JWhiting.com

I haven’t spoken about it very much here because there was never much to say, but after many reversals, headaches and false-starts I finally optioned my first film script!

To make a long story short, Jeanne and I and a producer friend sat down a couple of years ago and banged out a detailed 50-page treatment for a PG horror film aimed at tweens. (Note to aspiring filmmakers: leave producers out of the equation until you have a script-in-hand.) I then went away and wrote the full script.

Jeanne and I allowed things to proceed, trusting that our contributions and interests would be respected without much more than a loosely drafted written-by-us agreement. (This was, obviously, also a mistake.)

Anyhow after several months, meetings and rounds with entertainment lawyers we finally have a signed agreement and cash in hand! I’m not sure if the film will ever get made and what state it will be in if/when it finally does hit the screens, but it’s good to know that this chapter of our lives is finally closed.

I was recently reminded that the big book draft that darkened my doorway on Friday isn’t technically my first book… That dubious honour belongs to the soporific 8000 Series Components Manual. (Click the link for a free copy!)

When I graduated with a computer engineering degree from the Royal Military University in 1996 I knew a few things: the Canadian military was stuck in a massive rut and I wanted to go somewhere to combine my green writing and technology skills.

My first step down the writing/tech path was to become the Junior Technical Writer at Tundra Semiconductor Corporation. The dot-com boom was on and considering the mundaneness of the things we got into from day-to-day, they were fairly exciting times. I was young, flush with cash, given stock options and an expense account. The experience financed my move to Montreal and the purchase of the duplex that I’m happily ensconced in at this very moment.

One of my first jobs at Tundra was to touch up the 8000 Series manual right before they decided to discontinue that product line forever. Part of that job entailed drawing up a couple of schematics. As a non-artist, non-Adobe Illustrator guy, I remember being particularly proud when I finally figured out how to make the correct curves on a tricky little 28-pin SOIC package. (And no, I no longer have any idea what an SOIC package is…)

Hopefully the success of my second book will surpass that of my first…

I haven’t really spoken about it here, but I spent much of last year and the beginning of this year writing my first novel. So far the book-writing process has been both highly satisfying and deeply maddening. Luckily the highs have outnumbered the lows. And one of those highs came on Friday via the mail.

For all of its life so far the book that I’ve been writing has only existed in my head and on the computer screen. No one else (including my best buddy life-partner) has seen or read a word of it… Until now. [Cue the dramatic music.]

Late last night after piloting our new electric scooter through the mean streets of Montreal, Jeanne and I laid eyes on the first-ever printed pages of The Virus Makers.

I finished the first draft of this Young Adult novel at the end of March and my soccer-loving, boy-fathering, cousin-in-law Peter Coles kindly offered to print it up for me. Pete’s the VP of Sales and Marketing at Arcprint (and imaging) and it seemed appropriate that the book be birthed back in Vancouver where I first started writing it in the spring of 2006.

I’ll speak more about the book in, I’m sure, way too many subsequent posts, but for now I just want to fête the newly corporeal block of text that is the first draft of The Virus Makers!

I’m going to be doing some writing today for King Features’ Betty Boop franchise and, like the good writer-boy that I am, I spent some time last night researching the brand. I loved what I found.

Betty Boop started out her cartoon life as a dog-like creation of Max Fleischer (an animation legend who helped bring Popeye, Superman and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer to life).

Boop first appeared in the early 1930s sporting a decidedly 1920s style — it was all about the saucy little flapper dress, jazz beats and wry winks to sexily intoxicated good times. Eventually she was toned down (yet another black mark on the morality police) and her popularity waned.

One thing that makes Betty Boop’s earlier cartoons so great was that, unlike other movie-makers at the time, Max Fleischer wasn’t afraid to work with black musicians.

Check out the incredible1933 Betty Boop cartoon Snow White below (not to be confused with the Disney version that came out four years later: You can read Time’s 1937 review of that movie here).

Fleischer’s inspired version of Snow White features an incredible section with Koko the Clown dancing in a skeletal underworld. Koko was voiced by none other than Cab Calloway doing an amazing version of St. James Infirmary Blues…

(This film was chosen for preservation by the U.S. Library of Congress in the National Film Registry in 1994.)

Up to this point, this site has been a sort of clearinghouse for my random fascinations. It helped me get a handle on blogging, RSS, using Wordpress etc. It allowed me to rant at Videotron. And now things are going to change a bit.

Over the next little while I’ll be modifying the look-and-feel of the site as well as its focus. The site (now simply jwhiting at jwhiting.com) will serve as my professional face-to-the world.

Although I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea, in order to advance a big-ish project that’s coming down the pipe I have to get into the business of self-promotion. Expect some more talk about my writing and what I’m up to and less about my gift wishes and what I’m laughing at. Also expect the site to look a bit wonky and going up and down before everything gets back on track.

