Tripping Over Your Shoelaces on the Race to a Greenlight (9 min read)
Happy Friday!
Before I jump in I just wanted to say thank you so much for checking this out and continuing to pass it on to other writers and creatives. The reactions to the piece about the old scout made my week.
Fair warning, this issue is devoted to the craft of writing for TV and film, with a short piece on a hyper-specific subject that has been on my mind recently. A reminder, this is not meant to be a "how-to" or a guide for screenwriting. It's more of a "how I'm currently" navigating my own career and shaking up my process in pursuit of something new.
I hope you have a great weekend!
Tripping Over Your Shoelaces on the Way to a Greenlight (9 min read)
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.
Relevant Link:
The Screenwriting Life with Meg LeFauve and Lorien McKenna: 49 | Michael Arndt's Act 1 Masterclass on Apple Podcasts — podcasts.apple.com Little Miss Sunshine's script, penned by our guest Michael Arndt, won almost every major industry award, and for good reason. Its warmth, humor, and surefooted commitment to its themes makes it one of the finest scripts written this century. And SO many of those themes show up in Act 1. Michael has…
Flash Fiction - AITA
I did this piece for fun after reading one too many AITA posts from clueless men who are clearly the asshole in the situation...
AITA – Extant StoryTech — extantstorytech.com AITA by Mickey Fisher AITA FOR BREAKING UP WITH MY GF? A little backstory: my Uncle Ray was a bit of an eccentric. Picture Steve Buscemi in GHOST WORLD. That’s what he looked like because he modeled his whole style and personality on that character and
Article on the Chase Scenes in FAST9:
Some of my favorite moments in prep for an episode is when you have to work out a sequence with stunt cars and the team brings out a bunch of toys on the table to demonstrate. It just reminds me that we're just big kids who still get to play make-believe. This article breaks down F9's process and it's so much more work than you can imagine to get it right.
F9 and the violent science of the perfect car chase | WIRED UK — www.wired.co.uk F9’s trademark blend of carnage and car chases required a mix of CGI and plenty of real-world stunts