Date: May 20, 2010
Title: Going Hollywood
Podcaster: Sandy Antunes
Link: Project Calliope LLC.
URL: http://projectcalliope.com/
Description: Want to be a scientific consultant for Hollywood TV and movies? Here’s how three people did it!
Bio: Sandy looks at the science and the people in today’s 9-5 pro astronomy world. Born in the heart of a dying star (as we were all), Alex draws from his research, writing, and game design work to bring you the joy of science twice a week at ScientificBlogging.com/skyday— and to launch the first personal science/music satellite via ProjectCalliope.com.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Linda Lee in honor of her sister Nancy Atkinson.
Additional sponsorship for this episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” has been provided by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. Discovering the hidden Universe through radio astronomy. Visit us on www.icrar.org to find out more.
Transcript:
I am in transit back from the DCSWA Professional Development Day, DC Science Writers Association. And of course the first thing you think of when you think of ‘science writers’ is ‘Hollywood’, yes indeed.
One of the things we learned was how to get work consulting on TV shows to have accurate science. Alright, so you want to know about writing for Hollywood in science.
Jennifer Oullette was the speaker for that. Since November 2008 she’s run the “Science and Entertainment Exchange”, which is actually a National Academies of Science program that is in LA, that tries to match scientists and writers.
You might think this is kind of an unusual mix– when has Hollywood ever gotten science right? We’re not just talking movies, we’re also talking TV. The idea here is to get a more accurate depiction of science in television
With the Zuckers, actually– the director of Airplane and Ghost, and his wife– and Seth McFarlane of “the Family Guy”; there was a movie that I’m not allowed to show to you that was a neat little mashup talking about the arrival of science reporters in Hollywood. They consider “Science and Entertainment Exchange” to be 1-800-find-a-scientist. It’s free volunteer scientists!
And I admit, I heard ‘free volunteer’ and I thought, “oh well, so much for freelancing there.”
Sorry. ‘Hollywoood’s job is not to educate but to entertain and inspire’, that was her message. And the walkway I got from it is that Hollywood is all about relationships. These are, really the TV writers are really savvy people who are very well read but they may not happen to know science.
In a movie, a lot of things are “buys”, i.e. ‘a character can talk to dolphins’, that’s just a buy, you just go with that. The idea is to reduce the number of buys and have more things be accurate.
She had the great pull quote, ‘80% of people in America have never met a scientist’. Also on this panel was Leslie Kenna, she participated in a ‘match a scientist with a screenwriter project’. She started out with the great “in my former naive view (I have a new naive view)… I thought there was one person in Hollywood that everyone went to to basically find science.” As she said, the title of her talk was ‘Learning to Sell my BS to Hollywood’, with the emphasis that ‘BS’ is ‘Bachelor of Science’. It was an AFI workshop.
To do a pitch, you have to prepare a logline, a 1-sentence about who your movie is about, what they want, what’s in their way, and why it’s unique. It took them 3 days to write 1 line.
She gave an example for the Wizard of Oz: “After a twister transports a lone Kansas farm girl to a magical land, she sets out on a dangerous question twist to find a wizard who can send her home.”
That’s your elevator pitch, that’s the thing that you do to try and get people going on it. After that, you have to come up with a beat sheet, which consists of key events in each scene. You fill it out with dialog, and then you rewrite.
She was often told ‘Writing is rewriting. Writing is the easy part, rewriting is the hard part.’
I’m still talking with her to try and get permission to reveal what her logline and movie idea is. I asked her the question, if she had a movie option but not made into a movie, would that be satisfying? And she said that would feel very validating and possibly make her want to go into writing more, that’s a fairly dangerous thing.
And then we also had Brooke Wang, she was a consultant with TV writers in order to ensure accuracy of cancer in television programming. And the idea here is, again, that the writers turn to them, and in fact they do turn to their bureau nearly every week. Shows like ‘House’, ‘Desperate Housewives’, ‘As the World Turns’, ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, and etc. Originally funded by the National Cancer Institute, they’re still active now, with funding from 2 NPO endowments.
In 5 months the top 10 shows had 46 mentions of cancer. It’s an obvious plot point and she is helping to provide accurate information.
So that’s the story about Hollywood on science. And I will say that was one of the most interesting parts. You might wonder why don’t I have their original words, the answer is I couldn’t get a good recording off it. The nice thing about summaries is they get to go quick.
The next question you might have is, hey, how can I get a job advising Hollywood, because even for free, it’s a pretty good gig, right?
Well, Jennifer got her start by writing books like ‘the Physics of the Buffyverse’ so she already had a bit of a name before moving on to that position. Also, living in LA with a cosmologist helps quite a bit. Brooke Wang is a media relations analyst, she worked previously in health education, among other things, so basically, this is her job to do it. Leslie Kenna took part in the American Film Institutes Catalyst Fellowship Workshop.
So here you have three different paths. You can convince your boss to fund you in order to promote science and essentially do an outreach position, that’s a long shot. Or you can do a fellowship, those are competitive but definitely worth doing, and that’ll give you the connections and grounding you need to continue, and the encouragement. Finally, you can volunteer. I’ve given you enough links and resources here that you can hunt it up.
Ends up it’s always about networking. It’s not what you know, it’s what you know and who you know when you’re doing Science in Hollywood.
This is the Daytime Astronomer, on the train at ‘365 Days of Astronomy’. You can read me twice a week at scientificblogging.com as ‘the Daytime Astronomer’. Until next month, goodbye!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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