Saying farewell to 2013

Here's a holiday message for all you followers of Saberfrog.

Here in Rochester, New York, it's been bitterly cold. So cold that my car – which last year decided that anything under 20 degrees was not acceptable – has sometimes been reluctant to start.

So it gets to be Christmas day. The day when I should, ideally, be able to get in my car and go visit my mom, sister, and brother-in-law under my own power. But nope. The car would not start, and I had to call my family for a ride.

Frustrated and furious, I returned to my apartment to await my rescue. I found myself contemplating the many other things in my life that have not gone according to plan, and all the things that were making me feel stressed and struggling, and all the ways in which I felt constantly behind.

I turned on the TV, which was tuned to BBC America. And – I kid you not – less than a minute had elapsed before an unexpected programming interruption occurred. It was a live Christmas message from Her Majesty The Queen.

She began by talking about how she once met a man who had to spend a year in a plaster cast due to back surgery, and how he responded to his incapacitation by reading and studying. She then made the point that in this busy holiday season, we need to take time for contemplation.

As you might guess, this hit me where I lived.

If I myself wasn't in an incapacitated situation, I wouldn't even have been home. I wouldn't have had the TV on, and I might not have needed to hear that message so badly. And why was this being shown on American TV anyway? If anything, I was among the few people on Earth she wasn't talking to. Yet it felt as if she was speaking to me personally.

Then the Queen's message ended, and BBC America resumed its zillionth Doctor Who marathon already in progress. Which was somehow fitting, because it seemed like a real-life version of the episode where Wilf was spoken to directly by a mysterious Time Lord woman appearing on his TV.

Of such things are religions made, I suppose. Sometimes things happen and they seem like signs or miracles, even if logically they're not.

That doesn't make them unimportant.

Recently I've been revisiting some older projects, including an attempt at a feature-length movie that I made as a teenager. Back then, I had a much simpler and more innocent view of the world. I believed in dedication and hard work overcoming adversity.

I had not yet gone to film school, or lived in a big city. As a result, I had not been exposed to the artistic intellectual's more cynical viewpoint – that everything is bad; that being “dark” or depressed is somehow deeper than coping; that society is just a big conspiracy to keep the individual in chains, and that therefore resentment and hostility are the only correct attitudes for dealing with life. I didn't think that my entire generation, and perhaps the culture as a whole, would elevate this despairing viewpoint to the level of canon.

Rereading my scripts and notes for my teenage opus, I thought, God, I had it right the first time. And over the years, I've allowed myself to be talked out of it. Now I need to relearn things that I used to know by instinct.

I guess what I'm getting at is, you should live life like the rules work. Live like your dreams and actions count. Live like things matter.

It's easy to get frustrated. It's easy to dig the Web for horrifying news stories about something that happened far from your own community, and use these incidents to buttress a view that the world is broken beyond repair.

But there will always be obstacles and there will always be suffering. You shouldn't use that as an excuse to not try. It shouldn't stop you from aspiring to a better life.

So write that story, apply for that job, call that person you've been wanting to talk to.

The people who succeed, and are happy and stable, are the people who have a sense of balance. They know that some days are bad and some days are good. Perhaps most of all, they believe that their life and dreams and beliefs matter.

Many people who consider themselves intelligent or educated take pride in distancing themselves from religion. While I'm not a religious person either, I'm of the Joseph Campbell school that it still serves an important function. People who believe that there is an order to the universe, and that there is right and wrong, and that their actions matter, tend to live better lives. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's how we become good people.

December is an important time for many religions. It's the month of Christmas, of Hanukkah, of the winter solstice. It's a time when we should be looking ahead to better times even if the current reality is cold and dark.

Even on a secular level, it's the end of one year and the start of another. It's a time to let go of the past, and make plans for the future.

So have a happy new year. Face 2014 with hope and confidence.

And tell 'em the Queen sent you.

Quit your griping and start your typing: Or, the future of art and storytelling and stuff

As both an independent filmmaker and a punster, it's tempting to refer to the recent July 4th holiday as Independent's Day. But this year, for me at least, the label fits.

As I've mentioned before, I often attend events at Visual Studies Workshop, particularly their screenings of old 16mm short films. Their most recent screening was July 5, and had an Independence Day theme.

I'd been in kind of a creative rut recently. I still wanted to complete the books I was trying to write, but I was wondering if my heart was still in it, or what I would do with these books when they were done. I still considered myself a filmmaker at heart, but the complexities of low-budget moviemaking are not to be treated lightly and I wasn't sure if I was quite ready yet to re-enter those waters.

Anyway, at the VSW event, I inquired about a two-day course they'd announced for that weekend called “Performing Books”. I wasn't sure what this course was about, but it seemed to have something to do with combining elements of literature with elements of film/video and live performance. It seemed like it might offer a way to bridge these two worlds in which I was trying to rekindle my interest.

I hadn't had a weekend completely to myself in a long while, and I was looking forward to spending the holiday weekend catching up on things and trying to get back into my writing. I wasn't sure I wanted to give up 16 of those hours. But my gut feeling was that I should take this course.

And I'm glad I did, because it rekindled my creativity. The teacher, Tate Shaw, showed some different types of unconventional books that artists have made, and also showed some videos of various artists who had combined live readings with multimedia. A few of these were by people I knew of – Marina Abramović (the subject of The Artist Is Present, a documentary that was shown at the local High Falls Film Festival), Laurie Andersen, and of course Crispin Glover – while others were new to me.

I didn't “get” absolutely all of the work being shown, and some of it was the kind of stuff that my college-age self would have sneered at as pretentious and boring. But years after college ended, as a working adult studying this stuff by choice, I now appreciate why less accessible forms of art exist. The whole point of it is to challenge you, to make you think, to see things from a different angle. Even if you don't “like” it, it's good for you in a way. And it made me excited about my own work again, because it caused me to think of new ideas and new approaches.

The timing of this class was perfect. It was a case of one door opening when another closed.

Because some time earlier that week, I happened to vist the sci-fi website io9 for some reason. I have a love-hate relationship with that website – there's some fun and interesting stuff there, including science news and some good articles about writing ... but also some snarky junk, especially in the user comments. Anyway, one of the headlines was “When is the right time to finally give up on a series?”

My patience with nerd negativity had been declining for several years now, but against my better judgment I clicked on this link. As someone who was trying to write a book series, I thought I might get some insight into what elements make a series work, and what mistakes cause the audience to lose interest.

But when I read the page, I saw no insights into the art or craft of storytelling, or appreciation for the challenges of doing it well. All I saw was one fan grievance after another, as nerd after angry nerd listed a series they hated and the moment they gave up on it, and how as a result they now hated Stephen King or Orson Scott Card or whoever.

The one halfway thoughtful comment I saw was from someone named Rob Bricken, writing under the handle of Superman villain “mxyzptlk”:

“Maybe a better question is why we persist in keeping up with stories that have long ago made us question "Why am I keeping up with this?" ... maybe completism is a geek flaw — we're continuously drawn back to a flawed storylines [sic] because they tap into our weakness for identifying flaws, and that coupled with our completist tendencies make for craptastic bait we have a harder time ignoring than taking.”

I would have liked to take that observation as something constructive – that fans have the perfectionist mind of an engineer or programmer, and have an instinct for spotting bugs. More cynically, though, it seemed to indicate that these people just like to complain and criticize.

And that was the moment when I finally realized that this was not the audience I wanted to reach out to. This was not the community I wanted to be part of. Not when there are other communities of artists and DIY-ers and even some 'normal' people with minds more open than they get credit for.

