Creating a Successful Web Series: I Want To Go to There...

My dear friend Michael Perri, talented writer, producer and mimic was nice enough to write something for us here on the Rouge Wave about creating a web series:

***

Picture this: Some of your coolest peeps are kicked back in your pad, yukking it up over brewskis or wine and something to nosh on. The conversation is free flowing and TAH-DOW! Someone yells out, “OMFG, that story is so freaking amazing I almost tinkled in my boot cut jeans!” Another one of your besties chimes in, “Ya dude, we like should totally film that and put that on the web... like a series!” Everyone pauses for a brief moment as eyes widen like y’all just invented a way to turn water into gin. You pop out of your favorite La-Z-Boy and declare, “THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST WHATCHAMACALLIT THAT CYBERSPACE HAS SEEN SINCE AL GORE CREATED THE INTER-WEB!”

The allure to achieve long lasting fame through the Web is a powerful magnet. I am not talking about the 30 seconds of fame generated by viral videos like “The Landlord,” “Star Wars Kid,” or “Chocolate Rain.” I am talking about creating a viable online episodic series that people tune into each and every day.

With the millions of eyeballs gazing at LCD screens across the world and the potential for achieving inter-fame so high many ponder: What truly makes a great Web Series?

Blogs like Rougewave give words meaning; your Pod-casts give those same words a voice, while Vlogging (video-blogging) can even provide them with some kind of a face. Your choices are never-ending. Whether your web series is reality or scripted, it needs to have the right DNA to grow up big and strong, play in the big leagues and eventually dunk the ball.

But, the World Wide Web is still like the Wild-Wild West. Everyone is trying to mine for Internet gold. There are no barriers to entry and anyone can stake a claim. But can you harvest a juicy nugget and cash it in for fame and a new Aston Martin? I’m not going to bore you with the details of designing the site, fishing for ad dollars, tagging the site for searches... because without stellar content, a fresh hook and that uncontrollable variable of variables called luck - you just can’t be a success.

So what makes a great Web Series?

Goals: Whether your goal is to sell a boatload of advertising space or boldly go where no cyber-punk has ever gone before, make sure you have the target in mind so that everyone aboard the project is on the same page. It’s funny how many times I ask that question and people sputter out random thoughts instead of their mission statement.

Characters: Former NBC Chief Brandon Tartikov was a television executive credited with turning around NBC's low prime time reputation. He had a vision: great characters make great entertainment. The same holds true for cyberspace. Look at the top web series out there today: Ask a Ninja, Chad Vader, Dr. Horrible, Jesus People and my beloved Citizen Kate. They all are centered on a main character(s) that have a goal, whether it’s to answer your deepest questions through eyes of martial arts killing machine or meet Barack Obama - a strong proactive character with quirks and goals is certainly captivating.

Planning: You must put on your project manager cap or find someone who is detailed, task-oriented and cool under fire. As producer, you need to plot out the details of your shoot. Just like a full-scale production company, you’ll need to budget, hire, cast, procure, write and record. You may even get more bang for the buck if you prep and plan in stages. The biggest mistake people make is to try and do it all at once. Take your time.

Marketing: Word of mouth is still king. Within nano-seconds you can Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Text, email (or for heaven’s sake call) someone and share the funniest thing on the web. My inbox(es) were off the hizzy with the new Andy Samberg short minutes after it aired on SNL. So what if you don’t have Jamie Lynn Siegler or Justin Timberlake in your video? Use every avenue to let the world know your series has arrived.

Sales: Want to make money? Well, Veoh and Revver are some of the sites that will share advertising dollars with you. If all goes well and you’re thinking of trying to sell your series, all the networks have New Media groups or spinoffs for short form content on the Web. Disney recently launched Stage 9 in the hopes it could incubate shorts into movies or TV shows. But you’ll need an introduction. Why not try uber agent UTA’s spin off, 60 Frames? They develop, produce and manage new media clients and have one of the loudest mouths in the biz. You can even create series for mobile phones. Bunnygraph Entertainment specializes in bringing creative minds and product companies.

