Abroad Thoughts from Home

This is probably the most niche blog post ever, but I wish I'd had access to something like it when the need first arose. It's the Idiots' Guide for a British writer joining the staff of a US TV show. How you land the gig is up to you. This is just about the admin.

What used to be a rarity is becoming more common. For the British writer it's almost invariably a sideways move following a notable success at home or as part of the package in the acquisition of a successful format. Freelanced scripts aren't unknown, but they're exceptional. As a rule American TV drama is staff-written and the writing staff all work on-site. For all you need to know about staffing and more, I can make no higher recommendation than the Children of Tendu podcast.

This is an ad-hoc list that I threw together for a friend who asked for some advice. It's not authoritative, or comprehensive, and I'm taking no responsibility for any errors or omissions.

If it happens for you - and I hope it may - it's a brilliant adventure, and maybe some of the following will help to smooth the process when the time comes.

• If you supply material to the American market but stay resident in England, then you can do that with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) which means the IRS will leave you alone and you'll pay your taxes on the income as normal in the UK (UPDATE: I've been told that this has changed, and that you can now claim the exemption with your own country's tax ID. But make sure you check.).
• BUT if you're on a TV staff then you'll relocate, most likely to LA (though some shows have writers' rooms in NY). The room is almost always in LA even if the show is shot in Atlanta, Toronto, or wherever.
• For that you'll need an 01 visa (Alien of Extraordinary Ability) to get in, and a social security number to get paid.
• For the visa I had to make an appointment at the US embassy to show my employment contract and provide evidence of past achievements. It wasn't anything horrendous, just a lot of faff in a tearing hurry. Shows are greenlit at short notice and staff up quickly, so you don't get much lead time.
  
• My US employer hired a service in London to deal with my application and fast-track it through. I got my passport back at my hotel the evening before my flight!
• The payroll company will want a social security number in order to start paying your salary. Once in LA you can apply for it in person. There's an office on Olive Avenue in Burbank. It can take a few weeks to come through as it has to go via Homeland Security. My income backed up while I was waiting.
  
• You'll also need to provide your employer with a Certificate of Continuing Liability from HMRC, which basically says that despite working in the US you're still a UK resident and taxpayer. Without it they'll withhold Medicare and Social Security payments from your salary, and you won't be able to reclaim the money. I was completely unaware of this, and in that first year it cost me dear.
• To work for any of the WGA-signatory production companies - which is all of the reputable ones - you'll need to be a member of the Writers' Guild of America. 
• At one time any writer from Europe would be enrolled into the WGAEast, but that doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule. There's no substantial difference between the branches. Existing members of the Writers Guild of Great Britain can have the joining fee waived.
• Dues are paid quarterly. Your paid-up WGA membership will provide you with medical cover.
• You'll find that most of your coworkers will have their salaries paid into a Loan Out Corporation or LLC. My experience here is limited. I just worked and got paid as an individual. As an expat I already had enough admin to contend with.
  
• Once you have your SSN you're in the system and you'll have to file an annual return with the IRS and pay taxes on your US income. This is claimed as a tax credit against your UK liabilities, so you don't get taxed on the same money twice.
• If you're working in California you'll be paying Federal Tax and California State Tax.
• A friend of mine who worked in California for one year (not in the TV business) filed his year-end return using a program called Turbotax. I felt much safer having a US accountant do it. Having said which...
• My first accountant had no experience with expats while I had none of the US tax system, which resulted in various misunderstandings and penalties. Now I'm with an outfit with expertise in the tax affairs of non-residents.
• On arrival I booked into a motel for a couple of weeks and looked for longer-term accommodation while I was getting into the work. You can take your chances on Craigslist but the premiere resource for LA is westsiderentals.com. You can search their listings for free but to get contact details you have to register. 
• I paid the modest fee and searched for a furnished guest house, which is generally self-contained accommodation attached to a bigger property. 
• The search categories for a reasonable commute to the major studios are Santa Monica/Westside, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Studio City/San Fernando Valley.
• But find out where your writers' room is going to be. Many productions set up their offices in a rented suite away from a studio lot.
• Before heading out I booked a long rental on a car. For some reason it worked out cheaper doing it from the UK. Booking from here I got the Collision Damage Waiver included; had I done it on arrival that would have been an extra.
• Alamo was offering the cheapest car rental at that time.
  
