Looking for Brilliant, Paying for Crappy

Craigslist provides a nice selection of the sort of thing writer's typically see, for example:

We are starting a new magazine in the style of McSweeney's and are looking for freelance writers who can do up to three humorous and insightful articles a month. Figure the average length is 2500 words and none of us will be disappointed.

Of course, there is pay. We buy all rights.

Send your one best sample. It might be a slice of life thing or it could be a humor thing. No straight news clips, please.

We are looking for brilliant.

A little piece of advice, if they don't tell you the pay, there's a reason. The worst part of the offer though is the line We buy all rights. If you're getting paid microbucks or contributor's copies for your brilliant humorous magazine columns you should at least have the hope of collecting them into a book some day.

One or more people have spent the day posting similar sorts of job offers, From Craigslist.LA:

Need scribe who knows 12 languages and can write in 3D Reply to: gigs-595317554@craigslist.org
Date: 2008-03-04, 10:25AM PST

Have immediate need of a writer whose mastery of language is so extraordinary it cannot be described in words.

You should be fluent in at least 12 languages and be able to translate Ulysses into each, particularly Mandarin, in which you will adapt Joyce's impenetrable tome into a Hong Kong action film.

We need all this quickly, in under a week. Well-known talent have expressed interest in these projects while heavily intoxicated.

Although we have tremendous piles of cash buffeting our pillow-topped mattresses, we can offer only $10 for this assignment. Your name will be seen, albeit in a dimly lit, smoke-filled room.

Oh, and your work must be written in three dimensions. We can offer an extra $5 if you can write in the fourth dimension.

-- the original post is gone by now. The world cannot endure such honesty.

Voting in Lexington (pop 6000)

Just got back from the polling booths.

A lot of people were voting for that handsome young man, John McCain.

Lou Dobbs Thinks that it's 1811

I think I might have to switch to Fox News so that I don't have to be exposed to crazy, jingoistic nutjobs.

I'm exposed to a mere 2 minutes of Lou Dobbs tonight and the subtitle scrolling across the bottom of the screen is "Mexico's Meddling". They're running a report on Mexico's President Calderon, who is roaming the United States shaking hands and doing whatever politicians normally do.

The Dobbs broadcast calls this OPERATION DUAL SOVEREIGNTY.

Let me specify, because any sane person would normally think that this is worry about undue U.S. influence over Mexico. No. It's Dobbs and crew worried about Calderon trying to, I guess, turn the United States into a puppet regime.

Though, I think I've discovered the train of logic.

• Barack Obama is surging in the Democratic primary.
• If Barack wins the primary it's highly likely that he'll become president.
• Barack is a senator from Illinois.
• Illinois has a GDP equal to that of Mexico. (but, you know, still lower than three other U.S. states).
• Thus, Mexico = Illinois.
• Thus, Barack is a senator from Mexico.
• Thus, a Mexican will be president of the U.S.

Super-delegates -- A Nightmare in the Making

It looks like this concern is starting to get public notice, but just to spread it a little wider:

ABC has a write-up of the arcane policy of super-delegates.

The upshot, in my understanding, is that in the Democratic primaries, the ordinary voting folk choose 3253 of the 4049 total delegates (a little over 80%). 796 (19%) of those delegates go whatever direction they please. Any reasonably close race and even some unreasonable scenarios would certainly end up being thrown into the hands of those super-delegates.

My feeling is that if the ultimate winner of the primary is also the winner of either the popular vote or the regular delegate vote, there won't be a problem.

But if the voters go one way and the super-delegates make the primary go the other way, it'd be a catastrophe for the Democratic party.

Microbudget Movies: Locations -- the Convenience Store

I thought I'd share some of my experiences writing for microbudget movies -- in this case Marlowe (working title?), where I got to visit the set last November. I believe it came in at 200k. I'm told they target this number because SAG and the DGA have special contract provisions for films made at that budget. Other breakpoints are 600k and 1.7M.

Needless to say, everything is a challenge to fit into that budget. Actors are actually the easier part, since you can get talented but as-yet-unknown people willing to work to add to their reel and build up their credits -- and they'll work HARD.

Locations are the monster! You can't have very many of them and they can't be expensive.

