Don’t Forget To Validate Your Parking: “Opera”
I’ve tracked L.A.-based writer Mike Le for awhile now beginning here:
“Don’t Forget to Validate Your Parking” is written by a screenwriter in LA:
WHO ARE YOU?
I am a highly-paid, morally shallow Hollywood professional avoiding his Hollywood responsibilities by doing a webcomic that makes absolutely no money.
WHAT IS “DON’T FOGET TO VALIDATE YOUR PARKING”?
It is a silly little webcomic loosely based on my experiences and observations in Hollywood as a screenwriter, producer, and wannabe lothario.
It’s funny stuff. And I can definitely relate to the experience of an outsider to L.A., learning that you have to get your parking validated basically like… well, everywhere. All that validation… and yet somehow it all feels so inauthentic.
Mike has just gone live with his first animated short called “Opera”:
For more, go here.
Mike also has taken an interesting approach to selling his reality TV series “K-Town”: He’s shot a full pilot before pitching it to networks. Risky, right? But check out the publicity the pilot has garnered already: here, here, here, and here to cite just a few.
For more, here is the show’s blog.
In an era where content is king, one key is simply to create the content! That’s what Mike is doing. Good lesson for us all.
UPDATE: Jeff posted something worth discussing:
You’ve preached “create content!” a few times before, Scott, and I guess that leads me to ask:
Is it no longer, then, enough to create PAPER (as in script) content?
Let me expand on this…
I’ve spent the summer generating quite a bit of “paper” content… some short fiction, quite a bit of poetry, and now, as August winds down, a brand new script.
That being said, I DO have a few projects that I could, potentially, control the final product on… a hand drawn animated series (2-D animation, how geriatric, I know…) and some radio dramas… er, radio is dead so I guess I’ll have to call them MP3 Theater pieces??? Whatever…
Anyway, to just generate “paper” may not be enough… is this what you are observing?
To which I replied:
Jeff, I think it’s wise for writers to be open to all forms of narrative. Just as a spec script represents the creation of content and can, when we put it ‘out there,’ result in a sale, option, and/or representation, the same applies to everything else: graphic novels, comic books, YA books, web series, animated shorts, and yes, even TV pilots.
This is personal for me because I sold a spec script (K-9), so I have always believed in the value of creating stories to get in front of buyers.
But I still think a spec feature screenplay or a spec TV script is still a hugely important means of breaking in as a writer in Hollywood. Scripts are the lifeblood of both the film and TV business, and likely will continue as such for the foreseeable future.
Jeff’s comment has given me an idea: To do a GITS search to see all the different types of content — apart from spec scripts — that have translated into sales the last two years or so. There have been live-action shorts like “Panic Attack” that sold. There was a post I did a year or so ago on a mini-pilot 4 young guys did that a woman in Chicago happened to see, and she just happened to be the mother of an agent at CAA, who tracked down and signed the guys, and they sold the pilot (the CAA agent subsequently contacted me about the post).
If any other of those type of stories from the annals of GITS posts spring to mind, please post them here as I do think it would be interesting to see what types of content, other than spec scripts, have resulted in sales.
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