Lucy script?

Hey, does anyone know where I can find an I LOVE LUCY script?

Malcolm MacRury Interview, Part Four

CRAFTY: One of the big problems with a show about peacekeepers, I would think, is how little they can actually do. Did that worry you? How did you handle it?
MACRURY: We talked a lot about that. Here's a fresh idea: these people don't have guns. They can't solve their problems by shooting. They can't blow the bad guys away. But then you have a problem: the heroes can't take dramatic action. And of course you end up with kind of cheating it. To make them compelling, they gotta break the rules. One's a spy, one will commit murder, one's sleeping with everyone, and the other one is having psychotic visions. And the one who's the moral center is breaking rules to do the right thing. So that's how you get around "what do you mean they can't use guns?"
CRAFTY: It's sort of the difference between the US and Canada, encapsulated in their TV shows. On 24, it's all, "hey, let's torture this guy!" And on THE BORDER, it's, "Okay, we can't torture the guy, so what are we gonna do?"
MACRURY: America doesn't have peacekeepers, doesn't have UN observers. This is something we [Canadians] do, Indians do, Austrlians do. In fact, the school you go to learn to be an observer is in Kingston, Ontario. Americans don't do it. No peacekeepers ... unless it's a military action.
CRAFTY: The show goes pretty dark. I mean, there's a rule you can't kill an animal on screen and you can't hurt a kid. You kill a kid on screen. And that's not the worst thing that happens in that episode.
MACRURY: Yeah, I ... you're writing something and you have to trust how it's going to be conveyed and you write the images. How it's shot, how it's portrayed, that's the director's job. Mario comes out of the theatre of the absurd. And there, you do show the horror. I'm a little more squeamish than that -- I might have pulled back. But I think you have to show enough to honor the situation, so it doesn't feel like a fairy tale. And that's the great thing on pay cable, they encourage you. Is it exploitative? I hope not. I hope that in fact it draws you into the reality , as close a you're going to dare to go. It's something you wrestle with. When you read about the real stories, that's what you're drawn to. To try to write about it in a way that wouldn't disturb people would be phony. It would be, "I copped out." I didn't take the audience into the world I said I was going to convey.

That's again why we didn't want to do something happening right now. The stories we're drawing from are ten years old. You can't underestimate the passage of time. These aren't raw wounds. The fact that it isn't ripped from the headlines allows you to take a bit more care that it isn't more exploitative.

And yet you're walking a line. Yes, we killed a kid onscreen - and we also saved a kid on screen. Could we have just done the second? But that wouldn't have taken you the places you need to go. It would have been THE A TEAM, with no cost to our character.
CRAFTY: The show is almost entirely serial, whereas your typical broadcast show would be strongly episodic with overlying season arcs. How did you make the decision to go serialized?
MACRURY: Again that's funny because the first drafts were for the CBC. But a serialized show is what The Movie Network and Movie Central wanted. Something that is a page turner. You put one down, you want to see the next. And in the writing of it, that's immediately where we went to. I can't even remember any discussion. The show always went from day to day. The second episode could be the second day.

That's how we did the first season of DEADWOOD. First day, second day, third day. Those first 4 eps are 4 days in a row. I don't know if that was unconscious or not. It can work to give you some dramatic energy. It's always in real time. End of the day. I think every episode is one day. To have, you know, act two is a different day -- there was never any sense of that.
CRAFTY: When I write hour drama, I'm always pulled to make each episode about 24 hours. Sometimes I have to force myself not to compress things so much. An hour of TV feels like it wants to be a day of narrative.
MACRURY: On the show I've been working on, REPUBLIC OF DOYLE, each episode is like 3 days. But it's an investigation show.

