On July 4th, 2010, actress, book artist, painter, and bonsai artist Gloria Stuart celebrates her 100th birthday!

Gloria’s the oldest performer ever to be nominated for an Academy Award (for her portrayal of Old Rose in 1997’s Titanic).

Gloria Stuart visits her cork bark elm at the bonsai collection of the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, January 2010

Thanks to overwhelming popular demand (okay, moderately whelming popular demand), I am once again teaching a UCLA Extension Writers’ Program course entitled “Beginning Writing for the One-Hour Drama: Building the Story and the Outline” for Summer Quarter 2010! The class meets for ten weeks, 7pm  to 10pm on Tuesdays, from July 6 through September 7 on the picaresque UCLA campus in Westwood.

For the official course description (or to enroll!), go to this UCLA Extension page (or click on the above banner)… but here’s the unofficial course description: (up to) twenty students each choose a current one-hour TV drama for which they’d like to write a “spec” episode. I whip them guide them through the process of developing episode ideas into story synopses, basic “beat sheets”, and full outlines. Along the way, students pitch their ideas in class for notes and feedback… and also form small “writing staffs” to help each other brainstorm and “break” their stories on a whiteboard, the same way professional TV writers’ rooms work. At the end of the ten weeks, each student should have a solid 12 to 15-page story outline that’s all set to be expanded into a spec teleplay.

(And… early heads-up… I’ll be teaching the followup course, “Writing the One-Hour Drama Script”, during the Fall Quarter, taking students from outline to teleplay!)

EDITED 11 Jan 2010 to add: Good heavens, the class roster is actually full!

(Click the banner below to check if any slots have opened up… or to get on the wait list.)

No, it’s not an Indiana Jones ripoff, it’s an actual UCLA Extension Writers’ Program course entitled – take a deep breath – “Beginning Writing for the One-Hour Drama: Building the Story and the Outline”… and I’ll be teaching it in the upcoming Winter Quarter 2010. The class meets for ten weeks, 7pm  to 10pm on Thursdays, from January 14 through March 18 on the idyllic UCLA campus in Westwood.

You can check out this UCLA Extension page (or click on the above banner) for the official course description (and enrollment info), but here’s the course in a nutshell: (up to) twenty unsuspecting students each choose a current one-hour TV drama for which they’d like to write a “spec” episode. I whip them guide them through the process of developing episode ideas into story synopses, basic “beat sheets”, and full outlines. Along the way, students pitch their ideas in class for notes and feedback… and also form small “writing staffs” to help each other brainstorm and “break” their stories on a whiteboard, the same way professional TV writers’ rooms work. At the end of the ten weeks, each student should have a solid 12 to 15-page story outline that’s all set to be expanded into a spec teleplay.

(Had our innocent Mary Sue from my previous post taken this class, she’d've known everything there is to know (well, more or less) about the Process of Professional TV Scriptwriting before ever setting foot in the Space Slayers writers’ room…)

Actual whiteboard from FARSCAPE "Season of Death"
EDITED TO ADD: Click for larger version! (Prize has been won!)

Picture, if you will, perky young Mary Sue, an aspiring TV writer who’s celebrating her first sale. She pitched a dozen ideas to veteran genre-TV producer Sam Showrunner for his new series Space Slayers, in which a ragtag team of teenage misfits travels the galaxy and battles alien mutants. But Mary Sue’s enthusiasm will soon be tested; she has no idea what terrors await in… The Writers’ Room.

Mary Sue’s successful pitch:“Griff and Angela [the series leads] must mind-link with K’Vax [their sentient, female, wisecracking spaceship] after a radioactive nebula erases K’Vax’s memories.”

There was more to her pitch – such as the mind-link forcing the aloof Griff and Angela to confront their true feelings about one another – but Mary Sue never got that far; Sam had interrupted. “Good hook, but amnesia’s soft. Needs more jeopardy. Hey! What if the nebula turns K’Vax evil? And she tries to kill everybody on board! So it’s dangerous for Griff and Angela to go into her mind; they might never come out. Terrific pitch! Sold!”

Mary Sue was ecstatic. “Great! I’ll write up an outline –”

“We don’t do outlines. We – me and the writing staff – break all our stories in the room. Once we get the structure down, you go off and write the script. Come in Tuesday at nine. Bring in a beat sheet. Not an outline, just the big moves. Some rough act breaks. Keep it simple. One page, tops, just to get things started.”

