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Now you know, Gentle Readers, that I much prefer to talk about writing tricks — I mean “techniques”– than to give advice about how to get into the business, since I really don’t consider myself an expert on that. However, I just found out about a writers’ program at NBC called Writers On The Verge. The official link to the program can be found
here

My understanding is that this program is specifically intended for writers who are inches away from breaking into the business. Here’s what one of the program organizers told me about what they’re offering:

Basically, it’s our crack at a fellowship. It’s more like the WB or CBS Fellowship than ABC in the sense that it’s only 10 weeks and I can’t afford to pay them for their troubles. Another difference between ours and theirs is that WOTV is two nights a week. Tuesday night is solely dedicated to a writing workshop and Thursday [to a] speaker series and personal development exercises. They [the participants] write a spec to get in, and in the program write a new spec and start an original. It’s really fast paced because we want them ready for staffing.

Though we’re the newest fellowship, we’ve had a good amount of success so far with 5 of the 8 fellows from last year staffed and all 8 represented. The other three writers have moved up the food chain in some way as well (script coordinator with a freelance, etc…). In fact, NBC just bought a comedy pilot from a team that was in the program last year — so that’s our most exciting news to date.

Wow. I’ll say — that’s a pretty amazing track record for a fairly new program. And it’s also another good place to use those specs for existing shows, which are otherwise increasingly devalued.

May might seem like it’s a long way off, but this program clearly sets a high standard and you’re going to want all of that time to get a spec into the kind of shape it’s going to require. If I were you, I’d start working. So let’s hear some typing noises! Good luck!

Lunch: BBQ chicken and those amazing spicy fries at Ribs USA.

Friend-of-the-Blog Jeff Greenstein comments on the last entry. He says: I always pick out a special font for each show and put it (fairly) big on the title page. I’m looking at his most recent pilot script and it’s true. However, his own name appears below the title in 12-point Courier. This seems to me to be a fine compromise — the script looks unique without looking over-puffed.

Jeff also points out the importance of making it clear that a script is, in fact, a pilot (as opposed to a spec feature or a spec episode of an existing show). He does this with the simple subtitle (without quotation marks) “a pilot,” while I do it by listing the name of the episode (with quotation marks) as “Pilot.” They’re both perfectly fine options.

EVEN MORE ON ENTITLEMENT:

I had just completed this post when I got another email from an experienced writer. Friend-of-the-blog Mark Verheiden checks in on the other side! …the first studio script I submitted, I did a title page where I put the title (that’s it) in 16 pt type. The executive practically hurled it in my face. […] I don’t do that anymore.

Fascinating, no? I’m not sure what to advocate anymore! I suggest that this choice should probably be dictated by your own personality and values, and perhaps even the tenor of the script — free-wheeling comedy might allow for looser rules than a restrained drama. If anyone else weighs in, I’ll let you know!

I’m still in Vancouver, and will be for another month. While I’m here, I’m continuing to read the book I mentioned before, “Best Television Humor of the Year”. The year in question is 1956.

I came across an example of a very-difficult-to-execute joke type in the book. The type is the Intentionally Bad Joke. Here’s how it played in an episode of “The Life of Riley,” as one couple says goodbye to their neighbors, who are heading off on vacation:

PEG/RILEY
Bye! So long! Have a nice time in Portland.

RILEY
(realizes he’s told a lousy joke)
Well, you see, Portland, and cement, er… er… and so I said wooden cement… oh, never mind–

I actually had to do some research on this one, Gentle Readers. It seems that cement doesn’t come from Portland, but that there is a material called Portland cement. Let’s just assume it was better known in 1956. (Or perhaps it’s absolutely huge right now and I’m just out of the cement loop.)

My guess is that the exchange above doesn’t work for you. It doesn’t work because the secret of the bad joke joke is that it has to come out of character. Riley doesn’t have any particular attitude in the scene, no reason to try to make a joke. Here’s the exact same joke, really, from an episode of “Ellen”:

LAURIE
Hey, Ellen, why don’t you turn on the stereo? How about a little Edith Piaf?

ELLEN
Yeah, everybody likes a good rice dish.

The extent to which that works for you as it lies there on your screen probably depends on the degree to which rice pilaf is more familiar to you than Portland cement. But in the context of the episode, it worked. It worked because Ellen was nervous. She was on a date in which she didn’t know what was going to be expected of her. The joke came out of her nervousness and the audience laughs at its badness because they’re really laughing in sympathy with her situation. The worse the joke, the more nervous she must be.

