The UBS Evening Television & Movie News 1.21.10
Posted by George H. Sirois on 01.21.2010
A special report look at the current state of unsolicited scripts on the Internet, a brief look at the next wave of films trying to knock Avatar out of the number 1 spot, the latest box office results and my Mad Prophet rant looking at the past and present screw-ups of NBC’s late night. All this, plus Andy’s Photo News Brief in The “Never EVER Believe Your Contract” Edition…
Welcome everyone to the latest edition of the UBS Evening Movie News. I'm George H. Sirois, and if you're on Twitter, you can find me HERE! And don't forget, for all of you who are new to 411Mania.com, make sure you check out all of our zones. We have some of the best writers on the Internet right here, and we love to hear from all of you! So keep coming back to read what we have for you, make us your homepage and if you have Facebook, make sure to join our group HERE!
CHOSEN ONES, STEP FORWARD!
"Eons ago, on the planet known as Denab IV, its creator Excelsior appeared as a vision to several people he deemed "Chosen Ones." Those lucky few were selected by him to lead their fellow Denarians in keeping the planet as the paradise he always envisioned. As each passing generation of the Chosen Ones reached a certain age, Excelsior visited them in their dreams to give them the wisdom necessary to pick up where the previous generation left off. This continued on until Excelsior's spiritual form was cast down to the planet he had taken such care in crafting.
I'm thrilled to report that the pre-orders just keep trickling in. Each day, someone else is putting in an order and making sure their names go into the acknowledgement section of the novel. In fact, yesterday 3 more came in, so feel free to click on the link and be a part of this growing group. You can even go to the main blog page and let me know of your intent to order so I can at least make sure your name will be in the acknowledgements section…
This week, we're doing something a little different in the news section. I saw a terrific piece in the Wall Street Journal that will serve both as very informative and a bit of a splash of cold water in the face for all aspiring screenwriters hoping to make their connections on the Internet. Not quite some news I WANTED to give, but it's something that I feel is very necessary that you know.
And with that, let's move on…
SYBIL THE SOOTHSAYER
EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES: A drama centered on the efforts of John and Aileen Crowley (Brendan Fraser and Keri Russell) to find a researcher (Harrison Ford) who might have a cure for their two children's rare genetic disorder.
It's nice to see Brendan Fraser get a chance to be involved in an adult drama like this, since the guy rarely gets any credit for work he did in films like Gods & Monsters. Hopefully this will open up the general public's eyes to what he can do.
LEGION: Paul Bettany stars as an archangel who teams with a group of strangers to protect a young woman pregnant with the new messiah.
They couldn't use "The Terminangel" as a title? If there's any more evidence we need to show that the beauty isn't in the original story, but in the original take on a familiar story, this is it right here. I doubt it will knock Avatar out of the number 1 spot, which is ironic since that's ANOTHER movie telling a familiar story in a new way.
TOOTH FAIRY: A bad deed on the part of a tough minor-league hockey player (Dwayne Johnson) results in an unusual sentence: He must serve one week as a real-life tooth fairy.
The original script for this was written over fifteen years ago and was supposed to be offered to Arnold Schwarzenegger. He did Last Action Hero instead, and we know how that turned out. But looking at the clips I've seen of this, I can understand why Arnold is probably immensely happier with his decision than to be associated with this. Even as far as family movies go, this just doesn't look good at all, but that probably means it will be a big hit since the families likely already took their kids to see The Squeakquel and need something new to show them.
Credit: TheMovieBox.net
JIM WEBBING AND HIS IT'S THE HONEST TRUTH DEPARTMENT
The following buzzkill has been brought to you by the Wall Street Journal: In 1991, a book editor at Random House pulled from the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts a novel about a murder that roils a Baltimore suburb. Written by a first-time author and mother named Mary Cahill, "Carpool" was published to fanfare. Ms. Cahill was interviewed on the "Today" show. "Carpool" was a best seller.
That was the last time Random House, the largest publisher in the U.S., remembers publishing anything found in a slush pile. Today, Random House and most of its major counterparts refuse to accept unsolicited material.
When Minnesota mom Ms. Guest sent out "Ordinary People" in 1975, it was refused by the first publisher. Another wrote, "While the book has some satiric bite, overall the level of writing does not sustain interest and we will have to decline it." It became a best seller and a movie.