And so it begins…

9:00 am Tuesday. A punctual Mary Sue happily looks around her first Writers’ Room. Cheap, mismatched “executive” chairs surround a coffee-stained table strewn with old magazines, food wrappers, a Slinky, a broken water pistol, various Rubik’s-type puzzles, and other toys. The walls are a crazy quilt of actors’ headshots, set blueprints, costume design sketches, test photos of alien prosthetics… and three large whiteboards.

Two are covered with multicolored scrawls, circles, arrows, renumbering, and crossouts – the story beats for Episodes 5 and 6, in impenetrable shorthand: “5. BRIDGE: G + A expo. K ng 10 min no Froonium. H/L payoff? AB: J zapped.” The third is frighteningly blank – a naked canvas awaiting a plot. It continues to await until:

9:40 am. Two writer/producers saunter in: Madman Moe, a cheerful, inexhaustible fount of wild ideas, and Cyndi Cynic, a jaded naysayer who’s great at untangling plot logic. They get coffee and make phone calls until:

10:15 am. Sam Showrunner dashes in. “Sorry. Problem on the set.” To Sam’s surprise, Mary Sue proudly hands him a fifteen-page outline. “Wow. Lot of work here. Good for you.” He glances at the first page, tosses it aside forever, and hands her a marker. “It’s your story; you do the honors. Ready? Teaser’s easy. Fly through nebula, ship sparks, life support screws up. Act One –”

Sam stops. Mary Sue’s still neatly printing “TEASER” on the whiteboard. “Just put a ‘T’,” Cyndi suggests. “Then put ‘Nebula, sparks, life support NG.”

“Act One, Beat One,” Sam continues. “Ramon runs diagnostics. Technobabble. Thinks he’s found the problem. Fixes it. All seems okay. Beat Two. Spooky stuff begins. Suspense. Scary noises. Like a horror movie. So… hmm… Maybe Trixie’s below decks. Alone. What’s she doing?”

“Taking a shower,” Moe offers. “With Angela. And suddenly the lights flicker and the water turns cold.”

“That’s good.” Sam turns to an aghast Mary Sue. “Put that up. T and A, shower, lights.”

“Can’t do that,” says Cyndi, to Mary Sue’s relief. “I’ve got Trixie showering with Ramon in ep 5.”

Moe’s unfazed. “So make it the sauna.”

“What sauna?”

Sam likes it. “The Cargo Bay, redressed and smoked up. That sauna.”

Cyndi considers. “We could do different color smoke because K’Vax is pumping in poisonous coolant gas or something.”

Sam’s enthused. “Great. We’re rolling now. We’ll be done by six, easy.”

6:45 pm. Act One has seven beats on the board, Act Two has five, Three and Four are still blank, and nobody likes any of it. “It’s flat,” says Sam. “Bland and boring.”

“Excuse me,” quavers Mary Sue. “But I, um… have a thought…”

“Jump right in,” says Sam. “It’s your story.”

“Well… maybe Beat Two should be a character scene with Griff and Angela… because we need to set up their unexpressed feelings for each other…”

All stare at her. “We do? Why?”

“Um… because later, when they mind-link with K’Vax, they confront their feelings and realize –”

“In episode seven?” Sam’s incredulous. “Not a chance. Besides, this story’s already way too soft. We need conflict. Drama is conflict.”

Mary Sue’s getting crabby. “Well, what I pitched had lots of conflict. Internal conflict.”

“This is TV, not some romance novel. I want external conflict. Action. Danger.”

Mary Sue snaps. “Well, if K’Vax turning evil isn’t enough danger, why don’t we just throw in some nasty aliens with guns?”

Silence.

“She’s nailed it,” says Cyndi. “Problem is, we’re missing a villain.”

Moe concurs. “Evil K’Vax is great, but our heroes have to cure her, not kill her, which means they don’t get to defeat a bad guy.”

Sam nods. “But if a Gavork spy sneaks on board and brainwashes K’Vax, now we’ve got two problems – and somebody to fight in Act Four.” He slaps the table. “That’s it. Solved. Okay, everybody go home and think about it and we’ll finish this tomorrow. Nine o’clock sharp.”

It’ll take four more days of this to break Mary Sue’s story. Ultimately, Ramon, not Angela, will join Trixie in the sauna, to follow up on their shower scene in ep 5. Oh, and the mind-link with K’Vax will indeed force Griff and Angela to confront their feelings for each other – but once the mind-link’s over, they’ll forget it ever happened.

Mary Sue will grudgingly concede it’s a cleaner, punchier story than the meandering fifteen pages she came up with on her own.

And then she’ll have two short weeks to turn it into a script that makes it all work… but that’s another tale.

