N’Jeri Eaton comes to Netflix by way of Apple and NPR. An award-winning storyteller, she has roots in documentary filmmaking, something near and dear to many a DC filmmaker.
While that’s all cool, the big surprise from the article for me was that not only that Netflix has a number of podcasts already –many being deeper dives into their TV shows and films– but that they are building up publishing and social media presences. That growth as an overall media company is, I suppose, something one might expect, but I confess to still thinking of Netflix as the streaming enfant terrible vs. “another media conglomerate.”
I’m also, for obvious reasons, wondering if they’re going to start making moves into original audio fiction.
Given the traffic some of my project management posts get, I figured I should get back to being wonky on Wednesdays or other days. I’ve recently rediscovered the Vlogbrothers, aka John and Hank Green, and have been cycling through their videos at a fast pace. That’s easy, because most of them are under 5 minutes and they contain some thought nuggets that fire the synapses in the most delightful way.
So then I came across this one from 2017 about productivity:
As some of you project managers and office denizens may have clued into, the “80%” he refers to calls to mind “the 80/20 rule” or the Pareto Principle.
And yes, the Pareto Principle started as something a bit different –and is invoked in a number of rather different arenas– but Hank Green’s reference aligns with how I most frequently encounter it in terms of quality control and optimization. Or put another way: perfect is the enemy of good.
And “done is good,” a fact I learned back when I was building sets and hanging lights and the curtain went up at 8pm whether or not things were perfect.
So embrace your 80%, people! Except for consuming ice cream. Finish that whole cone/bowl/pint/what-have-you. Exceptions make the rule after all.
As one filmmaking colleague I know has mentioned, “Money isn’t an issue, it’s the issue.”
And many creative endeavors rely on crowdfunding these days. Hence my previous post about the audio drama Apollyon(which I should mention I and the other cast & crew really do want to get funded to continue the story).
As many of you may know, the audio theater troupe I run, Jabberwocky Audio Theater, has its shows start on broadcast radio, WERA-LP 96.7 FM in Arlington, Virginia to be precise.
WERA is community radio, as in the program literally comes from the community. And it gives back, with news, coverage of local events, and some of the best value in media training around (which includes TV as well, since WERA is part of Arlington Independent Media).
But it also depends on the community for financial support in the best of times, so this past year has hit them hard, and Arlington Independent Media is looking to keep on going through their 39th year and beyond. They’ve been integral to our getting Jabberwocky Audio Theater off the ground again in 2018 and we’d love to see them continue.
It’s been six years since I re-launched my personal website, which evidently is the “iron” anniversary, hence good ol’ shellhead above. As I mentioned in last year’s blogiversary post, I was going to try and make this more annual and — especially because last year felt like at least five years — it felt right to do a post.
So here are some highlights and personal favorites.
Star Trek
My series Crisis of Infinite Star Treks lasted the first five years of the blog. As it happened, there was also a Star Trek-related project that I worked on over that same five years. It came to fruition thanks to the pandemic — and to quote a certain Klingon, it was glorious.
As I kind of expected, the traffic I get to this post and its related pages dwarfs just about everything else on the site. It’s like people are interested in Star Trek or something!
The pages that had the comments (with spoilers and snark) got far more hits than the pages with only titles — and of those, the “Whole Enchilada” got far and away the most traffic. Breaking it down by show, these are the pages that got the most traffic:
Mind you, I don’t think this tells me anything more than which series Trek fans most want to see some guy on the Internet’s ranking of — which reminds me: the fact that Voyager is right there at the top doesn’t surprise me. Based on conversations on Reddit, some of my fellow Trekkers love that show and, just like Enterprise, if you haven’t checked it out there’s a whole slew of episodes that are really good.
In fact, just as I’ve done a “Viewing Guide for Enterprise,” I will be doing a “Viewing Guide for Voyager” and some of the others later this year (if all goes well).
Theater and Creativity Amid Coronavirus
Many of my creative colleagues are depend on being physically on sets and on stages for their ducats, so I’ve been tracking how those industries are doing and posting about them this past year:
While I didn’t want to focus on the pandemic endlessly, I did find it cathartic to share some articles and videos and events related to it, so I created a tag, COVID Craziness, which has a little bit of crossover to theater coverage above. There’s plenty of joy and introspection.
Check it out when it seems right. I suspect for some people it’s too soon, but other’s it’s just right.
Most Visited Posts (apart from Trek)
Apart from the Star Trek ranking, in honor of this, the sixth blogiversary, these are the top six visited posts from the year (not necessarily written in the past year):
Book one in the trilogy (image via JohnAugust.com)
In traditional project management, the last phase is closing. It means the project is accepted as ‘completed’ on some level of formality. Not only that, what with project managers loving to document things, they like to document ‘”lessons learned.” In other words, what will you do better next time? What might you try to avoid doing altogether? What definitely worked? While users of agile and lean frameworks may think of continuous improvement, a good concept to bear in mind, sometimes you only have the chance to really step back and evaluate what the heck happened at a bigger milestone.
“Post-mortems” in theater and film projects are where I first encountered “lessons learned,” so when I later crossed over into the office environment, they were not unfamiliar and something I’ve encouraged for both their pragmatic and cathartic benefits. This has also meant that I’ve always known it’s good and necessary to do lessons learned for creative projects.
