I read the first draft of what is surely going to be a script subjected to an intense bidding war. 6 pages too long, crammed with on the nose dialouge and the feeling that there are way too many “fucks” for a pre-watershed sitcom. That said, I was not bored reading it, but I do have notes… lots and lots of notes. Draft 1.2 is in the works now with each scene receiving suitable scrutiny.
How did we get so far.
The fact is you are walking in at the end of an 8 month process. Almost like a dinner guest watching me drop the parsley on a finished dish. You don’t know the hours slaved away in the kitchen mixing spices through trial and error to find that perfect blend.
So here we flashback to the early days in the process. It was late last year, the markets were crashing as moved quickly towards the recession, America was in a fierce one sided battle for the presidency and I was out of work. My writing partners and I were looking at maybe 4 months to write the next big sitcom… This would be the first of every deadline we set and missed.
We all ready had a setting… lets say it was a school (it isn’t, but the setting is a closely guarded secret and I want to share without giving too much away). So now we need to populate our world with characters, different characters. We want all our characters to have different voices, see things differently and solve things differently. Confronted by a mugger one character might hand over the their wallet, another might run away, another might fall to the floor weeping like a child, basically not every character would do what I would do (Go Jackie Chan on their ass). So with a list of characters we then explore them, who are they, where did they come from, what do they want and how will they get it. 2 months later we had 6 Characters maps and 6 in depth biogs — One of our characters got it on with a rugby player at university and another collected PG tips trading cards; the audience will never know this, but we do. We were ready for the next stage… although at some point down the line biogs and maps were going to rear their ugly head once more.