Prior to that, I'd been thinking about why I originally wanted to make movies, and why I was so passionate about science fiction and fantasy when I was younger. Cinema was something that entertained and excited people ... and if it didn't, that just inspired the restless and creative souls to want to create their own original visions and put them on screen. At the same time, the sci-fi fan community seemed to be a haven of smart and friendly people in an otherwise brutish world.

But something seems to have gone sour. It's weird because I don't think fans have ever had it better. The biggest TV shows in the world right now seem to be Doctor Who and Game of Thrones, and maybe Sherlock. Every halfway decent drama on TV nowadays, genre or otherwise, has gone the Lost / Babylon 5 route of epic story arcs that span multiple seasons. Every tentpole studio movie seems to be based on an established franchise and marketed to the Comic-Con audience.

So I don't completely get where this growing anger is coming from. However, I do get the sense that Hollywood isn't liked right now. The studios seem to be putting more and more eggs into fewer and fewer baskets, trying to please everyone and instead pleasing no one. Their losing strategy in the last couple years has been as follows:

• Instead of ever making an original movie, just buy an obscure property whose core audience is very small, but also very vocal and determined to create bad publicity
• Hire an auteur director who will want to put his own original stamp on the property, thus alienating the aforementioned core audience
• Spend so much money on the film that it will have to be an all-time blockbuster just to break even
• Produce a really generic marketing campaign that doesn't tell you what the story or premise is, or why you should see the film, instead relying on the obscure brand to sell itself
• Generate nothing but apathy or hostility from the fans (who don't like auteurs), the critics (who don't want to see an auteur wasting his talents on a remake of something), and the general public (who don't know what this thing is or why they should care)

A similar formula admittedly worked for the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but recent attempts to duplicate those successes have grown ever more futile.

There also might be a class resentment of some kind. I never fully appreciated how deeply Hollywood directors and actors are hated right now until the recent backlash against Zach Braff. If you somehow haven't heard, the former sitcom actor recently decided to fund a follow-up to his cult film Garden State by raising money from fans on the Internet (“crowdfunding” as da kidz call it nowadays). From the bitter backlash he received in some quarters, you'd think Braff was some pampered Tudor who bathed in a diamond-encrusted bathtub full of champagne and baby seals' blood, while raping orphaned migrant workers at the same time.

Most of the criticism of Braff I've seen essentially boils down to “Braff is in the Hollywood system, and therefore all-powerful and evil! He already has all the power and influence required to get a movie green-lighted and distributed by the studios!”

A cooler, calmer head might point out that if Steven freaking Spielberg has trouble making the movies he wants (his recent Lincoln apparently came within a hair's breadth of being made for cable TV instead), then maybe creative clout isn't that easy to come by in the studio system anymore. Nearly every name director who's been a major influence in my lifetime, from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderberg and Kevin Smith, has been in the press recently bemoaning the difficulty of getting their movies made and/or announcing their imminent or eventual retirement from filmmaking.

In the midst of all this chaos and frustration, maybe it's time to ask: If Hollywood cinema is really that much of a dinosaur, then why are we still so obsessed with it anyway? We have video cameras, which are better than ever. We have computers. We have the Internet. What's wrong with just making something on a smaller scale, something you truly believe in, instead of trying to compete with the Goliaths? Do you just want to complain, or do you want to be part of the solution?

I can think of at least one person out there who might have the answer. There's a website called CrochetMe.com which, about five years ago, discussed the DIY movement and online distribution with a guy who crochets but also makes web videos. Here's something the guy said:

“I mean, let's face it, in the media there are now eight companies. ... Everything is becoming consolidated, so where there used to be lots of variety, there are now, like, ten giants and tons of tiny little villagers. And yeah, the villagers are going to start making their own stuff because the materials will be available to all of them, and we can't all just do things the way the giants want, because it does seep something out of your soul. I think it's absolutely true on every level of art that this is the worst of times and, like some guy might have said once, the best of times. ... we are now in a situation where everybody can do what they do. ... I will always give them credit for trying to find a way to steal Christmas, but this time they might not be able to. There's always been an independent side to the industry. And for this particular medium, I think it's going to be a lot harder for them to crush it.  .

“[A]t the end of the day right now, you can create something; what you can't usually do is make a fortune off of it. But ... it's not about, "... I'm going to be [a] millionaire without enjoying the process and the product." Ultimately, the artistic expression can't be squelched; it's just they'll try to cut off any avenues for that expression to be, shall we say, monetized in a realistic fashion. Like I'm saying, the sort of people who understand the DIY mentality are more about the doing than the having. So I think that ultimately, my advice is what my advice always is: Make stuff. ... Right now, because of digital technology, you can make crafty little movies, you can make crafty little things that go up for millions of people to see. ... It is no longer the time of sitting around and thinking about doing something.”

It's been five years since the guy gave that interview, and he's since been busy making other stuff but he probably still feels the same. And it seems to me that if that guy wants to crochet and do web videos as well as make Hollywood blockbusters ... and if Crispin Glover wants be a spoken word artist in between Hollywood comedies ... and if Zach Braff wants to crowdfund an indie film … and if George Lucas wants to retire and make experimental films in his garage … and if Ethan Hawke wants to do whatever it is he does … then what the hell is stopping the rest of us?

So I think the smart people are gonna be the ones who stop bellyaching about what Hollywood does, and how mainstream pop culture does this and doesn't do that, and are willing to embrace new technologies and new opportunities, and actually show people how it should be done.

And it doesn't even have to be a traditional movie. That used to be the dream – make a full-length movie and show it in a conventional theater to a live audience. But if that medium is dying (as it seems to be), there are other ways of telling a story. You can make a web series. You can write books. You can be like the folks I learned about last weekend, and find ways to combine existing media into something new.

I think J to the W was right. These are the worst of times and, “like some guy might have said once,” the best of times.

Resurgence

I've been trying to write a new blog post for a while, but have thrown out two previous drafts as a result of new thoughts and experiences I've had recently.

I spent much of May pitching in on the production of Adrian Esposito's film Bury My Heart With Tonawanda, a period film about a young man with Down's Syndrome finding acceptance in a Native American community. On a couple of days I was asked to fill in as cameraman, which I never considered my strongest skill as a film student, but which is now an area where I feel more confident. It's been a very ambitious project, marshaling the talents and enthusiasm of many people from inside and outside Rochester, and I look forward to seeing its completion.

I've had other personal experiences and insights in recent weeks, which I was going to yammer about at great length – in fact, there are two previous drafts of this blog entry where I did just that. However, a recent family near-emergency caused me to rethink my priorities and whether my own crap is that important or not, so I'm gonna keep it brief.

On Memorial Day weekend, I visited my friends Greg and Misha down in NYC. They were throwing a kind of mini sci-fi convention for friends at their home, and I was invited to be a Fan Guest of Honor to give a presentation on Doctor Who. The presentation was well-received, and folks asked many questions during and after the presentation. I saw how much social capital there was in having knowledge of something that other people were interested in.

It was a great experience, and a further step towards recharging my faith in fandom. I've let the especially shrill fans of a different franchise – the Franchise That Shall Not Be Named (which had its thirty-fifth anniversary last month) – blind me to the acceptance and friendliness that can still be found in the larger fan community. I've complained enough about That Franchise's possessive fanboys, and doing so probably made me just as possessive as they were, and therefore not really any better than them.

While there is much in later installments of That Franchise that I would still defend, I think part of the continuing dispute is that its plaid-clad creator keeps clinging to an older expectation of the relationship between artist and audience. Basically, he's still trying to be Stanley Kubrick in a Joss Whedon world.

