In One Day in the Room...

I heard so many cultural references/recommendations that I now need to read/watch - it’s hard to keep track! Baskhi’s Lord of the Rings, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany, countless Sam Peckinpah films I’ve never seen, the list goes on… I was extremely fortunate to have seen Aguirre: Wrath of God for the amount of times that’s been a character/tonal reference. What I’ve come to realize is that in many cases cultural references like these are just the most concise and efficient way to transmit your idea for a part of the show to the group. Having the reference shows that the idea can be done well, can be drawn upon, and also elicits any inherent enthusiasm for the source material in regards to your idea. It’s a nice bit of transference. What is also means is the most TV, film, books and comic books you’ve read and can call upon - the better you will be in the room.

On Secret Identities

There’s some questions swirling around on how to handle some secret identity subplots that have been set up on our show — during a debate about it, one of the writers said this: “Secret identity crap can be like cat nip for a writer, you keep wanting to go back to it but it doesn’t deliver new drama, it doesn’t progress but instead distracts from other new drama – and there’s always too many iterations to always consider.” It’s moments like this that remind me that TV writing (and any specific form of writing) is a profession that must be cultivated with years of work. So many people think that because they watch TV and love TV and know how to formulate dialogue on some level - that they are prepared to switch careers and delve into TV writing as a profession. I’m not saying you shouldn’t pursue your dreams, but you shouldn’t think it’s readily deserved or easy to achieve either. Little blips of wisdom like this, that the writer threw out, came from years of writing her own work - and moving up the ladder on shows in various positions. You have to do the work again and again and again to realize the little intellectual pitfalls that are unique to your profession - and be able to articulate them to a different room in a totally different context. Another writer said, “writing is just averting accidents all the time” - so like any good navigator, with intuition, training, and experience you learn to avoid the accidents.

When to Work Backwards

We got about halfway through breaking EP107 on the show before the overall strategy needed to change. At that point we vaguely knew where we were going, and there were certain huge finale moments that we knew would not change.

So, we’ve paused breaking specifics in 107 and have returned to this big grid/board that has squares going horizontally across for every episode (1-10) with a row for each major character. Each square is for the major plot movement & arc of that character for each episode. What I didn’t realize, even as the writers’ assistant, is how much of the previous arcs that we’d already established had changed. It seems that as you plow ahead with plot, it can really revise how you look at characters retroactively.

The first thing we had to do was reconfigure the previous episodes on that grid so that they really reflected where each character was “coming from” heading into the terra incognita of EP107-110. Or really, 109 since enough of 110 had been figured out by the showrunner in advance of the room ever meeting.

After we went back to the beginning, we had to skip to the end and work backwards from where we wanted each character to end up in the finale. Essentially, we were (and are) just trying to fill in three squares (109, 108, 107). But to me it felt like working backwards meant absolutely anything is possible (in a dire sense). It’s like a Rubik’s cube where you can take the pieces out of the square rather than just shuffle them around. We began the process last week, without the showrunner in the room — today, with him back, we’ll see if we can get past the questions and create enough of a road map to return to 107 and continue trucking forward.

Mayhem

I had no idea that the word was actually a medieval legal term for intentionally damaging or destroying the limb of another person, basically a form of “maiming” - check out the definition below and please accept this as a second cop-out post for the week as I have to rush to complete a short screenplay for a 2 day competition this weekend, as well as catch up on story materials for the show I’m working on, and complete episode two of a podcast series. Ya yoy.

Legally speaking, mayhem refers to the gruesome crime of deliberately causing an injury that permanently disfigures another. The name derives via Middle English from the Anglo-French verb maheimer ("to maim") and is probably of Germanic origin; the English verb maim comes from the same ancestor. The disfigurement sense of mayhem first appeared in English in the 15th century. By the 19th century the word had come to mean any kind of violent behavior; nowadays, mayhem can be used to suggest any kind of chaos or disorder, as in "there was mayhem in the streets during the citywide blackout."

Cop Out Post

I’m a bit under the gun today and also have zero creative energy for a good daily post, so I’m going to do a total cop out here and list the books that make up the top portion of my standing desk at work. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll look back on this detail and be glad I wrote it down.

