Hey, it’s Michael Jamin. So a little about me. I’m a TV writer. I’ve been a TV writer for about 25 years. These are some of the shows I’ve written on. Hey, there’s King of the Hill. There’s Beavis and Butt-Head. There’s Wilfred. There’s more. Okay. You can look around me. When the pandemic hit, Hollywood shut down. So I couldn’t write on a show. I couldn’t even pitch a show. I couldn’t sell a show because all the executives are like, “Get away from me. I don’t want to. Get.” You know? So, we were done.
I have a friend, Phil, and he had been hounding me for years to put together a course because I used to help him. He was an aspiring writer and he’d give me a script and I’d give him notes and I’d kind of teach him everything that I know. This went on for months and months. We’d go back and forth. I always had an excuse not to do this, but when the pandemic hit, I really had no excuse. I was like, okay. I put together a course.
Phil went to film school. He didn’t learn any of this in film school. I don’t know why. I don’t know why they’re not teaching them this. Maybe they just don’t know. Whatever. So this is the course I teach and I hope my little short videos have been helpful. The gold is really behind the paywall. The gold is really how to break a story. How to take an idea that you have and really know where the beats of your idea go, because you just, “Okay, I have an idea, but is that the beginning? Is that the end? I don’t really know.” You’re not supposed to know. I didn’t know when I first started.
I remember getting on my first job, Just Shoot Me! I don’t know. All of it was over my head. It was like a miracle. It was like a magic trick when the Showrunner was breaking this story on the wall and telling everybody, okay, this beat goes here, this… I was like, how do you know all this stuff? It really took years and years to learn it, but it’s so important, especially when you’re writing your own. I don’t care if you’re writing a movie or pilot or just a spec script to get on a show. It has to be broken correctly. It just has to be.
I think right now, I’m not surprised if you’re not flailing around, because I don’t know how you’d be expected to know this without having someone teach it to you. Even right now, the students who go through my course, one thing that I hear over and over again is, “I took your course. I thought my screenplay was good until I took your course, and now I know it’s not as good as I thought it was. Not only do I know what the problems are, but I know how to fix them.” I’m hearing that a lot. It’s, “Oh, my script is so much better now than I took the class,” because you’re not expected to know this stuff.
So don’t feel bad. If you want to learn more, just click this link and sign up. I’d love to see you there. Good luck.
