Hey, TV writers (and writers of all stripes)...

There was a great turnout at least week's WGA meeting about organizing reality writers... and there's another meeting this week.  If you're interested in attending-- or have questions-- please RSVP or contact Jayson Pope.  Here's all the info...

WHEN:   Wednesday, July 2, 8:00 p.m.
WHERE:  Writers Guild, west - 7000 West Third Street, Los Angeles, CA 90048
RSVP (or questions):  jpope@wga.org

Hey, screenwriters—

Thought we’d take another look at one of the entries in the SCRIPT NOTES ONLINE PITCH WORKSHOP.  Thanks to all of you who have submitted… and please—keep ‘em coming.  I’m happy to hold off on moving to Phase 2 (paragraph descriptions) if more people want to post stuff.

Also, do me a favor—part of the workshop being a success is gaining feedback from readers.  So please… check out the four loglines that have been posted, and give some feedback.  Especially if you’ve posted an idea—take a few moments and help out your fellow writers!

In the mean time, here’s a quick look at Phillip Sevy’s movie pitch…

“A God-Fearing Man, a feature-length drama, follows Elijah and Karen, a middle-aged married couple, as they struggle to find meaning in their lives after a tragic small-town shooting forces them to question everything they know.”

WHAT I LIKE:
•  It reads smoothly… we immediately know what it is (a movie), the title, and the names of the main characters… giving us simple, accessible touchstones to wrap our heads around.

•  It’s rooted in a hugely relate-able (and timely) event… a shooting, death, personal loss.  In other words, it’s ripe with pathos and humanity.


WHAT I’D WORK ON A BIT:
•  Quite simply, I’m not sure what the story is.  Elijah and Karen are clearly in a highly-charged emotional situation, but a story isn’t merely people emoting, it’s people wanting something tangible and taking solid actions to achieve it.  And with Karen and Elijah, I’m not sure of either of those things.  Here’s what I think it needs, Phillip…

A)  I think we need to know a bit more about the shooting and how it affects Elijah and Karen personally and directly.  Was their daughter killed in the shooting?  Was their son the gunman?  Did it happen at Karen’s office?  Were they witnesses?  A small-town shooting affects everyone, sure, but the more direct you can make this event to your main characters’ lives, the better.  I won’t care as much about random citizens who live in the town as I will about the family or friends of those directly involved.


B)  What do Elijah and Karen want?  I know they want to “find meaning,” but this is pretty nebulous and intangible.  Truthfully, everyone wants to find meaning in their lives; in a way, that’s what every story is about.  As I talked about with E. Daniels’ pitch, these characters need "tangible wants"… specific, tangible things they’re working toward… that also reflect the emotional journey this tragedy has sent them on.  Perhaps one of their children was killed in the shooting, so they set out on a road trip to reconnect with their other child.  Perhaps their son has been wrongly accused of the shooting… and they want to prove his innocence.  Maybe they somehow feel responsible for the shooting (perhaps they run a store that sold the murderer his weapon), so they want to make reparations to the families of everyone killed.

I usually think that every character has two simultaneous, compatible wants—the “tangible want,” or the physical thing they’re striving for, and the “emotional want,” which lies beneath and fuels the tangible want.  For instance, in Almost Famous, young Will wants only one thing… TO PUBLISH AN ARTICLE IN ROLLING STONE.  This is his tangible want; it’s physical, solid, attainable… he (and the audience) will know precisely when he accomplishes it.  And it fuels everything he does.  Every action Will takes is a step toward getting his article in Rolling Stone.  BUT…

Beneath that want is his “emotional want,” which explains the tangible want.  Emotional wants can be up for interpretation, but—in Almost Famous—I think Will wants to be taken seriously as a writer and an adult.  And he believes that publishing a story in Rolling Stone will validate him as a grown-up.  Of course, his journey teaches him that there’s more to being an adult than simply publishing magazine articles, but it’s these two hand-in-hand desires that drive the story.

You’ve given Elijah and Karen their emotional wants (although I think you can define them a bit more than just “finding meaning”… and this will come as you figure out who they were connected to the shooting), but giving them tangible wants will be a huge help.


