Complications Ensue: The Crafty TV and Screenwriting Blog

In Which I Am Interviewed

2009-07-13T15:22:00.003-04:00

Gordon Rogerson was kind enough to interview me for his blog The Greenlight.Com. Check it out!

But They Make Up All Their Lines, Don't They?

2009-07-09T10:09:00.003-04:00

Q. Do you think Friday Night Lights would be worth speccing? I don't know if I should bother trying to write a script for it since the reader will know that the actors are encouraged to ad-lib a lot of the time.

As far as I know, they're encouraged to ad-lib off the script, which they've memorized. That means they might change a few words in a line here and there, and add handles ("Look, ...") and hems and haws. But I guarantee you there are lines in them there scripts. Check'em out yourself.

As far as I know, FNL is a good spec these days. The tricky thing, as always with a serial, is how to fit your spec into their timeline. You can either try to squeeze one in between two episodes, try to make your ep relatively free-floating, or write a season opener. The latter will be tricky, because as you know, Coach is no longer coaching the Panthers as of the season finale, and who knows who's going to be in the show next year. (And it will do you no good to just make up a slew of new characters, since that's not what a spec script is for.) But that's another headache entirely.

Interesting Scripts

2009-07-08T09:43:00.002-04:00

Carson Reeves is getting hold of major scripts in development (like Aaron Sorkin's script for a movie about the founder of Facebook), reading them, blogging about them, and in many cases, linking to the script. Check out the competition.

Sprint for your Short

2009-07-07T10:58:00.005-04:00

[QUEBEC] SODEC is doing their COURS ECRIRE TON COURT program again, soliciting the best short film scripts in both English and French from emerging but professional screenwriters between 18 and 35. There are two prizes for best script, and there's even a $1000 CBC prize for best English script. Check it out.

Applicants must:

- be between the ages of 18 and 35 (i.e., younger than 36 as of the submission deadline on August 17, 2009)
- be pursuing a professional writing career (i.e., high school, college and university undergraduate students are not eligible)
- be a resident of Quebec for at least two years
- be available between September 7 and October 19, 2009
- submit all the required entry material to SODEC
- never have been selected as a finalist in a previous edition of the contest.

Note also that the next deadline for the Young Creators program is in November. (PDF.)

Adjusted Box Office Mojo

2009-07-06T13:28:00.002-04:00

Box Office Mojo has listed the top grossing movies of all time as adjusted for inflation.

If you really want to gauge cultural impact, you'd have to adjust the list further according to US population at the time -- when GONE WITH THE WIND hit theaters, the country was half the size it is now. But this is a heck of a lot better than the un-adjusted list.

The Gordian Not

2009-07-04T19:15:00.005-04:00

I was listening to Brooke Gladstone's ON THE MEDIA podcast about the difficulty of obliterating public misconceptions (e.g. "Barack Obama is a Muslim"). She was talking about how people don't remember "not" well. If you try to sell people on the concept that "Barack Obama is a Christian," you might convince some of them that he's not a Muslim. But if you try to sell people on "Barack Obama is not a Muslim," it might have a short-term effect, but in the long term, all anyone remembers is "Barack Obama" and "Muslim." Your efforts actually entrench the misperception.

Similarly, when Richard Nixon said, "I am not a crook," people identified him (even more than they already did) with the word "crook."

Partly this is the Denial Paradox. When a guy denies he's a crook, what goes through most people's minds is, "why does he have to deny it? There must be some truth to the accusation."

But there's something deeper going on. Negation is a surprisingly advanced concept, it turns out. I know because I got my 5 year old daughter's "report card." She's mildly autistic, so she's speaking at roughly a 3 year old level. She's learned basic grammar (SVO) and lately she's mastered the more difficult protocols for using "I" and "you." These are difficult because she can't just repeat what the teacher says. She has to swap the words. "I give you the brush" becomes "you give me the brush.") The two main things she hasn't learned at all are tense (was/is/will be and negation. If you ask her, "Give me the ball that is not red," she'll give you the red ball. So negation is at the same level of abstraction, it would seem, as time.

How does this help you writing scripts? Be careful when you use negation. It's easy to write a line like this:

Sandy's wearing a lot of makeup, but it's not at all whorish. It's actually rather well done.

Unfortunately, while you know what you mean, and your reader is intellectually capable of parsing your meaning, what she will actually take away from the sentence is the word "whorish." It's visual and grabby. The word "not" requires too much processing. It's likely to get lost. Your character will appear whorishly made up in her mind.

Instead, write this:

Sandy's wearing a lot of makeup, but it's beautifully done, like an actress going to the Oscars.

Use this power only for good. It would be wicked, in speechwriting, to say things like, "Sarah Palin is not a flakey bimbo," knowing the audience's poor ability to process negation...

People in Glass Houses Shouldn't Be...

2009-07-03T12:37:00.005-04:00

My friends Lara Azzopardi and Julia Cohen's pilot is airing on the CBC:

Throwing Stones is a half-hour drama (with a healthy dose of comedy), about the lives of five remarkable working class women who belong to a local curling club in Winnipeg. Starring Academy Award winner Patty Duke, Lolita Davidovich, Caroline Neron, Barbara Radecki and Stephanie Anne Mills, directed by Mario Azzopardi (ZOS: Zone of Separation), written by Lara Azzopardi and Julia Cohen. Produced by Original Pictures and Curling Productions. Airing Wednesday, July 15th, at 9pm EST.

