Okay, so Joe Melchione's question deserves a longer answer than I gave it. Here it is again…
Having read your columns and blog for the last two decades, there appears to be a frequent pattern of employers (both comic book and TV related) asking you to produce a script virtually/literally overnight. I have trouble understanding why this happens so often. I realize you work in a industry made up of highly creative people where ideas may trump proper scheduling and that it often takes a long to make it through the corporate red tape to get a project green lit. Even so, why such unrealistic deadlines? Wouldn't the whole creative team benefit from a balanced schedule?
Yes but some of this, honestly, I bring on myself by juggling different projects for different publishers or producers. Life would be easier in some ways if I just worked for one entity but then (a) I wouldn't have as great a diversity of things to work on and people to work with and (b) I'd feel somewhat trapped at that one source of income. Even while working in the most benevolent of situations — and most of mine have been that — it's nice to know that if things go sour on one project, I can quit…or they can fire me and I still have work. Also, even companies you think are stable sometimes suddenly go under or bring in new management.
But obviously, there's a downside to that and sometimes, it's that everyone I'm working for suddenly needs an urgent rewrite on something by Monday morning. Individually, they all gave me reasonable deadlines but doing them all at the same time can get…well, unreasonable.
That said, I am often expected to produce things overnight or close to it. In fact, I am sometimes called because, well, that's the deadline, they need someone fast 'n' dependable…and they think that's me. In the eighties, I did a lot of scripts, including several animation pilots that sold, in 48 hours or less. One time, ABC called on a Tuesday and asked if I could write a pilot for a half-hour series. I asked them if I could have until Monday morning on it. They said, "Mark, if we had until Monday, we could have called you on Friday."
Why does it happen so often that they need it day before yesterday? Often because someone else screwed up. Someone else wrote a script within the time the schedule allowed. Another someone else didn't like it. Another writer is called in and now there's no time left.
Or the producers or editors squander time deciding what they want and by the time the writer gets called, he has to be pressed to make up the difference. That's a very frequent situation.
Also, most of the time, what we write is part of an assembly line. At Hanna-Barbera, when I was story-editing Richie Rich, the following situation happened a number of times. I had a script ready a few days before the artists would need to start working on it…but then there'd be a crisis over in the Scooby Doo unit. The artists there were almost done with Episode #101 and the script for #102 wasn't going to be finished in time.
Bill Hanna lived in dread fear of employees sitting around on the payroll with nothing to do…so he'd run through the building, looking for some script he could give them to work on. He'd find I had a Richie Rich that wasn't yet needed in production so he'd put the Scooby unit to work on that script…and suddenly, I'd have three days to get another Richie Rich script written and approved by the network so the Richie Rich unit would have something to do.
That happened a lot at Hanna-Barbera and it's happened in some ways at every animation studio and in comics. One time at DC, Julius Schwartz turned to me and said, "I need a script to give Irv Novick three days from now. Can you write a script in two days for me?" Irv had a contract that guaranteed him a new assignment the minute he finished one. And even if he hadn't had that contract, it's not usually a good idea to not keep a steady flow of work going to your freelancers.
I could write a lot more on this topic and maybe I will…but right now, believe it or not, I have a deadline to meet. So I'll just mention that sometimes, doing it at the last minute has its advantages. I've written TV scripts that were produced almost exactly the way I wrote them simply because there was absolutely no time for rewrites…by me or anyone else. There are times when that's a good thing. It's also sometimes creatively exhilarating to be in that position, the same way doing television live can add a certain special energy to a show. When you only have one chance to get it right, that sometimes helps you get it right. Or maybe at least righter.