Rosenberg Interview continued
TKTV: What is your average day like from start to finish?
MR: Get in around 10am, eat a bagel, go to the writers' room and work on either breaking a future story, rewriting a future script, or rewriting the current week's script. Order lunch. Continue working while the PA fails to get the food to the room while it's still warm. Eat. Continue working until around 4pm. Go to the stage for a run-through. Eat popcorn while waiting for the show to start. Watch the run-through. Walk upstairs with the writers discussing how great the run-through was and how early we'll be able to leave tonight. Wait around eating Skor bars until the executive producers are finished getting notes from the studio or network and giving notes to the actors. Go back to the writers' room and rewrite the current script until about 7. Eat dinner in while we work. Continue rewriting until the rewrite is done, which, depending on the day of the week and condition of the script, could be as early as 9pm and as late as 4am. Rinse, repeat.
TKTV: Tell us a little bit about how you write an episode of "Titus." How long is the cycle from concept until it appears on screen?
MR: We come up with a rough idea of the story and pitch it to the studio and network. If they both sign off on it, the writers will all sit together and "break" the story. "Titus" stories tend to be harder to break than stories on other shows because we strive to be as real as possible. Not just real as far as being true to Christopher's history but emotionally true. Also, we're very concerned with not doing anything that you've ever seen on television before. If anything strikes us as familiar or "sitcomy," we'll spend hours trying to find a screwed-up spin to it. At the end of the story process, the writers' assistants will have up to 20 pages of notes that lay the story out in detail with a lot of jokes.
Then one or two of the writers will be sent off to take the outline and turn it into a script. This takes one to two weeks. When the first draft is done, the whole room of writers will take a rewrite pass at it and it will be sent to the studio, which will give notes requiring another pass. The result of all of this is the "Table Draft," which is what the actors will get. The writers, actors, studio, and network meets on a Thursday afternoon for the "Table Read," where the actors read the script out loud for the first time. This will occasion more notes and a rewrite Friday and Saturday.
During the production week, we'll see a run-through and do our biggest rewrite on Monday night. Tuesday we'll generally have a lighter but significant rewrite. Starting Wednesday, we begin shooting the flashbacks, so the script can't really go through much more rewriting. Sometimes, though, we'll do some minor rewriting (just lines, not scenes or story) on the set during the shooting. We'll tweak the present time story up until taping Friday night.