In which we answer your questions. And I think it'll be Thursdays. Want to give Waid a whole day of posting to himself.
Let's see what's in the mailbag ...
Red Dawn: I tried to watch the production videos but it requires a windows PC. Any chance TNT will make your show more accessible to mac users?
Working on it. I have to admit, they must be pretty sick of my geekery by now. There is, however, now a YouTube Channel for the show now. As a matter of fact, the next sneak peek is up ...
... hmm, a bit more serious than our usual sneaks. More clown killing, less baptisms! I hope more will be up there soon.
Joshua James: If you've told us already, my apologies, but can you make Leverage scripts (those shot and shown) available for readers?
Working on it. People get tetchy about copyright and stuff.
Matt: Good episode, but I've got to ask: was there any hesitation about using the "stall number switch" so soon after the "container number fakeout" in the last episode? While the mechanics of the scam were a little different, they both rely on people's tendency to not quite remember physical locations if they're given a numerical identifier.
There was a lot of hesitation -- which is why a.) this episode was originally scheduled to be broadcast five eps after The Homecoming Job, and b.) that's not how the original scam worked.
Welcome to the realities of physical production of television. The original scam involved a much more complicated bit of business utilizing the outside of the stables/stalls. Once we got to production, we wound up getting our locations for a very limited amount of time, and therefore had to use the interiors, and adapt the scam to that reality.
That episode? We were on the track for precisely one day. There are 116 green screen set replacement shots.
Even funkier, this one was written and shot before Homecoming, so I was essentially raiding our own kitchen when I used a similar gag in that episode. Now, what's weird is, in the scripts the numbering doesn't seem to be a big deal at all, it's a pretty minor part of the scam. But when you hear numbers spoken aloud, and they're the focus of the shot, they resonate.
All to say we were nodding and saying: "Yeah, they kind of overlap, but it's not like they'll be broadcast right next to each other."
Sigh.
It's also a lesson we learned along the way -- the final scam is the one everybody remembers. In Homecoming, we had a.) a three-person pickpocketing gag and b.) voice-controlled lock gag after which we c.) conned the opponents into hating each other by d.) stealing a bill on the floor of Congress on the way to e.) revealing a money-laundering scam which we ended by f.) not stealing most of the money using a number/location trick and g.) framing the contractor and Congressman with their own security devices on the way to h.) delivering a truck full of money that appears empty.
This is why television is the most fun. Evolves as you shoot in ways a self-contained story just can't.
Commish: One question concerning Ep 2... I understand now the process of thought that led to using a private hospital for this gi-normous anonymous donation, but wouldn't it still seem fishy since they're housing a vet who was "accidentally" shot by the contractors who just publicly revealed that they were trying to launder billions?
DON'T STOP THE FUN TRAIN!
(NOTE: Tongue is firmly in cheek here. That's an inside joke in the writers' room.)
Yes, and the best way to deal with a ganster mache who took your father's printing company probably isn't to run a complicated Big Store con involving race cars, King Tut and a death curse. But we ain't in the reality business. For that, you can always tune in Law and Order SVU, where you can watch somebody be sodomized with a violin bow.
We sodomize you with FUN!
Wait. That didn't come out right ... Let's just move on.
Jim Kakalios: And I love Sterling. I am already looking forward to the season finale, as I know that there will be a huge triple con that will deal with the crisis du jour, and finally resolve the Sterling issue simultaneously.
You don't resolve Mark Sheppard. Can you resolve the wind?
What I'm trying to say is, I seem to be stuck with the bastard until Javi writes another show and takes him off my hands.
adc1966: I hope you will make a recurring thing out of Parker's bizarre childhood memory flashbacks. All while holding that big stuffed bunny. And more Parker+Sophie. That scene last week with the zip-line in the stairwell was adorable. :-)
There's more Young Parker kicking around. And Mr. Bunny is still out there. Waiting.
Parker and Sophie do have tons o'fun coming up, although they tend to be working in different locations in the scam because of their different skillsets. That said: Hey, look Ma, we pass the Bechdel test!