Chris Wheeler in the FARSCAPE writers room, 2001

Just heard that Australian writer Chris Wheeler, story consultant on Farscape and writer of the episode “I Shrink, Therefore I Am”, died this week, apparently from a heart attack.

Talented, funny, hard working, friendly, great to work with, and definitely One of the Good Guys. He’ll be missed.

ETA 7 Aug: Obituary has been posted by the Sydney Morning Herald.

Case in point. Froonium isn't proto-nuclear.

Science quiz! Which of these is the least scientifically plausible?

1. An alien species can project heat rays that can fry humans dead… or serve as a powerful truth serum.
2. A society has developed a liquid “litmus test”: just dab a drop on your lips and kiss someone. If the kiss tastes sweet, your DNA is compatible for having healthy children.
3. They’ve also got technology that can turn people into metallic statues… and back again. While you’re a statue, you remain fully conscious, you can see and hear just fine, and you don’t age. If your statue’s head is lasered off, it can be reattached with no ill effects.
4. A human wearing no protective gear jumps out of a spaceship in orbit, spends a minute in vacuum… and survives.

If you answered #4, you’re not alone… but you’re incorrect. All the above are from Farscape’s “Look at the Princess” trilogy of episodes, to which a lot of viewers reacted “No way! That just couldn’t happen!” And they weren’t talking about #1 or #2 or #3… few even blinked at those. No, it was #4 that got people flustered.

(Well, okay, some of our fans were far more perturbed that our hero had sex with someone other than our heroine… but that’s a different discussion entirely.)

Everybody “knows” you can’t survive in outer space. But as it happens, #4 was one time – possibly the only time – that Farscape got its science more or less right. Humans exposed to vacuum do not promptly blow up like balloons and explode. Their eyeballs don’t pop, their blood doesn’t boil, nor do they instantly freeze solid. In fact, according to NASA, if you don’t try to hold your breath, half a minute or so of vacuum exposure won’t damage you permanently.

So why could viewers accept “truth rays” and living statues and DNA kiss tests, but not a suitless space walk? Because what’s true is rarely what’s believable.

Mirror, Mirror

It’s often said that “art holds up a mirror to life.” Well, if it’s a mirror, it’s a distorted funhouse mirror, designed not for accurate reflections but for caricature, exaggeration, and analogy. And one big difference between art and life is that art has to make sense.

In a way, art has to be “more realistic” than real life. To borrow William Goldman’s example (from his book Adventures in the Screen Trade): Let’s say you’re writing a story in which Nick, your square-jawed hero, must have a private talk with the Queen of England, and the only way Nick can do that is to sneak into Buckingham Palace at night and find the Queen alone. How would you plot it?

1. Nick, in a high-tech radar-invisible ninja suit, hang-glides onto the palace roof undetected, then silently renders the guards unconscious with tranquilizer darts or karate chops. Nick must then circumvent a corridor crisscrossed with laser beams by crawling on the ceiling like Spider-Man or by contorting his body through the gaps or by diverting the beams with mirrors… etc.
2. Nick follows Sir Smedley, a member of the royal staff, to his local pub. Nick picks Smedley’s pocket for his security pass, dons a latex face mask to disguise himself as Smedley, and… etc.
3. Nick assembles a crack team. The Teenage Hacker disables the security system. The Hot Blonde puts the moves on the palace’s security chief to distract him. The Crazy Demolitions Expert blasts a tunnel into the palace basement so Nick can… etc.
4. Nick, in jeans and dirty T-shirt, climbs over the barbed-wired outer walls, strolls around the palace, and enters through an open window. But the inner door’s locked, so he goes back out and keeps walking. This triggers two alarms – but Security assumes they’re both malfunctions and does nothing. Nick climbs a drainpipe, cuts through an empty office, and wanders the palace halls. There’s a man posted outside the Queen’s bedroom… but at the moment, he’s off walking the Queen’s dogs, so Nick walks right in. The Queen awakes and tries to summon the palace police with her bedside phone. The operator passes on the message, but the police don’t respond. Nick chats with the Queen for ten minutes before a chambermaid enters, sees Nick, and summons help…

I highly doubt you’d choose #4 for fear your readers would pelt you with fruit. Who’d believe it? Yet #4 is exactly what happened on July 9, 1982, when 31-year-old Michael Fagan walked unchallenged into the bedroom of Queen Elizabeth II.

That’s Incredible

Storytelling demands credibility, not truth. We don’t expect fiction to be true; we accept that it takes place in “parallel universes” (hey, kind of like Sliders)… worlds that resemble our own, but aren’t. In so-called “mainstream” fiction, the parallel universe often isn’t all that different from ours… the only changes from “our” Earth might be the specific characters and events the author’s invented.

