By Darrell Hope and Elif Cercel

Editor's note: The following is the second in a two-part series about directing television pilots. In the September issue half-hour episodic pilots were covered.  To read that story click here

Director James Frawley

Directing the pilot for a one-hour series is an art unlike any of the directing jobs that will follow should the show successfully navigate its way into the safe harbor of being broadcast. It is similar in tone to the task of the feature director in its requirement to spin straw into gold. However, it can also be more complex, as the pilot director's job is to light the way for other directors to follow in subsequent episodes.

Vengeance Unlimited, Kate Brasher and Jack and Jill are all series that made the journey from pilot to a network schedule. What they also have in common is each began as a pilot under the guiding hand of James Frawley, a DGA Award nominee for his Ally McBeal pilot and Emmy Award nominee for his pilots McBeal and Ed.

Frawley's recent track record for directing pilots that successfully transition into series is probably part of what induced writer/producer Jim Leonard to tap Frawley to direct the pilot for Thieves, a comic-tinged action/drama that recently debuted on ABC. The relationship Frawley forged with Leonard led to his being given a great deal of leeway to contribute to the project creatively.

"Ideally, the director gives his input on the story, the characters, the physical production, and the style and tone of the pilot," said Frawley. "Jim Leonard, John Stamos and I cast for three weeks prior to formal prep, which was five weeks. I introduced Jim to my cinematographer, chose my production designer; hired my stunt coordinator and basically began setting up the physical production in Toronto with another DGA member, line producer Peter Giuliano, before Jim came up. Fortunately, we were making the same picture, so he supported my choices.

"Jim brought me into the creative process early and encouraged me to make contributions. For example: he writes great '40s-style banter that's smart and funny but I suggested that we take a four-page dialogue scene between John and Melissa [George] and break it up into five different locations, continuing the dialogue from hotel room, to corridor, to elevator, to lobby, to car. That gave visual energy to a scene that was originally written for a hotel room. That writing-directing style has continued with the week-to-week episodes."

Director Thomas Carter (right) and actress Vera Farmiga

"That wasn't scripted. It was a sequence that I just imagined and had to go and steal footage for," said Carter. "I would take a second camera from the set and while I was shooting one scene, I'd go lock it off on the car and mount and say, 'Go out and shoot down this street.' Then reposition the camera and request a different shot. I was learning that was what a director is supposed to do. He's supposed to do more than just read the story on the page. It should inspire his own imagination to take the audience deeper. That became the kind of thing they did week after week in the series. I think it literally did bring something new to series television that we hadn't seen before. But it relied as much on visual storytelling as it did on the script. If you look at the first seven or eight minutes of it, there are probably only three to four lines of dialogue."

In addition to Vice, the DGA and Emmy-winning Carter also directed the pilots for A Year in the Life, Equal Justice and NBC's new detective drama UC: Undercover, where he also served as an executive producer on the pilot. Although he's directed hit features like this year's Save the Last Dance, Carter still holds a special place for pilot directing. "I think it's the immediate ambition of every director of episodic television to do a pilot because you want to do something that's a little bit more special and you can call your own creation as a director," said Carter. "A pilot is telling a story that has to stand on its own but also needs to compel the audience to want to watch the next chapter of the story."

Schlamme is another director who knows a great deal about the art of creating a successful pilot. His half-hour pilot Sports Night won him both the DGA and Emmy Award for 1999 and the next year he directed the DGA Award-nominated, Emmy Award-winning pilot episode of the one-hour drama The West Wing.

Director Thomas Shlamme (photo by Robert Hale)

Robert Butler's eye has framed the setting of hit shows from Moonlighting to Remington Steele, and even his less than completely successful pilots have made their way into legend, as any avid Trekkie would recognize him as the man behind the first Star Trek pilot episode "The Cage." Butler was Emmy-nominated for his pilot for the whimsical retelling of the Superman myth, Lois and Clark, but his stirring exploration of the organized chaos of an inner-city police precinct in the pilot episode of Hill Street Blues can easily be considered a hallmark for innovative series directing. The almost-documentary look and feel of the camerawork cleaved perfectly with the slice-of-life writing and gave the show a grittiness and reality heretofore unseen on series television. The pilot won him both the DGA and Emmy Awards.

"Hill Street is a show set in an eastern city and I knew that we had to take the East, and all that that implies--the congestion, greater density in population, the myth of eastern cities--and put all of that into the show," evoked Butler. "The busy-ness and seeming confusion, chaos and mess was in the material, which was about people in that lifestyle and professional situation, and I just ran with that. The writer/producers, Michael Kozoll and Steven Bochco, thought of shows in terms of dialogue. I've heard Steven interviewed where he said he 'hears a show, he doesn't see it.' Maybe that's why he's comfortable falling back and letting the execution of the production take place. But that resulted in immense specificity. We didn't just do walking radio, we crowded it with the compression and congestion and exaggerated it."