Once upon a time, a person who was into the arts – either as an artist or as a fan – tended to be a loner or an outcast. When you read interviews with 1970s directors like Spielberg or Scorsese or Coppola, they always seem to talk about growing up as the weird kid with asthma who had to create a rich fantasy life to compensate for the lack of outlets in their own life. Every subcultural movement, whether political (feminism, black power) or artistic (punk, grunge, rap), comes from a similar need to transform enforced separateness into an identity. Having a personal vision and trying to get it out there – whether the mass audience understood it or not – was why people wanted to become filmmakers in the first place.

That separatist attitude may explain why most artistically acclaimed films tend to be about alienation, victimization, loneliness, lack of emotion, lack of connection with other people. Or they tend to be protest movies about how society and the masses are dumb. Critics praised these films for being challenging and uncompromising.

Science fiction, in particular, went for these kinds of separatist themes again and again. The dystopian future that only the disaffected hero has the courage to defy. The mutants who are born special in a world that fears and persecutes specialness. The androids who struggle with human concepts such as empathy. The Gandhi-like aliens who force humans to consider how cruel and careless their own society can be. All of these played to a crowd that saw themselves as being deprived, marginalized and wronged.

But the culture has changed. In spite of all the manufactured rage you find on the Internet and on talk shows, to me the world seems friendlier and more accepting than it did when I was younger. It's much easier to find a welcoming community that shares your interests. Geek culture seems a lot more cheerful now. Which is as it should be, because humans are social creatures and we are meant to interact with each other. When I was younger, I wanted to run away. But now, I want to belong.

I feel like I've come full circle on this point, because as a kid I just wanted to make cool, fun movies. Perhaps years of studying film has made the role of the defiant artist seem more alluring, to the point where the kinds of movies I used to love – that I used to aspire to make – now can seem too easy, too safe, too mainstream.

Fandom also has a certain seduction, which part of me resists. It seems safer to obsess over something outside yourself – that objectively exists in the world already, that other people already know about – than to spend time digging inside yourself to produce something new, that needs to be promoted from scratch. It's easier to be a fan than to be an artist.

I do still have a desire to see something odd and different now and again, and I do still lament the way that established brands are replacing original visions. If you want to make a movie based on a story and characters you thought of yourself, it does seem that you need to steer a bit more towards an indie hipster audience rather than a genre fan audience. But just because an audience doesn't know they'll like something doesn't mean they won't like it once they actually see it. And if expectations for movies seem more limited nowadays, expectations for other storytelling forms have continued to grow. And you can't resist that. You can't be a separatist.

All this has been on my mind as I consider where the Saberfrog journey has taken me – from writing, to production, to the steps I'm now taking to find a wider audience for it. It really seems like the main character's journey in the film has mirrored my own progression. Josh starts out as a lonely, alienated nerd in search of meaning in his life, with only his obsession with a sci-fi franchise to give him solace. By the end of his journey, he has learned some life lessons and formed a connection with other people in the wider world.

That's what I'm trying to do now. After months or years of huddling in my shell, waiting for the storm to blow over, I'm ready to venture out into the world and connect with an audience again.

I'm finally putting together an official Saberfrog DVD, which I plan to have for sale by the end of the year. I'm also looking into setting up online streaming of the film at some point. I've even managed to write the first of the novels that Josh is obsessed with (though it could still use another draft).

But on top of all that, I'm planning to take Saberfrog on the road later this year. The film is a road movie, set in several different cities (if not actually filmed there). So I've decided it would be a good idea to actually go to those places – and maybe a few others – and screen the film for an untapped audience.

It might not happen. I might run out of time, or the venues in those areas might not be affordable. And the publicity and logistics could be challenging. But I've had the idea since April, and I'm finally announcing the goal here and now. God knows I've had some dark and despairing moments with this movie, but you can't make a movie and just shelve it. It needs to be seen.

I'm back, baby. And so is Saberfrog.

RIP JN-T, 10 years later

May 2002 was a pretty crappy time for me. I'd become involved in an arts organization I will not name, thinking it would be a great experience as well as a step forward in my film career. Instead it was one of the grimmest experiences I've ever had, due to some very ugly personal politics that arose.

I'd been promoted to a high position in the organization because some officers above me were not getting along with a colleague and suddenly quit. I thought I could sort out the resulting mess, and I was wrong. I wanted to leave the organization in better shape than I found it, but by the end of May it became clear that this was not going to be possible.

By the end of that month, I found myself thinking of John Nathan-Turner. He was the producer of Doctor Who during the 1980s, and played a large role in promoting the show in the US. Doctor Who was still near the peak of its popularity when “JN-T” (as he was widely known) became producer in 1980. By 1989, the show had been canceled after years of declining ratings and viewer dissatisfaction, for which JN-T was often blamed.

I didn't know a huge amount about the show's behind-the-scenes history at that point. But from the few available books I'd read on the subject, I got a sense that JN-T stayed aboard the sinking ship longer and longer, thinking that if he fixed one more crisis he could leave the show in good health … and ended up still in charge when the show was finally canceled, thus forever taking the blame for its demise.

I decided I would learn from his example, and not make the same mistake. As much work as I had put into the organization, and as much as I cared about its continuing success, I decided to resign my post and let it become someone else's problem. I eventually cut my ties with the organization entirely. It was a painful and devastating decision, but necessary for my mental health.

I then found out that JN-T had passed away on May 1, at a relatively young age. Doctor Who Magazine published a tribute issue in memory of the former producer, and when I read it it hit me hard. The issue described at length the personal attacks JN-T had endured during his time on the show, from both colleagues and fans. Friends praised him for keeping his chin up, continuing to do his work as best he could, and not sinking to the level of his attackers.

Misery loves company, so the saying goes, and I took great consolation in reading about the ups and downs of his time on Doctor Who, feeling that I'd walked a mile in his shoes. Disturbingly, I knew that this story was seeing print only because of his passing – to some degree, I owed my sanity to the fact that this man died exactly when he did.

But I never met the man. Over the years I've seen and read interviews with various people who worked with him, and certain themes have emerged. People seemed to like him socially but not entirely trust his artistic judgment, feeling that he didn't have the greatest understanding of scripts. Worse, he apparently felt a need to be the boss at all times, and would lose his temper if he thought someone was challenging his authority. So at least some of the criticism he endured may have been justified.

JN-T craved the approval of fandom, and made a number of personal appearances at conventions and on talk shows. By putting himself so much in the spotlight, he may have made himself a target. Years before the Internet was widespread, Doctor Who was the first geek franchise to allow the fans to have a say in the show's creative content. JN-T gave fan Ian Levine the unofficial role of continuity advisor, letting him insert references to old episodes as well as select old clips for use in flashbacks. Some fan-made artwork was also used in the show itself, including lapel badges worn by the Doctor himself (as played Colin Baker in the mid-80s). It's now felt that this emphasis on fan-pleasing in-jokes was detrimental to the show. It's a cruel irony that the historians asserting this view are probably the very fans who were demanding that kind of fan service back in the 1980s.

Perhaps the lesson is that fame is fickle, and that by putting yourself in the spotlight you make yourself a target. Some people have a knee-jerk assumption that anyone who reaches a position of fame and authority couldn't possibly be flesh and blood like you and me, but must be evil robots whose sole purpose is to add to the sum of human misery.

As an aspiring young filmmaker with big dreams, it never occurred to me that becoming successful and achieving your goals could make one a target of hostility, often from people you don't even know. This has become even more true in the Internet era, when an offhand Twitter remark can provoke a firestorm and wreck a career.

