SAVE JOAN

It's been so nice to have God as a presence on network TV every week in Joan of Arcadia (and a cool presence, too, with no bouffant hair in sight). But Joan's days may be numbered. Network execs are currently choosing next year's shows -- and Joan is, as they say, "on the bubble."

So a petition drive has been started to try to remind the networks that Joan has some fans out there, and reader Scott asked me to let you all know about it.

How much good do these petitions do? Well, it was certainly fandom that resurrected Star Trek way back when (the failure of the current effort to do so notwithstanding). And other shows have been positively affected by awareness that they do indeed have fans. So if you're a fan, why not -- click on over and sign to save the show.

After all, do we really need another hour of CSI on TV?

BUY THIS BOOK! THE HOLLYWOOD STANDARD

When I teach my writing students, I am very blunt. (I tell them I am the Simon Cowell of their lives.) I tell them that if they can't spell, I will think they are stupid. I tell them that if they can't punctuate, I will think they are stupid. And I tell them that if they don't know how to format a screenplay but still want me to read their screenplay, I will think they are really stupid.

They can avoid all that pain by buying the new book written by the new director of Act One, Chris Riley: The Hollywood Standard: The Complete and Authoritative Guide to Screenplay Format and Style.

Now I have to admit right up front that I am a tad jealous of Chris for getting this book to print. After all, I am the one who teaches the "Style" class for Act One, and I do have notes for a book of my own (on structure and style, admittedly, not format and style)... Notes that are probably packed in some box somewhere at this point.

But believe me, Chris is the guy to write this book! After ten years running the script department at Warner Brothers, where he corrected everyone else's format errors, he knows his stuff inside and out. When Lee and I had a dilemma about how to format and "stylize" a first page of a script, Chris was the one we took it to -- and what a lovely, arcane, academic chat we had about tiny points of style no one else would care about.

I read dozens of newbie scripts -- and everyone gets it wrong in one way or another. People show up at Act One proudly toting screenplays that they wrote in college -- where the profs gave them incredibly bad advice on how to format a script. Every one of these folks needs to Chris's book.

As I tell my students: No one wants to read your script. No one has to read your script. All the reader needs is one excuse to put it down forever. And if your formatting looks sloppy or unprofessional, or your script is written with an astonishing lack of style -- that's more than enough excuse!

So anyone out there with even a smidgen of interest in writing a screenplay -- BUY THIS BOOK!!

A FRESH START

We signed with new literary agents yesterday.

This is really a radical change for us, as we have been with the same agents since we hit the big time over 10 years ago. And we loved our agent. But for quite some time, he hadn't been doing his job, instead just sitting and waiting for the phone to ring.

People like to say that a great agent-client relationship is like a marriage. And it can feel that way when it's working right. But, of course, it's not really like a marriage at all. It's a business relationship. And business relationships change.

We realized last summer the depth of how wrong things were between us. And we toyed with changing agents then. We made the calls, got other people to make the calls, sent scripts to be read....

We could suddenly relate to our unproduced friends and students who beat their heads against the cliffs of the agency world and get no response. What if no one wants us, you feel. And indeed, nothing happened. People responded well to what they read... but not well enough.

And the new year rolled around, and things with our agent got lazier, sloppier, worse. And we made a casual comment to a well-placed friend, who made a casual comment to her agent.

And all of a sudden, with no work on our part (not even sending scripts to be read!), the wheels were rolling. A whole new set of agents called around town asking questions about us, we began to get e-mails from people saying these agents had called, we sought counsel from people more knowledgeable in the ways of the agency world than us -- and then they called us and basically said they wanted to represent us.

And we met with them and shook hands and called our former (!) agent and said, "we love you but buh-bye!" And that was it. There has never been an easier agency change in the history of the world, it feels like -- and we have ended up at just the agency that all those knowledgeable types said we should be at.

So while I am not a big fan of change these days, this is certainly a change I can be a fan of. It feels like we are getting a brand new start. A do-over, as it were. And we are grateful!

Now if only finding a new place to live works out that easily.....

C IS FOR COOKIE. THAT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME.

So I read that Cookie Monster on Sesame Street has seen the error of his ways. He will no longer chow down on cookies at every opportunity, opting instead for carrots and fruit and healthy stuff like that.

In fact, after, what, 30 years(?), his theme song is even being changed. No more "C is for Cookie." No, instead, Cookie Monster will now sing "A Cookie is a Sometimes Thing."

Are they going to change his name, too? Turn him orange instead of blue? Is there no constant left in the universe?

And what kind of humanocentric reasoning prompted this change? Has anyone considered that the dietary requirements for monsters may be radically different than those for humans? What if, deprived of cookies, Cookie Monster's, say, circulatory system ceases to function properly? Will the do-gooders at Sesame Street be prepared to step in and administer intravenous chocolate chips?

