The Vampire Diaries and The Originals executive producer gave BuzzFeed News unprecedented access to her office, her writers rooms, and her world. This is what life running a television show is actually like.
Justine Zwiebel for BuzzFeed/The CW; Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images
Julie Plec's black Porsche pulled into her assigned parking spot outside the unassuming office building that has housed The Vampire Diaries writing staff since 2009 (and, since 2013, the brains behind its spinoff, The Originals) almost mid-day on Sept. 2.
While Plec's employees — who number in the hundreds and are spread between Los Angeles and Atlanta, where both shows film — arrived at the office hours ago, the executive producer and showrunner has always done her best work late into the night.
"I'm a night owl; I could work until 6 in the morning without even thinking about it," Plec later told BuzzFeed News. "I tend to go to bed when I'm done working, so there's no way in hell I could turn around and come back into the office at 9 in the morning. I also build in enough time to make sure that I have a good night's sleep, which is a rule I made for myself late in Season 2. I just realized that if I kept everyone else's schedule, I would burn out. So my start time is based on my end time."
As Plec — clad in a black tee and jeans, her hair still wet from the shower — made her way inside, she walked past a row of framed Vampire Diaries posters that serve as an unofficial timeline of the show's evolution: from presumed attempt to capitalize on the world's Twilight infatuation to a pop culture obsession in its own right. Since launching in 2009, The Vampire Diaries has become a signature show for The CW, turned its leads (Nina Dobrev, Ian Somerhalder, and Paul Wesley) into teen idols, lit up social media every Thursday, and launched the first successful CW spinoff ever in The Originals. With the sixth season premiere on Oct. 2, TVD is set to become the network's second longest-running scripted series (behind Supernatural).
Plec's first stop of the day is an impromptu pow-wow with Michael Narducci — a former Vampire Diaries writer who is now the co-executive producer on The Originals — in the massive kitchen that serves as the equator between the two hemispheres of Plec's world. As Plec switches between water and Diet Coke with Splenda, the two craft an informal schedule for the day. She will begin the morning hearing TVD story pitches, participate in a conference call with The CW to get their thoughts on the upcoming episodes (referred to within the industry as a "notes call"), and wrap up her day with The Originals writers. With that plan in place, the two share a nod, and go their separate ways for now.
Jarett Wieselman for BuzzFeed
Two things immediately jump out about The Vampire Diaries writers room. One is that a massive TV in the corner is playing unedited footage — called, in industry parlance, "dailies" — from the Atlanta set on a loop, displaying every take from every angle.
"It's just efficient," Plec said. "The joke of being a showrunner is that people ask how you get it all done, and you don't. The list of things I don't get done in a given day is longer than the list of things I do. And one of the things that's first to go is watching dailies. There's nothing I can do about what's already been shot, so I've decided that spending the five hours scrolling through what was shot instead of moving forward is not the best use of my time. But this way I can see out of the corner of my eye if a director isn't using enough movement, if the close-ups are too tight, or if someone's hair looks terrible, and I can make adjustments."
The second thing that's palpable is the sense of camaraderie permeating the room. As Plec walked in, the room erupted in excited greetings (akin to Norm's Cheers greeting) from the writers, who seem genuinely excited that Plec has arrived. That air of familial cheer is something the 42-year-old actively cultivated by instituting an unofficial No Assholes Policy. "Unlike working on a feature film, there is no end date to this process," said Plec, "and, unlike a feature, you're spending every single day with these people, sometimes for upwards of six years, and one bad personality apple can really ruin the room."
One of the most important ways Plec discovered she could create this welcoming environment was by essentially eradicating the importance of titles within the writers room. "I didn't come up through title politics, which can be the worst," she said. "Other showrunners will tell you a million horror stories about the hierarchy of who's supposed to talk the most and who's supposed to be quiet. I've never played by those rules. So it's easy to create a comfortable environment when you're not over- or under-empowering someone because of their title. Therefore, personalities tend to come out and flourish."
No comments:
Post a Comment