Things Not to Do When You're a Famous Writer

/* Studio 60 spoilers */
/* no, seriously, Studio 60 spoilers. Don't read this if you haven't watched Studio 60 yet. */
/* Though honestly? probably won't make much difference to your enjoyment of the episode */
/* This is a revised and clarified spoiler warning. */

Here are some things we expect you not to do when you're a famous writer:

• Have someone lie about why they're breaking a date, then get busted on it by the infuriated ex-date.
• Have a guy show up with a bunch of poisonous snakes, then lose one.
• Have some people go up on the roof and then get locked out up there.

Unless, of course, you're going to twist the situation one further and surprise us all with your brilliance.

Which didn't happen.

/* Apologies for not marking *which* show I was writing a spoiler for. */
/* But, honestly, did anyone NOT see those plot turns coming? */

Denis and I Advise Aaron Sorkin

As if. We wouldn't dare. But we are quoted heavily in this Toronto Star article about whether Studio 60 is getting better or not. I think it is.

Whether or not it is, actually, I think it's worth watching because when Sorkin fails, he fails in interesting ways. You can, for example, see too much of him in his work, where with hack writers you see too little. And he tries to subvert the audience's expectations -- but sometimes you know where he's going because you know what his favorite themes are. But I'm rarely bored by bad Sorkin. Only frustrated.

Um, it's on tonight, isn't it?

Why is Studio 60 Better?

[No real spoilers, I don't think.] I think it might be because the early episodes were about global stakes -- how better sketch comedy could save the world -- and these episodes are about personal stakes. Instead of being about whether Matt Albie will save the show -- it wouldn't be much of a series if he lost his show, would it? so a bit of schmuck bait there -- it becomes about whether the various characters will save their part of the show. Can Darius and the English Chick get a sketch on the air? Can Amanda Peet overcome her pride to save her job? Can Harriet tell a joke? (OK, that was more of a runner.)

One of the strange things about TV is it has no perspective. You see it on TV news all the time. We see a story about horrific bombings in Baghdad followed by long lines for holiday shopping. Darfur gets two minutes (or no minutes), OJ gets four, that weirdo claiming to have killed Jon Benet gets 25. TV wants stories it can put a face on -- which is why I get my news from The Economist.

TV wants personal stories. They can be small or big in ramifications. Jack Bauer's story has huge ramifications. But we're really watching to see Jack Bauer deal with his enemies. And it is, apparently, more important whether Meredith gets McDreamy than whether her latest patient dies -- except in so far as Meredith losing her patient might make McDreamy more or less interested in her. Friends got ten years out of whether Ross would get Rachel to think he's cool or Rachel would get Ross to respect her.

No perspective. Or rather, any perspective you want to give it.

'Cause people are like that. There's always the horror story of someone shooting someone over burned eggs. We're not good with perspective either, unless someone has put us in a position where it's our job to have perspective.

The stakes are part of the fun. But the stakes are only important to the extent that they're important to the hero. Make sure you firmly establish exactly how the hero would feel to win the stakes.

(Which is why, incidentally, we'll never care about the aimless/apathetic hero I'm always seeing in failed spec feature scripts. If he doesn't care, why should we?)

Surprise!

I was surprised to see that NBC is bumping Studio 60 this week -- for Friday Night Lights! But it makes perfect sense. So far FNL has had poor ratings (correct me if I'm wrong, Bridget) but rave reviews. Which suggests to me that while it might not be doing all that well in the Red States (apparently Tuesday night is Peewee Football night), it's got to be doing well in upscale coastal demos. That's Sorkin territory. With S60 losing audience, it makes sense to trick those audience members into watching a show they might not think to watch, but might love once they saw it.

Or it might not. Who knows?

Latest Studio 60

Some people have complained that this ep was mushy, but I liked this week's Studio 60 best of all. Instead of hearing a lot of gumph about how important sketch comedy is, or seeing sketches that weren't as funny as they were cracked up to be, the show was about what's important to sketch comedy people, and how they feel about it. That, I bought. And the two comedy sketches were for once interesting as story points. We see one black comedian kill with yet another racist sketch about the differences between white people and black people; and we're not meant to laugh, we're meant to think. And then we see another black comedian die onstage with an interesting but badly delivered bit. The sketches, and Matt and Simon's reaction to them, told us something about Matt and Simon, and about the state of comedy.

It also felt clearer that this is a drama about comedy people, rather than something that's trying to be a comedy about comedy people, and failing.

I hope Sorkin stays in this groove...

AIN'T NOTHING LIKE THE REAL THING BABY

Watched 30 Rock last night as well. Some of it was funny. Some of it was dumb. Some of it was dumb-funny, which is just fine.

As with Studio 60, few of the laughs were in the show-within-the-show comedy skits. (Though I did like "Science, Schmience" in S60's 3rd ep.)