Crossover Appeal: If you want to move over to the heights of the TV plateau, you must ask yourself, “Could I really watch this on TV?” But, even that’s hard to gauge these days. Remember Quarterlife? (Sorry NBC.) Pretend you get to put a show on air and millions will watch. Look at “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” or “Monster Garage.” Both pilots were shot on a dinky camera but both made it to series. Why? The idea had substance + awesome characters + a fresh hook...oh and luck...

Substance: Above all, your web-series must be about something. Then, how much substance is required for the Web? To just say your story must have a beginning, middle and end is not enough. It has to be UNIQUE! Is it timely? Is it provocative? One of the funniest things I have ever seen on the web was a short when a girl was enjoying an ice cream cone, then comedian Louis CK strolls up, steals it and then runs off to a nearby helicopter and flies off. All in 10 seconds. Never seen that before!

Okay. So, think you can beat the thousands of other people out there trying to create the next Chad Vader?

Ultimately, you have 10 seconds to grab some Web-surfer’s attention and up to five minutes to hold it. If your objectives are clear and your characters and story hook are distinctive, you’re well ahead your competition.

You have to have the patience, drive and creative fortitude akin to an indie filmmaker over and over again. Look what happened to Robert Rodriguez and P.T. Anderson after they wrote, directed and produced their movies. They tried, failed, tried again and succeeded. Don’t be afraid to try and try again to something sticks.

May the Web be with you...

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The Importance of Backstory

Good writers know that they must get the story moving as soon as possible at the top of the script. Jump into scenes late, make every scene count and only write those details that are illustrative and evocative of your character's - well, character.

We don't need to watch our character pour his or her coffee, take a shower and choose clothes for the day because this is a movie, with Movie Time and Movie Reality. We don't show the blow-by-blow or the minutia. Unless it matters or is adding up to something.

But what many writers conveniently forget is that when we meet your main character on page one, he or she has lived an entire lifetime before that moment. Let me repeat that: your main character has lived an entire lifetime before we meet them on page one.

All sorts of factors have shaped your character long before we meet them. Whether we see any of these factors or not. Your character has a backstory, in other words. And it made them who they are on page one - flawed, quirky - specific.

Coming up with backstory can seem like a superfluous detail, especially the kind of backstory I'm talking about. I have mentioned before needing to have a page negative ten for your character. By that I mean what was going on in your character's life two weeks or three months before this story begins - did they get fired, married, divorced, hit by a car, win the lottery, move into a new town, buy a new car - what was going on JUST BEFORE your story begins. The relatively recent past.

But today I'm talking about a deeper type of backstory. Those formative life events, situations and choices which slowly shaped your character. This is writing and character creation on a deep level - some of this stuff won't be necessarily obvious on the page at all, but it's stuff that you need to know about every significant character in your script.

Now, we know that in real life, we judge people by their appearances and the details of their lives all the time. Wow, can't believe he drives a Hummer. What an arrogant, insecure jerk, right? She goes to therapy three times a week - ruh oh. She has a huge amount of credit card debt - what an irresponsible person! And so on. You meet people, maybe as a new friend, maybe as a love interest, and these details about them add up and paint a picture - rightly or wrongly. You've heard the expression to have your house in order, meaning to take care of your Body, Mind and Spirit. Does your main character have his or her house in order? Hopefully not on page one, right?

Imagine you are getting to know someone over a glass of wine. A person you are thinking of dating. Wouldn't you like to know this stuff? It could prevent a lot of problems down the line, right? I think we've all gotten to know a great person only to find out later they've had a DUI, have three dollars in savings, tons of credit card debt and got fired from his last three jobs under mysterious circumstances. Oh - maybe that was just my experience. You know who you are. Kidding! I'm kidding!

Rightly or wrongly, in real life, the details of a person's past and present allow us to create a composite judgment. In the movies, these details matter too. Because they shape our main characters into somebody whole, organic, flawed and interesting.

