Should "Discovery" bring back the policy of fans being able to send scripts to the show?

Roshi?

 

You're talking about a system that existed back when people sent actual mail and used old stuff like paper.

If they're gonna do something like that now, they should update it so that it makes sense in these modern times, so basically just hire people with the neatest tweets.

 

I was going to author my own thoughts, but then I realized Takeru had read my mind, so I've just saved myself some time responding.

 

I thought Discovery made a big thing about the writers being fans and that is why we love it sooo much, lol.

 

Writers who are also fans.

 

So what? I’ve had jobs far far worse than reading poor scripts, and I’d happily do it for less than the chicken factory paid for binding poultry.

Submitting a bad script doesn’t mean it gets bought, and Threshold wasn’t a fan script, Masks wasn’t a fan script, A Matter of Honour wasn’t a fan script. Nemesis wasn’t a fan script.

So they get a few a Media Studies graduates screening submissions on a burger flippers wage. What harm could it do? The opportunity to write Star Trek, that’s big. A few treasures might be found, and new favourite episodes made. Who knows?

 

I've known a few people that have worked as readers - it's not the easy job you think it is. It's long, boring, you have to read a lot of terrible, awful scripts, generate coverage and/or recommendations, and then start the whole process over again. Trust me, a bad script is a slog to get through. The good scripts are maybe 1 in every 100 that get submitted to offices.

 

Imagine how many angry Trekkies would submit scripts that "fix" the show: Explain the Klingons, reconcile the visuals and continuity with TOS. It would make the fanwank explosion that was ENT season 4 look like a sparkler next to an A-bomb.

I remember one particularly loony fan tweeting William Shatner that she was waiting by the phone for the call from Paramount to write what became Star Trek Beyond in a way that would fix the timeline and restore Kirk Prime. And sadly she wasn't joking.

 

Need help with your Emmy speech?

 

I had no idea that there was a policy for fans to submit such until yesterday in the Voyager forum when someone asked. I guess that's where the OP got his/her inspiration from? Maybe just a coincidence. My reaction is the same as it was with that thread. Personally I would not want to write something that shapes the show. I'm happy to enjoy other people's efforts and creativity but for myself the mystery of 'surprise' is the entertainment.

 

There are writ

NOT ENOUGH WHITE MALE HETERO MALE LEAD.

I'm going to get some links for youtube videos that justify my position for why your script SUCKS.

 

I think any show works better when you have the same writers. They get to know the characters better, they can build arcs and maintain better continuity

 

The open submission policy was not about inviting "fans" per se to pitch for the show, since "fan" is not a job description and this was a professional enterprise offering employment opportunities. Rather, it was an open submission policy for freelance writers, waiving the usual requirement of submission through an agent as long as one signed a legal waiver beforehand. In every other respect, it was exactly the same as the usual freelance pitching process. Naturally a lot of fans and aspiring writers tried to get their first breaks in the industry this way, but they were still competing directly against all the veteran TV writers who were also pitching for the shows. (When I went out to Hollywood to pitch for DS9 in 1996, the guy beside me in the waiting room was Daniel Keys Moran, author of "Hard Time," a successful veteran who had to go through the same pitching process as a first-timer like me.) So whether you were a "fan" or not didn't matter in the slightest. All that mattered was whether you were a good enough writer and had fresh enough ideas to rise above the pack and compete with the pros. When I went through the process myself, I learned that of all the people who sent in unsolicited spec scripts, maybe less than 1 in 100 of them even got invited to pitch to the producers, and maybe 1 in 1000 of the ideas they pitched got accepted as episodes. I don't quite remember the numbers -- it might've been the other way around. But in any case, it was a very stiff competition. (And I didn't get an invitation until my second spec script. My earlier TNG spec script was just rejected.)

And that's another thing to keep in mind. If you sent in a spec script, they almost certainly wouldn't buy it. The spec script was just an audition to show whether you could write, follow proper script format, and understand the show well enough to be worth taking a closer look at. If they liked your spec script, they'd invite you in to pitch multiple ideas to the producers, either in person or over the phone. (The pitch process was always verbal, since they were required to pay for anything they asked you to submit in writing.) They wanted maybe 4-6 ideas per pitch session, and odds were you wouldn't sell any of them on your first few sessions; your real job was to sell yourself as someone who could work on a professional level, get along with the staff, and toss out enough non-cliched and non-obvious ideas that at least a portion of them would be viable. (After all, even the staffers were only able to use a fraction of the story pitches they thought up.) I pitched once in person to DS9 and twice over the phone to Voyager, and the closest I got was on my third pitch, when Michael Taylor agreed to present one of my ideas to the rest of the writer's room rather than rejecting it out of hand. I never heard from them again, and I'd decided by that point that TV writing wasn't for me anyway.

So while it's true that TV today is far more staff-driven, I think an open submission policy could still work as a way of finding new talent. After all, it wouldn't be your specific spec ideas that they'd be shopping for, it would be your overall talent as a writer and ability to come up with ideas steadily over time. Probably any writer who made it through the submissions process and gave a few good pitches might be invited to join the staff as an intern, which is how new TV writers generally get their start. After a successful internship, you'd get promoted to staff writer, which is the bottom of the hierarchy of writing-staff ranks that TV professionals rise through over their careers, from staff writer to story editor through various tiers of producer and executive producer, culminating in showrunner status and your own production company. Whereupon you'd be expected to cultivate new interns and staff writers and so forth and keep the ecosystem going.

 

Open submissions? No. What they need to do is go raid the writers rooms of better shows like Westworld and Lost in Space.

 

Wrong. I'm the next Ronald D. Moore and DC Fontana... combined... Tuvix-style.

 

RIP. We all know how that ended.

 

Donald C. Montana?

 

I directly benefited from the TNG policy, and it served a good purpose for the Trek productions for a long time. It also created a tremendous amount of work for the staff, and I gather that the returns from it diminished.

 

As I said, submitting a spec script doesn't mean it'll get made. It's just your audition to get your foot in the door. If you prove you can write at a professional level and understand the show, you may get to pitch more ideas at the producers, and they'll decide if one of those ideas is interesting enough to pursue. Then they'll take it into the writers' room and the whole staff will break it (i.e. construct an outline) together, and probably they'll assign the teleplay to one of the staffers and give you a story credit. If you're very lucky, or if you keep at it long enough to get an internship or staff writer position, they may give you the teleplay assignment, and you'll turn in a first draft based on the outline the staff broke (which might be very different from what you pitched), and then the staff will go over the draft and suggest changes and more drafts will be done, either by you or by more veteran staffers, and then the showrunner will do the final draft, as they do on every script to give them a consistent voice and continuity.

So it's still the overall writing staff that shapes the plots and characters as a team. Pitching to a show means you're applying to join that team.