Getting plucked from the slush pile was always a long shot—in large part, editors and Hollywood development executives say, because most unsolicited material has gone unsolicited for good reason. But it did happen for some, and so to legions of would-be novelists, journalists and screenwriters—not to mention "D-girls" and "manuscripts girls" from Hollywood to New York who held the hope that finding a gem might catapult them from entry level to expense account—the slush pile represented The Dream.
Now, slush is dead, or close to extinction. Film and television producers won't read anything not certified by an agent because producers are afraid of being accused of stealing ideas and material. Most book publishers have stopped accepting book proposals that are not submitted by agents. Magazines say they can scarcely afford the manpower to cull through the piles looking for the Next Big Thing.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. The Web was supposed to be a great democratizer of media. Anyone with a Flip and Final Cut Pro could be a filmmaker; anyone with a blog a memoirist. But rather than empowering unknown artists, the Web is often considered by talent-seeking executives to be an unnavigable morass.
It used to be that you could bang out a screenplay on your typewriter, then mail it in to a studio with a self-addressed stamped envelope and a prayer. Studios already were reluctant to read because of plagiarism concerns, but they became even more skittish in 1990 when humorist Art Buchwald sued Paramount, alleging that the studio stole an idea from him and turned it into the Eddie Murphy vehicle, "Coming to America." (Mr. Buchwald received an undisclosed settlement from Paramount.)
Stephenie Meyer sent 15 query letters about her teenage-vampire saga. She got nearly 10 rejection letters; one even arrived after she signed with an agent and received a three-book deal from Little, Brown. She doesn't need to send out query letters anymore.
Today, you can't even send an e-mail to a studio. When visitors to the Universal Pictures Web site select the "contact us" option, they must agree to a waiver that frees Universal and its affiliates from liability related to accusations of plagiarism. "While we are always happy to hear from you," the Web notice says, "it is Universal's policy not to accept or consider creative materials, ideas, or suggestions other than those we specifically request. This is to avoid any misunderstandings if your ideas are similar to those we have developed independently."
"It does create an incredibly difficult Catch-22 on both sides, particularly for new writers wanting to get their work seen," says Hannah Minghella, president of production for Sony Pictures Animation.
Fending off plagiarism lawsuits has become an increasing headache for publishers and studios. "It's become the cultural version of malpractice," says Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of public radio's "Studio 360."
Some producers make it easy: They just refuse to deal with new writers at all. Mike Clements, president of Good Humor, the production company founded by Tom Werner ("The Cosby Show"), has a personal policy against reading any sample or script that is not sent to him by an agent. "I make the occasional exception for a friend, or for my aunt," he says. "I just make them sign a release first."
As writers try to find an agent—a feat harder than ever to accomplish in the wake of agency consolidations and layoffs—the slush pile has been transferred from the floor of the editor's office to the attaché cases of representatives who can broker introductions to publishing, TV and film executives. The result is a shift in taste-making power onto such agents, managers and attorneys. Theirs are now often the first eyes to make a call on what material will land on bookshelves, television sets and movie screen.
Still, discoveries do happen at agencies, including the biggest publishing franchise since "Harry Potter"—even though it basically took a mistake to come together. In 2003, an unknown writer named Stephenie Meyer sent a letter to the Writers House agency asking if someone might be interested in reading a 130,000-word manuscript about teenage vampires. The letter should have been thrown out: an assistant whose job, in part, was to weed through the more than 100 such letters each month, didn't realize that agents mostly expected young adult fiction to weigh in at 40,000 to 60,000 words. She contacted Ms. Meyer and ultimately asked that she send her manuscript.
The manuscript was passed on to an agent, Jodi Reamer. She liked what she read, a novel called "Twilight." She signed Ms. Meyer, and sold the book to Little, Brown. The most recent sequel in the series, "Breaking Dawn," sold 1.3 million copies the day it went on sale in August 2008. The latest film grossed more than $288 million in the U.S.
At William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, Adriana Alberghetti only reads scripts sent to her by producers, managers and lawyers whose taste she knows and trusts. The agent says she receives 30 unsolicited e-mails a day from writers and people she doesn't know who are pushing unknown writers, and she hits "delete" without opening. These days, she is taking on few "baby writers," she says, adding that risks she would have taken five years ago she won't today. "I'll take very few shots on a new voice. It's tough out there right now," she says.
Book publishers say it is now too expensive to pay employees to read slush that rarely is worthy of publication. At Simon & Schuster, an automated telephone greeting instructs aspiring writers: "Simon & Schuster requires submissions to come to us via a literary agent due to the large volume of submissions we receive each day. Agents are listed in 'Literary Marketplace,' a reference work published by R.R. Bowker that can be found in most libraries." Company spokesman Adam Rothberg says the death of the publisher's slush pile accelerated after the terror attacks of 9/11 by fear of anthrax in the mail room.
