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You want to know a dirty, filthy secret about the entertainment business? It's a business. Nobody wants to buy "good" scripts, because some abstract sense of quality doesn't pay anyone's bills. What the industry wants is commercial viability. They want safe bets, stuff that will be easy to market. They want sequels, spin-offs and derivative ideas that are familiar but just novel enough to be acceptable. That's what sells advertising, gets the viewers and puts money in the bank.

What writers don't understand (and what they'll rarely be told) is that paying your dues is largely a process of disillusionment. To put it kindly, the industry wants sensible, informed writers who understand how TV is made and know how to write scripts that are easy to shoot and suit the medium. To put it less kindly but more accurately, the industry wants cynical, desperate writers who will write whatever cheap nasty dreck pulls in the viewers.

Paying your dues is like a gang initiation, social proof that you're willing to crawl through Albini's trench of shit to get your script into production. Every menial chore that you perform, every late night you pull, every arse that you kiss entrenches you into the industry, further investing you in the payoff of getting commissioned. The longer you've been a dogsbody, the more confident a commissioning editor can be that you won't argue when they bring in a script doctor, when they ask for a few "tweaks", when they decide that a page one rewrite is in order. They know you won't argue over the casting or ask for too much money.

Entertainment is a shit business, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svCA3DJRgfI

"I know nothing about the entertainment industry..."

Then maybe you shouldn't speak about it as if you do. I have heard the same advice in this article from a number of people working as tv writers (either reading articles, or as part of my mfa in creative writing), and it does seem like the vast majority of them only got where they are by "working their way up". The idea that you can just make something good enough that people can't ignore it is, in fact, the view that is hopelessly naive. It isn't like the internet where you can easily achieve massive distribution. You have to get it in the hands of a very small number of people who are swamped by an incredibly large number of people in the exact same situation as you.

The amount of good content that is generated by writers is overwhelming and, in fact, incredibly easy to ignore. Not saying you can't point to success stories of people who produced their own stuff. You can just point to more stories of people who lost a lot of money producing their own stuff and have nothing to show for it. Building relationships certainly seems to be a more reliable way to go about breaking into the industry.

Is working for someone as a personal assistant really 'building relationships', though? I suspect that personal anecdotes are poor proof in this case because the huge number of low-level employees who pay their dues and get nothing out of it are hardly in a position to give advice on how to break into show business. On the other hand, if most people are trying to get in through relationships, then you would expect that most people who were successful would have done it that way. It doesn't say much about your relative chances with either approach.

I don't think anyone meant personal assistant. The acronym "PA" means "production assistant". A good description is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_assistant

> The amount of good content that is generated by writers is overwhelming and, in fact, incredibly easy to ignore. Not saying you can't point to success stories of people who produced their own stuff. You can just point to more stories of people who lost a lot of money producing their own stuff and have nothing to show for it. Building relationships certainly seems to be a more reliable way to go about breaking into the industry.

Obviously, the answer is to write terrible shit, because no one is putting any of that heaping pile of good content into consumable products.

As many famous screenwriters have been at pains to point out, a movie is a very, very large collaborative enterprise by at least a dozen departments full of people, the leader of any one of which can make or break the results.

What this means is: There are a lot of bad movies made from good scripts. Don't assume that the quality of the average finished film is representative of the quality of the average script, let alone of the skill of the average writer (who is, after all, operating under many, many constraints).

That's nothing new. Read what Heinlein has to say about the making of Destination Moon in 1949 in his Guest of Honor Speech at the Rio de Janeiro Movie Festival twenty years later. It was published in the posthumous tribute collection, Requiem.

I'm in LA and in the industry and I agree with you. Take that menial job (although it is hard to work up from lowly PA, but not impossible). But here is the secret: DON'T BE A DICK. PLAY THE GAME BUT DO NOT COMPROMISE YOUR ETHICS TOO BADLY. DO NOT ACT LIKE A TYPICAL AMERICAN ENTITLED BRAT. BE RESPECTFUL.

