Thread by @tonytost

So much screenwriting advice I see seems excessively theoretical. In my working life, I find that most of the screenwriting actions I take are more practical. They're aimed at finding solutions to very specific, immediate, pressing problems.

A typical example: you write two or three good scenes in the first half of a script to set-up and give backstory to an important story development. But during prep you discover you only have budget and/or time for *one* scene.

Your problem now isn’t to just cram all that info into a scene. Your problem is to cram all that info into the scene while making sure that scene is both dramatic (entertaining) and true to the character’s established natures (authentic).

Theory won’t help you much here. Understanding of emotions, psychology, and dramatic structure might, though. Shit like this, I think, are a working screenwriter’s dilemma much more than bigger meta ones.

An example: when I first wrote the pilot for Damnation, I was nervous about its dusty period setting (Iowa in the Great Depression) being an obstacle for people, especially the LA & NY based network & studio executives I needed to convince to finance it.

So, my problem: people think of 1930s Iowa as being boring and dusty. My creative solution: leaning into this world's potential for action, violence, and surprise.

That's why the pilot script starts off with an action scene: a blockade of armed farmers stopping the truck of another farmer who's trying to sell his milk during a strike.

Then, suddenly, a cowboy dude from out of town (Creeley) pops up from hiding in the back of the milk truck and shoots the farmers' leader square in the forehead, killing him.

After this encounter, we then go to a small country church, where a well-liked, unconventional preacher (Preacher Seth) is giving a pro-labor organizing sermon. Afterwards, he's distraught to hear that the farmer leader has been killed.

Preacher Seth is our protagonist, our flawed hero, the man with a high stakes goal (starting a worker's revolution). Creeley is our antagonist, our dastardly villain, the man trying to stop our hero.

After we filmed and edited the pilot, the studio & network loved it. Then we did a test screening of it. And it did....just ok. It had two main problems.

Lesser problem: test audience members had trouble understanding the situation in the town. Some didn't even know what being on strike meant (!). Or what the Great Depression even was (!!).

Also, many felt disoriented by the suddenness of the action in the beginning. They needed more time to situate themselves in a historical world they weren’t intimate with. My creative solution to my "dusty 1930s" problem had created a new one. Fair enough.

The bigger problem: more viewers were rooting for Creeley (our villain) to crush the farmers’ strike than for Preacher Seth (our hero) to help lead them.

Uh oh.

It wasn't the acting. There was nothing off in the lead performance. Our hero Seth was dialed in and well-suited for his role. (Even critics who didn’t like the show praised the cast.)

Rather, the problem was how my script framed the two lead characters. It was on me. The script gave too many either mixed or muted signals about Seth & Creeley's roles. A viewer couldn’t get properly oriented to the story I wanted to tell.

After the so-so test screening, the show’s institutional momentum stalled. To push it towards a series order, we made a new edit of the pilot and made a sizzle trailer to show how the network could promote it.

But maybe the biggest thing I did was to write new pilot scenes that addressed test screening issues. Particularly in terms of understanding and liking Seth.

This was my new, very practical screenwriting problem: find a way to recalibrate audience feelings about my protagonist. Or else I wouldn’t get to make my dream show.

Soon I realized that I had stacked the deck, structurally, against Seth: he was introduced after Creeley, and in a passive manner (sermon). And he was in a profession often portrayed as the milieu of frauds.

So of course folks preferred the active, dynamic guy with no pretenses of respectability who came to them first (Creeley).

Even worse, my overall story was asserting that Seth was well-liked, but you can’t *tell* a viewer that. You have to show them Seth actively doing something. And hope the viewer likes him for doing it.

To reiterate: you can’t assume, because a character is your lead, that your audience will like them. The character must actively win the viewer over, or at least deeply intrigue them, on screen.

So a couple thoughts went into writing new opening Seth scenes: Creeley gets introduced via violence. That was working. But even though Seth is just as deadly, I didn’t want to lead with that same quality. Dramatically, I wanted his deadliness to be a later reveal.

Also: your opening scenes in a script are essentially offering a contract and a promise to a viewer. I wanted to promise not just action in my opening scenes, but also some hopefully interesting character and theme shit.

So, I have to introduce Preacher Seth without resorting to violence. How?

I turned to David Milch talking about introducing Bobby Simone (Jimmy Smits) as David Caruso’s replacement on NYPD Blue.

Knowing viewers wouldn’t give Simone a fair shot at replacing a beloved character, Milch had Sipowicz immediately voice that very sentiment when he meets Simone. But only exaggerated.

Bobby Simone comes into the station, shakes Sipowicz’s hand, and introduces himself. Sipowicz goes right to his superior and says, “I can’t work with this man.”

In having Sipowicz so unfairly reject Simone out of hand, the viewer gets a bit dislodged from their *own* suspicions. The viewer roots for Sipowicz to accept the new guy, roots for moral balance in the story’s universe.

The lesson I took from this: one way to solve a nagging problem is to put it right onto the screen and dramatize it.

I tried to do the same with Seth. Modern test audiences were so cynical about men of the cloth that they were instantly skeptical of Preacher Seth. I wanted to get that skepticism on screen in order to overcome it.

So I created a low-key situation where Seth arrives on a weird scene: an old dude is shooting at his chicken coop because an egg thief is in there. (It’s the Great Depression).

Preacher Seth arrives. He wants to stop the old dude from shooting into the coop and possibly killing the thief. Seth starts by offering spiritual salvation to the old man. But the old dude is not persuaded by salvation. He still wants to shoot the egg thief.

So Seth turns from the spiritual to the practical: he offers some food and fresh buttermilk if the old dude will just chill. The old dude finally relents.

After this, Preacher Seth gives a ride to the egg thief: a hungry young woman who lives in the woods. Seth invites her to his church, where they serve meals. The young woman says she'd rather live in the woods & go hungry than listen to some preacher tell her how to live.

This was my way of getting people's prejudices about preachers on screen right away: they're snooty, they're hypocrites, they're useless when it comes to worldly matters. For the story to work, the viewer has to think Seth is an exception to this.

So, to show that he's not like most preachers, Seth gives the girl advice: she shouldn't settle for just stealing eggs. She should steal the entire hen. And spread blood in the coop so it looks like a fox hit it.

Then Seth gives her something: while he was rescuing the girl from getting shot by the old timer, he managed to swipe a couple of eggs himself. "We're all a part of God's body," he says, "All I did was shift these eggs from His right hand to His left."

It's not anything anyone will be writing big think-pieces about. But this new opening helped the network see that a viewer would get that Seth was the hero of this story, that he was a good dude, & that he didn't inhabit the bad shit people associate with men of the cloth.

You can see the opening scene yourself and judge how it turned out: netflix.com/title/80176771

Besides trying to get folks to check out the show I created, I'm writing this up mostly to de-mystify the screenwriting process a little. For me, it's rarely a matter of grand theories. It's usually a matter of creatively solving a series of practical and dramatic problems.