Lights. Camera. Action! If you’re a quiet, book-loving person who looks enviously at Hollywood glamor, there’s a little-known way you can get in on the excitement of a big-budget documentary, feature film, or TV series: by acting like behind . off-camera technical script consultant.
Even when movies and TV shows take place in the realm of fantasy, they usually strive for some degree of authenticity and grounding in reality, and that’s where they hire (and pay) authors, experts, teachers and professionals with unusual skills or backgrounds.
A Northwestern University professor who specializes in robotics and artificial intelligence, for example, served as a script consultant for a series on the Syfy channel about fighting robots. He brainstormed plot concepts with the show’s writers, tweaked the dialogue, and suggested fixes for technical accuracy.
A Mount Holyoke College history professor was chosen as a resource for the BBC America series “Copper,” which dramatizes incidents involving the New York City Police Department during the Civil War. The producers even flew him to Toronto, where they filmed the entire series, so that he could continue to help make the characters, stories, and action as realistic as possible.
A neurosurgeon who teaches at the University of Arizona offers medical insights to “Grey’s Anatomy” and helps fine-tune the program to make it plausible. He tells the writers whether a character should say “Give me the tweezers” or “Give me the number 10 scalpel blade.”
However, you don’t have to be a college professor or published author to qualify for this type of job. A boy I know teaches survival skills outdoors in the woods of Maine. Because he used to live in Alaska, he had the opportunity to advise on a Discovery Channel outdoor adventure show on how the hero could make his way from the desert back to civilization without food, water, or tools.
A practicing Los Angeles attorney has credits as a script consultant for four television shows: LA Law, The Practice, Boston Legal, and The Paper Chase. However, as you can gather from the other examples above, you don’t have to live in California or near Hollywood to be eligible for technical script consulting work.
If you are interested in experimenting and contributing your expertise to these types of entertainment productions, look for film and television industry directories where you can list your qualifications. There are dozens of them. Plus, you can attract the attention of the right kind of people by blogging from your expert point of view about the inaccuracies you see and the themes of the stories you appreciate in movies and TV shows. Do it with respect, of course, rather than poking fun at the stupidity and ignorance of the writers and producers.
And while you’ll probably enjoy your glam brush, don’t make any prima donna demands. Those you work for expect a cooperative and flowing attitude from you. Tim Smith, the survival skills expert I know, told me, “Remember it’s all about the show, not you. They need you to be a team player.”