Script Blogger

[Exequiel Mondragon]

Firstmy friend Ben Blacker had me on The Writers' Panel to discuss my thoughts on networking on the picket line. We're in the nineth week of picketing and I've met something like fifty writers while picketing. And as I mention in this podcast, I also met Brandon Routh (SUPERMAN RETURNS) and his wife Courtney Ford (LEGENDS OF TOMORROW.)

And then I got to fulfill a nearly decade-long dream by appearing on a podcast hosted by another two of my friends and former co-workers, Javier Grillo-Marxauch and Jose Molina. Their show Children of Tendu is one of the greatest resources for an up-and-coming TV writer and it was an honor to speak with them about my path from internet guy to assistant to staff writer.

As a lifelong Superman fan, it is absolutely surreal to see my name on a Superman comic, let alone one with pencils by Tom Grummett - one of my favorite Superman artists. Tom was one of the artists on the book during the 90s, particularly during the period that covered the Death and Return of Superman. Tom's art is what a Superman comic should look like to me.

I lost my father to COVID in November 2020, after I'd been working on SUPERMAN & LOIS for about 8 months and only a couple months after I'd gotten a script assignment. My dad never got to see the show I'd waited my whole life to work on. He never got to see my first episode of TV, and as I started this, I was aware he'd never see my first comic book. That one especially stung because when I was younger, he bought me many of my first comics.

As the three of us writing the issue generated ideas for our stories, I landed on the second story that eventually saw print. I pitched it to Jai and Andrew as a story about the father/son relationship. Though I didn't specifically underline it was inspired by my feelings about my dad, they certainly knew what I was drawing on. Between the three of us we had several ideas and we had to whittle them down. They absolutely could have vetoed this early on... but they didn't.

Then we had to pitch our stories to our showrunner Todd Helbing. There were a couple that Todd passed on for one reason or another, but he gave the thumbs-up to "Father's Day" along with four other premises. We had to pitch three stories to our editor at DC, Andrew Marino. Andrew and Jai were supportive of "Father's Day" and it survived the culling.

After Andrew Marino approved the story, I told him about how it was a tribute to my dad and asked if there was any way it would be possible to dedicate it to him. He was immediately supportive of it, much to my gratitude.

To Todd, Jai, Andrew and Andrew... I lack the words to tell you what this means to me. I sent my mother and my brother advance copies of the issue and I'm at a similar loss of vocabulary when it comes to expressing how meaningful it was to all of us to pay tribute to my father, to make him a part of this experience even though he's no longer with us.

Eventually I'm going to feel like I've said "thank you" enough times. So far I haven't reached that benchmark. The entire experience of working on SUPERMAN & LOIS has been one that I'm full of gratitude for. Losing my dad is always going to be tied to my history with this show... but thanks to this issue, so is celebrating him.

We also got the most generous review from Cori McCreery, whom I know to be a massive fan of the Pre-Crisis Era of Superman. In a tweet, she said, "This was one of the best Superman comics I've read in a long time, and really captured both the feeling of my favorite era and of the show it was spun out of. Great job guys." The review made me unexpectedly emotional and I'm grateful to Cori for what she said.

I'll back up a little bit. Longtime readers of this blog - assuming any of you are still out there - are probably well aware of my affection for the WB TV series EVERWOOD. I not only once wrote a breakdown of the pilot, I also wrote a fun script called CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS that incorporated the characters of Ephram Brown and Amy Abbot in a multiversal teen drama crossover.

And then amazingly, got to see Gregory Smith and Emily VanCamp perform the script for a live read a little over a year ago. My point is, there's little point in pretending I'm not an EVERWOOD superfan, or that the show hasn't been a major touchstone for me in my own writing.

So with that, imagine my delight when EVERWOOD writer and showrunner for seasons 3 and 4 Rina Mimoun joined the writers room of SUPERMAN & LOIS this year. I wasted no time in trying to get EVERWOOD stories out of her. And by no time I mean that I'm pretty sure the first thing I said to her was "Hi, I'm Adam and I'm a huge fan of EVERWOOD."

