My producer for the animated show (who is also the producer for the half-anime show) was in town and I took him to
The Drawing Room for drinks. He kept snapping pictures of the untouched bottle of Grey Goose with his camera phone, which is one of the many reasons we remain such good friends. My career so far has been exclusively for pilots, as both writer, editor and director. This means that unless you're one of a handful of studio execs who have seen the pilots, you've never heard of me. What is amazing is that I have been able to live off of this for a year now. My producer's in town doing legwork for the animated show, which is- as you may have guessed: a pilot.
The original pilot I wrote for this is one of those backstory things that sets up why all the main characters are there, etc... What I've learned, though- is that this is a really stupid way to make a pilot. Television is famous for dropping these "origin story" pilot's and beginning with the second or third episode. The reason for this is pretty simple:
It's different from every other episode that will ever be shown! The first episode of
The Simpsons wasn't about how Homer and Marge wound up getting married, having kids and settling into a cozy house on Evergreen Terrace- it was about Homer hogging the TV and Bart irritating him until Homer choked the bejebuss out of him. A good pilot shouldn't set up the show, but show us what an average episode is like.
Yeah, it convinced my producer, too. So, now- guess who gets to do the rewrite?
I'm cramming in as much writing before the end of September on my own two main projects: the romantic comedy and the greek play. I saw an ad on craigslist for a local theatre company looking for plays that deal with war, which the greek play does. I sent over the synopsis and they love it. I was upfront about the fact the play isn't done, but they want to see it pronto, so- hurray for writing under deadlines. Actually, that's really the only way I get anything done. I'm really excited at the idea of doing something that will actually be seen by real people- as opposed to you know, studio executives (love you!).
In other news: Google has a kickass new tool called the Sidebar. I'll let the adorably geeky David Pogue over at the NYTimes
give you the full skinny.
*-
If you don't know already, "ANNOYED GRUNT" is how the phrase "D'oh!" appears when written in a The Simpsons script.
