Write Your Screenplay Podcast

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STRANGER THINGS - Part 2 - Writing A Pilot That Sells

By Jacob Krueger

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This podcast was taken from our vault, if you are interested in finding out more please check out our upcoming TV Comedy Class with Jerry Perzigian or our TV Drama Class with Steve Molton.

In the Part 1 of this podcast we discussed Stranger Things, the concept of the Series Engine, and how it relates to the pilot episode and the Show Bible of your series.

This week, we’re going to dive deeper into the Stranger Things pilot, to see exactly how it was constructed, and how it contains the blueprint not only of the Series Engine, but also of the Show Bible that could have been used to sell it. And then we’re going to talk about how you can apply these ideas to writing and structuring your own Series Pilot.

If you haven’t yet seen all of Stranger Things, don’t worry. We’re primarily going to be talking about the pilot episode in this podcast.  However, if you haven’t yet seen the pilot, you should be aware that there will be spoilers ahead.

Also, as you may know, October 5th through 9th we’re going to be holding our first TV Writing Retreat up in Dover, Vermont as part of the iTVFest Television Festival. It’s going to be an incredible event. We’re bringing our entire TV Writing faculty, including Jerry Perzigian (former show runner of Married with Children, The Jeffersons & The Golden Girls), Steve Molton, Karin Partin, and of course me. So if you’re interested in learning more about TV and Web Series writing & pitching in a real TV Writers Room environment, make sure to take advantage and sign up at our website.  Because the retreat happens as part of iTVFest, it also includes a special VIP Creator Pass only for our students, to get you into all the iTVFest parties, networking events and screenings.

 As we discussed in Part 1, when you write a series pilot, you have to do a lot more than just tell a great story. That’s because TV and Web series work in an almost completely different way than feature films. When you’re writing a feature film, you’re really just thinking about one story. Sure, you may have a sequel in mind, especially if you’re working on a super big-budget action movie franchise. But for the most part, you’re writing a self-contained unit, whereas a series needs to have the ability to replicate itself; it cannot exist in a vacuum.

So, when you write a pilot, you’re not just showing that you can tell a great story, you’re showing that you can tell a great story that can be replicated. You’re showing that you can tell a great story that can run for five seasons, maybe ten seasons. You’re showing a blueprint: not just for what this episode will be, but for what the entire franchise will be.

This is what we mean when we say engine. And of course, engines are an incredibly complicated concept. The engine is the foundation of series writing. When a series is working, it’s because you’ve got a great engine. And when a series is not working, it’s because you don’t.

And if you don’t have a great engine, or if you have a great engine but it’s not in your pilot in a way that your producer can see it, the truth of the matter is you’re not going to sell your series. And the reason you’re not going to sell your series is that your producer’s going to be afraid that it is going to run out of steam. So, when you create your pilot, what you’re really doing is demonstrating your engine.

We’re living in a Golden Age of Television writing, and this is one of the reasons that it is such an exciting time to be a TV or Web Series writer.

This week, Jake dives deeper into his analysis of the pilot for Netflix's new hit series, Stranger Things.

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STRANGER THINGS - Part 1 - The Show Engine & the Bible

By Jacob Krueger

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If you haven’t already seen all of Stranger Things, don't worry. We're going to limit this podcast to really looking at the pilot and we're going to do that for two reasons.

 

Number 1: to avoid spoilers for the people who haven’t seen it.

 

But Number 2: Because pilots are like bibles. And what I mean by that, there's a concept called the “Show Bible" which is probably one of the most important concepts if you want to sell a TV show. 

 

So what the hell is a bible? Well, the concept of a show bible actually began as a very different tool than it is now. Back in the day, the bible was a tool for new writers coming on to the show. What would happen was this shows are run really long time usually they will develop by a show runner and a team of writers. But eventually after many years, show runners or a writer might leave the show and new writers would be brought on. And as an existing writer, you don't want to spend all your time explaining to the new writer, "No we already did that in Episode 14. These are the things that can happen. No, this character would never do that."

 

So what happened instead was TV shows are built to run for a really long time and the producers didn't want the nature of the show to change. Because the whole reason that an audience comes to a show is because they want a certain feeling.

 

They want a very specific feeling delivered to their living room every single day. And if suddenly the feeling of the show changes or suddenly the rules of the show change with a new writer, the audience may associate feeling they're not getting that feeling anymore.

 

And when they do that, they're very quick to hit the channel button and change the channel on their television or their streaming. So the idea of a show bible is: We've educating the new writers about what already happened on the show. What the rules of the show were that it evolved over years and years and years.

 

What are the kinds of things that the character does? What are the kinds of things that the character would never do? Those little secrets that you get, that you develop as you get to know your characters over many years.

 

 

What's interesting is that back in those days the show runner would never dream of writing a show bible. In fact, the show bible was created by the assistant who would just sit and take notes on the episodes as they aired and the conversations that were held in the writer's room. And in this way, the bible was a naturally evolving document that kind of documented the life cycle of the show, rather than what it is today.

