My friend, the AV Club TV editor Todd VanDerWerff, kicked off a great discussion on Twitter this afternoon of how to break into a career in writing this afternoon, much of ably archived by the media scholar Myles McNutt. I ended up rambling longer than I intended, but Dara Lind was kind enough to sort out my Tweets into a couple of broad categories, and I’m reposting her Storify here in case some of y’all are contemplating questions like how to write in between freelance assignments or managing professional jealousy and competition.

Because this appears to have been something people were excited about, I think we’ll do it again. I’ll post details on how to submit questions, and where discussions will take place in the future.

We Steal Secrets, documentarian Alex Gibney’s examination of the rise and decline of WikiLeaks, which goes into wide release tomorrow, actually takes its title from an unexpected source, former CIA director Michael Hayden’s description of his own agency’s mission. Gibney tells the story of how Pvt. Bradley Manning decided to leak classified information on behalf of the public rather than a state, and how Julian Assange came to believe that publishing such information made him a world-historical figure as a hybrid biopic of the two men, interspersed with officials like Hayden other members of WikiLeaks. And it draws to a damning conclusion, arguing that WikiLeaks began as a decentralized publishing platform, and became co-opted as a tool to allow Assange to evade responsibility, not just for publishing classified information, but for other forms of misbehavior.

I spoke with Gibney about how Ennio Morricone’s scores inspired him, how he thinks Manning differs from the other figures in the film in his relationship to the internet—and to real-world consequences—and how he came to believe that the sexual assault charges filed against Assange in Sweden were not, as he’d initially thought, a set-up. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to start out by asking you about some of the decisions you made in structuring the film. It seems like there are two stories you’re telling, the biographies and the larger institutional story. I was wondering how you decided to balance those elements, since obviously they intersect, but it leaves you with a lot of story to cover.

I mean, the key thing was following the WikiLeaks story. But the WikiLeaks story is not just Julian Assange, it’s Bradley Manning. And the hard part, then, was how to structure that story in time and space. Because obviously the chats all happen in a relatively short moment in time, but we wanted to be able to intersperse them, as well as the discovery of them throughout, to be able to jump back and forth between Bradley’s story and Julian’s story. So that was the toughtest thing that we had to do from the standpoint of filmmaking and storytelling.

The other stuff, the context, was stuff we just figured out ways of inserting when it seemed appropriate, at moments when it seemed right. And that’s the advantage of telling a story in chapters. You can stop, end a chapter, and start a new chapter. So you know, in order to understand this story, you have to understand a little bit about 9/11, and how security and information-sharing changed. But it’s the ability to find those moments where you come off of something like Michael Hayden saying “We know that at some point, there would be a leak, and if it was a leak, it would be a huge leak,” and then we cut hard t and you see this chat come up, and you don’t know who the chat is from, and it just says “I’m an intel analyst in Iraq” and you go “Oh, what’s that?” The idea was keeping the mystery story going.

One of the things that I also thought was striking—and I’d know more about Manning’s backstory than Assange’s childhood—I wondered if there was information and reporting about both of their backstories that you wish you’d been able to get into the movie. Obviously Manning grew up with both sexual identity and gender identity issues, and you mention Assange’s sort of displaced childhood briefly.

Yeah, I mean, we had a much longer section about Assange’s childhood in the three hour and thirty minute cut, which we all had to sit through. And it is interesting. We actually went to Magnetic Island, where Assange grew up in part. It’s a small island off the coast of Queensland, near a town named Townsville. It’s called Magnetic Island, in this beautiful kind of metaphorical issue, because when Captain Cook sailed by, he claimed it fouled his compasses. So there’s Julian Assange from Magnetic Island, fouling the compasses of the most powerful military machine on earth. So it was pretty good. And we had aspects of his childhood and the sense that he was moving from place to place constantly.
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PBS has been getting a lot of attention for a snarky new 50th anniversary fundraising campaign based from WNET, its New York affiliate, around parody billboards for reality television ads that basically make the argument that it’s horrible and disgusting that a lot of Americans watch stupid reality television programming, and so why don’t you give us all the money instead?

