What have they done to Sela Ward?

Decided to check out CSI: NEW YORK last night. Hadn’t seen it since a friend was killed on it a few years ago. I won’t watch CSI: MIAMI because David Caruso is such an utter joke. And the original CSI is just not as good without William Peterson. But if it’s on and I’m already seen this week’s HOARDERS, I will check it out. It’s amazing the budgets those police forces must have. They each contain every piece of whiz-bang equipment ever invented. Those labs must cost two billion dollars. They’ll have a giant Hubble telescope type contraption that measures tire wear based on skid marks. How often would you use that? Who approved that acquisition?

So I sat down to watch CSI: NEW YORK. I don’t know the characters but so what? They’re all interchangeable. You got the male star who once had a feature career, the female star, and a gaggle of J. Crew models who serve as the field investigators along with cute television-acceptable nerds who work in the lab. Gary Sinise is solid. He’s like Greg Kinnear but always better.

What I didn’t know was that Sela Ward is now on the show. I have to say that when she first came on the screen I let out an audible gasp. My God, who did her face work? I was horrified. Squinty eyes, skin pulled way back – whatever softness and expression she once had is gone. With her bone structure and plastic surgery she now looks like Jack Lord. I found this so sad I could no longer enjoy the program. No matter what she said she had this odd smirk on her face. She’s consoling a grieving mother and involuntarily smiling.


Sela Ward is a beautiful woman. Yes, she’s now in her mid-50s but so what? Without any help, she’d be beautiful in her 70s. So she’ll never be offered the part of Gidget? Big deal. The real beauty of Sela Ward was how real she was. She always played smart, she always played sexy, but you knew there was a real person in there. Now she’s a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills.

Maybe television won’t let actresses age gracefully. And with HD you can’t get away with soft focus anymore. Perhaps if Sela Ward didn’t dye her hair jet black and have her cheek bones lifted to above her eyes she couldn’t have gotten that role on CSI: NEW YORK. It can be an ugly heartless business. So it saddens me that talented people like Sela Ward have to sign a Faustian-like contract with the devil… known to some as Beelzebub, known to them as Botox.

Free teleseminar on TV writing

A special bonus for Friday Question Day!! Next Thursday, January 20th at 6 PM Pacific/9 PM Eastern, I will be conducting a FREE teleseminar, answering your writing questions. It will last between 60 and 90 minutes. And you can get an mp3 of it to play on your boombox. You just go here for more information and to sign-up. Again, it’s free. No obligation. No salesman will call.

If I can't think of an appropriate photo I always just use one of Natalie Wood.

Okay, on to today’s Q’s:

We start with John, who has a follow-up to last week’s discussion of warm up men:

In the role of the "keep 'em warm" guy, was there ever a time when you did that for one of the scripts you an David had written where earlier, but the audience reaction to certain jokes hadn't been what you expected. Did that make you feel like you had to try harder to get the audience in a more receptive mood for the rest of the show, or were you thinking, "These miserable SOBs have no sense of humor, and probably ought to be shipped over to sit in the 'Happy Days' studio audience, where maybe they'll think Ted McGinley is a laugh riot." Or did someone else have to do the rewarming part, because you were in one of those set conferences with the producers on why you didn't get the reaction everyone was expecting?

Well, I wasn’t doing the warm-up this one night on THE TONY RANDALL SHOW for a episode that David Isaacs and I wrote that played great all week long. But on show night it died. We were stymied. Turns out, half the audience was bussed in and couldn’t speak a word of English.

We didn’t know that at the time, and neither did Jay Tarses, the producer who was also doing the warm-up. He flat out turned on them. He’d say stuff like, “Hey, your Hearse is outside waiting” and “Raise your hand if you’re awake.” The half that did speak English was pissed. 

Rarely will the showrunner do the warm-up. He has too many other things to monitor and worry about. So any show that I ran, I left that chore to someone else. I was always available for those emergencies huddles to fix a scene or a joke.

The thing you have to remember about audiences: the ultimate quality of a show does not depend on the audience. I’ve seen shows go right through roof on the stage and you look at them in editing and say "what the hell were they all laughing at?  This is awful!"  Likewise, a show that played to a flat audience may come way up on the screen.

Here’s another follow-up to last week’s post by Troy:

So how much does a warm-up guy make per taping?

Top guys in multi-camera can make as much as $4,000 a night. Disney and Nickelodeon pay around $1,500 or less.

