Andrew Cosby's excellent show Eureka -- about a town of super-geniuses and the federal marshall trying to keep order while unravelling an unpleasant murderous conspiracy -- has been picked up for 13 by Sci Fi. I've read the pilot and talked to Cosby about the season arc. You will dig it.
Andy is two for two pilots-to-air. He should be writing these little industry missives, not I. Congratulations to a fine writer. I don't know what I'm more pleased by: Cosby's success or the idea I'll have another good genre show to watch.
Monday, September 26, 2005
I want that software -- and the Aunt May fanfic.
Yes, I know he's abusing it, but I play my new computer games for a week straight when I get them, so I can't complain. Kevin of the Beaucoup makes me laugh with several of these.
Tweaks to the sidebar
Many changes coming. Christ, have to do something -- according to my statcounter, I'm apparently Josh Friedman's boywonder sidekick. This shall not stand.
New category -- Cool Job Links, wherein you will find blogs primarily occupied with the very specific details of a job most of us don't have. The first two additions are our young friend Assistant Atlas and the infinitely amusing Clublife. Take a look. Some new spec-monkeys, too. Oh, and swing by Geoff Thorne's joint RedJack, to meet one of the new Brotherhood of the Geek who'll be hanging about here.
I would also add, we can now see what heights the Interwebs have brought us: someone is auctioning off actual SPACE MONKEY PANTS. The very fact I can type that phrase in context means we have won, and frankly those Greek ponces with their fancy-thinkin' can sod off.
New category -- Cool Job Links, wherein you will find blogs primarily occupied with the very specific details of a job most of us don't have. The first two additions are our young friend Assistant Atlas and the infinitely amusing Clublife. Take a look. Some new spec-monkeys, too. Oh, and swing by Geoff Thorne's joint RedJack, to meet one of the new Brotherhood of the Geek who'll be hanging about here.
I would also add, we can now see what heights the Interwebs have brought us: someone is auctioning off actual SPACE MONKEY PANTS. The very fact I can type that phrase in context means we have won, and frankly those Greek ponces with their fancy-thinkin' can sod off.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Writing: The Pilot Pitch - the Room
Dispatched from the Air Canada Lounge in Toronto. Three random thoughts while waiting for you to take your seats:
a.) the budgets cuts are really showing in here. The lounge has developed a very end-of-the-empire seediness to it, like I’d imagine a Soviet Embassy waiting room in 1988.
b.) the Toronto Airport is possibly the worst laid-out airport in all my experience. I’m not even sure they actually drive you from terminal to terminal in that accursed mini-bus, I think they just circle around for half an hour until they can reasonably expect you’ve forgotten what your original terminal looked like, and drop you off ten yards from your egress.
c.) and man, what the hell happened to the National Post? Maybe my memory’s playing tricks, but when I started reading it, the Post felt like a rather fresh center-right paper. Today’s issue was a series of reprints of British tabloid articles and an editorial on the fate of Canadian Conservatism that read like a panicked screed from a drunken College Republican.
On the other hand, the new Ottawa Airport is aces all ‘round.
All set? Okay. First, we talked about the historical context for the current pitching conditions. Then we discussed the way you can shake out your ideas in order to help sell your show and also aid you in preventing the en-masse revolution of your beleagured writing staff. Now, onto the room. This is really something my manager, Will, should be writing, but he’s off in Vegas spending money he swears isn’t mine. He’s honed dozens of pilots with his clients, he’s far better at it than myself. But for now, you’ll have to settle for the working writer. I may ply him for a top ten list later this week.
There’s no way you can anticipate what the mood in that room’s going to be when you walk in. Sometimes the execs have heard five pitches that day, maybe twenty or thirty that week. Maybe they just found out about some horrible insider political move. Maybe they know they’re dead in the water, new administration coming in. Maybe they’re just dicks. Sometimes they have no sense of humor. No, seriously, no sense of humor as in zero, nada, borderline autistic response to a punchline. There is a TV exec who is so legendarily stone-faced – good God, pitching to this person is literally talking into an empty, silent void while everyone in the room stares at you like they’ve just caught you breaking into their kitchen naked at four am. Pitching writers have collapsed in tears outside in the corridor while the exec cheerfully told the agent that the pitch was the best thing they’d heard all month, and a multi-project deal was on the table.
The only thing you can control is your pitch. So have it down.
Remember what a pitch is for. You are a writer. If they were hiring you based on your writing, then you’d know what the hell to do. Once you’re typing, you’re in your element. But this is you convincing them to pay you to write the script. The pitch has to be a very clean little description of an idea so intriguing, they want to read the script for it. Yes, it has to make sense as a show, too, but focus. Don’t let the pitch become bigger in your mind than it is.
