Essential Listening: Making It as a Writer in Hollywood
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- Category: Essential Listening
- Published on Wednesday, 27 June 2012 16:21
- Written by Chris
If there is one business that is easy to get into, you're definitely going to find it in Hollywood. I hear there's an endless need for prostitutes and people to get yelled at by Christian Bale. Writing jobs, not so much.
Actually, one surefire way to make money is to write a book about how to be a screenwriter. If you can scam your way to a new "Save the Cat", that should cover your mortgage payment for a couple of months.
If you live if a few roommates.
In a sometimes porno house in Van Nuys.
If you can't hack the rule of 8, Van Nuys is probably not for you. So it's back to Rancho Cucamonga to crash at your very in-the-closet power-gay cousin's place for a few weeks and catch accidental revelations of his testicles 7 time. 7 times before People's Court is on. This and a job at Starbuck's that might as well be a cattle call for Dead Hooker or Dead Homosexual in some police procedural.
Which is to say, you're not going to be a scriptwriter in Hollywood, kid. Ya got spunk. Ya got some chops, kid. But chops don't cut out here on Magnolia. Go back to Muncie, go back to Ada. The machine is going to suck you in the door with a couple of unpaid assistants jobs on set where Sandra Bullock will reduce you into a jellied ooze with her clenched jaw stare of deossification. (Fortitude save 44). If you don't hang yourself off the grating in the Two and a Half Men set, you might make it just long enough to stand in for Wilma Valderrama or shooing Lindsay Lohan away from the studio with a cattle prod.
Screw all that. Figure your shiz out before you go. Listen to podcasts. They are the answer to everything that ails you.
You can find any number out there that might give you insight in this capricious business. Many of the comedian-interviewing-comedian shows get real information of the guests, i.e. their friends.
But you might learn even more from shows dedicated to how people, i.e. gods, got their jobs writing or show-running. Of those, two should be on your radar.
Essential Listening: Making It as a Screenwriter - Making It with Riki Lindholme
Riki Lindhome talks to people in the entertainment industry and asks them how they got their careers. There's no road map for show business and everyone's story is different, so Riki interviews people about how they started, how they've kept it going and what they've learned along the way.
Honorable Mention: Nerdist Writers Panel
The Nerdist Writers Panel series is an informal chat moderated by Ben Blacker (co-creator of the Thrilling Adventure Hour; writer for Supah Ninjas, Supernatural, among others) with professional writers about the process and business of writing. Covering TV, film, comic books, music, novels, and any other kind of writing about which you'd care to hear. Proceeds from the live panels benefit 826LA, the national non-profit tutoring program.
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musicEssential Listening: Movies
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- Category: Essential Listening
- Published on Wednesday, 20 June 2012 20:25
- Written by Chris
Since the early days of radio, Guglielmo Marconi and Jagadish Chandra Bose and Alexander Stepanovich Popov and all their radio-creating buddies wanted one thing and one thing only: to find out what movies they should watch.
With the advent of podcasts, their dreams are fully realized. iTunes has well over 100 podcasts in the TV&Film category. Of course there are serious podcasts wherein film critics ponder the wider implications of what the latest Woody Allen release means for the state of popular culture. Those are fine, I suppose.
Many of the rest feature nerds making fun of movies. Or nerding out over movies. Better ones are comedians making fun of movies. Or nerding out over movies.
Today's winner is the latter.
Essential Listening: Movies - How Did This Get Made?
One of the many fine podcasts on the Earwolf network, HDTGM? is a fun, irreverent look at 'good' bad movies. Hosted by comedic actors Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas with a special guest every other week, they've tackled such film stallions as Birdemic, Twilight Breaking Dawn pt1, and Superman III. They even had Vanilla Ice on to discuss his starring role in Cool As Ice.
Honorable mention: Comedy Film Nerds.
This is one of the comedians nerding out podcasts, starring Graham Elwood and Chris Mancini, along with a special guest each week. Besides the fact that these two guys know movies way better than you, all you need to know is their tagline: Han shot first.
Add a commentEssential Listening: Sketch Comedy
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- Category: Essential Listening
- Published on Tuesday, 12 June 2012 15:06
- Written by Chris
We've tackled comedy before, selecting Marc Maron's WTF as the EP for that category. Were I to re-do that, I would almost certainly choose You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes. He's really stepped up his game. Walking the Room has also eclipsed WTF, which strays a little too often into music for my taste. And since Maron is more successful and less angry, it's lost some of its raw charm.
Here's the deal. Those three shows, plus many others I like (e.g. You Had to Be There and Jordan, Jesse, Go) are interview-centric. The host or hosts bring on a guest and make yuks-yuks while discussing the arc of their comedic careers. And that's fine. It's funny; it's interesting; it can even be compelling.
That is not the only kind of comedy podcast. Take sketch comedy. Think something like Saturday Night Live, but with audio only. Or improv. Improv has exploded like a bloated corpse fished out of the river. The best improv rules the school. Most of the rest is trite and yawn-inducing.