I don’t know about talk shows, but I would guess the warm-up guys for Leno, Letterman, and Conan get top pay.


carol asks:

I tried writing a script once, just for fun, and one of the hardest things for me was to introduce the characters and history in the 'pilot' without resorting to the whole 'as you know, Bob' thing.

What kind of 'show don't tell' exposition tricks do you have up your sleeve?

First off, don’t lay out all the exposition at one time. Dole it out slowly. And in comedies, try to weave the exposition into jokes. That’s for backstory.

As for conveying just who a character is, let his behavior, attitude, and decisions do that for you. How he reacts in specific moments when you know he has options informs us as to who he is.

Exposition is the hardest part of a pilot. That’s why I suggest your pilot stories be as simple as possible. The audience has a lot to process. Usually, their first priority is to get a handle on the characters. Then they have to piece together the relationships and decide whether or not they like these fictional fun devils. If the audience is still trying to figure out just who is who then they’re not going to laugh at the jokes.

For that reason, don’t cast two actors that look very similar. And although it’s a popular trend, don’t give girl characters boys’ names. Until we know these people well, when two characters are talking about Alex, and Sam, and Mel, we’re going to think those are three guys.

There’s also a lazy way of getting out exposition and that’s by using a narrator. Or, if you really don’t give a shit, just do the pop-up video thing and use those little cartoon bubbles. Blip!  He has a crush on Sally.  Blip!  She's the stupid sister. 

And finally, from Lou H.:

If the sitcoms you've written had been on networks that didn't run commercial breaks, would this have affected the way you broke the stories into acts?

Probably not to a great degree. You still start with a problem, build to a crisis, and head to a conclusion. Without commercial interruptions though, we’d have more flexibility on when that crisis point would come. On network shows it needs to come right around the middle. On non-commercial shows it could come anywhere. And if the story is better told with two smaller crisis points (a three act format), you’d have that luxury too. Networks generally give you very strict formats to follow. And they can be stifling, but then I see a show like THE GOOD WIFE and it follows all of the network conventions, and has solid act breaks that fall right where they need to be, and still they’re turning out the best written show on television.

What’s your question? Who knows? It might be one I answer next Thursday night in my teleseminar.

How to break into voice overs without holding up a sign

With all this hoopla about homeless Obama impersonator, Ted Williams going from a street corner to a voice over career, let me tell you the story of how another VO artist broke into the biz.

Mark Elliott. You may not know the name but you sure as hell have heard the golden voice. He’s done thousands of trailers, God knows how many promos for CBS, and for many years was the exclusive voice of Disney. (He probably had to say “experience the magic” 7,000,000 times.)

In the mid ‘70s Mark was a disc jockey – a very successful one mind you – on top rated LA station, KHJ. But how many times can play “The Night Chicago Died” without wanting to kill yourself? Mark thought voice over work was the way out.

He started taking classes, knocking on doors. Nothing. No one was interested. And remember, this guy has pipes! If not the voice of God than the guy who fills in for Him on the weekends. At the time his girlfriend was a beautician and one of her customers was a dude who owned a company that made movie trailers. She told him about Mark and he said Mark could call him. It’s amazing how gracious people can be when someone is holding a sharp pair of scissors to their head.

Mark did phone the guy and predictably was told there was nothing for him. He already had announcers he used on a regular basis. But Mark asked if he could check back from time to time and the guy said sure.

Mark called him every single week. Finally, after a full year, the guy said he might have something for him but no promises. He had a director who had no clue what he wanted. He already went through three voice over guys who just threw up their hands and ran. If Mark wanted, he could work with this nut, but there was no guarantee his trailer would be used and if not, he wouldn’t get paid. This would all be work on spec. Hours and hours of it.  Mark said he’ll take it.

Now remember, Mark was a top disc jockey. I’m sure many other jocks in his position would be insulted. How dare they be asked to work for free? They’d be saying, “Do you know who I am, even though I don’t use my real name?” But Mark was willing to do the work.

For the next two weeks, when he got off the air, he drove to the studio and worked ten hours a day voicing a gazillion variations of this trailer. Finally, the director was happy and Mark’s trailer ran.

The movie was STAR WARS. The crazy director was George Lucas.

Almost immediately, Mark’s voice over career took off. A few weeks later he did the trailer for THE GOODBYE GIRL. More offers came pouring in. And the rest, as they say, is all profit.

I know everyone loves the Ted Williams story. I do, too. It’s that one-in-a-million fairy tale and allows us all to still believe that miracles can happen, even to us. But I prefer the story of the schmoe who worked his ass off and made it because of his passion and sacrifice. Even if it means no one will ever do a movie-of-the-week about him.