Mary Sue: Rogers! When can those of us with no desire to hook up to the cable TV cash drain get to watch the show?! I'm chomping at the bit over here!
Available on Amazon the day after, and iTunes a week after that.
Joe Helfrich: Got to admit, this was my least favorite episode so far. It just felt like it tried to cram too much--horse racing information, character backstory, and a complicated con--into 44 minutes. Plus, until the tag, Badger (he will always be Badger) didn't seem the sort to have a long term plan. Before that, he just seemed like a petty guy who wanted to screw with his old co-worker. Did you write the tag, Rogers? Because it was a completely different feel.
Runtime's actually 42:30, sport. Welcome to the new age of television. And yes, sadly, there's a bit more Sterling plotting going on in the original script ... somewhere in the other ten pages that were cut. We definitely took a big chunk of the year figuring out how to pace these things. The kids wrote the tag, if I remember correctly.
someBrad: Did you film THJ in an actual hospital? What was the process to decide what medical equipment to use, if it wasn't just "We're in the hospital so we use what they have"?
That's a real hospital in Long Beach, in a real rehab room, with real vets in rehab. Jake's the only one in the scene who's not actually in rehab.
Keith: Gina Bellman does a perfect southern accent, too. That's not easy. Being from the South, I can pick out a fake yokel accent a mile away and hers was so good, I wanted to ask her what church her family went to.**If you're from GA, you get this. If not, well. it's not that important.
Weirdly this was the one where Gina was worried. Chris was around for some pointers, and we soon discovered the linguistic links between Southern and British accents ... as usual, she worried for no reason. Even got the Mandarin down, too.
Ugh, post-production calls. Thanks for the questions. I'm on vacation for a few days, so bug Waid and Mike, and I'll see you next Tuesday.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Waid Wednesday #2: 101-A (a.k.a. "More Than Words")
Novelist walks into my office. Relatively famous, not as famous as Aforementioned Screenwriter, but a multiple award-winner in his genre nonetheless. And he’s immediately on my bad side because the comics script he has handed me is the dullest thing I have ever read, and I used to be a legal secretary.
It isn’t a bad story. To the contrary, the conflict is clear and intriguing and the plot moves along at a good clip. But the Ambien on the page comes from the fact that the writer’s a novelist. He’s accustomed to introducing his characters by writing hundreds of riveting words describing how they view the world, what their hopes and dreams are, and what’s going on inside their heads from moment to moment. But there is no room for that on the comic book page, so he just left it out, and now I’m holding a script starring a bunch of plot puppets who are indistinguishable from one another, who don’t reveal themselves through action, and who are interesting only in the writer's head.
Comics is a visual medium. That means the writer has to find a way to externalize the conflicts--literally or, with practice, symbolically--and not leave them locked inside the protagonist. I’m not saying punches have to be thrown--not every comic is or need be about Spider-Man--but if comics is the avenue through which you want to tell your story, it had better be a story that is, in its telling, visually interesting. If it isn't, you have chosen the wrong medium. I have been in awe of E.M. Forster's talent since I was fourteen, but I can imagine nothing more tedious than a graphic novelization of A Room With a View.
It sounds absurdly obvious, but I am so continually confronted with writers so in love with their dialogue that I'm going to say it again: comics is a visual medium. Bring every important character on stage by having him or her doing something--spinning a basketball, operating an electron microscope, taking a fistful of vitamins, anything--that instantly tells us something about them. When there's conflict, find a way to make it visual. Witty dialogue and clever repartee are priceless, yes, but probably more than in any other medium outside of, oh, mime, comics depends on the writer showing rather than telling. So give your artist interesting things to draw. Can this dramatic revelation happen in, say, a planetarium rather than in a hotel room? Can this confrontation happen on a Ferris wheel instead of a generic alleyway? Can these characters be acting rather than reacting?