Here’s another one, from the same episode. Ellen is frantically paging through Reader’s Digest, desperate to distract herself.

ELLEN
Oh. Look at this: “Laughter in the Military.” It seems that there was a lieutenant whose his actual name was Lou Tenant. Well, you can imagine the mix-ups.

It’s not hilarious. It’s not meant to be. But it’s funny that, in her emotional state, SHE thinks it’s funny.

Ellen also specialized in the elaborate squirm, explaining her jokes in long rambling monologues like the one from “Life of Riley” only far more complicated. I would not recommend you try this in your comedy specs — it’s a very specialized skill. Blocks of dialogue that require a very specific delivery are not good in specs.

Another note on the squirming phase of the bad joke joke: this is a place in which it is important NOT to write the line “I’ll shut up now.” That is a clam (an old familiar joke). If you’ve heard it, don’t type it. A funny joke about a very recent tragedy can probably still be squirmed out of with the line “too soon?” But the clam clock is ticking on that one, too.

Lunch: left-over room-service lamb chops. Cute and delicious.

Oh, such an adventure today, Gentle Readers! I got to go on a tour of the sets and entire operation of a daytime drama. You might think that the world of television writing is sort of homogeneous all the way through — like a potato. But it’s not. The worlds of comedy and drama have undergone some cross-pollinating in recent years, and if you work on a prime-time comedy, it’s possible you might even find yourself interacting with writers from the late-night world of Conan, Dave or Colbert, but soaps — they are unknown territory.

The effect is something like divergent evolution, as if soaps were put on an island in the early days of television, where they’ve continued to develop along their own lines, uninfluenced by the rest of the TV world. Their job titles and terminology and methods are similar to the rest of the business, but just different enough to cause delightful confusion.

The production aspects are insane– the show I visited doesn’t shoot, as you might assume, an hour’s world of material each and ev’ry blessed day. No. They do FIVE shows in FOUR days. So it’s more than one standard episode every working day. With no hiatus, of course. Year ’round, I’m sayin’. Holy cats. A single actor might be in seven, nine, eleven scenes in one day. I was told of one case in which and actor, trying to clear their schedule so they could take a week of… that one actor shot over twenty scenes in one day.

The sound stages look very much like sitcom stages, only without audience seating. The rooms have no fourth walls, and there are four cameras shooting into the sets, getting all the angles at once. Most scenes are shot in one take — taking as little as minutes to complete. The sets themselves are moved overnight as the ones needed for the next episode are moved in to replace the previous day’s configuration. This show uses four directors — one directs all the eps shot on Mondays, another all the eps shot on Tuesdays… I’m telling you, it’s wild.

Oh, and the director blocks all the scenes well in advance of shooting and all the sets are pre-lit to fit that blocking during the night before shooting. In other words, the actors don’t get any input on where they stand. What’s your motivation for crossing the room? Well, that’s where the light is, bub. Oh, and the director sits in a control booth, watching monitors there, not on the set.

Now let’s try to imagine the challenges for the writing staff! If everything goes smoothly, all you have to do is produce a full script every single day, year ’round. And they have only a few more writers than a standard prime time hour drama. So they cannot, obviously, run a standard story-break room. The system that evolved was for years, at least at this show, a sort of three-tiered system – a few top writers craft the overall story arcs. Mid-level writers work with them to turn those arcs into things that look a lot like traditional episode outlines, and an array of writers below that (who do not even have to be local to Los Angeles), take those outlines and quickly generate the dialogue while adhering slavishly to the outlines because any adjustment they might make would affect all the other moving parts of this speeding train.

Recently it seems that the middle of that particular snack cake may be disappearing — the higher-ups are creating things with a more outline-y flavor and the lower-downs are being given more autonomy to do a bit of structuring on their own. By this I mean that they’re told in which act a given scene goes, but not in which order. Of course, if it’s ultimately decided they got the order wrong, the scenes just be reordered in editing. Again, I must say that I’m fascinated. When the finished scripts come back to the top writers, they do rewrites in a process that they were calling “editing,” which sounds very odd to my ears, as much of this did. It was like finding a foreign country within our own shores.

Now, soap writing has often been disparaged, but once you view the necessities of the process, it’s frakking amazing what they’re able to accomplish. By the way, one of the results of the process is that there is even more of a premium on chameleonship in this writing than there is in prime time writing. If a script reflects the individual voice of a particular writer it can be somewhat distracting (or wonderful, depending on the show and your point of view on these things) in a prime time show, but in a show that airs every day and that has beloved characters with decades of history behind their voices, a reliable consistent authorial sense is absolutely required. That great new spin you put on that scene is going to be the spin that tears the machine apart.

