Tim Minear

Uptown Saturday Night

Thanks to everyone who emailed later (or told me in person at the time) about what a good time they had at our American Cinema Foundation/L.A. Press Club panel Saturday with TV writer/producers Paul Feig, Scott Kaufer, Rob Long and Tim Minear, which really did seem to be a big success and was definitely a lot of fun. These four extremely smart and funny guys all hit it off magically, as I supsected they would, and told a lot of great war stories about the TV business. The only frustrating thing for me is that I’m not used to asking questions without a pen and paper in hand to take notes, but Jackie D has a good post up about the panel at Samizdata, with (natch) a specifically free market perspective:

I believe wholeheartedly that there is no such thing as ’the mainstream,’ and that the mass market is dead, and being replaced by a mass of niches. I also believe that the mass media is not being destroyed, merely altered radically, and individuals are being liberated from the mass by the unprecedented choice of personal relevance that (thanks to things like blogs, mp3s, TV on DVD, podcasting, and TiVo) they have today - and that choice of personal relevance is increasing exponentially at a rapid rate. So the topic of the panel was extremely appealing to me as a total geek on the social ramifications of emergent technology tip.

I guess I forgot that these guys write some funny stuff, and that they were going to make me laugh - which they did, in a big way. Some of my favourite exchanges and lines:

CATHY SEIPP: How do you react to people who say they never watch TV? TIM MINEAR: I run them over with my Mercedes.

SCOTT KAUFER: After seeing [the movie] JFK, I thought, "Why don’t I make a movie called Oliver Stone, and just invent shit? ROB LONG: What would you have to invent?! PAUL FEIG: That he’s nice, he’s respectful of women...

I didn’t want to hit the guys over the head with the beliefs I laid out above, so I asked them if they thought that TV series on DVD (which they all seemed to agree was the best thing to happen to TV in a long time, even if the lack of leadership in the Writers’ Guild means that they get screwed out of decent earnings, receiving only 2 or 4 pennies per DVD sale), TiVo, and that greater choice of personal relevance is going to affect what they do in any significant way. Every panel member had something to say about that, but the most interesting answer came from Paul Feig, who said that the bottom line is that the show that draws the most advertising revenue wins, and it will always be that way.

Except I am sure that it won’t always be that way, and that the advances in emergent technologies and the rebirth of niche will bring about that dramatic shift a lot sooner than we may think. The business model of broadcast must change if it is not to die (and with only 12 per cent of US viewers getting their TV via antenna these days anyway, ripping it down isn’t a bad idea). As viewers (read: customers) get used to having that personal choice of relevance, they will throw their attention (read: value) to the places where they can get it: cable, satellite, and the internet. And if you think advertisers won’t pick up on that and move their ad spend accordingly, I’ve got some stock in broadcast that I’d just love to sell you....

This brought on many comments from Samizdata readers regarding micro-vs-macromarketing. Jackie also reminded me that Rob Long recalled at one point that he knew a writer who got into the business just so he could name all the whore and bitch characters after his mother. Paul Feig: "A prostitute named Esther, huh?"

And speaking of Samizdata (and serendipity), it turns out that the short-lived "Firefly" was Perry DeHavilland’s favorite TV show ever, I suppose because of the free market philosophy that Tim Minear somehow sneaked into it, so he was delighted to meet Tim. (Who was surprised to hear Perry remark on how "politically sound" the show was: "Not many people picked up on that.") Well, there was that outer space/Western ode-to-liberty song over the opening titles: "Yew cain’t take the sky from me..."

Also, Luke Ford, my loyal Boswell, was there with his trusty secret tape-recorder, and has a long (if incomplete and fairly rough) transcription. Warning: Luke, like Mickey Kaus, has no permalinks, so you’ll have to scroll down past the posts regarding "Where Did Blacks Go Wrong?" and the idea for a reality TV series starring O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake called "The Ladykillers." An excerpt, courtesy Luke:

Scott Kaufer: When I was an executive at Warners Television, people used to come in and pitch me shows we had on the air. They were the better pitches. When we said, that show is not only on TV, but we produce it, they’d say, ’Ehh, I don’t watch TV...’

