The Bucket Brigade

In the current New Yorker, there's a very fine piece on Steve Carell (tragically behind a paywall although everything else seems to be free). The key takeaway is the degree to which the big comedy hits are worked over and over:

With "Dinner for Schmucks," the script was crowd-sourced: after Paramount and Dreamworks hired several screenwriters to try to adapt the 1998 French farce "Le Diner de cons," without success, David Guion and Michael Handelman, both trained in improve, devised a structure that seemed to work. ... Guion and Handelman's draft was fussed with three times by sets of other writers, then tweaked three more times at comedy roundtables, where groups of writers gathered for about six hours to suggest new bits and jokes. Last summer, the script was given a two-week polish by Roach's writing partner, Larry Stuckey, and revised one last time by Guion and Handelman, before finally being turned over to a cast skilled in improve (with Guion and Handelman on set to suggest more alts).

Nowadays in the comedy industry, a Bucket Brigade of actors, writers and directors pitches in to punch up one another's films... They read one another's drafts, attend one another's table reads and rough cuts, and give notes. Lots and lots of notes.

The full article is definitely worth a read. Now where's my Bucket Brigade?

David W. Zucker at Banff

David W. Zucker is the showrunner of CBS's drama THE GOOD WIFE. He talked about the genesis of the show at the Banff Worldwide Television Festival this June.

The show was actually created by Michelle and Robert King. “What they came in with was the notion of the disgraced relationship. and you could see the opportunities to go five years with the show. She’s a compelling character, and every decision she makes has a huge impact on those around her, and she gets involved in the moral and ethical gray zones that corrupted her husband.”

What attracted CBS was the idea that Julianna Margulies’s character was also going to be a lawyer. CBS “has got fat and healthy knowing how to develop and promote franchise shows, and this gave them the potential of close ended case stories.

“But they passed on the first pitch. You could tell from their questions what had freaked them out. In the original pitch there was more time with the lead-up before she goes back to being a lawyer” [as she was 13 years before]. “The Kings wanted to explore the whole media frenzy. But the studio didn’t want to live there, because that’s not where a procedural would live. They didn’t want to spend a lot of time on the premise.

“So we went back to the same exec, and they were very open. I said, I think we can address your problems. Because it wasn’t a problem with the characters.”

So they made it more procedural (I’ve been in the same boat. I have a pay cable series that I developed; now we’re taking it to American networks. It has a fairly unique main character that everyone’s interested in. But in the serial pay cable version, she was working at a church charity; that took her into her stories. In the version we’ll pitch CBS, she’s a cop, and she solves crimes. If a network wants olive bread, you’re foolish to give them pumpernickel.)

The network liked the new version quite a bit more. “But [CBS president] Nina [Tassler]’s notes were very broad. And I tried to figure out what was missing in the script for her. Normally CBS are logic police if there is any possible confusion for the audience. But the interesting thing was that Nina was missing a deeper connection to the Alicia character. The studio and the network had been pushing for more of a procedural. Now the head of the network was asking for the thing they’d wanted us to do less of. They weren’t asking for any revisions but it left us feeling off.

“So we came back and said, “We want to go deeper with Alicia.” And out of that we got the scene in the pilot that Alicia has with her mother in law in the kitchen. That was the only time we get an expression from her what Peter put her through. And she loses it. And that single scene provided another texture. It also did a beautiful thing for us – made Nina feel she had ownership of the script.”

One of the weird things about Hollywood is that it’s not like what you think, but everything they tell you is also true. We joke about how you don’t want to be the guy at the gym who’s inflicting his script on all the producers, but passing along his script at the gym is exactly why Ian Brennan has gone from theater actor to creator of a hit show. And there are as many paths to getting your show on the air as there are shows. You can get your show on the air if you’re not an experienced TV writer — the Kings were experienced, but if you look at their credits, they’re almost all lower budget features. But they took it to Ridley and Tony Scott’s company and, though they’re “second chair” to David W. Zucker, they’re integral to the show.

The thing that all these shows we’ve been hearing about have in common is great characters — usually one great character — in a compelling and fresh situation. If you have that, a bit of luck and a lot of persistence will take you the rest of the way.

Works Sucks All Over

It's not just Canada: LA scribes are having a tough time.

While it is sort of depressing, think of it this way: at least it's not just you!

Bill Prady at Banff, Part Two

“We write every episode together from page one. There are seven of us on staff, and generally we are all sitting around while our assistant sits at a computer and typies it all up.

“To keep our momentum, we tend to skip over the science and put it in later: “Science to come.” The science itself isn’t crucial to understanding the show. It’s like Ricky shouting at Lucy in Spanish. You don’t have to understand it, but if you do, there’s another level available to you.

“We have a science advisor. A friend of a friend of mine was an astrophysicist at UCLA. What we did with the pilot was find stuff and then he corrected it. So for the show we asked him for recommendations for a science advisor. But he said, “can I do it?”

“Then later he told me he was on a plane reading a script, women came over and started talking to him. Welcome to LA where scripts are magic.

“The science has to be right. There was a show that shall remain nameless, but one of the characters was a paleontologist. And the paleontology was never anything that sounded right.

“We always have ‘the nerd beat.’ This is usually whatever we were talking about ten minutes before. Like Green Lantern is vulnerable to wood. But classic Green Lantern is vulnerable to the color yellow. Which means you can take both green lanterns out with a #2 pencil.