So, from top to bottom:

The Magus - John Fowles (have not yet read)

Papa Hemingway - A.E. Hotchner (have read, highly recommend)

Too Far - Rich Shapero (have not yet read, and probably never will - someone was giving these out on campus at UChicago my second year)

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden - Denis Johnson (have read, highly highly recommend)

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - Ernest Hemingway (have read, at least most of them, lots of good, some bad, and some that don’t hit the nail on the head but damn they make you think about writing)

Hellboy: Masks and Monsters - Mike Mignola (have read, not the best Mignola but still a good time)

Batman: The Dark Night Strikes Again - Frank Miller (have read, not magnum opus but amazing)

The Sandman: Worlds’ End - Neil Gaiman (have read many times, love this one and love this series)

Outcast - Robert Kirkman (meh)

Seven Novels of Jules Verne - Jules Verne (really want to read these but have not gotten to them yet, in the meantime will probably vaguely act like I’ve read Jules Verne before… I took this one because it’s a real chunker and good for the standing desk)

Okay well, it ended up being a nice warm-up for the fingers at least…

NYT - Yorgos Lanthimos

Just wanted to record a very compelling segment of a deep-dive article the NYT did on one of my favorite directors Yorgos Lanthimos - can read the full thing here. I love the idea that the director creates an atmosphere of almost zen-line now-ness wherein the actors can’t connect to anything to far ahead or behind them in their character’s arc. It’s “completely instinctual.” The actors go on to talk about how they have no sense of the work they’ve just done after the production is completed.

Really exciting that Lanthimos is delving into new territory with “The Favourite” in that he’s directing someone else’s script.

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The atmosphere he creates has more in common with an experimental theater troupe than a typical multimillion-dollar movie set. Lanthimos works to bring an actor’s instincts to the surface — and he shrugs off questions about a character’s psychological motivation, back story and context as effortlessly as he does questions about himself. “If you want to [expletive] annoy him, ask him character back-story questions,” Colin Farrell told me, laughing, of his first experience working with Lanthimos on the set of “The Lobster,” where Lanthimos refused to tell him what happened in the scene before the one they were filming. “He doesn’t really feel the need, you know. For him a story is born and dies between the first and last page.” Lanthimos is “trying to give space to mystery,” Ariane Labed, his wife, told me. “Yorgos does not explain things, even to the actors really, and they’re not used to that. But then they go through this experience, and they discover that having gaps in their characters’ journeys, they actually have more room for their own imaginations, [their] own mistakes, [their] own doubts, and I think that’s why actors are amazing in Yorgos’s films. They’re on the line.”

Two Observations from Show

 First, is a comment from a writer on our show who used to be an editor (both of reality TV and scripted). He, rather hilariously, explained to us how an editor would talk to a writer when cutting back chunks of their work to get to the right run-time: “I know that’s what you thought was in the scene, but it’s not in the footage so it’s now what we’re going to work with now.” The idea that “it’s not in the footage” was interesting to me, also scary. The idea that you may have written something brilliant, or at least intended to write something brilliant, but if for whatever reason it doesn’t show up in the actual footage (bad coverage, the scene didn’t unfold the way you intended, the writing wasn’t as good as you thought, or simply that it is not urgently necessary to the story) then it will be cut out.

The other thing is a more logistical process note to myself. And that is: if there’s going to be a break during the show (in our case, Thanksgiving) it REALLY is helpful to have intricate and detailed notes laid out before the break — notes that track exactly what

Always have really intricate and detailed notes laid out before a break because it is really hard to return to that when you’re back and remember the trains of thought that led you down certain rabbit holes of character arcs and subplots. And mentally, it just feels like eons ago when you return — the more big notes you have to jump-start those thought processes again is really helpful.

Quotes from Nowhere

I’m not sure who would say this or why, but I have a feeling it’s a metaphor for social media:

“You ever listen to the sound of a single frog. It’s beautiful, but it’s also lonely. The pauses between croaks are the sound of loneliness – and perhaps that adds to the beauty. How about a chorus of frogs? It’s also quite glorious, there’s no loneliness there but a strength there instead – a calm confident power of nature.

But you can reach unnatural numbers too. A plague of frogs? They’re more than a chorus, they’re mechanical cacophony. You can’t tell them apart, you can’t hear a song – there are so many that it becomes one solid noise, a blare. And you don’t know what they’re saying anymore, they’re not strong or lonely – they’re just deaf. It makes you miss the sound of a single lonely frog.”