So here are some questions about your character, divided into formative and house-in-order categories:

Formative
Does your character have siblings? How many? What is his or her birth order?
Where did he or she grow up?
Are his or her parents still living?
Does your character have an education? How much?
Is or was your character spiritual or religious? If so, of what nature?
Who was he or she in high school? Nerd? Jock? Shy kid? Prom queen?
Did he or she have money growing up or did the family struggle?

House in Order
What does your character drive? Why?
Does he or she have a savings account? How much is in it?
Has he or she every done anything illegal? What? When and why?
Does your character drink? How often? How much? Why?
Does your character eat well and exercise? Why? Why not?
Does he or she have a close relationship with family? Or estranged? Why?

These are just some starter questions but clearly, there are millions of questions you can ask and answer about your main character. Ask yourself, if you could be totally nosy and ask anyone anything you wanted, what would you ask your boss? Your lover? Your new friend? If a potential new lover revealed that he had twenty eight dollars in savings, does that then turn you off to him? Is there more to that story or is he just irresponsible? Ah but that's where being a writer comes in. Maybe he has no savings because he paid for his brother's kidney transplant surgery. Or maybe he has no savings because he has a gambling problem. Big difference. Which is it?

The answers to these questions, just like in real life, color the way your character makes decisions and choices in the now. And it is those decisions and choices - conscious and subconscious - that fuel the story you are about to tell. So please do take the time to get to know your characters, past and present. These details may not show up on your pages but like invisible ink, they are there, underscoring every choice and opinion your character has about the situation you are creating to entertain us.

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The Opening Image

We all know by now that screenwriters have very little time to grab the attention of a reader. Some say 10 pages, some say five - I'm going to blow your mind and say one page. Most experienced readers and consultants will often say privately to one another that they can tell if your script is good somewhere on the first page. Sometimes we sort of joke around with each other after a couple of cocktails - I can tell within two sentences. I can tell by halfway down the first page. I can tell by the first line of dialogue. I personally can tell by the first page. Can tell what? Whether you're a good writer and whether this script is going anywhere.

And how can I (we) tell? Your use of language, the pacing on that first page, succinct but compelling action lines, and a great opening image.

Now, the screenwriting world is divided into roughly two camps: The Film School Academics, who spout Eisenstein, and the Populists who spout just-effing-entertain-me. Then you have your subgroups: The Hero's Journey-ers, the Save-the-Cat-ers, the McKee-ers, the Syd Field-ers, the UCLA-ers, the USC-ers, the NYU-ers and the I-Never-Took-One-Class-ers.

What I try to do on the Rouge Wave is to synthesize those various points of view into actionable simplicity. Stuff that's easy to understand and to do. It doesn't have to be rocket science, in other words. Because if you want to talk Eisenstein, I can go there too but honestly, you don't have to go to film school to grok this stuff.

The opening image - it's right in the name - is literally the first thing we "see" when we read your script (or watch the movie, should you be so lucky). So, given that we all understand that your very first page better be provocative, compelling and totally engaging - what should you choose as your opening image?

The opening image could be a landscape, a home, a person, an event - but whatever it is, it should set the tone, genre and theme of your script up immediately, pleasingly and artfully.

This is the opening image from BLADE RUNNER:

EXT. HADES - DUSK
We are MOVING TOWARD the Tyrell Corporation across a vast
plain of industrialization, menacing shapes on the horizon,
stacks belching flames five hundred feet into the sky the
color of cigar ash.

This is the opening image from LA CONFIDENTIAL:

Over the opening strains of "I love you, California," a MONTAGE: a mixture of headlines, newsreel footage and live action. Economy Booming! Postwar Optimism! L.A.: City of the Future! But most prominent among them: GANGLAND! Police photographers document crime scenes. The meat wagon hauls ex-button men to the morgue. Where will it end?

This is the opening image from LOST IN TRANSLATION:

EXT. NARITA AIRPORT - NIGHT

We hear the sound of a plane landing over black.

INT. CHARLOTTE'S ROOM - NIGHT

The back of a GIRL in pink underwear, she leans at a big window, looking out over Tokyo.

