March 15 Derek

Tina Fey: go with the bran muffin on the white plate

Posted in Development |  Comments

First, Tina Fey needs to write more. Both of her New Yorker articles have been terrific. Second, her latest New Yorker piece had a great nugget on how producing is about discouraging creativity:

You may have an occasion where the script calls for a bran muffin on a white plate, and people from the props department show up with a bran cake in the shape of Santa Claus sitting on a silver platter that says “Welcome to Denmark” on it. “We just thought it would be funny”, they say. And you have to find a polite way to explain that the character is Jewish, so her eating Santa’s face might have negative connotations, and the silver tray, while beautiful, is creating a weird glare on camera, and maybe let’s just go with the brain muffin on the white plate.

It’s easy to get absorbed in code and build something that’s technically awesome yet far more than you need. In other words, that Redis-backed, OpenID-compatible, audible capatcha, two-factor identification login system idea of mine is creative, but wouldn’t a session cookie and that old-school relational database my grandpa talked about work for now?

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