I say Hoffman

final update,  I said wrong.

*******

The Republican candidate folds. I predict that the tea party candidate will win. This is based on nothing but a few headlines, so call it the recording of a hunch.

Premise: Politically, this is a terrible time to be Republican but not such a bad time to be a really pissed-off right-winger. Republicans per se have got it tough all over; pissed-off extreme conservatives have their spots where they can break thru.

update, Lib blogs point me to this, a Siena Institute poll. Chris Cilizza highlights:

more than 60 percent of Scozzafava backers were self-identified Republicans, meaning that the majority of them are likely to back Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman.

The NRCC is promising the tea party candidate a seat on Armed Services; the district contains a U.S. army military reservation, per Wiki.

Visionary: Prouty was right

Olive Higgins Prouty wrote the novels on which Now, Voyager and Stella Dallas were based, and she helped out the young Sylvia Plath with money and thereby wound up as "Philomena Guinea" in The Bell Jar. I know all this from Wikipedia, which I consulted because I just watched Now, Voyager.

Wiki says:

Initial production of the Prouty novel had to take into account that European locales would not be possible in the midst of a war, despite the novelist's insistence on using Italy as the main setting. Her quirky demands for vibrant colors and flashbacks shot in black and white with subtitles were similarly disregarded.

Okay, it was quirky to expect Warner Brothers, or anyone in Hollywood, to get so lively in 1942. But it still sounds like Prouty had a good idea. Color for the present, black and white for the past -- yeah. I mean, it makes so much sense that by now it may be a cliche. Subtitles, well, I'd have to see what she had in mind, but still ... could work, could be useful.

Overall, it sounds like she was going for something a bit Oliver Stone-ish but decades before he and psychodelics were ever introduced. I like Oliver Stone, so I'm impressed. "Quirky." The three-name lady was right. 

The  book/movie is a document of the early therapeutic culture. Wiki says Prouty had psychoanalytic leanings, but I didn't see much of them here. Now, Voyager celebrates the idea of emotional therapy, just emotional therapy in general -- not even the talking cure, let alone something as specific as Freudianism.

The movie is about Bette Davis's nervous breakdown and her subsequent vigorous rebirth thanks to enlightened therapeutic practices. That is, Claude Rains runs a country sanitarium, she stays there, and while she's there people treat her nicely and she's away from her horrible, browbeating mother. Then she loses weight, dresses up sharp, and goes on an ocean cruise where nobody knows her and she can be her new self. Before she sails, she reads a note that Claude Rains left her. His voice says: "The untold want by life and land ne'er granted / Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find." Apparently the words are the whole of a Walt Whitman poem called "The Untold Want," to which Prouty added a comma for her title.

The movie centers on three basic beliefs undergirding the therapeutic mentality: that persistent emotional misery can be explained by what a person experienced as a child (most especially by the behavior of mom and dad); that the unhappiness can be cured by someone who has a medical degree or something near and who uses the equivalent of modern medicine's hygenic operating environment (the sanitarium in Voyager, the impersonality required of practitioners of Freudian analysis, the "safe place" idea in modern-day talk therapy); and that no cure will happen unless the patient takes a risk, makes a stake in his/her life, decides that he/she is going to get more out of it than he/she has been getting -- you've got to start living out loud, as the saying goes. 

Progress report: 10'16 thru 23

I've kind of lost track of the day-by-day. But I've lined up 95 episodes in a shooting order that I find plausible. Forget how many I had to invent on the spot -- plenty, since I decided that some of my favorite previously invented episodes were too character-driven to keep the network happy. The network wants alien spectacle and "planet shows," the same demand Star Trek got from NBC.

Bronson-Gann.  Here's a side of things that I like but that any eventual readers may not care about. Star Trek is about a space ship, Sky Frontier about a space station, so I have to think of ways to bring situations to the station. One is the space storm, otherwise known as a "time-warp disruption." It's gobbledygook but useful, and it pops up more often as the series goes on. Eventually a script gives one space storm the made-up name of "a Bronson-Gann disruption," and the name surfaces a few more times, though scripts also revert to "time-warp disruption" and simple "space storm," depending on the attention being paid by the people in charge. Years later "Bronson-Gann" becomes a continuity staple of the franchise and penetrates fan talk ("He's having a Gann" means someone is acting like a flake or pitching a fit).

Mission Tube.  Last night, among other things, I worked out which episodes would feature space storms, disruptions, or Bronson-Ganns. I also worked out which ones would feature the Mission Tube, another contrivance for making plots possible. Sky Frontier should have started out with a teleport device, like Star Trek did. But it didn't, both because I want the two series to be different and because Sky Frontier's creator is a stubborn sort who wants people to come to him. But before the first season is up, he and his team hit on teleporting as a storytelling crutch. Instead of the streamlined teleporting used by Star Trek, theirs is quite a production. A machine with a man-sized portal sets up a high hum and the characters jump thru the portal and into whatever situation they're supposed to get into. The effect is much like The Time Tunnel, I think (because I haven't seen that show). The Mission Tube is not the surefire device the Star Trek crew enjoys; it can send you to the wrong place and is subject to interference from difficult local conditions. "We can scramble them there," the engineering man says tensely. "I just don't know if we can scramble them back."

