by Bob Levy
On pages 152–153 above I discussed one organic strategy that writers delivering TV pitches use to create an emotional reaction among their listeners – demonstrating their own emotional experience of what they’re pitching. If the lead character gets her heart broken in the pilot story, the writer should show her own emotional reaction to that heartbreak as she describes it. Emotions are contagious. The writer conveys her emotion not by “acting” it. She conveys her emotion by actually feeling it.
Writers are storytellers. When the writer is pitching his show he is a storyteller in the sense of traditional oral storytellers of earlier times. Long before there was TV or movies there were storytellers who told stories around campfires and in front of hearths of homes. They used the power of their voices to articulate the words that took their listeners on a journey. They used the power of their voices to convey an emotional experience of their story that cued their listeners in to the kinds of emotions they might feel in response to the events of the story that was being told. In a TV pitch, the writer is now that storyteller. Her job is to grab her listeners by the hand and take them on a journey into the world of her series. To make them see what she sees, to make them know the characters she has created, to make them care about those characters and to care about what becomes of them as they move forward in time, as they move forward in the story, and to make them feel the emotions of the characters and the emotions that the writer experiences and conveys as she empathizes with the experiences of her characters as she describes them. That’s what storytellers do, and that’s now the TV writer’s job.
No one’s saying it’s easy. But it’s doable and it gets more doable with practice, experience and confidence.
The writer doesn’t have to weep rivers of tears and tear his hair out as he describes his characters’ emotional journeys. No one is expecting a kabuki performance as the writer pitches his show. Emotions can speak very loudly when they’re conveyed subtly. Writers need to allow themselves to connect to the emotions of their characters as they describe them and that subtle emotional connection will be enough. If the writer feels it, chances are the people he’s talking to will feel it too. That’s the goal.
A big buzzword in Hollywood these days is “passion.” Hollywood development executives want to work with writers and producers who are “passionate” about their ideas. If they’re going to plunk down tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours of their time on a project, they want to believe the people they’re working with are truly passionate about their ideas. Writers need to believe in their projects deeply and sincerely, and to let that passion come alive as they pitch them. Passion speaks volumes. Passion can’t sell a weak pitch, but it can tip the balance if the buyer is on the fence, if the buyer isn’t sure he wants to commit to the project or not.
Writers need to show passion in the pitch. Again, I’m not suggesting they fake it. The writer doesn’t have to act like a cheerleader, jumping up and down and arguing how many millions of viewers will love his idea. That’s not passion, that’s puffery. The buyers want to believe that the writer believes in her idea in a real, sincere and passionate way. That she’s genuinely passionate about her idea, not merely the business potential of her idea.
How does the writer demonstrate passion? Again, not by “acting” it. But rather by actually feeling it.
Where does that feeling come from? A good place for the writer to find it is in the themes of the series that we discussed earlier on pages 136–138. What is the show really about? What does it mean to the writer on the deepest levels? How does the writer really connect to her show (beyond its potential to make a lot of money)?
Figuring out what the show really means and how and why the writer really connects to those themes can lead the writer to a deeper connection to his project. That deepest faith in the project is where the writer’s passion will come from. If the writer genuinely feels that true belief, it will show. He will exude it when he talks about his show. He will glow with belief and enthusiasm. People will see it on his face and hear it in his voice without him ever having to utter the words, “I really believe in my show! I’m passionate about this idea!”
Everyone wants to feel inspired. We want someone who believes in something passionately to inspire us. The writer should knock the buyer off his feet with her faith, with her passion for her project. That passion, applied to a genuinely great idea, will resonate with buyers and ultimately with a vast array of collaborators, it will infuse the show with life, energy and emotion, and may ultimately motivate a giant audience to love the show with the same passion, faith and belief as the writer’s original inspiration.
Notes
1 Just because a network commits to a put pilot or makes an on-the-air series commitment, doesn’t mean the pilot or series will actually get made and aired. Despite these substantial commitments, if the network doesn’t believe in the final pilot script once it’s delivered they can back out of their commitment by paying a pre-negotiated penalty payment, which is typically quite substantial but not nearly as much as paying for the production of the pilot or several episodes.
2 Yes, that’s an unmitigated run-on sentence. Remember, though, that the verbiage of pitches is written with the intention of being delivered orally so there’s no reason to hold pitch scripts (even the imaginary ones I’m creating for the purpose of this analysis) to the traditional rules of written grammar.
3 Mr. Chips was a character originated in the 1934 novel Goodbye, Mr. Chips written by James Hilton and made into a successful film with the same title in 1939. Scarface is the nickname of the character Tony Montana played by Al Pacino in the 1983 Brian DePalma film Scarface, which was inspired by the 1932 film of the same title.