Great cast! Alas, it didn't get picked up. But it sure looks like fun.

For bonus points, analyze what you think did or didn't work, in the comments.

[Note: the original press release said "July 1." Bad, bad, Lara.]

1959

2009-07-02T09:42:00.004-04:00

I've been reading 1959: The Year Everything Changed by my good friend (and Slate columnist) Fred Kaplan. The '50's is sort of an underserved period in popular history. We think of it as white bread, surburban, conformist, a period of unchallenged American dominance. But there was a lot of turmoil under the covers. The Beat Poets were the '50's, and jazz was going haywire, and the first mass market computers were coming in. Oh, and the modern Civil Rights movement really started up in the '50's. Meanwhile everyone was living in serious fear that there would be an all-out nuclear war.

Fred's written an expansive survey of all that, going into both the roots and ramifications of a whole slew of major events that happened in or around 1959. If you're speccing a MAD MEN, you might want to check it out to get a sense of the world the show lives in. Or, you know, because it's just interesting.

Get Invited Back

2009-07-02T09:11:00.002-04:00

From a brief interview with Steven Bochco:

One of the things I’ve always said to a new director who we hire -- somebody who’s doing it for the first time -- I always say, Your only job is to get invited back. Don’t try to win an Oscar; don’t try to win an Emmy; just get invited back. Because that’s how you progress in life.

I don't think you can usefully try to win an Oscar. You try to do your best work. You try to take the job seriously, and throw yourself into it. And most of all, you try to listen carefully to the people you're working with, and take their feedback seriously (which is not the same necessarily as taking it as Gospel). If you do all that, you may well win an Oscar, or an Emmy. But for sure you'll get invited back.

Magical World, Meet Mundane World

2009-07-01T10:40:00.003-04:00

There's a genre of kid's show where the kid lives in both a magical world and the mundane one. The kid has a door to the otherworld and uses it, but doesn't stay there. The narrative problem is relating the stakes in the magical world to the stakes in the mundane world. If he becomes king of Erewhon, but stays a picked-on kid at school (he's always picked on at school), what has he really gained? Because, after all, even kids know that Erewhon is really Nowhere spelled backwards. So traditionally, the structure of this kind of show is: kid has a Problem at School; escapes into the magical world; learns a Valuable Lesson (such as Stand Up For Yourself or Eat Your Peas); and returns to the mundane world where this Valuable Lesson turns out to just the very thing to enable him to solve the Problem at School.

Lisa and I have been working on a doctor show, so we've been watching a lot of HOUSE episodes. (Enough that Lisa has started becoming a bit of a hypochondriac on Jesse's behalf. I'm beginning to suspect that some of the problem with the American health care system is the plethora of doctor shows. People watch them and then expect the doc to MRI their bunions. But that's another story.) I was struck by how HOUSE has adapted this format.

The show has a medical A story, full of barely comprehensible jargon, and a dramatic, personal B story involving House and, sometimes, a member of his team. I've noticed that the A story often contains a resonance with the B story. A man whose right brain can't talk to his left brain because the corpus callosum has been severed appears in a story where we discover that House is delusional -- the intellectual side of his brain has made up a story to account for the actions of his irrational side. In another, a father has given leprosy to his son; meanwhile, Dr. Chase gets a visit from his toxic dad.

And, often, House figures something out from the B story that gives him the answer in the A story.

How very clever of Mr. Shore to adapt this structure for an adult doctor show!

If You Did Not Enjoy Transformers: Return of the Fallen

2009-06-28T16:25:00.001-04:00

Maybe it's because you didn't realize Transformers:ROTF is an art movie.

Tip of Your Tongue

2009-06-28T15:44:00.001-04:00

Can't quite figure out that perfect word. You sort of know what it sounds like and it sort of means this but it's just not coming?

Try the Tip of Your Tongue tool. Maybe it can help!

A New Meaning for "Hot Spot"

2009-06-28T11:57:00.004-04:00

[POLITICS] Here's something Western governments could actually do: create WiFi hotspots around their embassies so Iranians can get the news out. They presumably have satellite uplinks so are not subject to the Iranian Government web censorship.

I know, I know, that's not what embassies are for. And it's arguably spying. And it can easily be jammed or overwhelmed... I'm just saying.

Study Ball

2009-06-26T02:09:00.000-04:00

Have trouble keeping your ass in your chair? Maybe you need the Study Ball.

Any other uses you come up with are really none of my business.

Via Webs, who I'm glad to read is feeling better.

Wants, Part 2

2009-06-25T21:46:00.003-04:00

In yesterday's post, I talked about global wants and specific wants, and I suggested they can conflict.

It occurred to me today that the news about Mark Sanford suggests a conflict. His specific want was to see his mistress in secret. But his global want is to be with his mistress permanently.

