A Quote by Alec Baldwin
Soaps are the best. They really are. If you can do a soap, well, you can do anything. You have to learn pages of dialogue very quickly.
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When you're on a daytime drama you get one page, you better damn well know your character. You better know what she would do in every situation because it's a very, very fast paced business. You do ninety pages a day on a Soap Opera. It's insane. It's such a small world, the soaps. It's all contained in one little studio.
I remember I had a low point when I was working on a soap opera, 'General Hospital,' five years ago. It was my first real job, and it was so overwhelming. You would work five days a week and have to learn sometimes up to 30 pages of new dialogue a night, then have one take to shoot it all, the next day.
The learning curve on soaps is through the roof because it's a three-camera setup. There's a master and then there's two singles. And the great thing about soaps, and soap actors will tell you, is that when you get your line wrong, they don't re-shoot it. They just cut to the person listening.
Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map.
I do read very, very quickly. I do process data very quickly. And so I write very quickly. And it is embarrassing because there is a conception that the things that you do quickly are not done well. I think that's probably one of the reasons I don't like the idea of prolific.
The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.
I came up professionally as a lawyer, and when you're a lawyer, writing a 50-page brief in one night is just another day at the office. You learn to make choices really quickly, and you learn how to get thoughts down very quickly.
Most English people are horrified that I use soap, but I like it - it works for my skin. I try different soaps all the time, but I use very mild ones.
When you translate the American writers who are best with dialogue into German - someone like Elmore Leonard, or Tom Wolfe, who's also quite good with dialogue. It's very hard to translate them well.
I remember people saying that Atletico wanted me, that they are a big team, and that it will be a big challenge for me. I don't know why, but I just felt really prepared for it, really confident. I went there and tried to do my best in training as well as learn the language really quickly. That was important, I think.
I'm not that keen to do a daily soap, but I'm always ready for reality soaps.
I didn't study anything really. I didn't learn out of the books because I couldn't read music very well, so it is what they say it is - you learn from other people. And my cohorts and I would sneak around the coffee shops and hear stuff we wanted to learn, and then you ask whoever was playing it to teach you.
Soap operas are like TV boot camp. You have to be able to self-direct, learn a ton of dialogue in a short amount of time, and deliver a performance in one or two takes.
When I'm writing a script, before I can write dialogue or anything, I have two or three hundred pages of notes, which takes me a year. So, it's not like "what happens next." I've got things that I'm thinking about but I don't settle on them. And if I try to write dialogue before then, I can't. It's just garbage.
You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story - the best lines, the best observations - but they haven't got enough to do with the plot to stay in.
People learn racism through dialogue. Somebody tells them about it. So if you can learn it through dialogue, you can also unlearn it through dialogue.
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