And that's a danger in putting art within your art. A comedy sketch within your comedy (or drama) suffers from the "make me laugh" syndrome: you're telling the audience something is funny, which is a practically guaranteed way to make sure it's not funny. Jokes come from derailment, and if you have a comedy sketch within your comedy, you've already derailed the train before it can get up to steam.

There's a similar danger any time you want to show that someone is a great actor, or a great artist, or a great dancer. If you've got someone performing "To be or not to be" in your TV episode and you're telling us this guy can really act -- well, it better be one of the most impressing freakin' "To be or not to be"'s we've ever seen. Otherwise you provoke a reaction: That's brilliant acting? (I didn't find Jack Crew's "To be or not to be" in Slings and Arrows to be all that compelling. Did you?)

Whereas if you tell us your character is the best race car driver in the world, we'll just buy it. We have no way to evaluate one race car driver vs. another. Well, except that winners win. And we all know what winning a car race looks like. We just accept that the hero wins because he's good, not because he has a better car.

If it's something the audience can't evaluate, we may just buy it. I've got a couple of characters in my current feature that are supposed to be good artists. We'll try to get good artists to do their charcoal sketches for them, but everyone's got their own idea of what a good piece of art looks like. I don't think too many people in the audience will reject the art, so long as the technique is good.

Sometimes you have to fake it intentionally. Real ballet, to my mind, doesn't look that interesting on film, at least not to the mass audience. It seems to me that much of the time you have a ballet scene that scores, the filmmakers have jazzed it up. I doubt Jennifer Beals's dance moves would have got her into ballet school in Flashdance and I doubt John Travolta's moves in Stayin' Alive would impress Balanchine either. But they worked on film. (And while I'm horrifying the purists: I prefer Tex-Mex to authentic Mexican, and I prefer Upper West Side Szechuan to authentic Chinatown Szechuan. Because I'm an Upper West Sider, not an authentic Chinese person.)

Be careful when you put art within your art. If it's something the audience knows well, it better score. In Broadcast News, James Brooks had real news editors edit the news segments, rather than his usual feature editor. He wanted to be sure the broadcast news segments smelled right to an audience that knows exactly what a broadcast news segment is. If you can't make the art within the art score, find a way to give us clues how we're supposed to interpret it, or better yet, find ways that you don't have to put it up on the scre

I THINK I'M IN LOVE

We just watched Tuesday's pilot of Friday Night Lights. Hot damn that is some amazing television. I was swept up in a world I'm not familiar with, but felt real and true. The characters felt so concrete, so-un-tv. Rather than feeling like there were A stories and B stories and C stories, it felt like there were a bunch of people who had a web of relationships, and we were watching their lives. Of course it all built up to a hell of a bang in the end.

Yeah, as Denis says: football and West Texas isn't a big part of my life. But it felt much more real and close to my own life than Shark, or Grey's Anatomy, or Studio 60. Which is odd, 'cause I have friends who are prosecutors and doctors and comedy writers, and I probably couldn't live in that small Texas town without getting beat up on a regular basis.

The storytelling was so rich and dense, I kept worrying I wasn't watching a hour pilot. It felt like it must be a two hour pilot, and damn if my PVR wasn't going to cut off before the resolution. But it was all squeezed into the one hour. (Forgive me if my grammar has gone all Texas on y'all; it does that whenever I'm exposed to the axayunt.)

It felt like 6 acts. Bridget, was it 6 acts? Sure as hell wudn't no 4 acts.

And I am glad to see a TV show where people believe in God. Quite a few people believe in God, but I see very few characters on TV who seem to have a spiritual life without it becoming a Story Point. Sorkin has one Christian on his show, and it's worth writing home about. But in FNL, the whole town is folk who take it for granted that Jesus Christ is a part of their lives. I grew up among atheist Jews, and my own spiritual path isn't mainstream. But religion seems to me too big a part of our cultural life to leave it out of so many of the stories we tell.

Nice work, guys. I'm signing on for the season.

SEE NOW THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT

Watched the third ep of Studio 60, and I'm feeling a lot better. The jokes were funny. I loved "Science, Schmience" -- and the guy's Tom Cruise bit was great. The character moments had bite, and were often funnier than the jokes.There was a neat revelation at the end.

I did think the last act had an odd valedictory feel to it, as if it were a season-ender. The story felt overwhelmed by the atmosphere sometimes -- the fourth act montage went on a bit long while we waited for the plot to kick in again. Still waiting for Sarah Paulson to show her comedic brilliance. And the act outs were a bit soft. (The act two out was: Matt decides to look at the focus group report?) But at least I have a TV show to watch where no one is in regular danger of dying.