• I don't know if it's still the case, but renting a Satnav as an extra came at some ridiculous price. I took my own with a US map preloaded, and it was invaluable.
  

Pay special attention to the Certificate of Continuing Liability. No one warned me and, as I said, it proved an expensive omission.

Process and Procedure

Which ought to be the title of Jane Austen's unpublished crime novel...

It's the network pitching season in LA, and I just got back after an intense week with results that I should be able to tell you about sometime soon. After nine hours plus of breathing buggy plane air on the way home, I succumbed to a virus that's laid me out for the past three days. Emerging from the mental fog I find Good Dog back online with his personal list of movies that stand repeated viewing.

(In a separate post he also reports on the BFI South Bank Chimera screening.)

Reading these lists, compiled by various people as the meme hops from blog to blog, I'm struck by the sense of a common factor. The titles are diverse but none of the the films are stupid, and few are what you'd call chin-strokers either; and however they may differ, it's like there's something in their DNA that suggests a relatedness, however slight. Regardless of their genre, ninety per cent of the rewatchables can best be described as high entertainment executed with wit and intelligence. Call it the showbiz gene.

I'm not sure when entertainment became a dirty word, but somewhere in the second half of the last century it seems to have been redefined as the enemy of art. As far as the UK's concerned I suspect that, in a kind of back-door Orwellian move, the creation of the BBC's 'light entertainment' department helped to formalise the schism, defining an entire category of amusement without substance and separating it from more educated, more adult concerns.

In British TV drama, that seems to have led us into a commissioning culture where the showbiz gene's been bred out. The current crop of Drama execs make a buzzword out of 'passion', but approach scripts as texts rather than as blueprints for spectacle. With most new series, the kindest thing you can say is that you can see what they were trying for.

Much fuss has been made of the BBC's Sherlock, and for good reason; Sherlock has the gene, cropping up like a cheerful ginger in a clan of swarthy depressives. For me it's reminiscent of the first season of Jonathan Creek, a favourite of mine before the drawbacks of the one-to-write-them-all approach began to show. The giddiness with which Sherlock has been greeted reflects the parched landscape into which it fell.

In The Observer, former Guardian editor Peter Preston duly observed:

How would the primetime lords of American TV feel if they'd happened to make a series called Sherlock, about a modern Holmes, and won tremendous audiences and critical praise in the process?

Modest triumphalism? Not if the "series" in question was a mere three episodes, shown in the depths of summer, with nothing poised to come in the writing, let alone in the can. A pilot without a runway.

Which I think is where I came in. Here's how those 'primetime lords of American TV' go about it:

Now is the time of year when networks are hearing pitches from writer/producer teams. Many of those teams were formed when producers started taking meetings with writers in the Spring. At the networks, drama and comedy pitch separately. You get a half-hour slot to present your show and answer their questions.

Say you get lucky. What happens after that is kind of like Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The stakes increase as you ascend the ladder, and so do the chances of getting kicked off it. A successful pitch leads to a pilot script, which leads to a pilot. You have a matter of weeks to write before the pilot script goes into production; my producer friend Jeff Hayes completed shooting on the Rizzoli and Isles pilot in December of last year.

With the holidays out of the way, the networks begin to view and test the pilots and make final decisions on which of them to send to series. They have to juggle those decisions against which of their existing shows to recommission or cancel. By now we're into April and May. Once those decisions are made, it's staffing season. The successful teams start hiring writing staff and booking crews and directors, while the networks present the new shows to advertisers at the 'upfronts' around the beginning of June.

