Rob's Great 8 Mandate Welcome Post and Mail PrimerFor those of you who are new to the Great 8 Mandate Thread, Welcome! I know that a lot of you are wondering what you can do to help try to convince the CW to uncancel Gilmore Girls, especially since Memorial Day has just passed and energy can sag a little bit after a three-day weekend like Memorial Day. Well, heck -- Amy Sherman-Palladino has voiced interest in doing a 2-hour movie, and Scott Patterson, Kelly Bishop and Liza Weil have all three voiced reservations about the season finale being a series finale -- so it's clear that no matter how much time is passing, most people that are most important to the show (some of whom have even left the show) *do* want to keep it going. So that's all the more reason to keep going,
full speed ahead. This post is about voicemail, email and snail mail. Here’s what you can do:
1) SEND SNAIL MAIL:Handwriting is fine if your penmanship is good because it's such a personal form of communication. Otherwise, typing and signing and mailing by snail mail is the single BEST way to contact them. They expect to be deluged with email and voicemail and that helps as far as it goes, but the amount of effort that it takes to write/type a letter on paper and send it in an envelope
always makes a bigger impression than email and voicemail and the like. There's a rule of thumb that floats about in various media industries that every individual piece of correspondence that's written on paper and delivered by mail represents the sentiments of at least 7 other people. So if literally tens of thousands of pieces of snail mail are received, that's going to make a MUCH bigger impact on them than electronic forms of mail.
There are various addresses you can send your correspondence to, which are posted on page 1 of the thread, but IMO, the people who have the most potential to help are IMO, Lauren, Alexis and the CW’s President of Entertainment, Dawn Ostroff, who is the nexus of all network realities at the CW. They can be contacted at the following addresses:
Ms. Dawn Ostroff, President of Entertainment
The CW Television Network
4000 Warner Blvd., Bldg 168
Burbank, CA 91522-0002
Email: [email protected]
or post your comments at the Lounge at www.cwtv.com
Peter Roth
President, Warner Brothers Television
300 Television Plaza
Burbank, CA 91505
Amy Sherman-Palladino
c/o Creative Artists Agency
2000 Avenue of the Stars
Los Angeles, CA 90067
Lauren Graham
c/o John Carrabino Management
100 North Crescent Dr.
G-400
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Alexis Bledel
c/o Flutie Entertainment
6500 Wilshire Blvd
Suite 2240
Los Angeles, CA 90048
Email: Michael Flutie: [email protected]
Email: Paul M. Brown: [email protected] As the
series season finale has passed, email and voicemail can become handy, but don't discount Snail Mail as the network and actors will always take Snail Mail more seriously than any other form of correspondence. Snail Mail has become even more important now that the Upfronts have been announced, so I have a few tips/suggestions to help make you make your letters, voicemail and email as effective as possible:
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BE BRIEF: Keep the length of your letter down to ONE side of ONE page, double space it and use a simple 10 or 12-point Times font. (Arial font is hard to read.) If your letter goes on for
only one or two more lines beyond a page, don't sweat it, but the longer the letter is, the less of it they'll read before they move on to the next one. Double-spacing is the exact opposite in print as it is online -- it's
much easier to read on paper than single spacing is -- and again, the need to be as brief as possible will make you more concise and to-the-point. Conversely, single spacing will make you look a little wacky, especially if you go on for more than one page.
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BE BRIEF (AGAIN): If you must single-space to get all you want on one page, skip a line between each paragraph as that will help maximize readability. But definitely do not go over one side of one page at all. And I'd suggest if you're going to do single-spacing your message should take up no more than 2/3rds of the page, not counting your signature.
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BE BRIEF (FOR VOICEMAIL AND EMAIL): If you leave a long voicemail, it sounds like a ramble by somebody who's unstable. Just say who you are, where you're from, your approximate age, why you like Gg and why you think it shouldn't end/why you think the season finale is not enough. Don't beat yourself up if you think you went on for too long, though, as your nervousness will likely screw with your head. And be sure to thank the people you're contacting for their time and consideration.
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BE POLITE: I know that there's a lot of anger and sadness going on right now, but don't unleash any of it on the person that you're writing too (s/he may not even be responsible for what's happening to the show). Just tell them why you like the show, the actors, the stories, how it affects you, why you think it should continue, etc. If your letter is all tone and no substance, they won't read it. Or maybe the first person who reads it won't pass it on to someone else at the studio or directly involved with the show.
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BE POLITE (Again): DON'T mention salary issues because it's not our place to address them. Some form of "I hope that you are still looking for a solution that results in the show going on" would IMO be a great way to sidestep that issue.
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ADD PAPER DAISIES TO YOUR LETTER: Find a picture of a daisy, print and cut out lots of copies of them, send a dozen or two of them with your snail mail letter to the various contact addresses. And when I mean cut out a lot of copies of them, cut out individual squares or rectangles of the pictures, whatever shape the picture is (cutting out the outline of the daisy over and over again would, of course, be Paris-level insane). Enclose them in the letter when you fold it so that when the person has to open the letter, the paper daisies *have* to fall out. One creative thing to put in the mix -- maybe sub out one of the daisies and insert a Great8 Mandate logo instead.