In its purest form TV pilot pitch addresses two questions: “Why should we put this show on the air?” and “How will this show stay on the air?” *
Start, as always, with your hook. Be it the high-concept pitch sentence, a vivid description of the opening shot – PUNCH. No longer than a short paragraph. This opening needs to either elicit a strong emotional response or intrigue. They are two separate things, by the way. Manage both, and you’ve just banged it off the left field wall, nicely done. Thinking back on pilots I’ve conned people into buying:
-- “I married the youngest of five sisters, they all live in the same city, and I’m the only guy in the family.”
-- A description of the cold-open of Global Frequency, through “You are on the Global Frequency. And you have forty-five minutes to save the world.”
-- “Africa … is out of monkeys.”
-- “There is no reason on earth why a man can’t live a perfectly happy life in a mega-mall, and never leave.” (that’s with Rich Jeni, proper credit to him)
Now, the follow-up – what the show’s about. In Global Frequency it’s the explanation of what the GF is, and how cool it is. For the first pilot I sold, it was a chunk of stand-up repurposed as illustrations of why the original pitch line “I married the youngest of five sisters … etc.” would – in theory at least – lead to many amusing scenes and conundrums
You need to rifle through the characters here – you have two choices. Run through a stripped-down version of the pilot plot, stopping to hit a couple sentences on each character as they’re introduced. Attitudes, point-of-view. Again, real quick, showing how each character contributes a unique voice to the show. This is the run-and-gun version of all the work you did in figuring out your story engines. If you’re pitching a comedy, you’re much more likely to pitch out the characters and their viewpoints, illustrated with little dialogue snippets or situations to show how each is uniquely funny. The pilot plot (I think, anyway) a bit secondary except where it creates the conditions the characters will live in for the rest of the show.
The pilot plot has a different job, you see. It is representative – the platonic ideal – of the conflicts the characters will engage in for the rest of the series. If you describe the setting vividly enough, and have great sample story ideas to toss out, then often you can get by without even a pilot plot in the pitch. You’ll develop it in feedback with the execs once the pilot script’s been commissioned. The pilot plot for CSI, for example, is meaningless. “It’s the secret world of the cool science used to solve murders.” Either you find that interesting, or not. (In the pilot script, the characters of CSI are much … spikier than in the show. George Eads is banging Marg Helgenberger. In a car wash. And Peterson's a cranky bookish Jew. Interesting, no?) The reason House is so great is that it both accelerates a tired formula: “Every week House figures out a new impossible disease (crime) and saves lives (catches the murderer)” and layers on “House is Sherlock Holmes. All the technology in the world isn’t as effective as his powers of observation.” (It is, in point of fact, a bit of the anti-CSI.) Add Hugh goddam Laurie and you’re gold.
What I’m driving at – sloppily – is that there's no need to get buried in plot details at this point. You need to hook the execs, and then get the hell out before you stumble across one of the No Buttons. I’m not saying you should be obtuse. But “discreet” is not a bad watchword. Of course you have the pilot in your head. You could beat it out moment by moment. This is why you can do the fast version, act/conflict/resolve one-two-three with confidence, knowing that if one of the execs stops you for a question, you can toss out an answer. You can describe any act of any show in three sentences.
Okay. You hooked them. You then filled out the characters, and the conflicts. Keep your momentum up. Your sentences snappy. Now you dig into your story engines, and lay out how the show will continue to generate many different types of conflict over the years. I personally break this section out quite distinctly – “What’s fun here is that this concept gives us a lot of stories –“ Nothing ponderous. I usually limit it to three different conflict types that may not have been apparent from the first section. How secondary characters may drive new characters into unexpected conflict, or how primary characters will evolve into different types of conflict. Most writers are so geared up in the world of the pilot concept, they rarely think to include this section. It will be appreciated.
Then shut the hell up and let them ask questions.
With luck, you can tell they’re engaged during the pitch. Some execs are polite, prefer not to walk on a pitch as it goes. It may be that, or you may even get the dead-on feeling they’ve bailed in the middle of the pitch – which is why you keep it short and structured, so you can plow through it without panicking and talking faster-and-fasterandohgodwhywon’tanyoneTALK …
As a general rule, I better be finished talking by minute seven. I know there are “two-minute pitching exercises” and I suppose they’re useful AS exercises. But even at standup speed, two minutes is roughly eight jokes, or 16 sentences. All getting you to pitch in two minutes is good for is to get you over your panic reflex at having someone stare at you while you try to talk as fast as you can. If you boil your pitch down to the punchiest bits, you’ll find that you’ll be able to move at a comfortable, confident clip regardless of reaction. If the execs keep interrupting you to ask questions – well then, you should be so lucky.
Pitching is an art. I can hardly teach you to be an artist on this crappy little blog. But as Chuck Jones once told a friend of mine: “We all have a thousand bad drawings in us. The trick is to get through those bad drawings as fast as you can, to get to the good stuff.” If this shaved a couple bad pitches off your thousand, then I’m glad to have done my part. Feel free to post specific questions, and I'll attempt to be useful.
Break a leg.
