Category Archives: Marketing

Not My Kids

by Harry Dunn

The agony and the ecstasy of one man’s experience working in the TV writing biz. 1,449 words. Illustration by Mark Fearing.


There are many dreaded words a father can hear from their child. “Dad, I wrecked the car.” “Dad, I’m in a Tijuana jail.” 8547D799-C475-4659-B563-17A9A283F8B3“Dad, the pee stick has a plus sign.”

But none of those words could ever compare to the sheer horror of hearing a child of mine say, “Dad, I want to work in showbiz.”

Perhaps I should elaborate…

I am a husband and father of three kids. My career has been spent bouncing back and forth between life as a writer and life producing promos for a TV network. It’s been an occasionally pleasant but also frequently demoralizing. The highs are way too high and the lows are way too low. It’s career crack. Addicting, unhealthy and way too much suffering has to incur before receiving those rare tastes of joy. All those years of stories that started out with, "There’s a producer who seems to like my script…” “A big agent is going to read my script this weekend, I hope…” “The producer said if I give him a free option, he’ll try to sell it…" and then inevitably end with, "I haven’t heard back from him/her yet."

This is a profession I’ve regretted pursuing for a lot of years. And a profession I have adamantly tried to steer my children away from pursuing. You want your children to be both successful and happy, not just getting by and miserable. So I tell them my war stories to make it easy for them to reach their own conclusions.

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Day And Date

by Steven Mallas

A studio’s marketing maven is on a quest to destroy the distribution windows. 2,880 words. Illustration by Mark Fearing.


“It’ll never fly.”

“You’re not listening to me,” Kathleen Berg pleaded with him. A5B3E0F0-C9C6-486D-B9BF-98B356EAA0EB“We’ve got to be the first media conglomerate to do this. We’ll not only make history, but we’ll set a trend.”

That sounded incongruous; it didn’t matter if they set a trend or not, only that it was successful.

“Day and date will never ever work. Give it up. I’m getting tired of having this conversation with you, day in and day out! Out!”

Mentally crestfallen, Kathleen rose from the chair and left the executive’s office. The idiots would never learn. She’d have to convince them. Somehow.

As she walked away, the executive – another in a long line she’d spoken to about the subject — admired the shape of the lower half of her body in the snug power skirt.

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Straight To Series
Part Two

by Richard Natale

TV sitcoms survive on babies, weddings and controversies – in that order. 1,749 words. Part One. Illustration by John Donald Carlucci.


The ballyhooed nationwide talent search for a Muslim-American actress to play the lead in Alisha Loves Fred concluded with the selection of Chandra Parva, a stage-trained ingenue whose TV worked consisted mostly of Law & Order and Criminal Minds roles as the girlfriend or wife of suspected terrorists.

The network’s marketing guru Nina made certain that her staff touted Chandra’s American background. Born and raised in Iowa, even a member of the 4H Club, Chandra was not too dark or light complexioned, and she possessed just the right amount of spunk to make her interesting but not threatening. Still, it wasn’t sufficient to quell the Twitter-sphere where the most popular deprecation called her “a honky in a hijab.”

Casting for Fred narrowed down to the minor country music singer Blake Cummings, a Bakersfield native and bland enough Christian to pass muster. Again, his selection was trashed on social media.

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Straight To Series
Part One

by Richard Natale

This controversial sitcom is in trouble and network execs are in crisis mode. 1,953 words. Part Two. Illustration by John Donald Carlucci.


The first thing they agreed on in the programming meeting was that Alisha Loves Fred, a proposed sitcom about the romance between a Muslim feminist and an Evangelical redneck, was a horrendous concept. The second thing they agreed on was to take it straight to series. A full season’s commitment without a pilot.

As the senior executives shuffled out of the conference room, JoJo Travis, the network’s programming president, JoJo arrived back at her office, reached into her desk’s side drawer, popped a Xanax and washed it down with a shot of whiskey, hoping to quell her immediate buyers’ remorse. Then she whispered to her assistant, “Tell Nina I need to change my quote in the announcement release. It sounds too much like the one I made when we were dealing with the ‘Asian situation’.”

Nina Torkay, the marketing Executive VP, had worked at the network long enough to predict a wreck before the train had even left the station. She understood the politics behind this particular decision but the release announcing the series was ready to go. That JoJo would delay it by fussing with her quote and possibly jeopardizing the story leaking to the trades – for which Nina would be blamed, of course – was merely another glamorous perk of her profession choice.

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Boffo
Part Two

by Daniel M. Kimmel

The film marketer learns the secret science behind box office fever. 1,780 words. Part One. Illustration by John Donald Carlucci.


The rumpled old man looked peeved, as if awakened from a particularly pleasant dream. Dr. Burton Hollister cleared his throat ink front of his colleague Double Helix president Linda Balsamo and their hoped-for client Excelsior Studios SVP of Marketing Sy Mishkin, and went into what was clearly a rehearsed pitch.

