YouTube isn't the problem.
A while back, I wrote an article for Gawker talking about our overall earnings from Break a Leg and how hard it is to maintain a full cast production with the current Internet model. The problem is, not only did the article get blown out of proportion, but everyone jumped specifically on how much I said we made from YouTube. A fact that is now spreading like wildfire and making it sound like we don't appreciate what the company has done for us.
Here's the lowdown.
YouTube has easily been the most supportive video service to us, rivaling even our great friends at Blip.tv. They've featured us constantly, they've promoted our work, they even called us down to their headquarters to ask us for suggestions on various things. At least to us, they've thrown off the cloak of corporation and been very, very personal and supportive of our work. In fact, YouTube has made a very, very conscious step forward to promote better material, they've been featuring shows like The Guild, Life from the Inside and so on -- they're committed to showing good content. They're also, like I say in my article, the only game in town as far as making money. While we've made a couple of grand or so, there have been other people who make $10,000, $15,000 a month -- and those numbers are huge considering that you're making that money completely independently, with no network or anything like that behind you.
That said, the point of my article is being completely ignored. The Internet model is not ready to handle content that rivals television. Why? Because that content can't be self-sufficient, unlike one-man, Ask a Ninja-type shows.
Am I complaining? No. Am I saying that we made Break a Leg as a cash cow? No. Am I saying YouTube is a bad company and doesn't support us? No. This has nothing to do with YouTube. It has to do with the current Internet model. If anything, YouTube is the only company that has at all helped us pay off some of our costs, as I say in the article -- YouTube is the only game in town.
Again, the point of the article was this -- to the people who say the Internet is going to replace TV? I say, no, the money isn't there. Can you make money from the internet? Oh, absolutely. Catchy sketches, fun, easy-to-shoot videos, shorts, etc. -- those can bring it some great money. A full production with a full cast? Not so much. Is that YouTube's fault? Not even a little.
I'll step off my soap box now.
-Yuri
Break a Leg
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Jenday IX: EvsG
Sorry this is late, folks. Been a busy week. Anywho, here's a little side project I've been kinda working on and off on...off on. If ya like em, I'll make more.
Jen
Jennifer
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Fan Blog: Simona Antonova's "Never share your juice box. It’s small for a reason."
An Australian monkey.
Anyway, I'm still her editor (something that I used to get good money for, until this one comes around, with her talent and my good naturedness) and, to be completely honest for a moment, remember her name, because it'll be responsible for some fun movies in the not-so-distant future.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled program -- Simona harassing me.
---
A wise man once told me, “Don't make grand statements you can't back up”. This wise man is my editor. The same editor who doesn’t return emails. Or get back to me in time for competition deadlines. Or remember my scripts.
He likes to keep me living on the edge.
He also happens to be the co-writer/creator AND main character of Break a Leg (BaL), the sitcom. I could not name a more ridiculous show.
After reading some of the previous BaL columns, I’m ashamed to disclose that I cannot match the vocabulary, let along intellect, of a tempered 17-year-old girl. So don’t expect any fancy wordsmith-ing or some mountainous revelation.
Even if my editor is David Penn.
I prefer to call him David. “Yuri Baranovsky” sounds terribly Russian*.
Stop trying to pronounce it.
Editors... I burn through ‘em like fat off a racehorse. In under a year, I had managed to impress, repulse and reduce several highly proficient editors (not something you want to include in your résumé).
Then, David was sent.
Almost as entertaining as oil-wrestling in Turkey, David somehow managed to lighten the editing process. Perhaps it was his delayed replies, or his never-ending corrections cunningly concealed by compliments... whatever it was, it worked.
A little.
So some of you may wonder what lead me to write a column. David. David Penn.
David approached me (in an internet sort-of-way) a while back, and pretty much had a noose prepared if I rejected his invitation to write a piece. After repeatedly convincing myself it was the right thing to do, I wrote “Let’s Talk Cyber”. It was basically praising internet shows and ostracizing “the box”.
Yes. That’s right. I was in favor of the medium BaL was using. But seeing as though a small speck of David’s inspiration comes from television, you can see how he wouldn’t quite see eye-to-eye with me. To say the least. Now, “Let’s Talk Cyber” sits in a safe buried under compost in the south of France.
Thank you, David.
And now I write you this, simultaneously gulping down a juice box and trying to block out my neighbors’ torturous “Its Britney, B***h” remix.
Not like its 2 in the morning or anything. Oh, would you look at that!
This brings me to the title, “Never share your juice box. It’s small for a reason.” Recently, I rediscovered the wonders of the juice box. For you leaf-clad folk - it’s like a sweet, punishing mixture of an inverted all-day sucker on steroids. It’s pretty badass.
The other day I took a couple into work. As I was imbibing this somewhat holy creation, a coworker approached me and asked for a drop.
My reply to this absurd request? I simply raised my hand, asking for silence, and finished the damn juice box.
She’ll know not to mess with me.
Now David hasn’t asked to share my juice box, but he has dabbed in ignoring work-related emails, confusing my script with another – and if you know his other clients, you’ll understand my frustration.
As much as it kills me to admit this, his show isn’t half bad. In fact, there’s been times when he’s paid me enough to even praise it. But I can’t say it doesn’t get in the way of his editing. To all deluded BaL fans who believe it’s exciting to have David Penn as your editor, think again: cocky, impulsive, obnoxious, his advice rarely works, and his knowledge of screenwriting is suspect.
