I just came across this graphic on my harddisk. I downloaded it somewhere on the 'net years ago and meant to write a post here about it. In the late sixties and early seventies, various projects caused me to deal with a lot of print shops. Every one I went into had some variation of this sign. Some just said, "Speed, quality, value…pick any two." I thought about putting it on my business card but I realized it wouldn't register or matter with the folks hiring me to write things for them. Every one of them demanded all three.
"Good" or "quality" was the tricky one because it was so subjective. You could measure the other two with numbers. Three days is faster than six days, no argument. $500 is definitely cheaper than $1000 and always will be. But the quality of the work — how good it is — is much more arguable.
I don't know how many times I'd find myself in this situation, especially in the TV business: I'd be writing a script for a project where several folks had supervisory roles. I'd be getting "notes" (criticisms) from more than one person, often a whole committee. At Disney, it sometimes felt that I got notes from everyone who'd been to the Magic Kingdom in the past month.
Wherever it was, I'd go in for a meeting where all of them would gather to give me their comments —
— and they didn't agree. It was like they'd all read a different script, not the one (1) I'd handed in. One of them loved the character of Myron and wanted him to have more lines. One of them hated Myron and wanted him to have less, perhaps none. And there'd often be a person in the meeting who'd say something like, "I feel something is missing with the character Myron but I can't put my finger on what it is…"
There's a really helpful comment.
What I'd do in those situations is to just sit there quietly and let them duke it out. Sometimes, they'd all cancel each other out and I'd wind up making no changes. More often, I'd make one or two token changes for each…cut Myron back in some scenes; give him more than others. At a TV network meeting, I'd usually sense that for the people giving me the notes, it was not as important for them to win a discussion as it was to not lose or be ignored.
They just had to be able to feel and/or say they'd made some contribution. Sometimes, that meant rewriting every word and changing everything…but once, this happened: I wrote a pilot for what turned out to be an unsold cartoon show once and when I handed in my first draft, the lady at the studio said, "Can we change the name of this character from Barbara to something else? When I was going to school, there was a girl named Barbara I really hated."
I asked, "Did you go to school with any Brendas you hated?" She said no so for the second draft, I changed Barbara to Brenda and that was it. This was back in the days of typing on paper so I had to retype a number of pages and then call a messenger service to come pick up the script and deliver it. In the computer era, I could have made the change and e-mailed the script to the producer in under five minutes.
The first draft had been delivered on the required date and the second draft was there the same day I got the "note"…so I guess the script was fast. I felt I should have been paid more for it so I guess it was cheap. And the buyer couldn't find anything but the name "Barbara" she wanted changed so I'll say it was good, at least up until the point where the network decided not to pick up the series.
In that case, I don't think it was because of the writing. The networks then developed a lot of shows they probably weren't going to buy. One then developed "one-to-ten," meaning that if they were looking for three new shows, they made thirty development deals and tried to do at least one or two with each studio they considered a major supplier. And in this case, the network then had another studio hire me to rewrite a pilot script that they did want to pick up from another company.
So I'd like to think that in that case, I did achieve Cheap, Good and Fast. There were other scripts where I managed two out of three. I was almost always on-time, no matter how tight the deadline was…and I usually felt I'd been underpaid so Cheap was usually achieved. It was that third one, Good, that like I said, was always tricky.