So it's been a little while and you've all found other roadside attractions and ten months without a post is brain death for a blog so I get it if there's no one out there when the digital tree falls in the binary forest.
However.
An Infinite Fucking Monkey walking a near-infinite number of footsteps around Warner Brothers for eight hours fueled by chex mix and two burrito supremes starts to wonder if silence does truly equal death and if taking back the day means riding the blogosphere deep into the night.
Which is to say:
Hi.
Since I visited with you last I have shot a pilot and eight episodes of television on my wonderful little art house show we like to call "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." (Those of us in the know call it "Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles" for short.) Unfortunately, I've only locked picture on the pilot and each one of those other eight precious little diamonds is now sitting uneasily in an editing bay like a toddler whose parent has passed out on the couch from too much Vicodin.
In this case, the couch is the picket line and the Vicodin is my vow that I will do NO WORK on my show until the strike is finished. No writing, no editing, no sound mixing, no casting, no notes calls, no publicity, no NOTHING.
What will happen to our work of the last year? Couldn't tell you. Ask the AMPTP. It's their show now, along with a hundred other shows whose creators and showrunners have chosen to walk the picket line instead of doing their producer duties.
(There was some confusion that I was actually doing this work due to an NPR report about my show this morning that quoted my NONWRITING producer as to his feelings about the strike. I was NOT QUOTED in this report because I had refused to be interviewed--I initially thought it was to involve promotion of my show...Still, some people thought it was me on the radio. It was not. In fact, the AMPTP would probably tell you that radio is still an immature and unknowable media, and the fact that some people could confuse me with my nonwriting producer because they didn't see my face proves that we should wait a few years before trying to figure out how radio might be used.)
AMPTP: Wow, Ms. Prostitute. That was some great sex we just had.
PROSTITUTE: Thanks, AMPTP John. That'll be three hundred dollars.
AMPTP: You're kidding. I'm not paying you.
PROSTITUTE: What?
AMPTP: I paid you three hundred dollars for sex last week. I consider this promotional.
So Tyra was just the tip of the iceberg and now Kate Winslet's fully soaked and blue-lipped as twelve thousand of us try rowing to shore in the good ship Norma Rae. After one full day I can say with certainly that I have a particular facility for standing in one place for hours at a time but chanting while standing seems to escape me. I was asssigned to Gate 4A at Warner's--a very small gate only frequented by executives. I thought this was sort of the generic toothpaste of gates until a few fat white dudes rolled past us into the executive lot driving eighty thousand dollar cars and giving us the finger.
And while I have had many suits in many forms over the years tell me to figuratively fuck off as they mangled my screenplays, it is not til you see that actual finger from an actual person do you realize how few times in your adult life someone has actually told you, to quote the great Arnold Schwartzenegger in Terminator: FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE.
And I have to admit that it pleased me just a little because I'm tired of the polite and earnest way we get screwed by them every other day of the year and sometimes you just want someone to slap you on the ass and scream in your fucking ear.
So now it's day two and we know where they stand and they know where we stand.
And we will continue to stand there.
All day.
However.
An Infinite Fucking Monkey walking a near-infinite number of footsteps around Warner Brothers for eight hours fueled by chex mix and two burrito supremes starts to wonder if silence does truly equal death and if taking back the day means riding the blogosphere deep into the night.
Which is to say:
Hi.
Since I visited with you last I have shot a pilot and eight episodes of television on my wonderful little art house show we like to call "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." (Those of us in the know call it "Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles" for short.) Unfortunately, I've only locked picture on the pilot and each one of those other eight precious little diamonds is now sitting uneasily in an editing bay like a toddler whose parent has passed out on the couch from too much Vicodin.
In this case, the couch is the picket line and the Vicodin is my vow that I will do NO WORK on my show until the strike is finished. No writing, no editing, no sound mixing, no casting, no notes calls, no publicity, no NOTHING.
What will happen to our work of the last year? Couldn't tell you. Ask the AMPTP. It's their show now, along with a hundred other shows whose creators and showrunners have chosen to walk the picket line instead of doing their producer duties.
(There was some confusion that I was actually doing this work due to an NPR report about my show this morning that quoted my NONWRITING producer as to his feelings about the strike. I was NOT QUOTED in this report because I had refused to be interviewed--I initially thought it was to involve promotion of my show...Still, some people thought it was me on the radio. It was not. In fact, the AMPTP would probably tell you that radio is still an immature and unknowable media, and the fact that some people could confuse me with my nonwriting producer because they didn't see my face proves that we should wait a few years before trying to figure out how radio might be used.)
AMPTP: Wow, Ms. Prostitute. That was some great sex we just had.
PROSTITUTE: Thanks, AMPTP John. That'll be three hundred dollars.
AMPTP: You're kidding. I'm not paying you.
PROSTITUTE: What?
AMPTP: I paid you three hundred dollars for sex last week. I consider this promotional.
So Tyra was just the tip of the iceberg and now Kate Winslet's fully soaked and blue-lipped as twelve thousand of us try rowing to shore in the good ship Norma Rae. After one full day I can say with certainly that I have a particular facility for standing in one place for hours at a time but chanting while standing seems to escape me. I was asssigned to Gate 4A at Warner's--a very small gate only frequented by executives. I thought this was sort of the generic toothpaste of gates until a few fat white dudes rolled past us into the executive lot driving eighty thousand dollar cars and giving us the finger.
And while I have had many suits in many forms over the years tell me to figuratively fuck off as they mangled my screenplays, it is not til you see that actual finger from an actual person do you realize how few times in your adult life someone has actually told you, to quote the great Arnold Schwartzenegger in Terminator: FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE.
And I have to admit that it pleased me just a little because I'm tired of the polite and earnest way we get screwed by them every other day of the year and sometimes you just want someone to slap you on the ass and scream in your fucking ear.
So now it's day two and we know where they stand and they know where we stand.
And we will continue to stand there.
All day.
Image may be NSFW.
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