I first learned what an idiot Stephen was when I worked with him on a TGS story. It was the season 3 finale I think, where Brooklyn returns to the future. I wasn't originally supposed to work on it, but deadline approached and I had a lot of reasons to want to . Mmy story, "Ruby Eyes" had preceded it, and I wanted some of the content of that to carry over, plus I wanted to do the Brooklyn/Sata reunion scene, and all the Isaac Payne stuff, since I was the one that had come up with his character arc and first written him in season 2. IThere wa sa third writer as well, I think it was Alan was also on board.
Me and Alan get psyched about ti all, write it, and get our parts in. Stephen doesn't. For WEEKS. and WEEKS. Finally, he gets his part in, days before the story is supposed to go out.
AMongst other thigns, he had Brooklyn fighting a flying fire extinguisher in the rookery, making bad rhymes like "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the Payne", ripped off a scene line for line from the movie "Hook" (Nothing wrong homaging dialouge snippets, but this was an entire scene.) And he also made a Fat Albert reference, which nobody understood, and really, I don't see Brooklyn as the type to even know what Fat Albert is, let alone reference it. And as I recall, Stephen gave both me and Alan the advice of "Show the readers, don't tell them, whats going on". Huh wha?
Those are just the horrors I remember off the top of my head. Me and Alan were aghast, so we hurriedly edited and rewrote the story as best and fast as we could. There wasn't time to change everything, but we got rid of the most offending stuff and had a more or less proper version ready to go. (The "director's cut" still exists somewhere, and I've always meant to go back and fix it completely, but eh well...)
The episode went out as Stephen's version, cause Beth felt that was fairer.
The very first comment on the story was that it had a whole bunch of stuff that didn't seem to fit the content of the story properly, by Joxter I believe, and the guy proceeds to go through and review the entire story, and like hates every one of Stephen's parts. (I miss that guy, whatever happened to him? He like moved to Australia or something, right?) And Stephen immediatley declares, "I'm mighty suspicious of someone posting such an in depth and negative review of this story when they've never posted before! " By which I'm pretty sure Stephen was implying that Joxter was me or Alan. Nevermind the fact that the guy had been posting for like 6 months or a year and had done several reviews in the past.
Joxter points this out, and then Stephen is like "Well uh, there's been a person who has been annonymously emailing the staff saying bad stuff and I thought you might be them." Which is of course a really lousy cover for "Well, I thought you were Robby or Alan".
And of course, after that there were breakdowns for the next season of main TGS, when Stephen's idiocy came full front. I managed to shoot down all of his ideas and keep most of mine in place, but I'm pretty sure its Stephen specifically that burned me out on TGS as early as I did.
Oh, and Stephen's favorite movie ever is My Neighbor Totoro. Sure, its got a cute sequence or two in it, and it has all the typical Miyazaki standards of quality where the actual look of the thing is concerned, but its the most boring non threatening inconsequential movie ever. I mean, its even boring in fast forward!
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Me and Alan get psyched about ti all, write it, and get our parts in. Stephen doesn't. For WEEKS. and WEEKS. Finally, he gets his part in, days before the story is supposed to go out.
AMongst other thigns, he had Brooklyn fighting a flying fire extinguisher in the rookery, making bad rhymes like "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the Payne", ripped off a scene line for line from the movie "Hook" (Nothing wrong homaging dialouge snippets, but this was an entire scene.) And he also made a Fat Albert reference, which nobody understood, and really, I don't see Brooklyn as the type to even know what Fat Albert is, let alone reference it. And as I recall, Stephen gave both me and Alan the advice of "Show the readers, don't tell them, whats going on". Huh wha?
Those are just the horrors I remember off the top of my head. Me and Alan were aghast, so we hurriedly edited and rewrote the story as best and fast as we could. There wasn't time to change everything, but we got rid of the most offending stuff and had a more or less proper version ready to go. (The "director's cut" still exists somewhere, and I've always meant to go back and fix it completely, but eh well...)
The episode went out as Stephen's version, cause Beth felt that was fairer.
The very first comment on the story was that it had a whole bunch of stuff that didn't seem to fit the content of the story properly, by Joxter I believe, and the guy proceeds to go through and review the entire story, and like hates every one of Stephen's parts. (I miss that guy, whatever happened to him? He like moved to Australia or something, right?) And Stephen immediatley declares, "I'm mighty suspicious of someone posting such an in depth and negative review of this story when they've never posted before! " By which I'm pretty sure Stephen was implying that Joxter was me or Alan. Nevermind the fact that the guy had been posting for like 6 months or a year and had done several reviews in the past.
Joxter points this out, and then Stephen is like "Well uh, there's been a person who has been annonymously emailing the staff saying bad stuff and I thought you might be them." Which is of course a really lousy cover for "Well, I thought you were Robby or Alan".
And of course, after that there were breakdowns for the next season of main TGS, when Stephen's idiocy came full front. I managed to shoot down all of his ideas and keep most of mine in place, but I'm pretty sure its Stephen specifically that burned me out on TGS as early as I did.
Oh, and Stephen's favorite movie ever is My Neighbor Totoro. Sure, its got a cute sequence or two in it, and it has all the typical Miyazaki standards of quality where the actual look of the thing is concerned, but its the most boring non threatening inconsequential movie ever. I mean, its even boring in fast forward!