I think I would argue that if you look at the episodes, they are completely serialized yet there is a thematic closure to each one. Each writer got to tell a complete story within the episode. And often we ended up using montages at the end to highlight that. In the first episode there's the parade, the burial, the murders, ending with two of our characters on the steps, "You want to have a drink?"
CRAFTY: Pay cable doesn't have act outs, but did you write in terms of acts, or was it all just fluid storytelling, movie-style?
MACRURY: I think that varied from writer to writer. Some people found it easier to think in acts. Leaving the act structure aside, there is a natural progression of things are going to happen.
CRAFTY: But do you think in terms of, there are five acts, and in each of them I have to serve each of these story lines?
MACRURY: Yes. We'd find the main story that we're following. And then things would be following from that. The story structure gets more complicated as we get into the series, we start pulling in those three grunts [Canadian peacekeeping soldiers], and once they're in, we've got to keep servicing their story, even though they're not our main guys. We always tried to tie the stories together, for example when Kulkin comes to the mass grave.
CRAFTY: You tied things up pretty well at the end. Do you think there's a ZOS 2? Would that depend on the numbers, or do you feel you've said what you wanted to say?
MACRURY: I think we're done in Jadac. If there were a ZOS Season 2, it would be more along the lines of a PRIME SUSPECT model where you take the lead character and put them in another world. Maybe because we only had eight, we really put everything into it. I don't know where else we'd go in Jadac.
CRAFTY: So what's next?
MACRURY: I recently did a pilot for Showcase called LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY.
CRAFTY: Great title.
MACRURY: I wrote it originally for HBO -- in fact that's what got me the job on DEADWOOD. And I just got back from Newfoundland, where I did a half hour pilot, directed by Jim Allodi. with Allan Hawco. He was the Brit Captain in ZOS. It was a half-hour called THE REPUBLIC OF DOYLE. They asked us to turn it into an hour, so we were trying to figure out how to do that.
CRAFTY: Of course they did. Because comedy, drama, really, what's the diff?
MACRURY: There was always a lot of comedy in it, but we're adding more mystery. It's a private detective show set in St. John's. Yeah, it's ROCKFORD FILES.
CRAFTY: That's funny, because Kay Reindl was just blogging about how everybody wants to write a light detective show, but you just can't sell them.
MACRURY: Yeah, everybody wants to write ROCKFORD FILES. Fortunately, everybody's funny in St. John's.
CRAFTY: Thanks so much for talking to us!

ZOS premieres Monday, January 19th at 9 pm PST on Movie Central, and at 10 pm EST on The Movie Network.

ZOS: Zone of Separation

ZOS is a powerful, ambitious 8 x 1 hour series about a small city in former Yugoslavia divided between angry, bitter, scared Christians and angry, bitter, scared Muslims. There are men with artillery up in the hills. And between them, trying to keep them from massacring each other, are the UN observers.

Colm Meaney is a thuggish bar and brothel-keeper who's the Muslim strong man. Lolita Davidovich is the ruthless yet possibly fragile head of the Christian community. Michelle Nolden plays the UN observer captainwho's emotionally wounded by the conflict, and Rick Roberts the god-fearing martinet who's in charge of the Canadian peacekeepers. FLASHPOINT's Enrico Colantoni (pictured) disappears into the role of the flamboyant, romantic, possibly less insane than he lets on militia leader known as Speedo Boy.

The series tells hard stories about a place that has been Hell, and people who have been through Hell, and don't want to go back there. It demonstrates why pay cable TV is now the most interesting medium to create in. It creates a keenly observed and emotionally real world you've never been to, populates it with characters you want to know more about, and let them rip through stories that test the bounds of human relations. ZoS takes you a place you wouldn't want to go, but which your world could turn into, if all hell broke loose. It lets you live there for a while, safely and vicariously. If you're a fan of THE WIRE, then ZOS is a slamdunk.

I'm a writer, so file this paragraph under "I'd have written a slightly different show." The show is all about the interweaving, entangling story lines. I might have written a more episodic show. The series has the surprises of real life, where I might have tried to foreshadow more of the jeopardy. And you have to work at figuring out what some of the characters are thinking -- some of the most intriguing characters are as opaque as real people. But you know it all by the wild ending. What creator Malcolm MacRury and director Mario Azzopardi set out to do, they have done extremely well. The characters are so fully realized you wish the story played out over 13 episodes instead of only 8. It's must-watch TV.

So if you're in Canada, and haven't already signed up for Movie Central or The Movie Network, you might want to sign up now.

ZOS premieres Monday, January 19th at 9 pm PST on Movie Central, and at 10 pm EST on The Movie Network.