I know that’s hard to digest. But please, try to keep up.
I understand why you would be interested in knowing what its like to work with one of the creators of BaL. And to bring you justified peace, I could tell you David is the air that we breathe. But that would be a lie.
And lying is a horrible, horrible thing.
Working with David is like playing the glockenspiel - more fun to say than play. Or like rewinding a scene of flying geese, simply to see them fly backwards.
For crying out loud… Britney Spears, meet Led Zeppelin.
With this, one might conclude that David is a phenomenally poor editor. I wouldn’t say phenomenally. His empty praise is entertaining, his optimistic views are uplifting, and his conceptual ideas are... inimitable.
Now I’d love to go on about how inappropriate his conduct is, his vulgarity and lack of decency, his over exaggerated jokes/puns, and his tardy response to everything I send him, but I have to get back to work.
He’s expecting an outline in the morning.
*No explanation needed.
--
Have a blog you'd like to write for Break a Leg? Email Yuri@breakaleg.tv and we'll post one every Tuesday!
Thanks for reading!
-Yuri
Break a Leg
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Conversation Bloopers and Yuri's Network Show --
Hey, guys.
First up - for today we have Part 1 of the Conversation Bloopers -- which are bloopers from, that's right, you guessed it, the conversations. We'll be releasing these intermittently when we don't have time to shoot a conversation because of the main episode shoot, so, hope you like them!
As always, you can watch them here, under "Episodes" or on YouTube, where, again, you can help us by commenting, favoriting, subscribing and rating.
News #2 -- a while ago I mentioned that I got a writing gig that actually paid me to write scripts. Now that it's about to launch and the site is live, I figure I'll tell you guys about it.
The show is nothing like Break a Leg and, sadly, Vlad isn't a writer on it. The show is, for now, an internet show produced by MOJO HD -- a high-definition TV network responsible for a popular show called Three Sheets and a bunch of other things of that nature -- in association with Creative Bubble, a production company out of New York who have done tons of things you would recognize them, among them the Entourage intro.
The show is called, MOJO's The Circuit -- it's basically a Daily Show for tech and gadget news. Funny, irreverant (as I'm sure you've come to expect from my writing) mixed in with gadgetry and tech. I hope that it's still funny even if you could care less about gadgets, so I hope you'll check it out and tell me what you think! I'm the head writer on the project (with Kai, Pogo #1 from the Minisode being the other writer), so in a way, it's my baby (though I'm not at all responsible for filming it or anything like that.)
I also wrote a blog for the show that you can see on the website -- let me tell you, seeing your blog and the show you're the head writer on be on a network website is, well, something special. Hopefully Break a Leg will have the same luck.
This doesn't mean I'm quitting the show or anything -- in fact, it just gives me some cash so that I can eat and have some time to work on BaL. So, don't you worry.
Anyway, the website is http://www.mojohd.com/thecircuit
Check it out and tell me what you think! The Pilot was written a couple of months ago, so it's out-of-date and Episode 1 (coming next Tuesday) will be 100x stronger.
Thanks, guys!
-Yuri
Break a Leg
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“A half-truth is a whole lie” - Yiddish Proverb
So tonight's choice for background company is Grindhouse. Stuntman Mike is seeming pretty looney tunes. So's the damn movie, if you ask me.
Sometime back I asked Yuri what those little Russian nesting dolls were called. He prattled off some gobbledygook that didn't jive with what I thought I remembered. I swear I remember them also being called something else, like "Borscht Babies" or something like that. Not that, but something like that.
So that brings me to today's topic, such as it is. Two delicately intertwining topics actually, lies and adages. You see, they say that within every lie is a kernel of truth, nested within not unlike a Borscht Baby. You open the lie and find the Borscht Baby truth within, and should you discover that underlying truth to be a lie as well? That's okay, because there's another Borscht Baby inside just waiting to be discovered. Soon you reach the very inner core, the Borscht Baby inside that has none within, and you know you have reached the real kernel of truth within the lie.
If you find that last one is a lie too? Well, then you're fucked, because that's all there is. Sometimes a lie is just a lie I guess.
My wife used to work for some strange guy with a company run out of his garage, and he had an adage: "Excuses are lies, disguised as problems." I don't think it's really an adage since I'm pretty sure he just made it up himself, but I liked it and I use it all the time. You should see people's heads spin when I whip that one out on them; they're so tweaked trying to figure out what the hell I'm talking about that I can just walk away and not listen to whatever stupid excuse bomb they were about to drop on me.
So I'm curious about how these two adages nest within one another, like the aforementioned nesting dolls. If excuses are lies disguised as problems, and every lie has a kernel of truth, then what does that hold for the lie within the excuse?
(Now here I must digress a bit, because this (this point within my essays (or columns, as I've come to refer to them in my own mind (since I often refer to things differently in my own mind (as if I could refer to them in someone else's mind (ha!) or somehow cause you to refer to them differently in your mind) than I do in everyday conversation) since writing a column is somehow easier to me than a blog posting (go figure!)) where I usually sort of lose my train of thought) is where I need refill my glass of wine. Be right back!)
Sorry for that brief break. Anyway, let's discuss the lies and adages nesting issue!
Jimmy Scotch
in drew lanning
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