A more recent Doctor Who showrunner, Steven Moffatt, said in an interview that you can try to be a pandering crowdpleaser, but if the audience isn't surprised enough then they'll get bored. Whether John Nathan-Turner learned this lesson is hard to say – by his last couple of seasons he had apparently begun to cut himself off from fandom, and the episodes from those last two years are often considered to be among his best.

So the greater lesson might be that you can't please everyone all the time, and that all you can really do is maintain your integrity and do what you think is right, even when it would be easier not to.

Regeneration

Regeneration (or, how a failed TV pilot restored my faith in art and humanity)

It's been a couple of months since I wrote a proper blog entry. A far cry from the early days of this blog, when I was posting every day. Back then I was recapping which scenes were being filmed 25 months ago on that day, as a way of promoting my then-imminent world premiere screening of Saberfrog.

This past October I started a new day job, which I guess is always a big life change. It's a great job that fully uses my skills, but it has also kept me very busy. I found myself having less and less inclination to keep up my writing or to really do anything with Saberfrog.

I began to develop a theory (which I'm sure someone else has also thought of) that we create art only when we are dissatisfied. I remembered that it was a much younger and more alienated me who went to film school in the hopes of becoming a writer-director. And I also thought about how much less magical the movies seem to be today – the bankruptcy of Kodak, the hiatus of Rochester's 360|365 film festival, and the fact that Hollywood executives has so little faith in their own industry that they think movies have to be based on an established brand from another medium (comics, TV, board games, etc) in order to convince people to go see them.

So weeks went by without me writing anything. At the end of 2011, I was going to post something about two people who passed away that year: Ken Russell, director of Altered States, and John Neville, star of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, two films that had a huge influence on Saberfrog. But I was busy and that never happened. I was even going to write a blog entry announcing that I was done with the blog, and that maybe I was done with filmmaking as well.

But all that changed this past weekend, when I went to Los Angeles to attend the Doctor Who convention Gallifrey One.

I had gone to Gallifrey a few times in the early-to-mid 2000s and enjoyed it, but financial and relationship-related constraints caused me to stop going. (And disillusionment with fandom caused me to stop going to genre conventions of any kind anyway, a point I'll return to later.)

But I went this year because William Russell, one of the original cast members – now in his late eighties – was scheduled to appear, and as a longtime Who addict I decided that was not something I could bear to miss.

The last time I'd gone to a Doctor Who convention was around 2006 or so, when the modern series was still new, and the lovably grubby old show was still the main draw. This time, I was immediately struck by the vast majority of people dressed as characters that hadn't existed the last time I went to this convention.

The crowd was now younger and more female, and for the first time I saw with my own eyes a trend I'd previously only heard about – that of women going to conventions dressed as customized female versions of male characters (i.e. with a skirt or dress instead of pants, and maybe a girlier tie or jacket). After years of learning to associate fandom with grumpy middle-aged goons bemoaning their lost childhood, I was struck by the sight of fans expressing (gasp!) creativity, and having the same curiosity and excitement that I had when I first discovered the show.

I was struck by the genuine joy and enthusiasm for all aspects of Doctor Who. No character was too obscure or unpopular not to merit a fan-made costume. (The most obscure was surely the Doctor as depicted in Scream of the Shalka, an animated web series that was meant to be an official continuation of the old series before being swiftly buried once the new live-action series was greenlit.)

I did indeed get to see William Russell in person. I also got to chat with Steve Roberts, one of the wizards behind the restoration of old episodes for DVD release. I also met the guys behind BroaDWcast, a New Zealand-based website devoted to archiving the history of Doctor Who airings around the world (amusingly, they seem to have used my blog as a source for their WXXI entry).

But the highlight of the weekend was surely a screening of the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie (made as a pilot for an American series that never happened), with live commentary provided by its stars and producer, all of whom were guests at the convention this year.

It was one of the greatest movie screenings I've ever attended.

Sometimes it's fun to watch a movie on its own terms, as a work of entertainment. Sometimes it's fun to listen to a DVD commentary, and listen to the creators tell their anecdotes and war stories. And sometimes it's fun to watch a movie with friends who talk over it and laugh with or at it. Impressively, this screening managed to entertain on all those levels at once. The producer and stars spoke just enough to be amusing and enlightening, and just little enough that you could follow the movie on its own. They and their film had a huge audience, laughing and cheering from beginning to end.

And still, that's only part of what made this screening so great to me. To explain the rest, I have to backtrack a bit …

The week before leaving for Gallifrey, I happened to visit YouTube, and one of the featured videos was of someone reviewing the Star Wars novel Darth Plagueis. The reviewer gave the book a glowing review, saying it made him think a lot about philosophy and politics, and that it helped explain certain plot details in the Star Wars films.

I haven't read this book, but the reviewer spoke with an intelligence and insight that I'd stopped hoping for in Star Wars fans, at least the ones in my own age group. He seemed to be interested in larger concepts and ideas, as well as fleshing out his knowledge of the Star Wars universe. (The book's title character does not appear onscreen in the films, but is mentioned in dialogue in Episode III.)

I thought about how reading, viewing, and storytelling habits have changed in recent years. People complain that movies are all sequels, remakes and franchises now, and I've been foremost among them. But there is something to be said for creating a world, story and characters across multiple installments and multiple media, secure in the knowledge that a committed audience will be able to keep track of it all and will make the mental effort to form it all into a whole.

During my trip to Los Angeles, my friend John and I managed to squeeze in a screening of the 3D rerelease of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I've always had mixed feelings about this film – while I never hated it the way my contemporaries did, I've always found it a flawed film that could have gotten a better response simply by being better-paced and less confusing. I was on the fence about seeing it again, but knew that if I did, it would have to be in Los Angeles, not Rochester; and that I would have to see it with John, who's slightly younger than me and more of a fan of the film.

Seeing it on the big screen again, and in 3D no less, I was pleasantly surprised. The bold, CGI-heavy visuals and convoluted plot don't seem so jarring today. The last 13 years of TV shows, novels, comics and games have trained audiences to follow complex narratives with multiple characters. Even the slow spots were enlivened with colorful background detail. And of course, unlike the original films, Episode I was surely made with the knowledge that there would be books and games to explore all of its nooks and crannies. (Bounty hunter Aurra Sing, who appears very briefly onscreen during the pod race, went on to play a larger role in the Clone Wars TV series.)

The famous Red Letter Media fan review of Episode I seemed to argue that the earlier films were better because they were more straightforward and easier to follow. But there's now a younger, smarter, more media-savvy audience who doesn't need things to be made easy to follow. Episode I was made for them, not for the slacker generation who still cling desperately to their own 1970s childhood (when pop culture was a lot dumber, as Steven Berlin Johnson has argued).

All of this put me in exactly the right frame of mind to watch the Doctor Who TV movie with an enthusiastic crowd of fans. Since its 1996 debut, this film has struggled to shake off its reputation as merely a failed TV pilot. It was considered too glossy, mawkish and Americanized to properly “count” as Doctor Who in the eyes of established fans, while being too saddled with continuity and backstory to have a prayer of appealing to mainstream viewers.

But like Episode I, the Doctor Who TV movie seems to have been made for a future audience with different expectations. In 1996, both Doctor Who fans and indie-slacker types had a stifling distrust of anything that appeared to be competently made or decently financed. But now there's a new audience who got into Doctor Who through the new series. To them, there's nothing wrong with lavish production values, a soaring orchestral score, or hints of romance between the Doctor and a human woman – that's all the stuff they like about Doctor Who to begin with!