In science fiction, however, some of the universe’s underlying rules get changed. It’s arguably a defining characteristic of science fiction that it deals with “what would happen if” the rules were different. What if we could travel faster than light and encounter alien lifeforms? What if we could journey into the past or turn invisible or communicate telepathically?

If we change too many of the rules too drastically, we leave science fiction and enter the realm of fantasy. What if magic worked? What if dragons or sorcerers or faeries or unicorns existed?

Or, for that matter, Hobbits? Nobody mistook the Lord of the Rings films for documentaries, but they cleaned up at the box office. Tolkien’s world wasn’t “true”… but it was, for storytelling purposes, believable. It felt real.

What makes even a magical fantasy universe believable? Part of the answer is logical consistency. It’s usually not the altered rules we have difficulty buying; it’s the exceptions to those rules.

As example, I’ll make up a story about Superman. We already know the rules of the Superman universe, right? He’s a nearly invulnerable alien being, but the radiation of a substance called Kryptonite is deadly to him. Well, in my story, Superman chases a bad guy who pulls out a huge chunk of Kryptonite. But the Kryptonite has no effect whatever, so Superman jails the bad guy. The end.

You’re shouting at me, aren’t you? “Whaddya mean, the end? Why didn’t the Kryptonite work? You have to explain that!” And you’re absolutely right. If I expect you to like my Superman story, I do need to explain… not the rules, but the exception.

Moreover, the explanation should feel consistent with the universe, and not just something I pulled out of my, uh, hat to get out of a jam. “Well, it’s also been established that lead blocks Kryptonite’s harmful rays, so I’ll simply explain that Supes covered himself with a lead-based ’sunscreen’… and then in my next story, when I need Kryptonite to be deadly again, I’ll explain that the villain’s now using hyper-enhanced, Froonium-enriched Kryptonite that can penetrate Superman’s sunscreen…” (And I’ll bet you’ll have tuned me out by then.)

Of course, one viewer’s handwave (“It doesn’t quite make sense, but I’ll let it pass”) is another viewer’s fanwank (“no, it works fine if you just assume facts X and Y and Z which the writers didn’t bother to tell us”)… and yet another’s “Teenage vampires? Jeez, can’t we watch something real, like wrestling?” We all have different thresholds of disbelief-suspension, often depending how much we do know about the “real” rules. Cops, for instance, find CSI hilarious. Doctors guffaw at House and ER. And defense lawyers still explain how courtrooms actually work to prospective jurors, because too many of them expect the defense to not only prove the defendant’s innocence but also to expose the actual guilty party like Perry Mason always did.

For this is a danger of fiction: that people get so familiar with its altered rules and dramatic conventions that they mistake them for truth. If you thought a human would instantly explode/freeze/perish in vacuum, it’s probably because you’ve seen it happen that way in far too many movies and tv shows. (An exception for 2001: A Space Odyssey; they got the man-in-vacuum scene right.)

Drama can be entertaining, uplifting, cathartic, and inspiring. But educational? Put it this way: anything you “learn” from fiction demands a second opinion. Don’t get your daily fruit and fiber from jelly doughnuts… don’t take financial-planning advice from lottery commercials… and don’t get your science from science fiction. As the liquor advertisements always say: “Please enjoy our product responsibly.”

Sigh. One of these days I’ll actually start, y’know, blogging on this blog. This is not that day, but I want to bring this to the attention of all Los Angeles & Vicinity folk:

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (aka LACMA) presents FREE JAZZ on Friday nights from 6 to 8pm — yes, I said FREE! — outdoors on its (new) Central Court. Beer & wine can be bought. The museum itself is open until 9pm — and after 5 pm, museum admission is “pay what you wish.” But the jazz is utterly FREE.

And THIS Friday, 15 May 2009, the FREE jazz is the Greg Porée Group. I’ve been a fan of Greg and his music for Quite Some Time, so I will be there, my current wife will be there, and if you like jazz, then you should be there.

Details here.

Here's looking at you, kid: www.FusionTheSeries.com

Head over to www.FusionTheSeries.com and watch (or rewatch) Chapter One, go behind the scenes to learn more about the Fusion universe and our brilliant cast and crew, and join the Fusion community forums and post anything (well, within reason) you like… criticism, questions, fanart, fanfic.

(But keep on visiting here, where I’ll continue to blog on about anything and everything non-Fusion-related.)

Singing the praises of genre TV: The author (left) harmonizes with a Scarran named Wolesh (right).

“Genre” television — science fiction, fantasy, and other so-called “non-mainstream” shows — is expensive, tough to produce, and tougher to produce well.