The obstacle to his global want is being Governor of South Carolina. But by disappearing off the map for five days without telling his staff anything, he practically guaranteed that his secret mission to Argentina would be found out. And by doing it that way, he practically guarantees he'll have to resign as governor -- thus liberating him from his pesky governorship.

Whereas, had he simply separated from his wife and announced that he was in love with someone else, he might have lost some votes at the next election, but probably not even that -- see McCain, John.

How characters delude themselves between their specific goals and their overall goals -- how they trick themselves into getting what they won't admit they want -- is part of the fun of watching drama. The audience enjoys realizing things about the character that he doesn't realize himself; and by that effort, they draw themselves into the story.

You don't want your character to be vague, but don't be afraid to make your character self-contradictory, so long as the self-contradiction means something -- can be parsed for meaning.

Aaron Sorkin Interview on "Making Of"

2009-06-25T16:25:00.003-04:00

Ran across this Aaron Sorkin interview on the Making Of site. He doesn't say anything earth-shattering, but there are a lotta other interviews with interesting people there, too.

How Do I Get Scripts?

2009-06-25T03:47:00.000-04:00

Every now and then I get a question whose answer seems obvious, but since someone's asking, there are obviously people out there who don't know it.

I'm an independent producer interested in producing a crafty screenplay. What are your tips on how to find the script I have been looking for? Is there a service out there benefitting unknown screenwriters similar to what www.taxi.com is doing for as-yet-unknown songwriters? As an independent film producer, I’m constantly on the lookout for a great story crafted into a financially producible script, but I don’t have a resource through which I can read enough or at least sort through enough of them to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. If you know of anything, please let me know.

Producers get scripts by asking agents to send them. Simple as that. A producer is a potential buyer, so any agent ought to want his clients read.

If you call any literary agency, such as CAA, William Morris, ICM, UTA, APA, Gersh or Endeavor, and say, "I'm a producer, I'm looking for some scripts to read," you'll get sent to a junior agent who can ask what sort of stuff you're looking for, and send you a whack of PDFs.

The reason you go to an agency rather than a "service" is that the agency has already winnowed out 9 out of 10 bad scripts and bad screenwriters. Not to say you won't have to read through a hunk of junk, just that the needle to haystack ratio is higher.

Also, the agent can, over time, get a sense of what you like and send you stuff as he comes across it. Services can't do that.

There's no reason to look for "unknown" screenwriters. Known screenwriters also want to sell their scripts, and most of us have a bunch of scripts we haven't managed to sell for whatever reason. Some of them might be what you're looking for.

What Do They Want?

2009-06-24T19:13:00.002-04:00

I had a conversation with a friend of mine about her spec pilot. I couldn't figure out what her characters wanted. So there did not appear to be a plot.

When I brought it up to her, she told me that her characters don't know what they want.

But this is a different kind of "want." Really there are two kinds of ways a character can want.

There's a global want that defines a character, often in relation to the other characters. Lucy wants Ricky to be proud of her. Ross wants Rachel to think he's cool. Spock wants to be acknowledged as a fully logical Vulcan, in spite of his ancestry.

Then there's a specific want that creates a plot. Lucy wants to be a stenographer. Ross wants to impress his fellow paleontologists by a giving a speech. Spock wants to stop an evil Romulan from destroying Earth.

The two wants can be in line, or they can conflict. But you need both. Without a global want, your character has no drive. Without a specific want, your character has no story.

Of course both wants should be strong, compelling wants, or who cares?

Feeds

2009-06-24T18:51:00.002-04:00

I have set the site feed to "Short" which means to read longer posts, you actually have to go to the blog, rather than the site feed. Basically I want to see how this affects my numbers, since I don't think there's a way to tell how many people are reading the site in their readers. I will probably restore regular full feeds after a week or so.

Thank you for understanding.

Why No Prime Time SF Hits?

2009-06-24T08:07:00.001-04:00

Q. In Ronald D. Moore's Banff panel, a point came up that I've been pondering--the disparity of success between cinematic and televised scifi. From cinematic high art to blockbuster entertainment, scifi is well represented. Yet no television shows are big hits, and the genre struggles to be taken seriously among television critics. I can't think of another genre with such a disparity, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on it, Alex.

A few possible causes come to mind. Perhaps higher production costs become burdensome over a series' long run. Perhaps audiences are reluctant to commit to watching scifi on a regular basis (perhaps due to social stigma) compared to seeing a single film. I am surprised by some critics' and the Emmy's inability to recognize BSG, half-way surprised.

Why are no SF shows big hits on TV, while the most successful movies in the world are mostly SF?

I can make a few guesses. The movie audience is younger and more male. They like the big-boomy. They will tolerate idiotic plots like the past three STAR WARS pictures if there are spectacular special effects. Those effects aren't as effective on a smaller screen.

On the other hand, there are lots of SF and fantasy shows on TV, but they're generally structured to be as mundane as possible. MEDIUM is a fantasy show: the heroine has visions of the future. LOST and FRINGE and HEROES are SF. Even ALIAS had an undercurrent of SF or F.

What you don't see a lot of is space opera. You don't see hit primetime series about people bopping around in spacecraft. Sure, the STAR TREK franchise has spawned four long-running spinoff shows (TNG, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise), but they've always had relatively low ratings.