You see how each example is setting up the story to come with tone, visual theme and a compelling, interesting opening that describes, on a micro level, the story to come? So when it comes to your script - do that. Go to your page one right now - seriously, minimize The Rouge Wave and go to page one. I'll wait right here.

[muzak version of: You Light Up My Life]

Okay. What was your opening image? How does it speak to the story to come in a cinematic, thematic, tone-establishing way? Or does it do that at all? The opening image is fun. It is a creative opportunity to set the tone and to grab your reader. The opening image should grab YOU.

You know how you flip the channels on the TV and you take about 3 seconds (and guys, for you, that's 1 second for some weird reason) to decide whether to stay or keep flipping? That's how your script is read. You have one page, guys, to make me believe that you are a good writer and that I should turn the page and keep reading. Not for readers - you have one page to get them liking you enough to not be jaded and cranky as hell, since they HAVE to read the whole thing. But execs, agents and managers? One page. Maybe less. They have the luxury of the circular file. Don't tempt them into playing yet one more game of Script-In-The-Can.

Now get back to work.

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Screener Season

So this is my favorite time of year. Screener season. Every year, a few weeks before award season, production companies send DVDs of their films to the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences as well as those of the Writers Guild, Directors Guild and Producers Guild. If you are lucky enough to BE in one of those guilds, much less an Academy member, you are on the receiving end of upwards of 15 free DVDs of the hottest films of the year.

And if you are lucky enough to be friends with someone who gets screeners - well, it's all good. This week I have MILK, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and THE WRESTLER and next week I'll be in line for more. I am so excited. Now, I do not have a super fancy or large tv but for so many films, that's okay with me. Let's be pragmatic for a moment - I'm saving 14 bucks on each film by seeing them at home. Now screeners do have a slightly annoying stamp over the scenes PROPERTY OF UNIVERSAL PICTURES (or whomever) but hey, for 14 bucks, you get used to it fast. I'm sure sharing of screeners is frowned upon but everybody does it - it's a common mantra at this time of year - hey, I have that screener if you're interested.....

Meanwhile, because of my job and also because I'm a cinephile, I also spent time this weekend catching up on movies I haven't seen. Now, you have to understand, when I catch up on movies, or dig into screeners, I'm watching this stuff not so much as a viewer seeking entertainment but as a professional making sure my movie knowledge is well informed. If a movie is said to be bad, I want to see just why that is for myself. When I want to just be Joe Average movie viewer and totally forget myself and become immersed in a movie, I go to the theater like anybody else. So forgive these odd movie choices: It's research.

MONGOL: Oh my god, what an interminably long, dull movie. Very few BIG scenes of Mongolian hordes doing their thing. I have come to the conclusion that the subtitle, "The RISE of Ghengis Khan" should have been my warning. I don't want to see the RISE of Ghengis Khan, I want to see full blown Ghengis action! But no. I give this movie one out of five cupcakes with yak curd frosting.

THE HAPPENING: Oh, M. Night. What happened to YOU? Note to self: Must read "The Man Who Heard Voices..." to gain more understanding of the rise and the fall of M. Night Shyamalan. First act: three-and-a-half out of five cupcakes. After that: one out of five.

THE NUMBER 23: So much promise. Such an interesting conceit. But so confusing. I watched in confused silence with a friend and it was somewhere around the midpoint that we both went OHHHHH. Then there was more confusion and consternation. First half of movie, one out of five cupcakes, second half, two out of five. At best.

FAR FROM HEAVEN: Wow, such a gorgeous film from an art direction point of view. Great performances by all, however, depressing, fairly predictable storyline. I had heard this movie was just so spectacular by some friends and by others that they couldn't get through it. I'd give this movie three out of five cupcakes.

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The Last Seduction

You think about it all the time. In the middle of other conversations, while driving, when you go to bed at night. After some time alone with it, you're spent and exhausted. But you can't wait to go back for more. You don't talk about it much because other people just wouldn't understand. You tell your family you just don't feel up to going to the mall but when they walk out the door, you rush to your computer and open the file, feeling sneaky and guilty.

