Chris Marquette Message Board

His name is Jordan Gelber.

Deb

I think Dave would love to meet Kyle.  But yeah, no touching.

Deb

Gee, can't wait for all the IMDb bitching to start from Morris Brown students.  As if it wasn't already weird enough for them to shoot at an all girls school.  Now they're gonna shoot at a black college.  Wonder what that'll be like?  Maybe they'll be using the football field there.  I wish I knew when they were gonna shoot at Inman Park.  I could get there easily.  And it's not very big, so they'd be easy to find.  Druid Hills is a pretty big area.  They must be shooting at someone's house or something.  It's a beautiful, overy old area.  I'm not sure where or what Kirkwood is.  Maybe I'll catch up with them at some point.

Deb

Biggest mistake, Harry Knowles ain't in the movie.  Jst a guy playing him.  That article was written from very old info.  Still cool though.

And you know, what, I never made the connection that it was Jay Baruchel in Million Dollar Baby, playing sad little Danger.  Wow.

Deb

No, don't be sorry.  That was an excellent rant.  You are absolutely right on so many levels.  And yes, it was all about fear.  They set up a lot and for whatever reason, they failed to pay it off.  The addition of Ryan Hunter kind of scared me because it was more interference from an outsider and I saw a lot more of a drawn-out separation for Joan and Adam in S3 because I knew he was going to corrupt Adam even further.  Maybe they painted themselves too far into a corner for the spineless twits at CBS and that's why they got cancelled.

Deb

Maybe after a faltering Season 2, Season 3 would've gotten things back on track. As I often say, Season 3 of all my favorite shows always somehow seems to be the best, one of the best, or the first best season of the series.  I can site examples till the cows some home.  First and foremost, The X Files, Buffy & Angel.

You know, the first time around, I felt much the same way about Judith as you do.  I thought the whole thing was forced.  I didn't like the way they shoe-horned her into the gang.  I didn't like that she took time away from the characters we already loved, namely Adam and Grace.  But now, after having seen all of S2 three times, I have softened toward her a great deal.  Now, she's just very sad and tragic to me.  Still, that's with the benefit of hindsight.  Maybe it's unfair for a show to require repeated viewing to appreciate a certain arc.  But it happens sometimes.  And it did for me with Judith.

I guess I don't really subscribe to the notion that S2 was so vastly inferior to S1.  In a lot of ways, it was much more fun.  We had Lily and the whole Lucyfer plotline that made the cop scenes a little more interesting.  I'd say if they had managed not to destroy Adam, S2 would've been just fine with me.

Deb

Yeah, cool, TeeJay.  Right now, all talk about Fanboys will be about Sam and Kristen.  After the movie comes out, it'll be about Chris.

Sean, I read the Fanboys Vs Trekkies scene right before leaving work today.  Hilarious!  Gonna take a short nap now and read the other pages you sent later.  Thanks. 

Deb

Look what was in my Creative Screenwriting Newsletter today:

Television theme songs are fading fast By ERIN CARLSON, Associated Press Writer
Wed Oct 18, 6:16 PM ET

NEW YORK - Don't remember much about high school biology or physics. Couldn't tell ya how to compute a calculus problem. But, for the love of        Will Smith, the theme song to "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" remains fresh in the mind.

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Smith's catchy rap opened each episode of his hit `90s sitcom, in which he starred as a street-smart teen from Philly who moves in with wealthy relatives. A whole generation knows it by heart — that, and the "Saved by the Bell" song.

TV themes, from "The Beverly Hillbillies" to "The Brady Bunch" to "Cheers" to "Friends," conjure up memories of cozy nights, childhood bliss and a universal nostalgia for bygone days. But, today, show themes are doing a fast fade as the networks crunch their programming budgets.

Are they about to join the variety hour in the TV graveyard?

"It's a rarity today," TV historian Tim Brooks said of the catchy, tuneful opening. "It's kind of like the Broadway musical producing hit songs — it just doesn't do that anymore."

Back in the day, even into the `90s, shows usually had a "main title," a 40-to-60 second opening montage that introduced the cast and was often set to music written by a composer, said Jon Burlingame, author of "TV's Biggest Hits," a history of themes. Songs summed up what a show was all about, whether spinning the tale of how a group of wacky castaways ended up on "Gilligan's Island," telling how a spunky single career woman was "going to make it after all," or describing why six touchy-feely Manhattan singles were there for each other.