Sesame Street is not, of course, the first child's show to succumb to the nutritionally-correct police. Some years back Veggie Tales caved under similar pressure, redoing a song on their video "Rack, Shack and Benny." In the original, the villain, a pickle (I think) named Nebbie K. Nezzer sang a delicious, even sexy blues riff known as "The Bunny Song," a hymn of worship to a chocolate bunny (to whom our heroes were supposed to bow down).

However, under the pressure of parents who seemed to assume their kids were incapable of recognizing fantasy when they saw it, they changed the lyrics so that the villain now sings in praise of (you guessed it) healthy food. The song now makes absolutely no sense in the context of the story, turning a real villain into a cuddly buddy, and stripping a story about "Who do you worship?" of all its power.

Well, I have a clue for Veggie Tales and Sesame Street alike. Kids do recognize fantasy -- and that's part of the purpose of shows like this, to teach them how to recognize it. And here's something kids can recognize: Propaganda. They know darn good and well that cookies are yummier than carrots. Sure, we can teach them about healthy food -- but do we really need to infuse a heavy dose of cynicism, of the knowledge that all those adults out there are just feeding you a line, along with it?

Sorry, Sesame Street. In our house, C is -- and will always be -- for Cookie.

A SOLUTION TO MUSIC PIRACY

(forwarded to me some time ago, and discovered as I cleaned out files in my pre-packing mode....courtesy of urbanreflex.com)

Music Industry Unveils New Piracy-Proof Format: A Black, Plastic Disc with Grooves on It

Music bosses have unveiled a revolutionary new recording format that they hope will help win the war on illegal file sharing which is thought to be costing the industry millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Nicnamed the "Record," the new format takes the form of a black, vinyl disc measuring 12 inches in diameter, which must be played on a specially designed "turntable."

"We can state with absolute certainty that no computer in the world can access the data on this disc," said spokesman Brett Campbell. "We are also confident that no one is going to be able to produce pirate copies in this format without going to a heck of a lot of trouble. This is without doubt the best anti-piracy invention the music industry has ever seen."

As part of the invention's rigorous testing process, the designers gave some discs to a group of teenager computer experts who regularly use file swapping software and who admit to pirating music CDs. Despite several days of trying, none of them were able to hack into the disc's code or access any of the music files contained within it.


"It's like, really big and stuff," said Doug Flamboise, one of the testers. "I couldn't get it into any of my drives. I mean, what format is it? Is it, like, from France or something?"

In the new format, raw audio data in the form of music is encoded by physically etching grooves onto the vinyl disc. The sound is thus translated into variations on the disc's survace in a process tha tindustry insiders are describing as "completely revolutionary" and "stunningly clever."

To decode the data stored on the disc, the listener must use a special player which contains a "needle" that runs along the grooves on the record surface, reading the indentations and transforming the movements back into audio that can be fed through loudspeakers.

Even Shawn Fanning, the man who invented Napster, admits the new format will make file swapping much more difficult. "I've never seen anything like this," he told reporters. "How does it work?"

As rumors that a Taiwanese company has been secretly developing a 12-inch wide turntable-driven needle-based firewire drive remain unconfirmed, it would appear that the music industry may, at last, have found the pirate-proof format it has long been searching for.

DEVELOPING AN IMMUNITY TO HOLLYWOOD

I had some follow-up thoughts to our event with Hugh Hewitt last weekend.

We had a panel of folks from the industry talking about their own struggles with ambition and ethics, and the metaphor of battle seemed to come up a lot. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes a bit more subtly. "Where do you draw the line?" (as in battle lines being drawn). The general answer: It depends. It depends on the person, on the situation, on a multitude of factors.

And it occurred to me that, as applicable as "battle" may be for Hollywood, maybe we need a fresher metaphor.

And I thought of the immune system. When you're allergic to something, your immune system mistakenly takes that substance to be a toxin, and sets off a huge reaction to it, pumping out enzymes to protect the body from the perceived poison at hand.

Some people are allergic to, say, peanuts. Now I can eat peanut butter till the cows come home. But some people are so highly allergic that if they're on a plane and someone opens a packet of peanuts way up in the front, the mere dust from the peanuts will send them into anaphylactic shock and they could die.

But allergies aren't always so extreme. My son used to be allergic to peanuts. But all that happened to him if he ate peanuts was his cheeks got really red and he got a rash on the back of his neck and the inside of his elbows. Not that big a deal.

And he actually outgrew his allergy after a few years. His immune system matured, got to a point where it could handle peanuts, his allergist retested him -- and he was fine. So now he can chug Reese's peanut butter cups like a champ.

It seems to me that we have here an apt metaphor for Christians in Hollywood.

I have a friend who writes for That 70's Show. Now, the writers room of a sitcom is a nasty place, filled with graphic sexual humor, massive putdowns of everyone and everything, and all sorts of pushing the boundaries that we would rather not have pushed. Most Christians -- probably most *people* -- wouldn't be able to tolerate the behavior they would find in a writers' room. There is, in fact, a major lawsuit going on right now, brought by a former writer's assistant on Friends, alleging sexual harassment and other bad behavior.