It strikes me that there are two problems with this approach. In order to fulfill its two missions, PBS has to do two things: raise money to put programming on the airwaves, and attract people to watch that programming to demonstrate that their efforts are useful and worthwhile. This campaign is entirely aimed at the first goal, potentially at the expense of the latter. The campaign is perfectly aimed at stoking the contempt of the kind of people who despise reality television, and who perhaps don’t watch much TV, even and including PBS, at all. But if you do watch reality television, either in a way that’s serious or half-amused, these PBS ads tell you that you should be ashamed of your viewing habits, while giving you precisely zero information about what kinds of alternatives they have to offer you, and why they’re great. Watching Storage Wars does not legally preclude someone from liking Sherlock.

In terms of establishing its independent brand, PBS should absolutely adore the state of television right now. The reality glut may be irritating to donors who would like to see American tastes turn towards something more high-minded. But the fact that not everyone is going into the business of prestige family soaps and British imports actually makes it vastly easier for PBS to distinguish itself, find large audiences for programming like Downton Abbey, and prove to private donors, foundations, and the U.S. government that it’s meeting needs that no other channel has bothered to try to fulfill, along with providing access to things like high-quality children’s programming in areas where it might not otherwise be financially viable. If I were PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger, in fact, I would be slipping unmarked bills in plain envelopes under the table to Animal Planet to keep producing things like Mermaids: The New Evidence, trust that people who are disgusted by such things will arrive at a state of high dudgeon all by their own selves, and then use my advertising budget to put a lot of .GIFs of the Dowager Countess being awesome or clips of Ken Burns being eloquent on video advertising slots all over the place. PBS’s core product is frequently fantastic, and it would do both the organization and viewers a lot of good to advertise it that way, rather than treating it like spinach that should be supported out of the goodness of our hearts because the rest of America is so darn stupid.

The bridge is yours.

-The book sounds terrific.

-The death of Smash shouldn’t kill prospects for out-of-formula shows.

-Bill Nye on how Superman shaves.

-Preach on, Linda Holmes!

-People are apparently very, very over Charlie Sheen.

Academy Award winner Geena Davis spoke out sharply against the limited opportunities for women in Hollywood at the Motion Picture Association of America on Wednesday night, but stopped short of recommending specific remedies for the long-standing gender gaps behind and in front of the camera.

“I believed that the fate of female actors, where they seem to stop getting so many female parts when they hit 40 would not apply to me because I had been different. But it’s like falling off a cliff,” Davis, who founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, said of her own experience. “I was averaging about 1 movie a year, and in my forties, I made one movie. And it’s not that I wasn’t offered any parts, but I wasn’t offered those kinds of parts. And I was so inspired to play unique characters and to do different things, that to be the girlfriend of whoever gets to have the exciting adventure didn’t appeal to me. ..If you ever read, at some point, that I’ve signed on to play Sean Connery’s comatose wife, that’s about the right Hollywood age, you’ll know I’m broke.”

In a conversation with Rep. Rosa DeLaura, D-Conn., Davis emphasized that women are underrepresented in almost every facet of Hollywood productions. Just 17 percent of the people in crowd scenes in family films, she said, are women, and the ratio of male to female characters hasn’t changed since 1946.

“Could it be that having that ratio driven into your brain that much affects how you think?” she asked. “There’s a study, in a group if there’s 17 percent women, men think it’s balanced. If there’s 33 percent women, they think there’s more women than men.”
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This post discusses the fourth season of Arrested Development, released on Netflix last weekend, in its entirety.

“They sound like terrible people!” George Michael Bluth (Michael Cera) tells Rebel Alley (Isla Fisher), the actress that he has been dating towards the end of the fourth season of Arrested Development after she describes attending a dinner party with a conservative politician (Terry Crews) who brought a prostitute to dinner. The joke, of course, is that said prostitute is actually George Michael’s aunt Lindsay Bluth Fünke (Portia di Rossi), who is dating said politician both as an act of political sabotage, and because she’s attracted to the fact that he’s attracted to her, and that Rebel’s own date to this dinner was George Michael’s father Michael (Jason Bateman). “Oh, they were,” Rebel tells George Michael, and that it’s not clear if her statement is confined to the other couple, to herself and both Bluth men, or to everyone in the Arrested Development universe is precisely the point.