Flash-forward a couple months. The first four episodes are broken and episode five had yet to be assigned. Our writers were doubling up, so that meant that Rina and I were the only two left without an episode. That didn't necessarily mean we were going to be teamed and at one point it looked like each of us might fly solo on different eps.

As an aside, most of the time episodes are assigned based on seniority and availability. Indeed, you'll see that the writer breakdown this season mostly starts with the highest ranking writers on staff and works its way down. In rare cases, there might be an effort at matching a writer to their particular strength, but usually I'd caution against making assumptions about an episode that are based on what the writer has been credited on before.

To make a long story less long, I was thrilled when the assignment came down that I'd be working with Rina AND that we indeed were going to be getting "the quinceaera episode." Also, by that point, our EVERWOOD shorthand was well established so we were saying thing back and forth like, "It's like the Amy Abbott thing."

Our story break went pretty well. Most of the other writers were off on their own episodes for large parts of the break so much of it was just me, Rina and our excellent support staff. Showrunner Todd Helbing kept approving our beats along the way and eventually we were sent off to Story Area.

In the middle of this, Rina and I also reached out to Inde Navarrette, who plays Sarah. We wanted to get her perspective on what was absolutely essential to get right about our quinceaera and what elements of the celebration were likely to vary in real life. One of the notes became something we hammered again and again in our production meetings - "Make sure the tamales are authentic."

The way our show works is that we do a pretty detailed story break, send a 5-6 page Story Area (basically a synopsis of each storyline, broken into A, B, C stories) to the Studio and Network and then are sent off to script. Rina and I divided responsibilities on Story Area, which sailed through with mostly no notes and then had to decide how to divide the script.

The storyline of Sarah's quinceaera is filled with the kind of family drama that Rina is known for, BUT I also was prepared for the possibility that she might feel like she's written all that before and was more eager to dive into the superhero stuff. It turned out she was hungry for the Cushing family storyline, which was a relief to me because I did NOT want to be the guy trying to play "Piano Man" while Billy Joel was in the room.

I took the Jon and Jordan storyline and we divided the Clark/Lois A-story up by act. This worked pretty well, but while I was writing Act Two, I arrived at a concern that hadn't been evident in the story break. When Rina and I compared pages, we discovered we both had the exact same note. Still, we did the job we were sent off to do, completing the first draft according to the story break. Neither of us were shocked when Todd's assessment of that story element was the same as ours.

We rebroke the offending scenes and the second draft played much smoother. At that point, my job was done as the script rewrites become the purview of the showrunner and the upper-level writers. By the time we got to the Production Draft, it was in really good shape.

At the start of November I went to Vancouver for the shooting of my episode. After I arrived, I was told that usually they have separate cars to take the episode's director and writer from hotel to set, but for the first couple days, they needed me to double up with the director because we were tandem shooting with the previous episode. I had no problem with that.

My director was a wonderful woman named Diana Valentine. She's directed about 40 episodes of television and had worked her way up through the ranks to get there. The ice was broken immediately on our 30-minute drive to set. I mentioned she'd directed an episode of TV a friend of mine wrote and that just started a run of stories where we discovered all our various industry contacts in common.

I took my lead from Diana on set and very quickly picked up where I should be standing to be out of the way while still being available and engaged. While we waited in Video Village before our first shot, she said, "You know, I used to be Lynda Carter's photo double on WONDER WOMAN." What can you really say to that but, "Tell me more!" This was how I learned she got her start as a stuntwoman in the 70s and 80s and let me tell you, someone ABSOLUTELY needs to make a movie centered on the stuntwomen of that era because it's an underexplored topic rife with entertainment.

Suffice to say, by the next morning I went to our PA and told them they could just send one car to pick me and Diana up together for the rest of the shoot because we were getting on like a house on fire. It was great to start the day riding with her, and always fun doing a post-mortem on the way back.

On top of that, Diana was just a fantastic director, period. I learned quickly that she could anticipate almost any note I had and was thinking two steps ahead, always with an eye to the edit. She came prepared, knew what she wanted and - most importantly - knew how to communicate that to everyone. This was her first time on our show, but if you wandered onto our set at any point, you'd have assumed she'd worked with everyone there for years. That's a testament to her and to our crew.

3a8082e126