Partly that's a budget issue. It's cheap to blow stuff up, and reasonably affordable to stick a latex mask on an actor, but you can't really do something visually spectacular every week. And if you don't have spectacle, you run the risk of having a workplace drama with spandex uniforms.

I hate to say it, for I do love SF, but I think most people find the idea of bopping around on spacecraft to be fairly far from their own experience. They have a family at home; they have a family at work. The problems they deal with, the fears they face, are fairly concrete. SF operates at a level of abstraction. Sure, great SF is always grounded in our human experience. But it requires a little bit of mental work to connect what's going on in a STAR TREK episode with your daily life. So does absorbing a space opera's mythos. Most people don't want to have to work to enjoy their TV. For some reason, people find crime shows very easy to relate to, even though the average TV viewer probably will not have anyone close to them murdered. So maybe that's it.

But that's just a guess. Maybe someone will come up with a big, mainstream, hit primetime show, and we'll stop asking this question.

Querying TV Specs?

2009-06-23T02:17:00.004-04:00

Q. In your book you talk about querying before actually writing the screenplay to test the value of the hookCan you do the same thing for TV specs, to see if you should even bother writing it?

Er, no. You might query producers or agents about your spec feature to see if anyone's interested in the hook. But you're not writing a spec TV script in order to sell it. You're writing it to show you can write TV. A clever hook is a good idea, but producers and agents really need to see your writing chops.

On the other hand if you're talking about a spec pilot that you hope to sell, you can certainly pitch your TV show concept to people in the biz, to see if they warm to it, before investing in writing a spec pilot. You'll want to do this in person, so you see their reaction up front; also they'll be less likely to steal your idea; also, your concept will improve itself as you pitch it. I spent four days in the Rocky Mountains the week before last, pitching a couple of series ideas to producers. We've since had offers and we'll be optioning them shortly. Then we'll take the pitches to networks to see if they'll pay Lisa and me to write a pilot. So in that sense, you can query a TV spec pilot. But it's really a different thing.

Dmitry Lipkin, Co-Creator of HUNG

2009-06-22T00:46:00.000-04:00

Born in Russia, Dmitry Lipkin began his career as a playwright, running a theatre company in New York with his wife Colette Burson for ten years. He then created and was Head Writer for THE RICHES for F/X.

His new show, HUNG, co-created with his wife, Colette Burson, premieres Sunday, June 28 at 10 pm EST on HBO and HBO Canada. The show stars Thomas Jane as Ray Drecker, a middle-aged former sports star now down on his luck, who, with the help of a failed poet, Tanya (Jane Adams), exploits his only remaining asset: his big dick. He turns himself into a hetero male prostitute, with Tanya functioning as his pimp.

Crafty Screenwriting: What did you learn creating and then writing THE RICHES that you’re doing differently on HUNG?

Dmitry Lipkin: When I did THE RICHES, I actually did not know anything about creating a TV show. Network notes and many other factors went into this but I do think that we focused too much on driving the plot forward, and not enough on staying with the psychological reality of each character in that particular unique situation. And that’s something I definitely wanted to do on HUNG, to root us more in the situation, to really think through each step of a regular guy and this woman, this artist temp, how would they go about forming this partnership. How does a regular guy become a gigolo? Not skimming over any steps along the way --there’s nothing that happens on HUNG that happens offscreen.

On this show, we also got to write a lot more episodes before we started shooting, because we were writing all through development. On THE RICHES after the pilot we had a writer's room, and we sat down and said, "Here we are, what's the show?" Let's talk about what the show is for a couple of weeks. On HUNG we brought in a small writing room later, six episodes in. We already knew what the show was, we didn't want to open it up to "what the show is," we just wanted people to jump on board.

CS: Was this always an HBO show, or was there a network version of this show?

DL: We always had HBO in mind. One reason we went with HBO was, I love the idea of going to a place where a show can succeed or fail on the basis of how good it is, not on whether we get a good time slot. Going with HBO, I knew we can actually do this right. We can develop unique characters, create a distinctive tone. We don’t have to rush through it, run roughshod over the concept.

CS: You co-created this show with your wife, Colette Burson. Are you different writers?

DL: We’ve been working with each other so long, we know each other’s work so well we can pinch-hit for each other. We know what our strengths and weaknesses are. And we’re both pretty good at all these things. But I would say her strengths are idea and structure. I can really go off course -- she’s got an instinct for knowing what feels right...

CS: Because I’m mostly writing with my wife these days, and she has a million ideas, and I have very few ideas, but I know how to structure them, how to turn them into a TV show...

DL: She’s both actually, both the what if person and the structure person. I guess I’m the person who makes things ...

CS: ... Deeper and richer?

DL: Yeah. And that comes comes out of the playwriting experience.

We both ran a theater company in New York for ten years...

CS: So you’re gluttons for punishment.

DL: Yeah. But after that, you know, we made shoes for ten years and now we can make a good shoes.

CS: THE RICHES was a star-driven show -- you've talked about how it really took off once Eddie Izzard was on board, and he's such a strong personality. And you had Minnie Driver. How would you compare writing a star-driven show with writing HUNG, which seems to be a more story-driven show?