Long-time readers may recall I listen to the screenwriting podcast he and fellow scribe Craig Mazin do, called Scriptnotes. Long-time listeners of that podcast will already know August approaches most things with a thoroughly methodical, yet joyful frame of mind. You’ll see that on display in this list of 10 lessons learned. I’m not writing a trilogy per se, but a lot of the lessons here apply to my writing. Hope they work for you all as well.
Apted at the Peabody Awards in 2013 (Photo: Anders Krusberg)
When you talk with your filmmaking peers, it comes as no surprise they have always have a few filmmakers they follow closely, perhaps someone who isn’t necessarily a household name… or even necessarily an art house movie theater name.
Michael Apted was one of those filmmakers for me. He died at the age of 79, earlier in January (I’m just getting to writing this post now). You can read obituaries and remembrances from the BBC, the Guardian, Variety, and NPR among others.
One part of his career you see mentioned again and again is the Up series, documentaries made at seven-year intervals looking at a particular set of Britons starting in 1964. It has become –as I recall one reviewer putting it– “a time-lapse film of human lives.” It’s simple, straightforward, and extraordinary.
Apted continued to make fiction and non-fiction films for the rest of his career… and the fiction films included a James Bond spy film and an installment of the Chronicles of Narnia. His filmography is rightly described as “eclectic.” And with a background in both anthropology and theater, with a love of films and history, you can perhaps begin to see why he was one of the filmmakers I followed.
For those of you who have seen my biennial Favorite Films sort, none of his fiction films ever make it into my top 50 and –by virtue of me wanting each feature to stand on its own– that eliminates the Up series from competition (its heft comes from the whole package after all). But I would be hard pressed not to find something interesting an energizing about every single one of his movies. In part, I think it’s because he always finds ways to bring forward truth in the fiction.
Nowhere is this more on display for me than the natural double-feature of Incident at Oglala and Thunderheart. The former is a thought-provoking documentary about shootings and subsequent trials at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. The latter is Hollywood mystery thriller with Val Kilmer, Sam Shepard, and Graham Greene, among others, oh so clearly inspired by the real events, but distinctly different.
There are always bits worthy of note in all of his films. For instance, in 2001’s Enigma, you get a good breakdown of how codebreaking actually works versus the typical “hack the Internets” silliness sometimes on display in films.
Still from 2001’s Enigma (cinematographer: Seamus McGarvey)
So while my biggest disappointment is how the Up series will continue or end (something several people are now wondering), there are plenty of other films, big and small, I was hoping might pop up there.
The events of last Wednesday are still dwelling on my mind, so it was nice to catch this article by Lia Kvatum in the Washington Post Magazine about an itinerant creative who’s connecting communities to their history through theater. It provides some much needed light and joy… and the notion that we can communicate with one another.
Theatrical portraits of Hanson in Granite Falls, Minn. (Caroline Yang via the Washington Post)
Reading about how Ashley Hanson has been traveling to different communities and talking with the people reminds me of both how the Federal Theatre Project had a whole “think national, act local” approach to productions as well as the more recent Playback Theatre‘s attempts to translate personal experiences into short plays.
When it comes to theater, I am biased, what with it being a “non-trivial” portion of my working life, to say nothing of participating in some of the “walking theater” mentioned in the article (although my part got to be on stage). I believe live theater has a way of connecting and impacting people in a way that will make it just as relevant 100 years from now as it was 1,000 and more years ago. So I wish Hanson and others great success in hundreds more towns across America, because it means connecting and deep listening.
The short version of why I like it so much is that it’s essentially an infinitely reconfigurable checklist. Or checklist of checklists. Or checklist of checklists of checklists. You get the idea.
That short explanation touches on one of the traps people can find themselves in, where an item might fit in two categories: say, “Stuff to do Today” and “Items to Research for Blog Posts.”
Their new “mirror” function allows for not just copying a task, but making it so any update on one of the mirrors updates all the mirrors. So you can your organizer can now go all Kwisatz Haderach: be many places at once.
Part of my new year’s planning? Updating my jumble of “Workflowy filing cabinets” into a leaner set of mirrored tasks.
Since I’ve written about it before, I suppose I should make a habit of celebrating the fact that New Year’s Day is also Public Domain Day, which in the U.S. means that, as of today, any copyrights from works released or otherwise published in 1925 have expired and said works are now in the public domain.
Montage via the Center for the Study of the Public Domain
I should mention that I’m not an entirely disinterested party in these matters. As the head of Jabberwocky Audio Theater, I have a keen interest in stories that might make good adaptations for audio fiction. I mean, we can and will continue to find works from the 19th century and earlier to use (adapting “Prince Prigio” last year was a lot of fun). But “new” old stuff would be fun to do as well.
I should also note that Public Domain in the U.S. is a bit different than worldwide rights, which vary widely. But it’s certainly worth exploring. What books or films do you want to see new adaptations of?
I’ve been watching how theater and film productions have been coping with the pandemic (as you can see from June, July, and earlier in December). Safely producing new works is important not only considering my role in running Jabberwocky Audio Theater, but also thinking of my many colleagues whose livelihood requires being on stages and sets.
Federal Theater Project production of Macbeth, 1936 (Library of Congress)
So this article in Fortune, not my usual source for theater news, was an interesting read. Author Michael Barra puts forth some predictions about how theater may change, starting with Broadway and how the tourist percentage of audiences will drop, and then taking that change and extrapolating out to theater trends overall.
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