* You’ll note that not all execs even have both these questions in their heads – which is why so many flash projects show up and die. (again, another column)
(Edited to correct Jones quote, was mixing it up with Asimov quote)
a.) the budgets cuts are really showing in here. The lounge has developed a very end-of-the-empire seediness to it, like I’d imagine a Soviet Embassy waiting room in 1988.
b.) the Toronto Airport is possibly the worst laid-out airport in all my experience. I’m not even sure they actually drive you from terminal to terminal in that accursed mini-bus, I think they just circle around for half an hour until they can reasonably expect you’ve forgotten what your original terminal looked like, and drop you off ten yards from your egress.
c.) and man, what the hell happened to the National Post? Maybe my memory’s playing tricks, but when I started reading it, the Post felt like a rather fresh center-right paper. Today’s issue was a series of reprints of British tabloid articles and an editorial on the fate of Canadian Conservatism that read like a panicked screed from a drunken College Republican.
On the other hand, the new Ottawa Airport is aces all ‘round.
All set? Okay. First, we talked about the historical context for the current pitching conditions. Then we discussed the way you can shake out your ideas in order to help sell your show and also aid you in preventing the en-masse revolution of your beleagured writing staff. Now, onto the room. This is really something my manager, Will, should be writing, but he’s off in Vegas spending money he swears isn’t mine. He’s honed dozens of pilots with his clients, he’s far better at it than myself. But for now, you’ll have to settle for the working writer. I may ply him for a top ten list later this week.
There’s no way you can anticipate what the mood in that room’s going to be when you walk in. Sometimes the execs have heard five pitches that day, maybe twenty or thirty that week. Maybe they just found out about some horrible insider political move. Maybe they know they’re dead in the water, new administration coming in. Maybe they’re just dicks. Sometimes they have no sense of humor. No, seriously, no sense of humor as in zero, nada, borderline autistic response to a punchline. There is a TV exec who is so legendarily stone-faced – good God, pitching to this person is literally talking into an empty, silent void while everyone in the room stares at you like they’ve just caught you breaking into their kitchen naked at four am. Pitching writers have collapsed in tears outside in the corridor while the exec cheerfully told the agent that the pitch was the best thing they’d heard all month, and a multi-project deal was on the table.
The only thing you can control is your pitch. So have it down.
Remember what a pitch is for. You are a writer. If they were hiring you based on your writing, then you’d know what the hell to do. Once you’re typing, you’re in your element. But this is you convincing them to pay you to write the script. The pitch has to be a very clean little description of an idea so intriguing, they want to read the script for it. Yes, it has to make sense as a show, too, but focus. Don’t let the pitch become bigger in your mind than it is.
In its purest form TV pilot pitch addresses two questions: “Why should we put this show on the air?” and “How will this show stay on the air?” *
Start, as always, with your hook. Be it the high-concept pitch sentence, a vivid description of the opening shot – PUNCH. No longer than a short paragraph. This opening needs to either elicit a strong emotional response or intrigue. They are two separate things, by the way. Manage both, and you’ve just banged it off the left field wall, nicely done. Thinking back on pilots I’ve conned people into buying:
-- “I married the youngest of five sisters, they all live in the same city, and I’m the only guy in the family.”
-- A description of the cold-open of Global Frequency, through “You are on the Global Frequency. And you have forty-five minutes to save the world.”
-- “Africa … is out of monkeys.”
-- “There is no reason on earth why a man can’t live a perfectly happy life in a mega-mall, and never leave.” (that’s with Rich Jeni, proper credit to him)
Now, the follow-up – what the show’s about. In Global Frequency it’s the explanation of what the GF is, and how cool it is. For the first pilot I sold, it was a chunk of stand-up repurposed as illustrations of why the original pitch line “I married the youngest of five sisters … etc.” would – in theory at least – lead to many amusing scenes and conundrums
You need to rifle through the characters here – you have two choices. Run through a stripped-down version of the pilot plot, stopping to hit a couple sentences on each character as they’re introduced. Attitudes, point-of-view. Again, real quick, showing how each character contributes a unique voice to the show. This is the run-and-gun version of all the work you did in figuring out your story engines. If you’re pitching a comedy, you’re much more likely to pitch out the characters and their viewpoints, illustrated with little dialogue snippets or situations to show how each is uniquely funny. The pilot plot (I think, anyway) a bit secondary except where it creates the conditions the characters will live in for the rest of the show.
The pilot plot has a different job, you see. It is representative – the platonic ideal – of the conflicts the characters will engage in for the rest of the series. If you describe the setting vividly enough, and have great sample story ideas to toss out, then often you can get by without even a pilot plot in the pitch. You’ll develop it in feedback with the execs once the pilot script’s been commissioned. The pilot plot for CSI, for example, is meaningless. “It’s the secret world of the cool science used to solve murders.” Either you find that interesting, or not. (In the pilot script, the characters of CSI are much … spikier than in the show. George Eads is banging Marg Helgenberger. In a car wash. And Peterson's a cranky bookish Jew. Interesting, no?) The reason House is so great is that it both accelerates a tired formula: “Every week House figures out a new impossible disease (crime) and saves lives (catches the murderer)” and layers on “House is Sherlock Holmes. All the technology in the world isn’t as effective as his powers of observation.” (It is, in point of fact, a bit of the anti-CSI.) Add Hugh goddam Laurie and you’re gold.