DL: I think Thomas Jane has a lot of star quality... but, that's true, I just never thought of it that way. Getting Eddie on board THE RICHES was a huge thing. The concept was kind of tailor-made for Eddie’s strengths as a performer. HUNG was very much a story, and then Thomas and Jane and Anne [Heche] fleshed out a story that preceded them.

CS: The premise pilot seems to go in and out of style. What made you feel you needed to show each step of the process of Ray getting into his new business, as opposed to starting with him in it?

[In the pilot, we don't actually see Ray sleeping with a woman for money; the closest he gets is knocking on a hotel door about nine minutes before the end of the episode.]

DL: We always planned to take it step by step. We looked at WEEDS. WEEDS started a few weeks into her job selling pot. But the act of selling pot is simple --you give somebody pot and you get money for it. The act of a sexual encounter with a woman for money is complex and multifaceted. That's a huge step that we wanted to see him live through.

CS: Were you tempted to make Ray a male hustler? Because in real life, almost all the male prostitution is homosexual -- and if anyone fetishizes big dicks, it's gay men. Was that too transgressive even for HBO, or did you want to make the attractive fantasy stronger?

DL: We didn’t go there because Ray wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t go there. He’s barely putting up with the stuff in his life -- his divorce, his kids. He'd pretty much have to be homeless for him to do that.

We did very little research into the sex industry. We didn't want to make it like twenty other shows -- we wanted to approach it from the point of view that this is a unique situation. A kind of grass roots oddball partnership that these two people form. How would these two people who know nothing about this business do it? How would she get clients for him? It's not about the sex industry, people trying to do this unlikely thing.

CS: I've only seen the pilot, but you kind of went out of your way to make him someone we have to struggle to sympathize with. He's kind of angry and resentful that life hasn't treated him the way he expected. Is that kind of the pay cable thing, the unlikable main character, or is that the audience you're trying to reach, men who feel hard done by?

DL: He was never ... it's more apparent in later episodes, but he’s not someone who hates the world. He’s a guy who’s very much lifted up by the world around him. He was the golden boy, the big star. These kinds of guys, they're not angry, they tend to be ... befuddled. The world has shifted and I’m here and where did it all go? As you'll see in the later episodes, he's a considerate and kind guy. He can be grumpy but he’s essentially a gentleman; this comes through in the later episodes. He wants to do a good job. He’s been taught to respect women. He has essentially a Midwestern good guy quality to him that’s very endearing.

CS: What was the genesis of the character?

DL: We wanted to do a show centered around a male actor. No guns, no mobsters, nothing you'd expect. He's nothing, he's average. And then Colleen said: he's got a big dick. And I said: we call it "Hung."

And for the longest time Collette and I were joking: He’s got a big dick. That’s all we had. Wanna buy our idea, this is all we got! And the networks were interested based on that alone. We took it to Fox21 before the strike, we had a little two page pitch not even an outline.

Toward the end of the writers' strike we began to flesh out the concept. Here's this quintessential insider, heralded by his home town, lettered in three sports, played pro baseball... what's it like to be that? What happens to these guys ten, twenty years down the road and they find themselves not all that any more.

You see all these shows about a fish out of water. Well he's not the fish out of water, he's in the water, but the water has changed. He's a 99 cent coffee guy in the $4.50 latte world.

He’s got a house on the lake, this is where he’s most himself, when he’s sitting out in his yard that he grew up in ... he’s most at peace drinking a beer on his lake. that kind of opened him up a little it.

CS: I sort of wonder as you talk about it if the show crystallized with the image of him camping out in a tent on his lawn after his house has burned down.

DL: ... holding onto the life that he had that he’s being edged out of.

Really, both characters crystallized in relationship with each other. Ray, and Tanya played by Jane Adams developed in tandem with each other. She's a creative person caught in a place that doesn’t value creativity -- Michigan values sports, not creativity, and Ray was sports. She’s a local poet who works as a permatemp in a law firm. She doesn’t want to get a permanent job because it’s selling out, but she’s there every night temping.

The most unlikely pimp hooks up with Thomas Jane and they decide to go down this peculiar route. Because neither of them is very good at this, they have no idea how to do it, and she takes a sort of poetic way to be a pimp. It was kind of a blue-state, red-state partnership. She wants creative fulfillment, he just wants to fix his house and get his kids back.

As we were beginning to pitch the show, we were already writing the pilot to understand the show more. So by the time we sold the pitch, we were really selling the script as a spec.

CS: What do you think are the most interesting shows on television for you, as a writer, to watch? Do you watch shows you think are good, shows you may not like but are popular, or interestingly flawed shows?

DL: We analyzed a few shows before we started writing. WEEDS is more arch, this is more grounded, but I like WEEDS. I watched the first season of BREAKING BAD, then ran out of time. Before we wrote HUNG we also analyzed CALIFORNICATION, because it was another sex driven man show. We're more of a comedy; they’re a half hour drama. I think it's interesting though to look at a flawed show.

CS: What did you take away from your analysis of CALIFORNICATION?

