Notes Call

I have a friend who is a very successful and prolific television producer, who has had a lot of shows on the air, done dozens and dozens of pilots, and who works with writers all the time. Which means he gives a lot of notes. If he produces a dozen pilots a year, and each pilot script has three or four major phases – from the initial one-sheet idea that gets sent to the buyer, to the outline, the first draft, and the second draft – and each one of those phases needs to go to two entities, the studio and the network, it means he’s giving notes to a writer about eight times, and with a dozen or so projects in the pipeline, that’s almost one hundred notes sessions a year.