From Pitch to Script With Sample Pages (15 minute read)
Happy Friday and welcome back!
Julie convinced me to watch the new season of CHEER with her by telling me it’s about cheerleading the way FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS is about football. Now I’m hooked and learning a ton of lingo that I’ll never have any use for other than when I’m talking about CHEER.
The filmmakers do a great job of drawing distinct characters, investing you in their personal stories, and giving you character defining moments in every episode. It’s a sports movie at heart and this season is built around a rivalry with another school thirty miles down the road.
I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who may tune in but if you follow the show at all you know that one of the breakout stars from season one was arrested for production of child pornography and has since admitted to other crimes against minors. We’re just now getting to the episode where they deal with his arrest and the effect of Covid lockdowns on their season. It's taking a hard turn, reminds me of how the documentary ICARUS started as a story about doping in in sports but turned into something else.
Up to this point one of the things I loved most was watching how supportive these athletes are of each other. Even when they’re devastated about being “off mat” (basically sitting the bench) they push past it and cheer on the rest of the team. And not just in competition or the “full out” run-throughs in practice, I’m talking about every stunt in practice there’s a chorus of people yelling, “You got this, Maddy!”
Of course there are catty asides and the occasional bad attitude but when it comes down to the wire it seems like these kids really have each other’s backs, literally and figuratively.
I didn’t play organized sports after my first musical in the 5th grade. Until then I played football in the fall, basketball in winter, and baseball in the summer, and I was terrible at all of them. I did have fun, sometimes, but when I saw scenes of them running line drills it reminded me how miserable I was during most of those practices. I think I missed out.
You get some of that same camaraderie in theater or while you're making a television show but there's not nearly as much "mat talk" where you hype each other up. I can’t imagine sitting in the rehearsal room and yelling, “You got this, Steve! You better sing that G!” just before the actor playing Billy Bigelow in CAROUSEL hits the big high note at the end of “Soliloquy.” But maybe that would be… awesome? At least for one rehearsal?
How about in a writers room, when you know someone’s on a great run, connecting beats and scenes together and finally that story you’ve all been banging your heads on the table over comes together, so you start clapping your hands and yelling, “Okay, Shakespeare! Okay, Shonda, I see you! Bring it on home with your beautiful brain!”
You know what, I’m just gonna mat talk you people right now.
Because I have friends who celebrated big successes this week and I have friends who took big hits in the arena, with projects that got passed on or ground up in the machine. I have friends who had babies or got engaged and other friends who got Covid. It was a mixed fucking bag.
So let's bring it in for a minute. Ay, listen up.
If you sold that show or you got that phone call that changed your life, if you got that direct deposit that means you don’t have to worry about your student loans anymore, if your episode aired, or that Deadline article dropped, look at you! You did that! Do you know how hard it is to do that? Some of you did it twice in one day, Nkechi Okoro Carroll!
If you placed in a contest or set an exciting meeting, if you got or gave constructive feedback on a work in progress, you're a force of nature! Do you remember when this seemed so far away? How intimidating that blank page or blinking cursor was when you started? Look how far you've come!
And if you got knocked down this week, if you lost your footing or the pyramid crumbled beneath you and you landed face first on the mat, look at you! You’re still here! You got back up, you dusted yourself off, and you went launching for the rafters AGAIN!
Who’s got more heart than you? Nobody! You said, “You can break my ribs and maybe even my nose but you can’t break my spirit!”
Can I tell all of you how proud I am of you right now?
That the world is a better place because you’re in it.
That you make it more beautiful with your art, your stories, your recipes, your children, your pickles, your pet pictures, your songs, your heart.
You are amazing!
Amazing.
Now grab some water, catch your breath and I’ll meet you back on the mat on Monday.
We’ve got a big week coming up!
From Pitch to Script
I spent a bit of time bouncing around between new projects this week and I’m just now starting to feel like I’m back up to speed. I mentioned last week that I’d already written a basic story area for the new idea and would be moving on to outline soon.