One last time: comics is a visual medium. Use that. I am a huge, huge believer in page one of any comics story of any genre having an unusual image that will grab the reader and draw him in. It doesn’t have to be “super-heroey”--in the right story, a shot of a woman looming over an empty crib has just as much impact as, I don’t know, Superman punching a meteor--but by now, any comic book that opens up with four pages of guys in business suits standing around a generic boardroom is just death. D-E-A-T-H. Every issue, we have twenty-two pages, give or take, to tell readers a story that they paid good money for, so as a writer, I get very nervous opening with (or, once I’ve opened, spending more than about two pages on) something you can see on TV every day for free, without my help. Always think visually. Always, always look at your scenes once they’re drafted and ask yourself if they have more visual impact than two guys in business suits standing around a boardroom. If not, rewrite.
LEVERAGE: The Two Horse Job
Chris Downey and I were marveling over the Madoff Ponzi scheme yesterday. Insanely, the biggest financial fraud of the decade is something we never would have used in the show, because it was too damn easy. A frikkin' Ponzi scheme? Our audience would figure that out in a second. The sad thing is, for every unbelievable con we pull, there's a real world parallel that we'd never have the stones to try to get past an audience.
Note that it's always "Ponzi scheme" as opposed to "Ponzi plan" or "Ponzi con.". No idea why.
Mike's recent post on "where do you get your ideas" gave me the idea -- my, that's recursive -- to do a short post on broadcast day about the genesis of that episode's crime plot. Not the overall inspirations for the show, but the eps. I won't go into anything not revealed in "next Week's Scenes" or the teasers on TNT.
To catch up briefly --
"The Nigerian Job" -- was inspired by a magazine article on Ryan Air and my own personal hatred of how every con show does The Sting con. If you look at the ending of the pilot, it specifically refutes that choice. The innocent bystanders really are innocent bystanders, and the cops really are cops. It's a con payoff that depends on everyone actually being who they claim to be. The law that Victor Dubenich is arrested for breaking is real, down to the relevant language. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is a bitch.
"The Homecoming Job" -- This sort of moved backwards as Dean and I broke the story. We wanted to do something a little bigger for the second episode, with some serious heavy opponents. I had the Vanity Fair article about the missing billions in my notes for a while, and the image of pallets -- pallets -- of cash somehow resonated with my teenage job in a supermarket, unloading pallets of groceries. It was a very tangible sense memory that hooked me into the idea.
The scarcity of cash came from another old aborted project, although I wound using an old 2000 estimate of $500 in cash for each American as opposed to the current estimate of a couple thousand dollars per American. Bizzarely, that research paper is by the father of David Feige, creator of TNT's Raising the Bar. It's a weird world.
Corrupt Congressmen plus contractors gave us two pretty big, unstoppable power centers to throw at our protagonists for their maiden voyage. The rise of small-amount donors in modern elections gave us a good intersection for cash + Congressmen, which brought us to our money-laundering scam. The hopper is real, too. Although I was so proud of us discovering that through research, only to have everyone I told about it answer back, "Yeah, I saw that in Legally Blonde 2."
The interesting thing was, we got to the victims last. We wanted someone who'd been in Iraq who could have seen the wrongdoing, who'd then been shot up by the contractors ... okay, wounded vet. Seeing as veterans' care is a personal priority of Dean and I, we dove in. Our representative corporal has a need, our guys are going to fill it.
But that led to a whole different set of writing hurdles. The Walter Reed scandal is the most notorious story of soldiers not getting the care they needed -- but (what most people get wrong) Walter Reed is an Army medical center. There was no way we could fiddle a big payout to that sort of infrastracture.
The next logical choice is a Veteran's Affairs Medical Center. Problem again -- the VA system is maybe the best medical system in America. They've done wonders dealing with the structural challenges of this war, despite not getting nearly enough funding. If we were going for versimiltude, a VA hospital would just be, well, wrong. If Corporal Perry is at a VAMC, he's getting the best health care in the country.
At this point we were considered jettisoning that version of the story, but I reached out to some KFM readers who are either serving or just back, and some family members. That's when the challenges of the reservists dealing with private hospitals came up. There are serious transportation issues for some reservists when it comes to getting to their nearest VAMC for long term care. Not the fault of the VA, of course, but an unexpected result of having so many National Guard people serving. The Army pays benefits to private hospitals for injured soldiers who can't get to a VAMC -- but those benefits run out after X months, depending on the case, and the difference between what it costs the hospital to do this sort of rehab, and what the VA can do it for, is substantial. Despite some great programs being place being run by truly dedicated humans -- like any system designed by man and administered by the government, some people were falling through the cracks.