2)
SEND EMAIL OR VOICEMAILThe CW's comment line is
1-818-977-6878. It is voicemail and it often (but not always) fills up by early evening -- and appears to be full the entire weekend from whenever time on Fridays it fills up.
If you are going to send an email or leave a voice mail, that’s okay as a reinforcement of your Snail Mail, but
DO NOT AS AN INDIVIDUAL FLOOD ANY INDIVIDUAL ACTOR OR PERSON AT THE CW OR WARNERS WITH MULTIPLE VOICE MAILS OR E-MAILS ON THE SAME DAY. It will do the exact opposite of what you intend because it's considered spamming and more or less harassment.[/i] They want to hear from as many individuals as possible. And Snail Mail is a better way to do it than either email or voicemail because it's a tangible representation of the viewership's sentiments while electronic forms of correspondence are more abstract (because you can't hold them in your hands) and therefore easy to forget. And remember to BE POLITE AND POSITIVE. They already know that we're all upset, we just need to reinforce our presence in terms of the sheer number of individuals contacting them. Remember, once per day and that’s it, particularly for voicemail and email.
3) If you send mail to anyone other than Dawn Ostroff, Lauren and/or Alexis, I’m sure as heck not gonna try to discourage you, but please post the address for the management/agent team of each actor to this thread if/when you discover them. I'm especially interested in office addresses for Kelly Bishop and Liza Weil so that anyone who wants to can send them thank-you letters due to their great warnings about the
series season finale of the show. Although I don't know the addresses for the management teams of any other actors but Lauren and Alexis, and I only know them because they were posted on page 1 of this very thread.
Just please make contacting Ms. Ostroff, Lauren and Alexis your first priority. If they get the mail, they are sure to contact everybody else involved, including Ostroff’s bosses at the CW’s corporate parent companies, CBS/Paramount and Warner Brothers, as well as the other actors. (Or else they’ll hear it through the grapevine.) NOTE: at this time, Alexis may be in the most need of notes of encouragement to continue the series.
4)
Please send snail mail more than once a week. Two times a week is probably optimal. Write something different each time, choose a different person each time -- a different aspect of what the show means to you, whatever. Make it anything other than any other letter you've sent to them 'cause once they see an identical one, it registers as a form letter in their minds.
5)
Please send your first or only snail mail of any given week by registered mail/return receipt. It's more expensive than regular snail mail, but it means that someone has to sign for it and acknowledge the receipt, and perhaps they'll take the expense even more seriously than even if it were standard snail mail and thereby be more likely to read it.
6)
And send them daisies. Once per week, if you can afford it, twice a month, once a month. A different person each time, rotating between Dawn, Lauren and Alexis -- and now, Amy Sherman-Palladino (yay!) and Peter Roth.
7)
CONTACT ADVERTISERS:Divine has set up a word document containing contact information regarding the various national advertisers who placed commercials in the
series season finale. The document can be downloaded at
http://root.pcmasters.at/upload/files/2659036-List_of_Advertisers.doc If you contact any of the advertisers, please follow the same rules as I list above and also keep in mind the following:
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Please be sure to compliment them on their support of Gg, add that you like their product if you use it (but don't lie if you don't use it) and let them know about how pleased you are for the companies' support of Gg given Gg's continued high ratings, particularly in light of how terrible the ratings are of Veronica Mars. Don't otherwise knock VM (it's a good show that, unfortunately has no potential whatsoever to grow in the ratings), but let them know something like, "If the CW is alienating the viewership by cancelling both the high-rated Gilmore Girls and the low-rated Veronica Mars (whose fanbase is probably a subset of Gilmore Girls’ fanbase), doesn't it make sense for you as an advertiser to demand that The CW keep Gilmore Girls in order to retrieve the goodwill of that viewership and thereby make The CW a much better outlet for your product?"
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Please, do NOT copy what I wrote word-for-word. It's not that I'm withholding permission, it's just that letters that are written with the same wording are considered "astroturf," a type of spamming particular to letter-writing campaigns. Speak/write from the heart about why you like the show/what the show means to you, what you know about what the ratings mean and that you would appreciate the advertisers' support since the networks unveil their new fall schedules to you advertisers next week. As I said above, BE POLITE, BE ORIGINAL -- the advertisers want to know about your likes and dislikes as it helps them to decide where they're going to put their television advertising dollars. It's okay to tell the advertisers that you're mad at the network, just don't do it in a way that even implies that you might be mad at the advertisers as the current cancelled state of the show is not their fault. After all, they'd rather have the show with the higher ratings, y'know.
There is no 8. That's the point.
9)
NEW! Write to this CW weblog at: http://blogs.trb.com/network/cwsource/2007/05/rumorville_a_gilmore_girls_tv.html . It asks about how you feel about the news that Amy is interested in doing a 2-hour movie version of the show. I managed to swing the conversation a little in one of my own posts to the blog page, asking everybody to not take wanting to see a season 8 as a given and instead say if they'd want to see a season 8 rather than *just* a movie.
-- Rob
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Season 8: Because Full Circle is Regressive.
