Freelancing for SGU: Ya Gotta Have Faith

I WILL ALWAYS remember my day in the SGU writers' room, because it started with me in my hotel room, looking out over a beautiful, crisp & clear Vancouver day, watching Barack Obama take the oath of office to become the 44th President of the United States.

I will say that watching the new President's inaugural address (made possible by the 3 hour time difference) was a considerably less stressful occurrence than the last time history bumped up against my career.  That time, I had to finish up a half-hour comedy script and get it in by five p.m. on the afternoon of September 11, 2001.  I made my deadline.  I don't remember the script. I'm gonna go out on a limb & say that the legacy of Gleason is probably safe.

But back to that date in January, 2009.  The reason I was sitting there waiting for transport to pick me up at the Sutton Place in Vancouver was due to a phone pitch I'd done a few weeks before Christmas. My agent had arranged for me to pitch the new Stargate show.   I'd gotten a copy of the premiere episode of SGU -- watermarked with my name -- very fancy -- and read it and gotten excited.  It really did seem like a show that was going to take the best of a loved franchise & take it in a new direction.  The character of Rush seemed like a wonderful antihero, and Eli got some great lines.  Along with the script, I'd been given a few pages that described the other stories that were already being written. The object was to come up with pitches for new episodes.

This is harder than it sounds -- especially when you're doing it for a show that has all that Stargate backstory...terrible baggage for a freelancer.  After a while your success starts to handcuff you.  How do you not repeat a story in a franchise that's done hundreds of episodes?  Star Trek showed the danger of the law of diminishing returns there. How many stories were they recycling by the end of Voyager? Never mind Enterprise. Oy.

In my case, I took the brief about the characters of SGU and how they were new in the situation, and also that they were going for something grounded in reality. So I noodled around with issues of science & astronomy.  I have a friend who's an astrophysicist with the National Research Council in Victoria, and when he was doing his doctoral thesis & post grad work, it was in the new and emerging field of Exoplanets.  I'd always been interested in that, though my science is limited to 10th Grade biology & screenings of From the Earth to the Moon.

That led to the mystery hook at the heart of the pitch SGU eventually bought.  (I don't even remember the other two I came up with.  The mind tries to protect itself.)  I decided it would be cool if the Destiny came out of FTL, and the Stargate didn't fire up and nobody could figure out why they'd stopped -- except there was this funny planet there that wasn't on the charts.  And the planet was green & perfect for life -- except it shouldn't be there; the star's age & the planet's age didn't match --

-- Whatever did it all mean?



Phone pitching is terrible & stressful.  As difficult as pitching in the room can be, doing it without being able to see people's faces, or react to body language is much, much worse.  Somehow I got through it, and they got excited by the core of the idea I wanted to explore.

The first show titles had been very much in line about the crew struggling for the basics of life, and against the elements -- Air, Water, Earth, Fire, Time...  But this pitch was going to be for the 2nd half of the first season, where the plan was to start exploring some of the higher fundamental needs on that Maslow hierarchy.  The Destiny was a microcosm of a new society. Eventually concepts like justice, political organization, etc. would be important.

As a good Lapsed Catholic boy, I chose the need that troubled & interested me most.  Faith.

That was my pitch.  They find a planet, it seems perfect -- some people want to stay.  But it's clear that somebody else made this planet.  What if they're not cool with the trespassing?  Call it the Rights of Man meets Goldilocks & The Three Bears.  Faith in the ship. Faith in the planet. Faith that God had guided them there. Faith that eventually the Destiny would take them home -- it's a pretty rich canvas, right?  I thought so, and they agreed.

So cut to me in the writers room.

You know, last night I was flipping around after a truly hideous baseball game where the Jays took an absolute caning, and I settled on a channel playing Standing in the Shadows of Motown. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.  It's a doc about the Funk Brothers, the legendary backing group that can be heard on all the Motown hits.  These guys would be in sessions with young, talented musicians, calling out changes, working so well together that their drum fills & guitar attacks just naturally melded into craft so meticulous and distinctive that people have been trying to replicate it for decades.  The "Motown Sound" wasn't a fluke; it was craft -- what happens when you put genius musicians in the room together & let the creativity explode. It's lightning in a bottle.  And it must have been intimidating as hell to be around.

That SGU writers room is kind of like the Funk Brothers of story breaking. I'd never seen anything like it. Totally intimidating.  Most of the writers there were extremely senior, and had been doing it forever.   Besides the show creators Brad Wright & Robert C. Cooper, you had Joseph Mallozzi & Carl Binder & Paul Mullie -- these guys -- it's like the room full of showrunners.  And you've gotta play and go back and forth and just keep up.   Nice guys, all, very calm, very casual -- but also very exacting.  The professionalism of the group crackles, but it's not exactly...uh.... loose.  Y'know?  Or warm.  And around you, meanwhile, is binder after binder, and drawing after drawing of 15 years of franchise history.

Yeah. No pressure there.

It was a really cool time to be there.  They had yet to close on all the cast.  After breaking the basic beats of the story, talking through what was new & unusual about the idea, what the twists might be -- I had my marching orders.  Five acts.  Four or five beats an act. What are the twists? Etc.

