DEAD AIR / MONEY HEIST / THE MATRIX (13 minute read)
Welcome to Issue #20!
One quick note to start, I've been putting read times for the main "article" of the newsletter but starting this week the read time will be for the whole thing. Hope that makes it clear and helps you fit it into your day.
I took a trip to the Fingerlakes region in upstate New York last week to see Julie in one of her final performances of FOOTLOOSE at The Rev Theater. I’m always excited when she books a job up there because I love going to visit. We drive around the lakes, visiting wineries and seeing the gorges and waterfalls. There’s a lot of American history there and quite a bit of film and TV history.
For instance, there’s a town called Seneca Falls that apparently gave Frank Capra the inspiration for Bedford Falls in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. You can walk across the bridge that inspired the idea of George Bailey jumping into the river on George Bailey Lane.
When I visited in 2013 we took a road trip to see Rod Serling’s hometown of Binghamton and took a ride on the carousel a few blocks from his boyhood home. He got the inspiration for the “Walking Distance” episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE on a trip back home there one summer. As lifelong TZ fans we got a thrill out of following in his footsteps.
In 2014 his daughter Anne Serling released a book called As I Knew Him, and my friend Jinx got it for me for my birthday. It’s a beautiful book that lets you get to know the husband and father in addition to the artist. She has a lot of great memories of their time renting a cottage on Cayuga Lake during the summers when he could decompress a bit from the business in LA. I reread it on this trip just before we took Julie’s parents on another pilgrimage to Binghamton to ride the carousel and see his boyhood home.
This time there was an added bonus of an exhibit at The Bundy Museum in Binghamton dedicated to his work and an arcade a mile or two away where you could play THE TWILIGHT ZONE pinball machine. Julie and I closed the loop on Monday with a drive to the cemetery where he was buried.
I have a lot of artistic heroes but I don’t know that there’s anyone who tops him. He had a brilliant imagination that was matched only by his heart and his commitment to fighting evils like racism and prejudice. Every time I make that trip I’m inspired to reach for something higher, both as a writer and as a human being.
Speaking of inspiration — as I was walking around the park I challenged myself to come up with one new idea for a story before we left so I could say, "That's the one I came up with in the same park he came up with Walking Distance." It came to me while I was watching Julie and her parents ride the carousel. I’m thinking of doing an experiment this week where I also try his method of dictating a recording. I’ll let you know how that goes.
It’s also humbling to be that close to him and spend time revisiting his accomplishments. The man wrote 92 episodes out of 156 over the entire run of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, not to mention PATTERNS and REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT, all before he was 40 years old.
As far as TV writers go he's the best who ever played the game and no one’s going to change my mind about that.
Dead Air
When I was fifteen I got a job working as a disc jockey for AM 1230 WIRO, the “good times, great oldies” station on the hill overlooking Ironton. I worked the graveyard shift, from midnight to six am and then I came back in on Sunday afternoons to play a few fire and brimstone church services before punching in our local commercials during the Reds games.
There’s a whole lot more to that story that I’ll save for another time (including my stint as the creepiest clown in the Ohio River Valley) but one of the things I’ll always remember is that it seemed like no matter how late it was if there were more than a few seconds of dead air the phone would start ringing and I knew it was the station manager calling to ask what the hell was going on up there.
Looking back now I get why it was a big deal.
Dead air, even a few seconds, might have caused a listener to change the station.
It's the same thing with a script. You're fighting to hold someone's attention for 50-100 pages. A little dead air can break up the flow of your story and cause the reader to drop out.
The basic unit of a story is the act.
The basic unit of the act is the scene.
The basic unit of the scene is the beat.
You can run a diagnostic on each of these levels to see where your signal is cutting out.
This past week I was going through a script and noticed little pockets of dead air at the beat level, specifically in some of my entrances and exits.
I had characters entering or exiting scenes without any description of their state of mind or thought put into how I was transferring the energy from one scene to the next over the transition. It was only a few places but they stuck out because they were so flat in contrast with the rest of the scene.
I often want to rush ahead to the big dramatic moment in the scene and sometimes I do just that on the first pass because that’s the thing that I’m dying to write. But later I have to remind myself to stop and think about how this person feels about the space they’re entering. Is it foreign? Familiar? What is their relationship to the environment and the people inside? Are they carrying the energy and emotional POV of the previous scene into this one? These are all opportunities to reveal character.
This applies to exits as well. Are they exiting with energy and purpose? Do they storm out or slink away? Are they carrying this energy into the next scene? What is their relationship to this space? Are they drawing out their exit as long as possible or can they not wait to leave?
Another opportunity for dead air comes when we’re already in a scene and a new character enters or someone exits.
“Jim hears the bell over the door go DING and looks over to see Harry step into the barbershop. He gives Harry a nod before going back to work on the client in his chair.”
