LEVERAGE Week 3

No photo this time, as this week's snap was intended to be a staff picture in answer to Javi's. East side, yo. However, my staff rebelled at a spontaneous portrait. Apparently it will be allowed when more mascara is applied and hair crimped. And that was just Chris Downey. (Insert alternate hack punchline here) Ahem. Next week then.

This week was mostly consumed by beating out the 12-or-so page outlines for the first few episodes. This is the first time this staff has worked together, first time some of the writers have worked in one-hour, and first time any human alive has attempted to outline this particular heist/con man/vigilante show. So, you know, process stuff, exactly what our outline format is, "what was that great joke you pitched about Hardison and Parker?" etc. Filthy Assistant types at approximately 1000 words a minute so most of this stuff is already in the room notes, but it helps to have another human look at your act breaks and say "No, you are not insane, that works."
While those writers then buggered off for a day or two to put the final shine on the outlines, the rest hacked at a few new ideas for the next batch. They ranged from super-high concept to particularly gritty. So gritty, in fact, that researching and discussing one of the topics wa a magnificent, soul-sucking buzz-kill. This is the risk you run when writing a show about high-tech thieves going after powerful assholes in order to right wrongs -- there are so very many assholes, and so many wrongs, it can get a bit depressing. I cannot even imagine what the writer's room is like on a rainy day over on Law & Order: SVU. "Hey, it's child-rape Wednesday. When's lunch?"

It can also, admittedly, be quite inspiring. Downey brought in this article, about the ultra-rich jetting off to Miami, driving around in Hummer limos and playing competitive paintball with ex-DEA agents, and you cannot help but be fired up by the magnificent douchebaggery presented. I mean, come on, what sentient being can ride in a Hummer limo and not be cognizant of their karmic debt? I, personally, felt the belly-fire re-ignite at the prospect of skewering these fella's fictional counterparts.

The outlines were then turned in, group-read, and group noted. Not excessively so -- again, we believe firmly in the assigned writer's right to call an audible -- but there are always little logic humps that multiple brains can help with, or things that look a little screwy in the cold light of the outline. Sometimes a writer will simply say "Go ahead, read that bit. I could not make it work, no matter how hard I tried," at which point we all pitch in to fix it -- or often agree that the idea does indeed not work when put in a form that may actually need to be acted and shot, and so an alternative must be found.

The most fun is just seeing the individual writers' styles inform the very dry beat-sheets they go off with. There were great, unexpected little surprises in each document.

We were also somewhat distracted by the discovery that The Closer writers have a video blog. You can watch screenwriters ... screenwriting. The staff spent some time amusing themselves at the prospect of a videoblog detailing our day at work, and decided that it would not accomplish anything in growing the fan base, but would probably initiate a UN human rights investigation over my people-management skills. I chuckled munificently, had them throw out their lunch wrappers -- as I insist they not leave the premises during lunch -- and then started the 48 minute timer for our first afternoon session.

And you think I'm kidding.

As always, sate your curiousity in the Comments, and here are the questions from last session:

Caseyko74: So, do the writers have their own little office or are you all in the same location as the production office? I am curious since I have only ever worked on a pilot, and mostly films where we rarely see the writer(s).

Right now the writer's room (and I mean room) is based at Dean's magnificent new complex. When we actually go into production we will probably move to whatever facility we shoot out of, assuming we are in LA.

Oh, and Casey, hope you didn't think I was blowing you off when I was in New Orleans. I was there for 72 hours to visit and do some quick rewriting. I am, possibly, the only person to come to New Orleans and literally eat nothing but craft services. I know, I know, what a bloody waste. On the other hand, I got some spiffy pics of a cemetery.

joshua james: Once this season is finished and you're a hit, does the staff grow? Will you adopt more baby writers for the next season / level / dungeon challenge?

Hey, no summoning Princess Kinahora. Assuming there's a second season, I don't know what the staff situation will be. Personally I'm rather digging the small staff. If they stay, they stay. Our co-producer Amy Berg, for example, wrote a crackling pilot as a sample and I wouldn't be surprised if she's running her own show within a year or two, if not this one. So you never know.

As we're freelancing a batch out, we're grooming those folk as possible staff replacements. Speaking of which, I know there's a question about that somewhere ...

jim: I vaguely remember you saying some time back that this show was going to be highly freelanced. How does that work into this process or has that been dropped or am I just nuts and you never said that?

There we are. Well, oddly, although we have a small staff, that seems to be working out just fine. Now as many of you know we're required by the Guild to freelance out two scripts a year (hmm, that's for 22, I'm not sure what our quota is. I should check ...) Although we're not freelancing out as heavily as I originally intended, we're still going to use our freelancers as an aggressive bullpen, rather than the standard "Oh God we're behind, let's farm out a script" or "Hey, my buddy needs to make his Guild minimums for the year ..." We'll freelance fewer than planned, but more than usual, and in a different context. Once the show is on the air and more people can get a better sense of what it's like, I hope, hope, to go to Next Generation's old open pitching policy. But we'll see.

deepstructure: "The odd thing about television is that story doesn't really matter" well no wonder tv sucks! come on, no one else was shocked by this? i know characters are (more) important, but really.

