Category: Producing

Producing Various and Sundry

Freakonomics asks, “What makes a good boss?”

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I came across Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s “Eleven Laws of Showrunning” in the context of the entertainment industry not having the best management training for showrunners, the creative captains who steer a narrative show through all aspects of pre-production, production, and post-production. One of the notions raised in yesterday’s post was the fact that, well, a lot of people in a lot of industries are promoted to a management position… and the results are less than ideal.…

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Producing Writing

The 11 Laws of Showrunning by Javier Grillo-Marxuach

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

One of the nice outputs of reading Maureen Ryan’s Burn it Down, that I referenced last week, was to learn about Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s guide “Eleven Laws of Showrunning.” (PDF link) This guide was mentioned in the context of needing good management. So many showrunners are writers who have created the ideas of the show and are expert at both writing and solving writing problems, but they so often have zero managerial experience. Not only that,…

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Acting Producing Writing

Have We Tried Burning it All Down?

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

While I was covering the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes last year, an obvious question for a follow-up was what the future of Hollywood would be. While there’s certainly been a lot of pieces since the end of the strikes, one of the conversations I found that touched on this was with Adam Conover on his Factually podcast. It’s from August of last year, arguably during the height of the strikes. I actually linked to it…

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Producing

“…Maybe the Industry Deserves to Die.”

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I’ve been working on additional film industry posts, but in the meantime, this brief article about an adjacent industry caught my eye. Video games are a huge business — and from talking with some industry folks here and there, they experience some of the same bull that the film industry rank and file experience, so I read this piece by Lauren Morton for PC Gamer with that in mind.

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Producing Various and Sundry Writing

Star Trek’s Mission Log: 58 Years & Counting

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

The beginning of the end of Star Trek: Discovery‘s five-year mission streams this Thursday, April 4th. Originally, this fifth season of Discovery was apparently not intended to be the final one, which has caused all kinds of rampant speculation online. However, Trek overall, is not only not going anywhere, the powers that be want to maintain what isn’t just a franchise, but a veritable Intellectual Property (IP) empire. In a longform cover story for Variety,…

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Producing Various and Sundry Writing

Alternate Hollywoods

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I’ve had the chance to catch up on a lot of Scriptnotes episodes over the past few weeks, which is always a good thing. Scriptnotes is a weekly podcast hosted by screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin which has been going on for over a decade and continues to have things about and interesting to screenwriters. As I’ve been meaning to do some posts about the future of Hollywood following last year’s strikes and the…

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Producing Various and Sundry Writing

Mickey Mouse & the Public Domain: A Deeper Dive

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I’ve already done a couple public domain posts this year, notably the one for Public Domain Day and one on Monday about how people are, predictably, already having fun with the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse which entered the public domain in the U.S. on January 1st. But if you just want to get deeper into the legal philosophy behind public domain and also how that particularly involves Mickey Mouse, I have a couple…

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Producing Various and Sundry Writing

Well, That Didn’t Take Long: Steamboat Willie Edition

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I didn’t post this last week, but I actually saw some news even as I was posting about Public Domain Day last Monday: people aren’t wasting any time, Disney’s legendary legal ferocity be damned. One Steamboat Willie-themed Kickstarter launched on January 1st, there are memes aplenty (see image above), and –of course– there’s a horror movie. There’s plenty more in the works, as Sian Cain details for The Guardian (which also touches on the horror…

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Producing Various and Sundry

Now Playing: Detailed Public Viewership Stats for Netflix

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I still should work on a wrap-up post regarding last year’s Hollywood Strikes, but one of the outcomes the unions were able to negotiate was visibility about the success of shows on streaming services. In what definitely feels like an effort to guide that narrative, Netflix released a heretofore unprecedented amount of data publicly in December regarding how many people watched what on their service. You can get a summary, watch a half hour press…

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Producing Various and Sundry Writing

Public Domain Day, 2024

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Last year I mentioned making a Public Domain Day post a tradition and so: Happy New Year to All! Plus, welcome to the public domain for so many goodies. For a great overview of said goodies on offer, check out this article from Aaron Moss over at Copyright Lately. Moss is an intellectual property attorney and is quite ready to delve deep into all things copyright. I appreciate that he goes beyond the much-covered fact…

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