(Almost all drama is written by heavily collaborative writing staffs. The chances of standing outside the system and freelancing a script for an LA-based series are very small. I know I freelanced two Eleventh Hours but my position there was unique. Whoever I ask, on your behalf, about the way for a British writer to get any traction in Hollywood, the answer is always the same; relocate.)

The writers get a bit of a head start before cameras start rolling sometime around August. It's quiet on the lot, and you don't have to stand in line for lunch. You start by discussing the shape of the season and all the different ways it can be taken, before individual stories start to coalesce and get assigned.

Your first episode most likely goes out in the fall and your target is to make thirteen hours by the end of the year, at which point the network looks at the ratings and decides whether to commit to the 'back nine' to make up a full season of twenty-two episodes. If that happens, everyone (or sometimes a reduced writing staff) comes back to work in January for two or three months. Meanwhile, producers out there are meeting with writers to hear the next round of ideas...

It's relentless. But it gets it done. There's no dithering, there are no hesitant toe-in-the-water strategies. Our own system may not have the critical mass to match that kind of performance, but I think most UK writers will agree that our biggest frustration comes from commissioners' slowness in reaching decisions; they sit on scripts and keep their options open at our expense. Technically I'm still waiting for a straight 'no' on Oktober from the BBC, a decision I gave up waiting for when I took the show to ITV and made it over twelve years ago.

Last year I got an email from a director I'd once worked with, bemoaning the lack of available work at home and wondering if there might be any openings in LA. I told him that the timing was perfect, and the opportunities were certainly there; Terry McDonough had shot two Eleventh Hours and Bill Eagles was working on The Forgotten.

By the time his agent got around to following up, all the jobs were gone.

Behind the Scenes

I was aware that NBC had a crew on the set when we were filming our UK sequences in and around York, and then I heard from Jonathan Lee that they were covering the South Africa shoot as well.

Here's some of what they saw:



Jonathan - seen there in the clip - is the show's production designer and a tireless, inventive and much-travelled professional.

Crusoe really got started when Power TV's Justin Bodle asked him to produce concept sketches, and the series was pretty much financed on the back of them. For several months, Jonathan and his portfolio were the show.


NBC have posted more of the material in the photos section of the show site.

Man in a Suitcase

I just finished working my way through the boxed set of the 1967-68 ITC series Man in a Suitcase. It's taken me longer than I expected it to, and it's provoked some mixed feelings.

It's a show that I was enormously impressed by, the first time around. And I still am, but in a qualified way. So much of it holds up. Both Ron Grainer's theme and the credits sequence (designed by ITC regulars Chambers and Partners) are pretty well timeless. As is the simple but powerful premise of a scapegoated CIA man using his old skills as best he can to make a below-the-radar living in Europe.

Perhaps the most impressive element is a central performance of towering integrity and commitment by Richard Bradford; almost unknown before the series, almost forgotten after it until he resurfaced in a string of steady character roles for American TV.

Bradford prowls through the show with the grace and presence of a jungle animal, once wounded, twice shy, forever set on avoiding trouble, forever unsuccessful at staying out of it. My decades-old recall is of him getting the shit beaten out of him on a weekly basis, at the end of which he'd haul himself up off the ground and totter away with his trust often betrayed, but his dignity always intact.

All of which is what made the show stand out in my memory. What let it down this time around was just about everything else.

You can make allowances for the production values of the day; a good story will overcome that, no problem. But with a handful of exceptions, Man in a Suitcase didn't get good stories. What it mostly seems to have got, if you believe the rumours, was rejected Saint scripts made-over for the character.

So by the middle of the set I was flagging and when I got to the end, I had to go back to the pilot episode (Man from the Dead) and watch it again to remind myself why I've always held the series in such high regard.