A primary aim of the slush pile used to be to discover unpublished voices. But today, writing talent isn't necessarily enough. It helps to have a big-media affiliation, or be effective on TV. "We are being more selective in taking on clients because the publishers are demanding much more from the authors than ever before," says Laurence J. Kirshbaum, former CEO of Time Warner Book Group and now an agent. "From a publisher's standpoint, the marketing considerations, especially on non-fiction, now often outweigh the editorial ones."
Getting an opportunity in Hollywood as a writer once required little more than affiliation with elite institutions like the Harvard Lampoon, the humor magazine which spawned writers for "The Simpsons" and a host of others. The Web was supposed to dismantle such barriers. And to be sure, the Web has provided a path for some writers who use it well.
Scott Belsky, a 29-year-old Web entrepreneur whose sites include "The 99 Percent," wanted to write a book on how to succeed in the creative industries. To secure representation, he approached agents with data on his Web traffic, samples of reader comments posted on the site, and the number of times various posts had been blogged about, tweeted and retweeted on social-networking site Twitter. This data convinced Jim Levine at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency to take on Mr. Belsky as a client. Mr. Levine used the information to land him a book deal. "Making Ideas Happen" will be published in April by Portfolio, a division of Penguin Group.
One slush stalwart—the Paris Review— has college interns and graduate students in the magazine's Tribeca loft-office read the 1,000 unsolicited works submitted each month. Each short story is read by at least two people. If one likes it and the other doesn't, it is read by a third. Any submission that receives two "Ps" for "pass" as opposed to "R" for "reject" is read by an editor.
"We take the democratic ideal represented by the slush pile seriously," says managing editor Caitlin Roper.
The literary journal publishes one piece from the slush pile each year. That leaves each unsolicited submission a .008% chance of rising to the top of the pile.
Reading this made me think back to the times when I was first trying to get some kind of attention given to my screenplay of "From Parts Unknown," which would later become my first book. I sent out plenty of query letters to different agencies and production companies and got shot down each time, with one letter coming directly from Gale Anne Hurd's Valhalla company. Of course, that one said that they were returning the letter unread for the very reason that was mentioned in this story: the fear of getting sued.
Of course, the problem is that there are only so many different kinds of stories to tell in film. So many people in this country – hell, in this world – have the same kinds of stories in mind that they want to tell. The difference lies in HOW the story is told. Just look at Avatar. Dances With Wolves Meets Ferngully, but it works because of what Cameron brought to the table and his imagination that created the planet, its inhabitants and how they are connected to their home.
What the Internet is doing is simply showing the world just how few original ideas there are for a movie and how many different ways those ideas can be expressed. And this obviously scares a lot of the people in power since latching on to one of those means the possibility of so many others claiming it was their idea first just to make a quick buck. So yes, sadly all these services like ScriptShark that charge money to showcase your screenplay can claim to have some success stories, but you have to keep in mind that these success stories are few, far between and are getting even fewer and more far between.
But I will take this moment to thank one executive in particular for coming forward when I had my script of "From Parts Unknown" available for viewing on filmtracker.com in 2003. I hope he has the habit of Googling himself when I mention his name (but I hope he doesn't Google himself too much because he could go blind) so he'll know I'm thanking him for this. Formerly of Alcon Entertainment, John Formichella not only asked to read my screenplay, but gave me some very valuable advice on how to make it better. Despite him eventually passing on it, I will always be very grateful for his help on that script. And if he wants to give it another read, I'd be more than happy to send it his way. Come on, John. I know you're out there.
ANDY CRITCHELL'S INTERACTIVE BABE PHOTO NEWS BRIEF WITH ANDY CRITCHELL
Hey there everyone! This week I want to introduce you to Lara Bingle. Lara is a 22 year old model/TV personality in Australia (the land of hot chicks.) She is currently engaged to some cricket player. So there's that. The important part is that she is really hot. Let's check her out:
That's it for me this week! Back to you George!
MAD PROPHET OF THE AIRWAVES
Well, it looks like everything is starting to wind down now over at NBC. The executives have allegedly made up their minds regarding the future of The Tonight Show and those same executives are pulling off one of the biggest and loudest reneges in the history of television. Now that Jay Leno's about to get his desk back - which makes me wonder if he's going to get a whole new set or just add insult to injury by sitting in Conan's chair - and Conan O'Brien's future is uncertain at best, I find myself looking back at the last late night quagmire that NBC found itself in and I yearn for the days when it looked like NBC had a clue about what they were doing.