Then after lunch we walked around some of the Destiny sets under construction... The main "Gate Room" gave me a little chill up the spine ... and then they had to go to a production meeting, and  I was gone.

That was the last moment of comfort I had writing the script.  It was hard.  I did a couple outlines, talked with Robert C. Cooper a few times, adjusted for what they were looking for.  I was told a few times that I was getting too hung up on the science, or some other valid critiques.

The other challenging thing, of course, is that while I was off over a month trying to generate my story, fixed in stone -- all the other targets were moving, and moving rapidly.  Earlier scripts were going through production drafts...characters were changing and evolving.  Casting, and then shooting, revealed actors' strengths that meant that they got written to more.  I had only the barest, fuzziest hold on some of the secondary characters.  In a new show, things change rapidly in production, and when you're in the room you absorb those changes in small increments on a daily basis.

Eventually, I begged for more scripts, and got them, and being able to digest six or seven scripts, and see the characters on the page helped me writing my drafts.

It's hard to believe that freelancing was once the rule in TV, and still is in some places.  It just packs more pressure on the one or two people who have to make all the stories line up.  As a freelancer, my job with my SGU script was to get it to a point where somebody else could "take it over," and see it through production.  The better I did, ideally the less they'd have to rewrite.

Except of course it never works out that way, especially in a show's first season.  When you're three thousand miles out of the loop of the show that's developing on those soundstages, you just do the best you can, and hope that you don't cause somebody too much work.

Two drafts of the script, and that was it - I was out.  I still liked my story, and I thought the script I'd written was solid.  I just hoped there was enough there that whoever took it over could build on it, and not have to throw much of it out and start over.  That's kind of the freelancer's prayer.  That, and the five magic words:


"Please, Lord. Make it Better."

Everybody gets rewritten.  I've rewritten people & been brutal with stuff that didn't work.  And I've been rewritten in comedy, and in drama.  One time, on one show I was on, my script was sailing through pretty unmolested -- except for one scene in the psychiatrist's office that I could just not please the Showrunner on.  With humility, I finally said, "you should just write it, and I'll paste it in." And that's what happened.  Very weird -- a script that's all you except for one scene.  But you do whatever works.

What's more common is the production rewrite, or extensive rewrite, or the "page one" rewrite, where everything changes -- act breaks, story points, etc.  Then there are dialogue passes where someone -- often but not always the showrunner, "voices" the script.  Again -- because they've been on set; they've seen the words acted out, they've gotten to know the actors & their strengths, and that in turn has continued to spark & evolve how you feel about the show.   It's not unusual that when you read the finished script, you might find that only four or five of your lines have survived.

Many writers who start out look on this as failure.  It's not.  But it makes it a lot easier to take when the script gets better.

I've had scripts rewritten by writers so extensively that I hardly recognize them.  But they were funnier. The material was better.  You could tell that the best of the productions' minds had weighed in and the end result sung in a way that your early draft did not.  Had you been there, part of that process, maybe you could have joined in the chorus. But you weren't. That's just the way it is.  There's no point feeling bad about it.  Just be joyful that it got better.

What really sucks is when your script gets hacked by somebody who isn't a writer. This doesn't happen too much in the U.S. system, because of the primacy of the writer-showrunner.  But in Canada, it still happens, and no, it never gets easier.

Fortunately, Carl Binder took my script over, and I suppose eventually it probably also passed through the Laptop of Robert C. Cooper.  Months later, when I read the production draft, I was excited, and pleased.  My story was still very recognizable, but oh Sweet Mirinda it was SO MUCH MORE AWESOME.

I don't want to spoil, but one of the better changes, that just profoundly ripples through the story is that there was a plot point that I'd given to a guest lead, that naturally in the rewrite was clawed back and given to one of the main characters. It made the point resonate more; it was better in every way, it's the kind of thing that I would have suggested had I been there in the room, seeing the characters evolve. But see, that's the kind of thing that you kind of can't do when you're the freelancer. Maybe I could have come up with it; I don't know. But I didn't have the intimate knowledge of the character's arc to know that it was possible.

All in all, I found the process of freelancing for SGU fascinating, and difficult, and rewarding, and wonderful.  To see the machine they have rolling out there -- the BILLION DOLLARS that SG has added to Vancouver's economy, up close, is something else.  To see the writers in complete charge, producing, getting it done -- is heartening.  While we gnash our teeth over every spasm in the Canadian TV industry, the people at Stargate have just quietly been getting it done for fifteen years. 

Last weekend I briefly saw Robert C. Cooper and he told me he was really pleased with how Faith turned out.  I can't wait to see it.

Finally, here's a preview clip from the show.  I'm pleased to say that this represents the best that a lowly freelancer can hope for ... A version of this scene was in all my material all the way along...but dang it if they didn't come up with a way better blow line for the scene.




Thanks to Carl Binder for doing the heavy lifting, and the good people of SGU for the opportunity.  And for a show that I'm really digging every Friday night!  Sometimes you can be both pro and fan!