How about we talk to the people we’re supposed to be representing instead? Interesting initiative from the CRTC this morning. After two weeks of entertaining the hopes and dreams of government-made Billionaires and realizing that those who want to “Save Local TV” won’t guarantee that any of the money they get will actually go toward doing that while those who seek to “Stop The TV Tax” are only...
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Lazy Sunday # 95: The Cat Piano
Some wrestle with how to tell stories in a world of multiple platforms. Some simply do it. My own theory is that those who struggle are thinking backwards, assessing what the market might want first, measuring the profit margins of the available platforms, risk averse to any content that can’t be exploited universally and determining what might be worth pursuing and what will make cost recovery...
The National Party
It’s Grey Cup Weekend in Canada. And for the second time in three years, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, my home town team, Saskatchewan’s team and (to the eternal chagrin of the Toronto Maple Leaf’s marketing machine) Canada’s team is vying for football supremacy. We won in 2007. Last year we don’t talk about. And this year, the prevailing wisdom is that we’ll have our asses handed to us by the grid-iron juggernaut known as the...
Panic Attack!
The CRTC hearings on Canadian television are mercifully drawing to a close. 10 solid days of one group or another whining about a broadcast system that doesn’t work, can’t make money and somehow isn’t able to support home grown content. Most of the people testifying have said the same things they did last year, which was pretty much exactly what they said two years ago. Two years… How much could have been accomplished in two...
Braveheart, Baby!
I received a tweet from the Writers Guild of Canada earlier today that said… Maybe things look and feel different inside those suffocating government hearing rooms, but that sentiment is about 180 degrees from my own read watching on television, a reaction fully shared by the three other WGC members I’ve spoken with since. I promised myself I’d wait until I’d heard everybody make their presentations at this latest round of...
“Dr. Suzuki to Emergency! Stat!”
As all hell breaks loose in the world of Global Warming, Canada’s leading voice for environmental protection and climate change seems to have suddenly gone quiet. Where is the reaction to last week’s bombshell revelations from Dr. David Suzuki? Did he know about any of this? And if he did, what does he have to say now? For those who still get their news from the mainstream media, on November 19, 2009, a large amount of...
Lazy Sunday # 94: Home Cookin’
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assert that among the tribe of screenwriter and TV Producer bloggers, I’m the best cook. Challengers… Nope? I thought not. And nobody’s allowed to nominate novelist Jim (“Legends of the Fall”) Harrison, who both writes and cooks in an entirely different league from the rest of us mere mortals. Except for a couple of actors I’ve met along the way, who went on...
A Tale of Two Business Models
This is the story of two Canadian businesses and how they changed over time. One got very big and one didn’t. It isn’t some MBA thesis. It’s just my recollection of the events. But it’s offered as something to consider with regard to what it tells us about the people in those businesses and which of them you think best represents what this country should maybe emulate and be about. IN THE BEGINNING: I grew up in South...
Lazy Sunday #93: Fighting Gravity
Dress up anything you want as “The Right Thing To Do”. Champion the most Just cause you can find, one that is only about being fair and treating people with the simple decency they deserve and others already enjoy. Then put any one of those up against money and power. And money and power will always win. Oh, you’ll be told it will all get better “someday” or “when the world is ready”. But those...
Lazy Sunday # 92: Working Class Heroes
This Sunday, I’m being lazier than usual. Part of that’s procrastination. This is the day I clean out the garage so there’s somewhere to park the car come winter. Where does all this crap come from? Where the hell is it supposed to go? So, in lingering over a second cup of coffee, I listened to CBC Sunday Edition instead and heard a reprise of one of their old shows. (Guess somebody’s being lazy over there too). But their...
How To Make Friends and Influence People
So, it’s Saturday and I’m reading the morning paper – happy to be at the end of a week where it became clearer that not much is going to happen in the Canadian television business until this whole “carriage fees” issue gets settled and the Canadian Media Fund issues its new guidelines for funding programming here. So – like April. We’re basically in tread water mode until April. Oh, there’ll still be some stuff getting...
Lazy Sunday # 91: Trying To Keep Up
I’m sure the television business isn’t all that different from any other line of endeavor these days. Everybody’s just scrambling to keep up. This week the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation revamped its news services in an attempt to reach a wider audience, a younger audience, Hell, any audience. Our leading private network continued a process of trying to make itself the lead story and...
