three and a half minutes
Spoilers ahoy.
This year I'll be a part-time consulting producer on House; which means I'll be writing one script and my general involvement will be lower. For years I've been putting off personal projects (like a stack of novels that are circling 'round in my head waiting for clearance to land), and there's only so long you can ignore that sort of thing before it drives you crazy. It's been hard to think of leaving House, though, and as you can see, I haven't quite succeeded; I just plain love the show. I mean, where else do they let you make up anagrams of your characters' names and create imaginary porn movies? Where they don't think you're nuts because you care about the dialogue? (Seriously, I've been on shows where, if you talk about dialogue having rhythm, they look at you as though you're speaking Esperanto. But here, if an actor says a line as "Brilliant idea," you can say, "I'd prefer it to just be 'brilliant,' because we want to match the two syllables of that to the two syllables of "Long shot" in the alternate version flash immediately after," everybody knows at once what you're talking about. There's no need to explain. And every single person on set is aiming for as close to perfection as they can get, in every area they're involved with.)
So I'm happy to still be in the sandbox, even if it's not full-time.
There's more reason to be happy right now, but it will require explanation for the uninitiated. When I began television writing, about twelve years ago, there were four acts in a network drama, with about five scenes per act. As for scenes, three pages was considered a good average length -- not too short or too long, though after an episode was shot the post-production editing cuts would tend to make things shorter.
Now, three pages probably seems incredibly brief to anyone not used to TV scripts. I've been given scripts from people trying to break in that have scenes five, six, or seven pages long. "That's not how long our scenes are," I told someone once about a Smallville script, and she said, shocked, "They're not?" She'd seen every episode; what the heck was I talking about?
The scenes you watch on TV feel longer. You see two characters at a birthday party and you come away with the sense you saw the entire event. You didn't. You saw the Impressionist painting version of the event, where a brushstroke here and there suggested the rest of the scene to your brain, and you filled it in. The viewer is always coming into scenes after they've already begun, and often cutting out long before they've finished. Three pages -- two to three minutes -- is actually long enough for the necessary information to be conveyed to the audience, most of the time.
But as I said, that was twelve years ago. At the second show I was on, the showrunner said, "We're a little unusual here; we have a fast rhythm, six scenes per act. Sometimes seven!" I look back on that innocent comment now and smile; every show after that one has raced faster and faster, with shorter and shorter scenes. In today's scriptwriting world, twelve scenes are sometimes stuffed into an act. Scenes can be half a page, one page... occasionally two, if it's a substantive discussion. After that, you're playing with fire if you go any longer. (Okay, if you absolutely must, you can get to two and a half without being staked out for fire ants, but you'd better keep that sort of indulgence to a minimum.)
Suppose you have a high-school character, Adam, who's revealing to his best friend, Zach, that he's gay. And an alien. And that his people want him to conquer the Earth with his super-powers. Also, he doesn't want to reveal to Zach that he's attracted to him, but Zach figures it out at the end of the conversation, and Adam's a little embarrassed. Here's the paradox faced by today's TV writer: you can't do a good job with that scene in two pages. But if you hand in three pages, you know how it'll go: "Are you INSANE? Don't you know the audience CAN'T HANDLE A SCENE MORE THAN TWO MINUTES LONG?" Because the default belief is that since the days of MTV videos, if there's any pause in the usual series of quick cuts, the viewers' placid, hypnotized looks will disappear and they'll panic and change the channel.
So how can you solve this problem? Easy. Have the scene begin in the locker room after gym -- let the boys talk as they get their stuff together and close their lockers. Then cut to outside the school, where they continue the conversation. Done! You've made it into two short scenes. "But, Doris," you say. "It's still really the same scene, isn't it? It's just the location that's changed." Yes! Because the people who enforce the two-page rule think that all the audience needs to keep them from turning the channel is to see the background change behind the actors.
Because that's really what keeps you glued to your set, isn't it?
