a portrait of the geek as young editorialist
People who work in the entertainment industry use scripts, shooting schedules, and rewrite pages as scrap paper the same way normal people use napkins, legal pads, page-a-day calendars and post-its.
On TNG, we'd frequently go to our dressing rooms between scenes and find a small stack of envelopes inside, containing the blue pages, then the pink pages that revised those blue pages, and then the yellow, goldenrod and green pages that revised all of those. It got to be so silly, I stopped trying to keep my script updated from hour to hour, and collected a huge pile of rewrites in the corner the way I collect piles of junk mail on the kitchen table today.
I had this idea when I was 14, which I was convinced would make me a bazillion dollars, save the planet, and make fans happy as crap: stack up about 200 pages of rewrites and shooting schedules, dip one end in latex, and cut them up into notepads to sell in the company store to tourists. I thought people would love having a bit of their favorite show, which was also a useful addition to the home or office. Sadly, my idea was shot down by someone in the production office, who was certain that Paramount would never allow that material to be sold like that. I'm still trying to make my first million dollars.
However, I was undaunted by The Man, and continued to use pages from scripts and shooting schedules and stuff as scrap paper, the way normal people use . . . well, you probably read the first paragraph, so you know. (I have too many GURPS characters to count, written down on the backs of old rewrites, and the other day I found a page of a TNG script I'd folded into a bookmark, sealed with a KROQ sticker.)
When I was a kid, I really liked the political cartoons in the paper, and even though I couldn't draw to save my life, I came up with a few cartoons of my own, and I pinned them up on the bulletin board in the entry way between stages 8 and 9.
I thought they'd been lost forever, but for some reason my mom saved a bunch of them from being sent to the great shredder in the sky.
Here's an original "What A Life!" that I wrote and drew in 1989. Though I was just a few weeks into my seventeenth year, I was already a media critic, it seems.
(Click image to embiggen)
You may notice that this has a copyright for something called "STDINK." I wish I could remember what that meant, but it's lost to some memory wormhole somewhere. You may also notice that it is on the back of a blue page. What's on the other side? Take a look:
It's some sort of production report from the episode Who Watches the Watchers? which I was not in, explaining why I can't recall a single thing about shooting it.
