Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (41 page)

Julia said she and Drew submitted a
Mad Men
spec and a pilot. That surprised me so I asked Kelly, “You read a
Mad Men
for
Smallville
, though they couldn’t be more different?”

Kelly: “For us, writing action isn’t very important on our show. We have an amazing crew that will make anything look incredible. What we care about is writing characters so we’d much rather read a character-based story than something that has a lot of action in it for the show because the show is much more relationship-based than you’d think.”

Julia: “When Drew and I went to work for Brian and Kelly, I hadn’t seen them for years, and I was sitting there in the writers room and everyone started pitching five million ideas. They went out and came back in and what they were able to keep in their minds and what they were able to keep track of and how professional they were — they never skipped a beat no matter what anyone threw at them. They were different people from whom I’d known before and I was flabbergasted. I walked out of the room that first day saying, ‘Oh my God!’ When you haven’t seen someone for so long and they’d spent all those years learning and growing and acquiring skills I’d never seen in school, that was amazing to me. I walked around not being able to talk to them for the first couple of days.”

Drew: “One thing we learned being on the show now for two years is you pitch ideas. They encourage the writers to pitch really big ideas and they’ll figure out how to pay for them later. After a while we see how things go — how can we produce this, how could we actually be able to make this happen? For me it has changed how I write in terms of thinking about what could go into the scene and how to pay for it. You find a way you can afford to do it while still telling the same type of story you really want to tell. It impacts how you write scenes. You might pitch it one way but you have in your back pocket another solve that might be more practical.”

Next was Gib’s turn at the tape recorder. “I’m the exception to this wonderful group of TV writers because I’ve been writing theater,” he said. “In 2006 I wrote a play that went to New York City. After I came back from New York I became the Associate Producer of the theater company and did the Christmas show that included a ten-minute monologue. The interesting thing from that is though it was just a one-off for four performances, GLAAD came (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and I was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Writing for Theatre. Most recently the same theater company asked me to become the artistic director for 2011, and I’m thinking about that. It’s Playwrights Six, the oldest writer-run theater company in Los Angeles.”

Eric: “The past six years I’ve been making my living in animation, doing some comedy as well. Mostly I’ve been working in family entertainment animation, which has been good because I’ve worked on a lot of different shows, I’ve pitched things, I’ve had pilots in various stages of production, and though none of them were picked up, I’ve had lots of experiences with showrunners and executives and the life of a freelancer, finding the voice of a show that isn’t on the air yet, learning to operate with people. The downside is I work for a lot less money which kind of sucks. On the one hand it’s been great because I’ve written hours and hours of television. A lot of it is stuff I wouldn’t watch but it’s made the kids happy, I assume. In some ways it’s a really good gig for a writer because people go home early — most of them at Disney and Nickelodeon have families.

“I end up writing a lot of scripts and freelancing on other shows just to make ends meet. They are not anything I would choose to be on but it’s good practice. Every writer in this city ends up taking jobs they never thought they would take.”

The last time we met, Eric had been writing and producing shorts for the Internet, so I asked if he’s still doing that. He said, with resignation, “Everybody is realizing you can’t make money from that. On the Web with Hulu and iTunes and so forth there’s finally a revenue stream going through the Internet, but it’s hard to get paid. It’s incredibly labor-intensive to produce your own material to post and at some point the grown-up gene kicks in: I better focus on something that, when I look back, I could say it came to something.”

I knew Wendy was co-executive producer on
Dexter
, one of my favorite shows, so I was curious how she and the staff write it. She explained, “Everything is filtered through Dexter’s point of view, because of the voice over too. That helps locate where you are in the story. The first thing we break is where is his emotional journey? Not so much what are the plot twists but what does this episode have to accomplish in the emotional journey of twelve episodes. The reason the show is so successful is the emotional notes it hits.

“The biggest task is to decide the arc of the season and who that character actually is. We go to ‘camp’ to plan it in February — we’re February to October so we’re off-season. We spend February talking, just talking — the eight of us writers. And then we constantly evolve all the twists and turns, but usually we know the beginning and the ending. We know what’s in episode twelve and then everything has to work to that.

“The division of labor is that everyone is very much in every script. There’s so much talking about every script before it gets made. Even if your name is on it and you wrote the scene, somebody else’s fantastic idea may have just happened to land in your lap and there doesn’t seem to be a sense of this is mine, that’s yours. I think we all feel like we’re in service of
Dexter
. We love this character and we want it to be all it can be. It’s a show that you can give everything to and it can hold it.

“For me this is a heaven-sent gift in the sense that
Dexter
is so close to what I would write anyway. I think it’s about how do we deal with what really motivates us? To what extent is Dexter aware of the different parts of himself? When does his Dark Passenger take over? Does he want to fight it? It’s funny and really dark. He has such a wry view of life. For me it comes very naturally. I find myself thinking things that Dexter thinks too, which is strange and weird. I’m so thankful every day, every day.”

Since Kelly had spoken about how they take in writers on
Smallville
, I asked Wendy how they take in writers on
Dexter
, or do they not?

