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Message

Subject: Re: Attn: JMS, Re: frustration?
Date: 15 Aug 2002 06:49:16 GMT
From: jmsatb5@aol.com (Jms at B5)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated

>Do you ever get frustrated or discouraged over the seemingly never ending
>hurdles of putting out a quality TV series with a memory and which builds
>upon
>itself? How do you deal with it?

I don't.  Some days I just throw up my hands (or my lunch) and walk out of the
building and swear I'm getting out of TeeVee once and for all.  On one hand
it's a terrific business to be in...on the other hand, it's soul-killing if you
want to do anything other than walk the middle of the road.  More than once,
I've had to just go right to the wall, to say it's either this way or I
walk...and on many occasions, I've ended up doing just that, walking, because I
have only a few rules when I work, and the first one is "I never bluff.  Ever."

There are days -- lots of them -- when it's just a heartbreaker of a
profession.  But at the same time I have to keep it in perspective: I'm not
likely to get caught in a mine shaft collapse, or get hit by a falling house
frame, or endure the many hardships that people every day in far more important
jobs -- teaching, carpenting, construction -- the jobs that keep this country
moving ahead, have to endure.  It's all subcutaneous, neural, emotional,
creative, professional...but in ways that are designed to nibble away your
humanity and your compassion, to lead you to excess and arrogance and
indulgence.

There are days it drives me totally batshit.

But I tell stories, it's what I do, and television provides the biggest canvas
in human history, and I have no intention surrendering the field to the
visigoths.

 jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2002 by synthetic worlds, ltd., 
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine 
and don't send me story ideas)