Malcolm MacRury Interview, Part Three

CRAFTY: Let's talk business. At what point did this become a pay cable show? Did you have other versions in mind for other networks?
MACRURY: It actually began at the CBC [the Canadian public broadcaster]. There's a credit in the title scroll -- "Developed with the assistance of the CBC." The first 3 scripts were developed at the CBC -- the same exact show you saw. They were trying to figure out what they were going to be -- it was the middle of the transition to the new regime -- and there was a space for experimentation. They were interested in Paul Gross -- so we developed the script for the CBC that you saw.
CRAFTY: And I'm thinking they read the scripts and came back at you with, "have you ever actually watched our network?"
MACRURY: We kept saying "this is a ten o'clock show, at least, maybe eleven o'clock or twelve" -- and they don't even have a ten o'clock spot. And they kept saying "we love the arena and the people." But to their credit, and maybe partly because of Paul's credentials, they let us have the show back once they realized, this is just not a CBC show. We took it to The Movie Network and they snapped it up within, I think, 3 weeks. We were never being disingenuous -- we told them, this is the show, do you like it or not? But it was originally developed for a public conventional broadcaster.
CRAFTY: I'm thinking, with Colm Meaney and all the others, this must be some sort of international co-production?
MACRURY: It's not a co-pro, it's completely Canadian. Of course there was a gap in financing after the distribution advance, tax credits, etc. We still needed a couple million bucks, and that gap was filled by a German company called Alive Entertainment. And for that investment they got the world outside Canada.

That's the funny thing, in terms of the actors and the sales, it wasn't Europe pudding. We started with the four UN observers, and they have to be from four countries. It's one of the rules we inherited from the reality.

Colm Meaney, yes, was sparked by the international distributor. Of course Lolita [Davidovich] helps. But when we got Colm that was exciting for them. He's been on TV for fourteen years playing the chief engineer on STAR TREK. But the part was already written as an expat Brit, we didn't rejig it for Colm.
CRAFTY: And Lolita Davidovich is Serbian.
MACRURY: Lolita was really interested in the Serbian connection. She grew up in London, Ontario, but her dad is Serbian. She had the language, she was really interested in the terrain. She was scared to go to Bosnia, she thought, they're going to hate me. But she really liked the people. To get the part of someone who's the figurehead for this warlord, getting caught up in this strange affair, her dead son -- obviously she was attracted to the character, But she was also thinking, "this will be my homage to my people."
CRAFTY: I notice you didn't try to make all the characters good in some way. This is a part of the world where there are real villains, and without being cartoonish about it, you were willing to let some of the characters be really bad people without redeeming them.
MACRURY: Titac (Colm Meaney's character) is an opportunist. But we give him his arguments against the imam. 'Sure, the guy's well-meaning, but he's going to get us all killed.' He does have a philosophy. But he's like a Mafia guy that's lost his way. It's become more about guns and money and girls than anything else. Pretty common in reality. We read about Serbia and Bosnia, but also Northern Ireland. 'We believe in the Provos but we're also kneecapping drug dealers who aren't giving us our cut.' It starts with the public ambition but soon the personal ambition takes over.

It's tricky when you're writing about other cultures. In Hollywood you can just make them the villain. Or, our [Canadian] tendency is to make them saints. You're afraid of any backlash. Any character who's Native has to be a saint, any black has to be a saint. I think that's dehumanizing. When I write characters that are not my ethnicity or religion, I try to give them the same dimensions that I give the nice Canadian girl that's going to be a peacekeeper. They have to be as flawed as I am.
CRAFTY: And in Titac's case, much more flawed than you.
MACRURY: Titac is never non-interesting -- and non-interesting is the worst thing you can say about a character. You do want to understand him. He's a real presence the way Colm plays him.

I think in some regards we may have failed in this: it's always harder to write about good than evil. One of the most positive characters is [character redacted to avoid spoilers]. We gave him moments of flaw, but maybe should have given him more. If anything we erred to make him more positive because Titac isn't.

I think I would have liked to have spent more time with some of the good characters. Like the woman doctor. The cop, Kulkin, who's just trying to be a good cop.
CRAFTY: Yeah, I kept thinking, why didn't they get 13 episodes?
MACRURY: The fun stuff are the evil guys -- we're drawn to that. But the little girl, Anna, was important to me, because people who are in these situations, working, like Sean, often it comes down to, I can't save the world, but let me have one victory, let me save this one person. And as we heard from our military observer, you end up focusing on the little things you can do.

ZOS premieres Monday, January 19th at 9 pm PST on Movie Central, and at 10 pm EST on The Movie Network.

