The way show business is supposed to work is this: You work hard on a project for many months—or even years—and after putting to-gether the footage and fixing the sound and adding music, you send it out into the world in as good a shape as you can.
The writers and actors and directors and financiers—all of the various participants, all the way from the top of the budget to the very last line—have no idea how it’s all going to turn out. They have to wait for the box office returns or the television ratings to tell them whether the work product of many months was worth the time and treasure. That’s just how show business works.
That’s sort of how life works, too. The only way to know how it all turns out is to do it.
In the autumn of this year, I decided to take a little break from the cycle of think-pitch-wait-shoot-wait-fail-think-pitch and add something into the mix. I decided to go back to school. And not just any school: I am getting a master’s in divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, and I’m on my way to ordination in the Episcopal Church. As we Episcopalians say, Inshallah.
The reaction to this news from my friends and colleagues in the entertainment industry has been interesting.
“Good move,” a writer friend of mine said. “Faith-based stuff is so hot right now.”
That’s not what this is about, I said. I told him that I wanted to spend some time deepening my faith and widening the scope of my writing, that I was stepping away from the think-pitch-wait-shoot-wait-fail-think-pitch carousel. I told him that I had felt this call for many years, and the only way to know how it would turn out is just to do it. He didn’t buy it.
“You’re telling me you’re not working on a series pitch about this? Please. I know you.”
Full disclosure: I’m not not working on an idea based on my time in seminary, but I didn’t want to tell him that. In the first place, I don’t really have a clear idea yet—I’m still in the think part of the think-pitch-wait-shoot-wait-fail-think-pitch process. But I know that at some point, if I’m diligent in my studies and I continue to feel the call to serve my church, I may become an ordained Episcopal priest who is also a television writer and producer. And then I will find out what happens when you pitch a comedy series to a television network while wearing a priest’s collar.
But that’s a few years away. In the meantime, I’m a student again, after nearly 40 years.
So, yes, I’m among the oldest students here—everyone is too polite to make an actual count—and when the subject of my age comes up, it’s always with gentle curiosity. “I’d love to know more about the path that brought you here,” a young student asked me a few weeks ago. In show business, that person would have already searched my IMDb page, done some mental arithmetic, and decided that I am old and in the way and should move aside for someone new. In Hollywood, I am a “seasoned show runner” who needs to stop taking up space. At Princeton Theological Seminary, I am a repository of valuable life experience. If I’m being completely honest, I’d have to admit that both interpretations are correct. But I really prefer the second one.
Also, unlike in a typical writers’ room on a television comedy, you don’t hear much profanity here. Students and professors are polite and purposeful, discussions are thoughtful and almost always informed by deep scholarship, and no one erupts into a rageful cascade of verbal filth just because the assistant brought the wrong kind of turkey wrap—just to pick a completely random example out of thin air that in no way reflects the person I once was. Princeton Theological Seminary is a place where people of all backgrounds and faith traditions come to study and learn and contend with each other in a respectful and generous atmosphere, and Hollywood is none of those things, ever, at any time.
When someone offers a thought in class, the rest of us listen closely and patiently, instead of shouting, “Shut up! That won’t work! We need something better!” in an exasperated tone of voice. Also: Here, when you make an observation about, say, Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion…”), you don’t need to wrap it up with a joke. In fact, as I discovered, people will think it’s odd if you do.
Put it this way: I’m Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School: The Seminary Years.
So far, though, I’ve been too busy studying for exams and writing papers, and too exhausted and achy from carrying around a backpack full of textbooks, to spend a moment to begin the think-pitch-wait-shoot-wait-fail-think-pitch process with a faith-based project. In fact, instead of bringing my theological education to bear on my show-business work, it’s been the other way around.
In my New Testament Exegesis class, for instance, we were discussing the various scholarly theories about the sources and origins of the gospels. The nutshell version is this: Of the four gospels, three—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—are called the synoptic gospels because they tell the story of the ministry of Jesus Christ in more or less the same way, often with the same language. Scholars have decided that the Gospel of Mark was written first, followed by Matthew and Luke, and that Matthew and Luke probably read and used Mark as a source, but that neither Matthew nor Luke was aware of or read the other. The prevailing theory is that there was another gospel—something dubbed “Q”—that both Luke and Matthew used, but that is lost forever or maybe in a clay jar in the desert, waiting to be unearthed. At which point everyone will freak out.
It’s a theory that requires the use of charts, and tables of Greek words, and Venn diagrams to fully sort out. Very confusing—unless you’re a member of the Writers Guild of America and have ever participated in a Credit Arbitration Panel process.
The writing credits of a motion picture or television show are designated by the Writers Guild. Unscrupulous producers will often promise young, naive writers, I’ll make sure you get a ‘Written By’ credit when this thing gets made—often in lieu of actual payment. But the sole arbiter of who gets on-screen and contractual credit is the guild, and these decisions are made by an ad-hoc committee of guild members who read every single draft from every single writer on a project, plus whatever treatments or script-note documents have been submitted by the writers vying for a piece of the credit pie. Each document is read carefully—often with charts and tables and Venn diagrams—to determine who gets credit for what. Most projects have what are called split credits or shared credits—a writer or collection of writers gets credit for the story; another entity gets assigned credit for the screenplay. Some projects are dead simple, with only one or two writers who already agree on who did what. But some projects—often the big-budget ones—have a dozen or so writers all staking claims.
Every Writers Guild Credit Arbitration Panel, in other words, is essentially an exercise in biblical textual analysis and source identification. Which is to say, I am going to get an A in this class because I have done credit-arbitration panels many times before, and I know how to sort out the real contributors from the posers, and I also know that poor Q is about to get screwed out of his points. Show business has prepared me well for my work in seminary. I wonder if seminary will help me in show business? Probably. I mean, if a guy in a priest’s collar pitches a sitcom to you, don’t you have to buy the pitch in the room?
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