Don't Ask, Tell

Q. So we're getting notes from the producers. There are a few ways to address them, both with narrative pluses and minuses. Should I present the options and let them give their input or should I just figure it out myself?

Producers and execs hire you to bring your passion and intelligence to the material you're working on. When you have a creative question, do your best to solve it the way that feels right to you. If the producer doesn't like it, you can come back with, "I have another way to do it."

It's generally better to actually do the fix and then get feedback, than to ask a producer's opinion. What they think you're going to do and what you're going to do may be different things.

You may also find out as you try option A that it really isn't as good as option B. If you didn't ask your producer's opinion, you can now merrily go to option B without a fuss.

Execs, in particular, don't have time to babysit you.

I ask questions only when there's a marketing or budget issue. "I want to do X, is that doable on the budget you have in mind?" is a legitimate producer question. So is, "I want to make the hero a woman." Anything that changes the marketing profile of what you're working on is a producer or exec question. If it's purely creative -- how do I get the hero out of this corner I've painted him into? -- go with your craft and your gut.

Writing Process

Q. We wrote a script, shot a pilot, and we're shopping our show now.

Congratulations!

In the mean, we want to write 12+ scripts so we're ready to rock when the big bag of money gets here.

Mmm, no, I wouldn't do that.

Television is about the most collaborative medium I know. Even the movies are less so. In the movies, you can shoot your indie film and sell it. The studio may ask for cuts, but they rarely ask for reshoots, and they wouldn't think of asking you to reshoot the whole thing.

In TV, if they like it, if they buy it, the network will now want to make the entire show theirs. They won't like some of the actors. They'll have a few people in mind. They might want that cute girl changed into a cute guy.

And they will want to have input on the script. I know, you already shot it and edited it. But now they want to put it on television. They want it to fit their network mandate. Since you didn't know what their network mandate is, you didn't shoot exactly the show they're looking for.

On the other hand they don't mind pouring money into the show. If the studio made you reshoot your feature film, it would double the cost. But if they make you reshoot your pilot -- well, they're thinking at least 13 episodes, maybe a full season of 22, and they are hoping you'll go 100 episodes. So reshooting your pilot is not a prohibitive expense.

They will want a lot of input on the scripts. They may want to add writers to your staff. If they let you run your own show, they may still want to put a veteran Supervising Producer on board to shadow you and make sure you don't blow their money through inexperience.

So it does not make sense to write 12 episodes. They'll get changed too much, and some will get thrown out. Moreover, no one at the network is going to read 12 episodes.

What you could do, reasonably, is write two more episodes. Now you have three scripts, one of which is shot. If you can show three really kickass scripts, they'll know whether or not it's a series they want.

That's what we're doing on my pay cable series. I've written three scripts. With network input, I'm writing two-page breakdowns for the remaining seven episodes of the first season. Between the three scripts and the breakdowns, anyone who's interested in buying the show for their territory has all the information they can reasonably use.

Once the series is greenlit, and you hire your staff, you'll probably want to get eight scripts finished before you start shooting; later scripts get written during production, and get to take advantage of things you learn during the show.

We thought all the springboards should be done at the beginning of the season, so we knocked out 12 springboards. But maybe this is done at the beginning of each writing week--rather than set the season, writers bring the idea they had *this week*, and it goes up against the other ideas this week. Perhaps that's more practical, given that the story editor or the showrunner may significantly re-write any particular episode, and a springboard created earlier may no longer make sense. Confirm or deny?

I would definitely write 12 springboards now. When I pitch a series, I try to have at least a dozen springboards ready, so I know there's a show there, and so they know what the show is.

To get 12 decent springboards, you might have to come up with a couple more dozen bad ones. There's a lot of carnage.

You will wind up throwing out many of your springboards as you get into the series. Many of the survivors will get rewritten out of all recognition. No worries. You don't owe them anything.

I read you to say the whole room works on [the story] until there is satisfaction. How much of the writer's meeting should that take?