Thanks.

Jason

The Gazette is Montreal’s only English-language daily newspaper. It’s an adequate paper with adequate local coverage that sources just about everything of substance from its parent and other newswire services. (It also runs Christopher Hitchens articles several days after they’ve appeared in Salon. Maureen Dowd’s NYT piece often receives the same treatment.)

When I first moved to Montreal as a not-so-mature student about ten years ago, I subscribed to The Gazette because the student rate was so low. Since then I re-subscribe whenever I get a call from the Gazette’s deep-discount promo people. (Right now I’m paying about $5/month for my Gazette subscription; reg. rate is, I believe, $22/month. The Gazette is worth $5/month. It’s not worth $22.)

Anyhow, even though I’m on a super-low subscription rate (that’s set to expire tomorrow actually), I still maintain a bitchy atitude when it comes to the paper’s content. Yes this is petty and small, but that is sometimes my way. We know this. We sigh, shake our heads and move on.

Even though I hate that the Gazette is only now rushing to catch up to the climate crisis problem (without touching its daily “Driving” section cash-cow, of course) and even though I find their columnists to be, for the most part, old and out-of-touch, the section that usually causes me the most grief is the Books section.

I think it’s because I like books so much. The Books section should be a source of joy and wonder. A chance to discover a new treasure. I love to tuck into the New York Times’ book review. The Gazette’s effort, however, always leaves me cold. I find that there’s rarely anything of interest in there to anyone who was born between the 1950s and the 1990s.

So, on Monday, in the spirit of one activist action a day, I decided to do what any fine subscriber should do: Even though I’m only paying pennies a day, I demanded a better books section. Here’s my back and forth with the Gazette’s Books editor:

Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:55:10 -0800 (PST)
From: “Jason Whiting”
Subject: Books for 20-40s.
To: MShenker@thegazette.canwest.com, ESadler@thegazette.canwest.com

Hi Gazette Editors,

When you’re assembling and assigning the Gazette’s books section can you please remember that there is a big section of readers between the ages of 20 and 40? These days it seems like it’s all kids books and historical/World War II fare. I didn’t feel compelled to read a single review this past week.

Thanks.

Jason

I received a reply (formatting untouched):

Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:27:53 -0500
Subject: Book section
From: “Austin, Edie (Montreal Gazette)”
To: jasonrwhiting@yahoo.ca

Dear Mr. Whiting,

Many thanks for having taken the time to write.

Am sorry you did not find anything interesting in last week’s Books
section.
I do try to vary the content to cover a variety of tastes and
interests.

In your opinion, what type of books is the 20-40 age group interested
in?

Granted, the section you refer to had a cover review on retirement
planning
(never too soon to start, by the way…), and there were several
historical
novels and memoirs. However, not being so far past 40 myself, I do
think
that there were a lot of things in the section that would have been of
interest to many people in the 20 to 40 age group (including at least
some
of the historical material), even if they did not happen to be of any
interest to you. For example, The Painter of Battles, by Arturo
Pérez-Reverte (reviewed on page 4) is a novel about a war photographer
that
raises some important, perennial human issues (and the war in question
is
not even WW2, but the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s). (As for the
children’s
book coverage, it is targeted at parents more than children, and a lot
of
people in the 20 to 40 age group are parents.)

In any case, I hope you will find this coming Saturday’s section more
interesting. In it, we will be featuring some graphic novels/memoirs.

Please let me know what you would like to see more of in the section. I
would appreciate your viewpoint on this.

Sincerely,
Edie Austin
Books editor

I replied:

Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:09:09 -0800 (PST)
From: “Jason Whiting” View Contact Details View Contact Details
Subject: Re: Book section
To: “Austin, Edie (Montreal Gazette)”
Hello Edie,

Thanks for getting back to me.

The biggest blind spots in the Gazette’s Books section are, as I see it, books about scifi, horror, and graphic novels (memoirs not so much). I’m also missing books about technology, including the technology of books. (I haven’t, for example, seen any discussion on Amazon’s Kindle. Why is that? Why so silent about Google’s putting the full-text of books like Fast Food Nation online?)

Why no review of Man Gone Down, or The Savage Detectives?

(And while we’re on the subject, what is the rambly, predictable mainstream-defender Dr. Schwartz column doing in the Books section? )

To me, the entire books section seems to be pitched to the baby-boomer crowd. I’m glad to hear that its not meant to be, and look forward to the time when I can dig into more reviews that are of interest to me.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond to my first letter and for soliciting my opinions.