Avatar, and 3 D

Lisa and I saw Avatar over Christmas. I didn't blog about it at the time because I really didn't see much to blog about. Special effects: spectacular. Cinematography: lush and wonderful. Story: perfectly fine, not that surprising, a little cartoonish.

(Possible spoilers.)

Various people have remarked on how it's very much DANCES WITH WOLVES TALL BLUE ALIENS. White guy comes from far away to lead the savages in battle to protect them from his own people, who are rapacious exploiters and profiteers. America in Iraq, America and the Native Americans, tribes in the Amazon v. loggers, etc. Because atrocities don't happen unless there's a white guy to witness them, and savages can't fight back unless there's a white guy to lead them.

Yeah, that's all true.

But since this is science fiction, some of the cliches of this subgenre of movie got to breathe new life. The Navi of Pandora aren't just metaphorically attuned to the planet, like Native Americans supposedly were: they are actually set up with their own USB cable to interface with it. And the planet isn't just metaphorically alive, it is literally conscious. It literally protects itself.

I thought that was a nice touch.

Science fiction and fantasy -- and stories in general -- get to make the world behave the way we want it to behave. We want to believe that the world is alive and has a relationship with us; in the movies, it does. We want to believe that the natives have a deeper understanding of some fundamental truths that we do; in the movies, they can.

That shadow passing across the Moon really does mean something bad is going to happen. In real life, it means it might rain.

What I didn't really see the point of was the 3D. I watch all my movies in 3D. That is, I watch them, and I have an effortless sense of who's close to camera and who's far. Partly it's size. Partly it's that faraway things are misty.

I never had a sense that AVATAR's 3-D was really bringing something to the party. I was grateful it spared us the "whoo! the rock jumps off the screen at you" and just created a sense of depth. But I remember having a sense of depth watching LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

The change from black'n'white to color gave us information we didn't have before. Red, blue and brown all look the same in black'n'white. The change to widescreen gave us something important: vistas, and two shots. But I'm still dubious about the value of 3D.

Oh, I see the value for exhibitors. It makes it harder to pirate the movie, and it makes people want to see the movie in the theaters, at least until the thrill wears off. But is 3-D here to stay? Sixty years of 3-D movies suggests it may not be.

Malcolm MacRury Interview, Part Two

CRAFTY: Did you have the whole series arced out when you wrote the pilot?
MACRURY: We had that week together where it was the four of us. By the end of that week we had sketched out in broad strokes the 1st three episodes.
CRAFTY: And those three episodes really feel like an Act One, with a strong ending to them--
MACRURY: Then I went away and wrote the pilot, and Pete and Jason were working on 2 and 3. But it was important to get the pilot in the hands of the other writers as they worked on their outlines. So by getting the pilot first draft done quickly we could hear the voices.
CRAFTY: It sounds like you sort of had an unpaid writing room...?
MACRURY: We had three weeks paid, plus everybody got a script. One week to come up with the stories. Then we came back in the room and broke down three more episodes. Then another week for the last two. Somewhere Pete dropped out to do other things and Paul Aiken ended up co-writing with Jason. You don't need more than that, especially if you're block shooting eight episodes and you know you're going to have all the scripts finished before you shoot anything. Still it might have been good to have one other person around as a story editor – another ear – somebody who can focus on the words.
CRAFTY: Talk about how the block shooting affects you as a writer.
MACRURY: On the one hand you think it's better for the writer, you get to think it all through before you shoot anything. But what it can hamper is the thing that makes TV great – the moments of connection – oh, these two actors are so good together. Speedo Boy – you start to see how we need him in the show – hey, Lolit'a's really good with him! You can miss that in block shooting. We had to fight hard to keep thinking, and not just go, "oh it's done." And in some cases we were able to do something, and in some cases we couldn't.
CRAFTY: You didn't leave a lot of loose ends for ZOS 2!
MACRURY: I'm pretty happy if this is the end. Trying to tell a story about how do you make peace – the absurdity of trying to make peace where it's not wanted-- my favorite show of all time is the Prisoner – I'm sad but curious to see they're remaking it – that's what I was going for, the ending of The Prisoner. "Take care out there."
CRAFTY: Which apparently they had to write in 24 hours when the network pulled the plug in the middle of the season!
MACRURY: And I knew we had to have a Tragically Hip cover band playing over all this chaos-- these innocents performing in the midst of it. Kind of a circus feel.

