both output and method.

From the outside these achievements are so immense that I suppose the arsehole-ness is a price worth paying for such a great result (and anyway, I didn’t have to suffer the bullshit, so whatevs). They got into a situation that most of us can’t even begin to comprehend and made the best of it; who are we to judge that?

There isn’t a finishing school in being a showrunner, so there are as many styles as there are people who do the job, and the people who work with them have the choice to do so or quit (as many of them eventually do). They may suffer but they could also look back and see that they contributed to a lasting piece of art that many people enjoyed, loved and admired. Was that worth it? I’m sure there are many answers to that, but I think many of us would wade though a few turds to be part of something that incredible.

So it’d be great to live in a world without arseholes, but like foie gras, we just have to accept that sometimes wonderful things are the result of misery.

50s American housewife drops acid (thanks, V):

The Wild goddam West (thanks, G).

If rappers were copywriters (thanks, J).

Bill Murray infographic (thanks, V).

Shit PR ideas (thanks, W).

Commentary to rival honey badger (NSFW if you’re a dog. Thanks, J):

10 things wrong with the modern blockbuster (thanks, G).

GTAV on the SNES.

The Humping Pact (thanks, J).

The horror of getting caught checking out computer porn (thanks, G):

Get a picture painted and help stop cancer (nb: this is a charity link, not an entertainment one).

Awful comic book artist dissected (thanks, D).

Everything in a Golf (thanks, G).

Brand generator for students getting their book together (thanks, W & S).

Let this site choose movies for you (thanks, G).

Good ‘lost’ signs (thanks, D).

Steve Albini’s letter to Nirvana about producing ‘In Utero’ (thanks, E).

Amazing projection mapping (thanks, B):

Occasionally a side project comes along that touches my heart so deeply that I just have to tell you all about it:

Project Bush is seeking to destigmatise the porncentric expectations of femaile pubic hair.

How?

Glad you asked.

By getting as many of you as possible to go to Mother on the 3rd of October to have your own topiary (or lack thereof) photographed anonymously for an exhibition.

As the organisers put it:

A project designed to encourage debate and discussion about choice in pubic hair, and to show there’s more to vaginas than their current representation in porn.

It’s not about exhibitionism. It’s not about pornography. It’s about choice.

We are going to photograph bushes in all their glory, totally anonymously and very beautifully, in our Bush Booth next Thursday 3rd October here at Mother.

Be there.

You have nothing to lose but the opportunity of having someone anonymously photograph your muff.

If you were on the blog late last night you might have seen a link to, and a cut-and-paste from, this site.

It’s a huge amount of brilliant screenwriting advice from Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, the guys behind Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean and Aladdin (as well as this year’s less successful Lone Ranger).

Anyway, apparently my cut-and-paste fucked their site up, so now there’s just the link.

Click on it to find out about how ideas (not just screenwriting ones) live and die, the Raiders Of The Lost Ark method of cramming more words onto a page, and why letting your first excellent screenplay go unmade is a really smart thing to do.

In the ever-expanding world of car analogy ads I found this one to be refreshingly fun.

http://vimeo.com/66487005

Back in 1991 Extreme made clear the importance of using ‘more than words’.

It was a magical, beautiful song, but also unwittingly prescient.

We now operate in a world of visual-verbal communication that is vastly different even to ten years ago. We now write so many texts, IMs, status updates, Tweets and emails that they are now our primary form of communication. Whether we write ‘to you’ or ‘2U’,’I’m happy’ or :-), there is a need to make the written word work harder so that it carries the delicate nuances we use to shape our spoken words.

As a fan of the evolution of the English language, I rather like neologisms such as ‘pwned’ and ‘teh’, but I realise they have to be pointed in the right direction and I’m aware that occasionally putting those words in the communications of someone who is pushing 40 has a kind of self-conscious irony (that might only be in my head). I sometimes add ‘z’ to ‘skill’ for that very reason, and whether I refer to the internet as ‘t’internet’ or the interwebs or whatever the ‘amusing’ nom du jour might be, it’s all gravy (there I go again).

So a word is not just a word. If I say chair there is little meaning beyond that thing we all sit on, but whether or not I sign off an email with ‘cheers’, ‘best’, ‘Bx’ or any one of several other options depends on who I’m talking to, how well I know them, how they sign off their emails and the mood I’m trying to convey. I usually go for ‘cheers’ because it’s noncommittally affable as well as versatile, but there are plenty of people who would think something was wrong with me if I didn’t add a little ‘x’ to the end.

Emoticons also fascinate me. I think they’ve changed from being irredeemably twee to being essential additions to many communications. Because we live in a world so steeped in irony it’s difficult not to have, say, a sarcasm font that allows us to make a joke a little clearer. For me this is where the 😉 (I always use the nose, BTW) comes in. I’m joking, but not 🙂 happy. Actually, I think that’s the only emoticon I use, but I use it daily.

Then we have grammar. I sense a new role for the much-maligned exclamation mark: like the emoticon it started off as a sledgehammer that ought to be used sparingly, but I now find myself adding it my emails to kind of suggest I’m in a good mood about what I’ve written. Consider how ‘thanks’ looks compared to ‘thanks!’. I feels the latter denotes a brighter, cheerier form of gratitude, while the former can seem grumpy or reluctant. Of course, both of these depend on the context, but it’s just another example of how we are (or at least I am) having to adapt written style to more accurately convey meaning or mood.

I think it’s a very interesting time for English: old prejudices must be reexamined and new ways forward explored. There is much trial and error to come, but I think that a written English that can work as hard a the spoken version is both welcome and overdue!!!!!!!!!!

UPDATE: I didn’t know WordPress would turn my emoticons into yellow faces. That was not, and never has been, my intention 🙁

Sublime… Sartre Wars (thanks, T):

Behind the scenes of Rosemary’s Baby (thanks, T).

Photos of New York, 1970-1989 (thanks, G).

And vintage crime scenes superimposed on modern photos of New York (also thanks, G).

Octopi make chameleons look like dogs’ nuts.

More accidental penises (thanks, J).

Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling (thanks, G).

Difficult-to-strip-to hits (thanks, R).

The writer of Out Of Sight and Get Shorty on writing movies:

The habits of happy people (thanks, G).

I’ve posted clips before, but here is all of ‘Talking Funny’:

Have an acid trip without taking acid (thanks, R).

Terrible estate agent photos (thanks, G).

Stairway To Heaven brilliantly reworked by Heart. Yes, Heart. (Thanks, R.):

Ah, South African students… (Thanks, G):

Looking for a technique to steal for your ad? (Thanks, N.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzlh18EvVDs

Directed by Gondry (he’s back too!).

(Thanks, G: for the title and the link.)