I know someone who went from an assistant writing position to start in H'wood who is now co-producer of a network smash hit (Glee)... he did it by patiently building relationships and staying positive. I know "screenwriters" who sit at home all day and are supported by their wives... because they have poor social skills and feel they are entitled to money because they are smart. Don't fall into this trap, it's a dead end.

There is a this american life story about pitching TV shows - can't find it right now though

Supply and demand; the supply of people who want to be writers is too high, and you are going to have to go to great lengths to distinguish yourself or get really lucky. As others point out this may not be the only way in, but don't expect anything to be easy or even merely hard, because every metaphorical door into the place is jammed tight with people trying to get in.

We get the same effect in our industry with games programming. Nothing about games really especially calls for endless deathmarches or 18 hour days with no overtime pay six days a week, any more than any of the many other industries in which programming is as critical or perhaps even more critical (there's more to games than programming) but somehow manages to get done in 40-ish hours a week. It's just the endless hordes of young programmers who think it's what they want to do driving the price through the floor by inflating supply until there's just no incentive for EA to treat them any better; they're not just replaceable, they're aggressively replaceable.

I really recommend against any of these careers, the risk/reward just isn't there. The risk is much higher and it turns out there are many, many other jobs out there that are just as rewarding, except without the possibility of fame for a small percentage of jobholders.

I think this is a common problem for any programming job that's particularly visible or technical. Most programming jobs are boring, frankly, and there are a lot of very smart people in the industry fighting for the few stimulating, high-status, technically-challenging jobs. For example, anything to do with aerospace seems to have competition that puts the games industry to shame.

Obviously it depends on your definition of high-status, but I know a lot of people hiring developers across a range of sectors for technically challenging jobs, and they all have trouble hiring talented people.

Every time I'm advising a young person or young people I always underline that there are challenges everywhere. If I just describe my job, it sounds terrible, very business programming oriented, but in fact in order to make it work I'm pushing myself very hard, lots of server and coordination problems, retrofitting code never meant to do this and doing it in the most developer-time effective manner, and even pushing the cutting edge a bit in some ways. It's as interesting as games programming could be and a lot less stressful, and like you say, there's stuff like this all over.

It may be challenging, but something can be simultaneously challenging and boring. (For me, an MMORPG at high levels falls into this category.)

Spot on. Any time some industry insider tells people they need to work like slaves to get a good position has no idea how economics works. Instead the industry insider should be telling people we have enough people looking to break in and you should work in some other industry until ours settle into a more manageable supply/demand ratio.

I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive.

I get very, very worried when I see "contribute to OSS" as career advice, for exactly this reason. No, we won't pay you, but if you could grind out some boring glue code for the frameworks that our for-profit businesses use to make money, that would be great. Why, if it turns out that you're good at it, we might even look upon that favorably in an interview... some day.

I think the main reason to "contribute to OSS" is to learn (and demonstrate!) new skills that you would not otherwise be able to learn on the job. Businesses generally are not in the habit of paying people to do something for which there is no business need. So unless you work at Google, you are very unlikely to have an opportunity to build a webserver. Unless you work on the compiler team of a big company (almost all of which require prior experience with compilers), you are unlikely to have an opportunity to build a compiler or interpreter. Unless you work for Google or Bing, you are unlikely to have an opportunity to build a search engine.

But if you contribute to Apache or Lighttpd, you're building a webserver. If you contribute to Python or create your own open-source language, you're building a compiler/interpreter. If you contribute to Lucene, you're building a search engine.

All of these teach you skills that can be very valuable if you start your own company. If you can take your server count down from 27 to 1, that's money that goes straight to your bottom line. If you can spend 3 hours writing a script that fixes a problem throughout your codebase instead of 3 months doing it manually, that's time that you can use to innovate instead. If you can index the contents of the web efficiently, you'll know how to index lots of other things efficiently, and there's bound to be a startup idea in there somewhere.

I don't think "writing some boring glue code for the frameworks our for-profit businesses use" is all that much of a resume boost anyway. Writing Mongrel or Factor or Rails, however...