Far from being dumbed down, the TV movie is fast-paced and funny, full of action and spectacle, with throwaway jokes and colorful supporting characters. The supposedly garbled plot was surprisingly easy to follow, and the high stakes (Earth and a big chunk of the universe are in danger, and the Doctor's time machine is out of power!) justify its position as “Doctor Who: The Movie.” I know fans objected to the fact that the film contained a shootout and a motorcycle chase. But it's a very old-fashioned, Gen-X attitude to think that a franchise must never, ever do anything it hasn't already done yet.

And any complaints that the TV movie relies too heavily on audience knowledge of Doctor Who can at last be dismissed. It may have been a misstep in 1996, but the world has caught up. People do know about the Doctor and his universe. They know the TARDIS is alive (a recent Neil Gaiman-scripted episode dwells on this at length), so why shouldn't a surgeon like Grace Holloway be able to repair her? (That might not be what the script had in mind, but fan culture is interactive – you can draw on your own knowledge and imagination to fill in any gaps.) And the Paul McGann-performed Eighth Doctor, seen onscreen in this movie only, has (like Aurra Sing) led a full life in other media, enjoying a loyal and passionate following.

The TV movie's producer, Philip Segal – who struggled for seven years to bring Doctor Who back from oblivion, only for the result of his labor to be ignored or condemned – must have felt validated at that screening. If I ever again hear the question “If you could switch places with someone famous, who would it be?” that will be my answer – to be Philip Segal on the afternoon of February 19, 2012. I can only begin to imagine how it must have felt to see your long-maligned kid get crowned homecoming queen like that, in the company of the family who helped you raise her.

That screening, and the weekend overall, was the latest and biggest sign that it was finally time to leave the bad old days behind.

For more than half my life – since “Generation X” first became a thing – I've felt poisoned by the relentless assumption that anything true or “real” has to be despairing and angry and mean-spirited.

I looked to sci-fi and fantasy as a respite, as a sign that things could be better. Name authors such as Asimov and Bradbury talked about the strength and inspiration they found as young writers entering “fandom”. But I eventually concluded that they belonged to an older world, when people were optimistic and visionary, and set themselves positive goals to strive for.

The fans closer to my own age, that I actually knew, seemed defined by resentment and jealousy. The fact that they'd been unpopular in high school, or had problems at home, was to them universal proof that everything, everywhere, was contaminated. To them, life's obstacles were something to be complained about, not overcome. And I slowly came to notice that the way fans of my generation defined themselves was in opposition to someone else. To bolster their own puny self-esteem, they needed to find someone else to pick on, just as they had been picked on.

My first indication of this came in the mid-to-late 1990s, when I was hanging out with aspiring sci-fi authors. Devotees of sci-fi literature had (and maybe still have) an intense hatred of sci-fi movies and TV shows, so much so that – as a filmmaker myself – I sometimes felt like a closet Jew at a neo-Nazi rally. When going to conventions, I saw that no panel topic was too broad or specific that it wouldn't immediately devolve into bitching about movies and TV.

At one such panel, while listening to someone ramble about how much they hated Star Trek: Voyager, I thought: How did we get here? I thought fans were the smart guys, the cutting-edge guys, the guys who lived in the future sooner than everyone else. If they can't even cope with the existence of a mediocre TV show, how are they going to cope with the sweeping social and technological changes that sci-fi is supposedly preparing us for?

But because I still identified with fandom, I tried to overlook this. I tried to overlook the tendency of literary-SF authors and readers to condemn every medium but their own. I tried to overlook the tendency of Doctor Who fans (in those days) to hate anything made after the early 1980s (or after the mid-1970s, in the case of extremists). I tried to suppress my growing suspicion that these weren't the smart guys – that these were the dumb guys, who couldn't cope with new styles or approaches, who resented “kids” who were in fact older than they'd been when they'd become fans.

But the constant, unrelenting moaning about the Star Wars prequels, and the smug personal attacks on George Lucas, was the last straw for me. That's when it occurred to me that Generation-X fandom, with their constant bleat of “my childhood!”, is about keeping your own maturity and comprehension levels as low as possible, to the absolute exclusion of anything new or different. I don't agree with everything Lucas has done, but he was one of my biggest inspirations as a young filmmaker – his own example proved that a small-town kid with limited social skills could overcome obstacles and learn to be a writer, a director, and a businessperson – so I always take those insults kinda personal.

And it's not just Star Wars. Whenever I hear Gen-X nerds criticize anything (even something I don't like either), it makes me want to ask: How are you smarter than a person who made something? How are you more accomplished than the person who wrote a script, finished a novel, drew a comic book, devised a TV story arc? If you know so much more about the craft than the people who do it for a living, why do you have nothing to show for it, even in an age when the tools for creating and distributing stories have never been more widely available? Not to play the old-man card, but 20 years ago people still had to do things the hard way – they loaded film cameras and typed on typewriters – and still managed to create art, instead of just having resentment and jealousy towards the people who did.

In the 1990s I sometimes saw interviews with indie-type filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino or Terry Gilliam or Spike Lee, in which they would bash Hollywood or other directors (often gratuitously) ... but at least when they did it, there was the implication that they themselves were aspiring to do something different, that they wanted to be part of the solution.

I sometimes encounter people who would rather make nothing at all than gain experience making something bad. I disagree with this attitude. Making something bad requires the ability to make something. And making something requires knowing the craft to at least a basic degree, and it requires the ability to complete a project. It's also a learning experience; you develop new skills and, hopefully, figure out how to do better next time. Every time I make a film, I'm a different person at the end of it. And I'd like to think that other people are similarly capable of personal growth, but multiple encounters with bitter idiots had caused me to abandon any such hope.

It took Gallifrey 2012 to strip away that armor of cynicism that I'd built up in recent years. There's now a younger generation that is a hell of a lot more fun. They don't have the same allergy to anything bright or cheerful, or that girls might like. And I find that I can actually stand to be around them. I can't say for sure what caused this cultural shift (I'm sure the Internet is a big part of it), but I think I can at least say what the shift is.

For the past century or so, art was seen as an act of defiance. The way you proved that you were an artist was by criticizing society, or corporations, or the government, or by showing how depressed and alienated you were. And if you weren't an artist, the way you proved you were sophisticated was by appreciating things that were depressing or alienated, to the exclusion of anything more light-hearted. Even in more populist artforms like film and/or sci-fi, the way something gets hailed as “art” is by being cold and depersonalized, or satirically despairing of the direction in which things are headed. And if you ever have a craving for something a bit less dull or depressing or hectoring … well, that just means you've been brainwashed by The System and need your consciousness raised. Or it means that you're one of the bad guys, oppressing everyone with your bourgeois aesthetics.

While sci-fi fans only rarely overlap with the tweed-jacket-and-goatee stereotype I just described, they have often seemed to carry a similar attitude that the whole world is their enemy. So many of geek culture's iconic characters – Spock, Data, Ripley, Han Solo, almost any superhero – are defined by their outsider status. They either don't have normal human emotions, or have been made tough and stoic by experience. Many genre characters (superheroes in particular) are suffering martyrs, designed to appeal simultaneously to the high self-importance and low self-esteem of those fans who grew up in less tolerant times.

That brooding attitude makes a certain amount of sense when you're struggling to navigate the labyrinth of adolescence. But personally, I think you're eventually supposed to stop being fifteen, and develop the capacity for emotions other than jealousy and sarcasm. The newer generation seems to be a lot more confident and a bit more interested in what they can do, not what they can't.