The occasional breakout hit notwithstanding, it’s also a niche product, constantly struggling to corral enough viewers to survive. And it’s next to invisible at the Emmys or BAFTAs.

In short, it gets no respect.

So why do we make it?

Two simple reasons: money and groupies.

All right, I confess: there’s a third reason…

Director Orson Welles said that a film studio was “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.”

Well, making a genre TV series is like playing with a train set and a squadron of radio-controlled model airplanes and a Build-Your-Own-Robot Kit and a HyperGameStationPlayCubeXii2 all at once . . .

It’s fun.

Now it’s true that by the ninth week of production, we bleary-eyed producers will be swearing that the next series we work on will be Forty-Four Minutes of Two Actors Sitting Around Talking. No aliens, no spaceships, no CGI, no prosthetics, no pyrotechnics, no animatronics, no weird costumes, sets, makeup, or props . . . no weird anything.

Don’t you believe it. We’d be bored out of our skulls in two acts flat.

You haven’t lived until you’ve spent eight hours in a writers’ room with six madmen and madwomen having a violent argument about the logic of time paradoxes.

Or pondered, in a production meeting, what color(s) the Alien of the Week’s bodily fluid(s) should be. (“No, we did lime green two episodes ago on the Tavloids, remember? How about red-orange?” “Naah, it won’t show up well ’cause the creature’s scales are gonna be orange. Maybe purple?”)

Or sat in a screening room during a final sound mix and been blown away by an episode that’s finally all put together — with astonishing computer graphics, thundering sound effects, and a stunning musical score.

What’s more, this stuff’s also fun to write. Where else can you tell stories like these?

• A planet of primitive aliens mistakes a visiting human for a god — and prepares a human sacrifice.

• A living spaceship gives birth to a dangerous, weapons-laden offspring with a bad attitude.

• A person links minds with a wolf — and gets a rush from commanding it to kill.

• A lost human traveler finally returns to Earth, only to find that:

• 1. this Earth is just a gigantic alien simulation,
  2. he never left; it was merely a weird dream, or
  3. Earth’s real, but it ain’t home no more.

Really, there’s not much one can’t write in a genre show. A musical? Joss did it on Buffy. A Looney-Tunes-style cartoon? DK did it on Farscape. Horror movie? Fifties perfect-world sitcom? Existential surrealism? Cops? Bug-eyed monsters? Western with ray guns? Been there, done those, had a blast.

Oh, I suppose this is where I ought to blather on about speculative fiction speaking to the human condition as no other genre can, presenting societal analogies and archetypal myths and bla bla bla.

And, you know, all that term-paper talk is true enough. The genre can pack a mean allegorical punch at times. There is actual nutritive value to be found now and again.

But that’s part of what makes it fun: the ability to say Darned Near Anything. To poke taboos with a sharp stick. To extrapolate where no television has extrapolated before. To dream the impossible dream — sorry, didn’t mean to turn this blog into a musical.

Okay, now that you’ve decided (correctly) that some (if not all) TV writer/producers are raving lunatics, let’s talk about you.

Why do you watch this stuff?

(Assuming you do, of course. And other than the obvious reason that you possess above-average taste and intelligence, of course.)

I mean, folks, you’re definitely in the minority. Far more people have seen Law & Order or American Idol than have ever seen Smallville or Pushing Daisies.

And watchers of The Office don’t get stigmatized as “geeks” or “nerds.” NCIS fans aren’t generally advised to get a life. Show up for jury duty in a dress Susan wore on Desperate Housewives, nobody blinks twice. (Well, unless you’re male.) But show up in a Starfleet uniform — and it makes it onto CNN.

Granted, some of you are almost as loony as we are. But having met a fair number of you online, in
print, or in person, something else is clear to me:

Compared to the Vast Television Audience, you Genre Fans may be relatively low in number — but you’re unbeatably high in passion.

You don’t just watch, you participate. You discuss episodes in online chat rooms as you watch them. You create websites, fanfic, and vids. You attend conventions for your favorite shows, long after they’re off the air. And you organize sustained, elaborate, and heartfelt campaigns to get your favorite shows back on the air.

Why? Why such intense devotion?

I suspect that you could now blather about Futurism and Optimism and Romanticism and Escapism and Lotsofotherisms . . . but I suspect it would also boil down to this:

Sure, genre television can be challenging and inspiring and mind-expanding and all that, but first and foremost —

It’s fun.

And, hey, that’s a perfectly good enough answer for me.

2nd EDIT: The Fusion trailer and selected comments have moved to www.FusionTheSeries.com.