Best,

Jason Whiting

Soon after sending the above, I received this reply:

Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:00:59 -0500
Subject: Re: Book section
From: “Austin, Edie (Montreal Gazette)”
To: “Jason Whiting”
Thanks for your reply, will reply to your new email when I have a chance, but in the meantime, have to update something I wrote in my previous emai. My package on graphic novels/memoirs has just been bumped temporarily by something else that has just had its pub date changed, however I expect to get the graphic stuff in the following week.
Am now scrambling to deal with this development…
Edie

Since my subscription runs out tomorrow, I guess I’ll have to head over to MultiMags on Saturday to if there’s anything interesting hits the Gazette’s Books section this week… And thanks to you for listening to my crazy ramblings.

Like John Rogers says over on Kung Fu Monkey, it seems like a bad idea to go up against writers in the age of the Internet. The truth will out, especially when writers are able to so eloquently express their side of the story.

Check out Exibit A below…

As I first wrote about here, Jeanne and I pitched a new radio series to CBC Radio back in December. Early in 2007 we got the go-ahead to produce a demo with Frank Opolko that we sent up the CBC Radio chain-of-command earlier in April.

And then we waited.

Today the CBC spoke. And there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the unscripted realness of the concept sort of frightens them. (Frankly it frightened us a bit too.) Overall, although they liked the way the demo sounded, the process of putting it all together was too unpredictable and time consuming for them and it would be too expensive to produce the show if we actually started getting paid for each hour of work. (If I sat down to figure out what our hourly wage for the demo was, I’d be surprised if we cracked into loonie territory.)

The good news is that they like us. Tom Anniko still wants us to do something for the CBC and Frank Opolko wants to keep working with us. So its back to the drawing board, but this time it’s gonna be scripted. Which is definitely fine with me. It’s (supposedly) what I do best.

We’ve already begun on the concept, but its too early for details. Watch this space for updates and thanks for listening.

There are a couple of TV and film writers out there that maintain great blogs, but the best one that deals specifically with the Canadian television business is Dead Things On Sticks.

It was over on Denis McGrath’s blog that I first heard about the Banff Television Festival’s Global Television Writers Apprentice Award. From the Banff site:

The Writers Apprentice offers an emerging Canadian writer with the unprecedented opportunity to gain significant experience by completing a four-week internship in the story department of a prime-time series.

Sounds great right? I thought so and applied for the internship on the 20th. As part of the application, I submitted an original one page(ish) scene from one of my favourite TV shows.

Read my super-brief Battlestar Galactica spec script below the fold…
(more…)

I’ve isolated myself up north to get a big chunk of writing done with no distractions. It’s snowing and quiet (except for the sound of a brown dog snoring) and I’m… procrastinating.

So, really quickly, I recently became a member of the Writers Guild of Canada and I wanted to share this story that comes from them…

The History Channel in Canada is granted a broadcasting licence by the CRTC to:

… provide a national English-language specialty service consisting of historical documentaries, movies, mini-series and history programs which embrace both current events and past history, with a special emphasis on documentary and dramatic programs related to Canada’s past.

That mandate seemed to be pretty clear to the History Channel, until some eagle-eyed folks at the WGC noticed that the History Channel had begun broadcasting CSI: New York several times a week.

What does CSI: New York have to do with Canada or, you know, history you might ask? Well that’s what the WGC wondered too. They sent a letter to Atlantis Alliance (owner of the History Channel) and the CRTC asking that same question.

Turns out that Atlantis felt that CSI: New York was a historical show because it takes place in New York a historical city where 9/11 took place.

Say wha? Really? You sure that’s the best thing you could come up with? I’ve seen yoga instructors who can’t pull off that kind of a stretch.

The CRTC recently came down with a ruling and not surprisingly, they’ve asked History Television to stick to, uh, history. From their decision:

the mere fact that the drama is set in a city which was victim to a significant historical event is not a sufficient justification for broadcasting the program on a service that is mandated to be devoted to history programs.

Nice work WGC. And speaking of work, I’d better get back to it…

My long-lost buddy Dan Guterman is a staff writer at The Onion.

Awhile back Dan brewed up this article that was loosely inspired by my own experience with cellphones.

(For the record, that’s not a picture of me and although I’m not really passionately anti-cellphone, the only time I’ve ever owned one was when I was given a company phone while I was working for Airborne Entertainment.)

I just received some animation mock-ups for the great-cause project that I talked about in previous posts here and here and the final script of which is here. Can’t wait to see the final product!

So, the script for that good cause animation is coming along. A bit tighter than the last incarnation. Funnier? I don’t know… Trying to do funny stuff for the government is, I’m learning, a bit tricky. (One woman on the review committee apparently said “Everyone watches Trading Spaces!”)

Sigh.

Here’s the latest version (sorry for the doc link — I was getting frustrated trying to mess with the formatting and went for the easiest option…).