Visual strength is something that a pilot has to have if it is to make the transition to television series. It's also something that Rod Holcomb knows a lot about. His pilot for the hit medical series ER did for the medical drama what Hill Street did for cops-and-robbers shows. With its kinetic pace and free-flying camerawork, the show plunged audiences into the midst of a large metropolitan hospital's emergency room and won Holcomb the 1995 DGA Award and an Emmy nomination.

Generally the director's pilot sets the template for the rest of the episodes to follow, but with Max Bickford, Holcomb has a new wrinkle with which to contend. Although the pilot was shot on film, he is now shooting the series in HDTV, so that meant that Holcomb and his series DP Michael Mayers, had to create a new set of rules in order to technically match what Holcomb accomplished in his pilot.

"We cut holes in the walls of the hospital corridors and added doorways so we could 360° any shot and walk and talk nonstop without a cut for as long as the scene required," Holcomb recalled. That single creative decision gave rise to the show's signature style. "The floor was so rocky it was impossible to use a dolly and I wanted to create a sense of a gurney rushing down the corridor. SteadiCam seemed to be the best answer so we decided to be freeform with it and not worry about individual coverage of all the speaking actors. We let things fall in and fall out of the shot more like a Robert Altman film where you have voices and things layered throughout to give you the impression that no matter where you went with the camera, the audience would be part of the ride, just not an outside viewer."

As for the challenge of the lenghty script, "I don't believe we cut much of it down before we started filming," said Holcomb. "It read very fast so I knew it would shoot fast. We eventually came in on time, if not a little under on the two-hour pilot. It was one of those rare moments when everybody in the cast clicked."

Getting the cast to 'click' is another one of the hurdles that the pilot director has to overcome. Without a cast that looks like they belong together on the screen, the director may as well not waste his time thinking of interesting visual presentations.

Carter says pilot directors have an overriding responsibility toward shaping performances. "You normally need to be compelled by the lead actors in a way that usually motion pictures don't require, because they are people that you are going to invite in to your home every week and you want to follow their lives."

Knowing that if he could get his cast to bond together, the results would ultimately show on the screen, Schlamme put his West Wing cast through a full-rehearsal period before turning the cameras on the pilot. "The thing I always feel is missing in pilots is that you don't believe these people have an idea who each other are," Schlamme explained. "If you watch the first few episodes of a show you go, 'Wow, they're strangers.' Jimmy Burrows accomplished it brilliantly on Friends. He took the whole cast to Las Vegas before they started shooting it so people started to break down their barriers and feel comfortable. That doesn't mean that they act better with each other, but they feel safer."

Director Robert Butler

Because there are millions of dollars at stake if it all goes right and the luck holds, the profit participation of television shows can definitely have an "above-the-line" vs. "below-the-line" mentality. One subject of contention is the "Created By" credit, which is much more than a vanity display, but rather a stamp of ownership that is translated into cold hard cash once the accounting is done. Despite the creativity and innovation that the pilot director may bring to the project, rarely if ever are non-writing directors acknowledged as creators of a show. The directors themselves are of a variety of opinions over this fact.

"I created Remington Steele so I've had the created by credit," said Butler. "I dug my heels in and insisted that be the case because I had sold the notion to Grant Tinker and MTM hired Michael Gleason to execute that script. That situation worked out fairly well, and as I think about Hill Street now, I think it could be said that part of that show was indeed created by me. But it's hard for me to answer the question because I'm so close to the forest. I don't know the percentages of contribution at the end of the day that we make on pilots. What percentage of Hill Street Blues or Moonlighting did I create? You have to tell me because I'm too close."

"It's a complicated issue and I think there's one element of pilot directing that is seldom mentioned," Holcomb observed. "As I've grown more experienced and have more input into the creative process of mounting a pilot, I think you could argue that during the career of every pilot director, that director has created elements that have helped sell the pilot--you could say that there are a lot of series ideas being created by the director on the set. Certainly, there are writers who clearly follow through with their visions and deserve the credit. Yet, there have been times when the script is not completely realized and the pilot director needs to fill in the blanks. It is directed to a series level. At best we can negotiate participation and recieve royalties and often times that is enough. This is really not about credit for me but I'd like to give the pilot director his or her recognition for their important contribution to the sale of a pilot to series."

But in spite of all the hard work that goes in and who gets credit for what, none of it matters if the pilot is unable to negotiate the treacherous waters of audience testing. It adds another pressure to the process because the companies generally have to deliver their pilots to the networks by an early May deadline, which means that no matter where they came into the process, the director has a cutoff date to meet.

Director Rod Holcomb

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