What I’m driving at – sloppily – is that there's no need to get buried in plot details at this point. You need to hook the execs, and then get the hell out before you stumble across one of the No Buttons. I’m not saying you should be obtuse. But “discreet” is not a bad watchword. Of course you have the pilot in your head. You could beat it out moment by moment. This is why you can do the fast version, act/conflict/resolve one-two-three with confidence, knowing that if one of the execs stops you for a question, you can toss out an answer. You can describe any act of any show in three sentences.
Okay. You hooked them. You then filled out the characters, and the conflicts. Keep your momentum up. Your sentences snappy. Now you dig into your story engines, and lay out how the show will continue to generate many different types of conflict over the years. I personally break this section out quite distinctly – “What’s fun here is that this concept gives us a lot of stories –“ Nothing ponderous. I usually limit it to three different conflict types that may not have been apparent from the first section. How secondary characters may drive new characters into unexpected conflict, or how primary characters will evolve into different types of conflict. Most writers are so geared up in the world of the pilot concept, they rarely think to include this section. It will be appreciated.
Then shut the hell up and let them ask questions.
With luck, you can tell they’re engaged during the pitch. Some execs are polite, prefer not to walk on a pitch as it goes. It may be that, or you may even get the dead-on feeling they’ve bailed in the middle of the pitch – which is why you keep it short and structured, so you can plow through it without panicking and talking faster-and-fasterandohgodwhywon’tanyoneTALK …
As a general rule, I better be finished talking by minute seven. I know there are “two-minute pitching exercises” and I suppose they’re useful AS exercises. But even at standup speed, two minutes is roughly eight jokes, or 16 sentences. All getting you to pitch in two minutes is good for is to get you over your panic reflex at having someone stare at you while you try to talk as fast as you can. If you boil your pitch down to the punchiest bits, you’ll find that you’ll be able to move at a comfortable, confident clip regardless of reaction. If the execs keep interrupting you to ask questions – well then, you should be so lucky.
Pitching is an art. I can hardly teach you to be an artist on this crappy little blog. But as Chuck Jones once told a friend of mine: “We all have a thousand bad drawings in us. The trick is to get through those bad drawings as fast as you can, to get to the good stuff.” If this shaved a couple bad pitches off your thousand, then I’m glad to have done my part. Feel free to post specific questions, and I'll attempt to be useful.
Break a leg.
* You’ll note that not all execs even have both these questions in their heads – which is why so many flash projects show up and die. (again, another column)
(Edited to correct Jones quote, was mixing it up with Asimov quote)
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Apologies
Dial-up and northern house-stuff killing the sched -- will be back on track Monday. Good luck to any of our friends in Houston, hope you've been on the road long enough that there's no bloody chance you're reading this.
Stay safe, all, and see you soon.
Stay safe, all, and see you soon.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Ch. 2 of Dingo
Just a reminder, Nelson's posting a chapter a week of his novel. You will dig. Chapter 2 is now up.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Majiksthe Journo-tastico
By the way, big props to Lindsay, Brooklyn-based blogger who put on her hip-waders, grabbed her digital camera and went into the "K-Hole" as its known to do actual guerilla journalism from the ground. Spider Jerusalem would approve. You should swing by, cycle back through those posts and read her stories.
Monday, September 19, 2005
Writing: The Pilot Pitch - Prep
(All standard disclaimers apply, your mileage may vary, etc.)
So, you’re pacing in a network/studio hallway, trying to ignore the posters of failed 80’s sitcoms on the walls, waiting to go into the pitch. What do you need to do once you get into that exec’s room?
Yes, you in the back.
“… blow someone.” No. Don’t be stupid. You don’t blow someone for a pilot script commitment.
You blow someone for a time slot.
As we’ve discussed, beyond the purely “write the show” issues, television seasons (as they exist currently) require your pilot idea to generate literally a hundred-odd story variants in order to make sense from a business/programming viewpoint. Yes, this is changing. But having a show that'll run a hundred means pitching your 13-a-year will be a piece of cake. So master the Big Network Pitch, and your kung fu will be strong.
To know what to do in that room, you need to have done a shitload of work before that room. In a TV series, you have to sit down and create, very explicitly, what I call the story engines and story lenses. All of this depends on the very simple idea that story = conflict. Or, at least, story seeds grow from conflict-rich soil.
The story engines are: the exterior conflicts – obstacles—for the characters to overcome; the circumstances (setting, genre, etc.) within which the characters must work to solve the obstacles; the different viewpoints each character has that will bring them conflict as they overcome said obstacles; those different viewpoints that’ll put them in conflict regardless of any exterior issues; and the differences in approach to those exterior circumstances that’ll bring characters into conflict when attempting to overcome exterior obstacles.
