Break Your Soul Apart
What to Write, part 2
So, last month I talked about the many benefits of writing specs based on existing shows. And while specs are incredibly valuable for learning your craft and submitting to fellowships, what you really need to break in is an original script. The right original can be your Magic Script.
Magic Words
Michael Green (screenwriter of Logan, Blade Runner 2049, and Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot movies, as well as co-creator of TV’s American Gods and more) provided a wealth of insights in his one Writers Panel appearance back in 2011, but a notion that he introduced that I come back to again and again over the years is that of the Magic Script. He said:
Everyone’s had that thing where you’ve written some specs, you’ve written some specs, and then one day you start writing something, and then you’re like, I’m onto something here. This is different. And you give it to someone and they don’t say, “Oh, that’s really good.” They say, “Holy shit.”
When you write that indisputable script, it’s going to change the way people perceive you. Because in the world of specs, when you’re hiring staffs, you get stacks and stacks of scripts. And all of them are good. Some of them are great. But very, very few are excellent.
A Little Piece of Your Heart
It’s easy, right? Just write that script that everyone is going to respond to. BUT HOW?
Unsurprisingly, Green’s American Gods co-creator Brian Fuller (creator of Hannibal, Pushing Daisies, the just-announced Crystal Lake series, and more) puts it beautifully and cleverly.
Bryan’s Magic Script became the first series he created, Dead Like Me. Though he’d been on staff before, he’d never written anything quite like that pilot. “I wrote the scenes with the mom character, and I started putting chunks of my life into it. It became a Horcrux because I was breaking off pieces of my soul and putting it in and I was like, Oh, that's what we're supposed to do as writers. You're supposed to digest your living experience and find a way to process it and put it on the page because there's honesty and reality in it. That was a big epiphany for me: I just have to write honestly. I just have to write the truth.”
Getting to an emotional truth worked for On My Block creator Lauren Iungerich, who wrote a play that became her calling card and breakthrough. Her advice? “Take your humiliation and turn it into something.”
Many writers who’ve been on the podcast have put it exactly the same way. “Write the show that only you can write.”
“I wrote sci-fi scripts, I wrote thrillers, I wrote broader comedies, and they never felt true. They never felt real to me,” says Zander Lehmann, who created the terrific Hulu series Casual. “Be specific, and be targeted, and don’t shoot for the broad.”
Lehmann had to turn off the part of himself that was trying so hard to break in, in some ways. “You can try and write the saleable script, but I think people know. They can see if that’s not you.” His script for Casual, which he wrote on spec as a sample, was different. He started thinking, “you know what, fuck it, I don’t care what people are going to buy. No one’s going to buy this. It’s just going to be good.”
Most importantly, he says, “it was the show I wanted to write. And that’s probably why it did well for me, because it was authentic, and it was in my voice, and it was something I cared about. Just write what you like, and hopefully someone else will like it too.”
Meredith Averill, co-creator/co-showrunner of Locke & Key, says to “swing for the fences with your idea. If you have an idea that’s really fucked up and crazy, write that script because those are the scripts I remember. There was this ‘cow apocalypse’ script that I love, and the writer got staffed on the HBO show The Leftovers. Then this other guy wrote this show about Neanderthals versus Humans, and it was all in their Neanderthal language.” These are the kinds of “outside the box” scripts to which Averill returns when staffing “because they were so unique and so unusual and specific that they really stuck with me.”
Organ Grinder
When Acker and I wrote our Magic Script, we didn’t realize we were writing anything weird or outstanding. We just wrote the show that we wanted to see. It had the rhythms we love from screwball comedy films (which actually aren’t as fast-paced as you remember, but we wrote the version we remembered). It has characters who love each other and listen to each other and are smart about their work but dumb about their relationships.
Cut and Run is a half-hour dark comedy about best friends who are kidney thieves and the havoc that job wreaks on their respective love lives. I think what people responded to is that the script is unexpected. Readers expected a story about kidney thieves to be dark and disgusting. So they were surprised, and delighted, when they found a light character-driven story about best friends and relationships, packed with banter and jokes. The pilot was a little ahead of its time. (We wrote it in 2007 and it served as our sample for another decade; sometimes it still does!).
Executives who read Cut & Run and enjoyed it saw how we’d fit into their network plans, either to push us for staffing or to develop something with us. There was one comedy exec who would reach out to us every couple of years to say now the market was ready for Cut & Run, and he wanted to be the guy to sell it to a network. Most surprising were the execs at Nickelodeon and Disney who loved the script. We never got as strong a positive reaction than we did from those execs who were reading kids’ material all day and then opened up a script in which a character is up to his elbow in a human cavity on the first page.
Cut & Run led to us getting our first managers, who helped us get our first agent. It was our first script sale. It landed us in rooms where development executives asked us what we had that was like Cut & Run but without the gross organ thieving.
The end of the Cut & Run journey (for now; nothing in Hollywood ever dies) is the series we got to do for Audible that came out in 2020. I’ll tell that story some other time, but for now, know that we’re really proud of the three-hour story we got to tell. And the cast is incredible: D’Arcy Carden, Sam Richardson, Rachel Bloom, Tom Lennon, Ed Begley, Jr, Eugene Cordero, and more. Who else? How about MEG RYAN?
Open a Vein
Look, I know Halloween is over, but these body horror metaphors are just going to keep coming. And it’s because the analogy is made over and over on the podcast, by writers of all different kinds of TV and films.
“So much of writing is opening up your veins and letting it spill on the table in front of other people,” says Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter.
Kelly Marcel, writer of the first two Venom films and just-announced writer/director of the upcoming third film, admits, “I literally just sit there and stare at the computer screen until my forehead starts to bleed.”
Danielle Sanchez-Witzel (My Name Is Earl; New Girl; showrunner of the upcoming Survival of the Thickest) puts television’s relationship with writers so perfectly and bluntly: “They’re paying us for our guts.”
What Winter, Marvel, and Sanchez-Witzel, and dozens of other writers I’ve talked to, are getting at is the thing that people will respond to in your script. That is: you.
What invested readers in Cut & Run, once they got past the fun of the premise and the rapid dialogue, is that the characters and their emotions rang true. Acker and I wrote about things that mattered to us: friendship, community, people trying their damnedest against calamitous circumstances. (Does the latter sound familiar).
In the past couple of years, I’ve written two scripts that are more personal and more emotionally honest than anything I’d written before. One is a horror drama about families and secrets. Specifically, it’s about my family (and boy was it cathartic to write). The other is a YA dramedy with a light sci-fi aspect. Specifically, it’s about me as a teenager (something I never thought I’d want to examine). It is, my wife says, the best thing I’ve ever written. Which is why I’m kind of afraid to show it to anyone.
But who knows? Maybe you get two magic scripts in a career.
Coming Attractions
Been thinking a lot about topics for this newsletter, and I want to jot these down, so I don’t forget. But in coming months, I’ll write about writers’ groups and partnerships, how to have a meeting, finding reps, what pitching is like now, and why it’s so hard to make anything good when all any of us want to do is make something good.
What topics would you like covered? I’ll prioritize those! Leave a comment. And thanks for reading.
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