by David Handelman
When you write on a TV show, you only get to actually “WRITE” very sporadically. Most of the job entails being locked in a room with fellow creative eccentrics (ten, on this show) and bashing out stories while trying not to gain too much weight being forcefed lunch and snacks.
So when after the first 8 episodes, the spinning wheel landed on me, I was READY. What’s different about Nashville, and what I was excited to use as a springboard, was the music. Obviously, I had to first pick up “the batons” from the previous episode and move them down the field toward what we knew had to happen in the next episode — an end of 2013 cliffhanger.
I needed stories that made emotional, narrative, and musical sense. (I also had a private agenda of doing stories that would bring as many of the myriad characters together, because I’d seen other episodes compress under the pressure of delivering scenes for so many storylines — and besides, we were due for throwing awkward, secret, reunited and ex-couples Scarlett/Avery and Zoey/Gunnar into a room together.)
So to answer the questions I’ve been asked by screenwriting students:
Do writers write the songs? (No!)
We have a weekly meeting with Frankie Pine, our music supervisor, where we lay out future needs and she plays us contenders on her laptop. The ultimate decision lies in the hands of show creator Callie Khouri, Music Producer Buddy Miller, and showrunner Dee Johnson, but we all weigh in. It’s an exciting and scary part of the process because we’re always up against time deadlines.
What do you put in the script? (Dialogue with XXXXX until the songs are finalized, usually during the last week.)
How do you decide who will sing and where to put them in the show? (I’ll just use my episode to illustrate.)
I set about to reverse engineer my stories from which performances I wanted to see, musically and storywise. Two involved pairing up people for the first time, for selfish — and story– reasons.
1) Chris Carmack and Hayden Panettiere. Will and Juliette — and the actors who play them — are two of the show’s most charismatic young performers and we’d put them on tour together, yet they’d not had a scene together since Juliette gave Will the gig pre-opening for her and the ambitious, scheming Layla. I wanted to up the ante and get them on stage together, so I cooked up a plot in which Juliette is threatened by Layla, demotes her, Will invites Layla to duet with him — so Juliette trumps her by grabbing the mike. So their duet would not just be a musical moment, but a power play, even a flirt.