Let’s take – hmm, was going to say CSI, but those characters are ciphers. Noooo, don’t want to do Lost, I have friends on that show – ah, the classic. X-Files.
Big whoop. Mulder’s a believer, Scully’s a skeptic. Moving on – no, wait up. Humor me for a moment.
First, exterior conflicts: the cases. Every week some new inscrutable mystery will need to be solved by our intrepid agents. Because they are working for the FBI these cases will run the gamut from normal-seeming crimes to government issues, homicides to white collar crimes to complete bug-nuts sci fi mysteries, they will be nationwide. One of our characters has connections outside the FBI and so more cases will come from the shadowy conspiracy world he is connected to.
Nice. No lack of legitimate exterior conflicts for Mulder and Scully (… Scully in the top hat. Ahhhh, Scully …) to solve.
Our characters also work in very specific circumstances – a world where apparently malign sci-fi forces do seem to exist, AND shadowy conspiracies, AND a bureaucracy which both empowers and constrains them. For each exterior problem, you then get to see if one of these conflicts will aid you building story. Does the FBI want them to solve this case? Are the government’s near-limitless resources an aid to them, or are the bureaucrats over them an added obstacle? Are they throwing the FBI’s weight around, or are they working just under the radar, stretching the limits of their authority? Is this case somehow linked to the agenda of some larger authority, be it government or conspiracy, which will offer resistance beyond that of the already formidable problem of solving this week’s mystery?
Note that these two engines often overlap. In hospital shows, for example, the circumstances of, oh, bureaucratic strictures of the hospital, the physical layout or inherent dangers of working with crazy/sick people, the lack of funding – all those can manifests as explicit exterior conflict. Either can be a primary conflict with the other as a modifier.
Back to the X-Files. Each character has a very specific attitude that will put them in conflict as they approach each problem. Mulder will go in with an open mind, no theory too wild—while Scully insists on the scientific method – hypothesis, experimentation, repostulation – and will in fact dismiss many possibilities out of hand as being fanciful. Mulder’s the people person, the old-school investigator while Scully’s the forensic whiz. Just their attempts at solving the problems from such different points of attack will generate conflict.
But they will also be in conflict without a mystery (exterior conflict) to solve. Those two worldviews are so different, if Mulder and Scully were accountants working at adjoining desks at Budget Rent-a-Car, they’d be in constant conflict over coffee conversation. A good story has a conflict illuminated by the opposing viewpoints of the characters. A GREAT story is really about the characters’ viewpoints, with the traditionally pitched “story” as a means to draw them out.
Where was – oh, and this one’s a bit subtle. “…the differences in approach to those exterior circumstances that’ll bring characters into conflict when attempting to overcome exterior obstacles.” Mulder and Scully, to varying degrees of importance in the episode:
-- will be in conflict with the exterior problem,
-- will be in conflict with the exterior circumstances constraining their solution to the exterior problem,
-- will be in conflict over how to solve the exterior problem
--, will be in conflict with each other regardless of whatever exterior problem they’re facing, but ALSO
-- – they will also attempt to manipulate/overcome the constraining circumstances in different ways. Hence, conflicto-gasm.
There are times Mulder will attempt to bargain, cajole, lie, abuse the FBI in his quest. There are times Scully, considering the same FBI, will believe it’s right to just straight-ahead call them in and certainly as shit not lie to them. There will be times Mulder wants to enlist the aid of, say, Lone Gunmen fellas, while Scully prefers to work with more established/credible figures. Yes, some of this relates to their different worldviews, but those worldviews don’t always create a consistent approach to operative authority.
You’ll note that in serial/soap-opera style shows, struggling with the constraining circumstances can actually become a lead source of conflict. Much of the shenanigans (… much or many? Is “shenanigans” a collective noun?) on Desperate Housewives consists of the housewives dealing with the societal expectations of their micro-world. Dealing with an illicit affair is tricky: it is considerably complicated by the spatial intimacy and (surface) propriety of Wisteria Lane.
Stepping back, we see that X-Files was, well, amazingly conflict-deep. At no point would any one episode put equal weight on all those conflict engines. But a season as a whole would draw on all of them to construct the episodes. Each show will be a little heavier in one attack approach. But you need that arsenal to aid you in generating 100 stories.
Each showrunner, hell each writer, tends to focus on certain types of conflicts to generate stories. It becomes their swing. When we had the three writers pitch for Global Frequency, each person came in with very distinct styles. Diego Garcia tended to focus on the person of the week, how that new innocent would deal with the world and draw Sean and Kate closer together He seemed to really dig the “You are on the Global Frequency” aspect. Dave Slack pitched darker – how the weirdness of the world would test the characters, really slam them against each other to either bond or destroy them. (Dave also … killed a lot more people in his pitches. Just saying.) Ben Edlund had a great change-up. It would seem like he was pitching typical genius Edlund high-concepts, but then he’d show it was really just a flashy way of expressing some conflict in Sean and Kate’s relationship he found fascinating. Someday, Ben, someday, I will find a show for Paco the Pearl Diver and his Oyster Knife of Justice. (And someday if we’re lucky enough, one of you will have a staffing question for me, and we can continue this conversation)
Okay, those are the story engines. Now the story lenses are much more a style concern. I’ve never actually articulated this before, so bear with me.