Talk about the block shooting thing – you do have to know the ending. It makes the show more like a miniseries or a movie. Contrast that with when I was working on DEADWOOD, David Milch never wanted to know the ending, not even of a scene. It's a different way of working and one I'm not good at.
CRAFTY: What did you take away from Deadwood?
MACRURY: The biggest thing I took away was how hard it is to get it right, the dedication you need. Early on, there were just the two of us lying on the floor while David [Milch] was writing a line of description – not even dialog – hour and a half to two hours, going over and over the same line of description. He'd change this word, that word, punctiuation – it was just a stage direction – finally he turned to me with a big smile – "I think that just about does it." And I laughed, and his mood changed – "what's so funny?" "This is hard work." "Yeah. It is. Because you gotta get it right."

That, and the use of the double dash in everything. People make fun of me. I never end a line of description with a period anymore. I don't use the triple dots any more – I use the double dash. This is writer wanker talk, maybe, but I find it so liberating. You look at a page and god damn it, it looks more dynamic! Even if it isn't. It's really flowing well. None of those horrible periods.
CRAFTY: Did you ever consider using a VO to get inside anyone's head? Some of these characters are sort of inscrutable and you play with that. E.g. we don't know what Simon's game is for a while. Or where Speedo Boy's loyalties really lie.
MACRURY: I think we made a decision about that. What I wanted to do – Sean, Michelle Nolden's character [who plays the head UN observer], was always crucial. Kind of the moral center of the show. We started her at the point of breakdown. Where's she going to end up, where's Simon going to end up. It's a complicated love story, and one, dare I say it, I don't think we've seen before. It's a story of a guy forced to do something terrible to a woman he loves and able to do it and feeling complicit – and yet there is love between them.

So she would be the character we privileged with the inner vision – we'd see things through her that would get at her state of mind in a way that she doesn't project to the world. So we didn't want to give anybody else the VO. We also didn't do a lot of backstory. We wanted to define them in what they're doing on the show. No "My father beat me" – revealing the character. We wanted to keep the characters more in the moment – what are they going to become – if they end up being a bit mysterious that's great.
CRAFTY: But you also didn't zoom in here and there to tell us where the characters stand, and I assume that was a decision, because you must have had network notes about "What's Simon really thinking?"
MACRURY: The thing was we had three scripts when we came to The Movie Network and Movie Central. And their only notes were more on the lines of "push it further." And it's a different piece than a lot of stuff out there.

ZOS premieres Monday, January 19th at 9 pm PST on Movie Central, and at 10 pm EST on The Movie Network.

Interview with ZOS Showrunner Malcolm MacRury, part one

CRAFTY: It's a hell of a show. How did you guys come up with the idea for it?
MACRURY: There was a first attempt made driven by the director, Mario Azzopardi. It was peacekeeping more as a cop show. He wasn't happy, though. [Producer] Paul Gross approached me because he's kind of obsessed with DEADWOOD--
CRAFTY: -- and you wrote on DEADWOOD –
MACRURY: We met and the idea we came up with was, could you tell the story of a whole community in the same way that Deadwood told the formation of a civilization out of illegal opportunity and opportunism. Could you tell a story about a community that had had law and order and then descended into chaos and anarchy. Could you tell the story of that community, giving equal weight to all the partners, to see what happened to it. And clearly there are parallels to DEADWOOD and Westerns. I was just joking with Rick Roberts [who plays the head of the Canadian peacekeeping force] that he's the "new sheriff in town." And Colm Meaney's Muslim bar owner is the Al Swearingen character. Mila, Lolita Davidovich's character, is Tolliver... This was a place divided by ethnicity and religion, and right in the midst of it, these outsiders, who have the unenviable task of making peace where it's not wanted.

