Jul
05

TV Writer/Producer Amy Berg on What Happens When Screenwriters Become Showrunners

Wired magazine’s Storyboard podcast recently featured a terrific conversation with TV writer Amy Berg (Eureka, Person of Interest, Leverage), covering everything from her singular path to getting hired (it ran through Nickelodeon and included Joss Whedon as a character in a one-act play) to her thoughts on genre shows (including crime stories and mysteries).

Some of the most interesting moments came when she discussed writers’ rooms and the impact of having screenwriters as showrunners:

These feature writers coming in to create a show is very, very difficult because this is the first time that they have had any control over their material. Usually they write something, and it goes away somewhere, and other people rewrite it … I think you’d be surprised by the muscle of the muscle of the feature writer being able to sort of lead the show. And as soon as they start learning the ropes of TV, they really do absorb the role themselves: ‘It’s my vision, my this, my that, my created by, my reputation that’s on the line.’ They very much cling to the material more than someone who has been in TV from the beginning. …

I don’t think it’s for the benefit of television, I don’t think it’s taking the experience of writing for television in the right direction. … You want someone who realizes what the job of the room is. The job of the room is not to support your singular decision-making process. It’s to help you create your vision, put your vision on screen, to give you the input that you need to be able to make decisions. Not make decisions and hope the writing staff comes up with something that was like that.

More from Amy Berg on Tumblr and Twitter.

Jun
12

Matthew Weiner on How the "Mad Men" Writers' Room Works

DAVE ITZKOFF:
There’s a traditional model of television writing, where stories are pitched in the writers’ room, assigned to individual writers and then the scripts that come back get rewritten in the room. Is that how “Mad Men” operates?
MATTHEW WEINER:
No, no, it’s not like that at all. The outline comes out of the room. Maria and André [Jacquemetton] drive the train on that. I have story ideas, people have story ideas, we break the A, B and C stories. This is all the way “The Sopranos” did it. That’s the only way I knew to do it and we have our own version of it. We cut them into strips and we tape them into an outline of like 45 beats. Some of them we assign to a writer and they go off and write a draft. I see that draft, and if I have time, I give notes. Sometimes it’s like an audition. There are people who write a draft and it’s the end of it. You say, “I don’t think this is going to work out.” But whatever happens, eventually the script comes to me and I start fresh to some degree. And then I do a draft and that goes to the room. They give me their notes, I do another draft, I do another draft, I just keep doing. If I change less than 80 percent of it, I will leave their name on it, by themselves. Now, it’s unfair on some level, because I’m deciding what I change.
DAVE ITZKOFF:
Do you think that’s commonplace at other shows?
MATTHEW WEINER:
Everyone who has my job does this. They don’t usually put their names on it. It was important for my mental health, to see my name on there for work that I had done almost all of, in some cases. And I never understood it, why a person would want their name on a script if they didn’t write all of it. I would never want my name on something that I did not write most of. Part of television is you get rewritten. When I wrote for David Chase, I kept saying, “I’m going to write a script he can’t rewrite.” That was my mode. Not, “You’re just going to change it anyway.” So that’s the way it works here and I’m very open about it also, and not everybody is.

Reblogged from stayforthecredits