But now many sitcoms and one-hour dramas are dropping that device. They dive straight into the action, sometimes flashing the show's title or logo at various points throughout an episode.

ABC's "Lost" does it. The twisty drama begins after a teaser, which touches on what happened in previous installments, and cuts to a black screen at a crucial plot point. A white "Lost" logo swirls into view. Eerie music plays. The whole thing lasts about five seconds.

"That's not a theme" nor an artistic statement, lamented Burlingame, longing for the urgency of the "Mission: Impossible" score.

Other title-flashers include ABC's "Grey's Anatomy," which threw out its 26-second theme last year, and "Desperate Housewives" and NBC's "My Name Is Earl," which both switch off between showing the full credits and the logo. New shows — ABC's "Brothers & Sisters" and "Ugly Betty" and NBC's "Heroes" and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" — display only the logo.

"Almost all shows have music, but it's generic, it's scene-setting, it's short," said Brooks, who estimated that fewer than 10 percent have "traditional" themes that set up the show.

Clearly, brevity is key. No drawn-out intro or hokey theme. Networks don't have time for that — and neither, prevailing TV thinking goes, do the country's couch potatoes.

"Producers feel, rightly or wrongly, that that interruption, if you will, is going to lose viewers," Brooks said.

"I think one of the things that has squeezed themes out is this relentless kind of move toward tightening everything, making it go right from joke to joke, from action to action, from shootout to shootout, so that you won't press the dreaded remote control."

Thanks to the elimination of commercials between the end of one show and the beginning of another, shows overlap before fickle viewers have a chance to channel-surf to Another Network. More commercials air within a show, making episodes shorter. Main titles and well-rounded theme songs and scores? Sorry, no time, no money.

Tara Ariano, co-founder of the blog Television Without Pity, isn't sweating it. She thinks a "full-on opening credit (and) theme song is kind of a waste, from a business perspective."

"The networks sort of assume we watch the show, so we don't need to have the premise explained to us each week ... In the era of the DVR, half the people watching the show are just fast-forwarding that anyway," she said.

Another trend, which harks back to the late`80s-early `90s fave "The Wonder Years" and the more recent "Dawson's Creek" and "Laguna Beach," is the use of music by established and new artists as both a theme in the main title and a device within the show.

"Increasingly, it's not music scored for the show, it's pop songs pasted into the show," Brooks said.

CBS' "CSI" opens with the Who's "Who Are You?"        Gavin DeGraw's star rose after his radio-friendly single "I Don't Want to Be," debuted as the theme to the CW's "One Tree Hill." And the Fray was, well, just a band on the fringe until "Grey's Anatomy" and others played their songs to underscore dramatic scenes and montages.

All of this makes Jesse Frederick-Conaway, who composed the music to G-rated sitcoms such as ABC's "Full House" and "Family Matters," a little sad. There is, he thinks, "this desire to be super hip."

"Now, the music director is sort of the composer," he said. "It's a different kind of deal."

Burlingame, citing the great intros of award winners such as NBC's "The West Wing" and HBO's "Six Feet Under," is confident the theme — lyrical, instrumental, whatever — will make a comeback. He'd rather see more original music, but he'll take licensed material if it's good.

"Some producers, I think, want to make a statement, in terms of imagery and music," he said. "It depends on who you get."

Will Smith, back in the `90s, made a hip-hop statement of his own while advising fans to "just sit right there/I'll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel-Air."

But, in this fast-forward TV world, would they still listen?

So far, I've been too busy to look at the pages.  But that won't last long.

Deb

OK, here's my pic.  Let's see if this works.  Sean, can you spot TeeJay's modification?

Deb

Yep.  I am struggling!  And I'm certain that I will fail.  Thanks, Sean.  Hey, fighting with myself, cool.  Gives me something to do. 

Deb

What I'm hoping to hear from TPTB, honestly, is some righteous anger at CBS for meddling and then for giving up far too easily.  We probably won't get it.  But it sure would be nice.

It's kinda like Buffy, Season Six when Joss Whedon brought the wrath of the online community down on his head for some of his wretched, bloody awful decisions.  For the longest time, he wouldn't admit some of what he did was pretty stupid.  He blamed everyone but himself.  Took at least a couple of years for him to say maybe he went a little too far.  And that in the end, it was nobody's fault but his own.

I just hope there are a lot of extras, whatever the turn out to be.

Deb