LEVERAGE: Mirabile dictu and The Bank Job

Well, let's crunch a recap and a preview post together over the holiday weekend. We'll answer some questions, and offer an open thread after this week's ep answering anything you ask in the Comments here.

Speaking of thise week's episode, it is not The Wedding Job. It's The Bank Shot Job, and the preview is here.



This was the first episode actually shot, written by our infamous co-producer Amy Berg based off a pitch from Dean Devlin and directed (in six frikkin' days) by Dean. Yes, it is a lovely little cosy shop we have, and yes, it is better than the old way of doing things. Anyway, it's way, waaaay outside the usual format, but it's one of the TNT suits' favorites, so it got bumped up in order. The ratings have been pretty promising, so they seem to want to really push while nobody else is producing new material.

The first-season-order-shuffle is always a mixed bag. On one hand, I think the chumminess the characters evince in Two Horse and Miracle -- two episodes written to be mid-season -- kind of jump the gun on the emotional arcs seen in this broadcast order. On the other hand, the Nate/Sophie scene in Miracle really belongs that early in the season, and I'm glad we got Sterling introduced early in Two Horse. Again, luckily, we wrote these intended to be primarily stand-alones, and the order pretty much settles in as intended for the rest of the season. Oh, yeah, and we got an entire season of 13 guaranteed. Unlike every other rookie show on the air. So, you know, aces.

For what it's worth, the upcoming Chris Kane fight scene in The Bank Shot Job is my favorite. Well, this and the one in Wedding. Oh, and Mile High ... never mind. (Yes, I have a fight obsession, to the point of being mocked by my own staff.) It was the first one we shot and it sets the standard for the rest of the season. The fight in Miracle is more of a conceptual fight. The gun-waistband bit in Miracle is stolen from ... ahh, it's too painful. Let's just say the movie will never be made, and we use all the parts of the animal.

One thing about Miracle: I've seen a few comments about how Hardison's morality seems to be ... flexible. It is indeed. He rationalizes like a sumbitch, and the one thing cut from Miracle I miss badly is the flashback to a teen Hardison with braces, rocking the Kid n' Play look, while he adapted his Nana's moral code to hacking the Bank of Iceland. Once the suited humans have returned to their offices in January, I may try to pry that footage loose. Also -- DB Sweeney gets the ladies steamy. The shoot had a constant background hum of whispered "toe pick!", strangled giggling, and the scurry of footsteps off to dark corners.

Big congratulations to Christine Boylan, also a staff writer, also her first produced script. Another East Coast Catholic like myself, she took a ridiculous amount of care on the sermon. Yes, we atheist sodomite Hollywood-types spent hours laboring over our episode about faith. I assure you, we ran right out and had some gay socialized medicine afterward.

Right, questions from the last post, and we'll tackle any from this post in the open-thread post for Tuesday. Bloody hell, that confused even me.

Mike Cane: >>>There are 116 green screen set replacement shots. OK, you just managed to con ME. I just watched my time-shifted copy two hours ago (working on pimpage post) and didn't notice ANYTHING like that. I can usually spot them too! Is this seamlessness due to: 1) HD vid? 2) Dir of Photo? Both?

Having Mark Franco, our visual effects ... honcho? Guru? Resident genius? ... available to come and call angles for the best greenscreens is the key, and Dave Connell of course has a major hand in it. Shooting digital makes a big difference in the workflow for vfx -- which I have Mark buttonholed to explain here on this site sometime soon. We have guys basically inventing ways to do quick 'n dirty greenscreen shots at Electric.

For example, the church in Miracle? Never more than half full with extras.

Alon: Only semi-on topic, but just FYI, I cannot get the episodes that are up on the TNT website to play. Every time I try, it crashes my browser, regardless of which one I try to use. When I first went to the page in Firefox, it said I needed a plug-in, so I downloaded and installed ...

and

Anonymous: commenting late on this, but: you talk at length at various points in your history about 4th Generation Media and so forth, but still, when I try the options listed by you of how to watch this show (which I want to watch) and also send some money in the direction of the people that made it, I have no chance to do so because I happen to live outside the US. Utter stupidity again. So we return to the age-old saying: piracy, the better choice, or, as in so many cases, the only choice.

And really, I _wanted_ to view it legally. I have no moral qualms about downloading something when I'm basically told: you live elsewhere, so fuck you.

First, piracy is wrong. Wroooong. Look, everyone currently reading my blog with a law degree who also works for one of the large corporations with whom I do regular business, piracy is wrong!

Well, fair points all, but this is the nature of evolutionary change. It's already a bit mad that we have no studio. Distribution comes with a whole other set of issues. TNT (rightfully) gets the streaming window, and it's up to their fine web humans to rock that out. They pay a license fee, and nicely enough broadcast and promote the hell out of us. The foreign sales network people demand their windows for broadcast, or they won't buy the series, which means that we'll take way, way longer to be in profit. Which will curtail our ability to make more wonderful TV shows. Television is cash flow, something Dean could explain to you in exruciating detail while dabbing the fine sweat from his forehead.

