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Factory of Emotions
May 31, 2010, Hospodarske noviny-published April 30, 2010
One episode of the Ulice [The Street] television series is written by up to fifteen people. Seven work on Ordinace v růžové zahradě [Rose Garden Hospital] and six on the Comeback comedy. Over the past few years, television scriptwriting has changed unbelievably. The solitary Jaroslav Dietl would maybe not even make it in today’s high-capacity story factories.
Each week serials manage to chain millions of viewers to televisions. Ulice, Comeback, Pře‘lapy [Missteps], Ordinace v růžové zahradě, Poji‘ťovna ‘těstí [Happiness Insurance Company], Kriminálka Anděl [CSI: Angel], Zázraky života [Miracles of Life] - those are the projects that are currently stirring the waters of the television world. The actors who play in them are stars, but nobody cares much about the scriptwriters who write them. Yet it is them who feed the television viewer with constantly new and fresh stories. Scriptwriters are thus collapsing under the work load and television stations are desperately searching for new authors. Yet just a couple of years ago they were wandering the streets, searching for any kind of work that would support them, while dreaming that one day someone will finally approach them to write a script. But the Czech serial boom, which began six years ago – when, after the viewer success of Rodinná pouta [Family Ties] on Prima, television bosses figured out how to fight for viewership --- caught them somewhat off guard.
Punks from Národní
The Comeback sitcom serial broadcast on Nova usually has over one million viewers. Tens of thousands additional viewers also watch it on the Internet. When last time in the serial they made fun of the Moravian city of Bruntál, it caused an outcry in the media, especially when the offended citizens of Bruntál protested. And that was not the first time something like that happened. This only proves how seriously Czechs take their favorite serials. The head of the scriptwriting group creating Comeback is a former journalist and one of the co-authors of the Zelený Raul [Green Raul] comic strip, Tomá‘ Baldýnský.
"Those of us not taking pills for the head are alcoholics," says Baldýnský. His group -- the boss of which actually is on anti-depressives -- is sometimes described by colleagues as ‘punks from Národní’. "It’s actually a little bit true. When we need to get work done, it sometimes happens that we are not in our office on Národní in the center of Prague for sixteen hours, but simply for twenty four and we somehow sleep in it,” he confides.
The creation of the Comeback scripts is unusually spontaneous. The individual stories, along with scenes and jokes that appear in them, are made up en masse in Baldýnský’s office. The participants trump one another, shout over each other, everyone tries to finish the idea of the other person, or evolve it, improve it. In the end, the definitive work is frequently created under circumstances where nobody actually knows who had what share of it. “It’s crazy, but it works,” laughs Baldýnský.
But with such an approach to production, there was a problem with author compensation. Usually compensation is paid for scripts, or for produced scripts, but Baldýnský often writes the scripts himself based on the ideas of his co-workers, or the scripts are created by one of them, but the others assist him in various ways. "In the end I turned them into employees. Everyone simply gets a fixed monthly amount and I can use the employees as I need,” explains Tomá‘ Baldýnský.
He himself got into scriptwriting at the time when Vladimír Železný left TV Nova. Whereas television shows were usually purchased from elsewhere under the management of the controversial general manager, the new ruler of Nova, Adrian Sarbu, wanted to strengthen Nova’s own production focused directly on the Czech viewer. At that time Baldýnský worked as an editor at the Reflex weekly and six years ago he had the idea that he could make some decent extra money by writing scripts for the Ulice serial that was just starting up. One of the spiritual fathers of Ulice was the former editor-in-chief Radek Bajgar, today’s director of Nova’s domestic production.
But Baldýnský did not last long working for Ulice, because he came up with the idea for his own sitcom. The station’s management team approved the idea, even though Baldýnský’s only qualification for creating such a serial was that he dared to do it. Incidentally, nobody else was better qualified at that time. Even despite efforts such as the Hospoda [The Pub] or Nováci [The Novaks] series, nobody in the Czech Republic had any experience with a real sitcom.
