Write Your Screenplay Podcast

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How To Write a TV Bible

By Jacob Krueger

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As we discussed in Part 1 of this podcast, when TV producers ask you to write a TV Bible with your pilot script, they usually request it in a pretty strange form. And a lot of writers get confused about what producers are actually looking for when they ask for a TV Bible and what’s supposed to go in it.

Most TV Bibles include a series logline, character bios for all the main characters, episode summaries for the first season, and often summaries of the future seasons as well.  But the truth is, if that’s all you deliver, your TV Bible’s not going to take you very far.

Because producers are never really asking for a bunch of boring information about your TV series. What they’re really asking is proof that you know what you’re doing, and that your series pilot not only has a fabulous premise and collection of castable characters we’d want to spend our time binge watching, but also has the kind of ENGINE required to run for at least 5 years.

They don’t want you to tell them it’s going to run for 5 years. They want you to show them. By putting together your loglines, characters, and episodes into a short sweet document that they can’t say no to!

So what should that document contain? And how exactly do you write it?

Well, you're going to start off with a killer logline. But how do you know if your logline is actually killer?

On the simplest level, the best loglines start with a character who’s got a very specific dominant trait, and then simply put that character in an ironic situation that would be very difficult for a character with that trait to handle.

This helps anyone who reads your logline see exactly what your series about, how big your character’s journey could potentially be, and that there are enough complications there to sustain a series.

So, for example, if you're writing a logline for a TV Drama like Breaking Bad, you might say something like this:

Logline: A law abiding chemistry teacher  finds out he is dying and teams up with his own worst student, to start a crystal meth business that can provide for his family after his death.

And you can see that that’s a big ol’ ironic situation right there. But it matters because of the character. If you just said “a guy creates a crystal meth empire” you don't have a logline.  The story matters because of the dominant trait of the main character, and the exceedingly difficult and ironic situation his desires lead him to in light of that dominant trait.

If you’ve studied with me in my Write Your Screenplay classes, you’ve probably realized by now that these are the same underlying elements we build upon as we build the structure of our screenplays. What’s it about? Who's the main character? What’s their dominant trait? What do they want? What’s the best, worst or most ironic thing that could happen to someone with a dominant trait like this.

In a logline, it’s dominant trait plus ironic hook that leads a producer to “get it” right away, to say to themselves “I see how this can generate episodes forever.”

If you're going to pitch Arrested Development. You might use a logline like this:

Logline: When the patriarch of a wealthy family ends up in prison for illegally building houses in Iraq, his morally upright son must wrangle the rest of his ridiculously self involved family to save the family business and for vie mom and dad's love.

And you can see from the pitch that there is enough there, a character with a clear want and  dominant trait, an ironic situation, and enough complications in his attempts to get it...

As we discussed in Part 1 of this podcast, when TV producers ask you to write a TV Bible with your pilot script, they usually request it in a pretty strange form. And a lot of writers get confused about what producers are actually looking for when they ask for a TV Bible and what’s supposed to go in it.

Most TV Bibles include a series logline, character bios for all the main characters, episode summaries for the first season, and often summaries of the future seasons as well. But the truth is, if that’s all you deliver, your TV Bible’s not going to take you very far.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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DIY Film Making: One Man's Journey To Sundance & Beyond

By Jacob Krueger & Chris Littler, ft. Adam Bower

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An article from our vault that is still relevant.  The first step is to take a step!  

As many of you know we are headed to Park City, Utah this week for the Sundance Film Festival, where we’re going to be hosting, in collaboration with our partner Stage 32, a series of free panels, lectures, pitch parties, and exciting events all throughout the festival.

So if you’re going to be in Park City, come join us! You can see a complete calendar of all our events and RSVP at: writeyourscreenplay.com/parkcity

In the meantime, in preparation for all the Park City excitement, we’re going to take a little detour from our regularly scheduled podcast and bring you an interview by Jacob Krueger Studio Director Chris Littler, with filmmaker Adam Bowers.

Adam shot a feature film, New Low, for $2000 and ended up a official selection of the Sundance Film Festival in 2010. He then managed to parlay that success into Paperback, a second feature at a much higher budget, which premiered at the Austin Film Festival this year.