Contributing patches to Rails is exactly what I am thinking of when I say this: it is a lot of work, visibility for new contributors is poor, and the main beneficiaries are going to be for-profit businesses. Yet I hear otherwise very savvy people telling unemployed CS grads that they should build up their github profiles by, e.g., doing patches to Rails. That strikes me as an astoundingly poor use of one's time -- you don't have a coding problem, you have a marketing problem. Patches have a very poor ROI for personal marketing.

I don't mean contributing patches to Rails, I mean writing Rails. Or contributing features to projects that are viewed as bit more hard-core, eg. Apache or Python, though even there you're often better-off starting a new project than contributing to an existing one.

There seems to be a general cognitive bias in the programming world against maintenance work, which strikes me as a bit dumb because it's both harder and more important than starting new projects. But as long as it exists, I'm going to exploit it, and do high-visibility but useless projects like port Arc to JavaScript or rewrite Tetris in 3 hours instead of contributing patches to JQuery.

>> There seems to be a general cognitive bias in the programming world against maintenance work, which strikes me as a bit dumb because it's both harder and more important than starting new projects.

This is not unique to the programming world. Starting something and finishing it looks a lot more impressive almost evrywhere than making something that exis´ts better. Just think how much more impressive founding yet another non-profit looks on ones cv compared to doubling the projects of an existing one.

Hmmm. If someone put on their CV that they got patches into Rails (or another large, popular OSS project) you wouldn't think of that as a pretty big plus?

Relative to what? I'd think of it as a big plus compared to a guy who never contributed to anything outside of his immediate job duties. I wouldn't think of it as a big plus compared to someone who started Rails, or who wrote Mongrel, or who founded his own startup, or even someone who worked for Google or PayPal.

I suffer from the same cognitive biases as everyone else. Even though I know intellectually that getting patches into Rails now is probably harder than starting Rails was, I'm still more impressed by the guy who started Rails.

I don't want to hire people who "paid their dues" but I do want to hire passionate people, and those that contribute to OSS seem to be the ones actually interested in programming, and that gives them a higher chance of getting along with me and others.

Someone can tell me all sorts of accomplishments on their resume. They can tell me about some cool NDA or Intranet project they wrote lots of code for. But I can learn a LOT more about their skills from their Github page.

So when I tell students to get into OSS, it's not to get free labor or to make them "pay their dues". It's to give them a better shot.

You could say the same about getting a degree, and you actually pay for the privilege in that case. But in both cases it's an okay signal that you're not going to be a total loss, which gives you a leg up on all the other folk who haven't proved anything about their worth (even if they're actually better than you). In theory the more qualified you are the easier it is for you to meet these goals.

It also sounds, with they way you put it, that it's the leaders of Project X, telling you to contribute to Project X in order to be hired by the leaders of Project X. Which is, or would be, scummy but I've never seen that advice. Usually it's leaders of project A saying that you should contribute to X, Y or Z because when they or similarly tech savvy people are hiring they'll consider that a good signal, all the more so if it's a project related to your work).

Contribute to OSS is good for your CV as a way to separate you from the loads of CS graduates who are not passionate about programming. There are people who have CS degrees who can't programme. If you have contributed to OSS then you are probably not one of them.

It's not really an entertainment industry thing.

Someone who's paid his dues by getting a PHD from CMU is more likely to get a job at Google than some guy who just read books on his own. Sure the guy who read books might create some startup, get some heat, and get bought out by google. And that can happen to a writer outside of the industry. But all things being equal, the smart money goes on the PHD.

And sure, every once in a long while you can get someone like Ross Perot, who mounts a serious Presidential campaign with ZERO political experience, but the overwhelming majority of serious presidential candidates paid their dues.

I'm sure the analogy can be applied to about any industry out there.