4 Author interview with Marlene King.
8
Developing the Pilot Script
It goes without saying that among the handful of entertainment professionals who contribute to the process of developing a pilot script the writer bears the largest brunt of labor. The writer does the “heavy lifting” (a phrase I’ve used throughout the book and a common one in TV development, almost always referring to work performed by the writer). In short: The writer writes the pilot. There are numerous books about screenwriting and writing for television, and developing pilot scripts from the writer’s point of view is examined extensively in those works. I’m going to use this opportunity to look at script development from the point of view of the other development professionals who develop the pilot script in partnership with the writer. I’ll focus on the ways network and studio development execs, producers and production company execs approach this eventful step. With hope, information in this chapter is beneficial to writers too.
The business goal at this stage is to develop a pilot script that earns a greenlight, gets the project ordered to production, makes a great pilot episode and gets the project ordered to series. In the case of a spec pilot script, the business goal is to sell the script to a network and/or studio, to get paid for having written it and get it into active development – toward the further goal of having it greenlighted to pilot production. In the case of a straight-to-series project, the spec pilot script is typically the most important element of the package of materials that’s shopped to networks, and therefore the goal of the pilot script is similarly to get ordered to production.1 Those are the business goals of the pilot script. The creative goals of the pilot script are to make it great, to make people love it and want it and want to make it. But what does that mean? And are there more specific creative goals development professionals should have in mind to make a pilot script “great?”
First, let’s back up and review the process steps we covered in Chapter 2 that have gotten us to this step: The writer and her partners (studio execs, producing partner, possible production company development execs) deliver a written version of the pilot story to the network execs and get their feedback and approval. The writer does the heavy lifting (there it is again) of creating the bea
ts and scenes that tell the pilot story/stories, structures them into acts (if the network uses them) and writes them into outline or prose form.2 She typically writes many drafts of the story to incorporate the notes of her producer, studio and network partners. Once the story is approved, the writer is officially commenced to draft.
Creative Goals of Developing the Pilot Script
Beyond making it “great,” the primary creative goals of the pilot script are:
1. to make us fall in love with the lead characters;
2. to tell a great story;
3. to dramatize the series concept.
I put “make us fall in love with the lead characters” first because, as discussed in the last chapter, the characters are generally thought to be the single most important reason why TV series work. The audience falls in love with the lead characters and wants to spend more time with them. Or, at the very least, the audience develops a deep and emotional concern for them, and cares enough about them to want to come back to future episodes to find out what happens to them. Even if the pilot story doesn’t introduce a series drive that gives us a specific question to which we want to know the answer (will Walter White earn enough money to provide for his family before he dies?), effective pilots make us love the characters, care about the characters or simply enjoy them enough to want to come back and spend more time watching them. Does the pilot script achieve those things? Many industry professionals agree that those are the most important questions to ask of a pilot script because those are the most important factors that make TV series work.
Another term for this is “rooting interest.” Does the pilot succeed in generating rooting interest in the reader/viewer for any of the lead characters. That’s usually why we come back for episodes two and three and beyond. We develop a rooting interest in the characters and we root for them, often unconsciously, to get what they want.
When I began my career as a network development executive I had to learn how to read scripts. My colleagues, most of whom were women, were better at reading scripts and evaluating material than I was (even my younger colleagues), and I came to the realization that it was because they were able to perform their work closer to their emotions than I was. The execs I worked with were better able to read a script and know how it made them feel. I realized from listening to them talk about material that I needed to learn to read with my heart and not just my head. As I evaluated scripts, I needed to read with my heart open and listen to my own feelings. Did I care emotionally about anything I read in a script? Did I care about the characters? Did I care what happened to them? If I didn’t care, why? The writer wanted me to care – why didn’t I care and what changes to the characters or the events that happened to them or the actions they took would make me care more?
Does the reader care about the characters? Does the reader finish the script with a rooting interest for any of the characters (ideally the character/s closest to the center of the series, the leads)? Those are the most important questions in evaluating a pilot script. Does the reader care? When I close a pilot script that’s the first question I ask myself: Do I care? If a pilot script can make the reader (and ultimately the viewer) love the characters and root for them in 35 pages (if it’s a comedy script) or 60 pages (if it’s a drama script), it has a good chance of succeeding.
How do writers do that? How do pilot scripts create characters we love? Two ways pilots do that were introduced in the last chapter, and I’ll expand on them here: “victimizing” the lead characters and giving them a goal.
“Victimization”
I know the idea of “victimizing” a character may sound extreme. The word “victim” has accrued an unfortunate (and possibly political) stigma in recent years. People don’t like to think of themselves as “victims”; we sometimes refer to them as “survivors” instead. In the new connotation of the term, “victims” are defeated losers who expect others to help them. Victims ask for our pity and wait until they get it. Set aside that stigma for a moment. The victimization strategy I’m referring to isn’t about “playing the victim card.” By victim I simply mean one who has been wronged. Someone who has been hurt or mistreated through no fault of their own.