How long is a piece of string?

You probably don't want to spend more than four hours a day in meetings or people will burn out. The rest of the time, people will be working on their scripts, or their beat sheets... or checking Facebook, or surfing the Net, or whatever it is they do behind the top of their laptops.

On CHARLIE JADE, we probably averaged 2-3 hours a day in meetings, with more in the beginning when we were trying to figure the show out, and much less later on when we were consumed with the writing.

On a comedy, people spend a great deal of time in meetings, first breaking story, and then punching up the gags.

Which reminds me, how many days are there writer's meetings, and how many hours in each meet? We can spend all day whipping out ideas and bits and getting nothing done.

You, the showrunner, have to figure out what a good mix is. There may be days with no meetings. There may be days chock full of meetings. But bear in mind that "whipping out ideas and bits and getting nothing done" is getting something done. That's how you put a show together.

I have it on good authority that a certain story room on a successful series spent a lot of time watching midget porn. They got their show written, though.

Seriously: you meet until people are sick of meeting. You write until you can write no more. Go home, write some more. Go to sleep. Wake up. Repeat.

In the meetings, you talk, you digress, you whine, you shoot the breeze, and then you talk some more. It's up to you, the showrunner, to manage your writers well. Too much focus and people get burned out. Not enough focus and nothing gets done. Reasonable focus, and a long digression triggers a useful idea that opens up a door you didn't even see before.

You have to ask the right questions in the meetings. You have to guide the discussion. You have to know when to talk about macro issues and when to beat up on a particularly revelatory detail. The reason people get paid so much money to supervise a writing room is because it is hard to herd cats.

I read it that when the treatment is final, that unit is given to someone to write a script from. At some point, that writer comes back to the room with a version of the story told this way and presents it. The room is NOT to re-write the story proper but to tighten the scenes, the humor, the language, etc. Just sharpen it up. Right?

The room doesn't rewrite. If the writer isn't nailing it, a higher level writer might take it to rewrite it, on up to the showrunner. On a drama, the room probably never sees the finished draft, though the writer might hand it to his buddies on the show to ask what they think.

On a comedy, there'll be a day of punch-up. But if the script is really not working, then the room might have to go back and rebreak the story.

I'm not clear on the difference between what's brought to the room and "the first draft".

There are several first drafts. There's the first complete draft that the writer writes. I usually call that a rough draft. He rewrites it until he hits his deadline or he feels he needs some feedback. He turns it into the showrunner; that's the first writer's draft. Showrunner reads that, maybe rewrites it. It might be sent to network for notes -- that's the first network draft. Somewhere along the line the script goes to production -- that becomes the Production White.

I wouldn't make too much of the name "first draft." Every draft is a first draft until it gets into the jaws of production, and further changes start to cost money.

Beats = outline in other media. It looks like you said a writer should find *someone* to check the beats with--not the room, and not necessarily the story editor.

I like to have someone read my stuff first, if there's time. Lisa reads my stuff, and I have an assistant, and I have a reading intern who's fantastic. If there's no time, as is typical on a production, I would show my beat sheet to whoever is supervising me: a story editor if I'm a free lancer, a showrunner if I'm higher up the food chain. They'll make notes and / or rewrite the beat sheet, and I'm off to writing pages.

Good luck!

Effects of the Strike

This article, like many others, says advertisers are already worried about the effects of reruns on viewership."

“Everybody's in the same position. We all have stuff on the shelf we can use … the common assessment is that we're all good until January. But as of January, when new episodes of shows would have been expected, that's when schedules start to change a bit.”

I think people are underestimating the effect of the strike. TV is a not a warehouse. It is a pipeline. (It is, if you will, a series of tubes.)

Yes, you can shoot and edit and show all the episodes for which there are already scripts. And that takes you to January.

But what happens in January? Can you just get the writers to air new episodes? Um, no. Writers have to think up new episodes, write first drafts and second drafts, and then take them to production. Production needs to shoot them and editors need to shoot them.