Basically, we're pushing the envelope, but we're beating one problem at a time. We got "how to make a TV show based out of one old dog hospital in East Hollywood" out of the way. Next up is "being utterly independent of the distribution chains television has relied on for the last fifty years. " But we'll get there.

Emily Blake: am enjoying the show and particularly Christian Kane and , but I was wondering something. If I remember correctly, Hustle also did a racing horse switch episode. Do you guys watch Hustle? Do you think about ways to prevent your stuff from being too similar or do you just do what you do and not worry about it?

I watched the first two season, and then bailed. (I met Adrian Lester on an unrelated project. Great guy.) A fair chunk of my staff has seen every season. We have killed a couple ideas because they did something similar on that show. But at some point you just shrug your shoulders and say "Every caper show is going to have a card game/horse race gag/Big store/etc etc." It's a bit like working on Without a Trace and wondering if your "The wife you thought was dead is actually the killer" crosses over with any of the CSI's or Law & Orders. There are genre conventions, but the shows have a different tone, gang make-up, a difference in the number of explosions (advantage: us), and moral center - they are, as far as I can tell, never helping anybody, while that's our raison d'etre.

Besides, we're way too busy stealing from It Takes a Thief and Rockford to steal from Hustle.

Toxic Frog: Love the show - I just introduced it to my family (we're all fans of heist/con shows) and everyone involved approves. I do have some questions and comments, though:
- How did you get Gina Bellman on board? You didn't talk much about the casting, and when Sophie was introduced both my parents went "Oh my god! Her!" and are now pestering me to find out.

There's a little behind the scenes on casting up at TNT now. Which, conveniently, discusses Gina...




cont'd: ... - My parents wish to inform you that the circular-track camerawork in the opening of the pilot made them nauseous, and that you should stop it :)

You hear that Dean? You're hurting innocent MOMMIES AND DADDIES!! (sorry, private joke)

Vicki: BTW, is anyone planning to sell those nifty "Leverage" latte mugs anywhere? I need to have one.

... hmmm. I wonder if I can finance my day players with tchockes ... we'll see.

Kid Sis: Wow. This is all getting very Star Trek convention. You going to start yelling at bloggers to get a life and move out of their mom's basement??

I'm going to let it run until I see the Comic-con booth for "The Black Kings" next to the Browncoats, where Nate/Sophie shippers start throwing punches at the Sophie/Parker slashers. Then and only then will we blow the ref whistle.

lummox: BTW Leverage is a pretty decent show. Once it's either out on DVD or there's some other way us non-Americans can buy it, I'll be happy to do so.

I hope I didn't give a false impression earlier -- it will be broadcast, and soon, in most countries. Within a few months, unless I'm high or mistaken. You shouldn't have to wait for the DVD's.

Rght then, that's the mailbag for now. Toss any Miracle-oriented , or hell any other questions, into the Comments, and we'll get to them next week. As always, thanks for watching, recapping, and forum-posting. In the modern television landscape, we can't do it without you.

Wanna Be 'Splainin' Something

As we drove up Route 1, Lovely Wife dialed Michael Jackson's Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' on the iPod. This is not a song on my usual playlist. I was enjoying the flashback to junior year until the third chorus arrived:

I Said You Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'
You Got To Be Startin' Somethin'
I Said You Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'
You Got To Be Startin' Somethin'
It's Too High To Get Over (Yeah, Yeah)
Too Low To Get Under (Yeah, Yeah)
You're Stuck In The Middle (Yeah, Yeah)
And The Pain Is Thunder (Yeah, Yeah)
It's Too High To Get Over (Yeah, Yeah)
Too Low To Get Under (Yeah, Yeah)
You're Stuck In The Middle (Yeah, Yeah)
And The Pain Is Thunder (Yeah, Yeah)
You're A Vegetable, You're A Vegetable
Still They Hate You, You're A Vegetable
You're Just A Buffet, You're A Vegetable
They Eat Off Of You, You're A Vegetable
(copyright Michael Jackson)


"... You're a Vegetable"?

I'm sorry, what?*

This has consumed me. Four days in the Big Sur mountains, and I cannot stop thinking about it. I was humming the tune as I watched deer frolic. All because of this chorus. Please, in the name of God, someone explain this. Or, at least, add your own bizarre lyrics in the Comments. Bonus points for the 80's factor.









*You'll note the recent Akon remake seems to lack the "vegetable factor."

Waid Wednesday #3: Economic Storytelling

If you’ve set your sights on writing an original novel or a prose piece, you can generally type to your heart’s content. There’s no hard-and-fast space limitation. American comics, on the other hand, tend to be 22 pages. It’s a totally arbitrary number; since their invention in the 1930s, comic book stories have been as long as a hundred pages and as short as one. In the early 1980s, industry leaders DC Comics and Marvel Comics, factoring profits versus creative costs, arrived at 22 as their standard page-count, and other companies settled in at about the same, give or take. (As the E-I-C at BOOM!, I allow 22 pages for first issues and 21 for ensuing issues, leaving room for a “what has come before” text recap after the opening scene.)

