Craig and John take a look the week’s news, including the WGA nominations, Warner’s shift to a 56-day video window, the folly of SOPA and the launch of Bronson Watermarker.

Along the way, we discuss Hoda Kotb, Marcus Bachman, and how great HBO Go is. (Really, it’s great, and other studios should follow its lead.)

All this and more in episode 19 of Scriptnotes.

Podcast: Download | Embed

LINKS:

• SNL’s Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee sketches
• Marcus Bachman bought sunglasses for their dog
• WGA nominations
• Warners moves to a 56-day window
• HBO Go
• SOPA, explained
• Bronson Watermarker
• INTRO: WFIL news theme
• OUTRO: OK Go’s Last Leaf as covered by Allison Dole. (Original is available on iTunes.)

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.

UPDATE 1-11-12: The transcript of this episode can be found below.

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I’d missed this article from November, in which Jesse Lasky describes his first experience pitching a TV show:

“We want you to come in and pitch it.” Hold up. This was just an idea I had. Not even an idea — a seed of an idea! And now they wanted me to come in with a fully grown flower? In less than a week. [...]

Normally, only 10% of the writing process is actual writing. The other 90% is a subtle mix of procrastination and self-doubt. But there was no time for any of that. I had to outline the premise. Figure out plot points. Who are my characters? I don’t know!

Often, the most panic-inducing moments are when things go unexpectedly well.

Responding to our podcast Zen and the Angst of Kaufman, reader Scott argues that Charlie Kaufman is in fact thinking of the audience:

He’s just like you. He’s trying to write movies that HE would want to sit in a theater and watch. But what he likes to watch is something true, not something he’s seen before in a slightly different form. We may not be entertained by this, either because our culture has trained us that a movie should be a certain way, or because we simply like different things than Charlie Kaufman likes (because everyone’s different).

He’s putting himself in the theater seats as he writes, as we writers should, but he’s asking us to be a more critical audience of ourselves than real audiences actually are.

We’re conflating two points here. I think both are valid, but they shouldn’t be confused:

1. Screenwriters should write movies they themselves want to see.
2. Screenwriters should consider the point-of-view of the audience.

Violate the first rule, and you have hacky trash.

Violate the second rule, and you have solipsistic indulgence.

Kaufman is clearly writing movies he wants to see. That’s good. But if another screenwriter loves horror movies and wants to see more movies like Halloween, his intentions should be considered just as pure despite being more commercial.

Scott feels Kaufman knows what “real audiences” are like, but holds himself to a higher standard. Okay. But if this higher standard makes the screenwriter’s work inaccessible or uninteresting to an audience — or at least, a large chunk of the audience — I don’t think it’s fair to put all the blame at the feet of “the system.”

In his BAFTA speech, Kaufman isn’t complaining as much as explaining (or exploring) why he feels compelled to write the movies he writes, and the resulting frustration.

Scott continues:

The Hollywood model panders to the universal truths that we already know are universal, because that will translate to the largest demographic and therefore the largest box office. What’s funny to me is that one fairly common “truth” sold by many of these films is that “money isn’t everything” (or some variation thereof). Yet the person (or committee) who wrote the script, the people who greenlit it, the people they hired to make it, and the people marketing it are solely concerned with it making the most amount of money possible.

Agreed. It’s likely because the credit-slash-blame for movies is shared among so many people that this thematic hypocrisy goes unnoticed.

The second season of Downton Abbey debuts Sunday in the U.S. As I’ve discussed on the podcast, I couldn’t wait and bought it off the UK iTunes Store. I’ve already watched the whole second season and the Christmas episode.

So, for American audiences, here’s a non-spoilery preview of what I found notable about this season.

You can never get back to normal.

One of the main storylines in the first season was the entail, the covenant that required a male heir for the estate to stay within the family. There was a palpable dread that the Crawley daughters would lose their house and fortune until their third cousin Matthew arrived as heir presumptive and all-around white knight.

I don’t think we hear “entail” once this entire season. Instead, the danger is that nothing will ever return to the way it was.

Characters go to war, and some don’t return. Hierarchies are up-ended. The normal function of the house is disrupted, forcing the Crawleys to eat breakfast in a different room. (Sorry. I guess that was a minor spoiler.)

Where the threat of the first season was losing a lifestyle, the threat of the second season is not wanting it back.

For the first time, we hear the downstairs staff openly question their assigned place in society. And we hear similar dissatisfaction from the Crawley sisters.