But moments later you get that high - the high that nobody else can possibly understand. When you're not doing it, you feel a little lost. You scribble notes to it on napkins and shove them in your pockets. You have a secret language that nobody else shares. Sometimes it breaks your heart and doesn't show up. Sometimes it betrays you and you don't even know who or what it is anymore. It's not you, your story says - it's me.

Meanwhile your family returns from the mall, rosy-cheeked and cheerful and they know something is up with you. Something that didn't include them. Something strange and seductive. You smile and ask about the mall. But you're still thinking about it and they know it.

When we talk to other people doing it, we get flushed and excited, as if we've landed on an island with familiar geography at long last. Somebody else who knows the curves of its shape, the feel of it in your hands. Somebody else who knows the rush, the heartbreak and the frustration of doing it.

But often, we'd give anything not to do it. To be able to just quit, walk away and be a normal person again. But we can't walk away from the dreamer's disease; it keeps pulling us back in. We're gonna need a bigger act break.

But are we ever going to walk down the aisle with our writing, getting showered with validation, money and respect? Or is this doomed to be a torrid, slightly debauched affair which will leave us ragged and destroyed, laughing mirthlessly in a gutter, looking up at the ironic stars?

Our writing's not telling. You have no idea, it says, dryly, and smiles at us with a rictus grin - right before it morphs back into a seductive siren, calling to us from the rocks: But I just had the best idea...

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Christmas Short Scene Competition

All right. Christmas is just around the corner so let's do this thing. The short scene must be Christmas themed and include the keywords below:



Keywords:
Maui
Blizzard
Egg nog

Guidelines:
Write a one page short scene which includes the keywords, above. Put the words in context, and make it creative and clever. The words should be key in the scenes, not just a passing inclusion. Don't just slot them in there somewhere. Genre doesn't matter, just keep it to one page.

Deadline:
Please turn your short scenes in by Friday, December 12th by 11:59pm Pacific Time. I will select the top three and post them here for voting on Monday, December 15th.***

Prizes:
Because it's Christmas and I'm feeling generous, how about a $50 gift certificate to a vendor of your choice: Starbucks, Amazon, etc.

Entry Fee:
Don't be silly.

Submit your scene HERE.

***Shall we vote in the usual way or should I find a super cool guest judge to decide the winner this time? Leave your comments either way.

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Point and Counterpoint: Is Story Dead?

Yesterday, I excerpted an article from the Sunday New York Times magazine, about the ascendance of "visual literacy." Today on Arts & Letters Daily (please be careful, this website is like crack. I'm serious. Don't even look.) there was an article by Sam Leith of the Telegraph with interesting and very complimentary take on the same subject:

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"Tell me a story." It's a plea that echoes through the ages: not only the ages of human civilisation, but the ages of man. As a child, tucked up and ready for bed.

As an adult, settling deep into a popcorn-scented cinema seat as the house lights go down. In old age, becalmed, combing your memories. Telling stories is as old a game as language itself.

So it's odd - not to say alarming - to read reports that some people seem to think we're on the verge of running out of narrative. A group of academics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in cahoots with some Hollywood moguls, have announced the opening of a "Center for Future Storytelling".

Click HERE to read the rest...

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Anniversary Cupcakes!

Today is a special day. It is the two year anniversary of the Rouge Wave. When I started this blog I had no idea what it would become or whether anyone would bother reading it. Today the Rouge Wave has hundreds of readers daily, an offshoot forum, guest blogs and a presence in the entertainment community.

I don't always have time to reply to every comment - I do my best - but I want to thank all those people who comment simply that they have found the Rouge Wave and they enjoy it. Those comments mean a lot to me, even if I don't reply. A whole lot. When you work hard to provide some kind of content every single day and people express gratitude for that, well, that's a nice feeling.