“Double Helix has discovered a way to link memes and microbes. We can literally infect people with ideas without their knowing it, making them think their actions are completely self-motivated.”

Linda beamed with approval. “You understand what that means, Sy?”

Mishkin was beginning to think not only had he wasted his morning, but perhaps he ought to pack up his belongings and freshen up his résumé. But, in for a penny, in for a pound.

“I’m afraid not, Linda.”

What she did next surprised him. She pulled out her cell phone and glanced at the screen. “It’s been ten minutes since we’ve come into the office. Tell me, Sy, how do you feel about Excelsior Studios going into business with Double Helix now?”

That’s it. He’d wasted enough time on this. “I think it’s a complete waste…” the studio’s SVP of Marketing paused as he considered how he really felt. Then he completed the sentence. “…of time talking any further about it. Of course we want to do business with you.”

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Boffo
Part One

by Daniel M. Kimmel

The about-to-be-fired movie marketer needs a Hail Mary but finds Typhoid Mary. 1,503 words. Part Two. Illustration by John Donald Carlucci.


Sy Mishkin threw down The Hollywood Reporter in disgust. His name had appeared nowhere in the stories in the trades about how Excelsior Studios had just released the bomb of the year. Costing $150 million to produce, Teen Pirate had everything going for it: a hot young star, a script based on a best-selling television series, and cross-genre appeal as the modern-day pirate faces both zombies and vampires. The reviews on RottenTomatoes.com had been terrible — only 18% Fresh compared with 82% Rotten — but who cared? This was a project that should have been critic-proof. Instead, as the old Hollywood joke put it, audiences stayed away in droves.

Mishkan, at 45, was the Senior Vice President of Marketing for Excelsior and he had been through the mill many times. When a film was a success, it was because of the vision of the director or because the star could open a movie at number one at the box office. When it failed, the talent might take some of the blame, but usually they’d live to fight – or, at least, have stunt doubles or CGI special effects do it – another day. To keep the stockholders satisfied that the drop in price was only temporary, one or more of the suits would have to pay.

Often it was the head of the studio, who would fall on his or her sword for having greenlit a project that turned out to be a turkey. However the new CEO of Excelsior had just assumed his job and Teen Pirate had been the “passion project” of his predecessor. Since that guy already vacated his office, with his name removed from every piece of tangible property at the studio including his parking space, there was nothing more anybody could do to punish him. Indeed, his $20 million golden parachute had already cleared his bank account.

So Mishkin feared the blame would fall on himself for failing to come up with a brilliant marketing campaign that should have made Teen Pirate the must-see movie of the year or, at the very least, last weekend. The way Mishkin saw it, he had only two options. He could start clearing out his office and letting people know that the debacle was due to the underlings he had inherited. Or he could come up with such a brilliant campaign for the the next release so he would be deemed the hero who had pulled the studio back from the brink.

Sitting in his third office in ten years, he decided he liked going to a job where he no longer had to program his GPS to find a route to work. He was going to stay.

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The Hard R
Part Two

by Gordy Grundy

The movie marketer needs to know who misspelled the mega-producer’s name. 1,839 words. Part One. Illustration by Mark Fearing.


Normandy was frosty. "Do I have to worry about the deadline?" she snipped to Buzz.

"Have you ever?" he smiled and snagged the passing waitress. "Can you bring us some more wasabi? My friend likes it hot. Thanks."

They were sitting at Katsu-Ya near the Burbank border of Studio City. The restaurant was Normandy’s favorite because it was the hot cool spot for all the studio marketing and publicity elite.

"Normandy. I want you to go back to the office and tell your boss that this misspelled sample is a gift that may grow in value, like a misprinted stamp or a miscast coin. Think Sotheby’s. The Smithsonian. Film history. Fore Score. One of a kind."

She smiled at that. "Do I get one, too?"

"Absolutely not. I think I’ll send you to the Rihanna concert instead." Her eyebrows twitched and she began to soften. An extra ticket would give her a sweet advantage in the socially competitive marketing department at the studio.

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The Hard R
Part One

by Gordy Grundy

Movie marketing is hard enough without misspelling the mega-producer’s name. 1,777 words. Part Two tomorrow. Illustration by Mark Fearing.


The phone on Buzz’s desk beeped twice. He picked up the receiver and punched the blinking light and it beeped again. The receptionist said, "Normandy on Line Five."

Buzz replied, "Thanks, Stinky." After the shenanigans of the Valentine’s Day office party, everyone in the company now lovingly called her Stinky.

He punched Line Five and greeted Normandy with an excitement that bordered on the romantic. Her reply was unusually tense and chilly. He caught the drift immediately.

"It’s Bruckheimer," she said, "Brrrr-uckheimer." This was out of the norm. She was his most important client and he was extremely sensitive to her needs, attentions and moods.

"Brrrr-uckheimer. Huh?" he puzzled.

"Ginger just got back from CinemaCon. She looked at the cap and said, ‘Brrrr-uckheimer.’ I said it was a sample. She asked who made it and I said you’re fixing it." Her last three words were pointed.

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