Ahh. A private hospital. The sort of place that can take a large, anonymous donation. Maybe not as large as we were planning on making in the script ... but close enough, and relevant to the real-world problems of our representative victim. Done, sir.
All that to create the framework for a good old-fashioned "eff" "uh" "keh" joke. I can't even imagine the crap House writers go through.
"The Two Horse Job" -- Which leads us to tonight's episode, written by the Wonder Twins, Rieder and Glenn. Unlike a lot of the episodes this one didn't start with a villain or vic, it started with the setting. Melissa Glenn is a horse-racing enthusiast -- well just a general sports enthusiast, actually, as are Albert Kim and Chris Downey, who were both at earlier points of their careers sports writers. It gets very jock-y down that end of the long writer's table. My end is all Doctor Who and WoW, so we balance out.
While R&G went and lived at a race track and hung with a trainer for a week, the Room pulled an old scam -- which you'll hear explained tonight -- off the wall of ideas. When they brought back their research and laid out the ins and outs and the revenue streams of horse-racing and breeding, we glued the two concepts together. R&G went off and knocked it out of the park. First produced script, too.
This is one of my favorite episodes because it does the job most of my TV favorite shows do: it takes the audience into a world they probably don't know much about, explains the intricacies of that world, and then exploits its pecularities for the plot.
It's also a favorite because it's the first appearance of Mark Sheppard as Nate's old rival Sterling. Some people, after the pilot, wondered how we would challenge such a (ridiculously) talented bunch of characters. Well, we wondered too. The recurring role of Sterling, the guy even Nate worries about, was introduced for just this purpose. And hey, when you've got a character required to deliver two and a half-page speeches in a mesmerising manner, you choices in television are essentially a.) Mark Sheppard and b.) Mark Sheppard.
This episode really lays out the template for the show going forward (although it wasn't written first. But that's the story for another time ...) -- They start with Plan A. Plan A goes wrong/requires Con B. Con B doesn't quite work out, or instead is really Con C disguised as Con B. At the same time this keeps our guys on their toes, it also set up one of the primary challenges of developing the show: we need to eat two or three heists/con jobs a show. Never mind the pain in the ass the five act structure is for this type of show.
That said -- man, is this a fun job. In the Comments, any process questions about the last few episodes, or your feedback on tonight's after you see it.
(NOTE: This is damned hard to do this without spoilers. Maybe we'll move it to the Wednesdays after)
(EDIT: ooo, production blogs are up. Which makes this post somewhat redundant.)
Note that it's always "Ponzi scheme" as opposed to "Ponzi plan" or "Ponzi con.". No idea why.
Mike's recent post on "where do you get your ideas" gave me the idea -- my, that's recursive -- to do a short post on broadcast day about the genesis of that episode's crime plot. Not the overall inspirations for the show, but the eps. I won't go into anything not revealed in "next Week's Scenes" or the teasers on TNT.
To catch up briefly --
"The Nigerian Job" -- was inspired by a magazine article on Ryan Air and my own personal hatred of how every con show does The Sting con. If you look at the ending of the pilot, it specifically refutes that choice. The innocent bystanders really are innocent bystanders, and the cops really are cops. It's a con payoff that depends on everyone actually being who they claim to be. The law that Victor Dubenich is arrested for breaking is real, down to the relevant language. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is a bitch.
"The Homecoming Job" -- This sort of moved backwards as Dean and I broke the story. We wanted to do something a little bigger for the second episode, with some serious heavy opponents. I had the Vanity Fair article about the missing billions in my notes for a while, and the image of pallets -- pallets -- of cash somehow resonated with my teenage job in a supermarket, unloading pallets of groceries. It was a very tangible sense memory that hooked me into the idea.
