Alias


Of all the new TV shows, Alias is one of the most innovative and imaginative in its storytelling. The stories are compelling and complex, yet a viewer never feels lost. Surely you may not understand all the spy stuff, but the core of the series couldn't be on more solid ground. A month prior to my interviews with the writing staff, the Academy of Television Arts & Science (ATAS) sponsored an Alias panel where the show's creator stripped away all the flash. To him, Alias is simply a twisted family drama.

In addition to Abrams, I interviewed the following members of his writing staff: Jesse Alexander (Supervising Producer), Jeff Pinkner (Supervising Producer), Crystal Nix Hines (Executive Story Editor) and the writing team of Erica Messer and Debra J. Fisher (Story Editors).

scr(i)pt: You say that the show is ultimately about identity. What do you mean?

J.J. ABRAMS: Well, the show is called Alias. It's about this woman who puts on different identities, but deeper down it's really about [discovering] who is she as a person. The pilot was all about believing your life is one thing: This is who you are working for; this is what you do. She was going to get married. She reveals the truth to her fiancé. He gets killed. She realizes she works for the bad guys. She can't believe it. The man with whom she had no relationship, her father, turns out to be the only person she can trust. Over the course of the first year, she learns that her mother, who she thought died when she was six, is alive and has returned to the picture.

Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) always thought her life was one thing, and she realized that what she believed could not be farther from the truth. So, it's about identity aesthetically, on the surface, but in a much deeper way. It's about understanding-who you are, where you came from, why you are who you are-and then coming to terms with it...and then committing to it and accepting it, not idealizing it and bullshitting your way through life. It's as if there is a bigger picture that we like to believe we're telling. Then there's the obvious pyrotechnical window dressing, fun, sexy stuff.

DEBRA J. FISHER: When you get down to it, it's this dysfunctional family with this little girl in between her fighting parents. When you take away all the guns and the KGB and the CIA, that's what it basically is: this little girl between two arguing parents.


CRAFTING AN ALIAS STORY

JESSE ALEXANDER: In TV, you need a lot more exposition because there are a lot of people who are tuning in who haven't seen the show before. Perhaps they were folding laundry and haven't had a chance to tune in yet. So you kind of constantly need to be updating people, letting people know what's going on; but you have to make it feel very seamless. It's something that's been difficult for us on Alias because [Sydney's] life is so complicated, and to impart that for new viewers has been hard for us because there's so much information that you need to watch our show.

So much of it is about Sydney: What is Sydney's emotional state for the episode? [It's also about] having her deal with emotional situations and action situations and being able to overcome these kinds of scenarios and problems in her life. We like to see her dressed up and doing something exciting...doing something with Vaughn, with whom she has a good relationship. We can't get enough scenes with Jack, her father, who's an amazing actor, Victor Garber. His performance as Jack is awesome. We're always trying to figure out ways to do more scenes with him.

Our show is tough because it's very emotional, and you try to have some fun as well. It can be difficult at times to find the fun because her emotional situation is so dire: She's working with this villainous guy who killed her fiancé. She's not sure if she can trust her father. We're trying to figure out ways to simplify her life and simplify her situation so that we can lighten up a little bit.

scr(i)pt: Usually, shows have a teaser and four acts.

JA: We do five acts. Our first act is very long. Most shows do a short five-page teaser. Ours is like 10 pages plus. We really push it as far as we can and have found that this five-act structure works really well for us.

scr(i)pt: What's the hardest thing to come up with?

JA: Very often, what the bad guys are doing. It's important for us to find a story that has very high stakes but isn't quite a real-world story. It can be a new weapon technology or a new surveillance technology. For me, one of the biggest struggles is trying to figure out what sounds as if it would be a bad thing if it were to happen or if the bad guys got a hold of it. What do we really want Sydney to stop them from doing?

ERICA MESSER: You need to be careful with Sydney Bristow. She's not a superhero, but she could easily be written as a superhero. So it's keeping those moments. J.J. says that he thought of this idea sitting in the Felicity writers' room, "What if Felicity got recruited to the CIA and couldn't tell anyone?" You need to keep Sydney Bristow as Felicity as possible or else she's a superhero.

scr(i)pt: You do these amazing in and out flashbacks in the middle of a scene to explain a gadget that's about to be used. I love it because you save on having to do a long expositional scene.

JJA: That device was first used at the beginning of last year. I think the script in which it was first seen was a script by Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci. It was simply a device that would allow us to get on with our story and still have the information and not do it in a linear fashion. I love non-linear story telling. In the pilot, I wanted to start in the middle of this insane situation and then flashback and catch up to it so that you don't feel as if you [should simply] be watching the story play out. Rather, you're sucked into it because you're wondering how you got here.

scr(i)pt: At the Alias panel, you talked about reverse engineering stories. Would you expand on that a bit?

JJA: What I mean is that we will start off with, for example, it would be great if Sydney wants to go to her mother for advice on something, and dad doesn't want her to go. It's a metaphor for a normal teenage girl with divorced parents who wants to go out with some friends: and one parent says, "It's fine," and the other parent says, "I don't want it to happen." A battle starts, and the kid's stuck in the middle.

