Version 1.0. | Go to Version 2.0
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Just For the Record...
... It'd be real cool if Hawaii had its own telenovela-style soap opera, a limited-run (say, one to six months) melodrama airing every weekday.
I'd been thinking about this a lot for the past week, since a friend of mine told me that Telemundo is training writers to create telenovelas for the U.S. market. I don't speak Spanish but it's the kind of pop culture writing challenge that trips my trigger and makes me wonder what else is possible. And as I have no plans to leave Hawaii anytime in the next decade or so, I began wondering if a telenovela would work here on Oahu. There are a lot of local channels - most notably, OC16 and KIKU - but would any of them be able to finance or wish to air a daily soap? What kind of budget would be involved? And what exactly would the story be about?
If I had my druthers, it'd be set in Waikiki and involve the different cultures that interact there. And there'd be a lot of sex and violence and unexpected plot twists. And ghosts. And Japanese pop idols.
It isn't that I want to get into screenwriting - I'm happy right now splitting my writing time between freelance work, this blog, and my obscure little hypertexts - but it just would seem fun to write by the seat of your pants and tell an elaborate story with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
One of the things that most impress me about 24 is that the writers of the show openly admitted that they don't always know what's going on from week to week, that they make it up as they go along. (Which still doesn't forgive the mountain lion, but what the heck.) The French comics creator Enki Bilal has also said he does something similar, taking a bunch of different plot elements and hoping they all tie together meaningfully in the end. (The first part of the Nikopol Trilogy is a striking example of this method.)
In a sense, this is one of the inimitable joys of serialized writing: to force yourself into challenges, to create situations that you can't back out of (because the previous installments have already aired or been published), and to create something beautiful and surprising out of it. Growing your own lemons before making your own lemonade.
So, anyone willing to pony up the bucks for a Hawaiian telenovela? The Young and the Kamaina? The Hapa and the Beautiful? Passions on Kuhio? (Sorry, Wahine Trouble is already taken.)
Anybody who wants to finance such a harebrained scheme drop me a line.
I'll be holding my breath.
I'd been thinking about this a lot for the past week, since a friend of mine told me that Telemundo is training writers to create telenovelas for the U.S. market. I don't speak Spanish but it's the kind of pop culture writing challenge that trips my trigger and makes me wonder what else is possible. And as I have no plans to leave Hawaii anytime in the next decade or so, I began wondering if a telenovela would work here on Oahu. There are a lot of local channels - most notably, OC16 and KIKU - but would any of them be able to finance or wish to air a daily soap? What kind of budget would be involved? And what exactly would the story be about?
If I had my druthers, it'd be set in Waikiki and involve the different cultures that interact there. And there'd be a lot of sex and violence and unexpected plot twists. And ghosts. And Japanese pop idols.
It isn't that I want to get into screenwriting - I'm happy right now splitting my writing time between freelance work, this blog, and my obscure little hypertexts - but it just would seem fun to write by the seat of your pants and tell an elaborate story with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
One of the things that most impress me about 24 is that the writers of the show openly admitted that they don't always know what's going on from week to week, that they make it up as they go along. (Which still doesn't forgive the mountain lion, but what the heck.) The French comics creator Enki Bilal has also said he does something similar, taking a bunch of different plot elements and hoping they all tie together meaningfully in the end. (The first part of the Nikopol Trilogy is a striking example of this method.)
In a sense, this is one of the inimitable joys of serialized writing: to force yourself into challenges, to create situations that you can't back out of (because the previous installments have already aired or been published), and to create something beautiful and surprising out of it. Growing your own lemons before making your own lemonade.
So, anyone willing to pony up the bucks for a Hawaiian telenovela? The Young and the Kamaina? The Hapa and the Beautiful? Passions on Kuhio? (Sorry, Wahine Trouble is already taken.)
Anybody who wants to finance such a harebrained scheme drop me a line.
I'll be holding my breath.
