Friday Free-for-All: Michael Scott vs. David Brent

Last night, The Office bid farewell to Steve Carrel's Michael Scott in a rather nice episode. The debate will probably be never be settled as to which Office "boss" was better - Michael Scott or the British equivalent David Brent, played by Ricky Gervais. Perhaps we can settle this with a simple dance-off?



I'm calling it for USA.

Don't feel bad, Brent... you'll always have your singing career.

Write for the read - Scream

In preparation for Scream 4, I found myself watching a making-of documentary on the first Scream. In it, writer Kevin Williamson says that he had a specific approach to his style. In his words, "I wrote it for the read."

What this means is: he made sure that it wasn't taxing on the reader. Once they picked the script up, he didn't want to give them an opportunity to put the script down. And sure, it sounds like elementary advice when I just say it like that, but you wouldn't believe how many writers seem to forget this, based on their opening pages. I see a lot of openings that are just bogged down with unnecessary descriptive detail, drowning in exposition and clunky dialogue.

In contrast, Scream has a very clean, very gripping opening. A teenage girl is home alone and she gets a call from a strange man. The first six pages or so are made up of very quick, very sharp dialogue between the two. This makes those early pages into a very easy read. The reader very quickly falls into the pattern of turning pages and then just when they start thinking, "This scene is kind of long," they hit the moment on p. 7 where the Killer says, "YOU LISTEN, YOU LITTLE BITCH. IF YOU HANG UP ON ME AGAIN I'LL GUT YOU LIKE A FISH. UNDERSTAND?"

That gets the reader's attention, and from ten on, the tension ramps up. It takes 17 pages to get through the opening sequence, and it reads like butter. It's a case where something takes up a lot of pages, but it works. Notably, those 17 pages translate to just under 13 minutes of film in the final cut. I think most readers who encountered the script would sense the heightened pace. (For me, I probably wouldn't have to think about it - I'd more likely notice that the script was a smooth easy read.)

Most of the time, I decide if something's a PASS or CONSIDER right after I finish the read and before I write a word of the write-up. It's a "go with the gut" kind of feeling and it comes down to nothing more complicated than "Did I like the script?" An easy read always equals a script in contention for a Consider. It's not like I start tallying points and do some kind of equation to decide, "Ah, yes.... this is a Consider."

An easy read means that the writer is usually doing something right. The flow, the pace, the distribution of information and the arcing of the plots and character arcs are all in harmony. That's what it takes to get a consider - a script that's worthy of presentation at the next level.

A hard read means that something under the hood is broken. Usually I'll devote my coverage to discussing specifically what is broken, but I'll almost never give a CONSIDER to a hard read. Over the years I've seen writers manage easy reads for very complex and complicated stories and premises. If your simple romantic comedy is a chore to get through - that's YOUR problem.

Write for the read.

Job Watch - looking for Writer's Assistant jobs

I got an email last week asking for an update on my job search. At the moment, I haven't really hit paydirt. I've been lucky enough to meet with a few writer's assistants who've offered to pass my resume along, and I've corresponded with a few working writers. As I suspected back when I put my initial plea out there in March, I'm still a little early. There's still about three weeks until the upfronts that announce the lineups. That means that shows on the bubble don't yet know if they're coming back, and most pilots certainly don't know if they're picked up yet either.

I admit there was some strategy to putting that first call out there so early. I figured it was better to be a bit ahead of the curve and have some time to talk to those contacts personally while they were free, rather than risk waiting too long and contacting them after any open positions might have already been filled. So yeah, it's mostly been meet-and-greets and a few polite emails, but that's the reality of looking for work in this business.

I will say that by writing this blog over the last two years, it has helped in making contact with people. I don't have a huge readership when you compare me to something like Ain't It Cool News, but I do have an audience of people within the industry. (Frankly, I still get shocked when someone working on a TV show or movie has heard of my blog. Sometimes I forget people actually read my ramblings.) It's become something of a calling card and it's given me a bit of credibility too. Most of all, I think it's put a face to my resume.

So this would be my advice to those of you trying to network long-distance: start a blog and get a Twitter. I talked to one assistant who made many professional contacts via Twitter before moving out to LA and that later led to help finding a roommate and getting settled upon coming to Hollywood.

If my blog directly leads to a new job, I'll certainly update you all. (Knowing me, I'll probably get at least a post or two out of it.) In the meantime, I'm aggressively looking for a job as a writer's assistant - or even a writers' PA if that's what it takes to get my foot in the door on a show. So if you're a fan of my writing and think I'm the sort of personality who'd fit well on your support staff, please contact me.

Like the side of the blog says, I've read for agencies and production companies. I've worked in development and have a fair amount of experience in the industry. Honestly, I'm keeping my eyes open for development openings too, as I'm aware my resume is pretty tailored to that position.

So if you've got any openings, please drop me a line at ZuulTheReader@gmail.com. We'll chat and I'll give you my resume, no obligation. I've got plenty of good references too if you're not willing to take my word for it.

Tuesday Talkback - What are you writing?

So what's everyone working on these days?

