by Bob Levy
As Gayle did her pre-reads, Marlene, Les and I began talking to the network and studio about potential directors. Meanwhile, the studio physical production department began looking for the best place to shoot the pilot. We heard from the studio that they wanted to shoot the pilot in Vancouver, British Columbia, because of the generous Canadian tax incentives, but that if the pilot were ordered to series we would receive a California rebate that would allow it to shoot in LA, on the Warner Bros. lot. We were entering the fall of 2009, and we knew Vancouver would be cold and most likely rainy when we had to shoot the pilot, but if we could survive the Canadian pilot production, the cast and crew would enjoy sunny Burbank ever after.
Troian Bellisario came in and auditioned for Spencer Hastings in the first week of producer sessions and gave one of the most powerful, confident auditions I’ve ever seen. Troian had only recently graduated from USC’s theatre school and had only one TV credit under her belt, but we knew she was the real deal. When the door closed behind her, Marlene, Gayle and I looked at each other and said, “Test!”
We brought Troian and three other Spencers into the studio test, and they signed off on our top three choices. We brought them into the network, and the network immediately loved Troian and approved her as Spencer. Two down!
We continued our search for Emily. We had a strong suspicion Hanna would be cast with a blonde actress, so we assumed we would ultimately cast a white actress to play Hanna. We always intended to cast an ethnically diverse ensemble, which meant that, with Lucy and Troian on board and Hanna probably going to be a white actress, we had to make an extra effort to look for minority actresses to play Emily. We found a really strong African American actress that we liked a lot for Emily, but realized we needed to go into the studio and network with more than one good option. We read Shay Mitchell, who’s part Filipino, and we liked her and thought that she would make a good runner-up to the African American actress who was our top choice. We brought the two actresses into the studio, and, true to our expectations, the studio said they preferred the African American actress but that Shay was a good second option. Then we went to the network test where the unexpected happened. Shay blew the other actress out of the water. Even though we were prepared to say that the African American actress was our strong preference, we had to admit that Shay had given a much stronger audition on the day it mattered, and we thought she would make a great Emily. Paul Lee agreed, said they loved Shay for Emily, and we had our third liar. You walk into a network test thinking one way, and you never know who you’re going to walk out with.
As casting continued, Marlene and I met with director candidates. One of the first names on the list was Lesli Linka Glatter who had directed the first movie that Marlene had written, Now and Then, in 1995. Marlene and Lesli had bonded professionally on that project, and Marlene thought Lesli would make a great choice. Marlene and I met Lesli for coffee in Sherman Oaks, and we all hit it off. Lesli articulated the themes of the pilot script that drew her interest, that “what appears to be isn’t,” and her intention to shoot the pilot as cinematically as possible, and we realized we were all in sync. Marlene, Les and I spoke afterwards and agreed Lesli was a great candidate. We expressed our preference to the network and studio, and they signed off enthusiastically. We now had our director on board, and Lesli jumped into casting sessions along with Marlene, Gayle and me.
Our production start-date was looming and we didn’t have a Hanna. We started getting nervous. As we were coming down to the wire Marlene, Lesli and I walked into Gayle’s offices for yet another casting session and noticed Gayle was unusually excited. She told us that Eastwick, a TV update on John Updike’s novel Witches of Eastwick starring Rebecca Romijn, had just been cancelled by ABC, and Gayle had scheduled one of its series regulars to come in and read for Hanna. I’d never seen Ashley Benson before but Gayle had high hopes. Ashley came in literally the day after her other show was cancelled and auditioned. Marlene, Gayle, Lesli and I all breathed a sigh of relief. Ashley was Hanna, and we knew we had our fourth liar. Studio and network tests were set, and Ashley sailed through. Everyone agreed she was the perfect Hanna. We had a pilot.
The pilot table read was set for the evening before we were all scheduled to fly to Vancouver to start production. The network and studio executives, Marlene, Lesli, Gayle and I sat down in a Warner Bros. conference room to watch our full cast, dressed in their street clothes, read the pilot together for the first time, seated at a long table, their scripts open in front of them. I was optimistic but terrified.
The script played great. Just about everything seemed to work. Lucy had a great chemistry from the very beginning with Ian Harding, whom we’d cast as Ezra Fitz. Troian, fresh from her theatre training, commanded the room every time she opened her mouth. There was a palpable excitement in the room as the stories unfolded. Our one concern was Ashley. Her performance felt “under” everyone else’s, quiet, internalized and lacking the energy and dynamism all the other actors brought to the reading. We knew she was beautiful and had done great work before, and we crossed our fingers that she was just feeling shy in the crowded, executive-filled conference room.
Throughout prep it rained non-stop in Vancouver. The pilot was set in Pennsylvania, the week after Labor Day, and Lesli tried to figure out any way she could to make cold, wet, early-December Canada look like sunny, late-summer Pennsylvania. We couldn’t put green leaves back on the barren trees, but Lesli ordered bags of fall leaves to dress exterior sets so at least pops of color could brighten the shots.