If you are a film student here at Jacob Krueger Studio, you know it’s an extraordinarily exciting time to be a filmmaker. We are seeing more and more people like Adam, who are making their own material. These writers have stopped waiting for people to say “yes” to them, and instead started saying “yes” to themselves, developing great screenplays and going out and shooting them.

Chris sat down with Adam and asked him a bunch of questions about his process, about what it means to be an indie filmmaker, and how he managed to shoot a film on $2000.  He got some very interesting responses, particularly about some unexpected benefits of shooting micro budget, compared to his experience with a higher budget production.

Enjoy the interview!  And then get out there and make some movies!

 

Chris: I'm interested in the process of creating things, taking things from an idea to whatever it is at the end. And for you it's feature films, right?What had you done filmically before you took on a feature length?

Adam: Yeah, so I was trying to get into the film school at UCF which is in Orlando, University of Central Florida, and the first year I didn't get in. I was 18 I didn't have any real experience except for shooting sketches with my friends on weekends when I was in high school but they were all like terrible. And then the second year I forgot to apply in time. I remember sitting in class in one of my film pending, entry level film classes that you take before you get into the actual thing and I was talking to another guy who was getting into it and I was like "Hey, when are you gonna send in your application, and he was like that was due months ago now we're waiting to hear." And I was like oh my god.

So, at that point I really didn't like UCF, like I said Gainesville was a really good fit and Orlando was kind of like the opposite of that, it was a suburban sprawling kind of bummer place to live, so my brother went to UF so I got this idea from a friend of mine. He was going through the teleprom program at UF because UF didn't have a film school. He was going through the telecom program and treating it like a film degree where he was basically, because you got to make shorts in the program, so he would use that as a way to make short film, have access to the equipment and learn like basic things from his professors, but really take it upon himself to learn and make things and make his own technique and style.

We’re going to take a little detour from our regularly scheduled podcast and bring you an interview by Jacob Krueger Studio Director Chris Littler, with filmmaker Adam Bowers.

Adam shot a feature film, New Low, for $2000 and ended up a official selection of the Sundance Film Festival in 2010. He then managed to parlay that success into Paperback, a second feature at a much higher budget, which premiered at the Austin Film Festival this year.

If you are a film student here at Jacob Krueger Studio, you know it’s an extraordinarily exciting time to be a filmmaker. We are seeing more and more people like Adam, who are making their own material. These writers have stopped waiting for people to say “yes” to them, and instead started saying “yes” to themselves, developing great screenplays and going out and shooting them.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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Star Wars: The Rewrite Awakens

By Jacob Krueger

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Whether you are one of the many that loved Star Wars: The Force Awakens and saw it again and again, or one of the disappointed few who were frustrated with the rehashed scenes and safe choices of the film, there is no doubt that there is a ton that you can learn from this movie as a screenwriter, particularly when it comes to rewriting your screenplay.

As I was watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it occurred to me that in many ways, this movie is just a rewrite of Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back with a little spattering of Return of the Jedi splashed in there.

And like any effective rewrite, the structure and the approach of Star Wars: The Force Awakens focuses on two vital concepts: Compression and Amplification.

Compression begins with identifying the very best elements of your early draft, and cutting out all the boring, average, or even good stuff in between, so that you’re left with only the very best of the best.

And Amplification is about “turning up the volume” on those vital elements, visualizing them even more closely, exploring them even more deeply, and pushing them even further than you knew they could go.

On a creative level, this brings the essence of your script to the surface, allowing you to get right to the heart of what really matters, without distracting yourself, or your audience, with all that stuff in between.

On a commercial level, this makes every page a heck of a lot more compelling to read (and worthy of the thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars it’s going to take to shoot each line you write).

But most importantly, on a story level, this means you can tell more of your story faster, allowing you to take your character, your audience, and even yourself further than they (and you) were expecting when you first sat down to write.

In this way (and in true Star Wars fashion), rewriting isn’t just a mechanical process of making your script better or following a bunch of suggestions from coverage readers or producers. It’s also a spiritual journey towards connecting with yourself and with your voice as a writer.

