Adventures in Script Meetings

Corporate shill.

I was recently hired by an ad agency to write a 22-minute television show –– an animated family story that takes place in Pre-Colonial Hawaii and involves a young prince and his pet chicken. (Imagine 'Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer' with a corporate agenda.)

Because my kids love stories (and because we were waiting for the pizza we ordered to be ready), I took them through the entire script. 

Walter the Chicken. The one the
character in the story is based on.

They sat, rapt, for the whole 22-minutes. I know this because when I was done, I quizzed them on what happened. I asked them to let me know if anything about the story didn’t make sense. Nope, they replied. Although it could have been clearer that the bad spirits turned into nice spirits at the end. 

Note taken.

Then I asked if they liked it.

“Loved it,” they both said.

But then there was a little hesitation from Dashiell, my seven-year-old.

“You know what, Dad?”

“What?”

“Maybe instead of a raft, it could be a rocket that goes into a black hole and that’s how he gets to the Dark Island.”

And just like that, I’m back in Hollywood, having a story meeting with a studio exec.

Brian Belefant is a director who also works as a writer, but is mostly looking for directing gigs these days and if you happen to need a director you could do a lot worse than hiring him. Try calling (503) 715 2852 or emailing belefant (at) me (dot) com.

Everything I Ever Needed To Know About Advertising I Learned From A First Century Babylonian Rabbi

Rabbi Hillel making fun of crappy advertising. 

My nephew just called with a “quick question”. His high school Spanish teacher gave his class an assignment to create a TV commercial that communicates the value of speaking a foreign language. He wanted to know how to make a TV commercial. 

Oh, and the assignment is due tomorrow. 

When I was a kid, I remember a hearing a story in Sunday school about one Rabbi Hillel, who was challenged to explain the entire Torah while standing on one foot. The Torah, in case you didn’t happen to have the good fortune to be raised Jewish, is, to quote Wikipedia, "the foundational narrative of the Jewish people: their call into being by their God, their trials and tribulations, and their covenant with their God, which involves following a way of life (halakha) embodied in a set of religious obligations and civil laws." It's five books long, plus, oh, 58 centuries of commentaries and interpretations by a people who, to put it mildly, have a thing for commenting and interpreting.

Okay, so what my nephew was asking me wasn’t quite as daunting. If you count the entire history of TV commercials, you can’t really go back before 1939, when RCA began broadcasting TV signals. 

Still, Dude? Seriously? You want me to tell you how to make a TV commercial while standing on one foot?

In the Torah story, the rabbi thinks for a moment, raises one foot, and says, “Do not do anything to others that you would not want done to yourself. The rest is all commentary.”

So I raised my own foot and told my nephew exactly that. Except that I substituted “inflict anything upon” for "do anything to". 

And then I hung up. I have to come up with a commercial for a client that communicates the value of buying something much less worthwhile than learning a foreign language. And the assignment is due tomorrow.