...Maybe We Were Born to Run

Wings to Wheels is moving, I think, because its mix of historical footage and new interviews does an extraordinary job of chronicling just what it's like to try to push through, and invent something new, as a group.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band toil day after day, fourteen hours at a clip, reaching for just the right sound, the right mix, the right interpretation. Bruce pares his words down, from the frenetic demi-Dylan pose he took on his previous album, The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, to the spare and sparse signature that would elevate songs like Born To Run, Thunder Road, and Backstreets.

It's a process that takes its toll -- and exacts a cost on some mercurial personalities. Two members quit, and are replaced. One producer is usurped by another. Six months is spent getting one song right...

Born to Run.

But the absolutely undeniable thing that one takes away from the documentary is this: without those people, all of them, locked in a room like that for that length of time -- none of it would have happened.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were under the gun. Springsteen had two critically acclaimed but commercially anemic albums under his belt. This was their last chance; a third miss would most likely have gotten them dropped by Columbia. Their recording careers would be over.

They needed to invent a whole world. And when that album hit the streets, it was obvious to everyone that they'd done it.

Often when I'm trolling screenwriting sites, or internet postings, or even in conversations with Network people and development executives, I'm dismayed to see just how misunderstood the process of the writers' room is.

There's a lot of talk about "the vision." The "big idea" that needs to come from the "one unified vision" before a series is going to be any good.

I think this is poppycock. I think it's a hangover from the auteur theory and it has nothing whatsoever to do with making good television.

TV writing, especially at the conception or early stages, really doesn't have too much in common with writing a screenplay. It has much more to do with the kind of thing that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were doing thirty years ago.

It has to do with creating a world.

A film screenplay needs to posit a heroic journey that has a beginning, middle and an end.

A television series, on the other hand, is all about creating a template: an ongoing landscape populated with characters from which a series of narratives can spring.

And just as we wouldn't be talking about the brilliance of Born to Run today if not for the sax work of Clarence Clemons, the guiding hand of Jon Landau, the keyboards of David Sancious and the off-kilter interjections of Miami Steve Van Zandt, series don't become series until you pull in the beautiful minds who shape the initial idea, polish it, and make it the thing it needs to be to engage an audience not for two hours, but for up to seven years. It's a job that's too big for one person, even though -- like with Springsteen -- the mythology demands that in the end it be credited to one person.

Aaron Sorkin, a genius? Yup. But it was Tommy Schlamme that made that show sing. And a lot of writers, from Lawrence O'Donnell to Rick Cleveland, who helped shape the show so that Sorkin could claim to be a one-man band.

David Chase had Tim Van Patten, Mitchell Burgess & Robin Green, and Terence Winter.

Even our sainted Joss Whedon had David Greenwalt, and Marti Noxon and Jane Espenson and a group of other writers to help guide and shape and cajole the world into being.

I'm feeling this strongly right now -- not just because of the documentary, but because I have pilot scripts and development projects that are at the point where they simply cry out for the input, the give-and-take, and the back and forth of other writers. I need a room so bad right now it hurts. Physically. I need to be challenged. I need to be put on the spot, and run things up the flagpole, and talk out possible arcs and see the looks on the faces of others when you've hit on exactly the right idea. That look is as good as sex. Depending on the sex, it's better.

The image of the lonely writer working alone is not a helpful stereotype. Not in TV. Yes, we're writers. So maybe we're weird, and we wear too many baseball caps and have too deep a closet of sweat-pant related attire -- but if you're going to invent a world, you need to be social, too.

And the simple reality is that working along side other writers simply makes you better. It makes you sharper. It means that you can't get away with ideas that "work well enough." It means that jokes will be funnier and more pointed, because you try to top each other. It means that four minds or five minds will shape and vet every story point so that the plot soars instead of plods. It means that when that script goes to the floor it's been thought through and checked by some of the smartest people you've ever met.

And that's what makes it good.

I keep having meetings with development executives where they talk about how they're looking for the "killer idea."

Let me tell you something. The idea never starts out killer. Hire the smart people, and put them together, and that's what makes it killer.

Lloyd Braun, a network guy, came up with LOST. But if you watch the extras on the LOST disc for Season One, there's no denying that the show didn't start to spark until Lieber met Lindehof and Abrahms.

I need a drummer. And someone who'll hit those sweet sax notes on Jungleland. And I need a woman who'll hear that the tuning up from the minor to the major note needs to be higher in the mix. If you want Born to Run, I need a staff.

And anyone who says differently doesn't understand how TV worth watching really comes to be.