It’s interesting that The Force Awakens came to the theatres just as we were talking about the concept of “The Engine” of so many successful TV series on this podcast. Because every movie also has an engine. And once you’ve identified that engine, both structurally and thematically, the process of compression, and amplification, and revision, becomes much easier.

It’s a search for that sweet spot, where it still feels like the same movie, even as it changes, deepens, pushes and surprises.

So it’s fitting that (after originally embarking on a different path with Michael Arndt, the writer of Little Miss Sunshine) Disney brought in Lawrence Kasdan, the writer of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to bring their mega-franchise to the promised land.

Because if anyone understood the engine of Star Wars, he was the guy.

And if you’re one of the disgruntled, who were hoping that a guy like Kasdan was going to deliver something revolutionary in The Force Awakens, the way he did in his sequels to the original Star Wars, you need to think for a moment where Disney was coming from.

They’d just spent over 4 billion dollars to acquire the rights to Star Wars from George Lucas. They were building theme parks, video games, re-doing Disney World. But they had a problem. Despite the financial success of the last three installments, there was a nearly universal agreement that those movies were ...

Whether you are one of the many that loved Star Wars: The Force Awakens and saw it again and again, or one of the disappointed few who were frustrated with the rehashed scenes and safe choices of the film, there is no doubt that there is a ton that you can learn from this movie as a screenwriter, particularly when it comes to rewriting your screenplay.

As I was watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it occurred to me that in many ways, this movie is just a rewrite of Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back with a little spattering of Return of the Jedi splashed in there.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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Does Your Show Need A Bible?

By Jacob Krueger

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What the heck is a TV Series Bible anyway? How do you write one?  And why do you need one?

The truth is, the idea of a Show Bible, as many people talk about it today, is total fiction.But like many fictional ideas, it’s become a reality that we now need to deal with as TV writers.

If you ask Jerry Perzigian, who teaches our TV Comedy Classes, he’ll tell you that in his entire thirty-some year career as a show runner on The Jeffersons, The Golden Girls, Married With Children, and about a dozen other hit shows, he never once made a bible.

Wondering if it’s different in TV Drama? Ask former Showtime Executive and Pulitzer Prize nominated writer Steve Molton, who teaches our TV Drama classes, and he’ll tell you the same thing.

In fact, on these shows the bible's weren’t made by the writers at all. The show bibles were made by the assistants. And only after the show was up and running for a good long time, when the old staff writers were moving on, and the new staff writers started coming in to replace them.

Since new writers joining the writers room likely wouldn’t have had a chance to see every episode, and even if they had, they certainly wouldn’t know them in the same detail as the original staff who wrote them,the assistants would compile old episodes into a document which could be given to new writers on the staff. It was a quick way to acquaint them with what had already been done, what will never be done, the kinds of things that generally happen in an episode, and the rules of the show that make the show’s engine run.They called this document The Show Bible.

What ended up happening was, people who weren’t in the industry or had never worked in television (the people who all too often end up teach TV and screenwriting classes) started to hear about this thing called a bible, and realized there was money to be made teaching people how to write bibles. So a whole new field of TV Writing teaching bubbled up about creating your Show Bible.

At the time this started, it was especially ridiculous,because at that time you couldn't even sell a pilot unless you were already showrunner. You could really get someone to read a spec episode for an existing TV show, and hope that it got you staffed on this show. But you could never get anyone to read a pilot from a new writer in those days.

So, this was craziness. But in an interesting example of the tail wagging the dog, what happened next was that festivals started popping up for TV Writing. And hearing about this thing called a bible that everyone was talking about, a lot of them started to require writers to submit a bible along with their show.

To me this is a fascinating example of having festivals who are run by people not in the industry, who are getting their information from teachers who are not in the industry. And somehow that all coming together to change the actual industry!

Because it’s gotten to a point where now a big change is happening in the industry. And,this is actually a very exciting change, as far as I'm concerned. Today, producers, agents and managers are asking for pilots. They're excited to sell pilots, because we're having a renaissance in TV Writing right now, and there are a lot of new markets with Amazon, and Netflix, and other internet based networks with a huge demand for content in television.