It's the same thing in piles of fields ranging from sports to law - you have to work your tail off in the beginning for a very marginal shot at getting into the top rungs. Want to be a doctor? You're putting in 80-hour weeks as a resident. Want to make partner at a top law firm? Better be ready to spend a decade putting in half again as much work as your bosses. Want to be the next Michael Jordan? Better bust your ass off every step of the way, from high school tryouts all the way through college. That's 7 years of eating, sleeping, and breathing basketball to even have a shot at the pros.

I once watched an interview of Ang Lee (crouching tiger, brokeback mt. the best director of our time, this is from my twice academy winning professor). Lee told of his early days as a director, when he simply couldn't get any gig for six years. (he stayed home, took care of the kids, and did a lot of cooking.) but he stuck with it, and eventually got some money to make a small budget movie that went on to win some international award, which launched his career. Looking back, he said something to this effect, "of my classmates who studied to be directors, the only ones who ended up being directors are the ones who stuck with directing all the way. Those who found jobs as editors, or critics,.. Those were the lucky ones who found stable jobs. But 20 yes later, they were still editing or crtiquing. None made it to directing their own films. Only the ones who stuck with it."

It depends on your goals and this isn't just true for TV writing - it's true for everything.

I just watched The Social Network, and it's a perfect example - slaving away as somebody's assistant, pumping your connections, doing something on the side, "meeting important people", you will eventually get into one of those exclusive finals clubs, and then live a life of secure mediocrity. Perhaps even at a very high level, making very good money.

If, on the other hand, you're actually obsessed about creating something great, you end up inventing facebook. There's a good chance you'll fail, too but at least you have followed your dreams and imaginations. I guess it depends on what kind of person you are, and what your goals are.

I assume that really great writers - or great anything -never did the connections thing.

True. You obviously don't know much about this industry. I worked for Disney Studios for a while after they bought Infoseek where I worked. Th clash of cultures was evident there as it is here. The main measures of success in the entertainment biz are qualitative, not quantitative despite what financial data and audience measurements can lead you to believe. There are many more talented writers than there are producers to produce their scripts. It's all about relationships and it's also about talent too but talent alone is just not enough. So I repeat the advice: just figure it the fuck out ;-)

I honestly reminds me of two talks from Startup School. One from Tom Preston-Werner of GitHub. He talked about "luck" and how part is chance and part is you. He moved himself to Silicon Valley to improve his luck. He also talked about the basic steps he used to "work his way up" to a success: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178966

The other was from Brian Chesky of AirBnB. He and his co-founders basically did whatever they had to, including selling novelty cereal boxes, to move up. He started his talk by saying how he was "powerless and obscure" and the moves he and AirBnB made, including joining Y Cominator to get to where they were profitable and "on the map" http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383

We may not start out by fetching coffee for Paul Graham's 3nd assistant (I doubt he has one), but we do all have to start from somewhere and make whatever moves we have to in order to move up. That may involve toiling at night, moving to SF or elsewhere, or whatever. But it still just needs to get done.

Enough said, I've got some coding to do this Saturday night.

> We may not start out by fetching coffee for Paul Graham's 3nd assistant (I doubt he has one), but we do all have to start from somewhere and make whatever moves we have to in order to move up. That may involve toiling at night, moving to SF or elsewhere, or whatever. But it still just needs to get done. Enough said, I've got some coding to do this Saturday night.

I know what you mean. I spent part of my free time this weekend teaching myself how LadderLogic works so that I will be more helpful in debugging a certain faulty machine next Monday because I'm not sure we can rely on the folks they're going to call in to give us any kind of fix.

Watch Charlie Brooker's (foul-mouthed) guide to getting a job in TV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIyg2a72uV4

In fact, most of his Screenwipe/Newswipe series is worth a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpVTUdfcEMg&feature=relat...

I think your perception that the entertainment industry is in anyway a meritocracy is naive. There are always exceptions to the rule but for the most part it is still a "it's not what you know it's who you know" industry. This discussion reminds me of one of my favorite all time bumper stickers: "Real Musicians Have Day Jobs."

Well, if you define good as something that is not only a great story but in a list of themes that executives are looking to put up on the screen, then yes, that's probably all it would take.