Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars Read online

  Other Titles in the Smart Pap Series

  Taking the Red Pill

  Seven Seasons of Buffy

  Five Seasons of Angel

  What Would Sipowicz Do?

  Stepping through the Stargate

  The Anthology at the End of the Universe

  Finding Serenity

  The War of the Worlds

  Alias Assumed

  Navigating the Golden Compass

  Farscape Forever!

  Flirting with Pride and Prejudice

  Revisiting Narnia

  Totally Charmed

  King Kong Is Back!

  Mapping the World of the Sorcerer's Apprentice

  The Unauthorized X-Men

  The Man from Krypton

  Welcome to Wisteria Lane

  Star Wars on Trial

  The Battle for Azeroth

  Boarding the Enterprise

  Getting Lost

  James Bond in the 21s' Century

  So Say We All

  Investigating CSI

  Literary Cash

  Webslinger

  Halo Effect

  Coffee at Luke's

  Perfectly Plum

  Grey's Anatomy 101

  Unauthorized Investigations

  into Veronica Mars

  EDITED BY

  Rub mamas

  WITH LEAH WILSON

  Table of [oninds,

  Introduction: Digressions on How Veronica Mars Saved My Career and, Less Importantly, My Soul .........1

  Rolf Thomas

  Welcome to Camp Noir ....................................................8

  Lan! Diane Kith

  Story Structure and Veronica Mars ...............................20

  Geoff Klock

  Veronica Mars: Girl. Detective ......................................34

  Eudgn itaughn

  Daddy's Girl ....................................................................46

  Joyce Millman

  Daddy Dualities .............................................................. 58

  FJmy Berner

  On the Down-Low .........................................................72

  Lgnne Edwards

  The Noir of Neptune ......................................................82

  fJmanda Hnn Klein

  Reality on Mars and Neptune .......................................94

  Jesse Hassenger

  "I Cannot Tell a Lie. And If You Believe That..." .......104

  John Ranws

  Lawless Neptune ..........................................................114

  Hlatair Burke

  The New Normal ..........................................................124

  Kristen Kidder

  The Duck and the Detective ........................................134

  [hris Md u thin

  The United States of Veronica ....................................148

  Deanna [angle

  I'm in Love with My Car ..............................................160

  Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Boom Goes the Dynamite ...........................................170

  Misty Houk

  Innocence Lost ..............................................................184

  Samantha Bornemann

  From Golden Girl to Rich Dude Kryptonite ................194

  Ludy Fitzwater

  The Importance of Not Being Earnest ........................204

  Heather Haurthsky

  Acknowledgments ....................................................... 213

  Introduction

  Digressions on How

  Veronica Mars Saved

  My Career and, Less

  Importantly, My Soul

  TAUGHT HIGH SCHOOL during my mid-twenties in Austin, Texas. I have clear memories of sitting in my living room watching TV and wondering how clearly god-awful programming made it on the air. Unfunny comedies. Cheesy dramas. Why can't every show be Seinfeld or Northern Exposure or Moonlighting? Surely there are smart, well-paid, well-intentioned people involved in the process of creating these shows, I'd say to myself. And even if there aren't, doesn't someone at the network watch the show and say, "This is bad television; let's fix it or get it off the air!"?

  They're spending tens of millions of dollars on something that is by almost any measurable standard bad. Do they know? How can they not know? Do they care? How can something this bad happen?

  I moved to Los Angeles for good nine years ago at age thirty-two, and here's what I learned in the TV/film business: It's a minor miracle when any finished product doesn't suck.

  I learned this particular lesson the hard way. It's possible to have a collection of talented people all working together on a project, all with the best intentions, working hard, and it still be far, far easier to fail than to succeed. It doesn't take much to destroy a project: one bad piece of casting; the wrong director interpreting it; a "gotcha" ending that doesn't "getcha"; one belligerent person in a test screening; one bad network "note."

  The list is a long one. A television show is a house of cards, and if you place one of those cards wrong, the show will collapse.

  Does this seem obvious? Perhaps, but it wasn't to me.

  I spent nine years playing in a rock band trying to make it. I never came close. Of course, I was at a bit of a disadvantage as a musician as I wasn't a very good one. So, after I quit the band, I turned to writing to fill this "artistic void" I felt in my life. To my surprise, after I finished my first novel, things happened extraordinarily quickly for me. I found an agent. I got a book deal. It was the beginning of a seven-year ride where everything I wrote was published or produced. I wrote four novels and a short story collection. Simon & Schuster published all of them. I wrote two feature films, an independent and a studio film-both went into production. And in the biggest miracle of all, I wrote a television pilot that went on to become a well-received if ratings-starved series. While I was writing and producing that series, Cupid, David Kelley called me. He was going to do a new series, and he wanted to know if I'd be interested in running it for him. It was going to be the first time he created a new show and immediately handed it off to another writer. I felt as though I were being anointed crown prince of Television Land. Competing studios offered me millions of dollars for my services. I'd only moved to Los Angeles eighteen months earlier. It's safe to say I was ripe to get smacked around.