We all know that audiences root for underdogs. Lead characters who are underdogs are a truism of entertainment. But what’s an underdog? What makes a character an underdog? How do we show that someone is an underdog? Presenting action that victimizes a character or presenting “facts” about a character that frames him as a victim are the easiest and most effective ways to establish a character as an underdog and to begin to earn the viewer’s sympathy, empathy, caring concern and love for that character.3
In the paradigmatic Hero’s Journey, the hero is often characterized as an orphan. One reason is because his journey will be about the character discovering who he really is. Another reason he’s an orphan is because even though the character is effectively a blank slate, an empty vessel just beginning his life and life’s journey, he’s already a victim. Life has already victimized him. Life has delivered the mostly unformed hero the single cruelest blow that can befall a young person, the death of his parents. Don’t we automatically sympathize with an orphan? Don’t we automatically want to give him the benefit of the doubt and root for him to thrive?
Let’s pick up my analysis of Breaking Bad that I began in the last chapter. It’s an especially effective pilot that I can continue to use in this chapter to help illustrate successful techniques of pilot script writing and development.
The first third of the Breaking Bad pilot script (as I also described in the last chapter) is effectively a sequence of steadily increasing victimization. As Walter White’s story slowly begins, the pilot script goes to enormous lengths to establish him as a victim.
Following a flash-forward sequence that begins the pilot with action, one that also quickly establishes tones of both serious jeopardy and humor, tantalizing the viewer with numerous questions (chiefly why’s the lead character in his underwear?), the pilot leaps back to the beginning of the story as Walter sits down to breakfast on his 50th birthday. Most of us expect special treats on our birthday, but Walter’s wife Skyler gives him the opposite – she gives him fake bacon because he needs to watch his cholesterol now that he’s getting “old.” She gives him some loving, wifely jabs about turning 50. His son Walter Jr. joins them and continues making friendly fun of his dad’s old-man milestone. Skyler and Junior’s jabs serve as loving abuse, beginning the sequence with the gentlest of victimization.
Then Walter goes to work where he teaches chemistry to high school students who not only couldn’t care less about a subject Walter clearly loves, but who openly mock him in class. The victimization escalates.
After school Walter goes to his second job (he makes so little money as a teacher that he has to moonlight to make ends meet – a professional injustice inflicted on him), where his boss orders him to drop his actual job as cashier and wash cars. This educated man is reduced to scrubbing tires, and, adding insult to injury, his rude teenage students happen to arrive at the car wash and belittle him further when they see him on his hands and knees. The victimization intensifies. Our hearts break for the poor man.
At the car wash one day Walter faints, and an EMT rushes him to the hospital. A doctor hits Walter with what turns out to be series-defining news: He’s got cancer, and it’s terminal. He’s got a couple of years to live. This revelation caps off a 19-minute sequence of victimization.
This long sequence performs other story functions than just victimizing Walter. Pilot episode real estate is limited, and every inch has to be used to maximum value. This sequence introduces other lead characters and many supporting characters. It introduces the world and establishes several notes of the tonal range of the series. It introduces the lead character’s starting place (his “status quo”) in the pilot story and series. But the most important facet of Walter’s starting place, the most emotionally resonant quality of his status quo, is his quality o
f being a victim.
One of the reasons writer Vince Gilligan went to such extreme lengths and devoted so many pages of the script to depicting his hero as a victim is because this hero is going to very quickly transform into an anti-hero. Very soon he’s going to choose to do very bad things, and, as fans of the show know, he’s going to spend the next several seasons doing increasingly bad things. For us to sympathize with him, to allow ourselves to follow him doing bad things and to forgive him enough to go along and find his behavior entertaining and even rootable, Gilligan needed to dig an enormous foundation of victimization and build up a big enough reserve of victimization sympathy.4
Let’s now look at the granddaddy of TV anti-heroes, Tony Soprano. How did David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, figure out how to make a stone cold criminal, a man we would see murder people with his bare hands in an early episode of the series, rootable? What technique did Chase use to introduce this character as a sympathetic and rootable lead? He made him a victim. The pilot story is about Tony suffering from a bout of anxiety. We meet Tony in therapy. This strong, brutal man is at his weakest. In the pilot he cries to his therapist, Dr. Melfi. The audience accepts Tony and begins to fall in love with him because we meet him as the victim of his own anxiety.
Why do we root for victims? I don’t know, but I know it works. My hunch is it has something to do with the instinct for fairness most of us have that I talked about earlier. Most of us feel treated unfairly – if unconsciously – and we identify with those life has treated unfairly. We instinctively root for them to find some kind of justice for their unfair treatment, as we would wish for fair treatment in our own lives. Victimizing a character in a script, especially a pilot script as we’re just getting to know a character, endears us to him, makes us begin to root for him and makes us begin to love him.