Now, don't misunderstand me. I have nothing against quick cuts and lots of scenes and driving, intense rhythm that leaves you breathless. I'm only saying that different kinds of stories, and different kinds of scenes within stories, call for different treatment. Action sequences, suspense beats, comedy -- they all profit from speed. The occasional character moment needs, as they say, "air." It's trying to lay out all scenes by the same formula that gets you into trouble.
Here's another thing to know: the more someone understands a particular art form, the less they'll need arbitrary rules to determine whether a story or a scene is good. Still, the sense I've had from most shows is that the two-page rule is so chiseled into the robot brain chips of everyone in TV, it just can't be escaped. At this point it would simply never occur to me to turn in a scene longer than that. So when David Foster and I found ourselves with a three-and-a-half page scene at the center of our story, I assumed it was doomed. I thought hounds would be set loose to track us across the ice and return our bloody carcasses to the Tomb of Presumptuous Scriptwriters.
House -- Unreliable Narrator, esq. -- tells his therapist, Nolan (Andre Braugher), about his week. The episode as a whole has that basic short-scene rhythm, and we wanted it to be playful and to move quickly. Then in a pivotal scene, Nolan deliberately provokes him (usually a House trick), leading to a confrontation; House turns from walking out the door to returning, chastened, to join Nolan in a quest for the truth. In other words, at the story's heart was a three-and-a-half minute scene between two characters in one room. If you're used to plays, you're probably laughing at me now; how can I be excited by three-and-a-half minutes? How many great plays have spent two hours in the same room with a couple of characters? But this is television, where nobody lets you do this stuff. And to see two magnificent actors simply act, without any tricks or distractions.. well, that's as good as it's ever gonna get, for any writer. I can't tell you how privileged, and how sheerly happy it made me. Sometimes I wonder why I came to a town where the trees don't change color in the fall and the bike lanes are a recipe for death. This is why I came. This is why I put off the novels I've longed to write. This is why, although the industry drives me to at least one evening of insanity a year, where I break out the liquor and pace up and down muttering about how I could have stayed in New York and done computer support, I know I'm not leaving any time soon.
(I also can't tell you how trivializing it feels to go to Twitter in an excess of exuberance and say, "I wish I could tell you all why I'm so excited about this episode," and get negative remarks back about how much screen time someone's crystal ball says Wilson or Chase will or will not be getting, as though that were the only thing a writer could possibly be interested in. But I'll save my discussion of the shippification of television for another post. For now, though, no, Lucas was not my idea, so -- you know who you are -- you can stop sending me email.)
Meanwhile: the plan for the year is to write an episode of House, a pilot, a comic book, and a novel. I know that's on the crazy-ambitious side, but I'm firm believer in the idea that it's better to aim high and fall short. It'll be interesting to see what actually happens. I'm in the middle of working out the first episode of season seven right now, and I'm pretty excited about it.
