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How do eight television writers get on the same page? Six Feet Under Script Coordinator Joanna Lovinger gives us an inside view.
There are nine people sitting around a long table strewn with blister-fried peanuts, pumpkin seeds, health food store cookies and Hershey's kisses. At one end of the table sits show creator Alan Ball. At the other end, partially hidden behind a laptop computer, is writers' assistant Cara DiPaolo. In addition to the snacks on the table, there are countless lunch delivery menus, research articles, and a magic 8 ball.
"Who watched Survivor: All-Stars last night?"
I'm in the writers' room for Six Feet Under, and before getting started today, the writers have some important issues to discuss, including an analysis and deconstruction of last night's TV. They're a well educated group, and they write for one of the most critically acclaimed shows on television, but the writers are largely addicted to reality TV. Except for Alan Ball. He prefers South Park.
Eventually, the debates over Average Joe contestants recedes, and they get to work. The writers have already determined in broad strokes what will happen to each of the characters throughout the season (called the characters' arcs). The entire season is charted on two enormous dry-erase boards on the wall. Black electrical tape marks columns for each of the 12 episodes. Within each column are one or two sentences describing each of the character's stories, written in Cara's block-like handwriting. The characters are color-coded. Ruth's story is written in blue marker, David's story is in purple, and so on.
The contents of this dry-erase board are a tightly kept secret and the room is locked each night. Internet plot leaks have plagued the show since the beginning. They got particularly bad in season three, and the Executive Producers even planned to distribute decoy plot rumors around Hollywood to catch the culprit. But even the most curious fan of the show wouldn't be able to discern much by reading the board in the writers' room. It's filled with inside jokes, nicknames for the characters and plot points simplified so tightly ("Sexy, sexy, sexy death!" begins #405) that to an outsider, it doesn't seem to make any sense at all.
Today, they are expanding on exactly what will happen to each character (called the story beats) in episode #409. All the writers pitch ideas. The group also figures out how to make dream sequences serve the story, and discusses how to build on themes within this episode. The conversation switches back and forth between this episode, the season finale (which they'll have to write soon), gender roles, sex, literature, dream analysis and funny stories about their families. Sometimes everyone talks at once; sometimes the group gets very quiet...until someone suggests they order lunch.
On the other side of the conference table hangs another dry-erase board, bearing a few doodles from writer Bruce Eric Kaplan, who also works as a cartoonist for The New Yorker. As this episode's story beats start to develop, Alan Ball writes them out in paragraph form. Cara transcribes this information into her laptop.
Later, the group will put the scenes in order and expand the paragraphs a little more. When they're done, they will have the outline for the episode. The outline contains every element that will go into the finished script - detailing which characters are in each scene, what happens in each scene, and where each scene takes place.
Even though the writers have developed the story together, only one person will write the script; Alan Ball assigns episodes to the writers early in the season, and this one is going to writer Rick Cleveland. Once the outline is finished, Rick will disappear for a week or two, staying out of the writer's room and all the discussion of family, sex, lunch and reality TV, until #409 is finished.
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Mortuary Fact
Ancient Greeks buried their dead with a coin in their hand or mouth to pay Charon, the ferryman who carries the dead across the river Styx and into the afterlife. |
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