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Cynthetiq · 03-14-2005, 12:12 PM

from today's NYTimes:

Quote:

Anxious to See How It Ends? So Are the Writers.
By NED MARTEL

few weeks ago, over eggs and turkey sausage on Sunset Boulevard, two young television writers talked shop about their network hits, until a phone call from the Hawaiian set of "Lost" demanded Damon Lindelof's attention. Josh Schwartz, the creator of "The O.C.," could guess the problem.

"To myself, I'm thinking, 'Script supervisor calling, actor doesn't want to say a line,' " Mr. Schwartz said, comparing Mr. Lindelof's call to the chaos in his life one year earlier. Back then, an actor on "The O.C." insisted he could no longer appear villainous, throwing a hastily written finale into disrepair. "And Damon answers the phone and goes: 'Hello? Unhh! What line won't he say?' " Mr. Schwartz recalled.

"Lost" and "The O.C.," along with "24" and "Desperate Housewives," are high-profile serials with substantial, devoted audiences, but no one - not writers, not network executives and not viewers - knows exactly how they will end their seasons. Their writers, like others in Hollywood, are trying to devise the perfect season finale - with little time to spare.

According to interviews with writers from all four shows, their finales are unshot, and mostly unwritten.

"The monster of production is at your back; you're writing closer and closer to deadline," said Mr. Lindelof, the "Lost" writer, who compared his mind-set to that of a marathoner who learns at Mile 15 that the race has been extended by two miles.

Mr. Lindelof listed his show's many leaps into the unknown: a locked hatch on the jungle floor, a marauding polar bear, an man-eating monster and more survivors from a previous plane crash. As adept as the writers, led by Mr. Lindelof and the "Alias" creator J. J. Abrams, have been at adding new mysteries, they now must subtract some. There's a hard-to-quantify moment when an audience stops feeling tantalized and starts feeling manipulated.

Mr. Lindelof committed to killing off a series regular by season's end; also by that point, the raft that some castaways have been building will have set sail, he said. But just who will live or die has always been a problem for this writing staff. "In the original pilot, Matthew Fox's character died halfway through," Mr. Lindelof explained. "We made him a real living, breathing, three-dimensional guy, so that his death would be shocking. And what happened was people, ourselves included as writers, said, 'Wow, I kind of don't want to kill this guy off anymore.' " The writers enjoyed the options for this character, Jack Shepherd, a doctor who could treat fellow castaways. Then, as "Lost" writers created glimpses each of 14 characters' pre-crash histories, other survivors won immunity. "Over the year, there were plans to kill off more characters that were abandoned," Mr. Lindelof said.

Another serialized drama, "24," helped make audiences comfortable with such unconventional storytelling. But unlike the nonlinear format of "Lost," "24" is fastidiously linear, with each episode detailing an hour in a very eventful day of an antiterrorism agent. That poses unusual writing problems, which demand extra time and brainpower to solve. "On any other show on TV and any other movie, you put a guy on a plane in Los Angeles and you want to get him to New York, you can have him in New York in the next scene," said Robert Cochran, one of the show's creators. "On our show, he's on that plane for five episodes."

With the structure of "24" bound by time restrictions on paper, Mr. Cochran wanted fewer such restrictions in the real world. After the network ordered the first full season of "24," the writers presented a huge map of the entire first season. The blueprint, however, didn't endure. "We used to obsess over that in Year 1," Mr. Cochran said. "You know, Oh, God, let's story out as many episodes as we can. We always got in a lot of trouble with that because if you try it, you end up locking yourselves into things that don't really work and it gets really contrived."

After his four seasons of "24," Mr. Cochran endorses the same approach: save big decisions till the end of the season. The writers and the audience, he insists, will then enjoy the benefits of a looser process. "At the beginning of the season, we certainly don't know," he said. "Halfway through, we certainly don't know. As we're writing episode 16 or 17, we start thinking in a very general sort of way, where we'd like to end the season."

Gail Berman, president of Fox Entertainment, said: "You have some idea of what's going to happen, but you just don't know exactly. And sometimes a character will pop and that will take things in a new direction, or a storyline will pop and that takes things in another direction."

Ms. Berman and her counterpart at ABC, Steve McPherson, each demand some sense of the show's arcs, which are often presented in packages of six or eight episodes that forecast a character's fate or a mystery's resolution. But both executives have learned to "respect the creative process," as the buzz-phrase goes, trusting that writerly intuition will flourish with looser deadlines and less intrusion. Pressed by reporters in January, Mr. McPherson admitted he didn't know how Mr. Abrams, a co-creator for "Lost," would end the season, nor did he care if the season's conclusion, at that point, was murky even to the writer himself. "I think it would be fun if he didn't know," Mr. McPherson said.

Mr. McPherson's embrace of the unknown is brave. ABC and Fox are neck-and-neck in a race for No. 2 in the ratings, behind CBS, and the outcome could turn on the handful of dramas, including "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives," that are the seismic hits of the season.

The writers of "Desperate Housewives" are creating their highly anticipated finale only now because they have already used ideas they meant to save for later. The entire series began with a death, the suicide of the show's narrator, Mary Alice, and her motivation for killing herself became the series' driving mystery. Right away, the show's creator, Marc Cherry, proved unafraid to spill even more blood. Martha Huber, Wisteria Lane's nosey blackmailing neighbor, was murdered in the seventh episode in a twist that couldn't wait.

Now the writers of "Desperate Housewives" are proving slaves to their own demanding invention: their fast-paced script format includes about 60 scenes of 2 pages each per episode. Other hourlong dramas average 35 scenes or so of 5-page scenes, according to Tom Spezialy, one of the series' executive producers.

The show's concept blends so many genres - romantic comedy, family drama, murder mystery, soap opera - Mr. Cherry and his nine other writers "must feed the beast," in Mr. Spezialy's words.

Mr. McPherson publicly teased Mr. Cherry that his publicity demands were officially over in late January; the writer had pages to produce. Each morning before noon, he confines himself to a bungalow on a Universal Studios lot and produces six new pages in six hours, before turning to rewrites and reshoots. Mr. Spezialy removed the phone from Mr. Cherry's bungalow.

The end-of-season "lockdown" means living more in the life of the characters than in one's own life, according to many writers. And when Mr. Lindelof ran into Mr. Cherry in the ABC offices, they commiserated on having had one day off in seven weeks. To Mr. Spezialy, it had seemed even longer. "Really we've been here since last May," he said.

Describing his own freshman season's final months, Mr. Schwartz of "The O.C." replayed his internal monologue as he was struggling to write dialogue. "How did I get here? How am I ever going to sustain this? This is all going to go down in flames. The whole thing's riding on me," he recalled. "You know, that sort of wired exhaustion."

This year, for "The O.C.'s" second season, he did not worry as much; he figured out what will happen in his Southern California "soapedy," as he called it, after having written half the season's 24 episodes. But he recognized the anxious determination he saw in a newcomer like Mr. Lindelof. "It's just that constant feeling of like, well, we can't ever do any more stories than that? Oh, but we have to, O.K.!" Mr. Schwartz recalled.