When you write anything, novels, nonfiction, screenplays or half hour comedies, you get put in a box. Your agent needs to put you there so he’ll know who your buyers will be. In my career, my partner and I started off writing for Mork & Mindy and the The Jeffersons.
At the time, they were two of the highest rated shows ever. Today, no show gets the kind of rating they did.
They weren’t Emmy winning shows at that time. Taxi, MASH and Barney Miller were winning most of the awards back then.
Our agent wanted to get us onto shows like Three’s Company, or Sanford and Son. When we went on story meetings at The Jeffersons, I used to slip over to the next office and not-so-subtly drop copies of our spec Taxi and Barney Miller scripts on the Story Editor’s desks at other shows.
I got a call from the Story Editor at One Day At A Time, who likes our script. We wrote an episode for them and they liked it enough to hire us to write on staff. This was a ground-breaking show (at the time) about a divorced mother raising kids on her own (Valerie Bertinelli and MacKenzie Phillips).
By this time we had made a lot of contacts. We stayed friendly with people like David Duclon and Ron Levitt (who created Married With Children). We were friends with Peter Casey and David Lee (who went on to work on Cheers, and later, to create Frasier.)
All of us were thrilled to be making six figure incomes on hit TV shows. Of course, everybody wanted to write features. During the breaks, between seasons, everyone gets time off and they write plays, pilots otr features.
Sometimes shows were cancelled and you went onto unemployment. Some of us wrote features during that time. I was kind of ambitious, and pitched a feature comedy to a producer who sold it to Dino De Laurentis. So I created another box to be included in.
Agents and managers will try to keep you in your box (half-hour-comedies), so it’s important to work on other kinds of projects, too. You have to remind agents that you can do other jobs. They tend to fly on auto-pilot.
After one of the big Writers Guild of America (WGA) strikes, my partner and I were out of work for many months. My partner wrote an episode for Winnie the Pooh, an animated show that was not a signatory to the WGA. Then I saw he was making six figures on staff. And he won an Emmy.
I started pitching animated shows, too. It became something we’d do during strikes or off-season. Eventually we worked on many animated shows, and even ran Xiaolin Showdown, and created The Wild Thornberrys and Spacecats.
When staffing season come around, you need to research the new pilots, find out who’s writing them and who their friends are. If you have a connection with the writer of the pilot, offer to punch up their pilot for free. If you impress them with your ideas, they’ll remember you if they get picked up and go to series.
So you start out in a box. You sell a feature, you write for a “women’s show,” and write some animated shows, so you’re in a few more boxes. The more boxes you fit in, the greater the chance your of working on different type of show.
We went after freelance episodes of certain shows. We went after ALF, Bob Newhart, because they were considered “A” list shows run by writers with “pedigree.” This meant they had experience on Emmy shows like Taxi, or Cheers.
We also went after freelance episodes for Duckman – a show that had a very dark, very edgy style of humor.
Now showrunners could look at some of our scripts that felt darker. The Duckman script got us into South Park and onto an animated, Emmy-winning show called Dilbert, a satire of cubicle life based on Scott Adams’ brilliant cartoon.
We kept our career alive by opening up as many boxes as we could. My partner made an independent film called “Lucky,” that won awards at a festival. We were called in to develop a feature called “Politenessman”, an edgy concept from the National Lampoon.
We worked on a feature called Blow Hard that satirized Die Hard, which led to other work for a showrunner/friend who directed a comedy for Spielberg. More work came from Amblin, doing rewrites based on actors’ note for the screenplay.
Animation experience opened opportunities for us to create our own animated shows, like The Wild Thornberrys and to produce animated shows like Xioalin Showdown.
For your career to last decades, like ours, we had to re-invent ourselves many times. We were known for being “big joke” guys, then for being “women’s writers,” then for being animation writers, then for being “darkly comic” one camera writers, and for writing dark and edgy humor.
You can’t rely on your old scripts and your resume to keep you working. The “what have you done lately” mentality kicks in. You have to keep reinventing yourself, writing new spec scripts based on the latest shows, or writing sketches, plays, features, and even webseries.
If you want to keep working, it helps to have a great reputation for being amiable, flexible, being good in a room, and to being able to adapt to trends that change both television and film.
You have to reach outside of your comfort zone in your writing and networking. All during your career, you have to think about reinventing yourself, about writing outside of your comfort zone. The alternative is getting stuck in old style shows, and finding it hard to move forward.
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Image credit: Creative Commons Mork-Technomavida, 2014, photographed by Technomovida Caracas, is licensed under CC By 2.0