But, but … you may say. But what about the economy, and the environment, and the Republicans/Democrats, and reality TV, and …

There will always be bad things. Emphasizing them, and using them as an excuse to give up on achievement and happiness, does not make you wiser than other people. The wise people are the ones who try to do something to make the world better. Either by volunteering, or by creating art, or just by being good at their job and good to their loved ones.

In a world of cynics, it takes courage to like something, and no courage at all to hate something.

And besides, sometimes the thing you hate is the thing someone else loves, and bashing it will just make you look like a dick. Some reality TV shows are good. I liked L.A. Ink (especially Hannah).

I guess all of this is just me de-toxing, and getting the bad stuff out of my system once and for all, so I can move forward as a filmmaker, as an artist, and as a person.


P.S. As I was sitting in Starbucks finishing this post, the loudspeaker started playing Iggy Pop's “Lust for Life.” This might be meaningful. Or not.

Movies, politics, and Time Lords

Well, a lot's happened since my last blog post. I haven't had much time to work on the novel or a new script, although I'm getting a little bit done here and there.

Last month I started a new job, which I'm enjoying a lot. It's kept me very busy, though, so once again the demands of a day job left me not being quite in the mood to participate in the Little Theatre's marathon of Halloween films. I wasn't in a funk like last year, though, and at least I went to a couple of the shows.

One was of a film called Scumbabies, a hipster musical comedy that reminded me of two surreal 80s cult films, Forbidden Zone and Meet the Hollowheads. If you haven't heard of (or didn't enjoy) either of those films, you might not be the audience for this one. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it myself, but I was happy to see an original, oddball film that didn't cling to a comic book formula.

I also went to the Little's Halloween-night showing of locally made short films, about half of which were the same ones they showed last year. This fact, plus the news that next year's 360|365 film festival might not happen due to lack of funds, could make one pessimistic about the vitality of the Rochester film scene.

But Scumbabies was directed by a local filmmaker, and both that and The Beast Pageant prove that there's interesting work being done around here, even if it's not coming from the expected places. Every once in a while you hear about a middlebrow, medium-budget indie drama (with a B-list actor) that is supposedly going to “put Rochester on the map,” and while I wish any such production well, I gotta ask: Did Evil Dead put Detroit on the map? Did Clerks put Red Bank on the map? It's not about the cities, it's about individual filmmakers with unique, idiosyncratic visions.

Speaking of New Jersey, I got to support a fellow filmmaker that same week. At the IFP conference back in September, I met Kevin J. Williams, the Trenton-based director of a documentary called Fear of a Black Republican. The title and premise appealed to me (I had put conservative black characters in my last two feature-length movies), and I wanted to see the film, so I had encouraged Kevin to screen it in upstate New York. About a month later, he screened FoaBR at Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo and at a church in Rochester, and I got to see the film in both venues.

The first time I saw FoaBR, I thought it boldly challenged the views of people on both sides, criticizing the racism of some white Republicans as well as the cultural conformity of some white and black Democrats. But the second time, I saw the film more as a centrist plea for balance, bemoaning the over-domination of Democrats in urban areas and extolling the virtues of the two-party system.

The audience reaction was also different both times; the Buffalo crowd was liberal and skeptical, while the Rochester crowd was conservative and approving. It's inspiring to see a fellow indie filmmaker get his work out there to the public and get a response, and I'm glad I got to play some small part in the process.

Finally, I'd like to mention that today is the 48th anniversary of Doctor Who. Last year at this time, I blogged about the impact that Doctor Who had on me as a teenager, but I mostly talked about how I felt about it as a fan. I only briefly touched on what I learned (and continue to learn) from it as a filmmaker.

It's easy to mock the original series for its limited production values, but over the years I've really learned to appreciate the craft that went into these old episodes. Much of the original Doctor Who was, in fact, quite technically sophisticated for its time, pushing the envelope in terms of what could be done electronically and on videotape.

And the more I learn about the conditions under which these episodes were made, the more admiration I have for the fact that they were made at all. An early-70s story, “Colony in Space”, recently came out on DVD, and from the text commentary I learned that it wasn't until the eighth season that they were able to dub the audio during post-production. This means that for the first seven years of the show's production, the music and sound effects had to be played during shooting, and timed with the actions of the actors and cameramen.

“Colony in Space” also features a moment that, for me, sums up the magic of the old series. Near the end of this story, the Doctor (then played by Jon Pertwee) encounters the wizened alien ruler of a ruined city that houses a deadly super-weapon. The Doctor's archenemy, the Master, wants control of this weapon so that he can rule the universe, and offers to share it with the Doctor so that he can use its immense power for good.

The alien creature consists of a crummy little puppet body, topped by a rubbery monster-mask worn by an actor who is sticking his head through a hole in the set. The poor actor needn't have bothered; the mask is so crude and inarticulate that I originally thought it was a hand puppet. Yet when this Mr. Show reject vows to destroy the super-weapon, and himself with it, to prevent it from falling into evil hands, the Doctor gently replies, “Not only does justice prevail on your planet, sir, but infinite compassion as well.”

It's a tribute to Pertwee's acting ability that he is able to sell this, and the moment is genuinely (if unintentionally) profound. To you and I, this alien creature is just a really bad special effect. But the Doctor doesn't judge by appearances, and sees this creature for what it truly is – a wise, benevolent life form worthy of respect. The Doctor's intelligence and morality give him a deeper understanding of what's good and bad, right and wrong, meaningful and trivial.

This and so many other scenes in the old series are saved by the heroic efforts of classically trained British actors. This is the aspect of the show that I savor most as an adult, but I get the sense that in modern Britain there's been something of a backlash against the stagy, educated-sounding acting style of old. I once read a magazine quote (either from showrunner Russell T Davies, or from one of the producers) boasting that the new series would be fresh and new and modern and that the age of hammy, middle-aged British character actors was over.

To this American fan, though, old-school British acting is a superpower. It can take a silly script and fill it with gravitas, it can take a ponderous script and fill it with wit and charm. It can bestow upon crummy puppet aliens a sense of justice and infinite compassion. To see “hammy, middle-aged British character actors” remain unflappably dignified amidst papier-mache sets and unconvincing aliens is genuinely thrilling.

And when these same actors are given scripts and production values worthy of them, stand the hell back. I recently used a day recovering from a cold as an opportunity to watch the entirety of “The War Games”, the epic swan song of Pertwee's predecessor Patrick Troughton. “The War Games” is one of the all-time classics, for the sheer scale it implies through a handful of sets, some period costumes, and a map claiming to show additional story realms never featured onscreen.

The team of villains in this story run the gamut of RADA-trained awesomeness: the War Lord, played with marvelous understated menace; the War Chief, a wild-eyed madman whose go-for-broke death scene had me applauding; the Security Chief, whose accent-slash-speech-impediment would make Emperor Palpatine proud; and Captain von Weich, whose stereotypical Germanic monocle and Blofeld-ish dueling scar make him the original Dr. Evil, but funnier.

Even when the ingenuity of the production team wasn't enough to redeem a low budget, I still cherish old-school Doctor Who for its ambition. Nowadays, everything has to be technically perfect, and no one tries anything if they're not absolutely sure they can make it work. Everybody colors inside the lines now, resulting in TV and movies that are slick but tame.