We'll start with an idea like that, and then we develop this mission where there's a character out there-a bad guy-who is developing some next generation technology or weapons that the CIA wants to get. Sydney wants to go to her mom for advice, and the father says, "This is what she thinks about you... ." We develop this whole storyline that's about that, played out in our world. As it develops, it becomes very complex; and suddenly the stakes are incredibly high, and there are issues of betrayal-obviously, the bad guy is going to have an effect on Sydney. By the time the story is done, in the TV Guide the blurb is [along the lines]: Sydney's been confronted with these next generation weapons; and she has to get thEM:, and a terrifying secret is revealed along the way.

I love to start an episode with something severe occurring and see how our people respond to it-see what does it mean, not only in terms of, "Oh, my god, that's an amazing way to get into a show," but also what and why our characters respond differently to it-ultimately, an episode that has some revelation about our characters that we didn't know before.

THE TECH OF ALIAS


scr(i)pt: How much research does it take for the technical side?

JA: It takes a good amount. Roughly, it's stuff that I have an interest in already so I read a log of technical magazines and study that kind of stuff. The type of reading I do is particularly appropriate to coming up with missions and set pieces and technical gadgets and new scientific theories-and that kind of stuff.

I look at a number of web sites everyday, and I subscribe to 30 magazines or something. I'm always looking for new information. What's great about TV is that you don't need to know that much about [the tech stuff]. You just need to know a little bit about it that someone can impart in a conversation. So it's a lot of fun. You can learn about so many things on a surface level, and it makes it fun and always exciting.

THE WRITERS' ROOM


scr(i)pt: In my eight years of interviewing TV writers and show staffs, Alias has by far the most active and dynamic writers' room.

EM:: There are three women in the room and usually six or seven men who are all very experienced; and if you have an idea, you better get it out there. You better talk as much as you can and interrupt because it's...

DJF:: Like a family dinner table...

EM:: Everyone's talking and interrupting each other...

DJF:: You have to fight for yourself...

JEFF PINKNER: Don't be afraid to be wrong, and don't be afraid to speak your mind. More often than not, I think that people, particularly early on in their career, are just there to kind of absorb; but they've been hired because they can contribute. Once you walk into the Writers' Room, you leave tour title at the door. I value differences of opinion because often out of conflict a third, better idea comes; and I think that being flexible is incredibly important on a TV show because things change for a billion reasons.

Of course, somebody needs to make the call when we disagree, to keep things moving. That should be the senior-most person in the room, or, in some instances, the person who is writing the story.

JA: For me, one of the best things about this job has been meeting these incredible people, these writers that we work with on the show. Everybody is so smart and everybody has their own vision and their own specialty. Being able to collaborate with all these people has been an amazing experience. The first year, we were in that room from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every day, sitting around a table together.

DJF:: At the beginning of the year, we start out and break the whole season, from episode one to 22. It's called long-term story. We break the big movements of the whole season. That can last anywhere from a week to three or four weeks. After we know the big tent poles of the season, then we go and break each individual episode on a big white board. We have each act and break out each scene for each act, and we do that all together.

CRYSTAL NIX HINES: It's a little intimidating at first because ideas are just exchanged so quickly. Fortunately, I had watched the show religiously because it would have been almost impossible if I had been a casual viewer.

Coming from a legal way of thinking, it was easier for me to see the holes in the ideas-following the logic. That's important to do, but you also have to [add] a suggestion and not just say, "Oh, it's not going to work for this reason." I had to train [myself to say], "Well, that may not quite work, but what about this?"

DJF:: You really need to be generating lots of ideas, and, as you were referring to in the Judging Amy interview (scr(i)pt Vol. 9, No. 1), [you need to] figure out how an idea really [becomes a story]. I've learned so much from listening to writers like Jeff. Jeff can take a little morsel and see 10 steps down the line. He can go boom, boom, boom, boom.

JP:: Personally, I think that the reason to do TV is to do it in a collaborative fashion. Even if it's the best idea in the world, if you bounce it off a really smart person, it's going to be better. That's what's best about working in a collaboratively-run television show. In that sense, I think that the Writers' Room is crucial.

scr(i)pt: What does the writer have after the room breaks the story?

JP:: A loose outline that you write up yourself after taking notes. We'll put the beats up on the board. Sometimes the beat will be as loose as, "They have a fight," and other times it will be, "They have a fight about X,Y, and Z." Often you end up with an outline or beat sheet; and when you sit down, you realize the transition doesn't work. You're missing this part of the story here; and you need to amend it, and sometimes you do that on your own. Other times you talk to J.J. and say, "I was thinking this. What if I do this?" He'll say, "Oh, that's a great idea, but what if we do it this way…" So it's a living thing.

BREAKING IN


scr(i)pt: J.J. told me to interview Crystal. Now I know why: She has the most amazing background and path to TV. She practically broke all the rules and made it in.

CNH: In law school, a friend of mine and I wrote an L.A. Law script because we loved the show; and we used to have L.A. Law dinner parties. We just did a script. Nothing came of it. Then I got very involved in the legal profession, but writing has always been my real love. I was in journalism before law school; and I was planning to go back into writing, but I ended up working as a political appointee in the Clinton administration at the State Department and then joined a Washington law firm.