Titles.  Here are some I came up with. You'll see I got pretty ripe:

"That My Hands Shall Know Their Maker"

"Half a Blindfold"

"The Stars that See, the Sky that Forgets"

A writer after my own heart

I never thought I would identify with a member of Obama's crack communications team. But:

... less than seventy-two hours before the speech would be delivered to a live audience, Favreau was sitting alone in an unfurnished group house in Chicago when the boss called. “I’m going to give you some stream of consciousness,” Obama told him. Then he spoke for about forty-five minutes, laying out his speech’s argumentative construction. Favreau thanked him, hung up, considered the enormity of the task and the looming deadline, and then decided he was “too freaked out by the whole thing” to write and went out with friends instead. 

Favreau is Jon Favreau (not the Hollywood guy, a speechwriter) and the speech in question was the big one, Obama's response to the flap over Jeremiah Wright and "God damn America!" It got written in the end, which I hope is a portent. The article is by Robert Draper in GQ, via Sullivan, of course.

Progress report: 10'13, '14 and '15

 

Today's Thursday, so the dates work out like this ...

Tuesday:  4 hours writing notes, mainly about the show but also with a section about two of the characters, CG and Olsen, and how they deal with personal appearances. Back in the '60s tv actors could make more money doing weekend appearances at shopping malls and small-town harvest festivals they made from their tv work. For instance, Leonard Nimoy was a bear about scheduling appearances around the country every weekend, then driving straight from the airport to the studio for shooting. Of course he had a certain amount of stardom; Koenig, Takei and Nichols, for example, didn't have much to say about appearances in their memoirs, most likely because they didn't do as much of that work. For whatever reason, I read their memoirs a few years ago and Nimoy's not until last December or so. Once I had read him, I realized I had to make p.a.'s a bigger factor in CG's and Olsen's lives, and now I think I've figured out how to do that.

The other notes had to do with my show's credits sequence and core gimmicks: the look of the space station, its set-up (Deck 8, Deck 7, Deck 6, etc., all the way up to Deck 1, Command, the High Deck -- the special h.q. with the screens and blinking lights and the regulars sitting at their posts), the neat tricks it can pull (protector rings, offense beams, etc. -- I don't have the notebook with me, but I worked out some pretty good terms).

I was very happy with what I decided for the credits sequence and the station's look. I've been noodling with both questions for God nows how many years, and now I've got answers that I like. They seem plausible for mid-'60s tv and plausible as winners with the people watching the show, and I managed to work them out in enough detail for them to feel solid. 

Wednesday:  Not much at all. I spent half an hour with my notebook while traveling by subway. Unfortunately all I did was write nonsense phrases for fantasy stories: "The red cut glass of the goblin's triangular stare in the dark." Reason: the night before I had read LeGuin's "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," which contains a few quotes from fantasy authors whom she likes. Not much of a reason, but it turned out to be enough.

Today:  Four hours selecting and rewriting the first 15 episodes to be shot. I don't mean rewriting scripts, because I'm not fool enough to write those, just blurb descriptions. Eighty to go and I'll have enough. I've got a bunch written up, though a count revealed the bunch was about 15 short of what I had expected. The job now is to decide which episodes were shot when, to write more as needed, and to fix the ones I already have if they need fixing. Not fix them too much, because I might get lost in the project and never come out, but enough for me to feel that each episode could have been broadcast and to give me an idea of what the production staff and actors would have had to do to get the thing made.

Progress report: 10'12

Think it was 3.5 hours. I'm trying to decide which episodes will go where in the first-season shooting schedule I made up.

(Clarification if needed: so far the schedule is just a set of dates. The fourth episode starts shooting on a given date, the fifth starts on a given date, etc. But which episode goes fourth? That's the side of things I'm working on now.) 

Exercises in meme sharpening

If the Republicans can't win, they want America to lose.

My own phrasing, and I hope the DNC sees it somehow. I think that's the ultimate in pithification for the line being pushed here. Also, it probably would have been best if the DNC had made the Taliban parallel a backup talking point rather than the lead.

More advice, this time to the Young Democrats. They have a letter harping on the vote by Sen. David Vitter, a client of prostitutes, against Al Franken's bill to let employees of military contractors use the U.S. court system if they are victims of sexual assault. "What exactly is David Vitter's problem with women?" the letter wants to know. That's subtler than saying "David Vitter hires prostitutes, therefore he hates women." But it's not as good as hammering at the fact that Vitter gave no reason for his vote. List all the common sense points that make the bill a matter of simple justice; leave Vitter's vote as a mystery he refuses to explain. "Dave, at least tell us why" would have primed the reader to say, "I know why" and out would have popped the memory of the sex scandal.

Sometimes not only do you have to avoid drawing connections, you have to let the audience supply one of the dots. Otherwise, as in this case, you wind up looking a bit cheesy.