A day on the Warner Brothers lot

My partner, David and I went to Warner Brothers yesterday to help punch-up a friend’s pilot. Judging by the nine-story-high billboards, I guess they tape Conan there. We were directed to a large parking structure across the street. That’s when you know your career is in the dumper – when they don’t give you a drive-on. When you’re assigned the lot reserved for audience members of ELLEN. Forget that we weren’t in a lot with all those fancy Porsches and BMW’s. We were the only car in the whole structure that had California plates.

I felt bad for the ELLEN audience. There they were in this confusing Byzantine parking structure, SUV’s coming at them from every direction. They had no idea where they were going. Was it really worth it to see Ellen interview 12-year-old basketball prodigy Jordan McCabe?

We crossed the street along with three people in clown outfits. At least they all came in one car. We next had to go through a TSA-like security check. There was a time that Warner Brothers practically seduced us to come to work for them. Now we’re considered potential terrorists.

We had to show our ID, and the guard (a very nice woman, by the way), compared my driver’s license photo to my actual face. I thought to myself, what happens when the clowns go through?

Once on the lot, we soaked up the Hollywood vibes. Every soundstage has a plaque listing what productions were filmed on that stage. So on one you might see CASABLANCA, THE JAZZ SINGER, $#’! MY DAD SAYS.


The first time David and I were ever on the Warners lot, we were like an hour early for a meeting. We were just starting out in the business. I think we had sold one script. And we were still given a drive-on. But I digress. We killed the hour by just walking around the lot. Standing by one stage door, in full costume, was John Wayne smoking a cigarette. He was making his last movie, THE SHOOTIST. He spotted us and said, “How’s it going, boys?” We were completely tongue-tied. “Uh…gr-gr-great, Duke”. We moved on and thought to ourselves, “Wow, we have ARRIVED!”

Today I think I saw that Asian guy from THE MENTALIST who talks like Jack Webb. But I can’t be sure. He could have also just been another maintenance guy on his way to hanging the seventh giant Conan poster.

We found our building, a charming older structure with a tile roof, and headed upstairs to the conference room to work. I always wonder -- what classic shows down through the years have been rewritten in this very room? Was 77 SUNSET STRIP created here? Or MURPHY BROWN? Or THE OBLONGS?

I have to say, there are few things as much fun as sitting around a room with incredibly funny people. So many laughs. I just feel bad that none of them got into the script.

Styrofoam lunch from the fabulous Warner Brothers commissary is a must. I was feeling nostalgic so I picked the entrée that traveled the worst – their world famous “homemade” chicken pot pie.

I knew it would come back cold, but I had no idea the presentation would be so, uh… unique. The goopy contents of the chicken pie were in the main compartment and a biscuit sat in one of the others. This was a homemade chicken pot pie? Where was the pot and the pie part? Good luck to the guys from THE BIG BANG THEORY who get to order here every day.

After five hours of everyone sharing their latest brain aneurism and Holland Taylor stories, we finished the polish. I hope the people coming in tomorrow are better.

On the way out I passed the stage where I directed EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND. “God, I miss this!” I said wistfully. David reassured me that I’d direct another show. “No,” I said, “My parking space.”

What turns men off?

A recent front page story in the Los Angeles Times (on obviously the slowest news day since 1954) claims that the smell of a woman’s tears can turn off a guy to her sexually. This scientific study put a group of women in a room, showed videos of the Brad Pitt wedding or something, and as they all wept uncontrollably, collected their tears. Then horny guys were asked to smell the tears and their libidos dropped precipitously.

Who even thinks to do such a study first of all? And why? But aside from that…

Neuroscientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science claim that the fifty men in the control group experienced a drop in testosterone of 13%.

Now here’s my problem: 13%? For guys? That’s nothing. At best that’s maybe one more drink.

So the Levine Institute set about exploring this further. For a guy to be sufficiently turned off to where he doesn’t want to have sex with a woman he was previously attracted to, testosterone levels must drop 87.3%.

