Wow! My call for my secret but faithful readers to come in out of the cold worked way better than I ever expected! Hurray! Hi all! (Wave) I'm really flattered that as many people wrote in as did.
But if you haven't written in yet, please do!
Today I overslept again but made it to Spring Creek Productions -- that's the company where I intern -- by 10am. There wasn't much to do today except go through the slush pile and do "quick coverage" on the ones we'd rate PASS. If we'd rate them anything else, we have to do full coverage.
Luckily, even the majority of agent-submitted writing samples really, really suck. So reading and rating is easy.
I headed over to USC to see the Guest Speakers Glen Morgan and James Wong, writers for The X-Files and co-creators of Space: Above And Beyond. An interesting pair. They've been writing together for 14 or so years.
Morgan and Wong showed two versions of the teaser (the introductory segment, before the credits) of The X-Files episode "Home", a.k.a. the inbreeding/dead baby episode: the first one the way they wanted it, the second one the way it aired, after network standards approved it. Amazing stuff. Slight snips here and there, and a new sound effect for the baby noise. Not quite the difference between night and day.
They also showed the "clubbing" scene the way it was aired and the way it was originally edited, which was way more graphic than what made it on the air. In the original edit, there were seven complete club swings; the network wanted one. In the final edit, there were three complete swings and three "check swings" -- that is, we never the killers break their wrists and get a called strike. We never, of course, in either version, saw the clubs hit the victim.
Fascinating stuff about how there are tradeoffs of all kinds, and how what goes on TV can actually be scarier when you can't show everything.
One of the things that I of course fixated on that they said was that you work long and hard hours in the TV biz and it breaks up marriages, et cetera. I mentioned this to Darin and he said, "People always talk about how many hours they work, no matter what industry they work in."
That Darin. Always focusing on reality instead of paranoid fantasies of why I won't succeed at this biz.
After the Guest Speakers we had a review session for Brooke's Business class, because we have a midterm on Monday. Answer these types of questions:
Okay...uh...no problem. I'll be able to hire people to do this for me some day, right?
I got on the road home at 7pm after the review and there was nothing but traffic. I nearly got side-swiped and rear-ended a couple of times. I'm getting really tired of driving home and seeing the way-too-fast approach of a car in my rear-view mirror and knowing there's not a damn thing I can do about it -- they can slow down, they can swerve, or they can crush me from behind. This kind of situation happened to me at most once a week in Northern California...but, to be fair, I never commuted up there.