Let's take the time machine back a while, shall we? Back to the late 1980s and early 1990s when CBS was still hurting from the demise of The Pat Sajak Show. Anyway, the network wanted to get some life back into their Late Night lineup so they heavily courted Jay Leno with a lot of promises to make him a major element in their lineup. But as good as the promises were, Leno and his agent - the late Helen Kushnick - knew that they couldn't offer what Jay really wanted, The Tonight Show. So several months after CBS' first offer, Helen coerced the NBC brass into giving Jay a brand new contract with a guarantee of being the next Tonight Show host after Johnny Carson steps down.
Now, the beauty of this contract is that it wasn't set in stone when Carson would actually give up the desk. But it kept everyone involved happy, since Leno had both job security and a guarantee of being next in line. The problem is that there was one other person who was all set to take over after Johnny and that was David Letterman. Letterman had been kicking ass with his NBC Late Night show and was delivering plenty of laughs that were just right for after midnight. Now, if NBC were cordial enough to alert Dave about the contract with Leno and do their best to keep him comfortable at the 12:30 timeslot, then it's possible the mess that followed could have been avoided.
Unfortunately, NBC's best laid plans of setting up a Leno to Letterman bridge to dominate the 11:30 - 1:30 hours were shot to hell because there was Letterman - who appeared to be the one chosen by Johnny Carson to take over - on one side waiting for the green light, and Leno on the other side who already had the green light and had to keep his mouth shut about it. Everything came to a head when Carson made an unscheduled appearance at an NBC function in New York City showing off the stars of 1991-92's Prime Time shows. He so casually let it slip that this would be his final season that it took a short time for the news to sink in with everyone there. But almost immediately after his announcement, he stopped in on Letterman's show to chat it up a bit with Dave. Everything seemed so seamless, that Dave would step in and his fans would just move their viewing habits up one hour.
But once NBC broke the bad news to Letterman, he demanded to be released from his contract and wanted out of the network immediately. He spent the next year gathering up some resources by finally getting himself an agent, and who better to start off a relationship with an agent with than CAA's own Michael Ovitz? From there, things seemed to get a little easier for Dave as Jay Leno started rolling on his version of The Tonight Show. Ovitz set up an invitation for the other networks and syndicators to pitch their services to Letterman, and CBS provided the best offer, as expected. They offered an 11:30 show, ownership of the show (NBC made sure that they owned the rights to The Tonight Show when they issued Leno's contract) and a home on an actual network. Fox provided the most laughable offer in 20/20 hindsight: a 12:00 show that would follow Arsenio Hall. My, how times have changed.
The whole story can be read in detail in Bill Carter's book The Late Shift, which I highly recommend, but just to wrap up this little section, Letterman got his 11:30 show, he dominated Leno in the ratings for almost two years and it all turned around once Leno got Hugh Grant on his show right after the Divine Brown incident and asked the question heard ‘round the world: "What the hell were you thinking?!" Ever since, Leno was the number 1 man in Late Night.
Now, with all that info handy, let's take the time machine back to the present time and consider what NBC SHOULD have learned from all of this. Well, they did the right thing to offer The Tonight Show to Conan O'Brien once Leno decided to step down, but there should not have been a timetable assigned to this deal. By the time Letterman expected to be offered the 11:30 show, he had been doing Late Night for, if I'm not mistaken, 11 years. This just happened to be around the same time that Conan's contract was up for renewal, so I can understand NBC's willingness to keep him around.
But where it goes wrong is when the timetable was assigned to Leno's departure. Carson was going into his 30th season as host when he decided to step down. When the timetable was brought up, Jay had only been doing his show for 12 years. The network should have considered that their host - who had a well-earned reputation for being the hardest-working man in show business - might not be ready to pack it in so early in his tenure. Especially when he was still the dominant persona in the Late Night wars.
Now according to Leno, here's how it all went down. Conan was getting offers just like Leno was when Carson was doing The Tonight Show, but unlike the situation in the early 90s, there was no competition for the spot now. It was simply a matter of promising Conan that he would be next in line, so it was an easier task than what Warren Littlefield and John Agoglia had back in the day, when they had two egos to placate instead of just one. But that's not how they handled it, and here's where Jay's at fault. He may not have thought it was his place to do this, but he was – and still is – the most iconic face of NBC and he should have reminded the top brass of how he was able to get The Tonight Show. But no, he was able to do a little bargaining and get a 5-year extension before giving up the show to Conan, and we now see that just 5 years wasn't enough.