(Boy, Pat Kingsley must be in hog heaven. She was Tom Cruise's publicist for years until he fired her. Her pitch these days must be: "See what happens when you don't have Pat Kingsley?" I'm sure he was just as nuts in the '90's, but no one was mocking him on fake sketch comedy shows.)

Tonight I'm definitely going to tape Friday Night Lights. It's had superb reviews, and it was a damn fine movie too. It's one of the few football movies I've seen where I really cared deeply who won, because it's not about money ball, it's about small town high school football teams in the kind of small town where football's the only thing going on besides Jesus.

MORE BITCHING ABOUT STUDIO 60

Watched episode two of Studio 60 last night. Did you?

I'm still hoping this show will kick in for me. Lisa enjoyed it, so there's hope. But I have some basic problems with it.

It's a dramatic show about a comedy show. It feels like it either needs to be funnier, or have higher stakes. It is hard to get too worked up about whether a sketch comedy show's showrunner can come up with a cold open or not. So higher stakes seem unlikely.

So to me it feels like it wants to be funnier. But it's not funny. It's witty. Snappy banter is not comedy. Wit comes from words and their rhythms. Comedy comes from derailment. There's only one derailment in all of "The Cold Open." (Can you guess which it is?)

I am also lacking the sense of accuracy that made The West Wing such a joy. I have trouble believing that Matt and Danny are brilliant comedy people. They don't seem nearly crazy enough. (Ken, back me up on this?) Even when Matt stops wearing that dumb suit and tie, he's ... well gosh, he never says anything outrageous enough to make anyone laugh. Is Aaron Sorkin this humorless in person?

Comedy writers make you laugh. Comedy writing is a painful process punctuated by hysterical laughter. I would say at least ninety percent of the comedy writers I know are seriously funny in person. How do you think they got to be comedy writers?

And what is the hero's goal and obstacle? He wants a cold open; he can't think of one. Mmm, that's a toughie to dramatize. Unless the whole episode was full of false starts -- where you got to see all the Bad Ideas appear, fly, and crash -- all you have is a guy staring at a clock.

And the cold open itself ... a patter song? Oh, come on. Compare it with, say, Al Gore's appearance on SNL where he was talking about the past six years of his presidency, with rampaging glaciers attacking Wisconsin. That was unexpected, and funny. The patter song was witty ... but not, actually, that funny.

In a way, I feel like the past two episodes are prime examples of What Not To Do in writing your pilot. Sorkin carries it off to a certain extent because he's a great writer and he's got a great cast and a great director. But kids, I'm not sure he's got a show yet.

I bet you Ken Levine could come up with a better cold open for that situation inside of a day.

Now why am I being so critical? Oh, because The West Wing was one of my favorite shows ever. Because it avoided all the mistakes Sorkin is making, I feel, on Studio 60. Because I really, really want to watch a good show. And this show seems so misconceived I don't see how it's going to recover.

Your thoughts?

BREAKING THE MOLD

DMc is thrilled that Aaron Sorkin is making a series about how television could be great instead of stupid.

To repeat and enlarge on my comments there: sure, but it's self-congratulatory where it should be challenging. It's hard to write a smart TV show. It's not that hard to write a show about characters who write smart TV, if you don't actually show any of the TV that they write. We never saw Matt's supposedly brilliant "Crazy Christians" sketch (dumb title), only the dumb "Peripheral Vision Man" one. The only proof we have that Matt is a good writer is: we see him accepting an award for his writing. That's cheating.

Denis is far, far wittier off the cuff than Matt Albie, scripted.

What part of the Studio 60 pilot SURPRISES you? What part is audacious? What pushes the envelope? What makes it more than a fired showrunner's fantasy of being handed his show back?

I'm hoping that the show, once it gets past its pilot, does push the envelope. Or at least, pulls us in more. I want to see Jordan behave like a wily and tough and dangerous network exec, instead of a smarmy, well-meaning, wussy one. I want to see Matt and Dan show us what brilliant writing and directing looks like when it happens, rather than just hearing that they are brilliant. I want the episodes to break the mold, because that's what Sorkin is promising the show-within-the-show will do.

Firefly breaks the mold. Breaks the conventions. Turns four act structure on its head. Let's see if Sorkin can top the Joss.

STUDIO 60

Just watched it on CTV. No spoilers, but I'm torn about this show. I want to love it. I know, you probably loved it. Or will love it. (I guess it doesn't air in the States till tomorrow, heh). But I'm comparing it to The West Wing and I just can't get that wrapped up in whether two characters playing halves of Aaron Sorkin's brain succeed in turning around a live sketch comedy show. As compared with, say, resolving big political issues. I know that's not fair. But it's one of the reasons I never warmed to Sports Night. That, and the dumb laugh track.