You don't get any new episodes until February or March.

Think of the strike as a growing gap at the beginning of an assembly line. When the engine-makers put down their tools, you can keep making cars until the gap reaches the end of the line. And then you shut the line down. But when you start the line up again, you have to wait for the engines before you can make any new cars. And no one's making the engines any faster than they were.

With each day of the strike, that gap in the line is getting bigger.

The truth is, the strike is already having an effect on every struck show. The effect is delayed, but it is irrevocable. TV staffs work flat out. There's no slack to take up. It's not like a plane you can fly faster to account for a late take-off. If you lose a day, you're behind a day for the rest of the season. (Okay, you can go from an 8 day schedule to a 6 day schedule, and you can do a bottle show or a clip show, but then you're just writing and shooting substandard episodes.)

Think reruns will help? Not in the long run. TV schedules already plan for reruns. But while you only lose, say, 10% of the audience the first time you rerun an episode, how about the second time you rerun it? The 10% figure comes from the audience not knowing a rerun is coming up. What happens when the audience decides "that show is nothing but reruns all the time?" They just stop watching, period.

If I were a shareholder, I'd be pretty irritated at the networks for pretending not to understand this.

I Have a Great Idea, But I'm Not a Writer

Periodically I get an email more or less like this:

Q. I have a surefire idea for a [movie / TV show], but I'm not a writer. Can I sell my idea? Or hire a writer to write it?

I don't know any writers who buy ideas. Producers don't, either, except from writers.

You could theoretically hire a writer to execute it. That's what producers do with their own ideas.

The problem is that hiring good writers is really expensive. WGC scale for a feature film is around $50,000. WGA scale is quite a bit higher, even with the weak dollar.

You can hire non-Guild writers and pay them less. The problem is there are very few experienced, talented non-Guild writers. Bill Cunningham and... I don't know anybody else.

So that leaves you with hiring an inexperienced writer who's hopefully talented. How do you discover one?

As one of the commenters below pointed out, you can try film schools. Call a film school professor and ask him to recommend some good students.

What you might also do is check out the various script competitions. See who's done well in one with a script that is similar to yours in tone. I.e. if you want to commission a horror film, hire someone who won a prize with her horror script.

With a less experienced writer you'll need to agree that there will be lots of drafts, since it will take a while to get to a draft that you're happy with even if you've hit gold (meaning found a great screenwriter). Of course, you're dealing with an uncrafted screenwriter, so you may never get to a draft you're happy with.

That's why you pay a pro so much. Not for the time he spends writing -- that may not be very long. But for all those years it took for him to get to the point in his craft where he could bat a professional quality feature out in six weeks. You could spend a year with a film student or talented amateur and not get a professional quality draft. But hey, you're the one who didn't want to pay fifty thousand bucks for a pro.

I took a few paid jobs when I was in film school. In one case my professor Lew Hunter was kind enough to send someone my way. I think the low budget horror movie I wrote for $800 was probably worth what I was paid for it, but I tend to doubt the historical miniseries bible I wrote for $2500 was.

Practically speaking, I think most ideas that civilians have aren't nearly as fresh or brilliant as they think they are. Some of the comments below say ideas are cheap, but it's not true. Great ideas are rare and quite valuable. But civilians almost never have them. Because a great idea isn't just a one line pitch, it's the setting, the characters, the theme... everything that you might put in a 6 page pitch document. What makes BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, say, great isn't the one line pitch --"all the surviving humans in the world are being chased through space by evil robots they invented!" -- it's something else that I'm not enough of a BG fan to crystallize for you here. What makes THE SOPRANOS great isn't in the hook -- "a mob boss tries to balance his family life with his Family life" -- but something deeper.

Only in the rarest situations would a civilian have a great idea as I'm defining it here -- because anyone that good has probably been thinking about TV seriously for ten years, and is, in fact, an aspiring TV writer.