So thank YOU, Rouge Wavers, for coming back every day and for making this blog an enjoyable thing to write. Sometimes it's hard to find something relevant to say on a daily basis, other times subjects come up which fairly beg to be written about. In the early days of the blog, many posts were very instructional, how-to about screenwriting (action lines, theme, character arc) while these days I tend to talk about the business in more general terms.

Would Rouge Wavers like to see an adjustment of the content or are you guys pretty happy with the content over all? Consider the suggestion box open today (and honestly, every day).

For now - happy anniversary to The Rouge Wave and to Rouge Wavers. Cupcakes for everybody!!

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In The Beginning Was the Word

An excerpt from an article entitled "Becoming Screen Literate" by Kevin Kelly, which appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on November 23rd:

***

Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg's invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact), and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.

Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you can assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift - from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.

The intensely collaborative work needed to coddle chemically treated film and paste together its strips into movies meant that it was vastly easier to watch a movie than to make one. A Hollywood blockbuster can take a million person-hours to produce and only two hours to consume. But now, cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, Photoshop, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images. To the utter bafflement of the experts who confidently claimed that viewers would never rise from their reclining passivity, tens of millions of people hav in recent years spent uncountable hours making movies of their own design. Having a ready and reachable audience of potential millions helps, as does the choice of multiple modes in which to create. Because of new consumer gadgets, community training, peer encouragement and fiendishly clever software, the ease of making video now approaches the ease of writing.

This not how Hollywood makes films, of course. A blockbuster film is a gigantic creature custom-built by hand. Like a Siberian tiger, it demands our attention - but is also very rare. In 2007, 600 feature films were released in the United States, or about 1,200 hours of moving images. As a percentage of the hundreds of millions of hours of moving images produced annually today, 1,200 hours is tiny. It is a rounding error.

We tend to think the tiger represents the animal kingdom, but in truth, a grasshopper is a truer statistical example of an animal. The handcrafted Hollywood film won't go away, but if we want to see the future of motion pictures, we need to study the swarming food chain below - the YouTube, indie films, TV serials and insect-scale lip-synch mashups - and not just the tiny apex of tigers. The bottom is where the action is, and where screen literacy originates.

***

Fascinating, no? And the article goes on for several more pages in which the writer posits quite convincingly that the moving image has replaced the written word and that anybody can make a movie. Certainly he is convincing on many points but what he doesn't really address is the human need for STORY - in whatever form - preferring to focus instead on literacy. Yes, YouTube had 10 billion video views in September,2008, but it's not tough to hold someone's attention for 3 minutes, is it? What does it really mean at the end of the day? Is this type of video enduring? Does it create the same depth of emotional connection and catharsis that a story told on the big screen over two hours does? I doubt it.

Nobody really knows the answers - I mean, Hollywood wasn't sure talkies were going to catch on and couldn't possibly have imagined the THX surround sound some people have in their very living rooms today. One thing is for sure - humans are continuing to evolve and we do take in information more visually now than ever.

But does this mean that the authors of visual entertainment need not have a facility with the written word in order to create and contribute to the visual medium? That would be nice, wouldn't it? But I don't think so. In the beginning was the word. And the word was good. One must take ideas out of the ether and commit them to the page before they can be translated unto a visual image. Unless you plan to make videos of funny stuff your dog does, or clever edited mashups of bits and snatches of movies for a living. Not sure who's going to pay you for that but hey if you get 1 million views of how funny your kitty is wearing sunglasses, go nuts.

Carry on.

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The Assistant Files

As we speak, managers and agents all over town are weighing their options: take the spec out now and be the only one everyone is reading, or wait until January and spec with the masses? As Julie mentioned yesterday, Hollywood practically goes into hibernation for the winter. Most offices will close down sometime the week before Christmas and reopen after the first of the year, and very few specs will hit the town right before the break.

So if we're not inundated with new specs during the holiday season, what are we reading?

In the recent past, water cooler talk at this time of year has centered around The Black List. Legend has it The Black List was created a few years ago when one resourceful development exec, looking for good scripts to read, asked friends to nominate the ten best unproduced screenplays they'd read that year. He took hundreds of suggestions, compiled and ranked them by number of votes, and The Black List was born. He sent it back to his friends for their perusal. And since Hollywood is a town that trades on information, that list spread through tracking boards and email chains in no time.

