MARK PERLOE
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 PictureMARK PERLOE
Where do you live (City, State, or Country)?
Sherman Oaks, California

Your script stood out among hundreds of others. What was the inspiration for your story and why did you write a script instead of a short story or a novel?
Thirty-two years of practice taught me that the articles and news segments about AI legacy services were describing the product, not the problem. I kept thinking there was more to it. So I started where I would start with any unfamiliar question: What does this world actually look like, and where is it headed in the next few years? My own cancer gave me a second vantage point on that question. A physician sees the sides of this a patient does not, and a patient sees the sides a physician has trained himself not to look at. I had both, and the two did not agree. Once I had a few characters standing in that world, the questions outran the form. A novel or a short story would have made me choose whose account of Elena Mercer was the true one. Serialized television lets four people be right at once for eight hours, and lets the audience live with the contradiction instead of resolving it. That is the show.

How long did it take you to write your script...and what is your writing process? Do you outline...use index cards...white board...or just start with FADE IN?
Six months, and counting. I came to this as a newcomer, so the first stretch was spent learning the craft itself: formatting, structure, how a story gets organized, and what a writer is expected to do once there's a script in hand. I don't start with FADE IN. I started with the world, and with the four people who would have to live in it. Before I broke a single act, I needed two things settled: an engine that closes exits on the protagonist rather than sending her looking for answers, and an arc for her that could carry eight hours. Everything after that was pressure- testing. I learned fast how much work the first ten pages have to do, and ten-page table reads taught me more than any book did. Hearing actors find the silences showed me what the scene was actually about. Somewhere in there the characters stopped being constructions I was arranging and became people I was following.

What is your ultimate ambition as a writer?
I've written before, though not like this. My first book was a medical one, about the infertility journey. Retirement and time around my grandchildren turned up a different story I wanted to tell. What I want now is to make a prestige television drama that hands an audience a world, a set of people, and a few questions they won't be able to answer on the way to the car. Not a puzzle with a solution at the end. A journey. I'd like to see this project move forward with me as creator, executive producer, and medical consultant, working alongside a writer-EP who can run the room and bring the craft I'm still learning. I didn't start this with a destination in view. That has turned out to be the useful part. Staying open to what the work wants, and to the people who show up to help build it, is how I got here, and I suspect it's how the rest of it happens too.

Was your entry at The Wiki Screenplay Contest a full script or “the first ten pages”? Why did you make that choice?
The full script. The world these characters live in is one most readers haven't encountered yet, and it takes some pages to build. More than that, the people in it are layered in a way that doesn't reveal itself quickly. Elena is composed almost entirely of what she withholds, and you can't read that in ten pages. You can only see a woman being careful. Early table reads made the choice for me. Ten pages introduced the room and the premise, and readers were engaged, but every question they asked afterward was answered somewhere in the back half. The first ten pages hook a reader. The full sixty are what the story is actually doing. I'd rather be judged on the second thing.

What’s your all-time favorite movie or television show...and why?
MASH and House, and I want to be clear that I loved them both long before I ever thought about writing anything. I watched them as a physician, which is a different way of watching. MASH understood that people doing serious work under real pressure are funny, and that the humor isn't a break from the seriousness. It's how they survive it. That was true in every hospital I ever worked in. House had the case I recognized: the one that doesn't fit, where you're wrong three times before you're right, and being wrong isn't a failure of character. It's the job. Neither show was trying to teach me anything about medicine. They were showing me people I already knew. Years later, when I sat down to write, I found I'd absorbed more from both than I realized.

What advice do you have for writers hoping to win a contest or place as a finalist as you have?
Read scripts. Not books about scripts, scripts. I read produced pilots, hour dramas, since that's what I was writing, and I tried to read them the way a reader would read mine. That's also where you learn what an action line is actually for. Mine were doing too much explaining early on, telling the reader what a character felt instead of putting the behavior on the page and trusting them to see it. Second: get your script in front of actors. Ten-page table reads taught me more about dialogue than anything else I did. On the page you cannot always hear which lines are on the nose and which carry subtext. In an actor's mouth it's immediately obvious. Third, on coverage. AI services can help a new writer find direction, but you will also need knowledgeable human readers who will read the whole thing and give you notes that mean something. Not every reader gives constructive ones. Treat notes the way you'd treat any advice: you decide what serves the story. If a report stings, put it down for a day or two, then go back. There are usually a few nuggets in there worth having. And know what contest readers are actually contending with. They are deep into a stack, working against a rubric, and the concept has to be legible early. Sloppiness is the one thing that isn't subjective.

What else are you working on that the world needs to know about?
I'm taking the world and characters I built for The Oncology Protocol and looking at them from a different angle, in a piece called The Blind Men and the Elephant. It's written as a standalone hour for an anthology. The craft problem is the interesting part. A serialized pilot can withhold, because it has seven more hours to pay things off. A standalone hour has to be complete in itself and still leave the audience holding something unresolved, which means every piece of withholding has to earn its keep inside sixty pages instead of borrowing against a season. Writing it has made me a sharper editor of the pilot.