Let me clarify. I said "doesn't really matter", not "doesn't matter", and there's a reason for that distinction.

Basically what I mean is, no matter how hard you work on story in TV, ultimately story will not save you. Character in TV is ALL. Truly good stories, of course, come OUT of character, they don't happen TO characters. Good story always comes out of character choice.

This doesn't mean that you can slack off and write bad stories, or you shouldn't bust your ass to write great stories, which is what all those writers hammering away in writer's rooms right now are doing. It's just that you can not help be cognizant of the irony that you are working hardest at the part of the show the audience cares least about. Very rarely do people show up, week in and week out, to watch intriguing stories regardless of characters -- those are anthology stories, or, arguably, Law & Order. People tune in to watch characters they like do things and deal with unexpected complications in delightful or interesting ways. Your story, per se, is disposable, week after week, replaced in the viewer's mind by the new week's dilemma like clockwork. Nature of the beast.

While I personally cannot think of a show that I watched on a regular basis because the story was just so gripping -- even though the characters were boring or I hated them -- we can all recall episodes of our favorite shows where in retrospect the episodic stories didn't really hang together, but we loved watching the characters deal with the situations (good chunks of several X-Files seasons fall into this, and I'm sure you can all add your own personal picks.)

What good story does is provide the most interesting or intriguing framework for the characters. Great story supercharges a show. Also, cumulative great stories allow you to address a season as a creative meta-work of art unto itself. Even so, while you need a constant stream of great stories, and breaking great stories is bear work, it's the invisible part of the magic trick, the skeleton, for 99% of the viewing public, and hence the occasional frustration.

Wil wheaton: Hey, is that Boylan on the board Christine Boylan?

Yep.

kid sis: Hey Rogers! Don't make a Brazilian porn fart on my wet dream of Underpaid Glorified Dialogue Writer! Zeus knows I can't clean bedpans or fill out insurance forms...

For that metaphor alone, you should get an automatic staffing gig.

Until next time, remember -- always three-quarter, never profile.

RE Software Guru

Thanks to all for the speedy replies. The tone of the post was indeed snarky; I was actually posting mid-room-rant, typing even as I grumbled aloud, proving the point to the writers that I could summon up the technical knowhow necessary to lick the perceived problem within seconds because My Commenters IS Smarter Than I (tm Ezra Klein).

As many of you surmised, I mispoke in the post -- I was talking more about how we format information for display rather than about literally print-format issues. All those who commented and e-mailed, thanks, and I will reply within a day or so. It's part of a larger discussion about how some information should just stay dumb, but we'll tackle that in a bit.

Again, thanks, and I'll reply imminently.

LEVERAGE: Week 2

No, no, I'm not THAT crazy. Baby writer Melissa was gone for a week, and the staff decided to welcome her back with a big dose of paranoid crazy. This was the first thing she spotted when she arrived in the room, hidden among the other notes on the wall. Almost had her there, for a second.

Some people in the last post reacted in horror to the index cards. Fools. FOOLS! The cards will save us all. We're making 13 hours of television here, or writing roughly 6-8 movies in about four months -- and those movies have to have connecting plot and character tissue.

Let's put it this way -- in the spiffy Ellis-like future, I will have some sort of nano-cloud hanging over the center of the table. As seven people brainstorm, the nano-writer's assistants will tag the ideas and then hang them in suspension assigning them a rough shape and color for easy identification and classification. As we link those concepts, the nano-notes recombine into story-molecules, changing color and phase-shifting. Onto these story molecules we graft other individual idea-atoms, or combine the story molecules into a longer narrative -- this combination phase-shifts again, forming an increasingly complex and dense lattice-work, until finally the narrative is represented as a story-solid, a complex chain of poly-beats consisting of all those individual ideas and the new phase-shifted forms they take when combined. That story solid is delivered to the writer for final crafting with his own individual style and voice.

LACKING THAT, we use the cards.

Work proceeds apace, with damn near half the staff already working on outlines for submission to the Beloved Network Humans. A few of these will drop out, of course, but not bad for two weeks in. Some shows submit essentially prose first drafts (45 page outlines!), which works wonders for them. I admit I'm weak, and don't like getting trapped in an outline like that, so we're aiming for a structure that's a bit more reasonable. Scripts are organic things, with their own rhythms inherent in the structure. Also I subscribe quite heavily to the Hemingwayesque theory that a story only has so much vital energy behind it, and every time you tell the story, some of that energy is dissipated. The last thing I want are the writers tired of the story by the time it's come to whip up the banter.

First guess, I'd say we're going to wind up with about half the staff outlining at any given time, and then release people on a staggered schedule to write drafts, so we always have room quorum. These drafts will be tuned once we get a better sense of what the episode broadcast order is -- then we go back in and backfill a little on the relationship arc stuff. But for now, breaking the stories and coming up with fun character bits is snappy enough work.