  Which, unfortunately, I did.

  I left the David Kelley series Snoops before we even began shooting episodes. David and I didn't see the series in the same way, and it was his show, so I left. But that's not the hard lesson. That came later. I didn't realize at the time but the day I quit Snoops was the first day of a five-year period that would see my career cool, cool some more, then freeze over. For the next five years it felt as though I were typing directly into a trashcan. I probably wrote a dozen pilots in that time, and nothing made it on air.

  Soon after quitting Snoops, I wrote a pilot for Fox about a minor league hockey team in South Texas. I was proud of the script, and the pilot was given a green light. I was attempting to get something akin to Northern Exposure on the air-smart, fish-out-of-water stuff, mixing in my own experiences moving to small-town Texas when I was a kid. I wanted Paula Marshall, one of the leads from Cupid, as the lead. She agreed to do it, but didn't like the way her character was introduced. She was playing a girl who grew up in Texas, moved to New York, dropped her accent, and found success in the business world. In the first draft of the script, it wa
s the death of her mother that brought her home to Texas. Paula was afraid that the show opened on too much of a downer. I wrote out the mother's death. Instead, she came home because her brother, who was supposed to take over the family business, came out of the closet and moved to West Hollywood. It was less of a downer but, in retrospect, it lessened the emotional weight. The network president who had signed me to my big deal asked me to add a character to the show He said I should give the "Fox audience" something a bit more familiar. Melrose Place was going off the air, and he thought I should add a "bitch" character to mix it up a bit with the Paula Marshall character. In came the saucy blonde sister-in-law.

  When you're already on the air, you have some leverage with a network. They've spent millions of dollars promoting your show They're invested. In development, the network holds all the cards. If they say they want a cute six-year-old in the show, you say, "Can it be an orphan?!?" So you make compromises. And I certainly made these compromises. It's possible the show could have survived all that, but the biggest mistake was all mine, and it doomed us.

  There was a two-season trend during the late nineties of doing pilot presentations. Rather than doing a full forty-two-minute pilot episode, networks were ordering twenty-minute "presentations." I was forced to cut my sixty-page pilot script into a thirty-page presentation script. Smart writers, when given the order for a presentation, threw out their original script and reconceived it as a thirty-page story. I didn't do that. I attempted to tell my original story in half the pages. The end result was a mess. I remember sitting in the editing room tinkering for hours and then having it dawn on me: This doesn't work. It will never work. Its bad. We've spent a couple million dollars to make it. And there's nothing I can do now to save it. Good, talented people with fantastic credits and best intentions had worked hard to make the show a success. I had believed in it absolutely when I wrote it.

  It was a terrible, sobering epiphany. I can put all my energy into a project, and it can still end up not working. I remembered my days sitting on my couch in Texas wondering how bad shows happen. Easily, it turns out.

  A couple years later, I did a pilot for ABC based on a British series. I rewrote the pilot, and despite loving the British version, I changed one plot point around. Rather than having the bad guy deliver a solo declaration of his evil intentions in the first act, I decided to hold off on that reveal until after he had actually committed a nefarious act. I thought my way was smarter. (I have an aversion to monologues. Who actually speaks out loud to oneself?) It was a big mistake. The climax in the British version is terrifying. The climax in my version? Not terrifying. It probably cost me getting the show on the air.

  To set the stage for Veronica Mars and what the show has done for me, it's important to understand my frame of mind at the time I wrote it. My initial seven years of success had given way to nearly five years of failure. I felt like I was spending my prime writing years on the sidelines. I love producing a show I love going to work. I love having my work out there for public consumption. Each fruitless development season put me further down an emotional well.

  Every writer in development makes a decision about how to proceed in development. There's an easy way that becomes difficult, and there's a difficult way that becomes easier. Networks have agendas during each development season. Generally they are chasing the success of a show on some other network. In the wake of CSI, every network went chasing procedural shows involving some sort of science. In the wake of Lost, every network wanted "outside the box" (read: non-cop, non-doctor, non-lawyer) shows with an ongoing unsolvable mystery. ER begat a dozen high-incident procedural dramas. The easy path for a writer in development is to find out what kind of show a network wants to put on, then give them exactly what they drew up on a dry-erase board on one of their many retreats. When you go down this path, the networks want you to succeed. Executives feel ownership of a show that they can truthfully say they helped with the creation of. The difficulty is that, when it's their notion, they become very proprietary with the show. If you're not careful, you become the hired gun executing their vision. Also, when network executives come up with ideas, they're almost never what one would call "fresh." They're rehashing of someone else's success, so you're generally stuck writing "a male Sex and the City" or "ER-in space!"

  If you take the other route-writing something you find inspiring or truly original-you face a longer road to get it ordered to script, ordered to pilot, ordered to series. You don't necessarily have a champion at the network. No executive is saying, "That's my horse in the race." The reward is that if you succeed in getting this show ordered, it's a personal vision. It's usually smarter and fresher. And the network is generally more apt to let you do your own thing.