So Baldýnský sat down at his computer and addressed sixty people that he knew from various blogs or discussion forums on the Internet and considered them as funny. Those who were willing to join his crazy idea then completed a course with an American teacher who explained to them the basics of creating a sitcom. Afterwards they all tried to propose what the show should actually be about. Baldýnský went through thousands of pages of ideas and in the end he made his choice - the result is a comedy series about the household of a heavy-metal fan and his timid brother-musician. They learned how to do this work from watching world sitcoms as well as from various foreign books and manuals.
In the end, only two writers from the original group remained. Today, there are six people on the Comeback team, including two writers educated in script writing, but also a former Latin teacher and a computer programmer. The Comeback author team also includes Petra Soukupová, whose Zmizet [To Disappear] prose won this year’s Book of the Year prize at the Magnesia Litera competition.
Dialoguers and plotliners
Baldýnský’s somewhat chaotic approach would be difficult to apply to other Nova hits, such as Ordinace v růžové zahradě or Ulice. Ulice alone, which is broadcast daily, is currently made up of around fifteen authors working in two groups: a team of story authors and a team of script writers that write the dialogs. Over 1,700 episodes have been created in five years and it appears that viewership is increasing with the growing number of episodes. Last Friday, more than one million three hundred thousand adult viewers watched Ulice.
The creation of scripts for Ulice works like a small factory that is more reminiscent of assembly line work than creative work. The team’s main character, who has veto power in scripts, is the head author. Together with his closest team he or she creates the story for the coming year, i.e., where the entire story will head. And this basic concept is handed over to the so called plotliners. They are called this because they are in charge of specific plotlines. In the case of Ulice, these are mainly the different families. So one plotliner is in charge of the Nekonečný family, another is in charge of the Boháč family, etc. They invent the story and plotlines among the individual family members, but at the same time they must coordinate their stories with the others because of course the individual plotlines influence one another. Once the plotlines are in place and connected, the dialog authors start their work and they write out the individual scenes. "So for example the dialoguer gets the description of a situation where two friends have an argument in a bar, why this happened, how it ends and how long it should last. His work then consists of giving the characters words and building the action so that it is interesting,” explains the head author of Ulice, Iva Bruknerová.
She is one of the few who have remained with Ulice from its very beginning. She was brought to the project by a friend. At that time, she did not have much experience. She studied scriptwriting at FAMU, but she left school and spent eight years on maternity leave with her two children, during which she occasionally made some extra money writing articles.
Important for her work is also the analysis of viewership research. “Thanks to this research we know what works well and what does not,” explains Iva Bruknerová. "Based on the viewership we learn that a particular model could be repeated, or we discover which characters should get more air time because the viewers like them. Conversely, we have to either change or play down some characters that are not popular. Even our long-term story outlines are then changed quite spontaneously based on what the viewers want.” This happened, for example, with characters played by Hanna Maciuchová and Rudolf Hru‘ínský. The viewers were interested in the relationship between them, so they got more air time. And Hanna Maciuchová even won this year’s television Nova’s Anno popularity poll thanks to her role.
Already about seventy scriptwriters have worked on the creation of Ulice during the time the show has been produced. Only a few of them have lasted the entire time. “Very frequently they burn out. The death-rate of even a very good author is two years. In that time they get to the point where they simply cannot or do not want to do it anymore,” explains Lucie Paulová, who managed the Ulice script writing team for four years and today is working on the next season of Ordinace v růžové zahradě.
Her journey to serials was similar to Iva Bruknerová’s. She also did not finish her studies of script writing and after her return from maternity leave she was looking for work. And she found it on Ulice.
She claims that for serials that are so long and so demanding as far as the story is concerned, it is actually good that the people in the team change. “Even if only because everybody brings some new views, adventures and experience with which he or she can contribute to the entire concept. The more interesting people that join the team, the better it is. Especially when out of ten ideas only one gets used in the end,” she explains.
So why is scriptwriting work so demanding? Mainly because of the need to constantly keep inventing new stories. Even if a person has a huge fantasy, soon the idea well runs dry - even if he or she uses all stories and situations that he or she has experienced or even just heard about. Moreover, the golden rule of scriptwriting says that only the fourth version of the script is usable. In other words, what the writer thinks up, he or she still has to rework and improve several times until the head author is satisfied. So sometimes the writer creates even up to eight drafts, and the boss still isn’t satisfied. One of the former Ulice script writers, Michaela Klevisová, knows a lot about this.
