Reporting from the trenches

Here’s a Friday Question that became an entire post.

Covarr asks:

Have you ever made substantial changes to a script based on input from an actor? Respectfulness aside (I would hope and assume that one is obvious), what factors influence the extent to which you heed their concerns?

Yes. In some cases it’s because the star is just difficult and wields the power to force wholesale changes. In practically ALL of those instances, the resulting script is worse. Or, at best, lateral.

I’ve been relatively lucky. I haven’t written for the more notorious of the monsters.

There have been times when an actor’s reluctance to do the script as written comes with a good reason. And those generally result in better scripts. We had a script on MASH where Mike Farrell took issue ethically with something we were asking BJ to do. We used that argument and did an extensive rewrite. The end result was a much more layered episode.

Look, as a showrunner I always assume that during the course of a season there are going to be a few scripts that are just snake bitten. We’ll be rewriting late into the wee hours night after night. The problem is you don’t know going in which scripts those will be. (If you did you would have addressed the problems before it went into production.) So if there’s a particularly hard week based on an actor balking at something and he’s right, that’s just the way it goes. I never resent the actor for that. We’re rewriting because we didn’t get it right the first time.

But here’s what really pisses me off: Actors objecting to something in the script and trying to justify it as a character issue when in truth it’s a vanity issue. The actress doesn’t think the actor we’ve cast to play her boyfriend is attractive enough for her. But she won’t say that. She’ll say her character wouldn’t date this person for some bullshit reason. We end up getting into this argument about motivation and the character when we KNOW that’s not really what this is about at all. And we can’t just call her on it. We can’t say, “The real issue is your ego. You think people will find you less attractive if you’re with this guy instead of George Clooney. You don’t give a shit about the character or the show. You just care about how YOU look.” So instead we engage in this fifteen-minute discussion of nonsense.

At the end of the day it’s all about who’s the most powerful person in the room. And there’s a great quote from the brilliant late producer, Steven Bochco regarding actors.

“The first year they work for you, the second year you all work together, and the third year you work for them.”

from By Ken Levine