Writings

The Trouble with Showrunners

The Trouble with Showrunners

When I first heard the job title “show-runner” I pictured a young man fetching coffee for a producer. As it turns out, I wasn’t far off the mark. A “show-runner”, as I understand it, is paid to fetch plot points to keep the action—“events”—on the screen from letting up.

In the old days, we had ‘writers’ who worked from a Theme and a Narrative, two of the basic elements of good prose (the others being Voice, Setting, Character, Dialogue, and Syntax).

So, for example, a respected writer like Graham Greene spent much of his …

THE BALLAD OF SEXY GULCH

Healey_Page_06

THE BALLAD OF SEXY GULCH:
Scenario For a Modern
Major Motion (Western-type) Picture

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So here’s the story a’ all the trouble what happened when the books came to Sexy Gulch.
A’ course that were back in the days afore folks was starin’ at the internetty all day. In them days, Sexy Gulch… what were known as Dentonville… were a right peaceful place… ‘cept for the usual gunplay an’ killin’. It weren’t till Miss Abigail DuWright, the town Librarian an’ a fine upstanding’ young woman, sent fer some books back East that caused some ruckus. When them books …

MY BRILLIANT MOVIE CAREER

Or
HOW TO FLOG
A DEAD HORSE

A MEMOIR
BARRY HEALEY

“It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I’d seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence.”  —Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

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Flying home to Vancouver in the Fall of 1974,  I was semi-catatonic, road-fatigued, suffering lapsed Catholic guilt.  I’d …