DL: I think a show like that is best when it services a through line... a season arc for the character, as opposed to arcs that run for three or four episodes. Every time it serviced the through line it felt good, but we felt it got distracted. So we try to keep close to our two main through lines, our two driving questions. One, will Ray make it as a gigolo... not just financially, but psychologically, emotionally. Second, will Ray and Tanya stay partners. We cared about them being together, we followed the ebbs and flows of their relationship.

CS: Dave and Maddy ...

DL: Yeah, we thought of MOONLIGHTING. Or LA STRADA.

CS: How far ahead have you thought through the show?

DL: We have some ideas for future seasons. We think the world is going to expand. We had all these ideas for the end of the season, and then we realized those were probably ideas for the middle or end of season two. The more we do it the more we realize we don’t need as many fireworks as we thought we did. You don’t need to throw in the kitchen sink. You can just live through it and have sort of anticipatory plot twists. The way we did it, we can keep going for years and years.

HUNG premieres Sunday, June 28 at 10 pm EST on HBO and HBO Canada.

Buffy Meets Edward

2009-06-21T18:23:00.001-04:00

'Nuff said.

Nice mashup.

(If for some reason you want to know why this video was made, as if it's not obvious, the creator writes about it here.

The Power of Babel

2009-06-18T23:13:00.005-04:00

I must be on vacation, because I'm reading comparative linguistics for fun. THE POWER OF BABEL, by John McWhorter is a witty, page-turning comparison of the languages of the world and how they got that way:

McWhorter ranges across linguistic theory, geography, history and pop culture to tell the fascinating sory of how thousands of very idfferent languages have evolved from a single, original source in a natural process similar to biological evolution.

There is one useful nugget for screenwriters here amidst the evidentiary suffixes and ergatives: spoken language tends to come in "idea packets" of about seven words. Written language often has lots of dependent clauses, but spoken language rarely has any:

Have you ever tape-recorded yourself and your friends talking casually and then listened to it later? What is striking is how few complete sentences we actually tend to utter, how contrary our daily utterances are to the idealization of language we are bombarded with on the page. We speak in "idea packets" or, better yet, when we try to spin out longer propositions, we risk being interrupted because our subconscious rules of discourse are founded on an expectation that people will talk in spurts.

This is one thing distinguishing real life from plays, in which characters stand around making five minute speeches while the other characters just sit and listen. If anyone does try to talk in chapters in real life, it's annoying. I once knew someone like this, and though the erudition and deathless zest for analysis were initially impressive and charming, it got old really fast.

When you write dialog, consider the rhythms of spoken language. I generally try to have my characters get to a complete idea as fast as possible. They can add another idea on top of that, but only after they've finished the first one.

This (from my pay cable pilot):

CHAZ
See, that’s the problem. You’ve been seeing things. This world -- you see it all around you, and you can’t escape it. So you tell yourself this is your real life. This flesh. These memories. That body you’re in remembers being a mom. But you’re something else. Aren’t you? Something that isn’t flesh. Something that fell as far as anything can fall.

Not this:

CHAZ
Your problem is precisely that you cannot escape the visible world around you. You tell yourself that your real life is made up of this flesh, these memories, and the body in which you find yourself, which remembers being a mom; but you're something that isn't made of flesh, which fell as far as anything can fall.

Lots of good writers give characters longer sentences than I do. I like a short choppy dialog style because when characters talk the way people talk, in quick bursts of single ideas, the audience won't get lost, and the actors can easily find places to breathe. When characters talk in long, complicated sentences, the audience gets confused waiting for the verb, and the actors have trouble figuring out where to breathe. That's when they start rewriting the dialog, and I hate that.

Listen to people, how they talk. They jump their train of thought from track to track, and they leave you to fill in the blanks. See if writing that doesn't make your dialog more vital.

Try breaking down your dialog into chunks of around seven words each. Don't worry about writing full sentences, or even connecting the thoughts explicitly; real speech is slightly disjointed because the speaker is making it up on the fly. When dialog is too logical, it sounds rehearsed, and they tune out halfway through even a sentence. When it's slightly disjointed, they don't know what's coming next, so they have to actually make the effort to listen to the whole speech. So when the audience has to work just a little to follow the train of thought, the effort pulls them into the experience.

In case the above sounds at all contradictory: I like the audience to be slightly off balance, so they're forced to pay attention; but I don't want them to have to absorb too many ideas at once, lest they get confused and miss something.

Does all this sound like an awful lot of analysis to go into dialog? Don't you just write what you hear in your head? No, of course not. You tinker endlessly. A good writer pays as much attention to the dialog on the page, and to his dialog style in general, as a poet might. You think about the meaning. You think about the sound of the words. You think about nuance. You think about rhythm. You think about how the words crash into the ear and make their way into the brain. You think about everything. You just want it to sound like you just heard it in your head.

A line will take us hours maybe. / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / our stitching and unstinting has been naught.

Now back to those wonderful Proto-Indo-Europeans who came up with all these lovely words.

An Interview with Ronald D. Moore

2009-06-17T00:01:00.002-04:00

Ronald D. Moore needs no introduction in this blog. I was extremely fortunate to catch up with him at the Banff Worldwide Television Festival and ask him my arcane, craft-oriented questions.

