TV Fact Checker: A look at the job of Parks & Recreation's writer's assistant and script coordinator

Wired has a great article about Parks & Recreation's writer's assistant/script coordinator Greg Levine, who also happens to be a regular reader of this blog.  It's worth a read, not only for it's look at a day in the life of a writer's assistant, but also for yet another "how I got the job" story.

How did you come to be the research guy on Parks and Rec?

“When the writer’s strike happened, I wound up in casting…. When it ended I was still there and this company happened to be casting The Office, so I got to know the people there. They said, ‘Hey we’re going to do a new show, do you want to come on board as a writer’s assistant?’… Very early on there were only a few of us on the show. It was just Greg Daniels, Mike Schur, the line producer and myself, really. 

"Mike and Greg would constantly work on stories for the pilot and they would come to me and say, ‘We need to know every step it takes to build a park.’ So, we knew we were going to set the show in Indiana, so I called a few parks-and-rec departments in Indiana and tried to talk to people who were willing to chat. And after talking to several people, I was able to pull together the 30-step process it takes to build a park.” 

What’s your typical day like?

"Myself and the other writer’s assistant are in the writer’s room taking notes, keeping a running log of every joke or story idea pitched in the room. And then at the end of every day we keep them organized by story, so if we want to jump back to Story X we can jump back and I have those notes ready for them. That’s one component. 

"Another is that as script coordinator, we publish every script. We keep a running, fully formatted, production-ready script. The research flows in and out of both of those. Sometimes I’m proofreading a script and catch something. I remember the first time DMV came up. I said, ‘I don’t think DMV is universal across all 50 states.’ So we checked and sure enough it’s BMV in Indiana.”

Check out the rest of the article at Wired.com.

Life in the trenches as an intern

This one goes out to a relative of mine who's getting her first taste of interning in the entertainment business.  It's an actual entry from my journal from... a few years ago when I was doing an internship at an Oscar-winning production company.....

As it's a little profane in spots even for this blog, I've replaced a certain offensive word with another.  See if you can figure out what it is.

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It’s hard being a Smurfing intern in a Smurfing office where they give you Smurfing menial tasks and treat them with the same Smurfing weight as the Smurfing tasks that actually Smurfing matter.  Especially when the Smurfing menial tasks come from the Number 2 person at the Smurfing office and there for carry more Smurfing weight than the more Smurfing relevant tasks from Smurfing people lower on the Smurfing totem pole.

As part of my Smurfing job I’m working the Smurfing reception desk.  This entails answering the Smurfing phone, greeting the guests, helping out with the Smurfing mail, making Smurfing copies and doing whatever Smurfing tasks the Smurfing assistants ask of me.

The Smurfing problem comes in when there is a Smurfing conflict among the Smurfing tasks.

Task 1: An assistant needs several pages copied out of a book.  No Smurfing problem, you say?  The catch: he doesn’t want the dark crease that appears in the spine when you Xerox from a book and he doesn’t want the black lines that outline when the pages ended.  The pages have to be perfectly white, too… no gray colors that often result from copying.

This means each page must be copied once, to obtain a flat “master.”  Then we must use the settings to crop the master as it is Xeroxed and also lighten the pages.  There was a fair amount of trial and error involved in this, especially in making sure that the initial copies weren’t crooked.

That process took some 30 minutes to work out, and two of us were working on it.

Adding to some confusion was that he gave us another copying assignment at the same time and told us that he needed that on 3-hole punched paper.  The other intern assumed this meant that both assignments were to be on 3-holed paper, so we chose that paper tray.

Backing up a little bit, at the height of our confusion, one of the assistants came over to us holding part of a plastic bread sack.  I should specify that this assistant’s job is to handle the personal errands of the Number 2 person at my workplace.  I’ll say it again:  he is paid to handle personal errands.  The interns are not paid, but it’s generally understood that our tasks should be office related, or at the very least, office tasks get priority.

This is complicated by the fact that this person is the assistant for one of the more powerful people.  Therefore, all tasks related to this person, no matter how menial, are to be given priority.  Still, this person has two assistants to handle the tasks.  So in theory, there should be little that trickles down to us.

Yeah, right.

But I’m getting off track… back to the bread sack…

“Uh guys, we need one of you to make some calls to some stores, and find out who carries this kind of bread.  Try [Overrated Store #1] or [Overrated Store #2] and… well… any other place you can think of.  It’s really important.”

Suffice it to say, the place where I work has nothing to do with bread.  This isn’t a business errand.  And, yeah, they don’t pay me, but they also don’t pay me to do that.