We do an average show for an average viewer. The young writer will probably never forget this motto, which the Ulice bosses beat into the heads of new script writers. She spent a half year writing for Ulice. “The comparison with a factory fits perfectly,” says Michaela Klevisová. “The script writing machinery is an absolutely perfectly configured machine, in which no wheel can stand out and each wheel must fit with millimeter precision into the other wheels. Because otherwise the machine will jam.” She became a member of the Ulice team three years ago, literally from the street. At that time the local script writing factory was facing the massive exodus of authors, and so the people from production were looking for new people. They approached Klevisová because of the success of her first book, Kroky vraha [The Steps of a Murderer]. Together with others she made it through the audition and started working. But within a half a year, everyone who started with her left again. “It’s simply a demanding environment that only a few people endure; in addition, one is always re-writing, creating various versions, something is constantly being fine-tuned and re-worked. It’s a tremendously demanding place on the psyche, a place where emotions rage and conflicts occur: simply a world perfectly made for a murder,” laughs the author who in the end came to terms with Ulice in an original way. She wrote a detective novel about the mass production of scripts, which she called Zlodějka příběhů [The Thief of Stories]. The plot is based on a murder… of a head writer.
Scarce goods
Because script writers frequently drop out, almost all head authors are dealing with the fact that there aren’t enough of them. As a rule, authors are missing not only at Ulice, but -- for example -- new people for Ordinace v růžové zahradě are urgently being recruited by Lucie Paulová. She joined the show in January after most of the previous team left. At the moment she is creating new episodes in a team of two people together with a group of five dialogue writers. She also has assistants who search for information about various diagnoses for the show and consult them with doctors. The scripts are finally checked by a so called rewriter, who keeps an eye on the final version of each episode: whether it fits into the overall concept and also whether the dialogue writers stayed true to the given characters. “Today a good script writer is worth gold,” claims Lucie Paulová.
Tomá‘ Baldýnský also urgently needs new people for Comeback. "We are also faced with a lot of departing script writers, because they started going crazy from it after a while. They either burned out or could not go on because they had a child and decided to do work that they didn’t have to do sixteen hours a day. We could use more people, but there aren’t any. I’d even give them more money than elsewhere, but there is nowhere to turn to. Moreover, I don’t have the time to keep looking for others. The trouble is that script writers leaving DAMU or FAMU aren’t prepared to work on serials, and not at all on the comedy ones. There simply aren’t any people,” complains Baldýnský.
The trouble with new script writers also consists of the fact that even though this work usually gets above average pay, the apprentice authors frequently don’t even make enough to cover regular living expenses. They are paid by the script, and if the head author is not satisfied with their work and the script must be re-worked, their compensation is gradually decreased. Sometimes even from twenty thousand for a script to eight. So sometimes they leave for financial reasons.
But the best ones make a different level of money. It always depends on personal arrangements. Whereas one script writer can get thirty thousand for work on one episode, another may get fifty thousand. Also in play is how many episodes a writer can write in a month. The most money is made by stars such as the head authors of shows or script writers like Lucie Koná‘ová or the Bártů sisters.
The bells haven’t tolled for novels
Never ending serials from the lineage of Ordinace v růžové zahradě or Ulice -- which are based on soap operas and for which the ending is not as important as the episodal development of relations between various characters -- are hot now according to viewership research. In spite of their popularity, the public broadcaster Czech Television is mainly trying to create novel-based serials. This is a format leading to a conclusion. So the individual episodes are actually only chapters of a novel that has a clearly defined ending or resolution. Whereas the fundamental idea of long serials is that if a viewer skips a few episodes, it shouldn’t affect his next viewing at all, but a television novel is a jigsaw puzzle in which most of the time each episode is important for the putting together of the final picture.
Television novels usually have thirteen episodes. “This is already our established classic. It represents the ideal length for one television season, i.e., either the spring or fall one,” explains the head dramaturgist of Czech Television, Jan Otčená‘ek, who as an author was behind the scripts of serials such as Náhrdelník [The Necklace], Hotel Herbich or the first continuation of Nemocnice na kraji města [Hospital at the End of the City].
