Month: December 2015

Larry Brody on Making Your Scenes Flow

flow_by_waqarwru

The TV Writer on TV Writing
by Larry Brody

Over my years running various TV series I’ve been amazed at how many professional writers don’t understand the basics of good storytelling. In a nutshell, the trick to working out your plot is to always remember that the scenes must flow from and to each other in a progression that takes into account three different elements of audience appeal. As in, the scene progression must be logical, surprising, and climactic.

What this means is that everything that happens must grow out of what happened before. On one level, given the personalities of the characters and the situation they are in, each plot point must be inevitable. And on another level, these inevitable twists and turns mut be such that the reader or viewer could never have predicted them.

Sound paradoxical? Crazy? Let’s take a true crime example. The kind of thing that happens all too often in real life. read article

2016 WGA TV Writing Award Nominees

WGA

TELEVISION AND NEW MEDIA NOMINEES
(for shows airing in 2015)
by Team TVWriter™ Press Service

DRAMA SERIES

The Americans, Written by Peter Ackerman, Joshua Brand, Joel Fields, Stephen Schiff, Lara Shapiro, Joe Weisberg, Tracey Scott Wilson, Stuart Zicherman; FX

Better Call Saul, Written by Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, Gennifer Hutchison, Bradley Paul, Thomas Schnauz, Gordon Smith; AMC read article

Hurtling Toward the TV Remake Apocalypse

sherlock

by Peter Bradshaw

This article was originally published in the UK, but the situation is dire here in the good ole USA as well. Pity the poor TV executives who are running “dangerously low” on beloved old media content to re-imagine, re-do, and de-fang. What will they do when they – shudder – run out?

An awful crisis is unfolding in the world of film and TV writing, a crisis that I learned about when I had coffee recently with a top British producer. We are reaching peak reboot. The number of out-of-copyright pop culture figures or mythic icons who can be reinvented and reimagined for a modern age, or sexed up in their original setting, is running dangerously low.

Sherlock has obviously been done. So has Merlin. King Arthur is being done again on the big screen. Dracula and Frankenstein are always being summoned from the grave, the cultural undead; and The Mummy’s being remade – again. read article

The Token in the Writers Room

Do TV writing diversity programs help…or are they just a new way to stitch on ye olde scarlet letter?

splashd-diversity-withtextby Rebecca Sun

In their ideal form, the mentorship and training programs that the Big Four television networks use to identify and develop new writing talent also serve to jump-start the careers of diverse writers. Such was the case for Rashad Raisani, who got into NBCUniversal’s Writers on the Verge program in 2007. Erika Kennair, who ran the program then and now is vp comedy development at ABC, pitched him for USA’s Burn Notice and worked out an unusual three-year deal in which NBCU would pay Raisani’s staff-writer (or entry-level) salary, even though the drama was being produced by Fox Television Studios. If the show decided to bring him back with the customary annual promotion the following year, Fox only would have to cover the pay difference until the NBCU contract expired. By the time Burn Notice ended in 2013, Raisani was a co-executive producer, paid no differently than the rest of the room. After helping develop NBC’s short-lived Allegiance as executive producer, he signed an overall deal with Universal TV in February and now is focusing full-time on development. “There’s no way I’d be here if it were not for Writers on the Verge because it made the decision for [showrunner] Matt Nix to hire me really easy since I was free,” says Raisani. “I also benefited from the fact that there was a diversity hire before me named Ben Watkins[now creator of Amazon’s Hand of God], and he was the star of the staff. He showed that ‘diversity’ doesn’t mean ‘second class.’ ”

Despite major strides in diversifying television with Empire, Fresh Off the Boat andBlack-ish, the stats on writers in Hollywood still are sobering: Minorities make up 13.7 percent of writers rooms while comprising 37.9 percent of the population nationwide, with only 10 individuals of color (out of 73) on THR‘s 2015 Power Showrunners list. There are no stats available on how many minority writers made it in TV without going through a program, though one Latino alum jokes: “John Ridley had to win an Oscar to get a television show.” Which is why new-talent development and “inclusion” programs, such as the ones every single broadcast network supports — no doubt part good business, part public relations, part social conscience — are a key part of writers room staffing. Like college scholarships for minorities, these programs are all about removing as many barriers to entry as possible, including financial ones. But with every good intention can come inadvertent side effects, from writers of color who are perceived as less qualified to the subsidization of first-season salaries that can lead to a “freebie” mentality among showrunners toward those scribes. read article

Know Thy Elevator Pitch!

If you want to sell yourself you have to be ready to make your move at all times. Know your stuff! Know your strengths! Know your elevator pitch!

elevator ninjaby Richard “RB” Botto

It’s been said that luck is where preparation meets opportunity. Only one of those things is completely in your control?—?preparation. Whether you’re a screenwriter, a filmmaker, an entrepreneur or anyone else trying to draw attention and support to a personal or professional endeavor, there’s no excuse not to have your elevator pitch down cold. It needs to be practiced, honed and memorized so that when opportunity rears its head, the words roll off your tongue with an undeniable confidence.

This is a horror story, but please don’t avert your eyes. read article