ACCOUNTABILITY.

What you may have not realized, and might be realizing following this blog, is that mounting a film or TV production takes a lot of time. Once I finished the first draft of the pilot script back in November, Todd and I began to organize this production. It took us about three months to get together the production for the trailer, and since March we've been working 60-hour weeks to push the series ever forward, closer and closer to your TVs. And that's just how it goes. We make partnerships, and sometimes they pan out and other times, they fall through. And while this might seem like it would be frustrating, I love it.

While we collectively wait, I'm reading and refining, adding better ideas when they arrive and subtracting out elements that don't fit with the better ideas. Once, I have a good plan for a story and characters, scripting a first draft is easy. I can write about 50 good pages a week (that's an hour-long episode), but it's those months afterward where I'm making small changes that I discover whether or not the story is really interesting enough to send out there. At this point, I've read the pilot hundreds of times. I have to tell you, I'm still as excited about it as I was when I first typed 'End of Episode 1' on the bottom of the last page.

Another benefit to the wait, is that Todd and I have been trying to communicate with you as best as we could, to make sure that we were all on the same page. It's given us time to really take a big-picture look at the future. Last week, I mentioned that we'd started to realize that the series (as important as we believe it will be) needs to exist within something larger. I've mentioned more than once that I don't come from an American filmmaking tradition, my career started and developed overseas in markets that have little to do with the broader American market. As much as I love 'Lost' or 'Battlestar Galactica' or 'The Shield', these shows don't come out of a system that caters to unique communities like ours.

And that's a problem. I've been thinking a lot about 'Big Love' over the past few months, because (and I don't want to get into the controversy, you've heard enough about that) I think that it's fairly representative of how unique communities get abused by the Hollywood system. This might get a little weird, so follow with me to the end.

'Big Love' isn't an organic grassroots expression of the polygamist community's desire to tell their own story to the American people. It's a product of boardroom decisions made in Los Angeles, it's a story crafted by 'outsiders' to be told to other 'outsiders' and it isn't accountable (apparently) to the community that it discusses. Much less the greater community of Mormons that are essentially collateral damage in LA's wholesale exploitation of the polygamist community. And I'm sure that HBO sends researchers to fact-check, and that they think they're doing good and accurate work (their PR statements always point this out) but, at the end of the day, nobody involved in the production really comes from that community, and their interest is having a successful HBO show, not telling the story of a 150-member community.

Last week, a script that I wrote back in 2007 for an established Norwegian director was rejected (again) by the Norwegian Film Fund. It's a great script good characters and drama; it has great actors attached; and, it already has a distributor attached that's willing to put the film into cinemas. But, it's not getting made because, as the film board told my partners, 'The film wasn't Norwegian enough.' And that's probably because I wrote it, and I've only been to Oslo once for a weekend. Fair enough, right? At the end of the day, I'm not part of that community and I'm not interested in being part of that community. I just took (and expertly completed) a writing job.

I just want to explain that I'm looking at this series (and LDS film, or even Utah film) from a perspective that lends itself to really considering how my story fits into the greater context of what is going on artistically in our community. I have this special story that I've written about where I come from, and I know that many of you have amazing stories that need to be told about our global/local community. And I know that something has to be done to foster the development of these stories. Todd and I don't want outsiders trying to tell our stories...

That said, a partner of ours made an interesting introduction this week. And Todd and I have started to organize something that I hope will answer some of these problems. And, like I said last week, it isn't something that's going to appear overnight. But it's coming...