I myself am, of course, ostensibly a comedy writer, in that my weird, sad lectures here on Cracked are how I indulge my wicked food-and-electricity addiction, but my horror and sci-fi works have gotten me far more professional attention than my comedy scripts have. Just hire a Hapsburg, why don’t you? I’m sure their “lived experience” of being a product of incest would make them a natural fit for the House of the Dragon writer’s room. Rich, well-connected people don’t even have to be in the film industry to leverage their positions to get people they know jobs.Īre you going to look me in the eye and tell me that Donald Glover went through thousands and thousands of applications and it just so happened that, besides his own brother, the child of one of the most powerful people in the history of the planet was the most qualified to be a writer on Atlanta? Come on. To which I offer this rebuttal: is there a gas leak in your house? The “nepo” in “nepotism” comes from the Latin nepos, meaning nephew, so you might as well say it’s not actually nepotism unless someone is helping the son of their sibling. Movies, the inventor of movies, but actually his third cousin once removed, so it’s not literally nepotism. The other weird way people will try to defend nepotism is by saying that, actually, Little Stevie Movies isn’t actually the son of Stephen L. This is a slugline, by the way, in case you happen to live a happy, fulfilling life and didn’t know. I don’t do either: I just rawdog it to the next scene. The answer to the bolded-or-underlined sluglines debate, by the way, is that it doesn’t matter. They’ll be so busy ineffectually bickering you’ll have ample time to saunter to safety. If you’re ever in the unlikely situation where you’re going to be attacked by screenwriters (perhaps you’re wearing a t-shirt which implies that Jackie Brown isn’t good?), the easiest way to break it up is to redirect their anger at each other by asking them if they underline or bold their sluglines. The point is, there’s a lot of really intense arguing among young screenwriters about stuff that ultimately doesn’t matter. It committed three mortal screenwriting “sins” in roughly the time it takes to squeeze off a furtive dump in a Wal-Mart camping section, and it also made about $624,000,000. Look at Ratatouille – a perfectly fine movie that begins with an exposition dump in a void followed by an in media res opening scene which leads into a freeze-frame “yep, that’s me” moment. I’m not saying this as a knock on contemporary film or television, but rather as a knock to myself and my own naïveté. There’s a certain skill floor you need to surpass, sure, but being able to master the basics is generally better than being able to consistently pull off staggering works of heartbreaking genius. Here’s the dirty secret of the television and film writing industries: you don’t actually have to be that good at it to get a job. But I don’t think most people realize how true it is, nor to what extent it’s true. DeGeneres’ eyes, she takes it as a territorial challenge and will maul you.” It’s likely you’ve heard this phrase before, whether you’re in what we call “the biz (short for ‘the business’)” or if you have a real job. Today I’m going to be talking about the showbiz axiom “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” It’s an expression about as well known in Hollywood as “Martini shot,” “deferred payment,” and “don’t look directly in Ms. Need another hit of Uncle Will’s sweet, sweet lessons about breaking into Hollywood? Well I’m here and I’ve got what you need … if you’ve got the cash.
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