For those of you not living in Montreal/not reading Montreal’s alt-weeklies, the Montreal Mirror’s cover story last week does a good job of summing up how I feel about Justice Minister Rick Toews’ proposed new anti-impaired driving legislation.

Marc-Boris St-Maurice, the founder of Bloc Pot, current Liberal Party member and executive director of NORML Canada is quoted as saying:

Looks to me like a sneaky way to modify the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. It’s a roundabout way to increase penalties without opening up the debate on drugs…. [The legislation] is a little premature and half-cocked.

Read the article here.

Today I handed in the first draft for a fun little script that’s going to be animated by the same gang that did this amazing spoof on what Quebecers call the Night of the Long Knives.

What I like most about this project is who it’s for and who I’m working with.

The client is Imagine Canada, a group that helps charities and nonprofit organizations “fulfill their missions”. IC hired an amazing young Montreal media company called Blue Horizon Media to get the word out about their new Web site initiative called Values Added and BHM got in touch with me to flesh out the concept and write the script.

I had a great time chatting with Blue Horizon Media’s Creative Director Pablo Salzman who talked about his company’s socially conscious ethos. Among many other things, Pablo said, “We run a not-just-for-profit company.” Excellent.

I’m going to post more about Blue Horizon in the future. I’m especially excited to talk about their project to create a sort of MySpace for people who want to make the world a better place, but I’m running out of time. (Jeanne is playing at the Wheel Club with her dad and I’m late.)

If you want to read the first draft of the script, I’ve put it underneath here, “below the fold”.

(more…)

According to the exhaustive timeline that’s available here, it was on this day in 1963 that Lenny Bruce stepped out onto the stage of New York’s Village Theatre (which later became the famous rock and roll incubator, The Fillmore East).

It was a Friday and Bruce was set to kick off four packed-out shows — 11,000 tickets had been sold, and for good reason.

Only one week earlier JFK had been gunned down in Dallas and the country was in a state of shock.

Bruce already had a well-deserved reputation for straying beyond the boundaries of what was considered “decent” and New Yorkers were both giddy and anxious to see what the famously blue comedian would have to say about the assassination.

Bruce’s opening line has been called the greatest current events joke ever told.

But first a bit of backstory.

In 1962 Vaughn Meader, a one-time singer and piano player, got together with some writing and performing buddies to record The First Family, a comedy album that took advantage of Meader’s newfound ability to faithfully mimic the popular U.S. President.

Against all odds Meader’s album, released at the end of October, went platinum before Christmas and one year later had sold an astonishing 7.5 million copies. It even won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1963. In short, it was off-the-charts massive. (More info at Wikipeeds.)

Vaughn Meader gave an interview to the New York Times Magazine where he said:

I was in Detroit the day the album started selling like wildfire. That day “The Ed Sullivan Show” called me, Time Magazine, The New York Times. So I went back to New York, and I was walking past Sam Goody’s and there was a big crowd, all the way out to the middle of Broadway. And when I got closer I heard that they were listening to me — it was mind-boggling. Then it got totally crazy. Just gone. It was just a whirlwind, going here, going there, going here, going there. And playing the game — the star game. It was a blur, you know? I thought I was having the time of my life. Who wouldn’t? Just wine, women and song, you know? But it doesn’t last. And nobody knows when you’re down and out.

And yeah, it didn’t last.

When Lenny Bruce stepped onto the Village Theatre stage, he accomplished the impossible, summing up all the nation’s angst and heartbreak to deliver a JFK joke that was both genuinely funny and touching at the same time. Bruce’s line?

Poor Vaughn Meader.

And Bruce was right. Vaughn Meader never worked as a comedian again.

Happy Anniversary Lenny, Vaughn and JFK. (Thanks to Pete Radomski for telling me about it.)

Denis McGrath maintains a blog called Dead Things on Sticks that’s all about TV and TV writing, from an English Canada perspective.

McGrath is always a good read, but his latest post about how Corner Gas puts the boots to the whiners of the Canadian television industry is especially good.

It’s called How Corner Gas Ruined Everything.

From the article:

More than a million people watch Corner Gas in Canada every week, and have since it came out. Most weeks it’s closer to 1.5 million. To give context to that number, remember that Canada is a nation of 30 million people. So this is roughly equivalent to over 30 million viewers a week in the USA — which is way, way, way better than most of the shows that are considered hits in the USA. Better than Lost. Better than Prison Break. Better than House.

[UPDATE: I just found out that The Daily Show numbers are equivalent. About 1.5 mil/episode. Food for thought.]

McGrath goes on to make the case that Corner Gas does a couple of things that Canadian TV producers are squeemish about: It has a stable of quality writers, who work in a writing room as well as on-set, and it doesn’t have distain for its audience.

Radical concepts huh?

(Now if only the CRTC will quash these other whiners…)