 

Today, the TV Bible is really a sales document. When a producer buys a TV show, they're not just buying a great pilot episode and that means when you, as a writer, sell a TV show, you have to do more than just write a great pilot episode.

 

TV pilots are almost entirely different than feature films in that feature films are a contained unit, TV is a series, whether it's a comedy, a drama, even a web series or a miniseries is a replicable unit. Meaning when a producer buys your pilot, they're not just buying the first episode and they're not just buying season one.

 

They're actually buying the first five seasons, maybe the first ten seasons. They're buying the ability to replicate a very specific feeling and a very specific kind of drama or comedy every single week (or every single episode if it's more than that for its releasing model).  And today, more and more,

This week, Jake breaks down the pilot for the new hit Netflix series, Stranger Things.

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The 3 Most Important Elements When Writing for Hire

By Jacob Krueger

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This week, we'll be taking a break from our regular programming to bring you an excerpt from one of Jacob Krueger's Master Classes.

Jake: You know, writing for assignment is very different than writing on a spec. The beautiful thing about writing on spec is we have all the time in the world to fully explore, to fully mess up, to go in the wrong direction, to explore what the limits of what the movie can be are, to play. And in an ideal world that's the way we want to write.

 

You know, most of the scripts that break writers into the industry were not written in a weekend. They were not written in a month. They were written over years and years and made to look easy.  

 

And it’s your next script- And, fortunately, when you allow yourself to explore that way, when you have the time to build that way, it also builds your skills. And it makes you much more likely to succeed when you’ve got to do these crazy 12 week turnarounds. The standard turnaround for a professional writer, whose only job is to write, is 12 weeks, and Marti is trying to do that with kids, a husband, a movie in pre-production and a commercial.

 

Marti: By August 30th, woo-hoo!

 

Jake: So this is a real challenge. It's exciting, and it’s a real challenge. So, what's the most important thing when you’re writing on assignment?

 

Page 1.

 

Page 1 determines what the reader is going to feel as they start reading your script. It's like the window through which they’re going to view everything else. So, imagine you’re going to a job interview. You can be totally brilliant, but if you didn’t take a shower and you look disheveled and you forgot to put your pants on, we all know what happens, right? So, the most important thing when you’re writing on assignment is Page 1. Remember, producers expect to have to give notes, and when there’s a 12-week turnaround, there’s no option that they’re not going to have to give notes. You’re not going to get a perfect script in 12 weeks. Period. Ever. It just never happens.

 

Even Matthew Shepard, for which we won a ton of awards, for which we had to turn in the first draft in four weeks (which was insane), even for that movie, we did a year of rewrites after that four weeks.

 

But the most important thing when you're writing for hire, and quite frankly if you’re working on a spec as well is Page 1. Because a producer is waiting…

 

Well actually, come to think of it, maybe the number one thing should be to turn it in on time! You are better to turn it in on time good, than late great. Because turning the script in late is like “icing” a producer: it screws a producer up.

 

Producers are incredibly dependent on deadlines. Oftentimes a producer has a star interested, for example, and that star has a window from this date to that date, and if they miss that window, that star’s gone and the movie’s gone. Or they have a director who’s available only during this time or they have a financial person who’s waiting for this script who they’ve made promises to…

 

So if you are late- late is always the worst. There is nothing worse that you can do than late.

 

A producer, is always really anxious before they get the script. I know when I was a producer I was always really anxious. First off you’re wondering, “Are they actually going to turn it in? Am I gonna have to call them? Am I gonna have to call their agent? Are they blocked? ‘Have they even written it?” So as a producer, you’re really freaked out. You’re like, “Oh my G-d!

The Write Your Screenplay Podcast takes a break from its regular programming in order to share one of Jacob Krueger's Master Class lectures on the most important elements of writing for hire, as well as some valuable tips on how to get you there faster.

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Suicide Squad: Script Soup

By Jacob Krueger

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What’s interesting about Suicide Squad is that this is a very bad script by a very good writer (David Ayer also wrote Training Day). So instead of looking at the script like most critics have done and simply bashing it, I want to look at it as I would if I was working with a student.

It's really interesting to see that even some of the greatest writers go through exactly the same problems, and can bump up against exactly the same causes of problems, that many new and emerging and student writers deal with.

The biggest problem with Suicide Squad is not Jared Leto's method acting antics. It's not the egos of all the many stars that were involved. It’s not even the many places where the logic of the script just doesn't make sense.

The real problem with Suicide Squad is the problem of too many good ideas.

This is actually one of the most common things that we see in screenplays: too many good ideas. And when you get attached to having too many good ideas what ends up happening is that all the ideas end up suffering.

In Improv, there's a concept called "Yes, and..." which is a way of building scenes in a way that speak to each other.

On the simplest level, "Yes, and..." means looking at what has come before, agreeing, accepting it, allowing it to land in you and then adding something to it that drives it deeper.  

