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Anyone know of any raw, long-form footage from a writer's room?
I'm very interested in the inner-workings of a writer's room. I have seen glimpses in "making of" documentaries, but I don't feel that they show much of the actual process.
I'd love to see more about how the sausage is made. Bonus points if it's a beloved, popular tv show or movie. I feel like I would be most interested in seeing the best of the best at work.
I'm about to dash how exciting this process is.
I work for a television production group in the UK. We make all sorts of TV, from documentary and factual to scripted.
Scripted is the interesting one. But let me tell you how it all starts... lots and lots of research and development, and not by geniuses with high level degrees, we're talking uni students and interns. They start by writing up a bunch of ideas for shows in something called "A Treatment", which is essentially a Word Document with a short description of the idea, some notes and general concept. They write hundreds of these things a year. Once or twice a week they gather together as a department and share their ideas with the bigger bosses who look for the most interesting ones, then they pick a few, improve them, and pitch them to channels/broadcasters.
Assuming something catches the eye of a broadcaster, they may ask to develop the idea further and throw some funding money at it. With that cash, they make a "development taster tape", or a short version using staff, or people off of the street. Think of a game show idea. They mock up a paper/cardboard version, maybe spend a little money on a question and answer system and show the concept a bit more real. The development team would be the ones running with this, chatting ideas through, and most of the thought process is in Teams chats, emails, etc., then occasional meetings up until they are ready to put the game together. At that point, they'd spend lots of time in the meeting room, drawing up the concepts. This would then be run and filmed like it's the real show and sent back to the broadcaster as that magical taster tape. If it gets the nod, they go ahead and write up the contract and build out the full show. At the point of the show being signed off, we put together a Production Team who will finalise everything, run it like it's a company (they all get their own Ltd company, budget, staffing, etc).
For scripted, it's a little different. Most of the scripted stuff you see comes from book adaptions, so those conversions from book to a script are a bit easier. We don't make scripted from the ground up so I cannot give you insight in to that kind of writers room. I know for our scripted department it may as well be a library and it takes years to go from idea to full show. The development process is slow. Our scripted department is 3 people. Once an idea gets a thumbs up they hire external contract writers to adapt the shows to TV and it's usually written up as a script using FinalDraft, which is the defacto standard in the industry.
Anyway, feel free to ask any questions and I'll answer what I know. We're UK based, one of the biggest indi TV production companies so I have a fair bit of insight, however, I work in the tech side.
I know you were asking for footage of sausage in process. If I sent you ours, you'd watch it at bedtime to help you drift off.
First of all, thank you for the insight! Very interesting to me even though it's just a boring job for those people!
But really, I think I'm most interested in the monotony of it.
I want to see the brainstorm sessions, the heads beating against walls, the good and bad suggestions getting ripped to shreds. I would love to see it for something like Breaking Bad or even books written by popular authors like Pierce Brown or Stephen King sitting there thinking aloud. I have read King's book On Writing, but it didn't quite go all the way into his process.
I think it's because I consider myself creative but I am also practical and enjoy logical, predictable systems. I would love to try using methods, systems, etc. to come up with my own stories and ideas. I always wonder how the writers plant ideas in season 1 that will blossom in season 2. I wonder how they decide which story beats should come next, how they decide if something is good or bad, etc.
Do you think the system you described was on things like Breaking Bad?
Our scripted department are some of the most articulate and, for want of a better word, quirky folks you'll ever meet.
During their brainstorming sessions which I've only been privy to a couple of times, they generally banter about ideas, read some notes out loud, make adjustments to scripts on the fly by just verbalising how they've written it in the script, and testing it in an open room of less than 10 people.
One thing to note is how often scripts may be written very well at the office, but once they hit the set they are then changed on the fly. I'm pretty sure a good 30%+ is changed during filming for the last 2 seasons of a show we released. What sounds good in the office and at rehearsal is never the same as when they're in the studio and the cameras are rolling.
I'm sure the writers room on something like Breaking Bad is way more interesting just because of the content and the humour involved. Just remember that it starts with a story they are trying to tell and then they have way more material filmed than you'll ever actually see. For a 60' show we may well have 240' of shot content. Scripted, again, is nearer the real time length as they can guage way closer the script to filmed time. They'll always film more than required because half the magic happens in Post, not development.
I cannot come up with an example for TV/movies specifically, but this documentary about Psychonauts 2 is the longest-form I've ever seen.
I haven't watched it all yet, but this is the closest and most in-depth view of making a large scale game in existence.
Edit: I have watched all of it, definitely recommend.
The best example I can think of at the moment is 6 Days To Air: The Making Of South Park. Great look at a writer’s room and yes Bill Hader is there moonlighting during a summer break from SNL. If the link goes down it’s also streaming on Max.
If you're motivated enough, the research-methods tack I'd take on this one is to find an list of TV show names that interests you, and set up a spreadsheet to build search links.
Basically, copy over the list of show names, add the show name to a search template, e.g. "<show name> writers' room archival footage site:youtube.com", use the URLENCODE function on that search phrase, combine that with a search URL stub like "https://google.com/search?q=", and you'll have a column of links that you can ctrl+click to open in browser. Should take <5 sec per search to see if you find anything interesting, so you can run through a few hundred shows to hopefully get a few interesting hits in about half an hour.
Phil Rosenthal’s book You’re Lucky You’re Funny is unfortunately not a documentary lol, but if you’re willing to read it (or have a kindle read it to you), it’s a fantastic look into how this process works. He wrote for Everybody Loves Raymond, & their staff would go on cruises with their families in the summer to gather fresh material about being miserable with your kids, things like that. In real life, I would guess it’s a pretty monotonous process with a few amazing peaks scattered around.
Conan O'Brien once hosted a reunion panel for some classic Simpsons writers. It's not quite about the writer's room specifically but since they were all writers on the show, their perspective is entirely from the writer's room and they discuss what it was like back then quite a bit.