Okay, now imagine what happens when the process doesn’t run smoothly — what if an actor has an emergency and can’t show up, for example? Or what if an episode turns out too long and a B-story has to be cut — how does that affect the next day’s script? What if an actor doesn’t like a story line and requests a change? Imagine that one-script a day train coming at you!

So what should you do if this work appeals to you? After all, it is one of the few Hollywood jobs that doesn’t require you to live in Hollywood. And it does seem to provide an unusual example of job security — almost everyone I met seemed to have been there a decade or more, some much more. Well, unfortunately, daytime drama does not appear to be a growth industry. And the downside of all that job security is that there are never any openings. So it’s hard to recommend that anyone pursue this as their do-or-die gonna-make-it-in-shobiz option. But I have to say that there is something very appealing in this high-pressure high-output write it now-now-now world. I can imagine myself wanting to try it just to test my mettle — but can you write… faster?

ADDENDUM: If you follow the link on this page (over on the right–>) to the ABC/Disney writing fellowship, you will see that one of the programs that is offered there is actually specifically for daytime (soap) writing. So if this is for you, that would be the place to start!

Lunch: chicken breast and mozzarella sandwich from the studio cafeteria! TV hospital food is much better than actual hospital food.

UPDATE: I have been informed (by two different Friends of the Blog), that the most prominent source for the “state your name” joke referenced here is the movie Animal House. So now we know!

Have you seen it yet? SciFi is running the Battlestar Galactica mid-season finale on their web site all day today. And of course it will be broadcast tonight. Tune in, okay? You need to see this. Seriously, one of the best hours of television ever. I cannot even articulate how proud I am to be involved with this show.

This episode was presented Wednesday night here in LA at a huge domed movie theater. It was incredible to see it on the big screen. There’s nothing like hearing the reactions of a crowd moment-by-moment. You really can tell what’s working and what isn’t. (It all worked.)

Before the screening began, Ron Moore got up and made everyone promise to keep the secrets they were about to learn a full two days before the official broadcast. He had everyone raise their right hands and repeat an oath beginning, “I, state your name…”. So everyone, of course, said, “I, state your name…” As he knew they would. It was a sweet moment of shared smart-assery, as Ron knew it would be.

It made me think about some things, that moment. How often does a crowd get a chance to be funny? Being funny as a group with no prior planning is ridiculously difficult. Perhaps a crowd, asked to repeat after their host, might refuse to stop repeating, but that’s more bratty than funny. Perhaps a group of close friends, out for a nice dinner, might spontaneously mimic the gait of the host at a restaurant after he says “walk this way,” but that’s a much smaller group. (And impolite, especially in a nice restaurant. I can’t recommend it.) The only other example of large-group whimsy that I can think of is The Wave, which is impressive, but hardly a reliable laugh-getter.

There’s that trick of saying to a crowd, “Everyone turn to the person on your right…” but that’s about making a crowd be foolish, not letting a crowd be funny.

So why does the “state your name” joke work? Because the audience knows the bit. I am not coming up with where exactly I’ve seen the bit before, but I certainly have. Taxi, perhaps? Perfect Strangers? Shows with someone with an amusingly incomplete mastery of English could easily use this joke. It would be a non-self-aware version of the joke, of course, in which the “swearer” makes a mistake. But, of course, it would also work on MASH or Cheers or even Welcome Back Kotter, in something more like its recent use: I mean, someone addressing a group of smart-alecks.

The group of smart-alecks is a great comedy configuration. The Marx Brothers, of course, are a spectacular example of this. There is something irresistible about scripted bits that capture the spirit I observed in that theater — the feeling of more than one person simultaneously seizing on a comedic moment. If you’ve got a group like that in your script, playing around with this concept is definitely worth your while.

Anyway, in whatever form, and from whatever context, the audience knew the bit. It’s so familiar, in fact, that it has crossed the line from “clam” to “classic.”

Could this bit be on its way to this status?

MAN WITH MICROPHONE
Can you hear me?

AUDIENCE
WHAT?

It would work, I’m telling you. Now we just have to get the general populace organized.

Watch BATTLESTAR GALACTICA!

Lunch: leftover Koo Koo Roo chicken and a yam. Disappointingly tasteless yam. Sometimes you get a boring one.

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