In a screenplay, "Yes, and..." can happen at many different levels, inside of a scene, inside of the overall structure, or inside a relationship between two characters.

So, a character says something or does something in your screenplay, and you can almost think of it like a tennis match: you want to allow that ball to cross the net, and you want to feel the shiver of it as it hits the racket of the other character.  You want to feel how that shiver changes the return.

And then you want to step into the other character, and allow the way that the ball was returned to shiver through that character and affect their return. That's what "Yes, and..." looks like inside a scene: “Yes, I accept what just occurred, and I'm now going to react to it, take it deeper, stronger, bigger, faster, cooler.”

"Yes, and..." can also happen structurally for us as writers, when we allow the scene that we've just written, or the idea that we've just come up with, to fully land. When we accept it, and then allow it to influence whatever comes next. We want it to drive us deeper into one thing, allowing us to build upon and outdo what's come before. This is an organic, natural, simple way to think about structure.

Unfortunately what happens in Suicide Squad is the same thing that often happens with young improvers: Rather than “Yes, and…” we simply end up “And-ing.”

And oftentimes that “And-ing” comes from a place of insecurity in us. We’re afraid that maybe our idea isn't good enough. Maybe we don't have enough to take the story where it needs to go. Maybe we don't have enough of a story here, or enough of a character here. Maybe we’re afraid we don't have enough for our character to do. It’s not going to sustain us. It's not going to be exciting enough for the audience.

So, we get to that place of anxiety. Instead of “Yes, and…” we start just “And-ing.” Just saying, “Well, maybe it's also this, maybe also this, maybe it's also this, maybe it's also this, maybe it's also this…”

We get attached to all those “And” ideas, even if they don't have very much in common with the idea that came before.  

And when that ends up happening, instead of getting structure, we get script soup.

Join Jacob Krueger as he sifts through the Script Soup that is 'Suicide Squad' in order to find the truly great stories and themes that could have given more structure to this summer flop.

Recording of the Table Read My Script Teleconference with Award Winning Screenwriter Jacob Krueger

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Swiss Army Man: The 'Bad Screenplay' Experiment

By Jacob Krueger

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This week, we're going to be talking about Swiss Army Man by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. This is an extraordinary script, and one of the great examples of just how far outside of the rule box you can actually go as a screenwriter or director. It’s also a prime example of how a really out-there script can sometimes attract the biggest talent in Hollywood, in this case, Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano.

 

There's an exercise that I often do with my Write Your Screenplay students that I call the “Bad Screenplay” exercise. We put a list up on the board of all the students’ greatest fears about their writing. We hear all kinds of things: “bad dialogue,” “cliché,” “redundancy,” “no structure…” the list goes on and on, as the white board fills up with increasingly egregious fears.

 

And then I give my students a challenge: to write a scene that embodies every one of the fears about their writing that we’ve put up on the board. To strive not for good writing, but for bad writing. In fact, I tell them that if their writing starts to get good, they should look up at the board, find the idea they find most horrifying, and strive to integrate it into their script.

 

In many ways this is exactly what the Daniels did in the creation of this screenplay. Daniel Kwan has spoken about the fact that he hates fart jokes, hates buddy movies, hates a cappella music, and many of the other fundamental elements of Swiss Army Man.

 

He built Swiss Army Man out of the things that he hated most in screenplays.

 

So why would somebody do that?

 

Well, there are couple reasons. The first is that, oftentimes, it’s our fears that actually get in the way of our greatest creativity. We are so afraid of doing the things that bring us shame that we just end up not doing them at all, for fear that we might fall short of our own expectations, or societal expectations.

 

And of course, if you’ve seen Swiss Army Man, you know that this is exactly what the movie is about. The movie is about shame. The kind of shame that cuts us off from one another, and from ourselves, and leaves us feeling like we’re on a desert island unable to actually reach anyone.

 

Now, just a warning, there are some spoilers ahead!

 

 

In a lot of ways, you could say the arc of Paul Dano's character, Hank, is simply a journey from hiding his farts from others, to farting in public. And this is probably the worst premise ever for the structure of a film. And if you're Daniel Kwan, and you hate fart jokes in movies, and body humor, and the thought of building a movie based around a giant fart joke fills you with shame, this is an especially horrifying premise for a film.

 

For the Daniels, this was the whole point of the movie. It started as a joke. it was for them, the most ridiculous thing that they could imagine filming. And they actually built the entire script simply to serve that joke, to give themselves the opportunity to do the thing that they feared, and in doing so to get some of their own shame on the page.

 

And you can see what happened when these writers moved towards their shame rather than away from it. When they put the things on the page that they were most scared of and most embarrassed about, all that silliness ultimately led them to a very profound theme about shame and the nature of shame.

 

It led them to a shockingly moving (and funny) exploration about how the things that are actually natural about us, things like farts and erections and masturbation and sexual ...