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Michael in Hollywood writes in with a concern. He’s having a hard time finding sample produced scripts. I’ve written a lot about the importance of having these if you’re going to write a spec of an existing show. They give you the show’s exact format and answer loads of questions such as, as Michael points out, whether they slug the characters’ dialogue with their first or last names.

They also help you figure out the structure and pacing of your script because you can compare those things apples-to-apples if you’ve got script pages to spread out.

But I am hearing from you and others, Michael, that these scripts are getting harder to find. They are, after all, the property of the studios, and apparently they are cracking down on their release. If I were you, though, I’d still make an effort to find them. Look on Ebay, for example. You might also try some of those Hollywood book shops like Book City. Since you live in Hollywood, you can even go in person and look at their selection. Also, living in Hollywood, you have access to the group Scriptwriter’s Network, which maintains their own library of such scripts that you can look at if you join. I just spoke to that group last weekend and can recommend them not just as a source of scripts but also for writing help, networking and all sorts of useful things.

In other mail news, to Terry in Kentucky: I’m sorry, but I don’t have contact info for Ringo or his assistant. But I love that you asked.

And a big “Thanks” to Elizabeth in Texas who loved my most recent Battlestar episode — glad you liked it!

Lunch: left-over potato salad from a party

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.

I recently answered one of two questions sent in by Gentle Reader Amy in Colorado. Here is her other, equally good, question:

Your recent posts about being up in Vancouver made me wonder — how does that work? When the writing staff and the production are in two separate locations, I mean. How do you keep in touch with each other; how do you have production meetings; where are other members of the production team located (i.e.: the show runner, other producers, etc.) Are the logistics a small nightmare, or does it work pretty smoothly in this virtual world of ours? My partner and I have written a pilot that is set in Colorado, and in a perfect world, it would be shot here. [In CO.] So I have wondered what that would mean…

Great question. First off, you might find that if your pilot were produced, Colorado would look a lot like Canada. Scenes from Smallville often featured snowy mountains looming over the Kansas plains, remember. There’s no reason to think that your fictional location will match your actual one. At least the snowy mountains would make sense for you.

But to answer the bulk of the question, each writer/producer makes the trip to Canada when their episode is being shot. The production pays for first-class airline tickets (I am told that this is a WGA-required perk and I applaud it heartily), and puts you up in a nice hotel with a little kitchen in the room. The general plan is to fly up the day before the production meeting, which takes place a couple of days before shooting starts. You attend the meeting and do rewrites up there (they install you in a little office).

The production meeting consists of the writer/producer, director, and all the different departments that will be involved in shooting the show: set decoration and extras casting and props and locations and wardrobe, etc. There are about twenty people in the meeting. All of these people work in Vancouver and are there in person. Not included in this meeting are cast members and people involved in post-production (editing), which is done in Los Angeles. A high-level producer often listens in on the meeting over speaker phone, but often says nothing.

As writer/producer, you look at props and tour the sets and look at the wardrobe for the episode and all that stuff. It’s fun to say, “Let’s not use that towel for the towel scene. Let’s use that towel.” You huddle with the director and have lots of talks with them about the script — answering their questions and explaining your intent.

If enough of the cast is available, there will also be a table read, in which your script is read through (very quickly in our case) by the cast, so you can hear it out loud.

Notice that every step will probably require you to tinker with your script a bit — to simplify a sequence or adjust a line or more.

Once shooting starts, the writer/producer sits on set near the director and watches. You get to fix problems and explain things to the actors and make changes to the script on the fly. This can be nerve-wracking, but it can also save a lot of wasted film if you’re there to settle a question or correct a misperception. Or mispronunciation.

When I was up there recently, I was producing two episodes in a row. That meant that I was often running across the Vancouver lot from the soundstage to the office to do rewrites or polishes or attend meetings about the next episode during lighting set-up delays on this episode. There’s nothing like the adrenaline of that. Fun! (Not sarcastic. It’s actually a blast.)

Sometimes you might stay for the whole shoot, other times, especially with an experienced director, you might only stay a few days into the shooting schedule. An episode takes 7 or 8 working days to shoot. If you stay the whole time, of course, you run into the next writer who’s already flown up for the production meeting on their episode, which will start shooting the day after yours wraps. And on and on it rolls.

During this time you are not in the writers’ room, which remains in Los Angeles, full of whichever writers are available. If there’s a crucial discussion, you may be included on speaker phone. Often, you will keep the other writers informed by email about any changes that you’re making to your episode during filming that may impact future stories, and they do the same in return: warning you to adjust a line, perhaps, that might be contradicted by something they just came up with for a later story.

The show runner will generally be with the staff, not on the set, unless it’s his or her episode or if there’s some crisis there that they need to deal with.

When you’re in LA, the writers’ room feels like the beating heart of the show. But when you’re on the stages, the immediacy and energy of filming feels primary. It’s certainly easier when a trip to the stages doesn’t involve a plane trip, as was the case at Buffy, where the stages were right there, but it is made as easy as possible by the people who book the flights and arrange the rooms and drivers to shuttle you to the set from the hotel every day. And there’s something very pure, I find, about being in Vancouver for a shoot — there are literally no distractions. Often, during shooting, the van picks you up at 7 AM or earlier, and takes you back to the hotel at 8PM at which point you might need to rewrite some scene that shoots later in the week, and then it’s off to bed because the van’s coming even earlier tomorrow. I always end up totally immersed in the episode, which would be harder to achieve in LA with all the distractions of home. (Some writers, I’m told, spend their small amounts of free time in the lively hotel bar, which is constantly full of movie stars shooting in Vancouver and lodged — always — in that hotel, but I value sleep too much to really participate.)

