I never know who’s going to sign up for my communications courses.
Last semester, I was pleasantly surprised when one of my former Los Angeles Times colleagues, an award-winning photojournalist, enrolled in my course on social media.
“I want to let you know that I’ve enjoyed the class tremendously, and I sure learned a lot…,” the student wrote to me after the course finished. “Thanks a million!” The pleasure was mine. In her case, connecting, re-connecting and deepening familial relations was a major goal for studying how to advance her grasp and mastery of social media. Others seek fulfillment of goals to make money, start a business or switch to a new career.
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Helping each student reach a goal is its own reward.
Besides professional social media managers, screenwriters and entertainment industry executives, I’ve had doctors, engineers and lawyers enroll in the course, which now includes membership in my alumni network. We gather with my Writing Boot Camp students and alumni from time to time for social meeting, mixing and networking.
Young and old adults alike enroll in classes, which often include Hollywood cast, crew and, sometimes, those considered by some to be screen legends, including an Oscar-winning makeup artist and the actress who served as model for the animated character Tinkerbell in Walt Disney’s 1953 classic Peter Pan. This year marks five years since I created the course, which I made to show why one’s self-interest drives successful social media.
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The social media courses run during a few months in wifi-ready classrooms on a campus near Bob Hope Airport. I coach writing, editing and marketing to students at Burbank Adult School, providing step-by-step instruction with my Writing Boot Camp, also in its fifth academic year.
My writing course features in-depth study of literary works, including poems, short stories and essays by Darwin, Rand, Kipling, Angelou and Bradbury and, of course, detailed analysis and feedback on student writing.
This fall, my media course returns in Burbank, Southern California’s Media City, with a new focus. Originally conceived as a workshop for predominantly self-employed artists in LA’s mid-Wilshire district, the 10-week course on social media functions as a media self-defense kit. I’ve re-formulated what was once a tutorial on essential ideas for general social media for branding, purposing and self-defense.
The Maximizing Social Media theme that rational social media is created, used and applied as the means to the end of one’s selfish pursuit of happiness remains. This means that students create, examine and discuss profiles, posts and campaigns on sites, apps and technology such as Tinder, Instagram and Snapchat as well as Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Quora and Facebook. I also instruct the class in the origins of each company and impetus for startup in addition to success and acquisition, so a company’s motives, potential conflicts of interest and record of privacy also get attention, from Microsoft, Lynda.com and LinkedIn to Comcast, NBC Universal and Snapchat, for instance. But it’s not a business class, so one’s personal and professional profile and development come first.
This is why I’ve come to appreciate social media as a tool for self-defense. Bearing in mind the privacy implications of any among today’s tech tools, which is an important caveat (Edward Snowden advises against using Facebook at all, for instance), media which is social in purpose and origin can buttress one’s values, arguments, body of work, reputation and philosophy. Reasons why this might become necessary are rapidly changing in today’s world, thanks to changes in technology, work and the culture. Today’s dominant or trending catastrophe, fact or news cycle can be tonight’s opportunity for advancement, management of expectation or aversion of unwanted attention. I’ll engage students in this new exercise for the first time this fall in Maximizing Social Media. (Get details and register online for my Maximizing Social Media and Writing Boot Camp courses here).
Writing Boot Camp returns, too. With emphasis on my seven-step writing process, the 10-week course affords opportunities for each student to think, formulate, re-think, finalize, detail, research, draft, edit and read aloud new pieces of writing. Then, the student gets feedback. It’s called boot camp for a reason, so I engage the student in a serious endeavor to think hard and for longer periods than many of today’s adults may be accustomed to and there’s enough practice, repetition and participation to undergird what’s learned and gained.
Students also read, break down and study excerpts, stories and great works of literature. Among the short stories, articles, essays, authors and poems past boot camp enrollees have evaluated for topic, theme, research and outline are Berton Braley, “The Lottery”, Charles Darwin, Invictus, Maya Angelou, The Early Ayn Rand, Rudyard Kipling, Leanita McClain, “The Last Leaf” by O. Henry, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and science fiction by Ray Bradbury (as well as some of my own unpublished short stories, blog posts and LA Times articles).
One of my recent boot camp “alumni” members, who enrolled and attended both of my courses, was employed by a Burbank studio as a talent scout. She recently announced on LinkedIn that she’s now a literary agent. Other past students have been published in poetry and story collections, do standup comedy and pitch pilots, movies and series to studios. Students have also been peace officers seeking to write clearer reports, lawyers, businessmen, immigrants studying English and entrepreneurs.
Next month’s course includes a new lesson integrating what I’ve learned from my 30 years of freelance writing. But, really, the whole Writing Boot Camp cashes in on that subject.
If these courses sound interesting, I invite readers to come to Southern California and attend the courses at the Henry Mingay campus near Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport. Class size is small and intimate. Tuition is low, thanks to Burbank Adult School, which pays for these courses entirely through the fees. Also, feel free to tell others and share this post, tag me on Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and spread the word. Classes accept waiting lists when capacity is reached and I’m happiest teaching to a full classroom, so if you’re unable to attend, help me fill each class.
