If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Last week I went to another talk at the Writers Guild Foundation in LA.

This time it was the turn of Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzman, writers of more recent blockbusters than you can shake a dilithium crystal at (the recent Star Trek moves and Transformers movies as well as Mission Impossible 3 and the new TV series, Sleepy Hollow).

Here, in no particular order, is their advice:

At first a gig is a gig, but then only take things you know you can close (love enough to finish).

Find the thing in the job that you like. They didn’t want to do Transformers, but saw it as a chance to write an ET or Back to the Future about a teenager and his car. They thought it was the best they could do when they had three producers, two studios, a toy company and Michael Bay to please.

Be pleasant.

Collaborate. And be ok with hat. It’s not cheating. They often hire a room full of comedy writers to beef up the gags in a script.

Look at movie sequels like TV episodes (they started in TV and regard big movies as initial parts of a series that needs to keep going in order to make financial sense for a studio).

Bet on yourself.

The audience is never wrong

Don’t be married to your words, be married to the spirit of your words.

A writer writes.

Record your conversations (to help with writing dialogue rather than to protect yourself legally).

Playing an instrument helps with the rhythm of writing.

They envisaged Kirk and Spock as Lennon and McCartney. Find great stuff in non-fiction and apply it to fiction.

Not ‘which actor would we cast’ but which actor’s character in what film (they didn’t just write for Denzel Washington; they wrote for Denzel’s character in Crimson Tide).

Write the crappy version on purpose so that you have the structure (‘Bob came into the room and said I hate you, I’m fed up with the kids, I need  to get away’ etc.).

Cowboys and Aliens failed because it was written for Robert Downey Junior. Then he got replaced by Daniel Craig and someone suggested they try to make The Searchers out of it, an obvious mistake for a summer popcorn flick called Cowboys and Aliens.

Transformers Two: Alex said that to say it’s bad would offend the word bad .

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And that was that. They seemed as nice as millionaire screenwriters could be. At one point the moderator kept swinging his arm to make emphasis what he was saying and almost knocked over a vase of flowers. Bob noticed this and moved them, but took a sniff as he did so, a move that came across to me as wanting to disguise his gesture for fear that it might make his friend’s clumsiness obvious.

Or maybe I read too much into that.

PS: apparently Bob may not be as lovely as I thought.

Tony Kaye is a director whose work dominated the UK advertising scene of the 80s and 90s.

Here are four of his many amazing ads:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j43sBiQUndo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV4Rw41RCxw

Along with an article he wrote in 2002 that explains him rather well.

If you’re around my age you’d have started in the industry revering him and his work. He produced so many great ads for so many varied clients in such a diverse range of styles that anyone would have given their left arm to work with him:

In addition, he was also pretty crazy (by most definitions of the word), holding the prints of his ads to ransom if he didn’t agree with the client’s cut. He then popped off to LA to direct American History X and had a much publicised feud with its star, Edward Norton:

I recall a team at AMV who made a campaign with him. It didn’t go so well, but that didn’t deter them from sending a request for him to sponsor them for the New York Marathon. The reply, which said ‘GO TAKE A FLYING FUCK OFF WESTMINSTER BRIDGE’, was blown up and hung on their wall with pride.

Now Creative Circle’s President, Ed Morris has directed a profile of the man himself, who seems to have mellowed a great deal now that he’s in his seventh decade:

And while I’m on the subject of Creative Circle, next year’s awards are going to be made of other crushed awards that have been sent in as part of an amnesty (so far, Pencils, Lions, Arrows and Clios have been sent in):

So if you have any old awards/trophies that are collecting dust, send them over to CC. And they don’t just want advertising trophies; they’ll also accept swimming, cycling, ice skating, archery, even ballroom dancing. Who knows, perhaps your old swimming badge will end up in a gutter next to a pissed creative! Send yours to Creative Circle, 90 Long Acre, Covent Garden, WC2E 9RZ, or email jeremy@creativecircle.co.uk and he’ll send over some lucky lackey to pick it up.

