My Life as a Screenwriter You’ve Never Heard Of
by Justin Marks

Here’s a day in the life of a writer that you don’t always get to hear about.

It was 5 p.m., and I was playing Call of Duty. Why? Because I wanted to. The phone rang; it was a producer with whom I’d just spent the past two years laboring over a cable pilot, a time-travelly science fiction thing. We’d delivered the final cut to the network, and we were awaiting The Call — the one where you hear that your show, which tested well, is being picked up, that your life is about to change.

But the producer had That Voice. Any experienced writer knows That Voice. Because That Voice means one thing: The network passed. “Hey,” the producer said, “we fought for it till the end. We’ll find something else.” I agreed. And that was that.

Probably not three minutes had elapsed in my game of Call of Duty. Two more minutes to go upstairs and erase my now-dead pilot’s name off the list of projects on my dry-erase board. Two years of effort gone in five minutes.

As I wiped the board clean, I saw another project listed below. Kind of a back-burner thing — I was busy at the time — but I owed the producer a call. So I picked up the phone. Told him I was in. By the next morning, I was back at the keyboard, as if yesterday’s pilot had never happened.

And that, my friends, is what it means to be Just Another Working screenwriter…

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Latest News About Writers Who Are Doing Better Than We Are

by Team TVWriter™

For close to two years we have been working passionately to bring first run premium content to an online platform with the creation of brand-new versions of the two iconic series, All My Children and One Life To Live. There was no precedent for this effort- we had no history-no barometer for how our fans would respond. We always knew there would quickly be new insights into how audiences would respond to our shows and this new platform, and that our ability to adapt quickly to audience needs would ultimately determine the long-term success of the shows and our mission. This is a new medium, a new time and we have always planned to make changes quickly by listening to you, our fans and customers.

Today it is clear these shows have resonated, as many millions of views have been logged since our April 29th debut, a mere two and a half weeks ago. We’ve consistently been in the top ten shows viewed on Hulu and viewers and critics alike have told us how impressed they are with the quality of both programs. The past two weeks have been invaluable in terms of learning about how you watch and when you watch our shows on this new platform. We have gained enormous insight through our actual viewing data and our research. And our research has revealed the following:

·         In the past these shows had their vast majority of views within the first 24 hours. Instead, our shows are primarily consumed on different days then when they originally air. Primarily, fans have been binge viewing or watching on demand, and as a result, we feel we have been expecting our audience to dedicate what has turned out to be an excessive amount of time to viewing these shows. (As an example, for the substantial audience only watching on the weekends, we are currently asking them to watch five hours of programming to keep pace with our release schedule).

·         On ABC the shows shared a large percentage of their viewers with each other. Yet, the majority of our viewers are watching one show or the other, not both, and they aren’t viewing the shows when they did before. Part of the reason for choosing between the shows may be that the largest viewing takes place either between 12PM and 1PM (when people generally can only fit one episode during lunch time) or between 5PM and 7PM (when the vast majority of competing shows are a half hour long). We are finding that asking most people to regularly watch more than a half hour per day online seems to be too much.

·         During their ABC runs, viewers watched only 2-3 episodes on average a week and picked up with whichever day’s episode it was. Our viewers seem to primarily start with the first episode and then continue forward episode by episode. Like with primetime serialized dramas as opposed to the traditional slower pacing of daytime, people feel lost if they miss an episode. People are starting from the beginning; the shows are designed for complete viewing from episode one. Yet starting from the beginning with the amount of episodes we are releasing is asking too much for viewers who need to catch up.

The clear conclusion is that while somewhat mixed, these viewing patterns resemble more closely the typical patterns of online viewing rather than how one would watch traditional television. This leads us to believe we are posting too many episodes and making it far too challenging for viewers to keep up. When it comes to online viewing, most of us are just trying to find time to watch series comprised of 13 to 22 episodes a season-so asking viewers to assign time for over 100 episodes per show is a daunting task.

Therefore, we have chosen to revise our scheduling model beginning this Monday, May 20th by introducing two new episodes from OLTL and AMC each week- new episodes of AMC will now run on Mondays and Wednesdays, and fresh episodes of OLTL will post Tuesdays and Thursdays. MORE, our behind the scenes series, will run as a single show on Fridays. This allows us to introduce a new episode of quality television every Monday through Friday and gives the audience a chance to catch up as we continue to build awareness and excitement around these new shows.   Because Hulu agrees with our findings, for the meantime they will keep all of our episodes on Hulu.com for free to give viewers the opportunity to find us and catch up.