It was an odd pilot. It felt like a pre-pilot. The series is going to be about two guys running a sketch comedy show, and this episode is not about that. It has all the flaws of a premise pilot. There are too many scenes that exist only to tell us who the characters are and why they're hot stuff. And what hangs in the balance is something we already know, because there wouldnt be a series if the outcome went other way. In a way, it's all schmuck bait.

Here's a useful test. Suppose you have an outcome you want the audience to get worried about. Ask yourself if the audience can really believe it's going to go the other way. If we don't believe the sword can really slice through the string, it's not the sword of Damocles.

But, it's Sorkin, so I'll keep watching.

FREE, AGAIN

Q. A producer has asked me to write a show bible and pilot script for a new drama show next year.

Congratulations.

However, you should understand what this means: "A producer has asked me to write a show bible and pilot script for a new drama show he would like to put on the air next year." Without a show bible and pilot script, the network has nothing to approve. Therefore nothing has been approved. No network approves an idea.

Q. The producer has asked me for a pilot script, treatment and character bible by this Friday (Sept 22).

Your producer is out of his mind. No one can do good work in that amount of time. The shortest I would agree to do a pilot script would be three weeks. I'd spend a week figuring out what the pilot should be and breaking it down. A week writing. A week rewriting. But honestly, I'd rather spend two weeks figuring out the show, a week figuring out the pilot, a week writing, and two weeks rewriting. That would be a nice tight schedule.

Q. Firstly, should I be doing this for free?

Of course not. It is one thing to write a pilot script of your own for free. US networks generally want to see a pilot, not a bible. If you want to option a show, you'll have to write a pilot.

In this case, though, your producer is attempting to get you so excited about his SHOW WHICH IS GOING ON THE AIR NEXT YEAR!!!!!! that you'll write for free.

What has really happened, I believe, is that he mentioned an idea to someone at the network. The network person said, "Yeah, I'm intrigued. I'm supposed to talk with [some other guy] on Friday. Can you get me something by then?"

Now your producer wants you to front the work on the off chance the network likes it. It's no skin off his nose if they don't. He only has to spend an hour or so reading whatever you wrote. (If he reads it at all!)

Typical rates in Canada might be $5,000-$10,000 for a pitch bible (plus guarantees of writing a certain number of scripts if any are commissioned, a possible royalty, right of first refusal to write an MOW, etc.). An hour pilot is minimum about $18,000. Minimum rates in the States are, say, two or three times that. (Maximums -- well, I shudder to think what it would cost to hire Aaron Sorkin to create a show based on someone else's idea. A million bucks? Five? Plus royalties, and he's guaranteed to be the showrunner with an appropriate compensation package?)

Note that your producer is not at the top of his craft. A good producer would never turn in something rushed. It makes him look amateurish. Have you checked out this guy's credits?

Q. For the treatment and character bible, do I need to include every storyline and dramatic arc for the full season?

I think a good pitch bible needs about ten springboards to show the kind of stories you'll be telling, the richness of the narrative vein you're mining, and the range of stories you might have. I wouldn't go much beyond that. Your springboards will all change as you create the show, anyway.

NEVER get too excited about anything a producer says unless it involves paying you money prior to commencement of writing services. It costs them nothing to talk.

EVEN SORKIN WRITES SPEC PILOTS

According to Variety, Aaron Sorkin is going out with a spec pilot -- a behind the scenes show about a Saturday Night Live type program. Sports Night, if you will, at a variety show.

You'd think that the more successful you get, the more you'd be willing to write on spec. After all, when you write on spec, you get to make the show exactly the way you like it before anyone else meddles. The more successful you are, the more likely someone will actually buy it. Most of us, though, as soon as we can get paid to do stuff, go for the money rather than the freedom. Partly that's because the more involved the network is in development, the more likely they'll support it getting on the air. Partly because so few things get on the air that you need the development money to stay afloat. (And when I say afloat, I mean, afloat in a styrofoam chair in your pool in Bel Air. But you knew that.) But partly it's because we've had enough rejection, thank you, and enough risk, and now we'd like to know we're getting paid for stuff. But there's a creative cost for that.

I think the trick is to keep a good mix of commissioned stuff and original stuff going. All commissioned stuff makes Jack a dull boy. (Though writing other people's stuff can be creatively engaging too.) All original stuff makes Jack a poor boy unless Jack is phenomenally lucky...

The other trick is to make sure you spend a lot less than you make. The more money in the bank you have, the more you can write what you want. The more you write what you want, often, the more people like it. One of the most lasting bits of screenwriting advice I ever got was from my teacher Sterling Silliphant (In the Heat of the Night). "Don't get divorced," he said. He stopped writing original specs after his first alimony payments kicked in. Keep your annual nut below what you can make in 9 months, and you will always have 3 months available for creative thinking...