Very creative…

Amusing airplane Twitter note fight (thanks, D).

Listen to Jordan and Peter sing (thanks, J):

Pixar’s rules of storytelling analysed in depth.

And while we’re here, a TED talk on story from the creator of Wall-E (both thanks to Cinephile):

Lots of spray paint, graffiti artists and wall space (thanks, J):

Behind the scenes photos of The Shining.

Kanye or Creative Director? (Thanks, J.)

Lovely GoT theme rendition (thanks, B):

Inverted celebs (thanks, J).

Iggy Pop’s tour riders (thanks, T).

I just had the immense privilege of hearing the Breaking Bad writers room inhabitants (including showrunner, creator, writer, and director, Vince Gilligan) give a talk.

Here are a few things I wrote down for your interest:

The writers wrote well because Vince created a feeling of ownership about the scripts, so they felt it was ‘our show’ and invested themselves to a greater extent.

Vince lives by a quote from Frank Capra’s autobiography, something like ‘the greatest sin is boredom’. But he does wonder if you can take that maxim too far.

One of the writers was very keen to join after watching a scene in season one where Jesse is having sex with a meth head in a motel. At one point she says, ‘That’s my root beer’; he thought she said ‘Oops, my pooper’, and thought the show simply had no boundaries.

The aim with Breaking Bad was to accomplish something different on TV. In the old days TV characters never changed throughout a season, or even the lifetime of the show, but Vince wanted Walt to change.

They approached the writing by asking where Walt’s/Jesse’s/Skylar’s etc. head was at over and over again. Get them into a situation then look for the truth of how they would really react to those circumstances. This sometimes led to things happening several episodes later than they had planned.

Vince really didn’t want to kill Mike, but he told the actor he was going to die  when they met at Aaron Paul’s engagement party.

The original plan was to kill Jesse at the end of the first season.

The fly episode was written because they ran out of money, so they could only shoot in a studio. They could have used different locations/sets, but they decided to do it like a Pinter play, at the extreme of the parameters they had been given.

Fring was named after the German football player Torsten Frings (one of the writers is a big football fan).

Even if you’re a control freak, if you hire good people you’re an idiot not to take their input.

Other endings that were considered:

Jesse was going to kill Walt. During the planning of this Jesse kidnapped Hank and, while Walt was watching, killed him.

Jesse went to prison and Walt tried to bust him out with the M60 that he uses at the end of season 5.

Marie was gong to shoot Walt because of what he did to Hank.

Other gruesome scenes were considered, including one where Walt tied someone up in his basement and rigged him up to a shotgun so he could commit suicide whenever he wished. Then he came in every so often and chopped a few inches of one of his legs then cauterised the wound with a blow torch. Eventually, when the would was up to the thigh, Walt’s son walked in and got in the way of the machine gun. The man pulled the shotgun trigger and killed them both.

Another had Fring walking round a DIY shop with another man whom he asked for a number between 1 and 24. Then he casually bought a chisel. Soon after, Fring rammed the chisel into the guy’s back at the corresponding number of vertebrae, paralysing him.

That’s all, folks.

I don’t understand this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bfP3TZHUzY

Help?

(Thanks, D.)

Philosophy:

1. the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.
2. a theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for behaviour.

I suppose there’s a lot of it about.

From TED talks to Freakonomics-type books, to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast And Slow, there are plenty of people telling us the best ways in which to live our lives.

But the ones I currently notice most are the comedians. The most obvious example of all this is Russell Brand, with his editorship of The New Statesman, Newsnight interview and regular columns for The Guardian. But there’s also plenty of life advice to be had from Louis CK railing against the indulgences of modern life, Ricky Gervais’s atheism and Frankie Boyle’s surreal analyses of pretty much anything.

Now, the idea of the fool who is actually the smartest guy in the room is far from a new one (see King Lear for one that’s several centuries old), but it seems to me that we’re in a time where these opinions are particularly pointed and are gaining a large amount of traction.

