A Quote by Jonathan M. Goldstein
To a large extent: it's about economy of space. You have so little real estate when you're writing a half hour show. It's really twenty minutes. So you have to with a pilot introduce all your characters, set up the premise in a way that shows the potential for a series and make it funny and do it all in about thirty-five or forty pages. It's very hard.
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If you don't start your career until thirty, that still gives you thirty-five years to make it professionally. If you can't make it in thirty-five years, you weren't going to make it in forty or forty-five.
If you have to pay about forty to forty-three percent of your income for housing, you also have to pay fifteen percent of your paycheck for the FICA for Social Security wage withholding. You have to pay medical care, you have to pay the banks for your credit card debt, student loans. Then you only have about twenty-five or thirty-five percent, maybe one-third of your salary to buy goods and services. That's all.
A typical day in my writing life starts with looking at pictures of real estate online for at least 20 minutes. If I happen to be actually in the market for a house, I do this for 40 minutes. Then I walk my dog, come back home, and tell myself I can look at real estate for another five minutes.
Interestingly, my first director's cut was an hour and forty-one minutes. Then, the studio actually wanted to add more to the story, so we went all the way up to an hour and forty-seven minutes. After that, I made some additional cuts and now we are where we are.
I set up this little office space with a piano in it and I thought that would be quite a novel way of writing the album, to make it like a job - a romanticised version of the 9 to 5. I think that was probably my favourite time. I made sure I walked there every day, which took me about an hour.
We had to be to the stadium at six o'clock for home games, and traffic was so bad it would take us an hour and fifteen or an hour and thirty minutes to drive. So now I'm sitting in a car for almost an hour and a half and I'm very tense. I'm worried about the traffic. So I started smoking a cigar going to the games.
I've been in the industry for 15 years, and I knew all the pieces that needed to be included to make a series. It wasn't just about writing characters, it wasn't just about writing a funny joke.
Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel.
At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.
You run for forty-five minutes, you train for an hour and a half, and the rest of the time you hang out and talk tough
Until your mid-twenties, you're still growing up mentally. It's fair to say there's a bigger difference between twenty and twenty-five than between twenty-five and forty in terms of who you are, how you relate to your work, and what you want out of it.
That's the really fun thing about writing for series versus just doing a pilot or even doing a feature: you get to live with your actors, and as you learn their voices and they learn your dialog, you're kind of building the characters together.
This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!
I really take pride in doing my own make-up all the time, which takes me about 40 minutes, and my hair takes another 15 to 20 minutes. Putting on my gear is probably another 15 minutes, so all in all, I don't think an hour and a half is too bad!
It's a combination, I think they want to know - it's for every show, which is I think networks want to know that you have a vision for where the show could go to make sure that it really is a show, that it's not just a one-off forty minute pilot, that it's an actual series.
At some shows, the set list gets changed while we are on stage. I know Ed thinks about the set very hard throughout the day in order to make the best show possible for the fans and for us.
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