Tim Minear: It’s such an old fashioned prejudice when there are so many crappy movies and good TV."

Cathy: Paul, there was a scene in Freaks & Geeks about watching a porn movie, and I thought it was one of the most wholesome scenes I had ever seen. It was sweet and touching and dealing with porn...[I wasn’t just catering to Luke’s audience here, by the way; get the "Freaks & Geeks" DVD and you’ll see what I mean.]

Paul: My mom used to get upset at all these talkshows with people screaming and yelling. ’It doesn’t do anything but bring the general mood of the country down.’"As an artist, you should say, what can I do to make people think, and not just add to the crap...

Cathy to Tim: "Your show is going to be bloodier and gorier than Silence of the Lambs. You told me before that you have to build character development or it becomes pornography.

Tim: It is lurid. That’s what the genre is. I don’t apologize for it. I didn’t apologize for it on Angel. The responsibility that I apparently have, I just got a [Fox] network note because I had a character (one of the good guys) who smoked. No longer. She’s played by an actress on Wonderfalls last year who smoked. They said, we don’t have characters who smoke on our network...

Scott: In Boston Legal, we end pretty much every episode with James Spader and William Shatner smoking on the balcony. Even though this is a different network, it is the same studio [producing both series]. We always get the network note, it’s part of the boiler plate of their notes, please be advised that ABC wishes to refrain from scenes showing people smoking. If you show people smoking, don’t show them inhaling." Never once this season have I paid any attention to that note or heard any follow-up...

Tim: I can’t get away with it... I couldn’t have [a serial killer] say the word ’retard’ because the serial killer would’ve been insensitive.

Paul: The medium we work in is so incredibly powerful that it is frightening. With Freaks & Geeks, I wrote scenes for a smoking patio [at a high school]. When I was growing up, even in Junior High, there was a smoking patio. We got it cast and we were about to shoot the smoking scene, and Judd Aptow and I looked at each other and said, ’We can’t do it. These kids are so appealing and they look so cool, that it’s like telling kids to go ahead and smoke.’ " It became the junkfood eating patio. We allowed one character to have a cigarette behind his ears and he could play with a lighter.

Rob Long: You get away with much more when you write the script as a spec. If you ask, the answer is almost always no. If you do it, the answer is, well, I wish you wouldn’t have, but now that you’ve shot it...We wrote a joke about a group of people at an ad agency trying to come up with a name for frozen hot dogs — "Anne Franks — They hide in your grocer’s freezer." We got a note from the network that Anne Frank is a revered character...

Update: Pop culture junkie Christian Johnson of the Arsalyn Foundation, who told me at the reception that "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" is one of his favorite films because it’s the ultimate Straussian (and anti-Machiavellian) Western, also has a good report about the evening.

I’m rather curious how most people who came to the panel heard about it, and if anyone cares to let me know via my comments section I’d be grateful. We got a big crowd (who asked a lot of smart questions) with basically no advertising, even though L.A. Observed, which normally lists these events, said no when I asked last week. Perhaps Kevin Roderick worried it would be too "wingnutty," as I think he’s referred to me from time to time (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But it’s too bad for his readers, because the panel was a useful resource for entertainment journos; it would have provided me material for weeks back when I was writing for Mediaweek Online, and in my experience showrunners aren’t normally nearly as candid on the record as these guys were Saturday night.

Maybe it was just as well, though, because we were about 95% full and my big fear with these things is always having to turn people away at the door.

Anyway, thanks to Defamer, FishBowl L.A. and the mighty K-Lo of the Corner for listing this event. I suspect an awful lot of people came because of the Corner, because I noticed several American flag lapel pins in the audience, and a couple of people furtively came up to me at the reception confessing they were conservatives even though they worked in Hollywood. Also, I didn’t get one question (and I was expecting at least one) about the lack of women on the panel.

It did seem to be an crowd heavy with industry people, as I was surprised what a big laugh Rob Long got with his inside-baseball line about a completion bond. (He’d been talking about an 80-something actress who felt she was too young to play a grandmother on one of his shows: "We probably couldn’t even have gotten a completion bond if we’d cast her.")

So if you were there (or planned to be) how did you hear of it? To quote Dirty Harry: I gots to know.

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