At the final production meeting the night before we commenced shooting the forecast indicated the rain would finally break. Our grizzled, local gaffer informed us that that meant that instead of rain cold would set in, and my heart sank. We had a ton of exteriors and a couple of night shoots that I realized could get very cold. You couldn’t see the cold on screen like you could the rain, though, so it was still a trade up.
Production went smoothly and as each girl began playing her role on camera our confidence in the pilot grew. On our third day Ashley worked for the first time. It was the sequence at the police station with her mom and Detective Wilden. When we moved the camera inside Hanna’s mom’s car, Lesli zoomed in tight on singles of Ashley and Laura Leighton playing her mom. Marlene and I sat in the video village, watching the performances on the monitor, and, as Laura hit her character’s a-ha moment, “This is about your father, isn’t it? You think this is going to get his attention?” Ashley’s face radiated all the hurt and shame a girl could possibly feel at being abandoned by her father. Ashley’s big blue eyes told her entire story without her needing to say a word. Marlene and I squeezed each other’s hand as we realized how much the camera loved Ashley, and that the table read in Burbank simply didn’t allow us to get close enough to the actress to see everything she was feeling and playing as the camera can. Ashley was brilliant, and we realized what an amazing ensemble we had.
The only problem was the cold. In the scene where the four girls stand on the street and watch Alison’s body loaded into the coroner’s van (which we shot at four in the morning), it was so cold that Lucy couldn’t stop shivering. In post we had to have all the girls come in and ADR their dialogue because Lucy’s chattering teeth ruined every take. When we shot the flashback of Spencer and Alison arguing outside Spencer’s house in their bikinis it was 29 degrees. The grips had to construct a shelter of translucent white scrim over Troian and Sasha Pieterse to keep a dusting of snowflakes from falling on their bare shoulders, ruining the “summer” scene. The girls wore calf-high Ugg boots just below the frame of the shot, and the moment Lesli called cut wardrobe dressers ran in with full-length down coats to wrap the actresses, rubbing warmth into their arms between takes. To their amazing credit, none of the girls ever complained.
In post-production, Marlene and I discovered how good Lesli’s work really was. She had taken Marlene’s deliciously soapy, mysterious pilot script and made it visually bigger and bolder than we had
ever imagined. As we worked through the pilot with our editor, combing every take of every performance for the richest performance beats, we found layers of emotion we hadn’t noticed while shooting. During production Shay and Bianca Lawson didn’t appear to have the chemistry we needed Emily and Maya to have (unlike with Lucy and Ian or Troian and Julian Morris who played Wren), but it was there in spades once we cut back and forth between their singles in the edit room.
When Marlene King watched the scene of the four lead girls reconnecting as Alison’s body is loaded into the coroner’s van (after fixing Lucy’s chattering-teeth dialogue) her hair stood on end. After more than a year of work on the project, it was at that moment that she truly discovered what the most important themes of her show really were. “I realized from that scene,” she says now, “that this was a wish-fulfillment show about friendship. These four girls become family and love each other unconditionally.”4 She says the edit room discovery that the show was really about the power of friendship guided her execution of the series for the next seven years.
After we delivered our producers’ cut to our studio execs, the studio hired a research company to test it before they delivered it to the network. The test audience was a group of about 25 girls and women ranging from teens to late 30s. They liked the pilot but nearly unanimously tripped on one scene. In the bar scene in Act I, Aria meets Ezra, and he assumes she’s a college student because she’s sitting in a college bar. As the scene was written and shot (straight out of the book), Aria orders a beer and sips it as Ezra orders a whiskey, another cue that suggests to him she must be of age. The test audience said the scene didn’t make any sense, a bartender would never serve beer to a 16-year-old girl, and the apparent lack of realism prevented them from enjoying the rest of the pilot. The scene as shot made perfect sense to us. Small town college bars aren’t always as scrupulous as they should be, Aria carries herself with maturity and confidence … it seemed perfectly plausible to us.
The studio insisted we figure out a way to fix the scene and remove the beer. Marlene and I hated making the change, but the studio was convinced the test audience’s reaction might trip up the network (and its potential test audience), and they insisted we make the change. We went back into the edit room and figured out a way to cut Aria’s lines ordering the beer and the shots of her sipping it. We brought Lucy back in to ADR new dialogue ordering “a cheeseburger” and did our best to cut around shots of the glass of beer. None of it was as elegant or as fun and naughty as the original scene, but it played.
The day after the studio delivered the cut to the network, Marlene and I got a call from the network development exec, the same exec who three years earlier called me while the project was in development at the CW. The exec told us everyone at ABC Family loved the pilot and had zero notes. We were thrilled. And relieved.
Five years of work – creating the concept, fleshing out the story in book form, selling it to one network and failing, developing it at another network and failing, getting a third attempt at a third network, and surviving a tricky casting process and some harsh Canadian cold – had all paid off. Marlene’s vision of Sara Shepard’s book, her uniquely “delicious” tone, proved to be great TV.
