The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Blog

I walked into the writers’ office yesterday and saw a ping pong ball and two paddles sitting on the assistant’s desk.

I paused, staring at the ping pong ball.

This was one of those moments you see in indie movies, where the character is contemplating his life, but you don’t know exactly what he’s thinking because, you know, “show, don’t tell.” But, since this isn’t a movie, I can tell you. I was thinking:

This is where I should be– counting how many times I can bounce the ball while idly bullshitting with the other writers about whatever this week’s story is. Then, suddenly, the story breaks, and we leap to our computers and start furiously pounding out the script.

Now, I know this isn’t how it always works. Writing can be frustrating and dull and lonely. But it can also be engaging and exciting and social, in the right circumstances.

I told my wife about ping pong ball, and she rolled her eyes. “That’s not really writing.”

You see, my wife is under the misapprehension that “writing” consists of the time spent at the keyboard. In fact, she uses “writing” and “typing” interchangeably. “Do you do any good typing today, sweetie?”

She does this mostly because she knows it annoys me.

The truth is, there’s much more to writing than the actual typing. An electrician’s job is to light the set, but the entirety of his job is not encompassed in the moment he switches on the lamp. He has to lay cable, position the light, set the dimmer board.

When I’m playing Portal for the eighteenth time, or calling up friends, or just staring at the ceiling, I can see why that’d look like goofing off. What I’m really doing is laying cable.

Although, sometimes, I am just goofing off.

I remember a director trying to give a pep talk at the beginning of a shoot. It’s going to be a great film, we have a great cast, great blah blah blah.

Then he gets to the part about how this film will be great for all of our careers. Pretty standard, until he says, “If this film is as successful as I know it can be, you’ll get all the credit. And if it doesn’t work, don’t worry. As the director, I will get blamed.”

Riiiight.

I am perpetually amazed at how often writers are blamed for things going horribly awry. Just this morning, Adam Carolla was complaining about the ridiculous plot to Ocean’s 13.

The truth is, you have no idea why a script wound up the way it did. Writers work as much on the whim of their employers as the rest of us do. In North by Northwest, Hitchcock simply dictated a bunch of sequences he wanted (a chase across Mount Rushmore, an airplane attack in a corn field), and left it to Ernest Lehman to make a coherent plot out of it. Sometimes this process leads to a classic. Sometimes, it leads to Ocean’s 13.

Terry Rossio (one of my heroes, who wrote Aladdin and Pirates of the Caribbean) has a great article on his website about this very topic. Ever see The Puppet Masters? Don’t.

Sitting in the production office, I read every script for our show. I try to visit the set a lot, and I certainly watch the episodes when they air. What you see on TV is not always what the writer wrote. That may be good. Or, it can be very, very bad.

No, I didn’t say that about being a PA.  That’s Jane Espenson, talking about “producing.”

I produced a sitcom pilot in film school.  I asked my professor what, exactly, was a producer’s job.  My professor said, “The producer is the guy who, when something goes wrong, fixes it, even if it means picking up a screwdriver and doing it yourself.”  He happened to be, at that very moment, fixing something with a screwdriver.  He was a simple man.

His simple declaration was one of the most important things I learned in that class (that, and the fact that I’m a terrible producer).  But deciding who is a producer is not always that simple.  Studio executives, script doctors, and, God help us, managers have all tried to lay claim to the title, despite the Producers Guild’s best efforts.

But nothing violates my erstwhile professor’s dictum more than a television series.  The show I’m working on now has no less than a dozen folks with “producer” in their title– we have Producers, Executive Producers, Co-Producers, Co-Executive Producers, Supervising Producers, and Associate Producers.

About two of those people actually fit the definition of a real producer.  Most of them are writers with enough experience to demand a cooler title.  Of the eight writers on the show, only one has the word “writer” in her title.

Don’t get me wrong, I love our writing staff.  They do a great job, and work long, long hours.  But the work they do is writing, not producing.

At least, that what it seems like, from the perspective of one production assistant.