NOTE: I have no idea why an animated image titled “Busy Octopus” came up when I searched for “Twitter” on Getty, but you’re a lunatic if you think I’d use anything else once I saw it. I’ll figure out how to make it relevant. Gimme a minute.
“Hey, you remember how Facebook was a movie?”
“Yeah.”
“Well what if we made Twitter, like, a TV show?”
Lionsgate Television is preparing to tell Twitter’s origin story.
The studio is teaming with The Hunger Games’ Allison Shearmur to develop Nick Bilton’s New York Times best-seller Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal. […]
[Said] Shearmur, former president of motion picture production at Lionsgate: “Hatching Twitter will go behind the scenes of a groundbreaking Silicon Valley company in a way that’s never been captured before on television. The Social Network was a perfect film, and this series will be different, providing a longer view of the work/life changes, gamesmanship and personal sacrifices made by a group of individuals who are building a company that will change the way that people communicate.”
Okay, well, sure. Sounds great. But here’s the thing: PACING. As in, how does one space out the developments in the book? Because a television series, unlike a film, does not have a set end point going in. (Unless they decide to limit the run to two seasons or something.) This means that you have to decide how much of your origin story you want to give the audience in the first season, and how many bullets you want to leave in your gun for potential, not-guaranteed future seasons. And that decision is especially difficult with something like Twitter, which is very much in its infancy in the grand scheme of things, and only has so many stories in the chamber to begin with here in late 2013. I mean, you don’t want to end up at a point where you’ve burned through everything and the writers have to start furiously scribbling down plot developments and rushing them to the set as they happen in real-time, you know? There’s no way they’d be able to get the scripts done in a reasonable amount of time.
Unless…
…
[looks at banner picture again]
…
the writers had eight arms.
Boom.
(via THR)
