Interview (Part 1): Michael R. Perry
Michael R. Perry has had a long and productive career in Hollywood writing and producing 1-hour TV including such series as Millennium, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The Guardian, Stephen King’s Dead Zone, and The River. He has also written movies including Paranormal Activity 2 and his latest The Voices, based on his 2009 Black List script. The movie rolls out in theaters and on VOD beginning Friday, February 6.
Today in Part 1, Michael talks about how he got into the TV writing business and provides 11 writing tips he’s learned along the way:
Scott: Where did you grow up and how early did you find yourself interested in writing?
Michael: I grew up in two places: Boston, Massachusetts until I was 9; then Worthington Ohio through high school. In high school (a 3000-student public school) and college I had the usual academic training, which emphasized grammar, had us read Important Classics, etc.; but the real place I found my voice was writing for fanzines. Pre-web, these were photocopied mini-magazines, usually (but not always) about pop culture or music.
Every month or so, with five or six others, we’d get some pizzas and sit up all night to write articles, reviews, cartoons, etc. with the only standard being “does this amuse my friends?” Unlike a school assignment, the sky was the limit. Nothing was off-topic, and I learned to see, instantly, if something was any good.
Scott: How did you go about learning to write for TV?
Michael: I went to USC film school — that helped enormously, but the real learning came by reading, appreciating and analyzing stacks of scripts from good, current shows, and seeing how the pros do it. When I got into one-hour in 1994 I spent about six weeks holed up in an apartment reading everything I could get my hands on by David Milch (and a couple other leading writers at the time) studying how they began scenes, learning dialogue style, story structure, etc.
Scott: I believe your first writing gig in Hollywood was for the TV series Eerie, Indiana. How did that come about?
Michael: The great Karl Schaefer knew my writing, and asked me to pitch! That was a mind-blowing experience, Karl was very open, letting writers in on every part of the process. I visited the set where Joe Dante was directing (on the Radford lot) and was treated royally. Karl taught me how to take a great, original idea for a scene and focus it so that it is entirely in the service of character.
Scott: You’ve written for multiple TV series including The Practice, Millennium Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, House M.D., and NYPD Blue, and in the process worked with a who’s who of 1-hour drama writer-producers such as David Milch, Chris Carter, David Kelley, and Dick Wolf. What are some key lessons you’ve learned along the way about writing for TV?
Micheal: 1. When you know where the story is going — go there. Right then. Don’t vamp and make the audience wait for something they already know is coming.
2. Character is king. The mottled, complex, nuanced details of the major and minor characters in a story are the reason we identify and become engaged.
3. Sam Raimi (for whom I worked on “American Gothic”) said, “create characters people love — and then punish them.”
4. The events of the plot can be compressed or expanded as much as necessary so that the bits you reveal on-screen give us an intimate and privileged view of the characters. Especially when working within genre, any parts of the story that are obligatory (and therefore predictable) should probably happen off-screen; on-screen is reserved for that which is new, surprising, and unique to this story alone.
5. Nothing true ever comes out when a character is giving a prepared speech or is otherwise speaking in a public forum. Play against that stuff by visually showing the “tell” that reveals to the audience what the character is really thinking.
6. Every television show — and every good movie — has a house style, and the best ones are so sophisticated, solid and well-developed that you can channel surf and land in the middle of a scene and know exactly what you’re watching, even if you’ve never seen that episode before — or even that show! Carter, Milch, Wolf, Kelley and others each have a singular way of structuring a story, of developing a scene, a tone and an emotional temperature that is unique. I think great screenplays have an internal set of aesthetic rules, and all the scenes within service that style.
7. Any scene can be done in at least a dozen competent ways (and probably more like a hundred), and you must choose the one that reveals character while maintaining dramatic tension.
8. Any rewrite for any reason is an opportunity to make the script better by discovering what is essential. Many times, when a script had to be changed for logistical reasons unrelated to the story, I’ve gone back into a script and discovered a better way to do a scene, even if it’s something as mundane as changing a location, or rewriting a scene to accommodate a production schedule.
9. Surprise yourself. If you’re a galley slave, mushing through a plot you don’t really believe in, throw a wrench in the works to keep it interesting. If you’re bored, the reader is bored.
10. The truth is in the pages. You never can tell what will work until you have it down on paper. Test-drive a new idea for a few pages or more and see what it looks like. Sometimes that which pitches well, dies on paper; and sometimes great scenes are impossible to explain verbally.
11. Everything on every page should support the story. When you describe a location in a script that’s to be produced, somebody will start driving around trying to find a real location that matches your imagination; if they can’t find it, someone else has to build it. The movie (or TV episode) is made by a team of artists who each have specialized expertise that you could never dream of achieving. Your job is to inspire them to their best work by conveying the emotion and the narrative logic; they can then surpass your wildest imagination about how that is to be realized.
Tomorrow in Part 2, Michael discusses what he learned from working with the likes of Chris Carter, David Kelley, and David Milch, and what the inspiration was for his new movie The Voices. Here is a trailer:
Michael is repped by UTA and Kaplan / Perrone Entertainment.
The Voices opens in theaters and on VOD on February 6.