I wait three beats, give him the “you have got to be Smurfing joking” look, and say, “It might be a while.”

You see, by this point there were at least five other major requests for copies, and all of them had to be done fast.  Plus the mail needed to be taken down the street and the other intern is the only one permitted to do that.  This left me as the only one to do the final steps of copying “Task 1.” 

Let me explain something about the copiers where I work.  You have to input a code correspondent to the person you are doing the copies for.  If the machine is left idle for a few minutes, it automatically logs out and resets all the settings.  This posed a problem, as we didn’t want to lose the specifications we’d spent half an hour working to figure out.  But the mail was due for pickup soon, and we still had all those other copies to do.  The only option was for me to do those copies while the other intern ran down the street.

Unfortunately, I still had to cover the reception desk and answer the phone, meaning I spent about fifteen minutes constantly running back and forth between the front desk and the copy room like a chicken with my head cut off. 

Somehow I get it done and juggled, and just as the other intern returns, the copies are done.  (Not all of them, just Task 1).  He rushes them upstairs, and I take a breath before figuring out how to accommodate the other requests.

It is in this brief respite that the other assistant for Number 2 walks over and sees the bread wrapping.  She asks, “Did you track this down?”  Patiently, perhaps too patiently, I explain that there are a lot of things we’ve been assigned and we’re nowhere near catching up.  “It could be a while,” I tell her.  She takes it and disappears into her office area.  For a moment, I’m foolish enough to think that I’ve been relieved of that task.

Two minutes later, the other assistant shows up.  “Have you guys called these places yet?”  (You see how it works:  She kicked him, so he has to kick me.)  So I explain it again, stopping just short of saying that this is a prime example of why there should be a real receptionist here rather than assigning an intern to “play receptionist.” 

He seems disappointed, but I’d feel a lot guiltier if I didn’t know the guy has a habit of dumping these tasks and making them sound like a priority when there are more important things to be done.  He walks off again.

The other intern returns.  “Uh, I screwed up.  He didn’t want these three hole punched.  We have to do them again.”

Now this isn’t as simple as just running it through the copier, because the holes will leave black marks on the side of the copies.  I think you can see where this is going.

Yep. We have to start all over again on these copies.  There’s another 20 minutes wasted.

It gets better.  Remember how I said the mail had to go out earlier?  Well, now someone who wasn’t paying attention at mail call needs something sent out, so I have to send the intern out again before the next and final pickup in 30 minutes.

Once more I play the headless chicken.  Cluck, cluck.

And it’s here that the phone starts ringing off the hook.  Usually I just have to transfer people, so it’s not taxing in that sense, but it’s impossible to juggle all these tasks at once.

An hour or so later, we’re finally caught up.  I can almost smell the other assistant coming with the bread bag again when I’m given another office related task.  So I spend an hour on this mind-numbing chore, but at least get to avoid the humiliation of calling around asking for bread.

Maybe, maybe, if I was getting paid I’d have a bit more of a sense of humor about it.  For now I’m telling myself it’ll pay off when I sell this story as a sitcom script.

Tuesday Talkback: Which show improved the most from pilot to its eventual heights?

Fall TV premieres are in full swing and that means pilot episodes galore. Shows are under intense pressure to hook audiences immediately. Audiences are fickle and networks have itchy trigger fingers. A weak pilot (that somehow managed to get ordered to series for one reason or another) could spell doom for a series - especially if the show doesn't improve in a hurry.

But some of TV's biggest success stories have been shows that took a while to find their audience. Cheers - despite getting off to a creatively strong start - was dead last in the ratings for all shows in its debut year. Seinfeld not only had low ratings and a very short initial order of four episodes, but it's pilot episode frankly wasn't all that funny. It definately took the show a while to find its voice. In fact, I might say that it ranks as one of the series that improved most from its pilot to its glory days.

So what's your pick for a series that started slow but eventually became awesome?

Making the implausuble plausible - suspension of disbelief

Perhaps some of you have checked out Ringer, the new Sarah Michelle Gellar series featuring a young woman on the run from the mob and the law who is given reason to believe her twin sister is dead. Seeing a chance for a fresh start, she assumes her sister's identity and - at least in the pilot - does a good enough job of replacing her that no one suspects a switch has happened.

The premise is similar to ABC Family's The Lying Game, where two long-lost twin sisters meet after being adopted by different families. The sister raised in privilege has the sister raised in foster homes switch places with her while she continues investigating their past. And again, no one seems to catch on immediately that Foster Sister isn't Privileged Sister.

I've known a set of twins or two and I'd have to say that it's really unlikely that even sisters who grew up together would be able to maintain that sort of ruse for long. Even when they look exactly alike, there are too many subtle differences in manerisms, behavior, and even vocal inflection. So how does the script get around this?