I agree with many of the criticisms of Netflix’s resurrected version of the show, which was cancelled by Fox in 2006, including the arguments that the episodes and the scenes go on too long, prompted perhaps by the tight schedules of the cast, that the episodes seem clearly constructed to set up a movie, rather than to produce a satisfying arc on their own, and that the new episodes rely too heavily on cameos and repeated jokes. But the revived Arrested Development is an interesting experiment in what makes a comedy work, and how long privilege can be interesting to watch.

The classical definition of the forms means that in comedies, everyone will be all right—if by all right you mean hitched—by the end, while in dramas, things are destined to conclude poorly. But the best sitcoms have a talent for tricking you into forgetting that their characters’ predestination. I have been utterly convinced by Cheers that Norm might permanently drop out of the workforce, by Community that Abed Nadir might not survive his encounters with the social rules of the wider world, by 30 Rock that Liz Lemon might be crushed by Jack Donaghy, and later that their friendship might not survive some of the obstacles flung in its path.

But Arrested Development is a story about people who are privileged in the most basic sense: no matter what happens to them, and no matter the circumstances in which it happens, they’re always going to be all right. Land in prison for securities fraud or commandeering the Queen Mary? You’ll find your way in with a prison gang—and in Lucille’s case this season, maybe even onto a reality show. Have your assets seized? There’s money in the banana stand, or a rent-free model home to which you can retreat. Reduced to prostituting yourself out to your wealthy, vertiginous neighbor as Michael does in the first episode of this fourth season, proposing to Lucille Austero (Liza Minelli) that they have sex as a substitute for repaying a very large loan? The very presence of a Lucille Austero in the various Bluths’ lives is a rather odd form of good fortune, but there’s no denying that’s what it is.
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Well, this should be entertaining. From Deadline comes the casting news that Tracy Letts, best-known for writing plays like acid family drama August, Osage County, will be joining Homeland to do in fiction what Rep. Darrell Issa would love to do in real life:

The Tony- and Pulitzer-winning actor-playwright, who was tapped for a recurring role on the upcoming third season of the Showtime drama a week ago, has now been upped to a series regular. He will play the role of Sen. Andrew Lockhart, the powerful, authoritative, and commanding Committee Chairman asking tough questions as the government’s investigation begins in the wake of the horrific terror attack that decimated the U.S. intelligence apparatus, and prompted a global manhunt for the world’s most wanted terrorist — Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis). Letts is the first new series regular to join the cast of Homeland for Season 3.

Much more so than with the inquiry into the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi that killed four people last year, there are serious questions that remain after the attack on Central Intelligence Agency headquarters that closed the second season of Showtime’s War on Terror drama. Does CIA security routinely let large vehicles full of explosives just drive onto the premises without searching them all the time, or is there a special exemption that makes that possible for events where large numbers of dignitaries descend on headquarters for events like a tribute to the late Vice President Walden? Did external security just get pulled so everyone could mourn Walden’s warmongering self properly so no one was left to man the gates or patrol the campus? How did everyone other than Carrie Mathison get convinced that Nicholas Brody was mentally healthy after almost a decade of captivity, even putting aside questions of his trustworthiness? How is there no security camera footage of Carrie and Brody sneaking out of the memorial service, and running around CIA headquarters like they’re teenagers at a house party? Hasn’t the CIA used some of that War on Terror money for secure cloud storage? Not to mention the question of what’s happening with those bunker busters Walden was trying to sell to Israel at the beginning of the second season, or the whole Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities that it seems like we’ve all forgotten about entirely while figuring out whether Carrie and Brody would emerge as the One True Pairing.

I’ll be very curious to see how this plays out, not just narratively, because of what it says on a larger level about Homeland‘s worldview. When the show started, it was unique because of its acknowledgement that the United States has created some of its own enemies, and that the decision to carry out a terrorist attack was highly personal, and was something that people could turn away from. Now, it seems to have moved in a different and more conventional direction, depicting terrorists as high-tech masterminds capable of executing highly complex Rube Goldberg device plots and producing enormous number of causalities on a regular basis. We’ve been there before, but I hope Homeland can find something new not just in switching from spy setups to Congressional inquiries, but in the show’s take on how those inquiries play out in the real world. Will Lockhart find conspiracies everywhere, and an administration determined to cover them up, essentially affirming the position Issa’s taken in the real world? Or will something more subtle and interesting happen?