40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
Finding a fascinating primer on TV writing and production while skimming through the interwebs made our week. There’s a lot of meat in this stew, so without further ado:
To truly understand the phrase “controlled chaos,” you should consider crashing the set of a television show.
Mr. O’Neil is too modest to say this, so we will: “Buy this book!” Because if ever a guy knew how to write the #$@! out of anything, it’s LB’s favorite collaborator whom he has never met:
Okay, let’s get this out of the way at the beginning: Yesterday I published a novel. The title is The Perils of Captain Mighty and the Redemption of Danny the Kid. I’ll add one more fact: The original title was The Perils of Captain Power and the Redemption of Danny the Kid, but there were a couple of still active copyrights for “Captain Power” and although these copyrights weren’t likely to cause any problems, they could, and so Power becomes Mighty and we proceed to the next paragraph.
Are you expecting a little chest-beating here? Not happening. Not that I have anything against some self-congratulation and some of the writers I most admire were not above it. To cite three, a trio of my favorite Nineteenth Century scribblers: Charles Dickens (who, according to one source “thrived in the spotlight”); Mark Twain (who, according to another, had a “flair self-promotion”); and Walt Whitman, who sought praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson and got it (“I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” the sage of Concord wrote in a five-page letter Whitman later used to promote his Leaves of Grass.) In my own time, I might cite Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer as writers unburdened by crippling modesty. (Anyone with absolutely nothing better to do might list a few more, but let’s hope you’re not that desperate for amusement.)
It happens sometimes – the dream turns into a nightmare. Getting a series on the air is a major high. Getting thrown off it, OTOH….
So I’m walking to a rehearsal in Midtown, and my agent calls me.
Congratulations, friends, you’ve done it. You have gathered your troops, made battle plans, and now, the real run begins. It’s time… for production.
Depending on the size of your cast and crew, your experience on set might be totally different from every other person reading this column. Even so, there are rules of thumb every production should follow when approaching the filming process.
Before you get to set
“…an over-the-top, sixteen-car-pileup-sugar-popped-cereal-bowl of a series that’s not afraid to be everything your mother warned you about television: a cartoonishly extreme, randomly fantastic, special-effects laden, three-fisted walking-and-talking toy-line advertisement of an action-adventure-sci-fi comic book in which the fabric of reality barely survives in the end, and the journey invariably reveals a completely surreal strangeness behind everything we hold to be true.”
Javier Grillo-Marxuach pitch for The Middleman. as quoted on TV Tropes
JAVIER GRILLO-MARXUACH is a prolific writer of television, movies, comic books, essays, and interactive media. Javi probably is best known as one of the Emmy Award-winning producers of Lost or as creator of the the comic book and ABC Family television series The Middleman.