It’s not ideal, having to leave the room several times during a season, but it can be made to work very smoothly.

Lunch: Cup O’ Noodles

Amy in Colorado writes in with two questions. Here is one of them.

How does this happen? I recently watched a movie […] where the time-line/histories of the main characters made no sense at all. Early in the film, the main character explains that her mother never liked her husband because they met when she was 19 […] Then, 3 weeks after the husband dies, she has a 40th birthday. […] Later, she’s all upset and yells that her husband was only 35 when he died. […] Then, there is a flashback scene from their first meeting… [and]… there’s no way he’s 15. So, am I to believe that not a single person involved with the movie noticed the obvious contradictions???

Yes, it’s possible that they didn’t notice. Or, more likely, when they noticed after the fact, they felt that making some kind of fix would lead to some worse consequence — if they made the husband older when he died, for example, the poignancy of his loss would be lessened, perhaps, and that would be worse than a logic flaw that most viewers won’t catch.

This kind of thing happens all the time, more often on tv shows — in which the backstory evolves over years — than features, and there’s good reason for it. The problem is that scripts aren’t imagined, written and then shot. They’re imagined, then re-imagined, written, then rewritten by others, then reconceptualized during preproduction, tinkered with on-set without the writer present, then totally re-imagined one more time in the editing room — again, usually without the writer being there. I don’t know the movie in question, but I wonder if it’s possible that the flashback scene was added late in the process, after the rest of the material was filmed and hard to change. Or, perhaps, the woman’s birthday was originally a 30th birthday, but the casting of the female lead made that implausible? They may have decided that the funky math was better than trying to age down their actress. Or maybe they originally were going to delete the birthday reference, then added the “met when I was 19” line, then later realized they needed the birthday for some other reason… Or who knows what. In the chaos of making a movie, the logic of the script is often — not ignored, but rather, jettisoned in favor of more immediate crises.

There are lots and lots of things like this that can happen between page and screen. Actors get haircuts or boob jobs during a shoot, or some location is suddenly unavailable or the writer forgets some choice they made weeks earlier and writes something that contradicts it.

Remember that big fight between Buffy and Spike in which the whole point of the scene was that Spike could suddenly survive (and fight) in sunlight, but the whole scene was shot in the deep shade? Well, the day grew late and the shadows grew long. Everyone noticed it, but there was little that could be done.

After you’ve seen this happen to a few of your scripts, you may start to try to make them production-proof. I remember on one sitcom early in my career I was told, “never write a scene that requires a specific prop unless you have one in your garage.” Now, I’ve never had any problem, ever, with the prop people failing to supply what I needed, but clearly the guy who gave me that advice had. The problem with trying to write protectively is that trying to prevent problems leads to overwriting in which everything is laid out too clearly, or to boring writing in which everything is on an easy-to-control interior set without crowds or too much action.

In a way, those of you at the “aspiring” stage of your tv writing careers are lucky in that you’re writing to be read, not produced. You have no other writer and no panic-pressed writing of your own that will introduce contradictions, and, like a novelist, you have the imaginations of your readers to deal with, not the vagaries of nature and a crew. Of course, part of the assignment is to write a script that appears producible, so you can’t go nuts with a chariot-race in every act, but you can at least keep your characters’ ages straight, and rely on sunshine when you need it!

Lunch: That strange strawberry-spinach salad again. Get the strawberries on the side and avoid the pink dressing.

Addendum: I keep thinking of new ways this could’ve happened. Maybe the birthday was originally supposed to be years after the husband’s death, not weeks, but in the moment they decided that it would really only play with fresh grief. This feels quite likely to me.

UPDATE: I got word back from the guys at the ABC/Disney program about the web site. They say, “We are a bit behind with the updated application, but are hoping to get it posted no later than Friday of this week.” So there you go.

Wendy in Reseda wants to know if she can submit a re-worked version of the same script she submitted last year to the ABC/Disney Fellowship this year. I don’t see a problem with that. If it’s read by the same reader, they might notice that it’s familiar, but they should be good enough at their job to realize that it’s well-written. It’s possible that it might give the impression that you’ve only got one idea, but if that’s their concern they will simply request a second script to make sure you’ve got the goods. If you’re really proud of this new version — if it genuinely sparkles — use it.

Lisa in Indiana is working on a “Lost” spec, also for ABC/Disney, and she’s worried that by focusing on a less-commonly featured character, she’s creating something that will be seen as an atypical episode. “Lost” is, of course, a bear of a show to spec. Many people will tell you not even to try. But Lisa is passionate about the show, and since (as she points out) the show does experiment with different types of tones and structures, it’s not clear that the “atypical” criticism even makes sense anymore. Just as I told Wendy, if you’re confident that the script sparkles, use it.

R.A. in Phoenix is checking in to make sure the ABC/Disney program is continuing at all, since apparently the web site (see sidebar over there –>) is in need of updating. Yes, it is, and the site should be updated soon.

Other Gentle Readers have written in with other ABC/Disney questions, that I plan to get around to shortly. I’m so pleased that interest in this program continues. It gave me my start and it continues to attract and nurture aspiring writers and turn them into colleagues.

Lunch: Shabu shabu with Kobe beef. Then I took home the leftover raw beef and cooked it up to make a superlative steak sandwich.

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