Far more important that all that "making television for The Man" business, the room bits are also coming along nicely. A discussion of how Casper the Friendly Ghost, taken in abstract as a dead kid, works differently in other cultures, gave rise to the recurring character of Casperu, the Japanese Dead Ghost Child Buddy. The kid from The Grudge showing up in your Harvey Comic is a different matter entirely ... "Sophomore year", the groin shield barbecue, Chris trapped on the staff of Pushing Daisies ("Five pitches on whimsical fruits! GO!"), tiger cubs and the Endless Spinning Void of the Atheist Afterlife (that last requires me to spin in my chair, hands up, as I fall endlessly through the darkness making small talk with Hitler) -- as with all good room bits, they are generally incomprehensible to outsiders and triply hilarious for being so.

Wil Wheaton once chastized me for not answering Comments questions in the main post bodies, as he reads by RSS feed, so I'll grab the answers from the last week.

D.M: (off photo)Should you be buying your office wall lamps from funeral home overstock?

The LEVERAGE offices are located in a 1930's dog hospital. No lie. We suspect ghost dogs. Or at least I hope that's a ghost dog doing awful things to my leg under the table.

MCM:Having just done something similar (but in a very different way), I'm curious: where do writers start to impact the story in your system? Do they get to pitch ideas, or do you basically give them that quasi-outline and they have to play in that box?

All writers in at every step, but we have a weeeeee tiny staff. Seven people in the room, and that's counting both showrunners. Chris and I get right of final refusal on any pitches, but this is such a complex bear of a show -- we're averaging two heists/cons per episode -- I welcome the voices.

Each story originates from one of the writers in the room, sometimes just the high concept, sometimes a three or four beat arc. If possible that writer's assigned the script, and then will follow it all the way through production.

I know some rooms are "producers and up" or even showrunner-written outlines which are then assigned, etc. but I was taught by my old showrunners (LAAAAANDSBEEERG!) that part of the EP's responsibility is training the younger writers to work in the room and eventually create their own shows. Also, why the hell are we hiring theses people if they're just going to be glorified dialogue machines?

MARK: I'm curious about long-term show and character arch. Does you show have long running plot lines? If so, how do (did) you go about scoping those out? How do you incorporate them into each episode.

We have a progression of relationships, but this show lends itself to stand-alones. Some recurring day players will drop in, and we'll shove the characters through a change by the end of the season, but I think in season one you want to make sure people can drop in somewhere around episode 4 and not feel totally lost.

As a result, we've got the character changes arc-ed out over 4 ep increments. Episode 13 could not occur without the character changes from eps 1-12. Think THE CLOSER arc style rather than BUFFY. It will, however be a closed season. I despise cliffhanger endings.

CARLO:What's the ballpark pay for the 50+ hour weeks, Rogers?

Hmm, staff writers are paid weekly, but on short contracts. Once you're producer level and up, you're paid by the episode, and that fee is amortized out over, for 13 eps, about 40 weeks. It's good money to get paid to do what you love, but all in all it probably ranges from staff writer to CO-EP as, say, a young newbie insurance agent to a decently paid bank executive. (NOTE: I just checked. Staff writers make a little less than nurse-practitioners) Cut out your agent and manager fees, plus cost of living in LA, and it's comfortable but not filthy ga-ga money everybody thinks it is.

However, seeing as it is a specialized profession in a highly profitable field, it's precisely what the market will bear. And who am I to doubt capitalism?

J: As an aspiring baby writer (an embryonic writer?), I was wondering if you could talk about what it's been like for your baby writer thus far. How is s/he doing? Do you give baby writers a few weeks to learn and absorb everything or do you have them just jump in with ideas?

Multiple baby writers -- they're cheap and hungry, and not still attached to some truly goofy quotes.

A "few weeks to learn"? You're in the Show, kid. Deep end, etc. etc. What, am I going to send them off to read Lajos Egri while we're breaking story? Bah. Paid to write means you're in the room. And pitching. Your baby writer ass off.

Anil: How much does this process vary from what you do when you're outlining a screenplay alone? Do you use cue cards? Do you type a list of arenas a go from there? Do you have your theme of tone written somewhere so you can always reference it (do you do that for the show?)

Because the show's recurring, it has repeating structures and themes so it's easier to stay on track. ironically, over that much larger cumulative page count. The odd thing about television is that story doesn't really matter, even though you spend so much time breaking stories -- it's the characters, and as characters are theme, everything's a bit more self-evident as we work.

When I work on a movie, if it's not a rewrite, I generally work backward from the main story points (which I've already derived from any ideas about theme and character). Using those 5-8 points as my anchors, I do use the card method to fill in the blanks with incremental levels of detail. The room process is a refinement, however, and I'm interested to see how lessons learned as I apply the technique to large tracts of story transfer to my individual projects.

Writing's just years and years of building the toolbox. It never stops, and you'd best hope you don't accidentally pick up some crappy wrenches along the way.

Ask away in the Comments, and we'll see how long we can keep your interest up.