![]() On instinct, I wrote a 6 page or so SEASON/SERIES OVERVIEW DOCUMENT for myself, imagining where this story and these characters would go after the pilot. I didn’t realize it at the time but grounding it in reality was a big selling point.Īfter the pilot was finished, I did one of the most important things I could have ever done. A lot of the technology was grounded in stuff I was reading on Wired or finding on Reddit, stuff that’s going to be available to everyone in the near future. I was conscious about laying the pipelines for a serialized story and where these characters might go and conscious about the world the story took place in. I wrote the first draft of the pilot over a month and then did a lot of rewriting after. ![]() So what came out was a sci-fi thriller about what it means to be human, wrapped up in a story about a female astronaut who goes to space on a solo mission and comes back pregnant to her husband and android child. In fact, I’m listening to THE FORCE AWAKENS soundtrack as I write this. My earliest memory (other than my youngest sister being brought home from the hospital for the first time) is seeing STAR WARS. I was a genre guy, have been my whole life. But I realized that the stuff I was writing is not the first thing I would go see if I was looking at a film festival brochure or deciding what to see on a Friday night. Until then I’d been writing what I knew, keeping my stories small and contained, stuff I could shoot on my own for very little money in my hometown in Ohio. Then I followed one of the most important pieces of writing you can get: write the show or movie you would want to watch. I got into filling all of those things out, imagining the world and the longer arcs for the characters. At the time I was using CELT-X screenwriting software on my iPad and it had a template for a Bible, with sub- categories for Characters, Timelines, etc. I did this over and over again, with probably twenty episodes in all over three months.Īfter that, I wrote a pilot for a show called HOPEWELL that was kind of a practice pilot about a small midwestern town where strange supernatural things began to occur. I made note of how many acts there were in each one, how many scenes were in an act, and the approximate length of each scene. I took a number of episodes of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, BREAKING BAD and DOCTOR WHO and watched them with a remote in one hand and a notebook in the other. So I spent a few months really looking at the structure and rhythm of my favorite shows. As much as I LOVED television I didn’t know how to write it. I’d been writing plays for almost twenty years and writing feature films for nearly that long. ![]() I’ll start with…īy the time I sat down to really write my first pilot, I realized that I knew very little about writing television. I won’t make any assumptions about your experience/expertise, apologies if this seems like basic common sense or stuff you already know. I’m offering it to you in the hope that some part of it may be useful. This is just one guy’s overall experience from writing the pilot to selling it. I know it’s not going to happen for everyone the same way and there will be plenty here that other people will disagree with. But it DID happen and to quote David Mamet from THE EDGE, “What one man (or woman) can do, another man (or woman) can do.” So I’m passing along what I learned from my personal experience. It was my first job in Hollywood.Ī lot of people are going to tell you that it NEVER happens that way. I was made an Executive Producer as well and spent two years learning how to make television at the highest level. One of the Executive Producers was Steven Spielberg, it starred Oscar Winner Halle Berry, and got a straight to series order for thirteen episodes from CBS. The day I turned forty years old I sold my first big script, a tv pilot for a new show called EXTANT.
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