We had several important scenes set in a Quickee Mart. Since they couldn't afford a big chain store like 7-11 or, my personal favorite, Circle K, they worked with a privately owned store (which actually had Quikee as part of the title--how fortuitous). One thing about mom & pop convenience stores -- they make a lot of their money on liquor, pornography, and lottery tickets. The Lotto was fine and the mom & pop had kids, so not much porn out in plain view, but there was a lot of liquor, and this being a kid's movie all that had to be hidden.

Big movies can make money off product placement. Small movies could too -- if they had the time and connections available to clear all the legal hurdles. We of course didn't -- so we had a bunch of the crew inside the store turning all the candy bars and bags of chips upside down or backwards so that their trademarks wouldn't appear on camera. A distressing number of candy bars have their trademarks printed on the back too! At the last minute they got a product placement deal from the Little Debbie people, so we were able to hide a bunch of stuff behind Devil Squares and so on. Debbie has our undying gratitude.

Another issue was that all the refrigeration units had to be turned off whenever they were recording for sound. The microphones are very sensitive and would pick up the hum. Being a convenience store, many of the refrigerators were filled with ice cream -- so you'd unplug them and have to plug them back in right away when they finished shooting. And you'd have to turn off almost all the power since the entire store is wrapped in refrigeration units!

Since that experience I've been a lot more conscious of using locations that don't involve batteries of brand names staring at the camera (for example, I'm now a big fan of the rural road produce stand -- but not on a paved road, because you need special permission to block those off).

ADDENDUM -- also, our Quickee mart apparently was the number one seller of lottery tickets in California!

Heh, heh, spin states, heh, heh

toothpastefordinner.com

As we all know -- it's a cliche -- new communication technologies catch on for the first time when they are used for the distribution of pornography. -- Charlie Stross

Neo-Humean Epistemology

Cabinet Flunkie Who Was In Ally McBeal to President Palmer --

I know your history with Mister Bauer runs deep, but don't let that impact your judgment here. 24, Season 6, Episode 2

-- apparently advancing some new critique of inductive reasoning.

Continuous Functions

The one-touch faucet is a marvel -- a long faucet arm grants fine-tuned control and you can simultaneously adjust water flow and temperature across the continuum of the amplitude/temperature state space.

Unless you have our faucet -- which, as you can see in the below photos, goes from unbearably hot on the left (perhaps -1 degree off vertical) to the kind of tepid that feels like it leaves your dishes teeming with bacteria on the right (+.5 degrees off vertical?). I put in the scrub brush to help center the frame of reference.

Somewhere in between those two settings is the comfortably hot point. So, one learns the technique of getting the handle close to right, then tapping it until it gets to a temperature that's acceptable.

Pundips

Unbelievable!

On Thursday night everyone was talking about how Obama needs to pull out a win in New Hampshire to make Iowa really count -- and that win is very questionable.

Today they're saying he needs a 10 point win otherwise it's as good as a loss.

Structure, The Office, and M*A*S*H

I finally started watching The Office (Americanized), which is conveniently also available in high quality streamed video at the NetFlix website.

After watching several episodes I noticed it's structural similarity to M*A*S*H, and I'm not the first. Matthew Gilbert at Boston.com said the following:

I'm working on this theory that "The Office" is "M*A*S*H" all over again. Kinda, sorta, maybe.

First of all, Dwight and Angela are updates of Frank Burns and Hot Lips. They are the goody-goody couple who have a not-so-secret but oh-so-freaky passionate life (oh, they'll get back together, just you wait). In that other theory I've been working on -- that "The Office" is a metaphor for American politics -- Dwight and Angela fill the hypocritical conservative category that Frank and Hot Lips practically invented on series TV.

Jim is Hawkeye Pierce, of course, but for a less Groucho-oriented generation. Jim's asides are generally non-verbal, but that slight rising of the eyebrows evokes Marx's cigar and the full-on eyebrows as much as Alan Alda did. Jim's partner in crime is Pam, which makes her his Trapper John McIntyre or his B.J. Hunnicut, and, well, I'm going to go for Trapper John. Jim and Pam's pranks on Dwight are genius.

And then there is Michael Scott, who is unique. Still, he has some of the farcical leadership qualities of Henry Blake, as well as the same need to be friendly with his charges. Michael is easily manipulated by Jim and Pam, just as Henry was totally played by Hawkeye and Trapper. And now that Michael is bucking Ryan, he recalls Henry's resistance to military protocol.