Playwright Neil Simon’s hallmark intelligence, wit and, briefly, pathos remains on display in a revised version of Simon’s 1993 comedy, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, playing at the Garry Marshall Theatre (formerly the Falcon Theatre) in Burbank. The two-act play runs through April 22.
The setting is a New York City television writers’ room in the early 1950s, when a band of comedy writers, a secretary and a brash TV show host banter, clash and strive to tap what’s humorous about news, politics and culture amid a major media transition from radio-friendly routines to the onset of televised sports, variety and situational comedy. This is Neil Simon’s homage to early television figures such as Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Revised through a modern perspective by director Michael Shepperd, neurotic creatives try to please the blustery boss of a weekly 90-minute show. Though a recent Saturday night performance was a bit sluggish in the first act, and some of the acting was overdone, cast, crew and show come through.
You can tell from the caustic humor that this is an early 1990s take on the early 1950s. The 40-year difference lies in a few too many McCarthy jokes and flat lines about the deaths of Josef Stalin and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The basic narrative with young Neil Simon stand-in Lucas (Jason Grasl in his Garry Marshall Theatre debut) punctuates and frames the story about the strain of storytelling when making sharp jokes about Ibsen and Shakespeare was about to fall prey to the less literate post-war culture. Not that these writers for the fictional Max Prince Show put on high brow material. They don’t, which inevitably is part of the play’s point that writers are human and must deal with the culture, too. Laughter‘s funniest shtick mines this self-awareness, which goes to Neil Simon’s strength in portraying ordinary people making light of life’s indignities — enduring damage, digs and hardship — without making fun of what matters.
Like Simon’s Lost in Yonkers and his 1980s trilogy of coming of age-themed plays, Laughter on the 23rd Floor recreates artistic struggle with a wistful longing that wrestles with the Fifties’ deficiencies, too. Neil Simon is a master storyteller. Here, too, he sets forth arcs of loss and love in life and work. With a standout performance from understudy Jason Weiss (also in his Garry Marshall Theatre debut), filling in for Jeff Campanella as hypochondriac Ira, a pivotal role that helps Pat Towne bring the show to a climax as TV host Max Prince, the 130-seat Garry Marshall Theatre delivers with Laughter on the 23rd Floor, which marks the final production in its four-play inaugural season.
Tickets, starting at $45, are available by calling (818) 955-8101 or visiting GarryMarshallTheatre.org
The performance-driven Driving Miss Daisy opened this weekend at Burbank, California’s Colony Theatre at Burbank Town Center. It’s been 30 years since playwright Alfred Uhry brought this quietly elegant and understated work to New York City and slightly less since this piece in his Atlanta trilogy won literature’s Pulitzer Prize. Like a play from another racially-themed city trilogy, August Wilson’s Pittsburgh-based Fences, Driving Miss Daisy is a simply structured slice of life. So, don’t expect something other than a display of naturalism.
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With infectiously transitional pop music such as songs performed by Doris Day and Burl Ives, and Genetra Tull’s finely detailed, creatively applied scenic design for a small stage, the setting for this story about a wealthy white woman in the South and her black driver begins neatly in the late Forties. These assets become liabilities as the sparse design barely changes — and the music’s occasionally too obscure or out of order — which fails to mark the passage of time. The sense of time passing is crucial to Driving Miss Daisy‘s success.
This is because the bond between Daisy (Donna Mills, Knots Landing) and chauffeur Hoke (Arthur Richardson) evolves organically. Daisy is a prickly old lady of 72 years old and, as a pre-civil rights era Southern Negro, Hoke is a second-class citizen. As in the outstanding and undeservedly maligned 1989 motion picture, which won Oscar’s Best Picture award, their bond builds at the patronage of her son and his employer, Boolie, played here with precision, subtlety and skill by James Leo Ryan.
Ms. Mills is an accomplished actress and her acting has never been better. Playing down her character’s fear and narrow-mindedness without diluting either, Mills modulates and intones just exactly to the right extent. She’s softer but no less guarded and difficult as the aging Jew in Georgia. Mills knows when to let a co-star take the lead in this uniquely drawn character arc. She delivers a biting look, she rubs her knees, she visits her late husband’s grave and, always, the veteran actress leaves room for the wider perspective.
Uhry’s hardy tale of three distinctive lives revolves around the tension, separatism and distance of mid-20th century undercurrents of race, sex, age, ethnicity and other factors. In this sense, Richardson’s Hoke, too, well played by the actor, thinks about his own wants and worth and rightly acts in his own interest. Hoke, who speaks of having wrestled hogs north of Macon, prejudges people, too, gently chastising his boss for choosing not to have kids and constantly referring to the family’s being Jewish. “You Jews,” the chauffeur declares, as the times, tales and subcultures both change and, in some ways, remain the same. But, Richardson, too, plays perfectly against his co-star, specifically Ms. Mills’ somewhat volatile Miss Daisy. His Hoke cautiously checks in the rear-view mirror, expresses an intention to work, admits to a deficiency and, watchfully, checks and indulges his pride as meticulously as he polishes the car.