All we can do, I realized, is the best we can do. None of us in the crazy, sometimes chaotic development process can ever control everything. It’s a collaboration of artists, creative executives and business people, there are so many voices, ideas and opinions and so many opportunities for error, you just have to get lucky and hope the dice roll your way some of the time. If you have something you believe in, a story, a concept, a property that you know in your heart is a TV show, all you can do is patiently, methodically push forward, rolling the boulder up the hill like Sisyphus, hoping it doesn’t roll back down and crush you, but when it does, stand up again, and roll the boulder back up the hill again and again, until you get it right.
Notes
1 Almost all of the CW’s development slate that year was in line with the network’s initial 20-something lead mandate. Our other project in development there that year, Gossip Girl, was one of the few exceptions. It wound up being the first pilot greenlighted to production and, once ordered to series and on the air, branded the CW as the new WB, the broadcast network built on teen characters and stories. Several years later, when a new management regime was installed, the network succeeded in aging-up its programming to the 20-something game plan that was originally intended.
2 An “open writing assignment,” usually referred to in emails as an “OWA,” is a project in active development at a network that’s looking for a writer because it was bought without a TV writer attached; e.g., in this case Alloy set up the Pretty Little Liars books at ABC Family as an OWA without a TV writer attached.
3 A “bake-off,” one of my favorite expressions in TV development, refers to the competitive filling of an open writing assignment. In a bake-off, at least two writers go into a network and vie for the chance to fill an open writing assignment by pitching their takes on the project. The network, usually in consultation with the producer who brought the takes in, picks its favorite take. That writer wins the job and fills the OWA.
4 Author interview with Marlene King.
12
The Culture of TV Development
So far I’ve talked about the processes and creative strategies of TV development. A big question remains: What’s TV development in Hollywood really like? What are the people who actually do it really like? How do they think, communicate and behave? What are the goals that drive them? In short, what’s the culture of Hollywood TV development?
Contrary to my own worst fears when I moved to LA many years ago, the culture of the TV business in Hollywood is dominated by an ethic of professionalism. The tenor of most development meetings and calls is one of friendliness, respectfulness and professionalism. People are generally warm and positive. The attitude seems to be, “We all have a lot of hard work to do – let’s treat each other with respect and try to get through the day with a smile on our faces.” So much of TV development is ultimately subjective, and people generally work very hard to find polite and diplomatic ways to disagree with each other’s opinions. The best words to describe the culture of the day-to-day work of TV development are professional and collegial.
As I’ve mentioned, the culture of the industry is smart but not intellectual. Most development professionals approach their work with a sense of pragmatism rather than a philosophical or intellectual curiosity. Non-writing TV development professionals in Hollywood tend to think of their work primarily as a business. To the extent that they’re conscious of their work product as part of American culture, they think of it more as popular culture than art. In general, most talent – writers, directors and actors – do think of their work as an art. They have to. They have to find a personal, artistic connection to their work to harness their creative energies and do their jobs. Most non-writing development professionals are sensitive to this and support the artistic integrity of their creative teammates.
The best TV development executive I ever saw was utterly brilliant but completely non-intellectual. She had a high entertainment IQ, had great TV taste, knew what a good TV concept was, how to take a good TV idea and make it better, how to crack a story better than most writers, how to work the system to advantage her projects, and yet she completely lacked any intellectual curiosity about her work. She found it a waste of time, an annoying distraction from the business of making good shows.
The most successful people in TV tend to be the most open to good ideas from others. Lesli Linka Glatter, the producing-director EP of Homeland and the director of the Gilmore Girls and Pretty Little Liars pilots, refers to this as “The best idea wins” approach.1 “This is an art that we do with many people,” she says. “I don’t need to be the smartest person in the room. I want to be in the room with the smartest people.”2
It’s often the second-rate who think they know all the answers and don’t need
to listen to the opinions of others. The best listeners tend to look for pragmatic creative solutions, though, rather than intellectual observations and analysis. If they can use it, it’s valuable. If they can’t use it, they don’t have time for it.
Television is a very hierarchical industry. It’s easy to be misled, though, because what you notice first is Hollywood’s loose and friendly vibe. The youngest assistant calls the network president by her first name. There are no “Mr.s” or “Ms.s” in TV. Work discussions are often punctuated by four-letter words. But underlying the casual dynamic is a strong sense of hierarchy. The pecking order of organizations and meetings is understood by all participants. Everyone has a place and everyone is generally treated respectfully, but some people have standing to articulate their opinions and some do not. Everyone is keenly attuned to the pecking order of any group situation, and junior people wait for senior people to express their thoughts first, then typically fall in line with the opinions of those senior to them or find very delicate and respectful ways to express dissent. Development is hierarchical but production is even more hierarchical. When I’m on set as an EP on pilots or episodes in production crew members call me “sir,” which I still find startling after many years. But that’s the culture of production.