By these modern standards, old Doctor Who is fearless. If the production team wanted to have a mile-wide squid-monster attacking a refinery, or a Concorde jet landing on prehistoric Earth, or giant ant-people battling flying giant-butterfly people, they would go ahead and do it, whatever the result looked like. When the new Doctor Who series first brought back the Doctor's oldest enemies, the machine-like Daleks, they made do with one Dalek in some guy's basement. While this turned out to be a clever bit of setup, it reminded me that the old episodes never let budget limitations stop them from regularly deploying giant armies of Daleks, even when they had to resort to cardboard cutouts or shop-bought toys to make up the numbers.

I think that British fans have rather less appreciation for this aspect of the show, and regard its homemade quality with some embarrassment. Even the makers of the original series, when speaking on DVD commentaries and documentary extras, often lament the low budgets they had while envying the greater technical resources available today.

And every time they talk that way, it's a knife in my heart. If anything, my admiration for these rickety episodes has only grown with time. Whenever another old-school Doctor Who adventure comes out on DVD, I look forward to watching it with new eyes. As I continue to develop my own skills as a writer and low-budget filmmaker, these old episodes give me a fuller appreciation for what can be conjured on a small budget.

When being weird isn't enough

As an artist, sometimes you learn more from mediocrity than from masterpieces, because mediocrity forces you to realize what the masterpieces are doing right.

As I've mentioned in this blog before, I have been collecting and rewatching the original Doctor Who as its episodes trickle out onto DVD. Doing so has triggered some vaguely deep thoughts about science fiction as a genre.

Last month I watched three recent releases: “Revenge of the Cybermen” (1975), “Creature from the Pit” (1979), and “Planet of Fire” (1984). Although made several years apart, they all have something in common (apart from not being very good). Without boring you with the plot details, at some level they all depict planets where 1) a backward civilization lives in willful ignorance of the outside universe, but is now being forced to cope with some threat, and 2) there's some substance on the planet with special properties that is driving the plot.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that most old Doctor Who episodes not set on Earth fit one or both of those two themes. And this, in turn, has made me realize just how difficult it is for science fiction to come up with anything new.


In the twenty-first century, the sci-fi/fantasy genre is largely about franchises. The loyal fan learns everything about a particular universe, and its characters and history. New episodes in a series reward the fan for recognizing references to previous episodes, and for following the characters' personal story arcs. It's about comfort and familiarity and brand loyalty.

But before that, SF had a very different agenda – it was about taking the audience to new and challenging places, and rewarding the fan for being clever enough to keep up. Occasionally a particular author would come up with a trope too good not to share with other writers – the time machine, the ansible, the Three Laws of Robotics – but most of the time, SF was a genre that took pride in expanding your mind and reinventing the wheel.

Or did it? The artists who most pride themselves on smashing the old clichés tend to do so in similar ways, creating new clichés without meaning to. (For example, “independent” films are supposed to be a refreshing break from Hollywood formula, yet they're usually about either disadvantaged folks struggling to survive, or advantaged folks struggling to cope with alienation. Or they're sympathetic portrayals of molesters. Or they're documentaries about how corporations are killing us.)

Sci-fi, for all its apparent potential, tends to follow a handful of regular patterns. If you want to be a bold SF visionary, and tell a boldly original story set in an entirely new world of your own devising … well, there are certain problems you always have to solve, and there are a limited number of ways you can solve them.

One problem is that of audience identification. Since the reader or viewer has never heard of this newly created world before, how can they relate to a character who inhabits it? Who is the hero?

There are three possible solutions to this:

• The hero is a visitor to this world, and therefore learns about it at the same time as the audience. (He may be an ordinary person like Arthur Dent, or he may be a sci-fi hero who travels to new planets all the time but hasn't been here.)


• The hero is a native of this world, but has been sheltered up to now and is thus, like the audience, learning the whole truth about it for the first time. (If the story is popular, as the original Star Wars and The Matrix were, a franchise may result, and thus the world becomes familiar to the hero and the audience.)


• The hero is a native of this world, is fully aware of its rules, and lives a life that makes perfect sense to anyone else who lives there – which of course is nobody, leaving the audience out in the cold unless they're willing to work it out from indirect clues. (An arty and alienating technique, more common in novels and short stories than in film/TV.)

The first two are the most common – you can probably think of many more examples than the ones I've given above. The third is the hardest to do, and regresses into the second as soon as the hero tries to find out what exists beyond the world they've known all their lives.

Which brings us to the next challenge: What should the story be?

• The first type of hero – the visitor – may come here to achieve some specific goal, such as a military mission, or a quest to find some sacred Macguffin. Or perhaps he's been brought here against his will and is trying to escape again. (Or both – in the earliest Doctor Who and Star Trek episodes, the hero must complete some mission in order to regain the means to leave the planet.) He seems to end up in adventure stories.


• The second type of hero – the sheltered native – may be content with life when we first meet him, but eventually yearns to be free of the society he lives in, or to learn the truth about it, or to overthrow it. He seems to end up in political satires, especially ones where there's some big Soylent Green-esque shock revelation about how wrong this world is. His best hope is to get a franchise and have lots of adventures within this world, or find other planets to get into trouble on, thus becoming the first type of hero.


• The third type of hero – the socialized native – doesn't get to do much. His story is usually a vehicle for showing the audience the status quo in this made-up world, so the writer probably won't let him do anything to disrupt that status quo. Instead of a plot, we get an extended vignette or series of sketches. If it's any kind of drama, the hero will try to break free, often learning the truth about his world and thus becoming the second type of hero.

Sci-fi is a genre where the characters, story and world tend to be developed in tandem. The author will design a story and characters specifically to show off the world he's created, or he will populate the world with things that are useful to the plot. Which brings us to the third challenge: What sort of world should the story take place in?

This is where sci-fi and fantasy start to get tricky. The author can create a world that is clearly based on something already familiar (as Middle Earth is influenced by Norse mythology and Arthurian legend) and risk being criticized for being derivative. Or she can create a world so bizarre and foreign that the author must put in lots of awkward exposition – requiring the characters to tell each other things they already know so that the audience will know – or else leave it to the audience to figure it out on their own (or enjoy the confusion as trippy).

SF tends to pick its battles. You'll get compelling characters and an engaging story, but an implausible world based on dubious concepts. Or you'll get a lovingly created world, but not much effort into making us care about the story and characters.

Of course, the cleverest SF/fantasy creators find ways of balancing all these different priorities, often by having stories work on more than one level. The Lord of the Rings saga is, on one level, a simple story of good against evil, mainly involving (as Kevin Smith pointed out) people walking. Yet there's a wealth of world-building detail and background information for those want it – look up Middle-earth on Wikipedia some time, and try to read what you see without going cross-eyed. You can be into Star Trek for the characters, or the action, or the philosophy, or to learn the Klingon culture and language. You can view Star Wars as childhood escapism, as a film-buff homage to Kurosawa, as a treatise on comparative religion, or you can just memorize the names of all the bounty hunters and cantina creatures.

However, those are epic franchises that have the luxury of spreading their storytelling and their world-building across many episodes. That's fairly common now. What seems less popular today is the challenge of combining world-building, storytelling and character development in a short, original piece – something not connected to a franchise you're already familiar with. (When I think of the better futuristic or off-world stories on Doctor Who, they either set a familiar type of story in an exotic world, or they design the world itself to be an intriguing puzzle for the hero to solve.)

Ideally, the world itself should be compelling enough – visually and intellectually – to keep the audience interested. The concepts should be clever and imaginative, the sets and costumes should be designed to tell us a lot about this world and what its values are (while being cool to look at), and there should be enough throwaway details to make us imagine an environment bigger than what's glimpsed in the story. The crappier sci-fi environments lack anything original or intriguing, and seem to exist for the sole benefit of telling the one story being set there.


