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Writer/Producer for ANGEL |
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| Continued from previous page... THE WRITING A typical Minear episode will have a multitude of script changes. Does he just find the moods change as he progresses through the development of the story or is it because he’s a perfectionist at heart? "I’ve been accused of that, being a perfectionist," he admits. "I just feel like . . . actually the pragmatic answer is, on a lot of these episode this year I had a very short time to break the story and write the script. I would lay down the basic story as best I could in two or three days because they needed the script in order to prep the episode. We’d be in the middle of prep week and they wouldn’t have a script. So they needed something with all the scenes, with all the elements in order to find the locations, and figure out what the wardrobe was going to be and all those little elements you need. Once they had that, then I’d go back and start doing colored revisions because ‘I"> Buffy has long established their set core of writers while Angel’s beginnings went through a bevy of talent. This season, the Angel staff has set themselves up well including a couple cross-over writers from Buffy included among them Jane Espenson, "I love Jane Espenson," confides Tim. "She's a great writer and a great re-writer to boot!" So who’s left from last season? "Well, it’s interesting. Of all the writers that were hired last year, I’m the only one left and we’ve just hired two new writers. Actually we’ve brought on Jim Kaulf mid-season this year and he’ll be back. So it’s sort of a new group that is going into the second season. We didn’t have a big staff last year, and David was relying a lot on the Buffy people initially and eventually they got so busy with Buffy, that he turned to me a lot. It’ll be interesting, I think we’ve got a really good staff now. I think the people that we’ve hired are going to be great. One of them is Meredyth Smith, who was actually our script coordinator, who came to Buffy via The Bronze." Mere has high regard for her, now, fellow writer. She commented to me this little tidbit of Mr. Minear’s work ethic, "Tim only says nice things about me because I detail his car every Thursday! ‘Oh come on, Smith! What is THAT? A piece of sand in my floor mat?’" (laugh) Also new aboard the writing staff this season is Shawn Ryan who comes from Nash Bridges. "I think he’s going to be great," says Tim, "so I have high hopes." If you ever thought Tim has it easy because he has other writers on staff to balance the load, think again. "I worked on, wrote, or co-wrote or re-wrote 11 out of 22 episodes last year. For the most part I wasn’t credited for a lot of that writing but it was constant work after episode six." Things do get with the crazy. The production schedule can give them plenty of time to write an episode one month and literally leave them days when its crunch time near the end of the season as in ‘The Prodigal, where Tim virtually had three days to figure out the story and write the script. "‘Sanctuary’ was the same thing. We were four or five days into the prep time, there were a couple days left and we still didn’t have a story." Once it’s done do you ever wish you could have the luxury to go back and redo any of it? "Oh every time! Every time," he admits. When he does have time, some story lines may require a little research but there is one source and one source only for that as you’ll see. "A lot of the stuff is made up so it’s not so much research. When I was on the X-Files I did a lot of research. I was on a show called Strange World, which was about science, so I did a lot of research for that. As far as this type of show goes, there’s Joss!
Eliza Dushku takes the term I thought ‘5 by 5’ was an excellent episode! "Oh yeah! I love that episode, the ending just kills me." A lot of people told me they cried at that scene. "Oh it’s totally cryable." In the follow-up episode to that, ‘Sanctuary’, there is an outstanding scene with Buffy where she tells Faith, ‘I’ve lost battles before but nobody else ever made me a victim.’ On asking Joss about this scene, he gave Tim a SO of his own. "The Buffy roof scene in ‘Sanctuary’ was in fact mine," replies Joss. "I basically wrote the Buffy scenes and Tim did most everything else. It was he who insisted I share the credit with him, cuz he’s cool. Personally, my favorite scene was the Faith/Angel microwave talk. Go Timbo." Since Faith is predominantly a Buffy the Vampire Slayer character who has been so well developed and written by Doug Petrie, the perspective that Tim had to work with was a little different. "I love Faith," he admits. "I think I had the biggest challenge, I must say, in that I was writing a different Faith. In ‘5 by 5’ Jim (Kouf) got to write wise cracking, evil Faith. By the time I got her she had the crap kicked out of her and I had to try to build her from a psychopath to somebody who wanted to change. So it was very difficult to break that story because Faith started to become a cipher and not really an active character of the piece. And then eventually she does but I’m not sure I got to write ‘Faith’ in other words." Tim actually enjoyed writing another scene from that episode that may bring the character of Wesley more attention this season. "I think my favorite thing to write in that episode was the Council stuff with Wesley. I just really thought those scenes were cool. And also I like writing Kate now that she’s a little cucky." Kate’s character will be back this season although actress Elisabeth Rolm has double duty now as she also stars in the new TNT series Bull. But Tim assures us, "She will continue to be recurring on Angel just like she was this year, she was only in a handful of episodes really. I think she’s definitely an interesting character. The funny thing is, every episode where she was a main part of the story fell to me somehow and I actually really like writing that character." |