C)  Let us know what obstacles stand in the path of Elijah and Karen’s tangible wants… and what actions they must take to surmount them.  For instance, maybe—like I suggested above—their son was killed in the shooting, so they now want to reconnect with their other child… but she’s been estranged for ten years… and lives across the country.  So to reconnect with her, Karen and Elijah must road-trip from California to Florida to find their daughter and mend the relationship.  Or maybe Karen and Elijah feel responsible for the shooting because they sold the gunman his rifle… so they want to throw a fundraiser for families of the victims.  But Karen and Elijah have been the town misanthropes for years; no on likes them and no one wants their fundraiser, so Elijah and Karen must learn to become social, compassionate people… and go person-by-person, making amends to all the people they’ve hurt over the years.


So putting all this together—and this is not me rewriting your pitch, just creating examples—I’d love to see your logline look something like this…


“A God-Fearing Man, a feature-length drama, follows Elijah and Karen, a middle-aged married couple who has just lost their son in a shooting, as they journey cross-country to surprise their daughter… who’s been estranged for the last ten years.”

OR…

“A God-Fearing Man, a feature-length drama, follows a middle-aged married couple, Elijah and Karen, as they struggle to clear their son of shooting charges… and find he’s not the man they believed he was.”


Anyway, I hope that helps, Phillip.  Thanks for posting… and please—everyone!—post some thoughts and comments to all the people who have been putting their ideas out there!

Chad

Hey, guys—

Just wanted to let you know about an upcoming WGA meeting to continue the fight for fair treatment and compensation for reality TV writers.

Although the writers strike is long over, the battle for writers’ rights is not.  Most reality writers work without equitable pay rates, overtime, or even insurance and retirement benefits.  Some are even suing their production times for allegedly bilking them out of legal overtime hours in upwards of forty hours a week.

This Wednesday, June 18, the WGA is hosting its next meeting of Reality and Game Show Writers to discuss further plans for organizing the world of reality TV.  

If you’re interested in attending, here’s the scoop…

WHEN:    Wednesday, June 18, 8 p.m.
WHERE:   The Writers Guild West
              7000 West Third Street
              Los Angeles, CA 90048

This isn’t a meeting simply for reality writers… IT’S A MEETING FOR ANYONE WHO CARES ABOUT WRITERS AND WRITERS’ RIGHTS… whether you’re a screenwriter, poet, novelist, or reporter!

Hope to see you there!

Hey, everyone--

Special thanks to Jen Grisanti, of Jen Grisanti Consultancy, for pointing me to this week's great website.  But if you're looking for particular movie scripts or scripts of produced TV episodes, check out Script City at www.scriptcity.com.  Unlike Drew's Script-O-Rama or Daily Script, Script City is a pay site... but it has a MUCH larger library than any of the free sites.  Most scripts are between $10 and $20, but they have scripts (and different drafts!) of hundreds of movies and TV shows. 

Whether you're researching a TV spec you want to write or just love reading sceenplays, this is a terrific site!

I am pleased to announce that we have our first entry in the Script Notes Pitch Festival!  A big round of applause—and a thank you—for going first goes to E. Daniels, who posted the first one-sentence pitch Thursday evening.

Just as a quick refresher… we’re in Phase One of our Script Notes Pitch Fest, where you all are invited to post one-sentence (“logline”) pitches of your movies or TV shows here on the blog, then readers and myself will give feedback.  The idea is NOT to be judgemental, but to help one another whip our pitches into shape and make them as strong (and sellable) as possible.

So without further adieu, let’s take a look at E. Daniels’ one-sentence pitch.  E. Daniels writes…

“Each episode finds our twenty-something heroine vowing that today, unlike all the other days, she will quit her job!!! ...just as soon as they validate her parking.”

This is a great TV series pitch with which to begin our festival, because it’s got some strong things going on, and some things that can use improvement.  First, the good things…


WHAT I LIKE A LOT:

•  E. Daniels’ pitch taps into a personal, emotional dilemma that millions of people experience every day… the desire to quit a frustrating, unfulfilling a job, but the inability to do so because you’re totally dependent on it.  Everyone on the planet has gone through this… the feeling of being trapped in a job or relationship but not being able to quit.  This gives E. Daniels’ pitch an important element necessary to virtually any pitch – relatability, or the ability to let audiences relate to the story and character, to see reflections of their own lives.

•  E. Daniels has also given the pitch’s main character a “want,” an objective, which is the first step in kicking off any story.  Characters with strong wants and objectives are forced to act in order to accomplish those wants, and its that action that creates story.  So whether you’re pitching a TV series, a movie, or a novel, it’s imperative to know what your main characters want; only by understanding this will we understand your story’s narrative engine.  (Having said this, I have some thoughts on this particular want, which we’ll discuss in a moment.)