I realized that a lot of people may not know exactly what that is, so I figured I would give you a quick breakdown of how a scene goes from a pitch to a completed scene in a script. Unfortunately I can’t give you anything super recent but I did dig up a few examples from the finale of REVERIE.
This is one version of the process on one network show in 2017. It'll be different from person to person, show to show, etc.
THE PITCH
The showrunner, Tom Tszentgyorgyi, and I spent the first couple of weeks in the writers room tackling two major fronts with the writers. First, we needed to brainstorm a bunch of episode ideas, “cases of the week” about the clients who were getting stuck in the virtual world and needed help getting out. Second, we sketched out broad outlines of the serialized story regarding Mara and the toll that Reverie was going to take on her psyche.
Once we had the major tentpoles we pitched those to our friends at Amblin. After we got their feedback we rode the golf cart across the lot to pitch it to the network to get their feedback/green light, including broad strokes of the finale. This is different than the initial sales pitch for the show. Now we've been ordered to series, we've been working with great writers, here's the new and improved plan. This is what we told them:
STORY AREA / STORY DOCUMENT
Once the room had spent a couple of weeks breaking an episode the writer of that episode would write a 2-3 page synopsis in prose form called a Story Area (or Story Arena, or Story Document). From what I understand these sales tools started with procedurals and were meant to be a quick thumbnail sketch of the case for the studio and network to sign off on. It kept you from repeating yourself or doing a similar case to some other procedural on the network.
By the end of our season we were adding in a lot more detail, trying to get everyone on the same page before the outline. Each of these documents went through at least three rungs of notes: producers, studio, network. You're not just selling the story, you're also selling the tone and what it's going to feel like for the audience.
We put short loglines for the individual storylines in the header to give them context for what was to follow:
OUTLINE
Once everybody signed off on the story the writer of that episode would get to work on the outline. You take all the note cards and break them out into individual scenes with slug lines , fleshing them out with a lot more detail, often including important bits of dialogue, but still in prose.
This also varies from network to network and showrunner to showrunner. I’ve worked on shows where the outline was incredibly detailed and ran 25-30 pages on average. The upside to that is that if everybody signed off on it the actual writing process was much easier. I’ve worked on other shows where the preferred length was 12-15 pages with a lot more "writer's choice." If I remember correctly ours ran about fifteen pages.
This document sometimes has to do double duty, both as a sales tool for the studio/network and for production to get a jump on prep. If you're really behind you may be forced to use this on your first day or two of prep in lieu of a script. Decidedly less than ideal.
THE SCRIPT
Finally, you get to the point where you can actually write the script. Because we talked about this episode so much in the room along the way it didn’t change as much as some of the earlier episodes. We didn’t get as many notes on each stage of this one either. We were late in the season and the train was barreling down the tracks.
Some showrunners just want you to execute what’s in the outline but you still have to breathe life into it and get it to lift off of the page. Other showrunners are disappointed if there’s nothing that “surprises” them and makes it fresh. Get clarity on that before you dive in. Because I was writing this one I had already been watching it in my head for weeks.
I was hoping to link to the scene itself but it looks like NBC took it down and it's not on Peacock. By the way we cut that scene with Charlie and Deleon before production, which is a bummer because I really wanted to hear Dennis Haysbert say that line.
Again, there's no one size fits all to these documents. It's going to vary from show to showrunner to buyer, etc. When I'm writing a new outline for myself it's way less detailed, just a few sentences to give me the feel for the scene. By the time I sit down to write it I've been watching that scene in my head a ton anyway. I don't need to sell it to myself.
So that's where I am this week, working on that skeletal outline.
More next week!
Yoda of the Week
Lot of great stuff here from The GOAT. The one I needed to hear right now was about maintaining your passion for an idea over the years it takes to see it to fruition.
20 Screenwriting and Directing Tips from Steven Spielberg on how he created Jaws and West Side Story — www.youtube.com Submit your Feature Screenplay here: https://writers.coverfly.com/competitions/view/outstanding-screenplays-featureSteven Spielberg is an American film direc...