I’ve thought about hosting a podcast, because it might be fun and also help my “brand.” (Is that too blunt?)
I enjoy public speaking and have a fair amount of experience both conducting and giving interviews.
I figured that if I do want to have a podcast, or YouTube show, or whatever—I would need a sample of my hosting abilities.
So...please meet my friend Charles Vignola, a screenwriter and former 30-year executive at Jerry Bruckheimer Films. I’ve known Charlie forever and in addition to writing, he’s now operating his own screenwriting consultant company, Script Genius.
Normally, my position is that people who operate script consultant businesses should be dropped in acid. But Charlie’s different because he actually has the experience from his decades at Bruckheimer developing scripts to real movies. And he’s really smart. And he’s my friend, and I recommend him.
I invited Charlie to spend an hour talking with me about screenwriting, mostly because I enjoy it and it was a great excuse to hear what he has to say, both from his own considerable experience and in response to my crackpot theories.
It also turns out it’s super-simple to record a Zoom and post it on YouTube. Incredible what technology can do today...we’re living in the Jetsons world.
So here you—the “pilot” episode of my imaginary YouTube talk show, with special guest, Charles Vignola.
Or as legendary ABC announcer Ernie Anderson once put it in a famous outtake roll, “F*** it! There’s no special guest. He’s just a guest.”
If you go to our new video on its YouTube page, you’ll find a breakdown of the topics Charlie and I discuss with timecodes—personally, I find I don’t have the time or patience to listen to the ungodly number of hours of content available now, so I like a road map in order to skim.
Charlie and I both enjoyed doing this, and what I’d really love to do is have a show where we critique loglines submitted by aspiring writers—and if a logline is good enough, we’ll read and critique the script.
It would be FREE, and to those who worry about making their work public—you realize you wrote it to be a movie, right? Movies are public!
From my own experience, you learn the most writing when you FAIL—when you hit cold hard reality and find out how your work confuses, annoys and disappoints the reader. That is the only thing that makes you go, “Oh crap, I need to do better.”
Whereas most of these contests and coverage sites are only too happy to take your money and be mildly encouraging, so as to keep you spending money at their site!
But that’s just an aspiration at this point. We’d definitely need to figure out a legal release form on a submission page, just to cover our butts for the odd lunatic out there who pops up to accuse us of stealing his lame idea.
For now, many thanks to Charlie for his time, and have a great weekend, everybody!
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