Getting Kicked Off the Lot
My apologies for the ridiculous delay since the last entry. I pitched a serial to a producer last week and he was very interested, but as soon as I got home from the meeting, all ready to fire off a couple scripts and a bible, I had a blinding revelation which completely changed a significant aspect of the story. Ever since then, I’ve been working feverishly on revising the episodes and replanning the whole story (as well as dealing with a hundred other things) so I haven’t managed to make time for the blog until now. I’ll try not to let that happen again; in fact, I’d like to get onto an every-other-day schedule if I can, though I’m not going to make any promises. Anyway, all that personal jabber aside…
I’m one of the five or six people watching On the Lot. In some ways, it’s a huge mess of a show, but I’m surprised anyone ever thought it would be a hit regardless of how well executed it might have been. The sad fact is that most people just don’t give a crap about filmmaking. They don’t dream of becoming directors. They don’t wonder what it’s like to make a movie. And they don’t envy anyone in the business who’s not a celebrity. This manifests quite clearly in the dismal ratings and box office of every behind-the-scenes project that comes down the pike — I think without exception — so it’s a mystery to me why the financial types in the business keep greenlighting them. Of course I gobble them up, and I’m sure many of you do too, but we’re the exception that proves the rule. We’re the proud few who actually want to make movies, so of course we care.
But enough of that. I come not to bury On the Lot, but to praise (some of) its filmmakers. Telling a story in two minutes is hard. Damn hard. For the longest time I had no idea how to do it. Virtually all my shorts have been much closer to ten minutes than two, and some were a lot longer than that. Nor could I seem to get the knack of telling an episodic story in short, bite-sized chunks of no more than three or at most five minutes… i.e. for the web. Several years ago, in fact, after working for an animated TV show and totally failing to get any of my scripts on the air, I decided to roll my own show on the web. To make a long story short, while I set out intending to keep each episode under five minutes, I quickly wound up with a stack of really great 30-page scripts, perfect for conventional television but totally untenable online, and since I’m not a certified, accredited showrunner, into the closet they went. So I can sympathize with contestants who have trouble telling a complete and compelling story in just a few brief seconds. But I’ve long since gotten over my mental block, and anyone who’s made it this far on the show should have too.
Telling a story this compressed is all about shorthand; it requires quickly establishing characters and problems we’re all familiar with and can understand immediately. If this sounds like broad, shallow writing, that’s because in a way it is. In just two minutes, there’s no time for subtlety or complexity. Of course you have to personalize your stereotypes to make them feel fresh and new, but they still have to be familiar, or you’ll spend all your time and then some just setting things up and you’ll never get to the actual story. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what many people do — sketch out a character but neglect to put him or her in a story. (In fact, that happens with depressing regularity in features, too.) Other people try to assemble a plot but neglect to populate it with characters. (Likewise depressingly common in features.) Both mistakes are fatal.
So how did the filmmakers in last night’s episode do? Well, they were all over the map. Andrew Hunt’s Zero2Sixty was the best of the bunch (you can thank me later for avoiding the pun) because he came up with a funny, exciting scenario filled with well-drawn characters — a nebbishy, ineffectual car salesman gets caught up in a frantic car chase when a thief steals a car off his lot (thank me again!) and an FBI agent needs to borrow a car to go in pursuit; the car salesman accompanies him to protect the car and finds himself rising to the occasion and successfully selling the car to the agent. Jason Epperson’s Sweet was also very good. It’s about a guy who gets home from work and realizes he’s forgotten his anniversary, so he has to make a mad dash to get his wife some flowers and arrange dinner reservations in the few short minutes before she gets home. Everyone can relate to that dilemma, and the story was told in a fun and amusing fashion. Unfortunately, Sam Friedlander’s entry, Key Witness, was a dud. The story had something to do with a cop trying to bring in a reluctant witness, but we never found out why the witness wasn’t cooperating, and more importantly, neither the cop nor the witness ever became characters. So not only did we not really know what was going on, we didn’t have any reason to care. I halfway hope he squeaks through the voting, because his earlier Replication Theory may have been the funniest 90 seconds about farting that I’ve ever seen, but Witness showed none of the visual flare or storytelling panache of his earlier work, and I’m afraid the truth is that he deserves to go home.
The lesson to draw from all this is that even though shorts (and commercials) are very different from feature films, the basic rule of establishing character and situation immediately actually applies to both. You have very little time to grab your readers’ or audiences’ interest before they toss your script into the trash, hit the ’stop’ button or walk out of the theater. And if you think about it, why would you waste your time and theirs on scenes and material that aren’t actually a crucial part of your story? Get right to the point, or you’ll get kicked off the lot too. (What, you thought you were going to get away without any bad puns at all? Not a chance!)
Tags: On the Lot, TV