Development and Staffing Mandates or Dog Whistles?

Have a version of these mandates been said to you?

I might get in trouble for posting this. Since this Substack is about my mental health, I’d be remiss not to talk about some of the mandates and requests from executives and producers that have made me do a double-take. Below is a mix of staffing and development mandates.

• “We’re really into white men with a gun.”

• “Need a lower-level Gen Z who’s a standout.”

• “We like muscular writing.”

• “People who have an ‘Americana’ tone and can write gritty and muscular in an elevated way.”

• “We’re looking for a fresh voice.”

• “Filming in Korea might be too exotic for our audiences; exotic is Spain or France.”

• “Male leads are big right now.”

If any of these make you tilt your head a little and say, “Huh,” just know I felt the same way. Sometimes I wonder whether these conversations sound different depending on who's in the room. Hmmmmm. Ageist, gendered, and racial undertones aside, my strategy has always been to lead with your passion for a project. If it happens to be something the market wants to buy or a showrunner wants to read for staffing, then great. Yes, timing matters, and sometimes your project or sample arrives at exactly the right moment, or you need to withhold it because it isn’t considered “Americana” enough. But I don’t believe in chasing the market. By the time you write something specifically for the market, they’ll have already moved on to the next thing. Doing quality work is what matters.

On top of that, I feel like saying some of these mandates out loud shines a light on the weight and value we give them, which, in my mind, is none. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Sure, they reflect the more conservative moment we’re in. But they’re just word salad to me, something I have to take with a grain of salt and a sense of amusement.

And frankly, after the recent parasitic diarrhea outbreaks linked to lettuce, I trust a questionable Caesar salad about as much as I trust Hollywood trend mandates.

What questionable mandates have you heard recently?

Resource

Today’s resource is a writing app/site designed for fiction writers. I have only used the free version to get prompts to free write to. Someone I met at Martha’s Vineyard created the app, and I thought I’d pass along.

https://app.writewhipsmart.com/

See you guys next month.