The whole "Yank in London" setup made brilliant sense in the context of the premise, whereas in shows like The Baron and The Adventurer it was an obvious matter of commercial calculation. McGill's London felt real, with well-chosen locations and the sense of a genuine city rather than a tourists' backdrop. There in the pilot were the grit, the texture and the coherence that would slowly leach out of the episodes that followed, leaving Bradford standing there like the one enduring feature in an eroding landscape.

He wasn't popular with other cast and the crew, by all accounts. In his autobiography, Supervising Editor John Glen wrote, "Richard didn't seem to believe that acting was essentially about pretending, and wanted to do everything for real."

One can only imagine the eye-rolling and the after-hours bar chat that this must have provoked. But well done, Richard; time has proven you right.

There's a wonderfully bonkers version of the theme arranged for two flamenco guitars here.

Dumping Miss Daisy

I saw the first Pushing Daisies when it was leaked pre-air in 2007. I thought it made a great mini-movie but couldn't see the long-running series potential in it. Series tend to follow formula and spread their invention, and this did neither.

The second episode surprised and convinced me. It was the second episode that made me a fan. Opening episodes get all the attention but it's second episodes that are vital in establishing whether a show's to develop a following. Every showrunner knows this and, trust me, they factor it into their global thinking about the series' design.

Today I learn that for its UK showings, ITV are skipping the second episode of Pushing Daisies for the usual reason - to privilege a sports fixture later in the schedule.

The BBC's clumsy re-edit of Rome's first three hours into two all but dissuaded me from staying with it. A friend talked me into giving the HBO cut a second chance, and I was hooked. There surely must be a lesson there.

Lost, in Transition

You know where I came across the pilot episode of Lost? The one with the graphic plane crash and everything? It was part of the in-flight entertainment on a Virgin Atlantic service to the US. I mean, it didn't bother me, but, you know...

Apparently eight episodes of the new season were shot before the WGA strike closed down production. The ABC network has indicated that they'll be shown rather than held back, but hasn't yet said when.

Season three ended in a cliffhanger that neatly flipped the show on its head and refreshed the premise, which I thought was no mean feat. Lost is a show that plays a risky game; tantalise and satisfy but while tantalising more, on and on, with continuous invention and a continuing danger of viewer burnout. Just like on a plane ride, viewers can bale out in mid-flight but there's little-to-no chance of picking up new ones.

We baled early, but only because we found its form of transmission (5 breaks, ignoring the designated act endings, with the same sponsor bumpers repeated with throw-the-remote regularity) unwatchable, and so bought the US complete-season box set and watched that at times of our own choosing.

I'm not saying that Lost is the best thing ever, but when it's good, I do like it. It plays like a feuilleton - constant invention and distraction with the sense of a Big Scheme even though the big scheme itself can only have a vague shape in the creators' minds, and is being defined in the writing rather than designed in advance. And with the sense that anybody could fall into a volcano at any time.

(I know what they've said. That everything's been planned all along. Arse. Even the guys who sold 24 didn't know what was going to happen until they were into production.)

For me it can never end successfully with a make-sense-of-it-all revelation, any more than The Prisoner could... it's all about dread and uncertainty and wondering about what's on the other side of the door. As Stephen King points out in Danse Macabre, the moment you actually open the door all that wonder condenses down into whatever's there.

The only good ending I can imagine is s something like, they find a box that's the answer to everything, look inside it and go "Wow." Like the moment in Lost in Translation where Bill Murray whispers something to Scarlett Johannsen that makes everything OK, and we all have ideas about what it might have been that are unique to ourselves, and which are best not shared. Some people won't have that... a quick Lost in Translation Google shows messageboards with people wanting tips on how they can boost the soundtrack enough to hear what Murray says.

In the meantime I'll endure the dull touchy-feely stuff and bad dialogue ("You okay?" "I was looking for you." "Well, you found me.") for the high-concept elements I'm getting a kick out of, and a trust in the astuteness of makers who know to throw in a good kit-off moment or a bit of mud-wrestling when everything flags.

