JaneEspenson.com

Hey, it’s Wednesday night. Wednesday night is when a new America’s Next Top Model episode suddenly appears on my Tivo. Whee! Isn’t that, increasingly, the way television seems to occur? With Tivo, and with DVDs, and with episodes available for download onto one’s microwave oven or whatever, we’re finally getting that programming on demand thing that I’ve been demanding since I was thirteen and couldn’t get home from dance class before Soap was half-over.

When a broadcast schedule becomes irrelevant enough, it will disappear. And when it does, it will take with it the most common problem with television scripts, both of the spec and professional variety. Namely: they come in too long.

When shows don’t have to fit into a neat little grid, they won’t have to be tucked into their little Procrustean beds at night. But until then, the page count of your spec script is very important. Look at the produced scripts of the show you’re writing. You can get away with a spec script that’s a few pages longer than these, but I wouldn’t recommend anything more than that. It will start feeling long to the reader, and atypical of the show. And that’s the last thing you want.

You’ve probably been startled at how much your story has expanded. This is almost certainly your problem, not the reverse. So you have to cut.

You’ve probably got good instincts about the first things that have to go. Beginnings of scenes, the middle of long speeches, trivial greetings between characters, jokes that are funny but that don’t move the story forward. They may be hard to cut, but it’s clear they have to go. And there are the little things, too. Streamlining the wording just a little bit might pull up a page; nudging a compound word onto one line with a slight margin adjustment might get rid of that orphan on page 50.

But sometimes you do all that stuff, and it’s still too long. Too often, writers look at the choice: cut story or cut character, and they choose to cut character. Story is the skeleton of the episode, they reason. It can’t be removed because it holds it up, gives it a shape. Character stuff is flesh. Reducible in many ways and not strictly necessary. Hmm. If you follow this reasoning, you’re going to end up with the spec script equivalent of a top model. Skin and bones with no meat. A lightweight of a script.

Look at your story. Is there a chunk that can go? Can you lose one whole misdiagnosis from your House spec? Can someone have one little piece of information earlier that moves the story ahead faster? After all, what do you remember from your favorite episode? The time House thought it was syphilis? Or the time he kissed Sela Ward?

Story is important, but it’s only important because it’s the stuff that happens to your characters. A ticking clock is meaningless in a room with no one in it.

Lunch: In ‘N’ Out burger. My God.

Hi! You’re at the end of a scene, or the end of an act. And your hero has something to say. Do not let him say it twice. Just because you see it done, doesn’t mean you have to do it.

HERO
I certainly hope so, my friend. I certainly hope so.

Really. Don’t do it.

Lunch: turkey lunchmeat and sauerkraut rolled in cabbage leaves.

I had a delightful afternoon of Scrabble yesterday with my friends Kim and Michelle and Jeff. Little dogs playing at our feet, tiles clicking softly… Fantastic. I’ve known Kim and Michelle since we were all in the Disney Writers’ Fellowship together. It was that kind of bonding experience, and I cannot recommend it highly enough (It’s now the ABC Writing Fellowship). In addition to meeting people who will be your friends for life, you also get good practical writing advice and the thrill of seeing doors open that would have been hard to even approach otherwise.

As part of the fellowship, we television fellows (as opposed to the feature fellows – we were recruited in two camps), wrote a series of comedy spec scripts under the guidance of Disney executives. Comedy scripts only, because Disney was only producing comedies back then. We also were required to attend at least one sitcom taping per week. This began as a treat, and quickly became a chore. Our chaperoning executive actually pulled us out of the audience at Blossom one week because the Joey Lawrence fans were making a high-pitched sound of delight that was causing us physical harm.

There was also a strong recommendation that the execs made to us. They told us to hold our own little mini table reads at home, using the other fellows as actors, so that we could hear our specs. Nothing fancy, just a group of people with scripts on their laps. Having this kind of read is a suggestion you will probably hear from others as well.

I would exercise caution.

Homemade table reads are great if you’re writing a feature or a pilot or a play. If you’ve created the characters, I mean. You can learn a lot about what makes dialogue sound natural. You’ll also realize how very, very, long a chunk of dialogue is when it’s read out loud. You’ll probably end up cutting words out of every line you’ve written.

But even then, there is a downside. If your friends are not actors, they may butcher what you’ve written. And then their awkward line readings are in your head!

And if you’re dealing with a spec script for an existing show, you’ve got even bigger problems. One of your most precious aides in this whole process is your ability to “hear” your actors reading your lines. You want to be able to “hear” Hugh Laurie or Edward James Olmos or Jamie Pressly when you read your script. And the one time that I GUARANTEE that will not happen is when your friend Missy is reading the role of Dr. House.

