Prep: Day One

IT STARTS with a friendly meeting. The Director of the episode, Phil Earnshaw, sits down with me in my office and we go through the script and talk about his notes.

This is a first-blush discussion, based upon the Production White Draft. This draft represents probably the 3rd or 4th full draft of the script. Of those, there was a pre-first draft of about 65 pages that was only for my eyes. The pre-first that I sent to the Story Department was about 61 pages. There were changes made on that draft which then went to the network, on a 60 page script. The Production White is about 58 pages, which is what we're finding is a good length to get us to 42 minutes and change -- we're a fast paced show. I would have liked to have maybe one more draft to tinker with it, but we were a little late on getting this one out, so there will probably be some more story rewriting at the Pink and Blue draft stages.

You can learn a lot about what your work experience is going to be from this first meeting. Some directors come in with very clear ideas off the bat of things they'd like to change, and some don't. Those who want to change a lot don't necessarily make for a bad first impression and those who don't don't necessarily make for a good impression. Because TV writing is so much a temporal art, there comes a point where you just want someone who's got a handle on your story other than you to tell you what they respond to, and what they don't.

As we talk through the script, the Director's notes are very logical and straight forward. What does so and so think of here? When he's doing this, what's the intent? Why wouldn't this happen instead of that?

There are a few questions that have to do with changes that happened to the script from the First Draft to the White Draft. Many of those changes have to do with streamlining, some have to do with network notes and a few have to do with notes from other people in the story department. There's discussion back and forth of a few moments that are missing from the current draft that might be worth going back to re-explore. And there are a couple of questions that arise from "widows." Widows are lines of action description or dialogue that are left over from an earlier draft and either duplicate something or don't make sense in the current iteration of a story. If you change the setting from, say, the ocean to an outdoor swimming pool, but still talk about a seagull landing in the surf, or someone shaking the sand out of their shoe -- that's a widow. The Director hasn't heard that term before -- but gets it immediately. Much little bits of bonding ensue.

Widows can be really, really bad if you don't catch them early enough. Because the last thing you need is the props person bringing you five pink lifelike dildos when, in story terms, that didn't make it past the first draft.

Note: there are no pink dildos in the border. Unless you count yours truly, and I'm actually probably more of a dil-weed.

But back to "Family Values." There's a mystery at the core of the story, and several characters acting in ways that conceal their true agendas, so we discuss and track these characters through the draft, pointing out what the audience is supposed to think what's going on at this moment, and what's really going on in the character's mind.

Directors are usually pretty good at this, because they're used to having actors come up and say, "what am I thinking in this scene?" And when they ask that, you better have an answer, bub. Them actors, they'll eat you alive if you don't.

There's a famous Canadian Director who was told on his last movie by the Star you've heard of, after ten minutes of cerebral reasoning about a scene, "Okay, I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. You've given me nothing I can act. Just say 'Action' and I'll do something."

Directors and writers can talk subtext and stuff till we're blue in the face. But actors have to make it tangible...We writers can fudge that stuff. Directors can't.

In a couple of cases, there will be playback of video surveillance that's meant to repeat an earlier scene, so that you see something different this time. That requires a lot of talk of staging, how to approach the scene, and precisely what everyone's doing so it's clear. You don't want to telegraph it to the audience, but you also don't want to make it so obscure so people need a decoder ring to figure out what the hell is going on.

Canadian TV usually suffers from two scourges: either over explaining the obvious, or not explaining enough. (I realize this is perverse. But it's true.) I'm hoping we can avoid both extremes.

We get to the end of the script, and the Action takedown, and I offer that I'm really flexible on how this goes down. I'm not married to the way I've written it. I mention the three story points that need to happen. We're basically in agreement.

The Director will go away and come back with more thoughts, and that will probably generate another draft or so, before we get into changes sparked by locations and other production considerations. I'm open to good ideas -- a good idea is a good idea, and it's part of my job, as I see it, to make the Director excited about the script. At this point, my story is structurally pretty there. But there are different colours to the palate to be explored. The next 48 hours will be all about that.


Tomorrow: The Concept Meeting and Casting. My next rewrite will probably happen tomorrow night and Wednesday morning.