This interview assumes a working knowledge of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and is filled with spoilers for the series. If you haven't seen the show, then go rent the four seasons of it now. I'll wait.

Great, you're back. Good, huh?

CRAFTY SCREENWRITING: I’m going to try to ask you a few questions you haven’t been asked a million times before.

It’s almost unheard of for a TV show to kill off a core cast member unless an actor dies or asks for too much money. And BATTLESTAR kept its core cast firmly in the show in spite of situations where that might not have been the most natural outcome. For example, Colonel Tigh is outed as a Cylon, but he stays on as the ship's executive officer. Lee Adama becomes defense counsel for Baltar even though he's only the Commander of the Air Group. Then he becomes President of the Twelve Colonies. And then there's Kara Thrace. Are you ever tempted to let the story go where it wants to go? Or is keeping the core cast just an unbreakable aspect of TV, the way sonnets have to rhyme or they’re not sonnets?

RONALD D. MOORE: I never felt that it went off in an unnatural direction. I was never tempted to kill of any of the main cast just for the sake of killing them off. Usually when some character was dying, it was for a specific story purpose. Starbuck's death played into the larger myth. Laura dies, but it was a long protracted illness and part of her character from the beginning. There were people we considered part of the core cast who died, like Dualla.

But you're hiring a main cast because you want to use those characters and players. You consider them the heart of the show. Even if you're really intrigued by a plot turn... A TV series is a story about these people.

So there was very strongly an effort to find something interesting for Lee to do. At one point we were going to have him more involved with the Marines. We were sort of groping to find something for the character to do. We had Romo Lampkin, but he needed someone to play off him. And we thought it would be interesting to put Lee in that position. He was a much more interesting character out of the uniform, as a lawyer or a politician. So that was really the path we wanted to take him.

The concept is follow these people, not you follow these events. It's not a story about the Galactica as a ship. We're not up in the CIC and then we're down in the engine room as if it were a novel. You make a judgment at the beginning: here’s our core group of human beings. So the natural story is to keep them in the drama.

You could do a show about the Galactica but it's antithetical to a series -- it's not what a series is.

You could set up a series that was much more about an environment or a place or a situation, and have characters rotate in and out week to week. That's a different format than I do. Even as I say it, it's a fascinating concept trying to do a show like that. You're fascinated by this battleship or this police station. But then you'd approach it differently. You wouldn't invest the audience in those character so heavily.

Pilots are all about introducing the core characters. You want to see what happens to those people.

CS: You’ve rather bravely talked in your podcasts about how you’ve winged some important plot points. For example, you decided in the middle of writing the script that Sharon would shoot the Six on the surface of Caprica, so Helo could fall in love with her. Aside from Kara’s father figure seeming to be Daniel, did you ever feel you painted yourself into a corner?

RM: I'm still mystified that people got that out of the show. I know a lot of people had that impression, but it was just a bit of backstory. It was intended to tell you about Cavill and Ellen more than anything else. It solved a numbering problem in the Cylons. I continue to be surprised how many people ran with it. I even had to start telling people [in the podcasts] not to make too much of it, and people were still disappointed that the finale didn't go there.

CS: I guess because you developed so much trust in the audience, that they figured it if you threw out anything so loaded with meaning, it must be a plot hook.

RM: I didn't know I was throwing out a hook. It was just an anecdote.

CS: Are there any aspects of the way you structured the mythos of Battlestar that you might have done differently with hindsight?

RM: We wouldn't have had Boxy. The intent was that you had Boomer and you had Tyrol and Boxy as a sort of nuclear family going into the series. We tried to work him into episodes, but the character wasn't organic to our show. He was an idea that started and then stopped. We weren't even invested enough in him to kill him -- it seemed gratuitous just to kill him. Even for me.

We weren't going to deal with the fact that Boomer's a Cylon for a long time. We'd have these three forming a family. When I was writing "Water," the second episode, I said, "And she starts realizing she's a Cylon."

If we'd know that, we probably would have set her up differently in the miniseries.

We wouldn’t have thought certain things about the series that turned out not to be true. For example we intended to go to other ships in the fleet. We were going to go out to the fleet -- to the hospital ship, the prison ship, we were going to track a serial killer through the fleet. That was part of the sales pitch for the series. It's not just claustrophobic aboard this aircraft carrier and Colonial One.

That turned out not to be practical. The prison ship with Tom Zarek destroyed our budget. It was so far over pattern we had to make major cuts in the next five episode. So we realized we had to put all the action aboard Galactica and Colonial One. The series pivoted at that point and became very much about the characters on those two ships. And that meant that stories had to be about the overall story arc. Had we been able to go find stories on the other ships, maybe we could have gone another season or two. You would have had more shows not about the mythos. Instead we had to put the key cast in the heart of the action all the time, and that meant you had to go to the main story.

So we wouldn't have gone to the prison ship so early, to start that language of going to other ships.

We probably would have yanked Lee out of the flight suit sooner. Laura Roslin didn't really have anyone to complement her in the political world. It would have been good and useful to have him in conflict with her; we could have told stories more easily.

CS: Do you feel the DVD market has changed how writers write TV?