I'm not convinced that the similarity goes much beyond the character roles (and then mainly early M*A*S*H), but I do think that similarity is definitely there. In fact, I think the mix works even better in The Office. Having Pam/Jim as love interests gives the writers more to work with than having them merely as tent-mates and creates less of a situation where the Trapper John role is just a sidekick.

I think it also illustrates how useful it is for a writer to identify and recognize narrative structures that work well. In this case the structure is almost entirely the characters and their relations, but it's clearly a structure that provides fertile ground for comedy. I'm not sure The Office's writers even thought about M*A*S*H when they were doing their thing, which makes the structural similarity even more striking. Convergent evolution only occurs when you have something incredibly useful, like the eye in both octopuses and mammals.

Other structures must work well too, and it makes me think that if I were to try to brew up a comedy TV series I'd look at older programs, maybe the Bob Newhart shows or even back further to Mary Tyler Moore or the Dick Van Dyke show, and see if there's a structure in them that can be given a modern interpretation.

I think this is one of the reasons all those screenwriting books and seminars, all with their own favorite "this will get you sold" formula are so successful. They are selling a strong structure -- one that's been proven in multiple films or stories. However, there are a bunch of structures that work well for different kinds of stories, so each author or speaker can push their own personal one and make a tidy living off it.

Lost Articles

I've been asking around to see if anyone knew the name of or had a link to the research article that showed that the personal interview is a poor hiring mechanism (and typically does worse than simply looking at resume, references, and so on). Brian Leiter mentioned it a while back, but neither he nor Frank Arntzenius (who originally pointed it out to me) remember the name or where to find it -- but Prof Leiter did note that it was a psych article.

Given the psych angle, I figured I'd ask Gary, but seeing my limited success I thought maybe better just to throw the question out there in a desperate attempt. Can anyone help?

Also, I'd read a few months ago an article online, probably via some new service, citing a study that said that, on average, 20% of any organization's resources are wasted on ego-projects for the CEO. If anyone else remembers that article and has a link or some help to find it that'd be great. My Google-fu is weak.

Thanksgiving trip reveals why DVD sales are down

The Hollywood Reporter has an article about declining DVD sales this year and my trip last week to visit my folks offers an explanation I think.

Selling a home in Los Angeles and moving pretty much anywhere else (in their case an island near Tacoma, WA) means you move up one income class -- middle class becomes upper middle class.

That means they had a nice hi-def big screen TV to go with their house. Being the Pacific Northwest, we had plenty of excuse to sit inside and watch television. And hi-def does look sweet. I just couldn't bring myself to watch any of the non-hi-def programs on those lesser cable stations while I was there.

We also wanted to rent a few movies -- but they didn't have a hi-def DVD player yet, so we stuck mostly to the hi-def movies-on-demand offered by the cable company. It cost a bit more than a rental, but the panoramic views of mountains and rivers looked sparkling.

They were also just about to purchase Live Free or Die Hard -- because that's the kind of movie you'd like to test your nifty new hi-def TV on.

But here's why DVD sales are down. They'd need to get a new DVD player for that -- and they were more than willing to pay for one -- but which one? I was suggesting HD since it seemed that the big Wal-Mart $99 sale might mark a turning point -- but that's a bit of a gamble. And later, it occured to me that Live Free or Die Hard might not even be on HD (which I think it isn't -- only Blu-ray). That would really suck, buying a hi-def DVD player and having about half the new releases not even be available for it -- then having maybe a 50% chance two years from now of having bet wrong, and there being no new releases for it.

So, unless you want to throw away cash on two high-end DVD players, you don't buy any. And even people who can afford to do so won't simply out of principle.

Then you think of buying the plain old DVD and watching Bruce kick ass. But you've seen the promised land; you're ruined for the old stuff. So you catch a rental of hi-def on-demand when it comes around -

- and don't buy any DVDs at all, since you know you're just going to want the HD version when there's finally a standard. I don't even have an HD TV and I'm not going to buy any more DVDs because I too have seen the promised land.

Thus, DVD rentals doing well, maybe even up, and DVD sales tanking.

And Wal-Mart knows this. They're seeing this vast sum of HD DVD money being left on the table this holiday season because there's no standard -- that's why they're trying to force a standard by selling HD players at cost.