It all comes down to love, and on that note, I'll leave you with an image. For night shooting, a director will sometimes use these gorgeous, crazy, giant floating lights -- twenty or thirty feet across, they hang in the night sky like minor zeppelin moons, each tethered to the earth by a central stalk, making the whole thing look like a glowing jellyfish far above your head. I love them at any time, but how much more on a night when you're going into the woods of Griffith Park to shoot a man with antlers and some forest nymphs dancing around a bonfire? You have to leave a van and make your way along a dirt path, tall trees on either side, and ahead, in a glade atop a promontory, obscured by pines, is an enormous floating (false) moon. It's like walking into a fantasy illustration, and there's no chance of getting lost. The real full moon is out as well, but on this night it seems subdued. And when you reach the bonfire, there are the magical woodland beings, costumed brilliantly, leading you to expect Shakespearean dialogue at any moment, or at least a merry forest song in Middle English. I think there's a fair chance I'll never see another night like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/doris_reads_a_lot/sets/72157623994537230/detail/
This year I'll be a part-time consulting producer on House; which means I'll be writing one script and my general involvement will be lower. For years I've been putting off personal projects (like a stack of novels that are circling 'round in my head waiting for clearance to land), and there's only so long you can ignore that sort of thing before it drives you crazy. It's been hard to think of leaving House, though, and as you can see, I haven't quite succeeded; I just plain love the show. I mean, where else do they let you make up anagrams of your characters' names and create imaginary porn movies? Where they don't think you're nuts because you care about the dialogue? (Seriously, I've been on shows where, if you talk about dialogue having rhythm, they look at you as though you're speaking Esperanto. But here, if an actor says a line as "Brilliant idea," you can say, "I'd prefer it to just be 'brilliant,' because we want to match the two syllables of that to the two syllables of "Long shot" in the alternate version flash immediately after," everybody knows at once what you're talking about. There's no need to explain. And every single person on set is aiming for as close to perfection as they can get, in every area they're involved with.)
So I'm happy to still be in the sandbox, even if it's not full-time.
There's more reason to be happy right now, but it will require explanation for the uninitiated. When I began television writing, about twelve years ago, there were four acts in a network drama, with about five scenes per act. As for scenes, three pages was considered a good average length -- not too short or too long, though after an episode was shot the post-production editing cuts would tend to make things shorter.
Now, three pages probably seems incredibly brief to anyone not used to TV scripts. I've been given scripts from people trying to break in that have scenes five, six, or seven pages long. "That's not how long our scenes are," I told someone once about a Smallville script, and she said, shocked, "They're not?" She'd seen every episode; what the heck was I talking about?
The scenes you watch on TV feel longer. You see two characters at a birthday party and you come away with the sense you saw the entire event. You didn't. You saw the Impressionist painting version of the event, where a brushstroke here and there suggested the rest of the scene to your brain, and you filled it in. The viewer is always coming into scenes after they've already begun, and often cutting out long before they've finished. Three pages -- two to three minutes -- is actually long enough for the necessary information to be conveyed to the audience, most of the time.
But as I said, that was twelve years ago. At the second show I was on, the showrunner said, "We're a little unusual here; we have a fast rhythm, six scenes per act. Sometimes seven!" I look back on that innocent comment now and smile; every show after that one has raced faster and faster, with shorter and shorter scenes. In today's scriptwriting world, twelve scenes are sometimes stuffed into an act. Scenes can be half a page, one page... occasionally two, if it's a substantive discussion. After that, you're playing with fire if you go any longer. (Okay, if you absolutely must, you can get to two and a half without being staked out for fire ants, but you'd better keep that sort of indulgence to a minimum.)
Suppose you have a high-school character, Adam, who's revealing to his best friend, Zach, that he's gay. And an alien. And that his people want him to conquer the Earth with his super-powers. Also, he doesn't want to reveal to Zach that he's attracted to him, but Zach figures it out at the end of the conversation, and Adam's a little embarrassed. Here's the paradox faced by today's TV writer: you can't do a good job with that scene in two pages. But if you hand in three pages, you know how it'll go: "Are you INSANE? Don't you know the audience CAN'T HANDLE A SCENE MORE THAN TWO MINUTES LONG?" Because the default belief is that since the days of MTV videos, if there's any pause in the usual series of quick cuts, the viewers' placid, hypnotized looks will disappear and they'll panic and change the channel.
So how can you solve this problem? Easy. Have the scene begin in the locker room after gym -- let the boys talk as they get their stuff together and close their lockers. Then cut to outside the school, where they continue the conversation. Done! You've made it into two short scenes. "But, Doris," you say. "It's still really the same scene, isn't it? It's just the location that's changed." Yes! Because the people who enforce the two-page rule think that all the audience needs to keep them from turning the channel is to see the background change behind the actors.
Because that's really what keeps you glued to your set, isn't it?