Your lenses allow you variety in storytelling style and tone. Usually, your characters act as lenses. Mulder-centric X-Files tended to be conspiracy-heavy, or … wackier. Scully-heavy ones tended to be more emotional, and deal with religious faith in a very specific manner. To use another geek example, on Buffy a Xander-heavy episode not only tended to have a different type of conflict, it felt different. In a more explicit way, I had three primary characters on GF: Sean, a “retired” homicide detective: Dr. Finch, science girl: and Miranda Zero, enigmatic conspiracy secret agent. By adjusting the weight of each character in a episode, or picking which character’s lens we told the story through, you could modulate the feel of the show up and down for more variety over the years. Sean-heavy eps are going to feel more 24-ish, street-level. Kate will be more X-Files or more properly Andromeda Strain; and Miranda-heavy shows will – sorry, would have been – a bit more of the old ultra-violence, high-spy style.
Again, that’s a bit more down in the clockwork than most approaches, but I like the idea that you have yet another tool for creating variety within a show without breaking the genre of a show.
Does every Hollywood writer do this work? No. Many times -- several shows a year, in fact -- a writer has a great, GREAT high-concept or a piece of talent, and that’s enough to get a pilot script. And that writer writes a barn-burner of a pilot, and the pilot gets shot. And the pilot is GREAT, and the show gets picked up because that was forty-five minutes of ass-kicking television!!
And that writing staff has a gun in its mouth by January.
You know who you are, people.
Now, quick aside. The great thing about all this conflict-centric prep is that you may find one of your characters is not generating nearly as much conflict as the others. Or, their conflicts tend to overlap other character’s story ideas too often. You have found some deadweight. Sometimes you will find two characters seem a little poorly defined, or aren’t quite popping. Try combining them into one. Find the strongest combination of need and limitation. A character must be unique and contributing strongly to the story engines—or cut them. Ruthlessly. Each character on a show is like a prism, transmitting a distinct element of the overall story. No matter how much you love the concept of a character, if they are not generating conflict (or at least goddam jokes no one else can do), you will grow to hate them. Because week after week they will eat your page space and not give you anything in return. Trust me, you will learn to hate the actors all on their own after a while, never mind with the head start of being scene deadweight.
One word: Boone. 'nuff said.
All right, one more thing and we’ll tighten and summarize for the pitching room. It is said “Television is the art of rewriting the pilot every week.” As I’ve discussed before, many TV writers have a hard time making the jump to film because the overall goal of a television episode is to return to the staus quo. To bring you, by the end of the ep, to the same place which made the show interesting for the viewers to first tune in.
This has changed enough that you may wish to have in your back pocket some examples of how you will change the characters and some of their relationships over the course of the five years. Talk of radically-evolving characters tends to spook execs, who quickly form visions of confused viewers fleeing the show they once loved but now no longer know. However, showing them that you’re changing the characters enough to constantly generate new fields of conflict is good.
Oooookay. So, you’ve done all this spiffy work. You have a bunch of characters you want to live with over five years.* You have a unique, or at the very least interesting, setting to slap those characters into. You have a whackload of stories you want to tell with those characters in that setting, and maybe even one over-riding meta-story or theme you’ll be expressing over those multiple seasons. Now how the hell do you get that across to the suited humans with the checkbooks?
We’ll cover that next time. But, short version, to consider before we meet again:
-- no pitch ever sold because it was longer then ten minutes.
-- A pilot pitch has two parts:
“Why this show should be on the air.”
“How this show will stay on the air.”
* (yeah, didn't think about it that way, did you? Pretty scary, huh? But don't worry -- a bit more success and you can abandon your half-baked ideas to doomed writing staffs as you move on to the next high-profile project. Viva Hollywood!)
So, you’re pacing in a network/studio hallway, trying to ignore the posters of failed 80’s sitcoms on the walls, waiting to go into the pitch. What do you need to do once you get into that exec’s room?
Yes, you in the back.
“… blow someone.” No. Don’t be stupid. You don’t blow someone for a pilot script commitment.
You blow someone for a time slot.
As we’ve discussed, beyond the purely “write the show” issues, television seasons (as they exist currently) require your pilot idea to generate literally a hundred-odd story variants in order to make sense from a business/programming viewpoint. Yes, this is changing. But having a show that'll run a hundred means pitching your 13-a-year will be a piece of cake. So master the Big Network Pitch, and your kung fu will be strong.
