I'M SORRY FOR RUINING YOUR WEEKEND. | Screenwriters know that the person who will actually read their new script is not the studio executive who promised to read it, but rather an Underpaid Assistant. One of the awkward things about this arrangement is that the Underpaid Assistant will tend to be a highly intelligent Ivy League graduate who understands screenwriting backwards and forwards. Most of them, had they chosen the dubious profession of screenwriting, would be very good at it. This is a source of some misunderstanding. They’re not Underpaid Assistants because they are screenwriter wannabes, they’re Underpaid Assistants simply because they have chosen a different path: they want to be the person who hires screenwriters -- and tells them whether their last rewrite was good enough. Screenwriters also know that having their script dropped into the canvas bag of the Underpaid Assistant -- a bag already heavy with weekend-destroying scripts -- is the beginning of what is most likely to be a doomed relationship. The Underpaid Assistant already dislikes the screenwriter for destroying his or her weekend, but there’s also that problem of the Underpaid Assistant being an inherently good writer. If the Underpaid Assistant constantly thinks, while reading scripts, “I could write rings around this clown,” it's not necessarily delusional. Savvy screenwriters understand that this is who they are writing for: someone they will never meet, who already hates their guts without having read even the first line of the script. They know that they are writing for only one person. The Most Hostile Reader Imaginable. When I began my digital filmmaking life, I realized early on that between the pitch to the client, the realities and limitations of the shoot, and my somewhat, shall we say, embryonic abilities as an editor, I would always be chasing objectivity. This is the task of any creative person, but the particular blinders I wear suggest that it’s hardest in filmmaking. So that's when I discovered the value of imaginary friends. I knew that most of the corporate video work that I was seeing had some shared problems. The videos seemed a little smug at best, self-congratulatory and delusional at worst. I knew that loss of objectivity was part of the problem, and that I needed to get much better at regaining it on demand. I was making a fundraising video for a mentoring program along the lines of Big Brothers Big Sisters, and while thinking about the objectivity problem I remembered the Underpaid Assistants, and the tremendous rigor that screenwriters, the ones who understand that all-important first reader, apply to their work. And so I created my first imaginary friend: The Most Hostile Viewer Imaginable. In the case of the mentoring program's video, it was a person who believed strongly that bringing a non-family-member adult into a child’s life -- one who has no disciplinary duties whatsoever -- is fundamentally destructive to the delicate balance of parenting. “Of course she gets along with her mentor!” my imaginary friend would say. “All the mentor does is buy her things and take her places, and she never has to do the hard part, setting boundaries or establishing consequences in the child’s life! Mentoring programs like this, even with the best of intentions, are destroying the fabric of society!” I made sure that my imaginary friend sat in on each interview I conducted for the video. Knowing that he was looking over my shoulder kept my questions sharper, my need for proof of the program’s validity more acute. When editing, it completely altered the way I built my case for why the program deserved funding. Over the years I’ve had to invent a lot of imaginary friends. And learning to write characters, the kind that make sense to readers, the kind that resonate with a recognizable psychology, turned out to be the perfect training for creating imaginary friends. The more credible their convictions (and they were almost always diametrically opposed to my own), the more valuable their impact was on my work. So here’s to imaginary friends. May they thrive and multiply. And here’s to Underpaid Assistants. I’m sorry for ruining your weekend. |