Once you’ve learned to drive, are you content being driven?

Of all the show’s elements this season, I think this thematic line works the best. The characters seem appropriately aware, unnerved and exhilarated to realize that Everything Is Changing.

Maggie Smith speaks only in bon mots.

My friend Tom speculates that by contract all her dialogue is required to be pithy.

Yet it’s worth paying attention to every scene she’s in, because the show uses her as a proxy for the unseen history of the family, the estate, and their whole class. When she compromises, you know there’s no going back.

Wow, this really is a soap.

Again, no spoilers, but there are a few moments this season that feel like the Merchant/Ivory version of Dynasty.

Look: Shows need plot engines, but I found the soap tropes lazy. In a show with 20+ significant characters, how often do we need A Stranger Comes to Town or a Deathbed Complication?

I wish they’d gone a little more HBO, with internal rather than external forces pushing characters into choices and consequences.

Still, I enjoyed the second season and recommend it. If you haven’t seen the first season, it’s worth watching that first. You can get it through Netflix, iTunes or Amazon.

Pivoting off the discussion Craig and I had about Charlie Kaufman’s speech, Josh Barkey outlines a path that may lead screenwriters to resent their audience:

A. Art is often an outgrowth of the self’s desire to be loved. An artist’s motivation for making things is often, at some primal level, an attempt to say to other people: please, please love me.

B. If the artist is honest, works hard, and tells the truth, art patrons will often recognize themselves in the art. They’ll respond emotionally, and some of the love they feel for the artist’s product will inevitably spill over to the artist.

C. This love is, however, conditional. It requires the artist to make new and interesting things, and quickly becomes bored and withdraws love when the artist does not.

D. The artist feels betrayed by what he or she perceives as mis-directed and conditional love, and begins to resent the audience for not loving unconditionally enough.

E. Although the artist might even be aware of the irrationality of this resentment, the resentment can nonetheless shrivel into bitterness, which eventually shrivels into hatred.

I’d argue that for screenwriters, the “audience” is very often not movie-goers but rather the producers and studios who pay us to write. These are the people we’re trying to please and impress.

When they love our work, we feel loved and validated. When they don’t love our work — even though we know it’s better work than they previously praised — we can’t help but feel jilted.

I’m happy to announce our first-ever Mac app: Bronson Watermarker.

You can find it in the Mac App Store today.

Bronson does exactly one thing: watermark PDFs. There are other apps that let you do that (including Adobe Acrobat), but none of them are particularly good. They make simple jobs complicated, and they cost a lot more.

Bronson Watermarker also has two features that set it apart:

1. Give it a list of names, and Bronson will create individualized PDFs, ready to print or send.
2. Choose “Deep Burn” and Bronson will embed the watermark so thoroughly it’s never going away.

Watermarks are common in Hollywood, where studios and producers want to make sure screenplays don’t get passed along beyond their intended readers. Bronson Watermarker will save assistants a lot of time and hassle.

But Bronson is good for all sorts of uses beyond screenplays, so we’re aiming for a much wider user base — basically, anyone who needs to send out PDFs to people they don’t entirely trust.

Here’s the video we made about it:

You can read more about the uses for Bronson at the official site.

The backstory

Like FDX Reader and Less IMDb, Bronson Watermarker exists because I couldn’t believe someone else hadn’t already made it.

This past year, I needed to individually watermark 40 scripts with actors’ names for a reading in New York. No problem, I thought.

Because I’m a nerd, my first instinct was Automator, the Mac’s built-in batch scripting utility. It has a command for “Watermark PDF documents” with a surfeit of options — angle, offset, scale, opacity — but no ability to actually generate the watermark text. Automator wanted an image to stick on the PDF. I only had a list of names. I was out of luck.

If Automator couldn’t do it, surely a third-party utility could.

After a lot of Googling, I found several Mac apps that looked promising, each letting you type the text for the watermark. Unfortunately, none of them could generate more than one PDF at a time.

So, with deadlines looming, here was my workflow: copy the name from a text file, paste the name, export, rename the file. Repeat forty times. It was inefficient and error-prone.

I vowed never again.

I knew exactly what I wanted. I knew how this missing app should work. That evening, I emailed Nima the details, along with sketches for button and field placement. He sent back the rough version of the app two days later.

And now it’s real and ready to buy in the Mac App Store.

Props to Nima Yousefi for his speedy coding, and Ryan Nelson for the artwork and icon — and all the animation in the promo video.