As its first-page disclaimer states, "The Black List is not a 'best of'list. It is, at best, a 'most liked' list." Of course there are some scripts that people nominate just so they can act like the entertainment business is Important and Serious, or to make themselves feel smart. But I think largely people nominate what they liked, what made an impression over the course of the year.

To give you an idea of what makes the list, here are the top three scripts from the last three years:

2005: THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE (Allan Loeb), JUNO (Diablo Cody), LARS AND THE REAL GIRL (Nancy Oliver)

2006: THE BRIGANDS OF RATTLEBORGE (Craig Zahler), STATE OF PLAY (Matt Carnahan), RENDITION (Kelley Sane)

2007: RECOUNT (Danny Strong), FARRAGUT NORTH (Beau Willimon),PASSENGERS (Jon Spaihts)

What do we assistants do with The Black List? Read everything we can get our hands on, update our lists of writers, and debate the relative merits of the scripts as if we have some decision-making power.

The list has grown each year, and the 2008 edition will include the suggestions of a couple hundred film executives and high-level assistants.

Votes are in and the list is due out mid-December. If you can get your hands on them, I highly recommend reading these scripts. After all, these are the favorite scripts of the people you want to be in business with, the ones that got people excited. You might as well see what the buzz is about.

xxoo,
Andy Sachs

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Hollywood Calendar: 2009

Show business has its own peculiar rhythm. Whereas the mainstream American culture revolves around holidays like Christmas, New Years, Labor Day, winter/summer, the beginning of the school year, Hollywood revolves around film festivals, award shows, pilot season, fiscal end-of-year for production companies, Jewish High Holidays and Thanksgiv-chris-newyear-athon.

Is there a specific time when spec scripts are best to go out? Well, like everything in Hollywood, yes and no. It's like some playful god designed Hollywood with rules that are upside down, backwards and ever-changing, just to mess with us mortals, isn't it? If I had to warrant an opinion as to when spec season is at its best, I'd say it's sometime between mid-January through July.

Many production companies have a fiscal year that ends in October. That means in general, that by July or August, they're out of money to buy anything new. But then from Thanksgiving through the first of the year, when business is famously slow because of the holidays, nobody's buying much anyway. Anybody who's anybody is off skiing in Vail or snorkeling in Maui.

On the one hand, as I mentioned recently, during the slower winter holidays is when today's assistant/tomorrow's executive is manning the desk and that person might be more open to reading a new script. So I'm not counseling not to send in material this time of year. But be aware that this town is awful quiet from Thanksgiving through the New Year. It just is.

Many agents, managers and executives also attend the various Important Film Festivals, most notably, Sundance and Cannes and are busy a week or two before and a week or two after. While the anti-semitic urban myth that Hollywood is dominated by Jews is despicable, there is a fair Jewish population in Los Angeles and who work in the industry and the High Holidays which arrive in September/October each year do slow things down because so many do go to temple services and are otherwise engaged in solemn festivities. Not everybody. But a fair number. If you're interested in phoning up or setting up a meeting in Hollywood, you'd be silly not to be aware of when Yom Kippur is, now wouldn't you?

So here is a calendar of events for 2009 that you might want to jot down:

THE GOLDEN GLOBES
January 11th

SUNDANCE
January 15th through 25th

ACADEMY AWARDS
February 22nd

CANNES
May 13th through 24th

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL
September 10th through September 19th

JEWISH HIGH HOLIDAYS
(This includes Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement)
September 18th through September 29th

The spec season isn't like the Kentucky Derby, heralded with big hats and a trumpet blare; it's on and off, here and there. In a way, it's easier to look at the events above and see when it's NOT a great idea to send out query letters - late in the summer when there are no events but everybody's broke and the winter holidays are closing in fast, during Sundance and during Cannes. Again, roughly from the end of January through June or so is the best time to get out there with query letters.

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