"Because we are a public television broadcaster, our production should also have certain transcendence, it should strive for a message. This is another reason why we prefer author serials that are the work of one or two persons. We want to pass along the message of an individual who has something to say, and not just provide entertainment at any cost,” claims Otčená‘ek. As an example of a serial where this turned out perfectly he provides Zdivočelá země [A Land Gone Wild].
The dramaturgists at Czech Television receive around five serious ideas per month for the creation of a serial - whether they are from script writers, various film companies or even from complete amateurs. At this moment the dramaturgists are working on a theme that was written by a person with absolutely no experience. “It’s attractive and strong enough that we are considering going ahead with the creation of his serial,” says Otčená‘ek.
The making of a serial is preceded by a complicated approval process. Even one thirteen part serial costs fifty to one hundred million crowns, so in addition to the dramaturgist and program director, in the final phase it must also be approved by the CEO.
Even Czech Television sometimes makes an exception to the thirteen part concept. This exception is, for example, the Vyprávěj [Tell Us] show, which in the end should have 104 episodes. One of its authors is Rudolf Merkner. Even though he was a successful student at FAMU, and a winner of several prizes, just ten years ago he had to make his living by lecturing on literature at the Charles University Faculty of Education, and he only dreamed about script writing. “Czech Television was full of ideas from authors who were not allowed to write during communism, and our generation of thirty-somethings had no chance at the time. This situation changed inconspicuously but radically sometime six years ago. All of a sudden a script writer wasn’t someone in front of whom they closed doors at television stations, it was the opposite,” remembers Merkner. One of the first serials at that time was Redakce [The Newsroom] on Nova. In addition to it, he also worked on the Místo v životě [Place in Life] serial. In the end he left Nova to become a freelancer. From the beginning, he has been working on the Vyprávěj serial in a team with two other authors. He rejects the idea that this could be comparable with the Ulice style factory system.
“We divide the work and we combine it in various ways, but it is more like team author work rather than the classic factory assigning of tasks. Because of that we do work slower than we could, but on the other hand the work is more precise and we won’t go crazy from it. At the end of the day that’s quite a big advantage in comparison with the speed and effectiveness of the factory approach,” says Merkner.
Is a time of copies coming up?
Author serials are not just the domain of Czech Television. For example, the well-known sisters, Kateřina and Jitka Bártů -- who are behind the multi-year television Prima serial Rodinná pouta (later renamed to Velmi křehké vztahy [Very Fragile Relations]), which actually launched the whole serial boom in the Czech Republic -- only work in the time-tested duo. “We tried it, but we cannot work in a wider team. We want each of our scripts to have a certain style, so that the “artist-author” component is not lost from it - which is what happens in the factories. Rather than spend a long time explaining to someone what they should write and how they should write it, it’s easier and more time efficient to write it ourselves. When writing a serial, there are always cut-throat deadlines and those who can’t make it are out of the game. We prefer to take responsibility for each word, rather than to direct an anonymous army,” claims Kateřina Bártů. And Rodinná pouta had 550 episodes altogether, which in the end resulted in 35,000 pages of text.
With regard for the insufficient numbers of script writers, television stations are now orienting towards Czech versions of serials that were successful in the world. Incidentally, this was also the case of Redakce on Nova or is the case for the currently running Pře‘lapy on Prima. Considerably fewer people are required to rework a foreign serial for the Czech environment and, at the end of the day, the viewer doesn’t really care whether the story that he is watching was created by one author, a group of twenty people, or whether someone translated and adapted a foreign serial and shot it with Czech actors. But one person who does care is Tomá‘ Baldýnský. “Domestic television stations should definitely not resign from domestic production. I think that the viewer will prefer original Czech products rather than transformed foreign ones, even though those have the advantage that they are tested and have proven successful,” says the creator of Comeback.
In any case, it would be a pity if original production disappeared from Czech television screens. Even though it is absolutely unimaginative sometimes.
For additional information, please contact:
Romana Wyllie
Vice President of Corporate Communications
Central European Media Enterprises
Krizeneckeho nam. 1078/5
152 00 Praha 5
Czech Republic
+420 242 465 525
romana.wyllie@cme-net.com