Also, let's be frank. The people who ask me the question don't really want to pay even $5,000 for a script. What they really want is for someone to write it for free, and do all the work, and they'll split the profits -- which is not something I'd recommend to any writer.

Where to Begin

James refers me to this John August post:

Although I don’t do it on every project, I’m a big fan of writing off-the-page, which means creating character bios, alternate scenes and sequence chronologies to help me figure out the story and the characters. For example, I’ll write out the whole story from the villain’s point of view, both to track that the logic works, and also to gain insight on why they’re doing what they’re doing.

You don’t have to stop doing this once you begin writing the screenplay, either. If I’m getting frustrated with the script, sometimes it’s much more helpful to write up related pieces than to bang out another scene I don’t think is working.

I do very little of this. I like to discover things about the characters as I write them. More of the energy goes into the script that way. There are a couple of dangers in writing character bios. You can get locked into a vision of the character that isn't the most helpful one for your story. You can use up your creative impulses writing something that no one else will read. And you can hide in the character bios -- since no one will read them, it's a safe place to write.

I will sometimes write myself notes about "scenes I want to see." And I'll kind of arrange them in order. And start writing down scenes to hook them up. It's the equivalent of moving index cards around, except on the computer.

As for alternate scenes, well, they become alternate scenes when I realize the scene is wrong and I write a new version of the scene.

When I have a scene that isn't working, I tend to pound away at it until it is working. It makes me nervous to write a scene without knowing the scenes that came before it.

But there is no canonical way to write a screenplay. I suspect there are any number of guys who write the way John August does, and any number of guys who avoid "off-the-page" writing like the plague. Whatever works for you.

The Mythical Man Month

Here's a clearly written argument for hiring fewer, better PERL programmers and paying them well above average. Key point: "a good programmer can do as much as 5-10 average programmers."

I think the same is true for writers. A below-average staff writer is almost useless: you wind up redoing all their work. (And by "all their work," I mean "all their work." I can't tell you how many free lance scripts I've rewritten 100% from page 1, based on the outline that I gave them.) A good staff writer can give you exactly what you're looking for with minimal rewriting. A great staff writer helps you bring the show to another level by showing you aspects of your concept that you hadn't even thought of -- all while keeping on time and on budget.

The effect is harder to see in screenwriting. A program is fairly easily judged by management by whether it does the job without crashing or not. One can quantify some of its parameters -- how many lines of code (fewer is better), how much processing power it eats, memory usage. It's harder for a management (producers, network execs) to tell the difference between a script that works and one that doesn't.

As in programming, there's a good argument for finding the best writer and overpaying them as much as you have to in order to get and keep them. The cost will be lower than hiring more inferior writers. I'd rather have two great staff people on this show than four so-so ones.

On the other hand, writing is not programming. If you choose your writing room well, you'll get different perspectives from everyone in the room. One writer's a single woman who smokes too much, another is a middle-aged guy with kids, another is a gay guy in a long-term relationship. One can bring the funny, another has a really good reality check.

Also, I'm not sure that writers can telecommute as effectively as programmers. I've blogged in other posts about the writing room. You want the writers to be able to break story together, and to help solve story problems on the spot. And, you want your writers to physically see the set and meet the actors so they know what they're writing for.

So the article isn't dead on for show business. But still worth a few milliplatos of thought.

Aside from Brooks' Mythical Man-Month, can anyone else recommend any books or websites on programming that seem applicable to script development?

The Audience Doesn't Notice, But They Notice

When it comes to getting the right details into your story, my feeling is "the audience doesn't notice, but they notice." To unpack that a bit, the audience sees all sorts of details they aren't aware they're seeing. They don't consciously read them, but they process them. In particular they notice when they are wrong. They might not bump consciously, "Hey, that's wrong!" But they'll get a sense that something isn't right.

Here's an amusing stunt pulled on a couple of ad writers who didn't notice all the messages they were being exposed to...