The Writing Process

If you missed last night's episode, you missed the big catfight between Morgan Fairchild and Bo Derek. It was fun, but while watching it I realized how much this show differs from normal shows (Um... beyond budgets. Duh.). For the past couple weeks I've been tossing about phrases like writing episodes, working on production rewrites, etc. It can be confusing, especially if you have an idea how a mainstream network show runs because we're not like them.

So here's how it works for us.

We have a head writer/producer, who is given the original telenovela material. Fashion House, for example, ran in Cuba and looked like it was shot with an old RCA video camera. With that info, she or he updates it to work for a US audience while retaining certain telenovela sensibilities-- over the top plots, sexy people taking clothes off all the time, campy stories, catfights, etc.

The series is then broken down into episodes, with some major focal points throughout and all of it leading up to the final episode. We write the entire series before it's shot, and in the case of Fashion House and The Heiress all the writers sat down in a room and read through the entire series so that we could work through plot problems, smooth out dialogue and make the series feel like one voice. This is what I was doing last week when I said I was working until all hours of the morning.

Writing the entire series at once allows the production team to shoot the series like one really big movie.

So currently, we're waiting on more notes, and once those start coming in I'll be busy again. And once shooting begins, the current job will be over for me... pray that I have another one soon after.

You see, at the Mondo-Ricko blog we not only loves to laugh, but we also loves to educate.