I have a few messages piling up here that seem worthy of answering here. This one is from Andy Rose…
This is a little random, but I've always enjoyed the fact that you can appreciate the history of a medium without getting into "everything sucks these days" hypernostalgia about it. But when I look at links to other people you recommend (Stu Shostak, Ken Levine…maybe even Floyd Norman to a small degree), they seem to have a dismissive attitude about the present that I don't enjoy.
From time to time, I have the opportunity to meet with people from the Old Days of a medium that I'd love to talk to about history, but I find that when I do, it quickly degenerates into them complaining about how the kids today don't know what they're doing. (I guess I'm partially exempted from being one of those "kids" because my interest is flattering to them.) Any attempt to politely suggest that maybe things today aren't all that awful is usually met with a frown, at best.
Yet when I listen to you on Stu's Show, you always manage to parry Stu's ad hominem complaints without getting into an argument about it. So I guess my question is, how do you do that? Is there a way to make that kind of point without putting the other person on the defense, or have you encountered others with that attitude with whom it's impossible to have a civil discussion?
Well, I might disagree with you about your examples. Ken Levine sure seems to love a lot of current shows. You may be reacting to his complaints about how the networks today micro-micro-manage shows these days to the point of smothering them. In those remarks, I think Ken is spot-on.
The "funny" thing about the situation he's complaining about — and I put "funny" in quotes because I'm sure it doesn't seem like that to those whose work is burdened by it — is that network folks are so transient. Today, if you're producing a sitcom for one of the majors and you're not yet the kind of smash hit where you can demand they leave you alone, they won't let you cast a one-line walk-on role without doing auditions and getting the approval of some guy at the network. His judgment is so much better than yours.
Six months from now, that guy at the network will be out of the network and trying to produce a show for them…and his successor won't let him cast a one-line walk-on role without doing auditions and getting approval.
I know Stu and Floyd well enough to know they too don't feel everything today is awful…but I do meet folks who often rant monotonously in that direction. Often, it's because of diminished or denied employment. I have learned to avoid one writer-acquaintance because to say howdy to this guy is to listen to a twenty-minute diatribe about how the cop/detective shows today are all "crap" and he can't believe they put this "shit" on the air. His subtext is way too obvious. Such shows should be more like they were in the seventies…which coincidentally is when he was getting hired to write them.
And sometimes, the subtext is that the person just plain doesn't like that the world is changing, period. He or she is getting older and they don't feel that things revolve around them the way they once did. My view, as I've expressed here before, is that the planet keeps turning and you have two choices: You can turn with it or you can spend your time trying to shove it back in the other direction. Since no one has ever succeeded at reversing its spin, I don't see the point in trying, especially since it's so much fun to hop on and go along for the ride. At the very least, it's much better than being left behind. I once heard someone refer to one of these "things were better in the old days" guys and say, "He likes to self-marginalize."
I rarely (if ever) refer to specific creative work as "crap" or "shit" even when I don't care for it. I think that's needless overkill and usually a conversation-stopper. All you can do when you encounter such rancor is to register your disagreement with it and move on. You certainly can't have a reasonable discussion in those situations. If there's any reasonable point there which can be argued it's probably that one of us is thinking his opinion is way more than just his opinion. So I guess the trick is to just remember that and to be aware that to mud-wrestle with someone means that even when you win, you wind up covered in mud. Or crap or shit or something you definitely don't want to be covered in.