“Here’s our test for humor. If you can say a line to a friend, and your friend gets the joke without any context, then it’s a bad joke. You should have to spend ten minutes explaining who the characters are. If your friend doesn’t get the joke unless he knows the whole setup, then it’s a good joke.”

Bill Prady at Banff, Part One

Bill Prady showruns the incredibly highly rated comedy series BIG BANG THEORY. He had some interesting things to say about the genesis of the show at the Banff Worldwide Television Festival.

The show originated out of misery: Prady was unhappy. “Marta Kaufman [FRIENDS] had been blackmailed by the WB into running a 1 hour drama about four sisters called RELATED. I was her third choice for the number two writer. She wasn’t happy. It was awful. We were working a mile north of the WB lot. I started walking south down Hollywood Way, and I wound up in the office of Chuck Lorre.

“Now Chuck has no need for any more money. He’s created TWO AND A HALF MEN. I’ve told him, ‘Has no one explained to you how wealthy you are?’ But he’s passionate about his work.

“We decided to work on a pilot together. We wouldn’t pitch the show, we would just figure it out ourselves. We went through a bunch of ideas. Chuck had read a science fiction novel, and we tried that for a month adapting it until we realized it wasn’t a good idea.

“There was an actress famous for indie films who wanted to do TV. We developed a show for her about a woman who’s tough on the outside but out on her own for the first time. That didn’t work.

“Then we thought, let’s put these two charcters together. The original version of the show was about Leonard and Sheldon and this very tough version of Penny.

“So we wrote the first two scenes, and brought in a couple of actors and had them perform it for the president of CBS, and they commissioned the pilot.”

(Okay, let’s just stop there a moment. Remember how Ian Brennan was a theater actor before his gym buddy took his spec feature of GLEE to Ryan Murphy? Remember how Vince Gilligan created BREAKING BAD because he had no idea how to feed his family? Stories that give you hope that your long dry spell could just be the prelude to earthshattering success? Okay, this is the opposite. Somehow I suspect that if you were buds with Chuck Lorre, and he developed a show with you, and took it to the president of CBS, you could probably get a pilot commitment, too.)

“The original female character was envisioned as tough as nails but with a sweet inside, and it would take a while to break her down. Now I’m not a big fan of focus group testing, but the company that focus grouped BIG BANG had never seen such a gap between a score for a show and a score for a character. They loved the show. They hated Penny.

“Supposedly you never watch the men in a focus group. They’re dull, they don’t say much. Watch the women’s conversation. And all they were talking about was how they could get rid of this woman on the show and keep the guys.

“Generally the decisions on pilot pickups are made on Mother’s Day. This is to ensure that you have an absolutely miserable Mother’s Day. The first half you can’t focus on anything because you’re waiting to hear. And then you hear you didn’t get picked up.

“In this case, though, the network did an almost unheard of thing. They said, ‘we don’t want the show but we’ll do another pilot because we like the guys.’

“They thought it was a casting issue. But we thought it was a writing issue – no actress could play the part we’d written sympathetically.

So we brought in Kaley Cuoco. She’d actually auditioned before, but she was all wrong for the tough version, and it turned out she was perfect for the nice one.”

Emmy Nominees Talk About Showrunning

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER had a little roundtable last month with Vince Gilligan, Damon Lindelof, and a few other showrunners about what they think about showrunning. You should check it out.

Square

My television has four screen width settings: Full, Zoom, Wide Zoom and Normal. Sometimes I can't figure out which is the right one until I see that someone's face is a little too tall or wide. That can get to be a real problem if you're watching a Danny DeVito movie.

It would be really nice if DVDs included a square right before the movie. The square would go from the top of the frame to the bottom, so you could make sure you weren't cutting off anything important. And if you didn't have a square on the screen -- if you had a rectangle -- you'd know you had the wrong width.

Oh, and while I'm running for King, can we get rid of the FBI warnings you have to sit through? I don't they've stopped piracy.

Ricky Gervais at Banff

I didn’t make a lot of notes at Ricky Gervais’s talk at Banff. Gervais is a very funny man to listen to, but he wasn’t talking much about craft. I did learn that his name is pronounced "Gervaise. I had a great time at William Shatner’s panel moderated by Bill Prady too, but I can’t say I learned much beyond the importance of doing Shakespeare.

Towards the end of his talk, though, he mentioned having a list of do’s and don’t’s for THE OFFICE. He mentioned some of them:

“No exposition. ‘You know your brother who just came back from the Yucatan.’ ‘Yeah... he’s my brother, of course I know him.’

"No people entering just to do the important thing.

"No Eye of God camera coming between two people dancing. I mean, whose point of view is that?

"No director’s jokes. Nothing the character wouldn’t say just because it’s funny. We cut out half the jokes that were too smartass for the character. For example, Tim and Dawn weren’t supposed to be having a good time if they’re not together. Tim was supposed to be Norm from Cheers. But he was too smart. And the audience would think, if he’s that smart and happy, I don’t care. So what we did was no one laughs at his jokes. Only Dawn laughs at his jokes. That meant more than getting the laugh.

"Also, jokes sometimes ended with an embarrassing silence. That excited us as well.

"The reality of the piece excited us. The realer it was, the more it would resonate.

"It was about a man in free fall, who confused respect with popularity.

"Oh, and we knew we had to keep reminding people it was a fake documentary. Otherwise all we had was a slow sitcom without enough jokes.”