We wanted to tell it in the present rather than back in the 90's when the worst of the war was going on. Two reasons for that. One, I wanted to tell this post-9/11. How would all that paranoia affect the situation? I mean, the Americans were heroes in Croatia and Bosnia, but after 9/11 all these mujahedeen disappeared out of there. So we wanted to play with that.
CRAFTY: And you got a Donald Rumsfeld look-alike with a George Bush accent--
MACRURY (LAUGHS) -- This was a pretty secularized Muslim world. It's only a couple hours drive from Budapest but you drive through the hills of Bosnia and you'd see spires of mosques like you'd see church spires in Québec. These are European Muslims. Rooted there, intermarried, secularized-- though that's changing a bit. The Imam in ZOS asks if "only the Red Cross will be allowed to do this?" becaues in Sarajevo you have all sorts of Muslim money coming in. And religion is become more a mark of id. Sometimes you see women wearing the hijab. So the old Sarajevo model of everybody lives together has really been tested.
CRAFTY: Did you go there?
MACRURY: Sarajevo is a great city but not the meeting place that it once was. People live in their own neighborhoods. There are ethnic and religious identities that weren't so strong before. But you go to Belfast, and 10, 15 years ago you'd have said that was hopeless, and now everybody's getting along.
CRAFTY: And the other reason to tell it in the present?
MACRURY: We wanted something more like a fable than a historical recreation. That's why we use the terms “Christians" and "Muslims” rather than Croats or Serbs and Bosniaks. More archetypical. Because, who are we to try to tell this story in a historically accurate fashion?
CRAFTY: And somebody would always say you got it wrong--
MACRURY: --everybody would say we got it wrong. The good thing about setting it now but based in a struggle that had its climax over a decade ago is ... if you were to try to tell Iraq or Afghanistan now, you'd be too close. You want to take something that's got a little distance, a little time to settle – you can see things that you couldn't when it's in your face.
CRAFTY: What was the point at which you knew you had not only a territory but a show? Was there a point at which it crystallized for you?
MACRURY: That happened in the room really. We got together, Peter Mitchell, Jason Sherman, John Krizanc, and me, and the producers said okay, take a week, the four of you, sit in the room, see what you come up with. We brought in a military observer, Maj. John Russell, a real UN "swimmer" who'd been to all sorts of places, Sierra Leone, that sort of place. He gave us the overview talk that he gives to various places. It's therapy for him, giving this talk. That started us off. By the end of the week we had the bones of what the thing was.
CRAFTY: And you and Pete Mitchell are serious TV vets--
MACRURY: And Jason and John come out of theatre, Governor General Award winnning theatrical people, so that made a good combo. And we had a real freedom in that room. We realized, we can do anything we want. We're making it all up from nothing.
CRAFTY: But what was the moment creatively, the point where you knew you not only had a bunch of things you wanted to explore but a TV series?
MACRURY: A turning moment was coming up with the character of Speedo Boy. And that wasn't something Major Russell told us, that came out of John Krizanc's research. You come up with an image, and it sort of defines, "Okay, that's the kind of show we wanna do." It has some Monty Python sides to it. Or M*A*S*H, or CATCH-22. If you create a character like that, it informs how the world is going to be shaped. If a figure like that is allowed to exist in this world--
CRAFTY: John Boorman once told me that Nicol Williamson never really grasped his character in EXCALIBUR until he got that silver skullplate to put on his head, and then he felt he really had it. And for Laurence Olivier it was the nose -- he had to have the right nose for the role to come together for him.
MACRURY: Here's the weird thing – when we were actually filming in Tuzla, in Bosnia, they're very wary of the UN. It's no a happy history. We say in the show, "if all the sides don't hate your guts you'renot doing your job" but on the other side, there's a real skepticism -- So we're shooting, and Enrico came in late in the production -- we're doing block shooting – filming above the town – and he's wearing his leather trench coat over a Speedo, and the locals all come around and say, "who's he supposed to be?" And we explained, and they said, "Oh, I like him, he's real!" So that was kind of humbling. Four smarty-pants writers sit in a room in Canada trying to come up with something outrageous, and that's the thing they say, that's real.
CRAFTY: And on FLASHPOINT he's the most buttoned down guy in the world and on ZOS he's this flamboyant, crazy--
MACRURY: And by the way, talking about that, one of the things I learned on this shoot was, I really like actors. I hang out with them more now – I'm not uptight or precious about my words with them. Because what they bring to the character is so much more important. And you can write all the words and the actions – it's what they do on film that gives you anything you've got. They are creators along with the directors and the writers and the producers. I'm almost embarrassed to be learning this at my advanced age. I was at a writer's thing making this point and being shot down – showrunners were all saying "you can't let them go off script," "the script is what's vital to save." I think it's like the Bible. You have to let people interpret it and make it their own.
CRAFTY: But there's a difference, isn't there, between working with actors so they're comfortable with the lines -- which may mean rewriting them -- and having actors improvise. Because they usually start saying the subtext an sounding like they're from Southern California.
MACRURY: I had one guy come in, "I'm so used to coming onto shows and changing all the lines so I'm comfortable with them," and I didn't rein him in much, except here and there where he might have missed some information we needed to get out. But after a while he comes in and says, "I'm kicking myself, because I'm starting to hear the rhythms of what you wrote, and I'm starting to hear it in my head." So I guess we're saying the same thing. I do feel a bit liberated. When you have really good actors you can just trust them to run with it.