Now, don't misunderstand me. I have nothing against quick cuts and lots of scenes and driving, intense rhythm that leaves you breathless. I'm only saying that different kinds of stories, and different kinds of scenes within stories, call for different treatment. Action sequences, suspense beats, comedy -- they all profit from speed. The occasional character moment needs, as they say, "air." It's trying to lay out all scenes by the same formula that gets you into trouble.
Here's another thing to know: the more someone understands a particular art form, the less they'll need arbitrary rules to determine whether a story or a scene is good. Still, the sense I've had from most shows is that the two-page rule is so chiseled into the robot brain chips of everyone in TV, it just can't be escaped. At this point it would simply never occur to me to turn in a scene longer than that. So when David Foster and I found ourselves with a three-and-a-half page scene at the center of our story, I assumed it was doomed. I thought hounds would be set loose to track us across the ice and return our bloody carcasses to the Tomb of Presumptuous Scriptwriters.
House -- Unreliable Narrator, esq. -- tells his therapist, Nolan (Andre Braugher), about his week. The episode as a whole has that basic short-scene rhythm, and we wanted it to be playful and to move quickly. Then in a pivotal scene, Nolan deliberately provokes him (usually a House trick), leading to a confrontation; House turns from walking out the door to returning, chastened, to join Nolan in a quest for the truth. In other words, at the story's heart was a three-and-a-half minute scene between two characters in one room. If you're used to plays, you're probably laughing at me now; how can I be excited by three-and-a-half minutes? How many great plays have spent two hours in the same room with a couple of characters? But this is television, where nobody lets you do this stuff. And to see two magnificent actors simply act, without any tricks or distractions.. well, that's as good as it's ever gonna get, for any writer. I can't tell you how privileged, and how sheerly happy it made me. Sometimes I wonder why I came to a town where the trees don't change color in the fall and the bike lanes are a recipe for death. This is why I came. This is why I put off the novels I've longed to write. This is why, although the industry drives me to at least one evening of insanity a year, where I break out the liquor and pace up and down muttering about how I could have stayed in New York and done computer support, I know I'm not leaving any time soon.
(I also can't tell you how trivializing it feels to go to Twitter in an excess of exuberance and say, "I wish I could tell you all why I'm so excited about this episode," and get negative remarks back about how much screen time someone's crystal ball says Wilson or Chase will or will not be getting, as though that were the only thing a writer could possibly be interested in. But I'll save my discussion of the shippification of television for another post. For now, though, no, Lucas was not my idea, so -- you know who you are -- you can stop sending me email.)
Meanwhile: the plan for the year is to write an episode of House, a pilot, a comic book, and a novel. I know that's on the crazy-ambitious side, but I'm firm believer in the idea that it's better to aim high and fall short. It'll be interesting to see what actually happens. I'm in the middle of working out the first episode of season seven right now, and I'm pretty excited about it.
It all comes down to love, and on that note, I'll leave you with an image. For night shooting, a director will sometimes use these gorgeous, crazy, giant floating lights -- twenty or thirty feet across, they hang in the night sky like minor zeppelin moons, each tethered to the earth by a central stalk, making the whole thing look like a glowing jellyfish far above your head. I love them at any time, but how much more on a night when you're going into the woods of Griffith Park to shoot a man with antlers and some forest nymphs dancing around a bonfire? You have to leave a van and make your way along a dirt path, tall trees on either side, and ahead, in a glade atop a promontory, obscured by pines, is an enormous floating (false) moon. It's like walking into a fantasy illustration, and there's no chance of getting lost. The real full moon is out as well, but on this night it seems subdued. And when you reach the bonfire, there are the magical woodland beings, costumed brilliantly, leading you to expect Shakespearean dialogue at any moment, or at least a merry forest song in Middle English. I think there's a fair chance I'll never see another night like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/doris_reads_a_lot/sets/72157623994537230/detail/