What It’s Like

A couple of upcoming picket events which may be of interest: On Thursday, there will be a Hercules/Xena themed picket at the Alameda gate at NBC studios from 11-2.  I wrote a few “Hercules” eps, so I plan to be there, along with several other writers and producers from the shows.  Also on Thursday will be the first in a series of “Teaching Thursdays” at Gate 2 at Warner Brothers from 9-12.  This is a great idea, where writer/producers will gather to answer questions and discuss the craft with anyone who wants to ask.  This week’s genre is Medical Dramas.

I was at Paramount this morning, participating in the MLK Jr. day picket.  I’ll always have a special place in my heart for Paramount, since it’s where I had my first job.  So, today, I want to tell the story of my very first produced episode, the freelance script I wrote for “Deep Space Nine.”  I had sent in a spec “Next Generation” episode, which they liked well enough to invite me in to pitch for DS9.  They sent me a couple of scripts, plus a series bible.  You could always count on Trek shows for really thorough, detailed bibles.  I had my first pitch meeting on June 6, 1994.  No, I don’t have the date committed to memory, but I keep my old datebooks, and this particular meeting is written in big block letters on the 6th.  I remember that pitch so clearly.  I was terrified, of course.  Then the entire writing staff (5 guys) came out of a story meeting, and decided to take my pitch all together.  So I sat in the middle of Ira Behr’s office on a rolling chair, facing a wall of producers, plus the WGA intern, who was taking notes.  My pitches were way too long and detailed.  One was a story in which Dr. Bashir gets thrown into an alien prison and has to do bad things to survive.  From a page-long pitch, the writers took three words: Bashir in jail.  The rest of the story didn’t work, and they didn’t spark to any of my others, but they invited me to work out a new pitch from that concept and come back.

Two months later, I did.  It didn’t actually take me that long to come up with new ideas, but they were booked for pitches pretty far ahead.  I pitched another Bashir/jail story, along with several new ones.  Nothing stuck.  But they liked my ideas well enough to leave the door open for future pitches.   About three weeks later, I ran into Rene Echevarria, one of the DS9 writers, at a Duke in Hollywood function.  We chatted a bit, I don’t remember about what.  But I was a good little networker and followed up with the occasional note to stay in touch.

Around this time, I also started pitching at “Voyager.”  I had three pitch meetings there over the next few months.  Same reaction: no sale, but you’re in the right ballpark, so keep trying.  I pitched DS9 a third time, then a fourth.  In early 1995, I took a leap of faith and quit my day job, to spend six months focused on writing.  I sent a note to Rene, and mentioned my change of employment.  Then I got a seriously lucky break when he called to say that the WGA intern who was supposed to start her six-week internship the following week had bailed out.  Since I was available, would I be interested?  You bet your ass I was.  I spent March and half of April in the best job ever - getting paid to follow the writing staff around and occasionally take notes in a pitch meeting.

At the end of the internship, they decided to give me a freelance episode.  We all sat in a room and batted around the old Bashir-in-jail concept, which turned into a riff on classic POW movies, which led us to “Bridge On the River Kwai.”  Which I went home and rented immediately.  The DS9 producers married that idea with a story they’d bought from another writer, Nick Corea, about the Jem’Hadar (bad guys/warrior race).  So we ended up breaking a story about Bashir and O’Brien crash-landing on a planet full of Jem’Hadar, who are trying to break their addiction to a drug that’s being used to control them.  Bashir, the doctor, wants to help them and maybe form an alliance.  O’Brien, the soldier, wants to exploit a weakness in the enemy and escape.  Conflict between our heroes!  Great!  We paired this with a B story back on the station involving Worf adjusting to life at his new posting and inadvertently interfering with security officer Odo.

I wrote up the outline based on the story break, then had two weeks to write a first draft.   Looking back on that draft - which, of course, I kept - it’s embarrassingly clunky and expositional in spots, but pretty good in the meaty Bashir/O’Brien scenes.  Two days after turning it in, I got notes from Ron Moore.  I was being given the chance to write the next draft, which was a great vote of confidence in my work.  I had a week and a half for the next draft - which is a good long time.  Fortunately, this was during the summer, before production started, so there was time to spare on letting a newbie writer take a crack at her own rewrite.  I turned in the second draft, which Ron then took over.  He did a great next pass, including a really nice, philosophical speech by one of the Jem’Hadar.  He then saw it through the production rewrites and got it ready to shoot.

Exec producer Ira Behr liked my script enough to pass it along to Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor at “Voyager,” who were looking to hire a new staffer.  Two weeks later, on July 16, 1995, I reported for my first staff job.  So I was working on the Paramount lot when my DS9 episode went into production, and could stop by the set every day to watch it come to life.  Yes, it is an amazing feeling.  I hope you’ll all have the chance to find out for yourselves.