TO PLAY ALL OR NOT TO PLAY ALL? THERE IS NO QUESTION.

What the hell, Fox Home Video?

Look, I watch a lot of TV, and when there ain't crap on...I watch TV on DVD. I have amassed a more-than-respectable collection and when I'm writing or just around the house, I like to have something on even if I'm not exactly watching it (background noise). What I hate doing is having to attend to the DVD every 42 minutes. It's called "play all," FHV and what's worse is I know you know what it is.

Now, I have a great respect for Fox. They were out there very early pushing the whole TV on DVD thing into the mainstream with their (originally) ridiculously priced X-Files sets. (Still a little bit of irritation that they maintained the price points on those until the whole run was out, even as the industry settled down at 33% percent of what those things' SRP had been). I'm also very pleased that they are willing to put out less than popular series from their vaults (Tru Calling and Harsh Realm for instance) and that they have been able to recognize great opportunities (Firefly). That said, I just completely fail to understand their aversion to using the "play all" feature.

They use it on sit-com and animation releases like M*A*S*H and The Simpsons. I'm very happy they do. Having to find the remote and restart the DVD every 22 minutes would be a real pain when I want to throw one of those in and walk away from it. So I know they know how to use it. So why not put it on The Shield? I think it would fit extremely nicely on the 24 discs.

As a result, I find myself using discs from Warner, Buena Vista and Universal much more frequently. My West Wing and Sports Night discs get a hell of a workout, as do my Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars. Battlestar Galactica gets a healthy number of spins, as has Lost. And I thank Sony for including the feature on Rescue Me.


I find the feature to be of particular use when I'm working on a spec for a show which I also happen to have on DVD. Rescue Me is a recent example of that. I'll leave it on all the time, along with recordings of recent episodes (see that's fair use and I have every right to do it, stop trying to break my A/V junk, Hollywood). I use it to let the rhythm of the dialogue and the character's idiosyncracies to sink in. I'm not terribly inclined to have to interrupt writing to navigate from one episode's menu to the next.

I'd be inclined to gripe a bit on HBO discs, but they can't even put together a decent menu structure, so I'm giving them a pass.

TIME OFF

No more posts for the rest of the year.

Will return Jan 2.

Everyone go watch a Sylvester and Tweety cartoon.

JOHN SPENCER 1946-2005

John Spencer began his career in a recurring roll on The Patty Duke Show. He came to prominence with a role in Presumed Innocent. Following that, he played lawyer Tommy Mullaney on L.A. Law for several years with his future West Wing castmate, Jimmy Smits.

As former White House Chief of Staff and Vice-Presidential candidate Leo McGarry on The West Wing, Spencer has been nominated for five Best Supporting Actor Emmy Awards, having won one of them in 2002.

Dead of a heart attack at 58.

HAIRY LIKE AN APE

Here's a couple of quick freelance things I picked up recently.

One is a very brief interview with Michael Pellerin, the documentarian who is responsible for the King Kong production diaries which have been recently collected on DVD.

The other is an even more brief interview with Miki Mia, the girl who ripped the hair off Steve Carrell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Both of them are up at UGO.com.

Make with the clicky on the pictures.




And thanks to all who took up the one-page (or more) challenge. There was some good stuff out there and I think those of us in the scribosphere may have a better idea of what the others of us get up to when we're writing. Really, we'll have to try it again sometime.

ONE PAGE

I issue a challenge to the other spec monkeys that read this.

It's simple enough. Any of you can do it.

Post one page from a script you wrote on your website.

Just one page. That's all. It won't compromise your security. No one will be able to rip off your whole script (which should at least be WGA registered anyway) from just one page. It can be old, it can be new. Use something original or pull a page from a TV spec, whatever you've got. You can even write a brand new one page of something just for the occasion.

In the screenwriting scribosphere, there's been lots of talk about writing, but we rarely get to see much of the writing in question. I have had the opportunity to swap scripts with a few people and I've found it to be very interesting. And there's still a couple out there I look forward to seeing after they rewrite or other. Let this one page be an example of what you do and how you do it. I've posted a pilot page from King Vs. Queen once before and this time I'm putting up a spec page.

One page.