Writer on the Set?

MAYBE I'VE COME a ways since the last time I wrote about being the writer on the set. But I've found that the experience that I blogged about last year has evolved into something a whole lot more complicated.

Not that it's not contentious. Our guest poster from yesterday argues the "set sit" is a waste of time, and an insult to the Director. Ken Girotti has blogged a couple of times recently about the difficulty of fulfilling the full potential of what you're asked to do as a Director when you're being "babysat." He reiterated it here in a comment yesterday.

you're right when you say that by obliging a director to have somebody look over his or her shoulder (and that's my charitable version) not only might make a director feel like they've got a babysitter, but I just don't think a director will stretch as much. If every time one wants to do something outside the box one has to look back and ask, "'zat okay with you?" how the hell can anybody be spontaneous?

I think decisions about how a show gets shot should be made in prep. I think decisions about how a producer controls a director are implicit in who the producer hires to direct. Anything else is either self-conscious or just paranoid.

Well, all I can say is that there are a couple of thorny issues here, but they really all come down to one thing:

Respect.

A writer who feels that a Director does not have sufficient respect for the essential beats of the story is going to be prickly if they step on set. They're going to look for any opportunity to prove their thesis that just like hundreds before them, genius is being ignored by a Director looking to fill out his feature reel.

I've been in those meetings in prep and they're not pretty.

On the other hand, the nightmare spectre of a Director who feels an invisible hand on their shoulder at every shot is clearly not in the best interests of anybody, either.

I'm still tuning an on-set persona. It's new for me. I'm lucky that I get to watch some real pros, like David Barlow, negotiate the relationship ahead of me. What I've settled into is the thought that as a writer-producer on set, it's your job to be enthusiastic and say 'great take' when it is a great take, and be there to just generally help the Director do what it is he needs to do. And 99.7 percent of the time, that means...doing absofuckinglutelynothing.

Ken and the others are right -- in prep, ideally, that situation is reversed. The Director, in contemplating how they're going to realize the scene, should be willing to bring their best ideas, but really to listen when the writer is talking about the essential story points that need to come out. I've been in many a meeting where that simply wasn't the case -- where the Director's desire to visualize runs counter to what you need for the script. And not to be pissy about it, in about the eight or nine specific cases I can remember, I was right in the end. The Director's visuals didn't paper over the fact that they didn't nail the beat that needed to be nailed.

There are all sorts of levels of professionalism coming to play in this industry, especially in Canada, where you can have a Director who might have worked for seven U.S. shows and shot 23 tv movies being ridden by a writer who's nine months out of the CFC. Or, the situation can easily be reversed. Boy (or girl) Wunderkind blows past the 20 years of experience in front of them in the guise of the writer/producer.

Being a child of TV, and having had basically all my social interactions more or less influenced if not directly lifted from the medium, I tend to default to the world of the old cop cliche. I think in the pre-production process, if you're the Writer, you should be the Primary. The Director is interpreting your story -- and you probably have a better idea of how that story fits into a whole than he or she does.

Which isn't to say that you should be precious. You protect the key and the form of your story, if not the exact shape of it. That warehouse may need to be a library, and you need to consider how maybe that might happen. Your foot chase might be better to the Director as a slow tail in a car. And in that case, the question you need to ask yourself is, "does it really change anything?"

If not, you go for it. Or you come up with something better together.

But here's why, ultimately, I believe that the writer on the set can be a good thing, so long as your presence is conducted with respect for the reality that now, that person in the centre chair, and not you -- is the primary:

Because TV is won and lost on the smallest, most intimate o f things.

A few years ago on Charlie Jade, I crafted this scene where I wanted it to be about what two characters who had spent the night together weren't saying to each other. The culmination of this scene, where the woman realizes what a huge mistake she's made, and the realization that the guy is pulling away is accomplished not by saying that, but by the simple fact of taking the breakfast she made for him and throwing it away. That action was supposed to signify, to show, not tell -- what was going on in her head.

