Once, on an airplane, I sat next to a talkative scientist. His focus was quantum physics and the study of microparticles, with an emphasis on dark matter and something called “black body radiation.” Thank God it was a short flight.
The good news is that in about half an hour he had explained his area of study so cogently, so clearly, that I wondered why I had wasted so much effort avoiding every newspaper or magazine article about it.
For years, I’d read a headline. Something along the lines of “University Physicist Maps Electron Orbits” or “New Observations of the Copenhagen Interpretation Rocks Physics World.” And I’d just turn the page, zip right by it.
But my seat neighbor explained it all to me, in simple language and with clear examples. Somehow, he made a complex, baffling subject totally understandable. And then, about 20 minutes before we landed, he asked a question of his own. “Tell me,” he said, “about the television business. How does it really work?”
I shook my head. “It’s too complicated,” I said. “You wouldn’t be able to understand it.”
He gave me a very strange look. “I’m a world-famous physicist,” he said huffily. “I think I’ll be able to understand show business.”
I sighed. I’ve been through this before with smart guys. But I knew enough not to argue. I took a deep breath.
The easiest way to explain the ecosystem of the television industry, I began, is by describing when, exactly, a writer gets paid and for what. If you pitch an idea to a network and it likes it, it’ll order up a script and pay you for that. Once you turn in the script, a month or so later, the network will ask you to address a set of concerns — it calls these “notes” — and you’ll get another small check when you deliver a second draft.
The network usually orders more scripts from more writers than it actually needs to produce, so after you’ve turned in your script, you have to wait a few weeks, or months, to see if it wants to produce your script. This is called a “pilot order,” and it comes with another juicy check.
You now have to hire a director, assemble a cast, and produce the pilot, all under the helpful supervision of the network and the studio. When this is done and delivered, you get another check. And then you wait until the network decides if it wants more episodes.
The trouble with this system (well, one of the troubles with this system) is that the longer an idea takes to get from the brain to the screen, the flabbier it gets. By the time most pilots get produced, they’ve been massaged and adjusted and thought and rethought so many times that whatever made the idea fresh and clever has vanished. That’s actually what we call it: The Vanishing.
“That scene kind of…vanished,” we’ll say when a scene that worked 24 hours before and hadn’t been altered in the least is missing the lightning and the magic and the effortless charm it used to have.
And worse, when something vanishes, you wonder: Was it ever there? Was I deluding myself then, thinking that this material worked? Or am I deluding myself now, thinking that it doesn’t?
That’s really the hardest part about guiding a script through the months of rewriting, the network concerns, and eventually pilot production: figuring out how much of yourself to trust, how much of your judgment is sound, untouched by tiredness or nervousness or delusion or the blindness caused by thinking about it too much.
And when it’s all over, when the script is produced and cut and scored and finished, against all odds, you may have a hit on your hands. You may also have a flop on your hands. But whatever you have, it won’t really resemble the idea you pitched months ago. That will be long gone.
My seat neighbor took this in. “I don’t get it,” he said.
“Told you,” I said. And we both went back to our magazines.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