RM: It’s changed the audience consumes TV. And it’s probably given writers like myself a sense of “they’ll watch it on the DVD, that's where it will live forever. That's the real version." So when the cut comes in twenty minutes over, I'm thinking, "I've got to cut this thing down, but the real episode will be on DVD.

But it doesn't impact much in the day to day writing.

CS; You mention in the podcasts that your cuts often went quite a bit over, and that means you were shooting quite a lot...

RM: It's sort of my refusal to cut it. I don’t know what I want to cut -- it's refusing to chop into bone and muscle while the show is on the stage. Sometimes we'd come in twenty or thirty minutes over, and I've always been able to find a way to bring that down in the editing room, or make it into two episodes, but if I don't have the material I can't do that. Budget aside -- they scream about how much it costs. But creatively, I’d rather have all of it.

CS: People smoke in BATTLESTAR; and of course you’re a smoker. Could you talk about what went into that decision, and what were your most important pros and cons?

RM: I'm a casual smoker. I smoke in the podcasts for effect. I smoke with actors.

But I'm just not a big fan of the whole antismoking movement. People should get a life and leave people the fuck alone. It's just for people's convenience, it's not really a health hazard that someone's smoking somewhere near you. I mean, what about a double whopper with cheese, that's unhealthy. You suck in a lot of fumes from the air, and you’re going on about the fumes from a guy in a bar -- get over yourself! So yeah, that was me putting it in people’s faces.

CS: You talked in your session about how Tricia Helfer was able to make the various Sixes all distinct through her acting chops. How much did you define the different models of Sixes and Eights, and how much of that was the actors making their own decisions?

RM: It was kinda both. That was a slow revelation, that she could differentiate herself -- the makeup people could put her in a brunette wig, and there was a stunning difference. Put glasses on her -- you could change her physically without makeup and prosthetics.

CS: But I'm talking the personality--

RM: Maybe that was something we came up with in the story break. Who is this particular model of Six. Or the writer might call the actor and ask, "What's a version you haven't played?"

Tricia had no experience, she was a model. We didn't know in the miniseries what her chops would be like. We found out she could do variations of Number 6, each one she gave something special. And we wanted her to be more than in Baltar's head.

You start writing towards the actors. You hear the way they say lines. When they have trouble with one kind of material, you don’t give it to them. It's part of the job really.

And the actors we had were fantastic. Even the extras -- they learned how to operate the consoles in CIC on Galactica. They had a real dedication and love for the series.

CS: What’s your creative relationship with Mrs. Ron, if it's not impolite to ask?

RM: I bounce things off her. She doesn’t read the scripts, she wanted to be spoiler free. She would never see the episode till I watched the director's cut. She'd be in the car plugging her ears trying to avoid hearing spoilers. So she was really my first audience, because I saw it before anyone else.

CS: Do you feel the broadcast model of television is broken, and where do you see television going now that no one has to watch the commercials? Does it affect how you think about shows you’re developing at all?

RM: It’s a very changing universe, and it's changing in ways that we don’t’ understand. But it's hard to try to have that influence the creative. What is the new environment? You keep trying to do TV as you know it.

You think, the broadcast networks are more like this, basic cable is like this, pay cable is more like that. What's the kind of show I want to do? Do I have something that work for CBS? Maybe it's too dark, it's more a Spike TV show. Or is it something I really need to push boundaries and it’s going to go over to pay. What is broadcast TV going to be in ten years? I don't think the people that work there know. It's all about what do they want to buy this year? This is the year they want serials. This is the year they want procedurals.

I'll never forget the year LOST and DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES came out. I was working on BATTLESTAR, but you're always working and pitching other ideas. I had two pitch meetings set up when suddenly LOST and DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES hit, and my agents call up and say, "Can you make your show more like LOST and DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES." And I say, this is a completely different idea, it has nothing to do with either of those shows. "Yeah but if you can give them something like LOST, it will really help." They just want that hit.

CS: So you just pitch them what they're looking for now and let the future be their headache.

RM: Yep.

CS: I’ve noticed a number of screenwriters got their jobs by methods they would never recommend for anyone else. A friend of mind got a job by critiquing an X-files episode on a chat board that Chris Carter happened to be reading. As I understand it, you broke in by getting a spec script to a Star Trek writer by arranging a visit to the set through your girlfriend...

RM: I got a set tour via a girlfriend. I had written a Star Trek script, and I gave it to the tour guide, who was one of Gene Roddenberry's assistants.

It sat for seven months in the slush pile until Michael Piller was setting up a new staff. It was just a Rube Goldberg series of coincidences.

[Note: unlikely as this story is, STAR TREK: TNG was famous for being about the only show on television that accepted, and even bought, pitches and script from anybody, even SF fans. Still, do not try this yourself. It will never work. Except when it does.]

CS: What do we need to do in Canada to make shows as good as Battlestar Galactica? Would you care to speculate on what we need to do better?

RM: I think you just have to decide to do them. The talent pool is deep. You have to be willing to spend the money. You just need a place to sell it. And that's starting to happen. There's a natural progression. You've built a basic foundation of talent here. Everyone from the crew to the production staff, writers, actors ... just put the resources behind it. There's no reason you can't make it work.