Stories set in an invented world are not just difficult to make, technically and financially; they're also difficult to write. You must not only create a world that is interesting, logical and coherent, you must also communicate the rules of this world to the audience at the same time as telling a good story. With such a blank canvas, it's easy to lose heart and fall back on clichés, to spin yet another yarn about two alien races that want to kill each other, or a civilization that has a completely wrong set of values that can be quickly fixed once the hero turns up. Traveling to other worlds should be astounding, not predictable.

I guess a lot of this gets back to the old debate about whether art should entertain and reassure, or be challenging and thought-provoking. In the last decade or two, the SF/fantasy genre has steered closer to mainstream entertainment (soap operas and action movies) and away from experimentation or polemic.

Whether this change is good or bad is a matter of personal taste, but it's happened. SF used to be terra incognita for most people, but now it's been colonized and domesticated. Maybe this is why the alien societies on modern Doctor Who are polyglot spaceports (the spawn of Blade Runner and Mos Eisley) rather than the quasi-medieval, you-have-profaned-our-temple backwater planets often seen on the old series. The latter could often be quite atmospheric, but could also be lazy and laughable, as shown by the three dull stories I watched recently.

I've been talking as if sci-fi is supposed to be seem weird, but what if it's supposed to seem normal? Perhaps the genius of popular sci-fi is that it gets the audience to accept far-off lands and exotic creatures as everyday. After Star Wars came out, people reacted as if there had always been movies with talking robots, faster-than-light spaceships, and subtitled alien languages.

Maybe that's the hardest thing for sci-fi to pull off – to seem immediately accessible, without seeming dull or predictable. Maybe that's the sweet spot.

I'm still a sucker for weirdness, though. And if you will excuse me, I'm going to go watch the extras on the latest and freakiest Doctor Who DVD, “The Mutants” …

Doctor Who: 47 years of cheapo genius

47 years ago today, the very first episode of Doctor Who aired in England.

What to say about good old Doctor Who at this point? Once the Charlie Brown Christmas tree of sci-fi shows, now a global phenomenon. November 23 doesn't have many hours left in it (it's been a long, hard day at work), so I'll have to keep it brief.

I'd heard of Doctor Who as a kid, but didn't actually try to watch it until mid-1989. As part of a pledge drive, PBS station WXXI-TV showed the documentary “Doctor Who's Who's Who” as a lead-in to the season premiere “Remembrance of the Daleks”, and I was hooked immediately by this rumpled, misfit hero. Unlike the macho high school purgatory I lived in, in Doctor Who-land you could be the hero simply by being smart, interesting and funny.

After the pledge drive, WXXI started over with the very first black-and-white episode, and spent the next three years crawling forward through all surviving installments of the entire series. I watched in rapt attention, not knowing that this would be WXXI's last-ever complete run of the entire series, or that the next new season of Doctor Who (which aired in Britain later in 1989) would be the last for 16 years.

But somehow, that was part of the magic of Doctor Who back then, at least from an American point of view – it was this ancient, foreign artifact that few people seemed to know about, and episode guides were hard to come by. The only way you could catch up on all that lore was to collect the novelizations, peruse the few reference books available in libraries or comic book stores … and, of course, watch the show every Saturday night at 11 pm, usually with little or no knowledge of what was going to happen next. (Pleasingly, WXXI has given that exact timeslot to reruns of the new series.)

The continuing DVD releases of old episodes has allowed me to watch these shows in a new light. Some episodes that I enjoyed as a teenager haven't held up, while others that failed to impress me back then have turned out to be highly enjoyable. The old version of Doctor Who (by which I mean the first 26 years' worth of episodes up until its 1989 cancellation) is notorious for its shot-on-video cheapness, with flimsy sets, Halloween-mask aliens, and unconvincing special effects. But I still find those episodes enormously inspiring as a low-budget filmmaker, and many of those episodes were ahead of their time – or at least, far more sophisticated than audiences of the time would have noticed.

If you can get past the creaky production values and slow pace, there's a huge range of material in those old shows – comedy, horror, action, fantasy, surrealism, high-concept sci-fi, and various combinations thereof.

Most fans have a favorite Doctor (as fans know, the alien hero's ability to “regenerate” allows the part to be recast several times) or a favorite era. I came in with Sylvester McCoy (the seventh and last of the original Doctors), followed quickly by the early William Hartnell episodes, so those two will always be sentimental favorites.

Coincidentally, I've had the chance to revisit my two “first” Doctors quite recently. I've been watching a group of Hartnell stories on DVD in broadcast order, and “The Chase” jumped out at me as a particular gem. The Doctor and his trusty time machine, the TARDIS, are pursued through the space-time continuum by his archenemies – the tanklike cyborgs known as Daleks – through a number of cheap-but-charming locales including a desert planet, a sailing ship, a haunted house, and a jungle planet with killer plants and a gleaming abandoned city a mile high. It ends with the genuinely moving farewell of Ian and Barbara, two of the Doctor's original travelling companions. “The Chase” has a poor reputation among Doctor Who fans, so I was surprised to myself enjoying it so thoroughly after all these years.

Meanwhile, one of the first Sylvester McCoy stories I ever saw, “Silver Nemesis”, has recently come out on DVD. This one is also considered a clunker by fans, but it was only the third Doctor Who adventure I ever saw and at the time I loved it. It seemed to blend together every genre I liked, combining sci-fi, fantasy, action and comedy; and it introduced me to the Doctor's other cyborg foes, the more humanoid Cybermen.

For sheer quality, though, the pinnacle for me would be the “Key to Time” season of 1978-79, during Tom Baker's lengthy run as the Doctor. The quality of the stories and dialogue is uniformly high in this season, with each alien world imaginatively developed and populated by memorable guest characters. Tom Baker is at the top of his game, enjoying terrific screwball chemistry with his latest co-star, Mary Tamm (as Romana, an aloof genius belonging to the same Time Lord race as the Doctor himself).

The most recognized formula for Doctor Who (which the new show conforms to) is to have a young and naïve Earth girl traveling with the Doctor as he battles alien invasions of present-day Earth. But my favorite overall period of Doctor Who abandons this approach almost entirely. From about 1976 through the early 80s, the show takes a leap into pure space opera. Instead of a modern-day “audience identification” character as the Doctor's companion, we get a series of nonhuman or off-world characters as bizarre as the Doctor, and exotic, high-concept alien environments that are worthy of his penetrating intelligence. Doctor Who just seemed smarter and more imaginative during that period.

That the shoestring budget of old-school Doctor Who could deliver jungle planets, planets petrified by radiation, swamp planets where transportation is possible only by boat, planets ruled by giant insects, invisible planets, vampire planets, planets made of pure mathematics, planets that eat other planets … not to mention antimatter universes, lands of pure fiction, and so much else ... makes it somewhat disappointing that today's big-budget Doctor Who so seldom stretches beyond modern suburbs and council estates. Developing genuinely original alien environments may require a slower and more atmospheric pace than is permissible today, even with the best CGI money can buy. While executive producer Russell T Davies and his successor, Steven Moffatt, have been wise to ground the modern series in contemporary reality, I often crave the more adventurous, carefree spirit of the old series.

But today, anyone with a camcorder and a computer can make sci-fi that is at least as technically competent as old-school Doctor Who. And those old episodes showed that you didn't need huge budgets if you had a clever script, a good cast, and a lot of imagination. This is why the show continues to inspire me, two decades after I first watched it, and nearly half a century after it first aired.