The sketch comedy podcast scene is, like the interview-format group, dominated by a few heavies. In this case, that would be: Comedy Bang Bang, the Pod F Tompcast, and the Thrilling Adventure Hour. I suspect that in a few months time, UCB's Asssscat might be in that list as well, though they'd have to improve the audio quality first. Seriously, it sounds like someome just recorded the live shows with a simple mic in a crowded room. Oh wait...
Comedy Bang Bang is the show to beat. They've recently started a run on the old picture box, getting signed with IFC to do a season of improv for basic cable. A goodly number of great comedians appear on their program. But, personally, I don't really get the appeal. I don't find host Scott Auckerman to be especially funny, and I think his improv skills aren't as sharp as they should be. He has a tendency, in my humble opinion, to take each element of what the other players say too seriously or too far, trying to 'yes and' every point, when many of those elements are just throwaway lines.
Ergo, this week's essential listening is...(drum roll)...
The Thrilling Adventure Hour
This is great. What is it? I'll let them describe it:
Acker & Blacker’s The Thrilling Adventure and Supernatural Suspense Hour is a staged comedy production in the style of an old-time radio show that proves radio is still the king of all media!
A sophisticated comedy sprinkled with affectionate homage to 1940’s era radio, the Thrilling Adventure… program features three non-serialized serials in each episode, as well as jingles and messages from sponsors such as Patriot Brand Cigarettes (“Good for your Constitution”).
Not convinced. Consider who's on the cast? Paul F Tompkins, John DiMaggio, Kevin Pollack, Paget Brewster, and regular guest stars like Andy Richter, Gillian Jacobs, John Hodgman, Nathan Fillion, and so on and so on.
How could it not be awesome?
Add a commentEssential Listening: Quick Pick
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- Category: Essential Listening
- Published on Wednesday, 06 June 2012 04:53
- Written by Chris
In my country of residence, we (and by we, I mean, they) are celebrating their version of Memorial Day. In true American fashion, I am having a BBQ.
More important than you.
And though I value you, dear readers, as much as I do my own health (I am terribly unhealthy), I do need to devote my time today to the task of scrubbing the blood off my walls and hiding the boxes of Steyr AUG A3's that fell off a truck the other day.
But don't think that I've forgotten your listening needs. Perish the thought!
What I have for you today are a few episodes of great shows that you simply must listen to at some point in your awesome, sure-to-not-end-soon lives. These are not the best episodes of these programs, but they are important for any number of reasons.
First: This American Life - The Giant Pool of Money
If you think you understand the global clusterfuck that was (is) The Great Recession? Think again. Okay, maybe you actually do, but still listening.
Second: RadioLab - Cosmic Habituation
Studies about the effectiveness of prozac, bird mating rituals, ability to identify criminals, and many other subjects from diverse fields have all seemed to have diminishing results as experiments are repeated. It is very, very weird.
Third: Stroke of Insight
Neuroanatomist (it's a thing) Jill Bolte Taylor had a stroke. Being a scientist, she decided to study it. Fascinating.
Add a commentEssential Listening: Atheism
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- Category: Essential Listening
- Published on Wednesday, 30 May 2012 06:51
- Written by Chris
Few groups base their identity on the absence of some thing. Those that do can be an unsavory lot. Holocaust deniers, for example. Climate change deniers. Very likely, many people would put atheists in with them as well. Studies routinely show that Americans trust atheists about as much as they do rapists. Weird that they have so little faith in Helen Keller and James Cameron, huh? But maybe we misunderstood the study. Maybe Americans just really trust rapists a lot.
Atheism, by definition is "the disbelief in a deity". And while this is quite true, the majority of atheists (in my experience), would not put that issue terribly high on the list of things that identify them. Rather, their atheism is an outcropping of something more important: critical thinking. The vast majority of big-A atheists seem to be, at heart, skeptics. They will not, cannot, accept something on faith. That's a good thing. Anyone trying to get you to believe something without evidence is delusional or selling you something.
It can work the other way around. For many, skepticism grows out of their fall from faith. Maybe they finally read the whole Bible and realized that, man, it does not make sense. Or they heard one too many lies from their pastor or their religious mom or religious boyfriend. Or they couldn't figure out how a Christian, who is called to 'love your enemy as yourself' could hate fags/Jews/Muslims/atheists/Obama. Or how good, god-fearing Christians, who demand the 10 Commandments be hung in every classroom and courthouse in the land, could support the death penalty and war.
Whichever path brought them there, atheists tend to fall into 2 camps: skeptics (which we've already addressed), and anti-theists. When people get their panties in a wad, it's usually (but not exclusively) about anti-theists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Just like loud, evangelical Christians are a minority of all Christ followers, anti-theists do not occupy every pew in the secular cathedral (otherwise known as a science lab).
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