George R.R. Martin Addresses Small Rooms, Calls It “Hated” – Deadline

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George R.R. Martin has no patience with small rooms and how they make it impossible for new writers to succeed.

In his latest blog post, the author talks about how he got his start in television by writing for Twilight Zone in 1985. If it weren’t for the old system that writers worked their way into, he’d never have learned how to make a series.

“For the first fourteen years of my career, I wrote only prose; a few novels, and plenty of stories for female anthologies, Asimov, and various other SF magazines. As much as I enjoyed television, I didn’t dream of writing for it until 1985, when CNN decided to BBS released a remake of The Twilight Zone, and Executive Producer Phil DeGuire invited me to write an episode for them. An independent script. That’s how I started at the time. I decided to give it a try… And Phil and his team loved what I did. So much so that within days of delivery, I received An offer to come to the staff. Before I quite knew what had happened, I was on my way to L.A. with a six-week deal as a staff clerk, minimum union salary, scripts against it. (In the 1980s, a staff clerk was the lowest rung on the ladder. You can tell because it was the only job with “writer” in the title).

“What I knew about television production when I got off that plane in Burbank was… well, so I can’t think of an pithy analogy. But I learned. I learned in the writers’ room from Phil himself and the amazing staff he put together for TZ: Jim Crocker and Rockne S. O’Bannon, the amazing Alan Brennert, Michael Cassutt, and a host of fantastic freelance translators. And it’s not just about the dialogue, the structure, and the language of the script. I learned about production also. The moment I arrived, an elephant threw me into the deep end. I wrote five scripts during my season and a half on TZ, and I was deeply involved in every aspect of each. I didn’t just write the script, deliver it, and walk away. I sat at the selection sessions. I worked with directors. I was present at the reading table. “The Last Defender of Camelot” was the first of my scripts to go into production, and I was preparing every day. I watched stuntmen rehearse their climactic sword fight (in the lobby of the ST ELSEWHERE set, as it turned out), and I was present when they shot that scene and someone zigzags when it should have zigzags and the stuntman’s nose is cut off…a deep lesson about type Things that could go wrong. With Phil, Jim, and Harvey Frand (our line producer, another great guy who taught me a lot), I watched the dailies every single day. After the episode was in the box, I sat in post-production, watching the editors work their magic. I learned from them, too.”

“No film school in the world could teach me as much about television production as I learned on Twilight Zone during that season and a half,” Martin continued while describing his first 10 years of television — “long before HBO and Game of Thrones.”

“None of it It would have been possible, had it not been for the things I learned in Twilight Zone as a staff writer and story editor.” “I was the youngest of writers, probably a hot(ish) young writer in the SF world, but in TV I was so green I would have been invisible in front of the green screen. And this, in my opinion, is the most important thing for which the union fights. The right to have this kind of career path. To enable new writers, young writers, and prose writers to climb the same ladder.”

Martin goes on to describe the small rooms as his “hate”.

Before the WGA began its strike, it proposed a minimum staffing for episodic television writers’ rooms. For pre-greenlight rooms, she suggested a “minimum staff of six writers, including four Writer-Producers”. For post-greenlight rooms, she suggested “one writer per episode up to six episodes, then one additional writer required for every two episodes after six, up to a maximum of 12 writers.” Example: eight episodes requires seven writers including four Writer-Producers; 10 episodes It requires eight writers, including five writer-producers.

See the WGA’s proposals here.

Martin continued, “AMPTP’s refusal to pay writers to stay on their shows through production—as part of the job, which they need to be paid for, not as a tourist—is not only wrong, it’s incredibly shortsighted. If the story editors of 2023 are not allowed to have Any production experience, so where do the studios think the Showrunners for 2033 will come from?”

You can read Martins Full blog post here.