My current writing docket includes a webseries, a half-hour single camera pilot, a high-concept action feature, and a character-driven thriller.

What mediums are you writing for?
High concept or low concept?
Do you prefer working on one project at a time, or do you do what I am, moving between several projects at various stages?

Give actors characters to play

I was watching the actor commentary on The Social Network this past weekend, and one of the many interesting tidbits that comes up is the fact that Andrew Garfield and Jesse Eisenberg each read for the other's roles at one point. In fact Jesse mentions that it was quite interesting to watch Garfield's performance, as he realized that Garfield was making choices that never would have occurred to him.

This reminded me of something that a lot of writers either forget or never learn - the script is just one aspect of a very collaborative process. An actor will put the screenplay through their own "process" as they attempt to build their performance. Sometimes they draw conclusions about their character that line up with your intentions, sometimes they won't. They'll stick to your script (mostly), but there's no guarantee that their view of the character will be precisely the same as yours.

But the thing that allows two actors to make different choices that are both "right" for the film is that as written, the characters have depth and complexity. Andrew Garfield's Eduardo might be totally different from Jesse Eisenberg's Eduardo, but they could both be valid within the script. Good writing makes this sort of complexity possible, as it provides a wealth of opportunity for an actor to draw upon.

Bad writing reduces characters to little more than chess pieces manipulated though the game board that is the plot. Those sorts of characters are rarely interesting for actors to play, and I guarantee they're not much fun for people like me to read. Now, this is NOT an invitation to write a long opening sequence that tries to tell your character's whole life story via flashbacks and therapy sessions. Instead, it's a reminder to approach every scene while keeping in mind each character's POV, motivations and history that they bring to that moment. Find little things you can do that resonate on a character level. (If you're really good, you can find little moments that do this, and go in line with the themes of the story.)

I'm sure there are people who could write entire books about this. I think an easy thing to boil this down to is: "Write characters who actors would want to play." Writers sometimes get so caught up in their cool story or the awesome twists that they're sure no one will see coming that they totally forget to give the actors anything beyond executing those twists.

Characters need to be more than a means to plot's end. Good characters can get you good actors, and good actors can often get you a successful movie.

Start late, get out early - Law & Order: LA

I'm going to give you a little bit of homework here. There's a fundamental rule of screenwriting that says "start a scene as late as possible; get out as early as possible." Or to put it in layman's terms...

STOP FUCKING OVERWRITING AND OVER-EXPLAINING EVERY! LAST! DETAIL!

*whew!* That actually felt good. Maybe it was just venting that, maybe it was that effigy of bad spec scripts I just burned, but I genuinely feel better.

Anyway, though pretty much every good movie or TV show should stand as an object lesson of this, there are probably few shows on TV that better demonstrate this than Law & Order. It's pretty much pure procedural, which means every scene is driving the story. The show is more plot-driven than character-driven, so that makes the series a perfect teaching tool for noting how little we actually need to see in order to follow the story. The plots are so dense that every scene has to cut right to the point, while still managing smooth transitions.

Unfortunately, the original Law & Order is no longer in production, but since its retooling, Law & Order: LA has been almost as good and this weeks episode "East Pasadena" can stand with the best of the classic series. Even better, this episode not only has one of the series strongest plots, but it manages a pretty good character-driven subplot for Detective Morales (Alfred Molina.)

If you have some free-time and keep track of how short the individual scenes are and how much information is conveyed in them.

Scream 4 - When a core character needs to die

Note: The second half of this article contains many spoilers about who does and doesn't survive Scream 4, (as well as Serenity.) You have been warned.

When writing a thriller or an action movie, one of the most important things a writer can convey is the sense that the script might have the stones to do the unpredictable and actually knock off a main character or two before the end. I believe this is what Blake Snyder called, "the whiff of death."

One recent film that really conveyed this feeling was Taken. Part of the reason I got drawn into the script is there was just something about the tone that gave me the sense the filmmakers would have the balls to end the film on a dark note. It was the kind of film that could have ended with Liam Neeson failing, and his daughter winding up either dead or sold into sexual slavery. The brilliant thing about that is that once you convince the audience that the unpleasant is possible, the "happy ending" is so much more of a relief and release.

Sometimes in order to make these stakes real, you've got to sacrifice a beloved character. The thinking is that if the audience sees you gun down an audience favorite, you've proven that affection for the characters alone won't save them and everyone is fair game. Supposedly, when Return of the Jedi was being developed, screenwriter Lawrence Kasden was a major proponent for killing off one of the core characters at some point in the story. He felt it would have been more powerful for the Rebel victory to come at some cost, and he was a major advocate for killing a character early in Act Three, so that the audience would worry that they were just the first of several.

In most accounts, Lando is the character considered most expendable, and he would have been killed after detonating the Death Star and failing to escape the blast in time. Harrison Ford was also a major proponent of killing off Han Solo, feeling the character had nowhere to go, so he might as well die and give the whole story some resonance. As you know, all the heroes came out unscathed, and it's possible the film wouldn't have been as big a hit if Han bit the dust. Then again, if that had been part of the plan from the start, perhaps it would have helped set the tone of the film more in the vein of The Empire Strikes Back. (Or it would have clashed like hell with the kid-friendly Ewoks, making the film even more uneven as a result.)