So be careful. Unless you’ve got Hugh coming over anyway, and he’s able to lend a hand, you might end up doing yourself more harm than good. Many would disagree with me, of course. If you try it and it works for you, then that’s great. But I rely so heavily on my little metaphorical inner “ear,” that I keep far away from anything that will get between it and me. (I also like my literal inner ear. It keeps me from falling down.)

Lunch: chips and dips and wasabi peas eaten while Scrabbling!

Many years ago, I read a friend’s spec feature script. It was a murder mystery, a classic who-dunnit. In the script, there was an obvious suspect. He was shifty, clearly hiding something, and the clues all pointed to him. And then there was his brother. Clean and above suspicion — I think he might’ve been a senator. But he shared a blood type with his brother (this was significant in crime-solving many years ago), and they also shared an agenda that overlapped on many interesting points, some of the same enemies, that kind of thing.

My friend the writer knew that clever readers/viewers would be looking for a twist. He knew they’d know that Brother Shifty didn’t do it. That they’d suspect Senator Brother. So he tricked ’em! The end of the screenplay revealed that it was Brother Shifty all along!

Thud.

We all have to deal with the fact that audiences are onto us. They anticipate most of our tricks. The only response to this is either to play a different game, stop writing who-dunnits, or to make fancier tricks. The untwisting of a twist is not gonna get it done. Because no one is going to enjoy being told that the killer was the guy standing over the body with the bloody knife.

What my friend needed to do, of course, was come up with another option. Recently, the other option of choice has been confidante/best friend/lover of the investigator, the one person they trust. But audiences have caught onto that one, too. If my hero beds a new girlfriend during the course of his investigation, I pretty much assume she’s the killer. If he gets crucial advice from a brother cop who’s been tracking this killer for years, well, then, it’s the cop.

If he has a new girlfriend AND a brother cop? Well then, now it’s getting interesting. But whatever he does, the writer can’t look backwards at Brother Shifty or Senator Brother. He needs to keep pushing ahead. Maybe even by twisting the twist again: It’s the investigator himself, rendered unable to remember his own act! (Seen it)

It’s a terrible game, really, since in order to be shocking, each new step forward pushes credibility that little bit farther.

Keep track of what a savvy audience is going to anticipate. They ‘ve been watching TV shows (or, for YOUR audience, reading spec scripts) for a long time now. They’ve seen a lot of twists. Not just in who-dunnits, either. In all kinds of stories. They know that if the heroine of your sitcom kisses a guy she just met in a bar, that it’s going to turn out to be her new boss and/or her roommate’s boyfriend. They know that if she meets a great guy on the phone that he won’t look like what she pictured when she meets him in person. Think about what they’ve seen before, anticipate it, and then shoot past it. And good luck. This is hard business, surfing the anticipation curve.

Lunch: a ground turkey with fennel seeds thing I found in the South Beach Cook Book. Really good!

Had a great lunch today with friend-of-the-blog Maggie. So much fun! Much talk and analysis of my fave show, Battlestar Galactica. I came to the party late but have lately been much immersed in DVD viewing and the wonderful world of iTunes downloads. What a great show! It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a show that does such a good job of crafting plot developments that defy prediction without feeling arbitrary. It’s a tricky line to walk. But it’s vital. If an audience gets ahead of the story, they can get very bored.

This is also true in the micro as well as the macro. Wanna see how? Here is possible scene transition. For the sake of the example, let’s say this is an excerpt from an episode of, say, Taxi. We start at the end of a scene as Elaine is confiding in someone (probably Alex):

ELAINE
And here’s the worst part! I agreed to go out with Louie!
CUT TO:
INT. RESTAURANT
Elaine looks on in horror as Louie blows his nose into a cloth napkin.

Now here is a better scene transition:

ELAINE
And here’s the worst part! You’ll never believe who I agreed to go out with!
CUT TO:
INT. RESTAUTANT
Elaine looks on in horror as Louie blows his nose into a cloth napkin.

See the difference? The second option is better. The reveal of Louie as her date is funnier when it’s done as part of the cut. This is because it’s a bigger swipe at the viewer’s expectations. In the first version they go into the restaurant scene knowing something about what they’re going to see. It’s simply not as funny.

Try, as much as is possible, not to tell the viewers what they’re about to see. Unless you’re lying to them. Look at your scene transitions. I bet you can find some that you can arrange so that the cut into the next scene becomes a revelation, not just a what-happens-next.

Lunch: Sushi at Echigo on Santa Monica. Tiny morsels brought one-by-one on clouds of warm rice.

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