Ryan’s performance as Boolie adds depth to both Hoke and Miss Daisy while offering a certain context on how the white, male, Jewish businessman advances progress through his own achievement. Indeed, Boolie’s business success underwrites what drives his mother, Miss Daisy, and his employee, Hoke, even as lynching, subservience and Martin Luther King put the strife and struggle for individual rights front and center. That I saw this play on the day a church was attacked almost 59 years to the date that a temple was bombed — an attack which serves as a plot point — underscores the play’s relevance. Driving Miss Daisy‘s contrast of harmony amid agony is at once truthful, thoughtful and reassuring.
This production, directed by Heather Provost and scheduled to run at the Colony Theatre through December 10, can build on this theme with greater period detail in music and staging, if not necessarily its three performances, which were, this opening weekend, extremely well done.
This week alone, there’s been an editorial purge at the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice announced an end to its print publication and fan favorite and self-proclaimed feminist filmmaker Joss Whedon was arguably smeared by an essay written by his ex-wife in the pages of … the San Francisco Chronicle, a trending tidbit which caused his online fan group to totally disband within hours of publication. With today’s fast-moving media developments, including the President’s Tweets, Facebook’s new video platform and LinkedIn under Microsoft, being media savvy requires study and contemplation.
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Balancing, integrating and making the best of today’s media is the focus of my fall social media course. Lessons include: fundamental features, safeguarding and managing your reputation, planning for the long term across multiple platforms, pitfalls and putting visuals into a proper context. We work through several different scenarios and, using past and current examples, role-play and practice various drills. The premise is producing media in one’s self-interest.
The 10-week course, Maximizing Social Media, runs from 6PM, Monday, September 11th through November 13th at Burbank Adult School’s San Fernando Valley campus near Bob Hope Airport. Besides basic tutorials, visual presentations, demonstrations of various sites, apps, tools and content, every student gets an opportunity to test, examine and evaluate his social media presence and production. Space is limited (and last semester’s waiting list was long), however, so it’s best to register early to reserve a seat in class.
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My writing course tends to fill up, too, and I’m planning to invite more published authors as guest lecturers this fall. Generally, Writing Boot Camp includes adult students that write for work and as screenwriters — one writer in this summer’s class came in with what he described as writer’s block and now reports on my ‘alumni’ Facebook page that he’s writing and outlining a new movie script — studio script readers, actors, comedians, studio executives, talent scouts, managers and agents as well as coaches, instructors, published authors and others.
The series is an immersion in the writing process as a progression in six key steps. Students read their work aloud in an analytical, encouraging and purposeful class. As the instructor, I read and examine each student’s writing, offering notes, suggestions and feedback. Additionally, each student who completes my 10-week Writing Boot Camp earns admission to my closed writing group on Facebook, a networking and productivity center for tips and leads on publishing and production and literary, entertainment industry and other opportunities, resources and related events such as the LA Times Festival of Books and TCM Classic Film Festival.
Maximizing Social Media is a relaxed, exhaustive series covering essential media brand management. Lessons include how to foster an enduring social network. Every class features visual display or demonstration, as well as opportunities for guided instruction and screenshots. Register online for Maximizing Social Media here. The 10-part Writing Boot Camp takes place this fall at the same campus.
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I never know who’s going to sign up for my communications courses.
The setting is a New York City television writers’ room in the early 1950s, when a band of comedy writers, a secretary and a brash TV show host banter, clash and strive to tap what’s humorous about news, politics and culture amid a major media transition from radio-friendly routines to the onset of televised sports, variety and situational comedy. This is Neil Simon’s homage to early television figures such as Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Revised through a modern perspective by director Michael Shepperd, neurotic creatives try to please the blustery boss of a weekly 90-minute show. Though a recent Saturday night performance was a bit sluggish in the first act, and some of the acting was overdone, cast, crew and show come through.
You can tell from the caustic humor that this is an early 1990s take on the early 1950s. The 40-year difference lies in a few too many McCarthy jokes and flat lines about the deaths of Josef Stalin and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The basic narrative with young Neil Simon stand-in Lucas (Jason Grasl in his Garry Marshall Theatre debut) punctuates and frames the story about the strain of storytelling when making sharp jokes about Ibsen and Shakespeare was about to fall prey to the less literate post-war culture. Not that these writers for the fictional Max Prince Show put on high brow material. They don’t, which inevitably is part of the play’s point that writers are human and must deal with the culture, too. Laughter‘s funniest shtick mines this self-awareness, which goes to Neil Simon’s strength in portraying ordinary people making light of life’s indignities — enduring damage, digs and hardship — without making fun of what matters.