The great 70s comedians, such as Pryor, Bruce and Carlin were entertainingly analytical, but the UK mainstream never experienced the same thing, as our contemporaneous versions of those geniuses were racist pricks such as Stan Boardman and Jim Davidson. Sure, there was smart satire in the work of Monty Python, but it went round the houses and up the drainpipe twice before you knew what it was saying about British life of the time.

In the 80s we did indeed have a lot of political comedians, such as Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle, but their vitriol was precisely in step with the opposition of the time. These days the opposition and the government are far more aligned, so saying something outside of the Tory and Labour common ground is far more provocative. In 2013 you have to take on everyone because they all want to protect corporate tax avoidance, fudge the regulation of media and do very little about the stranglehold energy companies have on us.

I once went to a talk by Clive Stafford-Smith, who runs Reprieve, and he said that the only way to really damage a leader is to use humour to make him or her look ridiculous. Well, we seem to have  a few people heading in that direction.

I wonder where it will end…

Hunter S. Thompson vs The Hells Angels (thanks, B):

Pretend to your parents that you’re a drug dealer.

Fast food truths (thanks, L).

Wrestling is fake (thanks, V):

Motherfucking website (thanks, C).

Slight misquotes on T-shirts (thanks, J).

Fuck overfishing (thanks, P):

Amazing Breaking Bad video (spoilers alert; thanks, T).

Very funny blog (thanks, W).

World’s most beautiful data viz.

Watch Kanye get his bottom handed to him (thanks, F).

Not very inspirational quotes (thanks, T).

Breaking Bad bloopers (not as good as the ones for The Cannonball Run).

I love the idea.

I love the product range.

I particularly like the art direction of the product range.

But there’s something that doesn’t feel quite right here.

It feels like it’s trying too hard to be funny (check the ‘Lincolnshire gravel from Lincolnshire’ line):

Like the rest of you, I’ve seen some incredible HN ads over the years and they’ve always had an understated, intelligent tone that allowed you to get the gag; these rather force feed you with the yuks, and for me that just ain’t quite HN.

But overall that’s a pretty small quibble against a nice piece of work.

Art Director extraordinaire Dave Dye has just started imparting his colossal advertising wisdom on a blog.

He used to be my sort-of boss at AMV, so I have had plenty of first-hand experience of how useful his advice can be.

I remember when he first arrived. My knowledge of his physical appearance was gleaned entirely from his picture in D&AD’s The Art Directors Book. Funnily enough he didn’t look quite the same as that shot (not black and white, none of his face in moody shadow), so I didn’t recognise him. Beyond that I’m pretty sure he was dressed quite smartly, so when I first saw him in the studio at AMV and he smiled in a friendly, hello-ish manner at me I thought, ‘Who is that account bloke and what’s he doing in the studio?’.

Then I found out it was Dave and proceeded to fail to impress him to a quite stunning degree. We’ve had many a cup of tea since and he’s reminded me a couple of times of an occasion where he took me to task for something (almost certain laziness) and I resolved to work harder. Dave then popped down to my office at around 4:30 to find that Paul and I had gone home. I don’t recall that specific afternoon, but that’s probably because it describes so many similar situations and I just can’t narrow it down to the one he’s talking about.

Anyway, Dave was a top CD. You always slightly feared taking your work to him because 1) he has very high standards and 2) He and Sean would take the piss out of your work if it was takethepissoutof-able. But then your work always ended up better, so it was worth the extra work (by this stage I was working harder. Nearly losing your job can do that to you).

Then he popped off to start CDD, which produced a lot of truly great work before collapsing due to reasons it took 4 hours and several pints of beer for Dave to explain.

On then to DHM and more great work before that changed this year to become Hello People, and so another phase of presumably great advertising begins.

Oh, and just in case he pops into your studio in a suit, this is what he looks and sounds like: