Audience

Q. I recently pitched a pilot about a father and son serving inside an American humanitarian rescue & relief team. The son is more right-wing than his father, and resents his dad for pulling strings to get him transferred out of the Army and onto the team against his will.

People bumped on that. But don’t almost all leads in one-hour dramas find themselves in transition / in a situation they no longer want to be in? Whether it’s the onset of cancer (Breaking Bad, the Big C), being under investigation (The Shield), or a Marshall being transferred out of sexy Miami to backwoods county Tennessee ( Justified), isn’t it the whole point to start off with your character in a place that he doesn’t want to be?

Sure. The problem isn't the son's not wanting to be there. The problem is he doesn't want to be doing something we consider a Good Thing. That makes him a bit of a prick. (Most of us don't devote our lives to other people, but TV is more sentimental.)

On pay cable, your main character can be a prick (CALL ME FITZ, SOPRANOS) or a psychopath (DEXTER, arguably BREAKING BAD). But on broadcast, he can only pretend to be a bastard (LIE TO ME, HOUSE) but is really secretly A Good Guy.

Broadcast can show horrible things. But the good guys have to be Good Guys, and we have to want to wholeheartedly root for them. So you can have torture porn shows like CRIMINAL MINDS, but the cops are pure and good. Meanwhile on pay cable your main character has to be messed up in some way, and preferably despicable.

Needless to say the moral compartmentalization of the TV market is unfortunate for writers and viewers alike, because pay cable is also the natural home of serial narrative. I've got a bunch of serial narrative ideas, but unfortunately their protagonists have some good qualities. Meanwhile when I come up with procedurals, the main character is sometimes a bit of a prick. Neither of these combinations seems to work. It's either despicable people in serial narrative, or pure people in procedurals.

I'm exaggerating to make a point, of course. But not as much as you might think.

Structure

There are two kinds of story structure. One matters a lot more than the other.

Usually when execs talk about structure, they mean act structure. They might say the first act needs to get up to speed sooner, or the act four out is a rebeat (the same beat as an earlier beat). 

Usually when I talk about structure, I mean the elements of the story. Who is the character, what is his opportunity/problem/goal, what are the obstacles he faces, what are the stakes, what is the jeopardy? The structure I'm talking about includes who is the villain, the love interest, the intimate opponent.

These are the real bones of the story. 

Both kinds of story structure are relevant. You can't get around act outs in TV. But the second kind of structure takes more experience to see. When I work on a story, I have shapes in my head. I couldn't tell you exactly what that sentence means, but I have shapes in my head and if I change the elements of the story the shapes change. And when I make a breakthrough, the shape of the story feels better, stronger, sharper, smoother. Or something.

You can work at a story from the outside in. You can tighten up that first act. It is rarely as effective as working at a story from the inside out. Don't tighten up the first act. Work on the character more; or do a better job convincing us of his problem. If the act four out is a rebeat it's because you haven't increased the jeopardy, or revealed the real antagonist, or uncovered a previously hidden obstacle. 

If the structure is all there, the writing is easy. If it's not there, massaging the scenes will only get you so far. 

Try to learn to see the underlying structure of stories. Nothing to do with the page numbers; it's all about the rush and tumble of the characters' desires. See the shape of it, and mold that. A great storyteller is like a sculptor in clay, molding and kneading the story until it's right. Once it's in the right shape, it's a matter of mere application to decorate the pot and apply heat.

Half Hour Is a Pain in the Brent Butt

Q. You mentioned that an hour show is no more work than a half hour show. How do you mean? Is it that once you're already rolling on a show idea, its easy to keep pumping out pages? Any other reasons?

When I signed on to CHARLIE JADE, I'd just spent a year fussing over eight half-hour scripts for NAKED JOSH with my co-creator. I landed in Cape Town, and our writing room immediately started banging out hour scripts, three in the first week, then one a week for every week after that.

My impression is that a contemporary half hour script has almost as much story as an hour does. On NAKED JOSH, we had A, B and C stories. Sometimes we even had a runner on top of that. In CHARLIE JADE we had an A, B and C story. We simply had to work harder to fit that much story into 22 minutes.

The stories in NAKED JOSH were smaller stories -- more about observing the vagaries of metro life than, say, saving the multiverse -- but you could easily have unpacked them to hour stories to make a FELICITY-esque hour show.

When I started in writing CHARLIE JADE scripts, I found that I had a few more beats in each story than on NAKED JOSH, but not that many more. We were doing four acts instead of three. But the scenes could breathe more. Instead of the scenes being 45 seconds long, say, they were a minute to a minute and a quarter. (I'm guessing.)

I think it's telling that half hour sitcom staffs are much larger than hour drama staffs. Of course comedy is harder than drama. But I think if you take a typical half hour and plot it out, you'll wind up with almost as much story as you do for a drama.

I have some half hour pitches I would love to set up. But I know that if they do, I'll wind up working just as hard or harder on them as I will on my hour material!

Wrong Format?

Q. I was curious about your thoughts on a new series on Fox: The Return of Jezebel James. The format seems off or just plain wrong. This very well could be me but it feels like a one camera show and not a sit-com with a laugh track. If it is a little awkward in its format would this be a creator issue or a network issue? Once a show is bought can it's whole format be made to change to fit into something else entirely?

I haven't seen the show, but there could be a genre problem like you're seeing. The creator could have conceived of it wrong, for creative reasons, or because a network exec asked for a sitcom. Or, the network could have asked him to turn a single camera comedy into a sitcom for budget reasons, or because of market research, or because of the mix of programming they're looking for.

Denis Leary's half hour series THE JOB failed. If you watch it, you can clearly see its similarities to the later, successful RESCUE ME. What didn't work in a half hour format worked very well in hour.

I've occasionally come in with a pitch that could go either half hour or hour. That way, if the exec "hears" a half hour show, it's a half hour show. If they hear an hour show, it's an hour. They tend to hear the kind of the show their network has room for. My preference is to do hour shows -- they're no more work to write than a half hour, but they pay twice as well. But I'd rather have a show than no show. Bear in mind, though, that Canada has half-hour dramas, a form that barely exists in the US.

It's good that you're thinking this way. Don't just tune out a show, "this sucks!" Think about why it sucks. The makers must have had something in mind. Where did they go wrong? Sometimes (COP ROCK) it's easy to figure out. Sometimes it's harder. I'm convinced that FIREFLY failed not because it was a space western, but because Joss Whedon's storytelling might have been a bit too surprising for the broadcast audience. You just never knew where an episode was going to end up. And on broacast, that's not necessarily a plus.

Teasers in Movies

As we continue working on the plot of this haunted house movie, one question that keeps coming up is whether to put a teaser at the beginning.

A teaser in a tv show, you'll recall, is a high-key opening sequence that grabs the audience and makes it want to watch the whole show. Someone's running, someone's fighting, someone is killed. It often sets up the story. In HOUSE, someone becomes ill. In CSI, they find the bodies.

A teaser in a theatrical movie functions differently from a teaser in a TV show. If you've paid $12 to see a movie, you're not likely to walk out if the first twenty minutes are slow. All a teaser does is get your blood pumping. Think of the Bond movie opening sequences. Sometimes they have nothing to do with the plot of the movie; they're just an excuse to have a neato action sequence.

Arguably a teaser does have the same function in a movie you're watching on DVD. If you've rented a bunch of DVD's from Netflix or Zip, and the first twenty minutes don't do it for you, you'll go on to the next one. Netflix doesn't lose any money, but you lose word of mouth.

A teaser can be enormously valuable in a spec script, of course. If you don't grab the reader within the first five pages, she'll dump your script and pick the next one off the stack; or, if she's required to read through, she'll start skimming. Skimming is the death of most scripts.

But we're not writing a spec script. And I've noticed that a teaser seems to function much differently in a horror movie.

One of the biggest challenges in a horror movie is pacing. You want to reach a crescendo of fear. But you can't stay there long. A crescendo wears out its welcome pretty fast. So you have to carefully ramp up the pace, from the first stirrings in the shadows up through the climax. A horror movie is a symphony of fear. You start with the tinglings of dread. Slowly you build to a level of alarm. Soon there's whammy. But then you back off to a lull where the characters react. Then you begin building again to a bigger whammy, and so on until finally you're on a home stretch to the climax -- with plenty of twists and turns to stretch out the finale.

(There is a really clever recording I heard on the radio once that I haven't been able to find since. It's Beethoven's 9th Symphony with baseball style color commentary. "And he's coming up to the crescendo -- no, wait! I think he's going into a minor key! Folks, this is incredible!" Anybody know where to find it?)

So what happens when you have a teaser?

THE AMITYVILLE HORROR opens with a kid murdering his whole family with a shotgun. This sets up the curse on the house. Then we have a big lull while the Lutz family moves in. We're killing time getting to know the family and their issues, waiting for the first scare. A spectral voice tells a priest to "get out," the dog is nervous, etc.

The biggest problem for me was that the most horrifying thing in the movie happened in the first two minutes. Blood seeping out of the stairs has nothing on kinslaying.

The problem with a teaser in a horror movie is that it spoils the build. It's like starting a symphony with the whole horn section blasting away.

I noticed that in a lot of the movies we're watching for research -- THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, THE HAUNTING, THE OTHERS -- there is no teaser. The movie is a long build from the smallest, rationally explainable events, to the scares at the end.

(These can be of different pitch. THE OTHERS and BLAIR WITCH stay in the land of dread, while THE HAUNTING turns into a special effects lollapalooza.)

So what keeps us watching?

I think it's important to remember that neither the reader's nor the audience's experience begins with the script or the movie. The reader's experience begins with the cover letter, which mentions the hook. The audience's experience begins with the marketing campaign.

The most important fact that the audience knows coming into a horror movie is that they are seeing a horror movie. So they don't, strictly, need a teaser. They know bad things are going to happen. If you go see THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, you know that kids are going to be cut apart with a chainsaw. So you're going to stick around at least until the chainsaws come out. Until then, you'll make do with hints and suggestions. It's enough to see that one character is very, very scared; we don't have to see what she's scared of, yet.

Likewise, in ALIEN, we know there's going to be an alien hunting down the members of the crew. So we know to be scared going into the crashed spacecraft. We know to be scared of those eggs. We know that the dark corridors of the ship are scary, even if we haven't seen the beastie yet.

In fact, one of the hardest things to watch in a horror movie is where the characters needlessly put themselves in danger. What kind of idiot would poke his nose into that egg? And we have to remember that the characters don't know they're in a horror movie. They can't hear the scary music. Who's scared of an egg? Who's scared of a corridor?

We're writing this script in 7 act structure. No one dies until mid-3rd act. I've had the note that peril comes late. But I'm not sure that's right. The audience knows what the hook to this story is. They know this is a haunted house. So if I give them clever hints, they should experience dread. And I need to play with their dread for a while before I start killing off the characters, or the picture will climax too soon. On the kind of budget I'm working with, there aren't going to be any big special effects.

Oh, okay, one character gets sucked into a Maw of Hell®. But that's at the very end.

I'm using a seven act structure because it helps me make sure that each act raises the horror level and the pitch. In the first act, the villagers are scared of the house. In the second act, the characters see weird things in the house. In the third act, someone dies, but the characters don't know it yet. In the fourth act, they know the house is haunted, and try to escape, but can't. In the fifth, they're up front and personal with the house's evil. In the sixth, the outside world becomes involved. In the seventh, they discover what makes the house evil, and lay the evil to rest.

We did consider various teasers. One would have shown that the house was haunted; but we know the house is haunted. One would have set up the curse; but we know the house is cursed. All would have introduced extra characters that we'd never see again. All would have told the audience what they already essentially knew.

So, we ditched the teaser.

Of course, there are horror movies with teasers. The dreadful AN AMERICAN HAUNTING tells a haunting story set in the 1800s which begins in dread and ends in death; but it starts with a girl in the present running from nameless horror, in a bookending scene. It doesn't quite work but I see what they were trying to do.

There are also terror movies, which I'm leaving out of this equation. In CRAFTY SCREENWRITING I distinguished between horror and terror as: In a terror story, you're scared you'll end up dead. In a horror story, you should be so lucky. SCREAM has a clever teaser that kills off the movie's only name actress. But SCREAM isn't really about scaring the audience. You can watch SCREAM and eat popcorn all the way through. Try doing that the first time you see ALIEN. I'm not sure my definition holds up entirely.

I'm not sure how all this relates to the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movies. They are technically horror movies. The victims do wind up in nightmarish fates, though they seem more cartoonish than horrifying. The horror movies I like violate the laws of God in primal ways; the deaths in the Freddy movies seem more clever than primal. But they don't have the same slow pacing. We see Freddy in the first reel, I think, and the pacing is mostly dread punctuated by horror, dread, horror, dread, horror, etc. rather than dread, dread, dread, dread, horror, horror, horror.

But I don't really grok the whole Freddy/Jason/Pinhead franchisable demon killer subgenre, so I'll leave its analysis as an exercise.

Maybe I'm making too much of this. Maybe there isn't a rule that a horror movie doesn't need or want a teaser; maybe just a horror movie that depends on a long slow build. But I am pretty sure that the haunted house movie I'm writing now doesn't want one. And I think it is very important to remember that almost no one is going to see the movie you're writing without knowing what kind of movie it is. The audience is coming in to see it with certain expectations.

This incidentally is one reason the right title is so important. THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION suggests a movie about a convict who comes to terms with his imprisonment, which is not what the movie's about. Whereas if a movie has "haunt" in its title, or "horror," or "nightmare," or is simply called POLTERGEIST, then at least we're clear what kinda movie we're watching.