But this business with the box set permanently altered our attitude to series TV. It's been a liberation. Now disc is our first-choice viewing medium, something I could never have imagined.

Because we're all out of Piano Players

Did you hear the story about the British director Mike Figgis? He arrived at Los Angeles airport on his way to take up a TV job for Fox/Sony. When asked the purpose of his visit, he supposedly said, "I'm here to shoot a pilot."

As the story goes, it then took him five hours to clear security.

Sad to report, it's not entirely true... Figgis mentioned in an interview that the phrase and its possible consequences had crossed his mind, but what he actually said was something uncontroversial and he walked straight on through.

Didn't stop The Observer reporting it as fact, though.

Spoilers? Really?

The networks seem pretty sanguine about the online appearance of the two opening episodes of DEXTER's second season along with the pilots for several as-yet unaired series, leading some people to speculate that they were let out on purpose.

Next season, why not go for it for real? Get a sponsor to underwrite the show in return for an on-screen corner graphic in the place where the broadcaster's logo would go. At a stroke, an act of piracy becomes a new revenue stream. Every time a file gets shared or a disc gets copied or passed around among friends, the ad that pays for it goes right along with it.

Yes, I know those graphics are obnoxious intrusions. But it's either that or DRM.

Spoilers now follow...

BIONIC WOMAN

I've been given a disc with the leaked preview of THE BIONIC WOMAN (or are they just calling it BIONIC WOMAN? There were no credits or captions in the print) and I'd rate it as 'more or less competent' - the kind of show you watch until the end and only then get the full sense that your time hasn't been well-used. It's no GALACTICA, that's for sure, although a few of that show's regulars pass through.

In essence, the parts that are interesting aren't original and the parts that are original aren't interesting. It takes far less from its progenitor than it does from BLADE RUNNER, from which it lifts wholesale and without a trace of shame. Instead of runaway replicants with creator issues we have runaway semi-androids with creator issues. Katee Sackhoff starts off in the Darryl Hannah role, then upgrades into the Rutger Hauer role for the show finale... which is a bionic sockfest on a city rooftop in the pouring rain, complete with a hanging from-the-eaves moment!

As Jaime Sommers, Michelle Ryan is a pleasing presence (indie-movie-pretty rather than impossibly-TV-glamorous) but she makes little mark. That may not entirely be her fault - her character takes a passive line throughout almost the entire hour and when she does take action, there's nothing to make you buy it.

And yet... give me episode two and I'll probably watch it. Between the high concept and the stolen clothes there was enough to make me feel... I dunno. At home for a while.

(And yes, I'm told that plain BIONIC WOMAN is the title)

THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES

This proved to be a workmanlike bash-through of the material, picking up in the wake of TERMINATOR 2 and seeming to pretend that TERMINATOR 3 never happened (originally it was meant to take place in the timespan between the two, but Josh Friedman's script openly contradicts several aspects of the premise of that forgettable movie).

It starts badly, with the (for me) unforgiveable sin of kicking off with a piece of high action and then, just as the danger seems certain to overwhelm the characters, cutting to Sarah sitting bolt upright in bed and panting. It was just a dream. As a fan of Friedman's writing, I'm loath to believe that he came up with it or fought for it.

After that the story doesn't really go anywhere that you don't expect; but then, given that the point of the franchise is the extended stripped-down chase, you're getting what you came for. The threat comes from an anonymous army of craggy bodybuilders in the Arnie mould.

Plus-points are FIREFLY's Summer Glau as their robot protector - I know she ticks all the boxes for cute, but put everything together and it all adds up to weird, which keeps things kind of interesting - and pacy direction from ex-X-Filer David Nutter.

(the proper name for those screen-corner logos is a DOG, btw. It stands for Digital Onscreen Graphic)