Lunch with Ernie

Today was one of those days that will probably prove to be a formative experience in my career or life.  I spent the morning watching a few episodes of Mary Tyler Moore in order to prepare for my lunch with Ernie Angstadt, a producer who I met a few weeks ago that has taken a special interest in me because we both share a special interest in sitcoms.

We chatted for an hour and a half about all sorts of things - from my experience growing up to current and past sit-coms, as well as the series idea I came up with a few years back.  He wanted to see the episode I produced for my last internship at Waycross community TV, and I could kick myself for not keeping a copy.  I gave my only copy to somebody at OU when I transferred as proof that I did the internship, so if he doesn't have it, hopefully Waycross does somewhere in it's storage.  My only other option is to see if the footage is on some tapes that I still have, and re-edit the project.

One of the useful bits of advice I heard from Ernie was that I need to be on the west coast if I want to work on pre-production for sitcoms.  I thought that New York was the place to be for TV, and while that's true of production, he said that all the writers are on the west coast.  I suppose I'll need to apply for the west coast Page program as well.

He also advised that while it's good that I'm learning a bunch about production and analysis of shows, I need to not loose that little nugget of intuition about what will 'work' in terms of being funny.  This resonated with me.  I feel like I had a good grasp on that nugget in my first two years as an undergrad, but during the harder work of catching up and preparing to become professional of the last two years, that piece of me has taken a back seat.  I just plain and simple need to start writing again.  I'm planning on finishing my South Park spec script in the next month or so, and I want to start watching Big Bang Theory or Happy Endings to potentially spec one of those; Ernie praised both of those shows highly, and I trust his judgement.

Between the life advice, career advice, and the casual but pertinent and interesting conversations we had, I feel rejuvenated.  I feel like I've reconnected with my base: my love of story and humor.  Since I've been here, I've been so focused on the next step that I've started to compromise on narrative writing, the thing that made me want to study and eventually work in video production in the first place.  I'm planning on spending more time after work watching these shows and working on my own projects, instead of playing video games, a sink that drains most of my free time.