Write and Wrong: TV on auto-pilot

This guest post comes from my longtime pal Bill Braunstein, who has been in the TV writing business for decades. I don't know how he does it, putting up with the vagaries and politics of that profession. Please welcome Bill as WFB's first guest blogger:

The Writers Guild of America has finally agreed to drop its demands for jurisdiction in the areas of reality and animation writing so that contract negotiations with the AMPTP can move forward.

Many people on both private and public bulletin boards geared to “real” writers have expressed a degree of relief and satisfaction that reality and animation have finally been removed from the bargaining table.

So, in the spirit of self-reflection, it’s time for a serious examination of not just those two offending genres but a few others as well. Let’s start with reality:

Does anyone really think that reality shows have writers? Just because these shows have a beginning, middle and end, with indelible characters created by judicious use of sound bites -- all with story arcs and intriguing act breaks -- that doesn’t mean these shows are written.

All any potential reality producer need do is turn on a camera, tape everything that happens, and -- viola! -- there’s your program. Your Aunt Zelda’s home movies from her Finland vacation are as interesting as any reality show. Who needs a storyline?

And then there’s animation. Does anyone really think cartoon shows are written? The real creative work on animated shows is done by storyboard artists. Plus, if you just hire actors with funny voices, you’re guaranteed success. Fred Flintstone growling, “Yabba-dabba-do” always sets off howls of laughter. Animation “writing”? Ha! Yabba-dabba-do isn’t even a word.

And how about game shows? No sane person could ever say quiz shows are written. Access to Google, Ask.com or old Encyclopedia Britannicas qualifies one to work on shows like “Jeopardy.” Heck, there the contestants even do half the work by supplying the questions. Nope, quiz shows don’t have writers; they’re researchers. And they don’t even need to be smarter than a fifth grader.

That brings us to variety shows. No self-respecting TV fan could reasonably argue these shows are written. Staff members simply take old press releases or copy the backs of CD covers, and there’s your TV patter. Besides, how hard is it to pen, “Ladies and gentleman, a big hand for Celine Dion”? You call that writing? It’s criminal.

Which leads, quite logically, to crime shows. ... Could any level-headed person say these shows are written. Hardly! There’s a reason they’re called procedurals. So-called writers latch onto old LAPD handbooks, all to learn police procedures. They stop by local precincts, peruse the evening’s crime logs, drop in a few character names ... and there’s your next episode of “CSI.”

The writing on law or medical dramas? Please ... These aren’t written. Ask any lawyer or doctor for his case files, cross out the names of the “perpetrator,” “victim” or “deceased,” and then sprinkle liberally with make-believe names. Add a “Fade In” at the top, a “Fade Out” at the end, and you’re watching “L.A. Law” or “ER.”

Comedy shows? Any person with his head twisted on straight knows these shows aren’t really written. They all follow the same formula: Find a great standup like a Roseanne Barr, Jerry Seinfeld, or Tim Allen. Have them do their act with great improvisational actors. Roll camera. Stop every 30 minutes. Instant sitcom. Where’s the writing?

And movies? Come on. .... Take a look at screenplay adaptations. No one can doubt the author of any book is a true writer--unlike someone who adapts said book into a screenplay. The creative heavy lifting is already done. All any potential adaptor has to do is just take away the parts of the book that isn’t the screenplay. Does it get any easier?

Lastly, there are original screenplays. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, are these people really writers? There isn’t a person on the planet that doesn’t own a dictionary. And every screenplay yet to be written is within those pages. All you have to do is just join the words together in the right order. Creating screenplays isn’t writing, it’s a logic puzzle like a giant game of sudoku.

So, there you have it.

The only sane conclusion one can come to is that no real writing takes place in Hollywood.

Or that judging what is and what is not writing, is a very subjective business.

Unless you consider the obvious: it’s all writing.

Bill Braunstein has been a Writers Guild member since 1989. Oddly enough, he’s worked in scripted television, animation and reality.

The word on Word 2008 for Macs

I've just upgraded to Microsoft's Office: Mac 2008. So far, just feeling my way around, trying to determine what's what with the palates and inspectors and such. The software runs natively on my Intel-based Mac, which means it's faster.

My version is the Home & Student Edition, which costs about $130 at Best Buy (and Amazon).

A big change is the word-processing toolbar atop each individual document. That seems like a good thing. Always hated that cluttered, confusing toolbar glued to the top of the screen.