Here are other factors that dampen a man’s sex drive along with the percentage of how much:

She has a swastika tattoo – 7%

She wants to play her Barry Manilow mix tape during – 3%

She calls out your business partner’s name – 5%

She wants to do it at church during Christmas Mass – 2%

She says you’re smaller than her last boyfriend – 6%

She says you’re smaller than the guy an hour ago – 7%

She has 350 cats – 4%

She has a testicle collection – 8%

She has hairier legs than you – 8%

She wants to do a credit check on you first – 1%

She’s in desperate need of an exorcist – 4%

She's in desperate need of exercise -- 5%

She was a champion on FEAR FACTOR – 4%

She has to ask her stuffed animals if it’s okay to sleep with you – 1%

She wants to turn the lights out when you take your clothes off – 2%

She was once married to Marilyn Manson – 8%

She wants to check her email during – 1%

She wants to smoke during – 2%

She wants to read my blog during – 60%

She’s Orthodox and only wants to do it through a hole in a sheet – 5%

Her biker husband is in the next room – 4%

She’s a suspected serial killer -- 7% at 8 PM, 1 % at 1 AM

She doesn’t believe in birth control – 45% at 8 PM. 0% at 1 AM

She’s dead – 73.2%

She’s Ann Coulter – 93.8%

I expect at least Nobel recognition for this vital study.

Dan Ingram speaks out on Ted Williams

By now we've all seen the story of Ted Williams, the homeless toothless guy with the golden voice who was trying to get an announcing job while panhandling on a highway. A video was shot, it went viral, and he's now the darling of talk shows, doing commercials for Kraft Foods, MSNBC, NFL Films, and fielding other offers. It's certainly the feel good story of the year.

But there's another perspective. How do the professional voice over announcers feel about this? Dan Ingram has been a premiere voice talent for five decades. You've heard him on countless commercials. He also just happens to be one of the greatest Top 40 disc jockeys in the history of radio. Big Dan on powerhouse 77/WABC owned New York in the '60s and '70s...and Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Boston and every other city on the eastern seaboard.

Dan wrote to me yesterday about the Ted Williams hysteria and I'd like to pass along his thoughts to you before you grab a sign and stake out an interstate off-ramp.   

Dear Ken,

I feel used and conned by all the sob-sister P.R. crap about the poor scab VO guy who is selling his rather resonant voice because he's an ex junkie and an ex lush. I know at least fifty thoroughly qualified VO men and women who have never been hooked on drugs or anything else who are having difficulty making a living wage doing VO work as honorable Union members. They all know from their endeavors how fickle, thoughtless and downright cruel the VO business can be. I know that I do, especially lately.

I wish him success when he hits the bricks like the rest of us. And success under a Union contract.

In solidarity,
Dan Ingram

A rookie writing mistake

From time to time I try to flag rookie writing mistakes so you can avoid making the same blunders I did early in my career. Today’s topic: writing on the nose.


On the nose refers generally to dialogue where the characters say exactly what they think.

Sally: “John, I am so mad at you because you always flirt with my sister, Carol, and you know how jealous I get and how competitive I am with her.”

Sounds pretty bald and unnatural, doesn’t it? That’s because people go to great lengths to NOT say exactly what they’re feeling. Your job as a writer is to covey what a character wants to say without having him actually say it.

What if Sally said this to John instead?

Sally: “Remind me the next time we’re at my parents. I think they have a copy of Carol’s prom picture. You can keep it in your wallet.”

Subtext is your friend.

People use sarcasm, drop subtle and not so subtle hints. They’ll lead to you a conclusion without actually spelling it out. They’ll react passive-aggressively. They’ll mask their feelings, or deny them. Sometimes they’ll just clam up altogether. Or communicate more through their tone of voice than their words.

Body language is an excellent device. Most actors would prefer conveying their attitudes via gestures, facial expressions, and posture. A person’s body language might also be completely counter to the words out of his mouth.

Sally is in the kitchen chopping vegetables. Sally :“Are you kidding? I think it’s great that you and Carol get along so well.” As she says this John sees her vigorously chop off the end of a carrot.

Let someone’s behavior inform us of his or her attitude.

Sally starts flirting with Carol’s boyfriend.

Sally goes outside and has a cigarette and we’ve established that she no longer smokes.

Sally “accidentally” spills a drink in Carol’s lap.

When Sally and John are getting ready for bed that night and John is in the bathroom, Sally picks up his iPhone and checks to see if there are any texts between John and Carol and how many times he’s called her recently.

Now this isn’t to say characters never articulate their feelings, but there has to be a reason for them to. They’re cornered. They’re confronted. They’ve had a few drinks and let down their guard. They slip. They’ve left so many clues that haven’t been picked up that out of frustration they just blurt it out.

And even then, they rarely spell out word for word what they want to convey.

Sally: “Okay, you wanna know what’s pissing me off? You, John. You’re an asshole. You did everything but stick your tongue down Carol’s throat. That’s my sister, you dick!”

The point is there are alternative ways of expressing feelings. Explore them. Your characters will thank you. Or they’ll give you a little gesture that says thank you.