My friend at That 70's Show clearly has a high immunity to the toxins put out in a sitcom writers' room. He can handle it, when most people would find the atmosphere pure poison. So he should be there. And most other Christians, whose spiritual immune systems would go haywire there in five minutes, shouldn't be there.

Christians in Hollywood need much stronger immune systems in general. How many Christians are immune to the toxin that is celebrity? (Could you meet Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg/Julia Roberts/Tom Cruise/Brad Pitt and treat them like a normal person? And, more important, could you then walk away from the encounter or even the relationship not feeling like you were more special because you had them on your speed dial?)

How many Christians are immune to the toxin of fame? To the toxin of selling out? To the toxin of hiding their light under a bushel? To the toxin of money? To the toxin of being cool?

Those who are immune (or who can develop immunity, as our son seems to have done towards peanuts) should be in places that other people can't go. Places like Hollywood. And those Christians who are not immune to these potential toxins should simply not go into places that might destroy them.

Think about it this way, and perhaps the choices of whether to come to Hollywood (or whether to stay!) become a little clearer....

HUGH HEWITT ON AMBITION

Up at Bel Air Presbyterian's new entertainment and arts community, The Beacon, we had the privilege this weekend of having radio commentator Hugh Hewitt come speak to us on the topic of "Ambition and Ethics."

I don't normally take notes at these things, but about two minutes into his brief talk, I thought, "Wow, this would be good for my blog" and whipped out my pen.

Hugh opened up talking about how there are increasingly two types of people in American: "God people" and "non-God people." He pointed out that we "God people" tend to make many, many more distinctions (e.g., what kind of Presbyterian are you?), but that no one else cares.

And he pointed out that the "God people" are becoming increasingly marginalized from the point of view of the culture. There used to be a center ground, sort of a neutral zone. Now however, more and more there is simply a chasm, a great divide between the two camps. Hugh referred to C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength as an amazingly prescient book. (The embarrassing thing was that only 4 people in the room of over 100 raised their hands to say they had read it.)

He then went on to list the four general rules for Christians with ambition seeking to be in positions of influence:

1) You don't get to pretend that this increasing divide (between "God" and "non-God" people) isn't happening or that it isn't relevant.

2) You don't get to choose your allies.

3) You don't get to retire from the battlefield.

4) You have to support the next generation.

He also had five specifics to pass on to us:

1) You must either excel or retire. Success isn't accidental. (This is a great word for our Act One alums: "Good" isn't good enough.)

2) You must encourage, promote and prefer your fellow believers, when it is possible to do so with integrity. (In other words, you don't promote someone with no talent for the job. But you do give preference -- something the "Christian" companies in Hollywood have been woefully failing in for some time, as they repeatedly hire non-believers when there are equally -- or more -- talented believers waiting in the wings.)

3) You must boldly announce who you are. (No hiding as a Christian. You must be "out." You must be available to talk about your faith.)

4) You must serve the church. (So glad to hear him say this! How often have we seen Christians attain a measure of success and promptly cut off all ties to those who have supported and prayed for them! Or Christians who are too busy or too "important" to serve -- but always available to teach, to be interviewed, to be in charge.)

5) You must refuse the inner circle when the inner circle invites you in. Hugh views this as the greatest threat of corruption for people with talent. The issue here is that once you are in the inner circle, your role is to mock those not in the inner circle. Genuine Christians, on the other hand, should communicate with everyone in their life -- the gardener, the guy who delivers coffee, the receptionist, the FedEx guy -- all those "little" people whom it's so easy to ignore once you have some status. Instead, we need to practice this kind of communication until it becomes authentic.

On this subject, Hugh referred everyone to a lecture C.S. Lewis gave entitled The Inner Ring. I found this concept the most interesting -- because of course, we always want to be in the inner circle (I do, anyway) -- and that exists even at church (especially at church?) -- So the idea of consciously avoiding it was fascinating to me. I haven't read the essay, but will click on my own link right now.

All in all, a fascinating morning. Hope you enjoyed at least the notes!

CONDOLENCES...

My condolences to my Catholic friends and readers on the death of John Paul II. When to so many today, religion of all kinds seems irrelevant, it is wonderful to have the news singing the example of a deeply religious man who truly changed the world.

I had the pleasure of hearing radio commentator Hugh Hewitt speak on Saturday, mere hours before the pope's death was announced, and he opened with comments about John Paul's imminent passing. He pointed out that the next three weeks will be a time of immense spiritual battle, as the cardinals convene to choose the next pope. How greatly, he remarked, would the devil like to see an ineffectual or even rotten man in that job!

It seemed so obvious once he said it -- but I haven't seen anyone else comment on the role of spiritual battle in the choice before the cardinals.

Much more to come on Hugh's talk -- but I'll leave it there for now, with a clear sense of direction for my own prayers for the next three weeks.