When the sequence was shot, instead of throwing the plate away, it was simply placed on a sideboard. The Director blocked the scene but missed the point. And because that piece was missing, the scene was talky and not sharp, because the exclamation point was missing. If I'd known the action wasn't going to be performed, I would have written the scene completely differently.

If I'd been on that set when it was shot -- that could have been avoided. The writing department on that show might have spent a little less time scrambling to try and rewrite later episodes to explain emotional beats that were missing from earlier shows because the Director didn't shoot them.

Comedy provides another important Canadian example. Many Canadian-shot comedies suffer from being overly broad, and not blocked in a way that the joke or humor is sold. There's an ankle deep roomful of scripts out there that read funny but that weren't executed right, and so wind up being forgettable and bad. Comedic successes in recent years: Trailer Park Boys, Corner Gas, all have the writers on set. Recently, I saw a show that was quite excellent that will be coming out later this year. The comedy was subtle, and the tone worked. And when I found out there was always a writer on set, I asked if they had to step in. And the answer was compelling: "only when it got too broad."

For my part, over the last week, I'd like to think that my contributions on set have been small but meaningful. In one case, an actor changed a line. Now, I'm not precious about words here and there. It's only when the line gets way off the beam that I generally get concerned. But there are cases where a little change can have big implications for a character, and maybe only a writer will catch just how big.

The example? A character comes back from dealing with a difficult person who might be a target for assassination. The line as scripted is,

"I wanted to take a shot at him myself."

The line as delivered?

"I almost took a shot at him myself."

Do you see the difference there? If you do, you're probably a writer. If you think they're interchangeable, you're probably not. No matter.

That's where I turn to continuity and ask for a more precise reading of the line. Because those two things are not the same for that character. And you have to protect that.

In another case, a guest actor in a comic role did a couple of adlibs at the end of the scene -- as actors are wont to do. One was funny. The others weren't. I steered them toward the funny adlib. The result? On the coverage, the Director was able to come up with a corresponding shot that focuses the line and provides a funny visual tag to the scene. So the adlib fed the creative, and pushed the Director to a response that improved everything.

That's something that wouldn't have happened unless I was there, listening.

Listening, and trying to support the Director. Because that's the other part of it. Sometimes when things are going behind and a scene needs to be dropped, the best thing a Director can hear is, "if you drop this scene we can adjust this and we're not going to miss it." Because the Director's already trying to keep all his coverage in mind and making sure that what he gets will cut. If you can take the burden of one scene away when he's under the gun, then it also takes the stress of maybe truncating or dropping a scene that might be key. Scenes get dropped. It happens. When you can say, "this won't hurt," I'd hope, at least, that that might offer a bit of peace of mind to the Director. Especially if it's a shoe leather scene and it gives more time for him to make something meaty out of another scene.

Most of the time, if you're smart, and you have that respect, your time as writer on the set is going to involve you doing a whole lot of nothing. But when things need to be jogged around, you're there. The actors do try to stay on script more when you're watching, I find. In my head, I honestly believe that your role is not to second guess the Director. It's to be a resource.

You wrote your script. It's done. A day when they've got to get through 11 2/8 pages is no time to be precious about your words.

And what you see sometimes might not be what was in your head. I've seen that in the last week too. But almost universally - in the end what the Director came up with was more interesting that how I conceived it. You allow for that, and you've learned something.

Then again, someone who hires a professional writer probably should be asking clarifying questions instead of giving specific cuts or orders for how a scene should go.

It really does all come down to respect. At all levels. When you have that, you let people bring their A'Game. And then the writer on set has to be simply a neutral thing. In the end I'll throw it back to Ken, who said:

To be honest I don't actually mind having the writer on the set; but that often depends on who the writer actually is, or who they think they are, if you get my meaning.

Oh, I get it. More each day. It's a lesson that I hope a lot of writers learn without having to learn it the hard way. Because otherwise, our guest poster's right. It's no different than

"having a network executive standing over your shoulder and looking at the screen as you try to write a script."

Which would most definitely suck.