That doesn’t tell us anything about Jim or Harry or their relationship to each other. If Jim sees Harry enter and flinches causing him to nick the ear of the guy in the chair that tells us a lot in one little beat.
A new character’s entrance changes the dynamic of the other people in the scene. Exploring the way those other people react to this new presence gives us an opportunity to draw distinctions between our characters and their relationships with one another.
I was in the airport in Syracuse coming home and saw someone who just got off a plane walk up to the open bar in the middle of the terminal and surprise a friend who was waiting for their outbound flight. The friend’s spontaneous reaction was filled with so much pure joy that it impacted the people in the seats surrounding them. The arrival of that new “character” changed the dynamic from a bunch of bored people looking at their phones or the overhead TV to people grinning and taking notice of the world around them.
There are a lot of people in my life who would trigger that same joyful reaction from me. There are other people who I might fake a tight smile with, meanwhile in my head I’m busy coming with excuses to get myself out of the interaction as quickly as possible. There are people I would roll my eyes at as they they'll walk away, others I would try to sneak another glance at. There are as many different authentic reactions as there are different combinations of people in the world.
Of course, the obvious question is "Do you need this character to enter or exit at all? Can you just cut to them in action?" Sometimes you can but sometimes you need those transitions to establish a new environment or location or to just give the audience a moment to process. The trick is to keep that signal humming and not allow any dead air that may give your reader an easy off-ramp even at the micro-level of the beats.
MONEY HEIST
I’ve only seen the first season of MONEY HEIST (after much urging by my friend and full-time CASA DE PAPEL evangelist Carlos Foglia) but I braved the spoilers to read the article linked below. As time goes on we’re going to be asked more and more to consider global audiences when we’re pitching new projects to the streamers and clearly MONEY HEIST cracked the code.
One of the things it inspired me to think more about is the visual iconography of my ideas and how to convey those ideas in the script while still leaving room for the artists who will bring them to life. They talk specifically about the red jumpsuits and Dali masks and how those became ubiquitous around the world once the series took off.
I couldn’t help but think about RESERVATION DOGS (which I love) and how the black suits and skinny black ties from RESERVOIR DOGS got a generational powerup by seeing them on Native American teenagers. They were featured heavily in the trailers and artwork and I’d bet all my green envelopes for the rest of the year that you’ll see kids on reservations wearing those come Halloween.
I thought a lot about visual iconography when I was writing BARBARELLA but it’s easy to fall back on generalities when I’m working on stories that take place today. ("Dressed in jeans and a hoody." Boring. This article gave me an actionable lens that I can use to look at my work coming up this week, searching for places where the specific makes the universal.
Passing the article on to you for added inspiration:
How Netflix's 'Money Heist' Became a Worldwide Phenomenon | GQ — www.gq.com As it heads into its fifth and final season, the small Spanish drama has grown into one of the most-devoured shows in Netflix history.
THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS
THE MATRIX is a Top 5 movie for me and I didn’t realize how much I needed this new trailer in my life. I’m excited to see this world through Lana Wachowski’s eyes now that she’s made the transition. How did that affect her as an artist? I don’t know that we’ve ever been able to experience that kind of change in point-of-view from an artist on such a massive pop culture scale.
The Matrix Resurrections – Official Trailer 1 — www.youtube.com The Matrix Resurrections in theaters and on HBO Max December 22 #TheMatrixMovie-----------------https://www.facebook.com/TheMatrixMovie/https://twitter.com/T...
Tweet About Prepping for Generals from Yesterday
If you're unfamiliar with the term, generals are "get to know you" meetings that writers, directors, and occasionally actors take with producers and studio execs, etc. It's often called "the couch and water bottle tour" for obvious reasons. I must have gone on 40 of them in 2013.
I saw a tweet from fellow writer Gennefer Gross about keeping a running list of shows you're watching so that you don't blank in a general. A few days earlier I'd found my slightly cringey prep doc in my Notes app from then. It may seem kind of goofy but it did help me boil down my story, my influences, and what I was current on because it's easy to get in those meetings early on and blank when someone asks what show you're loving at the moment.
Mickey Fisher on Twitter: "Funny coincidence, was cleaning up my notes app the other day and found this from 2013. I wrote it up when I started going on generals: https://t.co/8F57gvqzxV… https://t.co/HbNeBrVUlT" — twitter.com “Funny coincidence, was cleaning up my notes app the other day and found this from 2013. I wrote it up when I started going on generals: https://t.co/8F57gvqzxV”
Yoda of the Week
This is just a great tune.
MUNA - Silk Chiffon (feat. Phoebe Bridgers) — www.youtube.com “Silk Chiffon” the new song by MUNA, out now on Saddest Factory Records. STREAM/BUY: https://muna.saddestrec.co/silk-chiffonhttps://www.whereismuna.com/https...