Thread by @tonytost

As a TV writer, I think it helps to understand a pilot script's purpose as a document. When you're writing it, it should be all drama & feeling & character & art. But after that, it probably helps to realize that your script is also a fundraising and/or recruitment letter.

A pilot needs to establish an interesting world & charismatic characters & tone & feel & such. But it also has to convince a studio and/or network to invest millions of dollars in it. How you do that is among your artistic choices.

One way is to get great talent attached to your project in terms of cast or director. In that case, the pilot's not just a piece of writing, but also an invitation for a director, or a promise of a great role for an actress or actor.

When I was struggling with getting Amelia right in the Damnation pilot, one of the producers asked me what was it about the character that would make a great actress want to play it. I realized I hadn't actually written my conception of Amelia as a mastermind into the script.

The pilot became a stronger recruitment letter once I did this. It also became a stronger story, I think.

Often, you'll have to revise your pilot (and your other scripts) in order to keep your financial patrons invested in your project. So to an extent, it can become almost a memo assuring investors their investment is in good hands & will produce the promised yield.

Then, once you get a green light, then the script is a new kind of document: it's a tally of budgeting and scheduling problems to solve. Can you actually film this in seven, eight days?

Once you keep your investors and talent invested and make the script responsibly budget- and schedule-friendly, it can momentarily be just art again. Except the script itself isn't the art. It has to be the blueprint so the director, cast & crew can get art on screen.

So you should revise again, understanding that scenes or lines or situations that worked on the page won't necessarily translate to film.

Then you shoot the script. How much fidelity you keep to it changes from show to show. (I tend to subscribe to the "innocent until proven guilty" school: I like cast to stick to the script.)

Then you're editing. And the best advice I got on this front came from James Mangold: the script doesn't exist any more, the shooting experience doesn't exist any more. All you have now is the footage. Make it work.

Then, at the end of this process, you hope to have stayed connected enough to the core of the story in its initial script form that its initial creative spark sustains itself through all those stages, and can connect to a viewer, who has a lot of other things they can watch.

Also, you need to shave another eight minutes off your edit to fit the 42 minute running time. And the network, studio, and other producers have notes.

So, basically, your script will have to do a lot of different types of work. Your job is to write it well, utilize it well, but also protect it. It's not easy. But it's addictive.

(This tweet deluge was inspired by the pot of coffee I just drank after not really sleeping that well last night before heading to my first day on set for The Terror in about two minutes.)