Serenity is a good example of this detail being executed properly. The film was spun off from the TV series Firefly and was hoped to be the first of several films with the TV cast. This made it all the more shocking when little more than halfway through the script, the Shepherd Book is killed. Even more traumatic to fans, less than half an hour later, beloved pilot Wash is swiftly killed after getting the ship on the ground mid-battle.

Two much-liked characters dead - and what does the film gain? Tension. Writer/director Joss Whedon used those deaths to set the stage for a climactic final battle where most of the survivors are in the middle of a pitched battle against the ravenous Reavers. Suddenly it doesn't seem unlikely that Whedon might go for an ending that has ALL of the Serenity crew go down in battle, and sure enough, as the fight progresses, there's a moment where it seems everyone's in mortal danger. Even when River ensures everyone else's safety and takes on the horde herself, we're still not sure that her noble sacrifice won't be a permanent one. There's only one thing we're sure of about the ending - anything can happen.

Fans still call for Whedon's head for killing Wash, but what that loss did for the climax is immeasurable. The alternative would have been a case like the original Star Trek, where very week you knew that if someone was going to die, it'd only be the nameless extra who beamed down to the planet with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Kill a core character, and suddenly everyone feels like fair game.

Which brings me to Scream 4. Last week I said that I hoped that Neve Campbell's Sidney wouldn't be killed off over the course of the film, especially as part of a bid to hand off the franchise to younger characters. Even after seeing the film, I still stand by that thought. Sidney IS the franchise and the neatest trick of this latest sequel is that rather than diminishing that, it's a flat-out confirmation of that fact.

I might as well just say this flat-out - the film completely cleans house on the new teenage cast. None of the fresh-faced CW types make it out of this film alive, nor do any of the other new characters, save for Marley Shelton's Deputy Judy. The returning characters of Sidney, Gale Weathers and Dewey Riley all survive to the final fade-out. After seeing the film, I feel like there should have been one core-cast death ala Wash, as it would have lent more tension to the climax when Sidney seems VERY likely to meet her maker.

There's a scene about halfway through the film where Gale encounters the killer and gets stabbed a few times. Dewey is quickly on the scene too and has a brief tussle with the killer before he (or she) gets away. Despite a very brief attempt to convince us that Gale might die, it's pretty clear by the time we see her at the hospital that if they were going to kill her, they'd have done it already.

One of Scream 2's best decisions was killing off Randy. No one wanted to see Randy die - he was one of the fan favorites from the first film. He was part of the core group who returned from the original so there was the sense that he was a bit more invincible, and he CERTAINLY wasn't supposed to be killed mid-movie. When Randy was killed partway through the film, it lent the sense that an even bigger casualty was possible later.

In my humble opinion, that's what Scream 4 was missing, but I'm not naive enough to think that the option was never discussed. I've worked in development when these sorts of franchise films are being developed and there's always a point where the possibility of killing a core character is considered. Maybe the filmmakers still regretted killing off Randy and got gunshy about offing another "regular." Maybe the actor in question balked at coming back just to die, or maybe the studio worried about what would happen if one of the core three died. We can't know, but I'm sure it was on the table at some point.

The issue is made a little bigger by the fact that neither Gale nor Dewey have an especially integral role to the story, and there's very little they have to accomplish after their brush with Ghostface (save for their role in the climax.) Killing one of them might have energized the character arc of the other, and given that character a stronger emotional arc to play.

My preference probably would have been to use Gale's horrible wound as a red herring and then - while the audience is still reeling at the possibility that she might bleed to death - have the killer finish off Dewey. This helps in several ways. First, Dewey's survived severe stabbings in all of the other films. When he first goes down, the audience might expect another fakeout - giving his death that much more impact. Secondly, as the only "new" character to survive to the end is the Deputy, we've already got someone who can fill Dewey's role in the climax of the film. Finally, it means that Gale gets the story she's been trying to find, but it comes at the cost of her husband.

And of course, this means that when the killer stabs Sidney in the gut and it looks like we're seeing the series heroine bleed to death, the first thing in our minds is, "They killed Dewey, Gale's hanging on by a thread, so they're probably cleaning house and this really is it for Sidney."

(I will admit that I'm so used to trying to out-think the creators that when Sidney was stabbed, I didn't dismiss it as a fake out, for I assumed that NOT killing Gale earlier was to lull us into a false sense of security that our old friends would make it out alive. Basically, I didn't trust them not to reverse the reversal.)

In the end, I don't think this is a huge black mark against the film. In fact, given the way the Cox/Arquette relationship talk dominated some of the press for this film, actually killing off one of those two might have only lead to some uncomfortable speculation about behind-the-scenes tensions.

But I can't help but wonder - if Dewey died, how would that have affected the reaction in the theater when Sidney takes what appears to be a mortal wound? I bet it would have led to even bigger cheers when she tells the killer: "First rule of remakes - Don't fuck with the original."