SQUEEZING THE LEMON

LegalDispatch 0.98

Howdy.

What a week. Dare I say I’m starting to feel the heat of little tiny embers of hope, at least from a creative standpoint. However, it’s still looking like Herr Trump is on a glide path back to the Oval Office.

Good times.

Q&A

Alex writes:

It is a pity [your LA Law reboot] did not go forward. LA Law was an absolute favorite of mine too. 

I realise it is not going to go to series but is there anyway to at least see the cancelled pilot?

There certainly is. Just swing by my house.

Kidding.

Or am I?

In all seriousness, though, I doubt the pilot will ever see the light of day. If it did, ABC would have to publicly reckon with why they didn’t pick it up to series, a decision which had nothing to do with quality.

@UltraSargent writes us from Twitter:

You mean on a scale of “1 to LA Law being released”?

Kidding.

Or am I?

Seriously though, unlike with LA Law, I wouldn’t rule this one out entirely.

The statute of limitations has sufficiently run to the point where I don’t mind talking about this a little.

First, there weren’t all that many complete scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor. To my recollection, there were mainly two scenes that were excised entirely.

In Hour One, we cut a short scene with Pariah (f/k/a Nash Wells) witnessing the destruction of Argo City.

The second scene — in Hour Three — was, admittedly, harder to cut. It was a tag at the end of the episode which saw Oliver Queen turning into the Spectre.

Now, this is obviously a critical and important scene. Even more so when you consider that it’s not just the end of Hour Three, but also the end of the first half of Crisis On Infinite Earths (the event would go on a mini-hiatus for the holidays between Hours Three and Four).

Unfortunately, however, the quality of the finished scene as shot was inversely proportional to its importance. In other words, it came out really (in my estimation) poorly and I made the difficult decision to not air a substandard version than to show it.

But now, to @UltraSargent’s question… will we ever release these scenes? The short answer is that it’s entirely up to Warner Bros. The longer answer is… we almost did.

I don’t believe this is publicly known (again, statute of limitations) but we had been working with Warner Bros. to release all five hours of Crisis in movie theaters across the country. The event — arranged through Fathom Events — was going to include special surprises like cast appearances and giveaways and we’d also cut together a few bonuses that would have been screened in-between episodes and, yes, they would have included the deleted scenes — with all the VFX completed, the sound mixed, and the picture color-timed — that I’d mentioned.

At this point, you’re probably wondering why this event didn’t go forward. Well, the answer is that it was scheduled for April 2020.

Covid ruins everything.

A THOUGHT ON WRITING

I’ve found that the newsletter editions which get the most engagement include tips or observations about writing and I’ve been meaning to share this one for a little while now but previously haven’t had the time or newsletter space. But now I do, so here we go…

When I started my career, it was a lot easier to break into television writing. There was significantly less competition and those writers I was competing against for gigs, quite frankly, weren’t particularly good. I made a nice career out of merely being competent.

Cut to 2024. Today, there are more writers vying for jobs than ever. It’s also the nature of every art form to not only evolve, but improve. When I wrote The West Wing spec that broke me into the business, I only had the teleplay for the pilot and 7 episodes recorded on VHS tapes to work off of. Today, the Internet is replete with copies of almost every script you can imagine. There are also countless books on television and screenwriting as well as various (if questionable) online services and coaches.

All of which has led to the extinction of the incompetently-written writing sample. The days of standing out — if not breaking out — due to sheer competence are over. When I’m staffing a show, I read hundreds of samples and 99.9999% are competently written to the point where I feel as though I’m drowning in competence.

In other words, the scripts are all… fine. Some are even good. But very, very few are actually great. Now, there are many ways to write a good script or to write a sample that grabs the showrunner’s attention (a subject which I wrote about here), but I wanted to talk about what is probably the easiest way to level up your sample and that’s dialogue.

Just like with the samples themselves, most of the writing I read has dialogue which is — say it with me — competent. Fine. But nothing remarkable. No particularly interesting turns of phrase. No wit illuminating of character. Just workhorse dialogue that tells the story and moves the scene forward. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but there’s not a lot particularly right about it either.

But rather than talk about this in the abstract, lemme give you a specific example. I have two brothers and they’re also writers. (My parents are still trying to figure out where they went wrong.) My brother Eric (Miracle, Magnum P.I.) was working on breaking in around the same time I was. He wrote a spec movie script that, for the life of me, I can’t remember what it was about, but it had the following scene in its opening:

The protagonist, a young guy, is driving in his car with a passel of friends. He runs a yellow light and, in due course, a police car’s flashing lights appear in his rearview mirror. One of the friends asks what’s going on and the protagonist replies that he “tried to run a yellow light but it turned red in the middle of the intersection.”

Except that’s not how Eric wrote the line. Instead, Eric wrote the following exchange:

FRIEND: What happened?

PROTAGONIST: I tried to squeeze the lemon.

FRIEND: And?

PROTAGONIST: I was unsuccessful.

See what I’m talking about? I’d never heard the phrase “squeeze the lemon” before (or since) to describe running a yellow light, but it’s specific and vidid and memorable. It’s a clever turn of phrase that tells the reader that they’re in the hands of a professional screenwriter (even if the writer is not yet a professional).

It’s a little like Emily Dickinson’s entreaty to “tell all the truth but tell it slant” — think of ways to convey ideas through dialogue in interesting and unexpected ways.

Now, you don’t want to do this with every line of dialogue. Your script is like a box of Lucky Charms — you need to get the cereal-to-marshmallow ratio right. You want to avoid a predominance of marshmallows. I don’t have a specific ratio to recommend, however. That depends on your style and, to an extent, the tone/subject matter of your script. Aaron Sorkin writes a lot of marshmallow lines and it works for him.

Good luck.

Be good to each other.

Best,

Marc

Encino, California

5.10.24

COMING ATTRACTIONS

I’ll be updating this list as information on new books and events comes out…

HEROES CON 2024 (June 14-16, Charlotte NC)

GREEN LANTERN #13 (7.10.24)

IN ANY LIFETIME Novel (8.1.24)

BEWARE THE PLANET OF THE APES TRADE PAPERBACK (8.13.24)

FAN EXPO CANADA (August 22-25, Toronto, Canada)

FAN EXPO SAN FRANCISCO (November 29-December 1, San Francisco CA)