Film Courage: Dan, on your website I think you have a beat sheet that you offer (a PDF)?
Daniel Calvisi, movie studio reader, screenwriter and private screenplay consultant: When people
buy my book I offer a worksheet (a Story Map worksheet) that they can use to map out their
own pilot for example. And what makes my book unique (STORY MAPS TV DRAMA: The Structure
of the One-Hour Television Pilot) is that it offers the first detailed beat sheet for
television. There have been a lot of books about feature screenwriting which offer that
paradigm (that Syd Field paradigm) the one who really started it. No one had yet done
it for TV and I kept getting clients asking me Well do you have a story map for TV? And
I went out there and looked and there wasn’t one. And so I decided to make one. But I decided
to make one from watching great pilots, great shows and from reading produced pilots (even
some that didn’t make it to series), stuff that was going around Hollywood where I could
get my hands on it and it actually sold.
I developed this beat sheet. It’s broken down into acts, it’s broken down into page
ranges. I give you examples of the page ranges of many pilots, like the BREAKING BAD pilot,
if you read the actual script the teaser was two pages. Act 1 was 8 pages, Act 3 was six
pages (just something hypothetically) and I break down where in those acts were those
specific beats with things like the first trial or the first casualty or the end of
Act 1 turn or the Midpoint, or the Assumption of Power. And I’m getting a lot of people
saying that they love it for that reason that this was the first time they found a beat
sheet for television. So it’s giving them a roadmap to write their script, it’s giving
them that chassis of the car to put their details inside.
And I’ve started actually getting produced writers telling me that they are using it
as well. I just had a producer from HBO Latino who is in Mexico City call me and say that
they are using it now for their show that is in their fourth season on HBO Latino. And
that was really cool and exciting to hear. So people are really using my beat sheet and
my paradigm.
Film Courage: Excellent. Can you share one or two other tips from the beat sheet?
Dan: It’s up to the writer how to break it down. You may do a teaser plus 4-Act structure.
You may do a teaser plus 5-Act structure. If you’re writing a 30 minute script, you
may do 4 acts, you may do a teaser plus 2-Acts. It really depends on you. The best way to
know how you should structure your script and how you should break down the page ranges
(the timing basically) is to watch shows that are similar to yours. They tell the story
in the same way that you’re going to tell your TV series. And so outline those shows
as you watch them and see how they break up the acts. If it’s a commercial driven network
like a broadcast network that has commercials, a lot of those act breaks are going to correspond
to commercial breaks, but not always. And not always in the script. So if you can get
your hands on the actual screenplays for pilots, that’s great as well.
Film Courage: How can someone get that?
Dan: If you just do Google searches you will find those. There is a site named The Tracking
Board where they have a number of downloads. For features around Academy Award time each
studio has their Academy Award nominated scripts or nominated for WGA awards and such. For
awards consideration you can download those PDFs. TV is a little bit harder to find but
they are out there if you maybe go to forum sites, maybe like The Blacklist site for
example, you will find people who will have these scripts and they can send you pilots.
Film Courage: The beat sheet, is it for the pilot or the entire season?
Dan: It’s up to you. That’s actually a good question, there is a different between
a premise pilot and a third episode pilot. A premise pilot is a pilot that takes the
entire length of the script to set up and it’s more of an origin story of that character.
So we are starting more at the beginning. For example, if is was SCANDAL (if it was
a premise pilot) we would start with Olivia Pope like in law school or in college and
then we would follow her over the years to the point where she opened her own firm or
maybe you would wait until the end of season one for her to open her own firm.
But what they actually do is a third episode pilot which is the structure of the pilot
uses the same structure that (for example) the third episode of the series would use.
So it uses the same structure as every episode going forward and that’s your decision as
a writer. But in the example of SCANDAL, she is already a Washington, D.C. fixer. She’s
already really successful. She already owns her own company and she has her own team,
she even knows The President at this point. So they decided to start the series late in
her life (you know, she’s not that old) but late in her professional life to the point
where she’s already on the ground running and a seasoned professional. And that was
a specific choice the Shonda Rhimes made for that series.
You can use the beat sheet to structure your pilot very specifically. You can define the
signpost beats, you can define the core elements that make your character and your series unique
and you can plot them out in the act structure that you are going to use. And you should
have a template show, an inspirational show that you’re using that uses the same structure
that you would like to use. So for example if you are using a show that has a teaser
plus five act structure, on the beat sheet, it’s broken down in teaser and five acts.
So you will use that as an outline template to beat out your particular pilot. It’s
up to you if you feel that your series should use this same structure in ensuring episodes
or the pilot should stand on its own as a premise pilot as its own story that’s not
quite going to use the same structure.
These days in the industry they like more the third episode pilot where the pilot is
written like subsequent episodes of the series. So that’s kind of the thing they like to
see more so they know what it is. They give you that question Well, what is this series?
What are we going to watch week-to-week? Well, you could say the pilot is written in the same
structure that each episode will be written in week-to-week.