Pivot to Video (but not really)

Happy Friday!

This is the first issue coming to you from Substack, since Twitter is turning into a whole Lord of the Flies situation.

Who knew there would be so much chaos with Elon at the helm?

On the one hand, he runs Tesla and Space X.

On the other hand, he named his child CTRL+ALT+DEL for a funny.

Guess which Elon model is running (ruining) Twitter!

Anyway, bon voyage, Revue.

So…

I thought we finished all of the series pitches for the show I took out with the studio but it sounds like we’re going to try for a couple more in the new year. What is dead may never die! I have my last pitch of the year for another series on Monday, an animated spin on the very first new idea I told you about way back in January. Bringing the year full circle.

If I have one regret at this late stage of the year it’s not taking the time to finish a new spec or have some tangible finished piece of work. In some ways, this newsletter fits the bill. If I tallied it up I probably have a word count equal to a respectable novel by this point. And I get the satisfaction of interacting with people every time an issue comes out, especially those weeks where the subject really strikes a chord. Maybe if I compiled a bunch of these issues into a book it might feel more tactile.

FYI, along these lines, I’ve heard from a couple of producers and a feature exec at a streamer this past week that specs are a pretty efficient tool right now. Their feeling is that studios are looking for projects that are pretty far down the field in terms of packaging and that it’s just hard to attach an in-demand actor or great director to a pitch. It was kind of music to my ears because that’s how I got my two shows made, I wrote the pilots on spec. So, write your spec. I’m going to as well.

The Old Scout - Video Excerpt

A few months ago I edited a video for the immersive audio company I started with a couple of friends from college. I hadn’t used Final Cut in years, I didn't even have a usable version anymore. I downloaded the trial version and started watching tutorials on YouTube to catch up. It really scratched that itch I have to just make some stuff, so I scrolled through these issues looking for excerpts that might make cool videos.

The first one is from a 2021 issue about The Old Scout. It was a blast pulling stock footage and playing around, recording VO, putting it all together. I hope to do more of these in the future. Check it out here: The Old Scout

Tripping Over Your Shoelaces …

on the way to a green light, from an issue in July, 2021. I’m bringing this back for anybody currently running the pilot gauntlet.

I’ve been in a few situations now where I’ve been in the final push to get a show greenlit or advanced to the next stage of development. In my experience it’s a time fraught with peril. You’re trying to do your best work while dealing with heightened anxieties and expectations, fully aware of the stakes. If it gets made it means hundreds of thousands, it not millions, of dollars. If it doesn’t get made then you’re back to the whiteboard.

On the traditional broadcast schedule you’re going through this process with visible competition and a ticking clock. On the streaming side there’s less of a ticking clock and any number of hidden algorithmic variables to contend with but that final stretch still feels very similar. 

At this point it’s easy and reasonable for your brain (and your producing partners) to go into “sales mode” as you’re taking notes in good faith and in haste to get your show over the goal line. If you ask any writer who has been through it they can probably give you a whole list of potential pitfalls. I’m going to tell you two key things I learned and at the forefront of my mind now. I also asked a friend who went through this process very recently if they had something they wanted to share and they graciously offered me a third piece of advice.

By the way, none of what follows is a knock on the notes process or the people who give them. I enjoy the collaborative process and have worked with great execs who made the material stronger. This is just to give you a heads up for potential hazards in the hope that it helps you better manage the outcome.

1) The first thing is to be careful of cutting for pace at the expense of creating what Michael Arndt calls “maximum rooting interest” in your characters. I’ve gotten notes to “pace things up” or “get to the exciting stuff sooner” out of the belief that if we’re not going full tilt in the first ten pages the audience will change the channel or hit the back button to the previous menu on the streamer. 

The catch-22 is that if the audience isn’t invested in your characters or hooked on a juicy question they desperately crave the answer to then nobody is going to give a shit when the action picks up anyway. Before you start cutting take a moment and ask yourself if you’re cutting scenes or moments that will invest the audience in your characters and their goals.

I’ll give you a small example from REVERIE. We were in the final rounds of notes on the edit of the pilot and working to get picked up to series. We cut a scene early on that was purely a character beat where two of our leads, Mara and Alexis, meet for the first time. They’re polar opposites, Alexis is introverted and a little stand-offish at first, but then we see Mara trying and succeeding in making the tiniest dent in that armor. The point of the scene was to plant the seed for the development of this unlikely friendship over the course of the series. 

We cut the scene out of concern for pacing and jumped right to a walk and talk between them that had a lot of energy and was visually more interesting, but the content was all exposition. When we tested the pilot it was clear that the audience hadn’t formed the emotional connection to Alexis that I’d hoped for. It wasn’t until the final beats of the episode when we showed a bit of her humanity that they saw her as a real person. If I’d kept that earlier scene I might have created an earlier rooting interest in their future friendship. The testing reflected my mistake and we had to make up a lot of ground afterward.

2) The second thing I learned is that you own your choices long-term. If you’re trying in good faith to make a note work, especially a note on a big foundational issue, it’s easy to get in the mindset of trying to “give them what they want” as opposed to finding a solution that you love and can champion down the line to directors and cast. “I guess this works” isn’t the same as, “I like this even better.” Nobody gives you points for just taking the note in the same way that shows don’t renewed because they came in under budget. You only get points if it’s great and/or it catches on with an audience.

If you find yourself saying, “I don’t love it but this is what they want” then take a breath, dig deeper, think about the note behind the note and try to come up with a solution that pays dividends long-term. Like I said before, you own that choice going forward, or at least until you write your way out of it. The “bad version,” in the parlance of the room, is if you get a note about wanting the character to be more flawed so you give them a drinking problem. You own that drinking problem until you deal with it in the story.

This goes for every element, the characters, the story, the worldbuilding, all of it. Don’t just think about how your fix may solve the pilot’s problem, think about how it could impact the kind of story you want to tell in episode seven or eight.

By “owning” it I don’t just mean that you’re wedded to it in terms of story. I also mean that you, personally, have to take responsibility for it. I’ll never forget the day on the REVERIE pilot shoot where the director, Jaume Collet-Serra sat next to me on a break and sighed in defeat. He was trying to make a scene more interesting but he felt like nothing was working and I knew it was my fault. I’d prioritized information over emotion and mystery to answer a note in that final push to get a greenlight. I went into “sales mode.” My fix made the note go away but it made both of us miserable on the day. It’s not like I could blame anybody else, it was on me once I wrote it.

Which brings me to this final piece of advice from my friend: 

3) “Don’t make whether you make a change or not about your personal integrity. We all have lines we will or won’t cross but if your show dies none of it will ever be seen, so if you need to compromise to get there, it doesn’t make you a hack, it makes you a realist. That said, know your name will be on it so you need to be more comfortable having the show as the network wants it to reach the world vs having it buried.”

I think this is really smart and self-aware. There aren’t a whole lot of people who can afford, either financially or in terms of their reputation, to walk away from a chance to get a show or movie made. Most of the people who do that likely have at least one hit under their belt, and probably a recent one at that. You can’t have a hit unless you get a show on the air and you can’t get a show on the air without some level of compromise. Making an episode of television is a team sport. It’s part of what I love about it.

I’ve been in a few situations where a producer has had to get real with me and say, “We have to do the note.” So I buckled down and found a way to do it that I could not only live with but also be excited about.

If that happens to you and you can’t just walk away over “creative differences” then see #2.

TV Writer Podcast

I had a great time talking to Gray Jones this week. Check it out:

TV WRITER podcast ep here!