To know what to do in that room, you need to have done a shitload of work before that room. In a TV series, you have to sit down and create, very explicitly, what I call the story engines and story lenses. All of this depends on the very simple idea that story = conflict. Or, at least, story seeds grow from conflict-rich soil.
The story engines are: the exterior conflicts – obstacles—for the characters to overcome; the circumstances (setting, genre, etc.) within which the characters must work to solve the obstacles; the different viewpoints each character has that will bring them conflict as they overcome said obstacles; those different viewpoints that’ll put them in conflict regardless of any exterior issues; and the differences in approach to those exterior circumstances that’ll bring characters into conflict when attempting to overcome exterior obstacles.
Let’s take – hmm, was going to say CSI, but those characters are ciphers. Noooo, don’t want to do Lost, I have friends on that show – ah, the classic. X-Files.
Big whoop. Mulder’s a believer, Scully’s a skeptic. Moving on – no, wait up. Humor me for a moment.
First, exterior conflicts: the cases. Every week some new inscrutable mystery will need to be solved by our intrepid agents. Because they are working for the FBI these cases will run the gamut from normal-seeming crimes to government issues, homicides to white collar crimes to complete bug-nuts sci fi mysteries, they will be nationwide. One of our characters has connections outside the FBI and so more cases will come from the shadowy conspiracy world he is connected to.
Nice. No lack of legitimate exterior conflicts for Mulder and Scully (… Scully in the top hat. Ahhhh, Scully …) to solve.
Our characters also work in very specific circumstances – a world where apparently malign sci-fi forces do seem to exist, AND shadowy conspiracies, AND a bureaucracy which both empowers and constrains them. For each exterior problem, you then get to see if one of these conflicts will aid you building story. Does the FBI want them to solve this case? Are the government’s near-limitless resources an aid to them, or are the bureaucrats over them an added obstacle? Are they throwing the FBI’s weight around, or are they working just under the radar, stretching the limits of their authority? Is this case somehow linked to the agenda of some larger authority, be it government or conspiracy, which will offer resistance beyond that of the already formidable problem of solving this week’s mystery?
Note that these two engines often overlap. In hospital shows, for example, the circumstances of, oh, bureaucratic strictures of the hospital, the physical layout or inherent dangers of working with crazy/sick people, the lack of funding – all those can manifests as explicit exterior conflict. Either can be a primary conflict with the other as a modifier.
Back to the X-Files. Each character has a very specific attitude that will put them in conflict as they approach each problem. Mulder will go in with an open mind, no theory too wild—while Scully insists on the scientific method – hypothesis, experimentation, repostulation – and will in fact dismiss many possibilities out of hand as being fanciful. Mulder’s the people person, the old-school investigator while Scully’s the forensic whiz. Just their attempts at solving the problems from such different points of attack will generate conflict.
But they will also be in conflict without a mystery (exterior conflict) to solve. Those two worldviews are so different, if Mulder and Scully were accountants working at adjoining desks at Budget Rent-a-Car, they’d be in constant conflict over coffee conversation. A good story has a conflict illuminated by the opposing viewpoints of the characters. A GREAT story is really about the characters’ viewpoints, with the traditionally pitched “story” as a means to draw them out.
Where was – oh, and this one’s a bit subtle. “…the differences in approach to those exterior circumstances that’ll bring characters into conflict when attempting to overcome exterior obstacles.” Mulder and Scully, to varying degrees of importance in the episode:
-- will be in conflict with the exterior problem,
-- will be in conflict with the exterior circumstances constraining their solution to the exterior problem,
-- will be in conflict over how to solve the exterior problem
--, will be in conflict with each other regardless of whatever exterior problem they’re facing, but ALSO
-- – they will also attempt to manipulate/overcome the constraining circumstances in different ways. Hence, conflicto-gasm.
There are times Mulder will attempt to bargain, cajole, lie, abuse the FBI in his quest. There are times Scully, considering the same FBI, will believe it’s right to just straight-ahead call them in and certainly as shit not lie to them. There will be times Mulder wants to enlist the aid of, say, Lone Gunmen fellas, while Scully prefers to work with more established/credible figures. Yes, some of this relates to their different worldviews, but those worldviews don’t always create a consistent approach to operative authority.
You’ll note that in serial/soap-opera style shows, struggling with the constraining circumstances can actually become a lead source of conflict. Much of the shenanigans (… much or many? Is “shenanigans” a collective noun?) on Desperate Housewives consists of the housewives dealing with the societal expectations of their micro-world. Dealing with an illicit affair is tricky: it is considerably complicated by the spatial intimacy and (surface) propriety of Wisteria Lane.
Stepping back, we see that X-Files was, well, amazingly conflict-deep. At no point would any one episode put equal weight on all those conflict engines. But a season as a whole would draw on all of them to construct the episodes. Each show will be a little heavier in one attack approach. But you need that arsenal to aid you in generating 100 stories.