SOME THINGS I'D IMPROVE A BIT:

While the pitch definitely has strong relatability, it also lacks the specificity it needs to really bring it to life, to allow us to see the character and her world in our heads.  In other words, IT’S TOO VAGUE.  Here's what I'd work on...

•  Give us some more info about our “twenty-something heroine.”  While this is only a one-sentence pitch, it’s still important to bring your character to life as much as possible… in as few words as possible.  Give her a name and a few choice adjectives.  For instance, rather than “twenty-something heroine,” which is fairly nondescript, say “Tara Stone, an impetuous 26-year-old clothing designer…” or “Free-wheeling 25-year-old Rita Webster, who dreams of being a decorated Air Force pilot…” or whatever info you need to give us.  Whoever she is… BRING HER TO LIFE FOR US.

•  While I applaud the fact that you gave your heroine (who, for the sake of discussion, I’m going to call “Tara”) a want, I’m not sure you’ve given her the kind of want that can propel a television series.  While all stories are driven by a character with a strong want, it’s usually tough to sustain a series when your main character wants only one tangible thing… like Tara’s desire to quit her job.  

This kind of singular objective is great for propelling one episode, or a movie, or a novel… but it’s tough to sustain a serialized story—like a TV show—with this.  A) It means your main character is driven by the same objective week after week, and it’s tough to keep audiences interested in what is—essentially—the same story (or same story engine) week after week.  B) In the world of television, these singular wants feel false and “cheat-y.”  After all, if we’re following a woman trying to quit her job week after week, we know she can never ACTUALLY quit her job… because it ends the story.  So we’re aware from the beginning that we’re watching something very finite, or we’re going to be strung along on the same repetitious journey for weeks on end.

(A handful of TV shows DO work by giving characters singular, tangible goals.  Each episode of 24, for instance, finds Jack racing to stop a calamity and stop a very specific villain.  But not only are these shows few and far between, they’re rarely successful.  24 is an anomaly, and most of its copycats have failed miserably.  Remember THE KNIGHTS OF PROSPERITY, about a gang of misfit thieves planning to burgle Mick Jagger?  How about THIEF?  Or HEIST?  The robbery theme aside, these shows all centered on characters working towards a single event—which is why they’re often called “event dramas”—and most are miserable failures.)

I’d give Tara some larger “life goals” that can not only drive her through the series as a whole, but generate episodic stories as well.  On FRIENDS, Joey wanted to be an actor and Monica wanted to be a chef… both goals that would take years of trying, fighting, and figuring things out.  More importantly, the characters on FRIENDS had enormous emotional goals… falling in love, figuring out their places in the world, etc.  These emotional goals helped spawn smaller, weekly storylines like going on dates, trying a new job, moving to a new apartment, etc.

I’ll give you some examples that will—hopefully—apply to this particular pitch in a moment, but first, I want to tie this into my next note…

•  Give Tara some relationships.  (I know I pound this notion a lot, but I stand by it.  There’s nary a story on this planet that’s not about one thing: RELATIONSHIPS.  RELATIONSHIPS RELATIONSHIP RELATIONSHIPS.  Giving your main character relationships is important for many reasons…

A)  Characters don’t exist in a void, so we only ever truly get to know them by seeing them interact with other characters.  Tara—no matter how compelling you make her—will never be interesting on her own… she will only be interesting in the context of other people.

B)  Relationships bring the world to life.  We all have different kinds of relationships depending on where we are… are work relationships are different from our family relationships, which are different from our romantic relationships, which are different from our friendships.  So when your series is set in a specific world—and yours seems to be set in the world of Tara’s work—you should populate it with those appropriate relationships.

C)  All good stories (or for that matter, pieces of art in ANY medium) work because they reflect the lives and experiences of their audiences.  So by giving Tara relationships that reflect the real world, we—your audience—are able to see reflections of our own lives in Tara and her life.  If she has a tumultuous relationship with her mother, we see aspects of our own relationship with our mom in that… if she has a loving, supportive boyfriend, we see our own romances… if she competes with her brother, we recognize our own sibling rivalries.

D) Lastly, TV shows, especially, are deeply grounded in their relationships.  A movie, for instance, can often succeed with weak characters and relationships but a very strong plot.  Not so with a television show, which needs to bring audiences back week after week.  And while viewers obviously want strong stories, what really attracts them is relationships… returning each week to a world whose characters’ lives reflect their own.  When you think of WILL & GRACE, for example, you may remember a few favorite episodes, but what you really home in on is the indissoluble bond between Will and Grace… their love for each other, their disagreements, their support, etc…. and the antics of their friends, Jack and Karen.