The bottom line was that everyone's names were on the contracts and EVERYONE should have abided by them. Why didn't they, you ask? Well, it has to do with the other lesson that NBC should have learned: to have PATIENCE! The execs should have remembered that it took almost two years for Leno to get his ratins up, and it took something monumental as a celebrity's first time on a talk show after a colossal fuck-up. So what if Conan wasn't getting the sort of numbers that Jay had when he left? Someone with power had to keep it in mind that celebrities have a constant habit of fucking up, and only The Tonight Show was going to be an ideal place for them to make their first appearance. Hell, if NBC waited long enough, Conan could have had Tiger on there.
There was a potential game-changing moment like this after September, when Kanye West got on stage and tried to screw with Taylor Swift's big win at the MTV Video Music Awards. Unfortunately, Leno was given Kanye instead, and while he gave a good interview that brought a lot of press, the show itself couldn't sustain that momentum since everything else on that show just wasn't very good. One perfect example of the show's downhill slide was when my wife and I took a look at one of the only two elements that ever really worked - Jaywalking - and watched with horror as Leno's writers turned that segment into a sketch that bombed terribly. The sketch just went on and on and on and you can tell by the audience laughter that they were getting less and less interested in it.
And the one thing that they really should have done - no matter how hard it may have been for them - was to put their publicity machine behind Conan and not try to shove Leno's show down our throats. Just because it's The Tonight Show doesn't mean it's going to sell itself. Conan's show received so little publicity, I wouldn't have been surprised if the general public just thought that NBC moved the timeslot to 10pm and didn't bother putting together another show.
Alas, here we are, coming to the end of the run of a television show that never had its chance to show America what it could really do. All NBC could have done was take Jay's show and move it to Sundays and let Conan keep his desk in Burbank. It's painfully obvious that Jay's writers could have used less pressure and should have been allowed to put all their focus and energy into one show per week, since the new format and the new timeslot just didn't seem to work well for those writers. Hell, this whole mess could have been avoided years ago if NBC decided not to put a concrete timetable into Conan's contract. But no, the network hit the panic button to keep Conan from going elsewhere and then hit it again to send the whole damn Late Night situation into complete disarray.
By doing all this, mere months after Conan shipped himself, his family and his writers out of New York to California, NBC and Leno can only look like the bad guys here. Conan's ratings have gone up, support for his show has gone up, and while it's too-little-too-late for his role as host of The Tonight Show, it will only mean that he'll get another opportunity very soon and God knows he's ready to make NBC regret their decision just as Letterman did back in 1993.
So if you agree with what I have to say here, and you want to let the execs know how much they are - in the words of Corky St. Clair - "bastard people," send a message to Jeff Zucker and Dick Ebersol to their respective e-mail addresses that Steve was so kind to post earlier: jeff.zucker@nbc.com & dick.ebersol@nbc.com. Let them know that they beat other celebrities to the punch by showing they're not above a colossal fuck-up of their own, and of course, tell them CoCo sent you.
And that's a wrap for Chapter 148 of The UBS Evening Movie News! For Andy Critchell, I'm and we'll see you next week!
Conan's Tonight Show not only suffered from the lead-in of Leno, but the fact that Leno became NBC's priority again. Conan never got the big guests, Leno did.
You can understand why Leno was more important to NBC, because he was in prime time... But at the same token, you can't blame Conan for low ratings when you gave him nothing to work with.
Conan had to compete with low lead-ins, a new audience and THE TONIGHT SHOW AT 10PM... That's a lot to swallow.
While the Jay Leno show changed ever so slightly, he was still for the most part, doing the Tonight Show. Which left Conan to fight Dave, while half the regular Tonight audience had already watched the Leno show and tuned out.
Oh well, Conan's ratings have been beating Leno and Letterman all week and he's came out smelling like a rose while Leno smells like the turd he is.
Posted By: Jake G (Registered) on January 21, 2010 at 03:26 AM
Those Eyes!!
Posted By: Guest#5908 (Guest) on January 21, 2010 at 10:24 AM
Considering Leno isn't funny at all this whole thing is ridiculous. It has made for great television though. From Kimmel to Conan to Letterman everyone has a take. Their impersonations of Leno were classic.
Posted By: JM (Guest) on January 21, 2010 at 06:09 PM
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