In both cases, the other people in the replaced person's life is unaware that a twin even exists. As silly as it seems, that's enough to clear the basic suspension of disbelief. If my wife suddenly started acting differently, I know my first thought would likely be along the lines of "Is something bothering her? Did I do something to tick her off? Is she under a lot of stress?"

As opposed to, "Holy shit! My wife has clearly been replaced by a twin that I don't even have any way of knowing existed." Some might call it a contrivance, but I think it works because from the POV of everyone in the twins' lives, they have no reason to suspect a switch has taken place.

I also call this the "Marty McFly Rule." A while back, I did a series on Back to the Future and a few people wrote in saying they never bought that Marty's parents didn't recognize their own son as the guy who helped them get together 30 years earlier. I've never questioned this, for the following reasons.

First, it's been 30 years between them meeting "Calvin Klein" and they only knew him a week. My high school days are less than half that distance in the past and I know I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a crystal-clear recollection of someone I only knew briefly then.

Plus, if I encountered that same person 15 or 30 years later - or rather, someone who looked exactly like that person - my first thought wouldn't be "They must be a time traveler!" It would be, "Wow, that guy looks a lot like someone I used to know." You also have to figure that with their son, they've seen him grow up into that face, so it's not as sudden as seeing this guy materialize out of the blue.

So that's what you have to keep in mind with suspension of disbelief. Some times it's about selling an idea to the audience, and other times it's merely about accounting for the characters' own disbelief.

Friday Free-For-All: Deep Space Nine's "Plain and Simple Garak" on root beer and crying wolf

I've long been of the opinion that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the best series of the franchise, and one of those reasons is the character of Garak, played by Andrew Robinson. From his first appearance in the second episode of the series, Garak announced himself to be just "plain and simple Garak." In fact, that was far from the truth.

Deep Space Nine was a space station abandoned by the Cardassians, a race in a state of truce with the Federation, after they were finally forced off of the planet Bajor by the revolt of the populace. Basically, think of the Cardassian Military as the SS and Bajor as WWII-era Poland. Thus, the Cardassians weren't too popular on Bajor or Deep Space Nine after the evacuation - making Garak's continued residency an oddity that immediately made one wonder about his history.

Beyond that, Garak was often a good source of the sorts of "outsider" observations and often dark lines that some of the other characters couldn't get away with. There's also the fact that he so often bent the truth that eventually everyone stopped taking anything he says at face value. In this clip from Season 3's "Improbable Cause," Dr. Bashir uses "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" as an analogy for why no one trusts Garak when he seems to be in danger. Garak - in one of my all-time favorite lines of dialogue - offers a different interpretation. (The teleplay is credited to Rene Echevarria.)



Another excellent Garak scene is this exchange between him and Quark in Season 4's "The Way of the Warrior." Here, root beer is used as a surprisingly deft metaphor for the Federation. This episode was written by Ira Steven Behr & Robert Hewitt Wolfe

Awkward sex scenes

Okay, I'm totally drained of inspiration, so I'll fall back on the topic that always generates conversation here: sex.

What's your pick for most awkward sex scene in a film? Off the top of my head, I'd have to give the trophy to a scene in Enemy at the Gates where Jude Law and Rachel Weisz have sex in a military camp while trying not to wake up the sleeping soldiers RIGHT NEXT TO LAW!

I'm willing to be few of you made it through the entire scene before closing your browser window in embarrassment.

I'm sure the director thought this would be incredibly tense, beautiful and hot but for me the scene is such a mix of pretension and awkwardness that I can't help but think it sinks the entire film right there. My take on the film has always been that the real story was the cat-and-mouse game between the two snipers, but the story's love triangle takes up an inordinate amount of time. It's so out of tone with the rest of the film that it ruins some really cool stuff.

Your selections?

Drinking age is 21, morons.

It's illegal in America for anyone under the age of 21 to purchase alcohol. That means if you're writing a scene of 18 year-olds toasting to either graduating high school or starting college, you CAN'T SET IT IN A BAR!

That also means that you shouldn't have 18 year old characters openly drinking alcohol at a restaurant - so watch that mistake. Sure, when this thing is cast your "18 year olds" will be played by people far closer to thirty, but try to demonstrate at least a little commitment to plausibility.

Related to this, if you go to the trouble of your characters having fake IDs please spare us the obligatory scene where either the fake name is absurdly lame or the fake picture barely resembles the lead. Superbad got away with "McLovin'" but you're going to have to top that if you don't want it to feel like a retread.