  I'd like to be able to claim that throughout the dark days of my career that I consistently stuck to my guns and only worked on projects that were inspiring personal visions, but that would be untrue. The hockey pilot was certainly a personal, out-of-the-box vision, and I'd gotten my ass handed to me on it. Over the next few years, I did more than my share of network-generated ideas.

  With my high school teaching background as well as my start in young adult fiction, I'd long wanted to do a teen drama. The trouble was, my favorite teen drama ever, Freaks and Geeks, was already on the air, and it was failing. There weren't many networks clamoring to put another teen drama in primetime-unless it was a soap opera about sexy kids doing sexy things.

  Years before, I'd sold Simon & Schuster two titles that were supposed to be my next two novels. The first, Seattle and Back, was going to be about a band on tour. The second, "Untitled Rob Thomas Teen Detective," was going to be about a boy who becomes ostracized by his peers when his sheriff father botches a murder investigation of one of his classmates. This boy was going to start working in his father's private detective agency after school. I'd named the boy Keith Mars.

  I started thinking about marrying a teen "coming of age" show with an anthological case-driven show. Strangely, during my brief stint at Snoops, I'd enjoyed breaking mystery stories. I kept coming back to my "teen detective" idea. Somewhere in the thought process, the boy became a girl and Keith became her father. I pitched the show at a couple networks including the WB, but no one was interested. I decided to write it anyway. Since becoming a professional writer, I hadn't written anything "on spec." ("On spec" is synonymous with "for free.") There's a thrill to writing on spec. You're simply writing what you want to write. No studio or network executive has spelled out any parameters. You haven't had to get an outline approved before writing. For better or worse, it's all you. I can guarantee that, had I sold the pitch to a network, there is absolutely no way Veronica would've been a rape victim. There's no way she would've been allowed to plant a bong in her antagonist's locker. She would not have been allowed to steal evidence out of a police locker.

  Honestly, I never thought I'd be able to sell Veronica Mars to a broadcast network. It seemed too dark. The character was too edgy. I hoped to convince someone at FX to give it a chance, or HBO, or Showtime. I had an informal, get-to-know-the-new-network-executives meeting at UPN. These are usually fruitless, but the head of drama, Maggie Murphy, said they were looking to skew young and female. I thought, "What the hell?" I told her I had this script about a seventeen-year-old female detective lying around in a drawer. She asked to take a look at it. That was on a Friday. On Monday, Maggie bought the script. (Of note: The show wouldn't exist without Maggie's championing of it. She's an executive who believes in writers' visions.)

  We shot the pilot with almost no script notes from the network and none from the studio, but during process there were a couple of crossroads where, had we gone a different direction, it would've spelled disaster.

  I find it almost impossible to imagine Veronica Mars played by anyone other than Kristen Bell. We had some fantastic actresses audition for the part, but Kristen was in another league. As producers, we audition scores of people for series regular roles, then we bring our finalists
to the studio for approval, and the actors who get approved by studio then audition for the network. After Kristen auditioned at studio, the first comment from an executive was that "she might be good in the best friend role, but not as a lead." It almost seems ludicrous now, but we had to fight to convince our studio to let us take Kristen to the network audition. Had we lost that argument, there would be no show today.

  Then, after the pilot was shot, the network began having second thoughts about not cutting the references to Veronica being raped. At the end of the day, they let us keep the rape story line, but had it been excised from the pilot, Veronica's motivations would have all become fuzzy. The pilot wouldn't have made sense.

  I suppose that, in summary, in the process of writing, casting, shooting, and editing the pilot into a TV show, there are a couple hundred important decisions, and it's possible to botch any one of them and ruin the show To quote Nigel Tufnel, "There's a fine line between clever and stupid."

  After we finished the Veronica Mars pilot, I took my girlfriend on a cruise from Athens to Istanbul. I proposed on the first night in Athens. We were scheduled to fly back from Istanbul to New York in time for the announcement of the UPN fall schedule. At the time, I didn't know if we'd make the schedule. There was one slot available and five pilots vying for it. What I did know, and I explained this to my fiance, was that Veronica Mars was my best work, and that if it didn't make the fall schedule, I was done in the television business. I was frustrated and worn out, and I couldn't take another year of being a writer whose work was never seen. I was very, very close to moving back to Texas and returning to the world of young adult fiction.

  Thankfully, we were on the schedule.

  I certainly appreciated my good fortune when I got Cupid on the air so quickly in my career, but I don't think I appreciated it enough. So many things have to go right. Every year a typical network drama department will hear 100 drama pitches, order forty scripts, make ten pilots, order three pilots to series, and just one of those will see a second season. We're in the middle of our third season, so we've defied the odds, and I can say with absolute certainty, there's nothing about Veronica Mars that I take for granted. Sure, we don't do well in the ratings, but our fans are fervent, and they pay attention to detail. I loved reading the essays in this collection. The fact that people care enough about this piece of pop culture to invest this level of critical thinking blows my mind, and makes it all worth it.