Happy Friday!The past couple of weeks have been a bit of a blur. I’ve had a bunch of general meetings, a meeting for a potential co-showrunning job on a really fun show with a group of people I dearly love, the first pitch for my “warring factions of public domain characters” series, and another pitch to a studio, adapting a short story to series. On the feature side, I turned in a pitch to my reps for a modern, romantic thriller take on another public domain story. I got a few first impressions from them and did a rewrite. In addition to all of that I taught a webinar for Netflix and Stage 32, I wrote a promo video script for our immersive audio company, I wrote a short film for my friend John Lawson to direct for the Easter Seals Disability Film Challenge, and I took part in a panel for Houston Space Center with SciArt Exchange founder, Jancy McPhee, and astronaut, Nicole Stott. I can’t tell you how much my new organization system helped in keeping those projects straight. Offloading some of my brain to Evernote has allowed me to move between them easily without much ramp-up needed and it’s helped me to schedule my time. Truth be told, I stopped doing the daily Rundowns and Recaps after the first week. It just wasn’t sustainable so now I just do them as needed or when I get a few minutes to get organized. Since January 1st I’ve done an enormous amount of work just to get to the point where I’ll get paid for more work. Between the jobs I went up for and didn’t get, a number of passes on my feature spec, and a recent pass on my series about those public domain characters, it seemed like these past few weeks have been a never ending stream of losses.But I’m happy to report… I took a big step toward a win this week. There's still a long way to go, but the project is super cool and the only way it could be more up my alley is if it was about a writer from Ohio named Mickey Fisher. I’m excited to tell you the story behind the story, which starts with a friendship forged all the way back in 2006.It’s been said many times but it bears repeating: one of the best things you can do when you’re starting out is to network laterally. Find your peer group, the people who are working at the same level as you, support each other on the way up, keep in touch, even if it’s lunch or dinner every year or two. And, celebrate their wins!Because I’ve been all over the place creatively I thought I’d give you a few quick takeaways of things I’ve tried or learned over the past couple of weeks. After I read that short story submission I reached out to the executives to do a brief “fact finding” call before I went in with my take. Part of that is because of the nature of adapting a short story into thirty plus hours of a series. There are so many different ways it could go I wanted to drill down just a little bit on what they loved about the story, have a conversation about tone, and gently test the waters on a couple of big ideas. Short stories are a bit of a Rorschach test, it’s easy for everyone to envision a different angle or tone. Talking for 10-15 minutes on that pre-call helped me set my compass for fleshing out an actual take.In my generals I’ve been asking about the number of seasons people are talking about in their pitches. Should I still be thinking about an engine that can run 5-6 seasons or should I take into account that shows on Netflix rarely go beyond three these days? What I heard was, “As long you’re not pitching us a six-episode limited series we’ll be pretty excited.” It’s not impossible to sell them but it is a lot harder. I’ve heard from a number of producers on the feature side that streamers want “go projects,” scripts that are ready (or very nearly ready) to be shot and talent attached. It doesn’t sound like there’s a real appetite for buying something, pulling it apart in development, and putting it back together again. For a spec script your best bet is high concept, high-level execution. Which is... aways true?Common requests I’ve heard over the past few weeks: action, thriller, psychological thriller, elevated sci-fi, “Two minutes in the future.” Short stories are hot. I’ve read a few of them for potential adaptation, including the one that I met with the studio about this week. The ones I’ve been sent either have a really strong conceptual hook or a character drawn in bold strokes. As an experiment I did a search for “short stories” on Deadline to see the most recent deals. I wanted to see if I could spot those common denominators. TWILIGHT ZONE all-star Charles Beaumont was a recent example.
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Recent Takeaways / Stage 32 & Netflix Webinar…
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Happy Friday!The past couple of weeks have been a bit of a blur. I’ve had a bunch of general meetings, a meeting for a potential co-showrunning job on a really fun show with a group of people I dearly love, the first pitch for my “warring factions of public domain characters” series, and another pitch to a studio, adapting a short story to series. On the feature side, I turned in a pitch to my reps for a modern, romantic thriller take on another public domain story. I got a few first impressions from them and did a rewrite. In addition to all of that I taught a webinar for Netflix and Stage 32, I wrote a promo video script for our immersive audio company, I wrote a short film for my friend John Lawson to direct for the Easter Seals Disability Film Challenge, and I took part in a panel for Houston Space Center with SciArt Exchange founder, Jancy McPhee, and astronaut, Nicole Stott. I can’t tell you how much my new organization system helped in keeping those projects straight. Offloading some of my brain to Evernote has allowed me to move between them easily without much ramp-up needed and it’s helped me to schedule my time. Truth be told, I stopped doing the daily Rundowns and Recaps after the first week. It just wasn’t sustainable so now I just do them as needed or when I get a few minutes to get organized. Since January 1st I’ve done an enormous amount of work just to get to the point where I’ll get paid for more work. Between the jobs I went up for and didn’t get, a number of passes on my feature spec, and a recent pass on my series about those public domain characters, it seemed like these past few weeks have been a never ending stream of losses.But I’m happy to report… I took a big step toward a win this week. There's still a long way to go, but the project is super cool and the only way it could be more up my alley is if it was about a writer from Ohio named Mickey Fisher. I’m excited to tell you the story behind the story, which starts with a friendship forged all the way back in 2006.It’s been said many times but it bears repeating: one of the best things you can do when you’re starting out is to network laterally. Find your peer group, the people who are working at the same level as you, support each other on the way up, keep in touch, even if it’s lunch or dinner every year or two. And, celebrate their wins!Because I’ve been all over the place creatively I thought I’d give you a few quick takeaways of things I’ve tried or learned over the past couple of weeks. After I read that short story submission I reached out to the executives to do a brief “fact finding” call before I went in with my take. Part of that is because of the nature of adapting a short story into thirty plus hours of a series. There are so many different ways it could go I wanted to drill down just a little bit on what they loved about the story, have a conversation about tone, and gently test the waters on a couple of big ideas. Short stories are a bit of a Rorschach test, it’s easy for everyone to envision a different angle or tone. Talking for 10-15 minutes on that pre-call helped me set my compass for fleshing out an actual take.In my generals I’ve been asking about the number of seasons people are talking about in their pitches. Should I still be thinking about an engine that can run 5-6 seasons or should I take into account that shows on Netflix rarely go beyond three these days? What I heard was, “As long you’re not pitching us a six-episode limited series we’ll be pretty excited.” It’s not impossible to sell them but it is a lot harder. I’ve heard from a number of producers on the feature side that streamers want “go projects,” scripts that are ready (or very nearly ready) to be shot and talent attached. It doesn’t sound like there’s a real appetite for buying something, pulling it apart in development, and putting it back together again. For a spec script your best bet is high concept, high-level execution. Which is... aways true?Common requests I’ve heard over the past few weeks: action, thriller, psychological thriller, elevated sci-fi, “Two minutes in the future.” Short stories are hot. I’ve read a few of them for potential adaptation, including the one that I met with the studio about this week. The ones I’ve been sent either have a really strong conceptual hook or a character drawn in bold strokes. As an experiment I did a search for “short stories” on Deadline to see the most recent deals. I wanted to see if I could spot those common denominators. TWILIGHT ZONE all-star Charles Beaumont was a recent example.