This is why the “wants” of most TV characters are concerned not with singular tangible wants, but with their relationships with other people.  For example, while Charlie and Alan on TWO AND A HALF MEN want tangible things in each episode—to score with a particular girl, succeed at work, etc.—their overall wants, the wants that propel them through the series, have more to do with being good fathers to Jake, finding female life partners, etc.

Anyway, all of this to say… I’d swap out Tara’s want of quitting her job for something more relationship-based.  Maybe something like…

“26-year-old Tara, an impetuous assistant at Moshman Designs, attempts to navigate corporate politics, sniping co-workers, and a micro-managing boss as she struggles to succeed in the cut-throat world of graphic design.”

Or…

“As 24-year-old Tara knows, it’s not easy being the world’s greatest undiscovered opera singer… especially when your boss thinks you’re his girlfriend, your co-workers don’t trust you, and your only friend is the 15-year-old copy boy.”

Or…

“Incorrigible Tara longs to quit her job and start her own dance studio… but quitting your job is never easy, especially when you’re boss is your father.”

(I’m not saying any of those are brilliant, or the story you want to tell, I’m just saying they tap into a bit of the same want and conflict, but they also flesh out the world and give a sense of Tara and her relationships.)

•  If possible, give us as much info as you can about what kind of series you’re pitching.  Is it a one-hour drama like DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES?  A single-camera comedy like EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS?  A half-hour multi-cam like RULES OF ENGAGEMENT?  

And, if you can, give us a title!  You may change it later, but a title helps establish the tone and gives us a bit of a visual image to wrap our heads around.

For example…

“EXPOSED BRIEFS is a single-camera comedy that follows the misadventures of Tara, a young paralegal who dreams of becoming a big-shot lawyer… if she can just convince the alpha-males at her father’s law firm to give her a shot.”

Or…

“INSEAMS, a one-hour dramedy, chronicles Tara, a seamstress in a floundering dress shop, as she juggles a domineering boss, back-biting co-workers, and a freeloading boyfriend as she struggles to quit her job and make it as Chicago’s hottest new clothing designer.”


Anyway, E. Daniels—I hope this is helpful!  Again—thanks so much for posting… and for the rest of you, keep the loglines coming.  You can post in the comments section below this post, or back in the original entry.  And feel free to post your thought on E. Daniels’ pitch as well!

Hey, screenwriters--

If you're in Los Angeles and interested in knowing how to develop and sell the next So You Think You Can Dance or Living Lohan, I'm once again teaching my 3-hour reality TV seminar at mediabistro.com next Saturday afternoon, and I'd love to see you there!  Here's the scoop...

WRITING THE REALITY TV SHOW
When: Saturday, June 14, 1-4 pm
Where: mediabistro.com, 7494 Santa Monica Blvd., Ste. 303, W. Hollywood, CA 90046
Cost: $65
To sign up:  Call Stefanie at 310-659-5668 or click HERE

Check out this webpage for more information... or here's the little blurb about it...

Moment of Truth. Wipeout. The Paper. From the multi-million-dollar series of broadcast television to the low-budget niche shows of cable, reality programming dominates television. But are reality shows really "reality?" How much planning and production goes into unscripted storytelling? And, most importantly, how can you get in on the action?

This seminar lays the groundwork for anyone wanting to break into the lucrative world of reality TV. We'll look at various types of reality shows and what makes them tick, from docu-dramas and docu-soaps (Denise Richards: It's Complicated, Laguna Beach) to game shows and elimination-style competitions (Hell's Kitchen, Survivor) to personality-driven and "aspirational" series (Tasty Travels, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition).

We'll then discuss how to conceive, develop, and sell your idea. What are the critical elements of a pitch? Should you attach talent? Does your series work as a strip? We'll explore how to structure your reality pitch and get it to the right people. Who are the major players? When should you attach a senior producer? What networks are best for your concept? Whether you're a writer, producer, or host, reality television's waiting for you.

In this seminar, you will learn:

• The difference between reality shows, and how to pitch them accordingly
• The critical elements every reality show and pitch must have
• How to structure a pitch both verbally and as a written document
• How to pitch to networks, studios, and production companies
• When to attach hosts or producers to your idea, and when not to
• What to expect when you're making your pitch, and what happens when you leave