When I made the commitment — this is Lee, by the way — when I made the commitment to expand the final season from ten to twenty episodes, I was unprepared for the scale of what I was undertaking.
The first thing I realized, once I started breaking my outline into halves, was that ten episodes was never going to be enough to cover all the plot points I had planned. So the twenty-episode commitment saved me from embarrassing myself — I would have either had to terribly rush everything in the last ten episodes (result: crappy show) and/or get toward the end and say, “I was wrong! More episodes coming!” (result: you can’t trust what I say).
But look at these pages. I mean, look at them. Judas Priest. When I printed all of this out for the first time I thought maybe I’d made some kind of formatting error and a blank page was being added for every full one, or something like that. But nope. It’s alllll RELATIVITY.
Now, a script is mostly white space. It’s not like a novel or a newspaper, which is essentially gray with text. Ideally, I was taught long ago, if you boiled a big script down into a stew of paper and ink, the resulting mess would still be white. The amount of ink in the whole mix should be that negligible. Which I guess makes all of who write scripts for stage, screen, or radio are the worst tree-killers of all time.
If true, as this series goes on, that is going to be incredibly ironic …