TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "television"
I like to think I’m a Rizzo, but I’m probably a Ginsberg.
Brian Eno on Television (1991)
Stop being so right Brian Eno. STOP. Go, like, make a 30-minute song with five soft piano notes.
Replace “TV”with “art,” period.
And yes, Brian Eno was right about pretty much everything.
(via braiker)
(Source: amandalynferri, via parislemon)
How HBO Made It Look Like Critics Liked ‘The Newsroom’ - Forbes
Salon’s Willa Paskin is quoted in the ad calling “The Newsroom” “captivating, riveting, rousing.” Here’s what she actually wrote: “The results are a captivating, riveting, rousing, condescending, smug, infuriating mixture, a potent potion that advertises itself as intelligence-enhancing but is actually just crazy-making.”
Welcome to the world of contextomy, or quoting out of context.
Movie studios do this all the time, and this is, essentially, how I make all of my art.
Blurbing = blackout poetry.
How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? - NYTimes.com
Fascinating article on Stephen Colbert. Few facts:
- His fireplace has the Latin motto “Videri quam esse” (“To seem to be, rather than to be”—this is the reverse of the North Carolina motto, “Esse quam videri”, “To be, rather than to seem (to be)”)
- He’s the youngest of 11 children (As Vonnegut wrote, humorists “are very commonly the youngest children in their families.”)
- His father and his two brothers died in a plane crash when he was 10
Article also contains some shots of behind-the-scenes on the show.
Dan Harmon and his storytelling circles
The creator of the TV show Community has come up with a circle diagram to “codify the storytelling process—to find the hidden structure powering the movies and TV shows, even songs, he’d been absorbing since he was a kid.”
Harmon calls his circles embryos—they contain all the elements needed for a satisfying story—and he uses them to map out nearly every turn on Community, from throwaway gags to entire seasons. If a plot doesn’t follow these steps, the embryo is invalid, and he starts over. To this day, Harmon still studies each film and TV show he watches, searching for his algorithm underneath, checking to see if the theory is airtight. “I can’t not see that circle,” he says. “It’s tattooed on my brain.”
Here he breaks it down for you:
Start thinking of as many of your favorite movies as you can, and see if they apply to this pattern. Now think of your favorite party anecdotes, your most vivid dreams, fairy tales, and listen to a popular song (the music, not necessarily the lyrics). Get used to the idea that stories follow that pattern of descent and return, diving and emerging. Demystify it. See it everywhere. Realize that it’s hardwired into your nervous system, and trust that in a vacuum, raised by wolves, your stories would follow this pattern.
(thx, @jamesfflynn!)
This is one of the better ideas I’ve seen on TV recently.1 How do you get people to watch movies on cable—movies that have been edited, cut up and interrupted with commercials, movies that they’ve probably already seen a half dozen times? Get a writer to do a little research, write a big batch of one-line, bite-sized trivia bits, and play them in real-time during the movie.
Best of all, AMC posts the Story Notes on their blog in text form.
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Kelly Deal reminded me that VH1 started this with Pop-Up Video. ↩