Wendy: “I had met on the show earlier and it didn’t happen. When there was an opening it was just very lucky that I was able to come in. I also had a lot of material that was very
Dexter
. I had a crazy serial killer love story and that was a good sample to have. It was a car commercial. I got hired by Lincoln to write twenty Webisodes that were two minutes each. So basically you were writing a pilot. It’s the old thing: never turn down a job. I had two months off, so I said yeah. And lo and behold it turned out to be a great pilot experience. And the person who directed it directed several of my
Dexters
and just won the Emmy for best directing. He had been on
Dexter
but he decided to do this crazy guerilla thing — we shot for five days, eight to twelve pages a day. It’s back before the Internet bubble burst when we all thought maybe that’s how things would get made.”

Beyond their professional lives, I wondered how their personal lives had changed, how they coped, especially Kelly and Julia, who are parents. Kelly answered, “For years Brian and I talked about how do we balance having a life and the job. Now what we’ve come to is you can’t. I don’t see my kids nearly as much as I want. I try to keep my weekends open. During the week the chances of me getting home before they go to sleep is slim. So you depend on the people around you. I don’t pick up dry cleaning. I don’t go to the grocery store. I work and then whatever free time I have is devoted to being with them. That’s very difficult, and it doesn’t matter what job you have on a show. The assistants’ hours are even worse than mine. I walk through the office yelling ‘Go home, people. Do you have to be here? If you don’t have to be here, go home.’ So that’s kind of hard. You get to do your dream, which is awesome, and you’re not the only one making sacrifices. The people around you are too.

“As for being pregnant and working in television — it was winter time and I literally did not tell the people I worked with until I was five and a half months pregnant. People were shocked. I wore jackets and big sweaters and scarves. I was in the middle of a contract negotiation and I didn’t want it to be an issue. Finally I told my bosses. I was the only woman on staff for two years, and the only woman above the line for the first years I was on the show. No one who had ever worked on the show had ever been pregnant. I walked in and I was so nervous. I said I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. They said ‘It’s nobody’s damn business if you’re pregnant.’ They could not have been more supportive and wonderful.”

Julia: “I did hide it also when I was pregnant with my son because I didn’t want it to be an issue. It doesn’t mean I won’t do the late nights or stay as long as I need to get the work done. The way I make that work is I make my son a part of it. He gets excited about whatever I’m working on. Mommy loves her job so much that I talk about it all the time. And when he was four years old he wrote a two-page synopsis for a
SpongeBob
script.

“We had an experience on different shows — this happened more than once — that the men would talk about their children in the room and the women don’t because you don’t want them to think you have something that’s going to take you away from the show. One of the men was talking about his new baby, and this amazing producer we worked with, John Tinker, stopped everyone and said ‘Guys, can you just realize there are women on this show with children. Have you ever heard them talk about them? Have you ever heard them say their kid kept them up at night? No. They’re not allowed to.’ It was amazing that he’d think to bring that to light.”

Gib added, “I don’t have a kid but I do have a kid — my dad. I have a 71-year-old. It’s like I’m always the pregnant woman in a way because I’m the primary caregiver. He’s been living with me for four years and when the phone rings at a certain time, all other calls are off. I have to step out or leave because there’s an emergency. It’s interesting being a man and a primary caregiver — you just don’t bring it up professionally. On the other hand I got to bring my dad to opening night in New York.”

Eric: “I’ve always been working on the side on something I hoped would get me somewhere else. So I’ve always had two jobs and I haven’t had much time for a life. I haven’t reached the point of stability where I feel I could build on something.”

Drew: “One thing about my relationship with my partner that has taken getting used to is that the hours are so intense. It was kind of a learning experience the first year we were on
Smallville
— okay, what hours will I be home? This year he knows that when I’m on script he’ll rent lots of movies and see other friends because I’ll go into a hole and just write. One thing about being married to a therapist — he spends most of his days listening to other people’s problems. So when I come home from being in the room and my brain is exhausted — we have twelve other people — he wants to talk because he listened all day. For me, it’s just I want to be quiet, so that’s also taken some adjusting on both our parts.

Wendy: “My life is just the same. It’s just the same! I think about it when we have functions. I don’t like to walk into a party alone, but I find somebody I know and we talk. It’s the moment getting out of a car that I think I hate being single, but otherwise you’re talking so much all day you’re happy to go home and read a book. I feel like I have plenty of ‘family’ time. I don’t feel there’s something missing.”

I asked them all for advice they’d like to give beginners. Eric answered, “Embrace the rewrite. New writers want to get it perfect the first time you write the scene or the outline and you never, ever do. The rewrite is your biggest friend.”

Wendy: “Also your attitude toward that. We’ve all worked with writers who are offended when they get notes and offended when they have to rewrite something. To the extent that we’re all in it to make the best script possible, embrace it with open arms.”

Kelly: “If you think you don’t need to rewrite your script one more time, you’re naïve. Working with Drew and Julia on staff, people are impressed with how enthusiastic both of them are. When you get a note it might be from someone who has knowledge of something that happens four episodes down the road and may not have anything to do with whether they liked what you wrote. When you’re running a show and you’re under so much stress if there’s somebody you can go to every time and say will you please help out with this, and they come up with ideas and they’re positive, I can’t tell you what a difference it makes.”

Wendy: “The defensiveness comes out of wanting to protect your voice and when you’re on a show you’re not there to protect your voice. This is the big conundrum: you tell a young writer to go to school and develop your voice. And then you get a job on a show and you have to switch personas. You have to become in service to the show. As a writer you live a double life. At night or on Sundays you come back to what your voice is or what your dream show is. I wish somebody had said that to me in school: When you’re in this room it’s not about your voice. Make your showrunner look like a star. Give everything to that.”