We know our most dedicated viewers will be upset as they would probably prefer more shows to less (we personally wish there were more episodes of our favorite shows; we would love 50 episodes a year of Homeland, Mad Men or The Simpsons). We apologize to these viewers and ask them to please understand we are trying to ensure our shows succeed and not meet the fate they experienced previously. We need to devise a model that works for all viewers and follows how they want, and are actually watching, online. When it comes to online, as with all new technology, it’s adapt or fail.  We feel fortunate to be an online company and to have such an opportunity to adapt. Of course, we will continue to evaluate all the data that comes in and will be vigilant about revising our strategy as needed.

We want to be clear that this will in no way impact our feverish pace of production – we will be filming new episodes through mid-June, continue editing throughout July and until we go back into production in August. It’s a frenetic schedule but all of us are up for the challenge and excited to continue to deliver great shows.

As a new venture we felt obligated to address the needs of our viewers head on and to make adjustments that we think will work for our viewers. And as always, we thank you for your continued support and encouragement.

Sincerely,

Rich Frank and Jeff Kwatinetz

Which, of course, is what makes this such important reading:

by Alissa Miller

In recent years there has been a proliferation of Netflix, Hulu, YouTube/Google, Amazon and other digital distribution platforms. Netflix alone has over 36 million streaming members worldwide, and internet goliaths like Amazon, Hulu and YouTube/Google are ramping up their own subscription streaming services.

Each subscriber pays a yearly or monthly subscription fee to stream content, and these fees form a large part of the digital distributor’s revenue.

But in order to attract an extensive group of subscribers, digital distributors need to continue to provide an immense amount of original, high-quality content.

Netflix’s CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings recently said in GQ that “the goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” So far in 2013, Netflix has aired “House of Cards” and “Hemlock Grove” and is planning to debut “Orange Is the New Black” (by “Weeds” creator Jenji Kohan), Season 4 of “Arrested Development” (which previously aired and then was canceled on Fox) and Season 2 of “Lilyhammer.”

Netflix has been able to attract programming with the promise of a large and diverse audience and its binge-viewing model, which allows subscribers to watch an entire season in one sitting. In some instances, Netflix has also offered a full-season commitment, which gives producers the assurance that their series will not be canceled halfway through the season.

Likewise, Hulu plans to air its first animated series “The Awesomes” (co-created by Seth Meyers and “SNL” alum Michael Shoemaker) this summer and has distributed around 25 new series in the last two years.

These new distribution platforms have resulted in increased competition for high-quality content by both digital distributors and the established cable channels and networks.

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The cool pic at the top of this article isn’t from this article, sad to say. We found it at  TV Mole, which turns out to be a wonderful resource for “industry intelligence, how-to articles and international pitching and funding opportunities – everything you need to get your factual TV programme commissioned.”

We’ll be writing more about TV Mole. (Please, no “Is that a threat or a promise?” jokes.)

The definition of the world “meme”, in the broadest sense, is “An idea, behavior, style or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture”. Internet memes are a subset of that behavior that takes place online, where people spread a cultural touchstone from person to person, often referred to as going “viral”.

But what is and is not a meme can be tough to define. After all, a meme can be almost anything including a hashtag on Twitter, a photo with changing user-generated captions and even a short video a cat pretending to play a keyboard.

All that’s required is that a cultural item be spread from person to person rather than some soft of central source.

However, this spread of content creates a series of difficult questions with regards to copyright. Though it’s easy to think of memes as being owned by no one, rather a creation shared by the Internet, the law often thinks different as many memes do qualify for copyright protection and were, at some point, created by someone who holds that copyright.

These issues are likely going to grow as memes grow in importance commercially. This was illustrated recently by a lawsuit filed against Warner Brothers and game developer 5th Cell. In the lawsuit, Charles Schmidt, the creator of the Keyboard Cat meme and Christopher Orlando Torres, creator of the Nyan Cat meme, claim that their works were unlawfully used in various Scribblenauts games and are seeking damages for trademark and copyright infringement.

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And, yeah, I do have some concerns. Mainly that Michael J. Fox’s new show is going to make me cry too much (for him) while I laugh.

And, just between us, I was one of the writers of the original version of IRONSIDE, and this ain’t IRONSIDE. It’s more LUTHER IN A WHEELCHAIR. (Which, come to think of it, could be better.)

No reservations about James Spader’s new show, though. Because it’s ruthless. And Spader’s the best “Hannibal Lecter” clone yet. (Better than Anthony Hopkins, that’s for sure.)

What do you think?

Click here to view the embedded video.

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