After I left the Clinton administration, I went to work for a firm in Washington and was a litigator. The position was fine, but I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I spent a year and a half while I was at the firm trying to figure out what it is I really wanted to do. At the end of that process, I realized I wanted to go back into writing. I wasn't sure if I wanted to do the journalistic again or creative. So I sort of pursued both options and did some writing again for the Times and sent letter to David Kelly Productions. It's a very un-Hollywood story, actually-I knew so little about the industry, and I really didn't have any friends in it-I just applied like any other job: I sent out a letter and resume.

The Practice had been my favorite show, and I thought that would be amazing to write for. Months went by, and I didn't hear anything-figured it was my shot in the dark. One day I got a message on my voice mail saying, "We got your stuff. Please, give us a call." It was from Pam Wisne, who was then the executive vice president of DEK Productions (she later became the president). [As it turns out,] I was coming out to L.A. anyway for some long-winded reasons, and so we got together. She met with me, and I ended up writing a spec script for The Practice, which apparently you're not supposed to do. I didn't have an agent or anything, but it worked out that they were looking for lawyers who were also writers. So it was a good way for me to segue into the industry. I'm sure it would have been much harder otherwise. The whole process took about a year; and at the end of it, they offered me a job.

scr(i)pt: I can hear the readers screaming, "But I'm told not to write a spec for the show that your submitting to?"

CNH: Yes, I know. It's a good thing, in a way, that I knew as little as I did because it might have been too daunting otherwise.

ADVICE TO WRITERS


DJF: If you want to write in television, you need to write TV specs, first and foremost-ideally, two. We were able to get an agent with one, but we had to write a second one.

EM: We wouldn't have had this job otherwise because J.J. would have read one spec and said, "This is fine. What else do they have?" I need to know they can hit it out of the park more than once. So definitely write two.

When it comes to a first-time writer trying to get a job, I equate writing a spec script to being a musician and playing a cover song. People want to know that you know the words and you can play along. They want you to do the same in television. If you can write a show that people know, they can say, "Oh, they really have the voice of that show. It helps someone like J.J. who gets so many scripts during staffing season to read. If he can pull a Sex and the City and say, "I've only seen it a couple of times, but these girls really have the voices down." Versus if he had pulled out a pilot we had written, he could say, "I appreciate their creativity, but I have nothing to compare this to."

DJF:: Networking. I think it's really important. Although [some] people wait tables, if you have the opportunity, get on a show or be an assistant and be around the writers because our writer assistants come in and pitch us ideas and talk to us.

JP:: I think, particularly in TV shows, study is undervalued. If you want to break in, study the underlying structure of the show you are planning to write. Often TV shows that are successful have their own formulas. When I started and I knew I was going to write for a Kelly show, I watched them and identified, either consciously or unconsciously, the beats of every act.

JJA: One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from my father. When I was accepted to a film school here in L.A., his advice was, "Don't go to film school. Don't go to learn how to make movies. Go learn what to make movies about." So I ended up going to college in New York and lived in Paris for a year. I had experiences that I never would have had if I had stayed in Los Angeles-not to say that [going to film school] wouldn't have been as great as well. It was advice that I took to heart, and I actually considered it while I was in college.

For me, I'm just glad I got to go to New York, live in New York, [and] live in Europe. I got to experience life and get a perspective that was different from what I had known when I was growing up. That's something I know that in everything I write, it's shaped by those experiences.

In terms of the [underlying] question "What should someone do?," there really is no rule. There is no path that is a guarantee, and that's the beauty and curse of the job. I just think that the most you can do is to do anything you can. The more you experience, the more places you go or jobs that you have even--and maybe especially--if they're a struggle, are the the things that fuel point of view. The people I write about are often composites [of people] I've met, and you will only meet that diverse and interesting group of people if you move around and have different life experiences.

The only advice that I would dare give (which I believe is given all the time by everyone), the most obvious advice, is: Keep writing. It's not to say, "Oh keep writing. Don't bother me. Go write." Literally, it's one thng to want to be a writer. It's another thing to say that you're a writer and still another thing to actually be a writer. Any writer who's out of work, who's desperate for work, can take solace in the fact tha tthey're not an actor because being a successful writer, as hard as it is, is to some degree something you can control. It can't be controlled entirely because you can't be a successful writer without an amazing amount of luck--no matter who you are.

My guess is, if you look at the percentages of people who finished those 120 pages, it's remarkably small. If you've done that, I really do believe two things: (1) you've accomplished more than most writers, at least people who claim to be writers, have accomplished, and (2) if you've done that, you literally have done the thing that anyone who is a successful writer has to do. You've taken that step. You've accomplished that thing.

No one is going to be a successful writer without having done that, and especially having gone to a college where a lot of people talk about being writers and never really produced anything. The've never actually wrote anything, that's one of those thing...and if you find that you can't get there, then you just shouldn't be doing it because getting the job doesn't make that process any better. You're still going to be miserably lonely. You're still going to be racking your brains.