ZOS premieres Monday, January 19th at 9 pm PST on Movie Central, and at 10 pm EST on The Movie Network.

Getting Ahead of Yourself

Q. I created a series, wrote the template, pilot, and came up with a dozen springboards for episodes. After submitting my show concept to two actors/producers (I checked them out IMDB) they optioned the idea for eight months. If the show gets picked up, how much control will I have ? Would it be rude for me to ask the Network for permission to hire the writers?

No, certainly not rude. It's understood that a newbie creator would like to work with an experienced showrunner who's on the same wavelength, who's going to try to bring the newbie up rather than sidelining her. Whether the network lets you interview potential showrunners depends on how you come across to them. If they think you're a sensible person, and they believe that part of what they're buying is your unique vision -- and not just a concept you happened to trip over -- then they'll want to keep you involved. The showrunner will probably not consult you much on the other writers, but if you're on the same page about what the show is, he'll have your vision in mind.

However, you need to go back and read your option agreement, which I am going to guess you signed without showing it to an agent or entertainment lawyer. Your contract determines what rights you have, including your right to continued involvement on your show. It should say that you'll have meaningful consultation on the showrunner; if you had a great negotiator it might even say you had veto over the showrunner. The contract should also say how many scripts you are guaranteed per season, that you have a guaranteed staff job with a guaranteed credit, that you keep the Created By credit, or a minimum of a shared Created By credit if the showrunner rewrites the pilot. It should contain a per-episode creative royalty, which could be a percentage of budget or a flat fee. It should include travel and living expenses if you're required to work away from home. And so on.

See, the option agreement is supposed to say "we have the right to buy your show, and if we do, here's what you get at that point." That's why option agreements take so ungodly long to negotiate. Long before a show I create is a real thing, before anyone is making money on it, my agent has to negotiate every detail of my package of compensation and credit. Because until I've signed the option, I have total control of my project. If they want it, they have to make me happy. After I've signed it, they may still want to keep me happy, but they don't have to.

All this is why you never, ever, ever negotiate your deal yourself.

Forgot to mention, I'm currently writing episode 5. The guys who optioned really liked my writing and told me to just keep on writing. I figure I'd write 13 and stop. If the show gets picked up, I was thinking, because of the economy, the order would be 6 episodes, 13 if were lucky , and 22 if we're extremely lucky

Stop writing scripts. Please.

Unless, that is, you're getting paid to write them. And I doubt you are, since they told you to " just keep on writing."

Getting a show made is striking the jackpot. It doesn't happen that often. Professional writers wax fat on staff jobs, but we survive on development deals. I spent all last year developing my pay cable show, writing draft after draft, running a story room, revising the season arcs, etc. If it doesn't go, I'll mourn, but my agent will still be very, very pleased with me.

You should not do any more new scripts until you are getting paid to write scripts.

Writing additional scripts also doesn't make sense creatively. No one at the network is going to read past episode 3 when they're deciding to pick up the show or not. In fact, most of them won't read past the pilot.

Moreover, the network may have different ideas about your show. TV development is collaborative. On NAKED JOSH, we started with a show about a freshman in college. The network asked us to age it up. We wound up with a show about a young professor. Imagine if we'd written five scripts about a freshman in college! Writing TV is a process of sending something to the network, getting feedback, and rewriting. For my pay cable series, I've written dozens of drafts of the first three scripts trying to nail "what the show is." The network hated one script (my bad) and I had to throw the entire thing out.

Don't get ahead of where your project is.

I would put all your energies into writing and rewriting the pilot. Make sure it is brilliant. Examine each line in it. Can you make that line smarter, more distinctive? Can you make the action sing? Writing is rewriting. Get real actors to read the script out loud at a table reading. (Maybe your actor producers can help there.)

Also, keep trying to improve the springboards, without actually writing the scripts. A great pilot with a great season arc document is all you need to sell a show to a network.