The biggest upgrade seems to be the Publishing Layout, a new feature for Mac that eases preparation of pages to be used for presentations, brochures, that sort of thing. No apparent help for Web work.

Also, you're no longer able to build and run macros -- not good at all. If you work on the Internet and deal with text from a lot of sources -- especially text with Smart Quotes -- this will be a loss and a compelling reason not to upgrade. Macros will scrub and polish the text until it's ready for the Web, if you learn some simple programming. Now they expect you to create Apple Script for jobs like this, not likely for this end user. (I remember problems with macros on the last release as well.)

One more issue of note. The Word documents are saved in .docx, not the old .doc (something to do with xml and file size). People who aren't up to date with Word won't be able to open the documents. Of course Mac users are used to that sort of stuff and tend to save outgoing files as text anyway. I have a client who wants everything for his site in Word, go figure. But you can save the documents as "Word 97-2004" and get that familiar .doc

There is a lot of grousing about this release, so you'd do well to read up on the pros and cons. There are options, including Google's Docs and Apple iWork '08. I'm used to Word and wouldn't consider a downgrade given what I do.

I'll update this post in a month or so. Meanwhile, get the rundown from a real software reviewer in MacWorld's Microsoft Word 2008 review.

Bed and blog vs. the home office

Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger polled his readership on the question: Where is your favorite place to blog?

I clicked on "Home office." That covers 99% of the content on any of my blogs.

When I started full-time blogging and such, I thought I'd do a lot of off-site posting, to hold off cabin fever. Like those guys you see hogging the tables at Starbucks.

Bought a laptop PC. Would have preferred a Mac laptop, but they were too pricey and I needed a PC for various reasons -- such as checking site changes on different systems. My son and I decided on a Sony VAIO, which has worked OK even with Vista. Not that I ask much of the machine.

The heavy lifting is done on my home office's Mac Pro, with the dual=core Intel Xeon chip. Great machine. I wouldn't be without a Mac. Windows always feels cheap and nasty to me (disclaimer: I own AAPL stock).

The reality is, I multitask like crazy. It's hard to get away from my room full of stuff and be effective. My writing is task-specific and a bit mercenary, so I'm not really into a coffeehouse vibe while writing. Unfortunately. Tunnel vision works out well for most writers.

Anyway, you can see the pie chart with results of the ProBlogger poll, based on 1,400-some responses. No. 1 was "home office," with 51%. The No. 2 answer was "in bed," which would be the last place you'd find me blogging.

This led to Darren's cool link-bait head: 14% of Bloggers Prefer to Do It in Bed. (That's why he's the pro blogger.) 51% of Bloggers Do It in Home Offices didn't have the same ring, he explained.

Wall Street Journal liberates op-ed content

Forget the noise about the Wall Street Journal's content going all-free now that Rupert Murdoch owns the shop.

The Journal has just liberated its op-ed content (opinion pieces and editorials), but told would-be freeloaders: "It's as close as we'll get to conceding there is such a thing as a free lunch." Say what? As in, that's all folks?

Wait. Here's a further piece of clarification from the new combined editorial and Opinion Journal page: "Please enjoy our message of free people and free markets -- for free."

Now we know. For free.

Update 1/25: Rupert Murdoch told a panel at the World Economic Forum that there would still be limits on the Journal's online content. "The really specialized (material) giving the greatest insights, that will still be a subscription service," he said. (Hat tip to Reuters)

Warning: Graphic images of text

Designers and developers love to incorporate text and headlines into their image files. I finished a project tonight in which one entire page was turned into a graphic. Art, headlines, text, footer, the whole thing.

Looked good to me. But not to Google or Yahoo's search robots. The bots see just the title bar, the file name and perhaps some alt text.

If you write search-engine-aware copy, follow that work through the design process. Look at the finished page via the source code (under View in most browsers). You should see the heads, text and links. If not, find out why.

If you can grab the heads and/or text as a colored block and place it all on your desktop, you're dealing with an image.

Use of search-engine-aware copy is the No. 1 driver of placement on the SERPs -- search engine results pages. (I'm including title bar wording in that.)

Every other web site I've helped as an SEO had this problem of text buried in images. Often key terms appear only in banners that are really images. If you have a custom banner that says "Widgets for Small Business" and the file name is banner.jpg, guess what the search engines register. Java looks great, but has similar issues.

Now comes word that Google is working on a way to read text in images. About time. The technology has broader implications than this, but perhaps a side benefit will be to make SEOs and designers better friends.

Read more about Google's optical character recognition scheme.