Twenty-two pages is not a lot of space. Believe me. Having written a bazillion comics, I still find myself more often than nine pages into a script and realizing to my horror that I’m only about a quarter of the way through the story I wanted to tell, and the next thing you know, I’m making fresh coffee and tearing up the floorboards to rewrite.

The best tools in a comic writer's toolbox serve the cause of Economic Storytelling. Your foremost task is to convey the maximum amount of story in the minimum amount of space. Don’t misunderstand; “story” is not the same as “plot,” and I’m in no way suggesting that every page you write be weighted down with a hundred lines of dialogue feeding me more exposition than I can possibly digest. But a plot, as I’m gonna presume you already know if you’re reading this, is simply what happens. A story takes a plot and adds emotion, timing, style and mood, and as loudly as I rail against comics that spend an entire page showing a character filling a glass from the kitchen faucet, I’d still rather read a story that was involving but breezy for 22 pages than one that was dense but dull and unmoving for eight.

Shorter comics stories are even more of a bitch to script. Eight pages, six...regardless of length, you still need to show me a conflict and a resolution or else it’s not a story, and there is no time to screw around. At BOOM!, I get a l-o-t of eight-page scripts that, for no good reason, burn up the entire first page with a slow zoom into a New York restaurant kitchen. This makes me homicidal. If your story is about a chef and geography is incidental, just show me the damn kitchen. Tick, tock. I love RESERVOIR DOGS, but if you handed me a comics script that began with four pages of gangsters debating the merits of Madonna, I would not only reject it, I would break your keyboard.

In a 22-page comic, figuring an average of four to five panels a page and a couple of full-page shots, a writer has maybe a hundred panels at most to tell a story, so every panel he wastes conveying (a) something I already know, (b) something that’s a cute gag but does nothing to reveal plot or character, or (c) something I don’t need to know is a demonstration of lousy craft. Comics are expensive. Don’t make me resent the money I spend buying yours. Every single moment in your script must either move the story along or demonstrate something important about the characters—preferably both—and every panel that does neither is a sloppy waste of space. This is one of the reasons why Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ WATCHMEN is so revered; it’s a tour de force example of Economic Storytelling because there’s significance to every word and every image.

It's the Story, Stupid.

by M A N

Truman Capote said that he was like a semantic Paganini, that he could just throw words up into the air and they would come down in the perfect way.

Must be nice, huh? Like most mortals, I toss my words into the air only to struggle with them for hours after they've tumbled haphazardly across the page. I guess that makes me more of a semantic Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Even so, I learned how to consistently write well. Not brilliantly, but well. I have a sense of rhythm, cadence, and can usually put words on paper in interesting ways. My high school teachers and college professors always told me so, so it had to be true ('cause they would never lie). So, armed with the confidence they instilled in me, I spent those nomadic years following my college graduation writing numerous short stories and one very epic, very unfinished, novel. Yet, no one wanted to publish them. I couldn't give them away. So what was the problem? I knew how to write, had a decent grasp of English grammar, and knew how to operate the spell check. So why the hell wouldn't anyone publish my stories?

It's because they weren't stories.

They were, as one kind editor told me, just book reports. There was nothing there. Every rejection slip I received (that wasn't a simple form letter) said the same thing: you can write, but you can't tell a story.

At the time, for the life of me, I thought that they they the same thing. I mean, aren't they? Isn't that what writing is, telling a story? Obviously, the answer is an emphatic "no." It would be like someone claiming to be an architect when all they know how to do is drive a nail into a board with only three hits of a hammer. A good skill to have, but that doesn't mean you can design a bridge.

Most of you might be thinking to yourselves, well, duh. But for me hearing this was like a slap to the face. It never even occurred to me that writing and story telling were two totally different things. But now that I knew that they were, I had to ask myself a very horrifying question: "Do I even know what a story IS?" Again, the answer was an emphatic "no." Turns out, that when it came to telling a story, I couldn't write my way out of a wet paper bag with a needle-sharp number two pencil. I mean, what is this "conflict" you speak of? You're telling me that all my stories have to have fist fights? I was clueless. All the things that go into making a story were nothing but vague, abstract concepts to me. All those years my teachers and professors were teaching me how to write, no one bothered to teach me how to tell a story.

Fortunately, I've had some wonderful and patient people sit down with me and explain the basic elements of story telling. Now, I won't go into what makes a story here because, honestly, I'm still learning myself and there are others much more qualified than I who can give you a better understanding (you're reading KFM, so chances are you've already got a head start). But it's just something to keep in mind when you're slaving over your world building or fine tuning the description of your antagonist's handlebar mustache. Good things in their own right, but is there a story? It doesn't matter how detailed and well-crafted your world is, if there's no story, no one will care.