To the patient reader of these pages, I apologize for my long absence and offer as an excuse the all-consuming hours necessary to write and produce a show during the height of The Closer’s shooting season.
For the past seven weeks, with very, very few exceptions, I have risen at 5 am and trotted downstairs to my home office to begin the arduous ordeal of helping Brenda through another investigation. Whether passing on someone else’s script or writing one of my own, the process of delivering production drafts of The Closer is my first priority and, also, the assignment I have the least time to perform during normal working hours. Therefore, nearly every minute I get at the keyboard must be stolen before the workday begins (or made up for during weekends, which are reserved solely for this purpose).
While the writing of outlines and scripts continues, prep on completed episodes begins, almost always with a casting-concept meeting. Greer, Mike and I sit down with Bruce Newberg to discuss characters and try to match them with actors.
Then the heads of the locations and production-design departments come by to exhaustively discuss where to shoot scenes not located on our standing sets. Do we build an apartment, or go to a real apartment building? Where will we find this week’s crime scene?
Next is the all-important preproduction meeting, where folks from all departments gather to try to figure out how to manage that tricky transfer from page to stage. Will Brenda need her glasses in this scene? Will we need a crane for the camera at the beach? How far does the blood pulse out of the body when the jugular vein has been cut? Are the mosquitoes particularly thick near the L.A. River in the early morning?
After this meeting, the script (which has already gone through outline, notes, draft, notes, second draft, notes, studio draft, notes, network draft, notes) usually has to be slightly rewritten to address the physical constraints of production.
Then casting begins. For three hours a day and for three or four days an episode, we gather with directors to audition potential guest stars. After we hear the dialogue spoken out loud, we also usually rewrite a little.
We also start examining and approving sets and locations based on pictures and drawings. Locations have to be “tech-scouted” in order to determine whether and how they stand up to an invasion of equipment, actors and vehicles. Naturally, too, the rental price is often a determining factor.
The costume meeting is always entertaining since our designer, Greg LaVoi, and his team have their own handle on our new characters and their relationships with Brenda, Gabriel, Pope, Fritz and our other regulars. Also, in cases of stunts, or when clothes are going to get messed up, we have to discuss double and triple backups of certain garments.
Then we have a video and stills meeting. What pictures do we need for the Murder Board in this episode? What kind of photographs do we want of suspects and witnesses? Which of Brenda’s interviews are to be conducted with observers in the Electronics Room? When will crime-scene photos be available? When should we get morgue shots?
Every episode includes its own “Detective Mike” meeting, during which we rigorously discuss how we should film the crime scene so that what we document fits with police procedure. How many morgue vehicles will we need? How many black-and-whites? How many Crown Vics? What can our characters actually discern from examining the site? Which way would the body have fallen? Where would the work lights go? There are too many questions to list them all here (generally about five pages' worth per episode). After this meeting, the script gets rewritten again.
Next we hear from Mr. Gil Garcetti, the former district attorney for the County of Los Angeles, who calls in with his own issues. Gil invariably asks questions that lead to better storytelling. The obstacles he throws in the path of a script lead to more surprising and gut-wrenching endings than we otherwise might have achieved. And, after we talk to Gil, we rewrite.
Now we have the big production meeting, where we go over everything we’ve learned and get updates on the information we’ve disseminated throughout the week to all the department heads, including props, set dressing, transportation, makeup and hair. This meeting, led by one of our two assistant directors, includes representatives from the studio and the network. After the production meeting, there’s a little rewriting.
Costume show-and-tell follows, where we see and approve what each character will wear as the show progresses.
Finally, all the actors in the episode are invited to a “table read” during crew lunch. We listen to the script as our cast and guest stars try out our words. Afterwards, we rewrite again.
And the very next day, this whole process starts over again on another episode.
Now, the schedule I’ve just outlined for you doesn’t include editing previously shot episodes, listening to a playback of the sound mix, meeting with the writers to break stories, or giving notes on the scripts to come. Nor does it include dashing off to watch the filming of a particularly tricky scene.
I love it all: It's total immersion in a world I helped create. But it does mean that everything else in my life must take second place for several months of the year.
Shooting on our season ended yesterday. And so, over the next two weeks, I’ll try to make up for lost time.
I realize this is the longest excuse for not having written since The Odyssey, and slightly less poetic, but it will have to do for now. Next up: Our post-Emmy wrap-up!
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