The scarcity of cash came from another old aborted project, although I wound using an old 2000 estimate of $500 in cash for each American as opposed to the current estimate of a couple thousand dollars per American. Bizzarely, that research paper is by the father of David Feige, creator of TNT's Raising the Bar. It's a weird world.
Corrupt Congressmen plus contractors gave us two pretty big, unstoppable power centers to throw at our protagonists for their maiden voyage. The rise of small-amount donors in modern elections gave us a good intersection for cash + Congressmen, which brought us to our money-laundering scam. The hopper is real, too. Although I was so proud of us discovering that through research, only to have everyone I told about it answer back, "Yeah, I saw that in Legally Blonde 2."
The interesting thing was, we got to the victims last. We wanted someone who'd been in Iraq who could have seen the wrongdoing, who'd then been shot up by the contractors ... okay, wounded vet. Seeing as veterans' care is a personal priority of Dean and I, we dove in. Our representative corporal has a need, our guys are going to fill it.
But that led to a whole different set of writing hurdles. The Walter Reed scandal is the most notorious story of soldiers not getting the care they needed -- but (what most people get wrong) Walter Reed is an Army medical center. There was no way we could fiddle a big payout to that sort of infrastracture.
The next logical choice is a Veteran's Affairs Medical Center. Problem again -- the VA system is maybe the best medical system in America. They've done wonders dealing with the structural challenges of this war, despite not getting nearly enough funding. If we were going for versimiltude, a VA hospital would just be, well, wrong. If Corporal Perry is at a VAMC, he's getting the best health care in the country.
At this point we were considered jettisoning that version of the story, but I reached out to some KFM readers who are either serving or just back, and some family members. That's when the challenges of the reservists dealing with private hospitals came up. There are serious transportation issues for some reservists when it comes to getting to their nearest VAMC for long term care. Not the fault of the VA, of course, but an unexpected result of having so many National Guard people serving. The Army pays benefits to private hospitals for injured soldiers who can't get to a VAMC -- but those benefits run out after X months, depending on the case, and the difference between what it costs the hospital to do this sort of rehab, and what the VA can do it for, is substantial. Despite some great programs being place being run by truly dedicated humans -- like any system designed by man and administered by the government, some people were falling through the cracks.
Ahh. A private hospital. The sort of place that can take a large, anonymous donation. Maybe not as large as we were planning on making in the script ... but close enough, and relevant to the real-world problems of our representative victim. Done, sir.
All that to create the framework for a good old-fashioned "eff" "uh" "keh" joke. I can't even imagine the crap House writers go through.
"The Two Horse Job" -- Which leads us to tonight's episode, written by the Wonder Twins, Rieder and Glenn. Unlike a lot of the episodes this one didn't start with a villain or vic, it started with the setting. Melissa Glenn is a horse-racing enthusiast -- well just a general sports enthusiast, actually, as are Albert Kim and Chris Downey, who were both at earlier points of their careers sports writers. It gets very jock-y down that end of the long writer's table. My end is all Doctor Who and WoW, so we balance out.
While R&G went and lived at a race track and hung with a trainer for a week, the Room pulled an old scam -- which you'll hear explained tonight -- off the wall of ideas. When they brought back their research and laid out the ins and outs and the revenue streams of horse-racing and breeding, we glued the two concepts together. R&G went off and knocked it out of the park. First produced script, too.
This is one of my favorite episodes because it does the job most of my TV favorite shows do: it takes the audience into a world they probably don't know much about, explains the intricacies of that world, and then exploits its pecularities for the plot.
It's also a favorite because it's the first appearance of Mark Sheppard as Nate's old rival Sterling. Some people, after the pilot, wondered how we would challenge such a (ridiculously) talented bunch of characters. Well, we wondered too. The recurring role of Sterling, the guy even Nate worries about, was introduced for just this purpose. And hey, when you've got a character required to deliver two and a half-page speeches in a mesmerising manner, you choices in television are essentially a.) Mark Sheppard and b.) Mark Sheppard.
This episode really lays out the template for the show going forward (although it wasn't written first. But that's the story for another time ...) -- They start with Plan A. Plan A goes wrong/requires Con B. Con B doesn't quite work out, or instead is really Con C disguised as Con B. At the same time this keeps our guys on their toes, it also set up one of the primary challenges of developing the show: we need to eat two or three heists/con jobs a show. Never mind the pain in the ass the five act structure is for this type of show.
That said -- man, is this a fun job. In the Comments, any process questions about the last few episodes, or your feedback on tonight's after you see it.
(NOTE: This is damned hard to do this without spoilers. Maybe we'll move it to the Wednesdays after)
(EDIT: ooo, production blogs are up. Which makes this post somewhat redundant.)
Monday, December 15, 2008
Dawkins & Derren Brown
I find Dawkins a bit of an asshat generally, but always a pleasure watching Derren Brown. Dawkins, for his documentary, interviewing Brown in six parts (h/t io9):
All six parts are on YouTube. My favorite Brown bit is actually this one:
All six parts are on YouTube. My favorite Brown bit is actually this one:
Bookending
I was 13 when I knew I wanted to be a writer. My dad had just finished reading Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords trilogy and passed it on to me, thinking that I might enjoy it. So while I was shuttered inside the house during a long Chistmas break, I sat by our wood burning stove and read all three books in the space of a week (for a hyperactive teen with ADD, three books in a week was a miracle).
It was the first time I had ever really noticed the magic of language and how clever turns of phrases made interesting and exciting scenes that much more magical. It was as if a light bulb inside my head was slowly beginning to glow. But it wasn't until I read the very last sentence of the third and final book of the trilogy that the light truly came on and it all finally fell into place. The first sentence of the first book and the last sentence of the last book were the same.
I remember grabbing the first book and opening it up to the first page and holding the two books side by side, examing the words. They were practically identical, yet the journey from point A to point B had given them completely different meanings. It was such a profound moment that I knew in that instant that THAT was what I wanted to do. I wanted to affect people the same way Saberhagen had affected me.
And I like to think that someday I will.
Yet of all the writing and storytelling techniques I've learned since that day, the concept of bookending still fascinates me the most. I always get excited when I see it. Alan Moore used it in Watchmen with the drop of red on the smiley face and again in "The Killing Joke" with the drops of rain falling in a dark puddle. The images or words may be identical, yet it's the story in between that gives each a separate meaning. It's the story that defines them (and I'm sure there are numerous other examples out there other than just these three).
As for my own writing, I've only used it once, with Fall of Cthulhu. Since it has been my longest ongoing series, I thought it fitting to use bookending as an homage to the story that infected me with the writing bug.
Which makes me curious about my fellow monkeys. At what moment did you know that you wanted to be a writer (or a musician, accountant, whatever)? Let's hear about it in commments.
It was the first time I had ever really noticed the magic of language and how clever turns of phrases made interesting and exciting scenes that much more magical. It was as if a light bulb inside my head was slowly beginning to glow. But it wasn't until I read the very last sentence of the third and final book of the trilogy that the light truly came on and it all finally fell into place. The first sentence of the first book and the last sentence of the last book were the same.
I remember grabbing the first book and opening it up to the first page and holding the two books side by side, examing the words. They were practically identical, yet the journey from point A to point B had given them completely different meanings. It was such a profound moment that I knew in that instant that THAT was what I wanted to do. I wanted to affect people the same way Saberhagen had affected me.
And I like to think that someday I will.
Yet of all the writing and storytelling techniques I've learned since that day, the concept of bookending still fascinates me the most. I always get excited when I see it. Alan Moore used it in Watchmen with the drop of red on the smiley face and again in "The Killing Joke" with the drops of rain falling in a dark puddle. The images or words may be identical, yet it's the story in between that gives each a separate meaning. It's the story that defines them (and I'm sure there are numerous other examples out there other than just these three).
As for my own writing, I've only used it once, with Fall of Cthulhu. Since it has been my longest ongoing series, I thought it fitting to use bookending as an homage to the story that infected me with the writing bug.
Which makes me curious about my fellow monkeys. At what moment did you know that you wanted to be a writer (or a musician, accountant, whatever)? Let's hear about it in commments.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
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