Each showrunner, hell each writer, tends to focus on certain types of conflicts to generate stories. It becomes their swing. When we had the three writers pitch for Global Frequency, each person came in with very distinct styles. Diego Garcia tended to focus on the person of the week, how that new innocent would deal with the world and draw Sean and Kate closer together He seemed to really dig the “You are on the Global Frequency” aspect. Dave Slack pitched darker – how the weirdness of the world would test the characters, really slam them against each other to either bond or destroy them. (Dave also … killed a lot more people in his pitches. Just saying.) Ben Edlund had a great change-up. It would seem like he was pitching typical genius Edlund high-concepts, but then he’d show it was really just a flashy way of expressing some conflict in Sean and Kate’s relationship he found fascinating. Someday, Ben, someday, I will find a show for Paco the Pearl Diver and his Oyster Knife of Justice. (And someday if we’re lucky enough, one of you will have a staffing question for me, and we can continue this conversation)
Okay, those are the story engines. Now the story lenses are much more a style concern. I’ve never actually articulated this before, so bear with me.
Your lenses allow you variety in storytelling style and tone. Usually, your characters act as lenses. Mulder-centric X-Files tended to be conspiracy-heavy, or … wackier. Scully-heavy ones tended to be more emotional, and deal with religious faith in a very specific manner. To use another geek example, on Buffy a Xander-heavy episode not only tended to have a different type of conflict, it felt different. In a more explicit way, I had three primary characters on GF: Sean, a “retired” homicide detective: Dr. Finch, science girl: and Miranda Zero, enigmatic conspiracy secret agent. By adjusting the weight of each character in a episode, or picking which character’s lens we told the story through, you could modulate the feel of the show up and down for more variety over the years. Sean-heavy eps are going to feel more 24-ish, street-level. Kate will be more X-Files or more properly Andromeda Strain; and Miranda-heavy shows will – sorry, would have been – a bit more of the old ultra-violence, high-spy style.
Again, that’s a bit more down in the clockwork than most approaches, but I like the idea that you have yet another tool for creating variety within a show without breaking the genre of a show.
Does every Hollywood writer do this work? No. Many times -- several shows a year, in fact -- a writer has a great, GREAT high-concept or a piece of talent, and that’s enough to get a pilot script. And that writer writes a barn-burner of a pilot, and the pilot gets shot. And the pilot is GREAT, and the show gets picked up because that was forty-five minutes of ass-kicking television!!
And that writing staff has a gun in its mouth by January.
You know who you are, people.
Now, quick aside. The great thing about all this conflict-centric prep is that you may find one of your characters is not generating nearly as much conflict as the others. Or, their conflicts tend to overlap other character’s story ideas too often. You have found some deadweight. Sometimes you will find two characters seem a little poorly defined, or aren’t quite popping. Try combining them into one. Find the strongest combination of need and limitation. A character must be unique and contributing strongly to the story engines—or cut them. Ruthlessly. Each character on a show is like a prism, transmitting a distinct element of the overall story. No matter how much you love the concept of a character, if they are not generating conflict (or at least goddam jokes no one else can do), you will grow to hate them. Because week after week they will eat your page space and not give you anything in return. Trust me, you will learn to hate the actors all on their own after a while, never mind with the head start of being scene deadweight.
One word: Boone. 'nuff said.
All right, one more thing and we’ll tighten and summarize for the pitching room. It is said “Television is the art of rewriting the pilot every week.” As I’ve discussed before, many TV writers have a hard time making the jump to film because the overall goal of a television episode is to return to the staus quo. To bring you, by the end of the ep, to the same place which made the show interesting for the viewers to first tune in.
This has changed enough that you may wish to have in your back pocket some examples of how you will change the characters and some of their relationships over the course of the five years. Talk of radically-evolving characters tends to spook execs, who quickly form visions of confused viewers fleeing the show they once loved but now no longer know. However, showing them that you’re changing the characters enough to constantly generate new fields of conflict is good.
Oooookay. So, you’ve done all this spiffy work. You have a bunch of characters you want to live with over five years.* You have a unique, or at the very least interesting, setting to slap those characters into. You have a whackload of stories you want to tell with those characters in that setting, and maybe even one over-riding meta-story or theme you’ll be expressing over those multiple seasons. Now how the hell do you get that across to the suited humans with the checkbooks?
We’ll cover that next time. But, short version, to consider before we meet again:
-- no pitch ever sold because it was longer then ten minutes.
-- A pilot pitch has two parts:
“Why this show should be on the air.”
“How this show will stay on the air.”
* (yeah, didn't think about it that way, did you? Pretty scary, huh? But don't worry -- a bit more success and you can abandon your half-baked ideas to doomed writing staffs as you move on to the next high-profile project. Viva Hollywood!)
An Unpleasant Team-up
Wonky Blogger and Dial-up connection conspire to slow my posting. As I hone the pilot article, I can only buy time referring you to the guy who found ancient buried Roman ruins in his backyard using Google Earth. (via Boingboing)
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