Suddenly, we’re finding ourselves in a market where we’re not only seeing great writing is happening in Television, but also a market in which you can sell a pilot,

What the heck is a TV Series Bible anyway? How do you write one? And why do you need one?

The truth is, the idea of a Show Bible, as many people talk about it today, is total fiction.But like many fictional ideas, it’s become a reality that we now need to deal with as TV writers.

If you ask Jerry Perzigian, who teaches our TV Comedy Classes, he’ll tell you that in his entire thirty-some year career as a show runner on The Jeffersons, The Golden Girls, Married With Children, and about a dozen other hit shows, he never once made a bible.

Wondering if it’s different in TV Drama? Ask former Showtime Executive and Pulitzer Prize nominated writer Steve Molton, who teaches our TV Drama classes, and he’ll tell you the same thing.

In fact, on these shows the bible’s weren’t made by the writers at all. The show bibles were made by the assistants. And only after the show was up and running for a good long time, when the old staff writers were moving on, and the new staff writers started coming in to replace them.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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Buildout Your Script, part 2: A Decision Every Moment

By Jacob Krueger

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As we continue to build out the new home for Jacob Krueger Studio (in expectation of a Jan 1 move in!) this series of podcasts will explore the many ways in which building out a space is like building out a script, taking some of the lessons I’ve learned in our buildout, and applying them to writing.

Today’s podcast covers a topic that any screenwriter, and anyone who has ever built out a space, knows well. The millions of little decisions you have to make at every moment of your buildout, and on every page of your script.

As those of you who have taken our screenwriting classes know, when you don’t know what choice to make in your script, you look towards your theme to guide you. Just like when you don’t know exactly what choice to make in your space, you look toward the purpose you ultimately want that space to serve.

But what do you to when your theme changes? Or when you’re not really sure what your theme is yet?

I recently faced this quandary while running Ethernet, HDMI , USB and microphone wiring for the online setup of our new classrooms. I knew that I wanted to build the most incredible experience possible for our online students, with top-end microphone, camera and television setup that would allow every student to see, hear and participate as if they were live in the room.

The challenge of course was that the ideal setup would be different for each kind of class we offered, and each decision I had to make seemed dependent on a million other choices: Would we be using HDMI cameras, IP cameras, USB cameras or some technology yet to be invented? Would the cameras always be in the same positions, or would they need to move for different classes? What technology would our students all over the world be most comfortable with, and which of these top-end solutions would it be compatible with?

We only had one chance to do this the right way, before the sheetrock went up, the insulation went in, and running wires inside the wall became very difficult and expensive, I found myself up all night for many nights, crunching on one wiring blueprint after another. Trying to figure out every possible scenario for the next ten years, before I’d even taught my first class in our new space.

Yeah, it was a nightmare.

Then I realized, of course it was a nightmare! For the same reason writing a script this way would be a nightmare.

Because, as nice as it would be to know every element you were ever going to need in your story before you wrote the first page, the truth is, you need to know the variables you’re playing with before you can learn how to play with them.

You have to let the story show you what it wants to be, and sometimes that means writing some scenes, or running some wires, that aren’t going to make it to the final draft. There are some things that you’re just not going to realize you need until you’ve lived in the script for awhile, and really come to understand what you’re building.

So how do you accept the messy nature of this process, while still “running your wires” in a way that’s likely to serve the final product you’re building?

Fortunately, there is a long history of great writers, all with their own solutions for this very problem…

Paddy Chayefsky, the writer of Network used start out by writing one word above his typewriter.

So, for example, he might write Capitalism above his typewriter before he started a project. This was his way of focusing his theme consciously. He allowed himself to write anything he wanted,

As we continue to build out the new home for Jacob Krueger Studio (in expectation of a Jan 1 move in!) this series of podcasts will explore the many ways in which building out a space is like building out a script, taking some of the lessons I’ve learned in our buildout, and applying them to writing.

Today’s podcast covers a topic that any screenwriter, and anyone who has ever built out a space, knows well. The millions of little decisions you have to make at every moment of your buildout, and on every page of your script.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes