Issue 7: Mashups, more pitching, and short film pre-production!
Hi friendos!
Feeling kind of glum with the inauguration two days ago? US TOO.
But we’re gonna try to put a little light into your world by talking about writing!
Because it beats falling into despair and anger. Ha ha, good times.
NEW STUFF
So we mentioned a few issues back about our original pilot script Robo Waitress Assassins being listed on The Stunt List’s Originals Bureau, of the hottest original scripts looking for buyers. We also mentioned that we had a previous actual stunt script on The Stunt List. So let’s talk about it!
If you missed it before, a stunt script is something written that can never actually be produced. Episodes for shows that are no longer airing, a Star Wars sequel that Disney/LucasFilm didn’t hire you to write, wild crossovers, etc. Usually they’re just done for fun or as a writing exercise, though occasionally they’ve also been used to get people jobs on a writing staff (on an entirely different show).
Before The Stunt List was even a thing, we were between projects and thinking about what to write next, and the idea for this The Good Place/Barry crossover dropped itself into our laps, and we were so excited by it that we couldn’t not write it.
Because The Good Place is all about dirtbags learning to be better people, right? And, at the time we wrote this, so was Barry (it later went some wild places in its last seasons, but that’s a different story). So thematically they lined up, and it helped that they were both comedies (again, at that point, Barry was much more comedic, even though it did skew dark).
The lynchpin was D’Arcy Carden, who appears in both shows. On The Good Place she played Janet, the omnipotent and all-powerful “not a robot” in the afterlife. And on Barry she was Natalie, a fellow student in Barry’s acting class.
And so what if Barry was “the real world” (it was a very grounded show) and The Good Place was still a tv show (as it’s really fantastical conceptually)? What if Natalie used the stage name D’Arcy Carden when she got an acting gig as Janet on The Good Place? And what if Barry asked her to get him a job on the show, too… because he’s a hitman, and just got a contract to assassinate our fabulous national treasure, Ted Danson?
And we found the perfect spot it would fit in, right between two episodes of Barry and two episodes of The Good Place.
It was such a wild idea and we had such a blast writing it. And it was super cool for it to make the inaugural Stunt List! You can read it on the Stunt List site!
WHAT WE’RE WORKING ON
Remember all those comic pitches we’ve been talking about? Yeah, we’re working on those!
One of them was finalized and the editor loved it, and it’s now off to The Deciders where she’s going to fight for it. So we’re just in a waiting period now, to hear if we get a green light or a hard no or a “hey let’s revise this a bit.”
We also sent off short, one-paragraph concept pitches for something an editor asked if we’d like pitch for, and those are now also going to The Deciders to see if they’d like us to develop one of them into a full-blown pitch (info on theme, characters, plot, etc).
And the other pitch we were working on was turned in, and the editor loved it, but wanted us to flesh the story portion out a bit before taking it to the publisher in the hopes of getting a greenlight. And that’s cool! You don’t always know if they want more or less detail in that section. Sometimes having more is helpful, so they can better visualize it. Sometimes having less is helpful, so they can give input and suggestions for what they might want to see. Just part of the job! In any case, we’ve added more story, but… way too much story (we already had an outline, this was the one we originally broke as a tv pilot), but now we have all the detail we need to write it… in whatever format it ends up in. So now we’re gonna pare that back so they get more (but not a ton more) and see how it goes!
Cross all those fingers and toes for these, wouldja?
Our short film is still progressing through pre-production, the producers are assembling crew and talking with the location and we’ve started collecting props and trying to figure out other things we’re going to need. We have weekly production meetings on where everything is at, and it’s wild how what will likely be a fifteen minute short requires just so many people and so much work and has a million moving parts. Like, we knew that, but now we really know… y’know? We’ll be revising the script to address logistic filming/location issues soon.
TRANS TUESDAY UPDATE
Trans Tuesdays are back, and we’re knee-deep into talking about trans representation in movies! The first was about the movie Emilia Pérez, which has been winning tons of awards. It’s about (and stars) a trans woman… but it was written and directed by a cisgender man who knows absolutely nothing about trans people and clearly did not care to learn. And as such, it’s one of the most incredibly damaging and harmful depictions of trans women in recent memory. At a time when legislative violence against trans people is at an all-time high, this movie confirms every bad thing transphobes have ever said about us. It’s, frankly, dangerous to the trans community. It's all outlined in the essay on it.
And just this week, the three-part Trans Rep in Media 2024 report began with part 1, movies! Tilly tracked every movie and tv show she watched last year (and it was a lot), and every time trans people appeared, or jokes were made about us, or anything else related to transness and gender stuff appeared. This essay includes discussion of Ghostbusters Afterlife, I Saw the TV Glow, Lisa Frankenstein, Monkey Man, Next Goal Wins, The People's Joker, The Substance, Transformers One, and more!
RECOMMENDATIONS
Silo season two just ended on AppleTV+, and it remains one of our favorites. It’s tremendously great sci-fi drama, and we super highly recommend it. It has so much to say about society and class and the way the rich and powerful manipulate the less fortunate and pit them against each other. It also has an incredibly strong, if likely unintentional, trans reading that says some amazing stuff. Tilly did a whole series of essays about season one and all the ways it spoke to the trans experience.
This week we also recommend the book Endurance by Alfred Lansing. It’s the true story of the imperial trans-Antarctic expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Lansing did an incredible amount of research to make the book as accurate as possible, and crafted a really great narrative by using diaries and also firsthand accounts from the last survivors who he was able to interview. This is a story of a failed expedition, but it’s also incredible that Shackleton was able to keep everyone alive, and he also headed up a very small team of folks to take a very small boat across 650 miles of open ocean to get help. Everyone should have died a thousand times over, and it is truly an amazing story of survival. (For those of you who are sensitive, TW that a lot of animals are killed throughout the book. Like, a lot.)
THE DIRTBAG DISPATCH
Despite the Dirtbag still outweighing Izzy by being something like double her bodyweight, she has stopped taking his shit because she learned he is King Baby and all bluster. He was giving her crap because he wanted to get in the box here, and she wasn’t having it.
Dirtbag Henry laying next to a box that Izzy is in, as she smacks him on the head several times
Although she then left the box, so I guess he still got what he wanted! There are multiple paths to the same outcome, this is what Dirtbag Henry teaches us. He is not wise, but his being a dick made him wise on accident.
A few days later they got into a little scuffle again, but this time Henry stood up for himself and didn’t immediately fold, and Izzy was… shocked, to say the least. How can this be? He’s all talk! This wasn’t the deal! Listen, Iz, we were as surprised as you.
WHAT’S IN THE BIG TIME?
In Issue 7 of the Big Time version, we go deep on writing tv spec scripts, the how and why, and what they can and can’t do for you.
Also the Big Time includes the final Monster High Monster Fest audio commentary! Listen to us talk about our Halloween special! It’s a clawsome, fangtastic, voltageous good time.
Sign up at birdguestbroadcast.com!
THE END
We’re entering some concerning, unknown, and scary times.
The only way we’re gonna get through it is by helping each other.
Do something kind for someone today, we all need it.
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