Written By by Christina McBride

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST

w w w . w r i t t e n b y . c o m

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The Art of Adaptation Robert Crais Steve Kloves Jerry Lewis Bill Richmond Cathleen Young

Exclusive! J.K. Rowling on Harry Potter

Time Traveler

Andrew Davies reinvents the past

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE MAD MEN WRITING TEAM BEST DRAMA SERIES 3 YEARS IN A ROW

WGA WINNER - BEST DRAMA SERIES

Jonathan Abrahams, Lisa Albert, Keith Huff, Jonathan Igla, André Jacquemetton, Maria Jacquemetton, Brett Johnson, Janet Leahy, Erin Levy, Tracy McMillan, Dahvi Waller, Matthew Weiner

WGA WINNER - BEST EPISODIC DRAMA “THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD” Erin Levy

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST

The Art of Adaptation

The King of Adapters 20 By Nancy M. West

Andrew Davies resurrects Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, E.M. Forster, and other classic authors. His secret? Sexing them up. Columns

8 Take 5 by Neely Swanson Cathleen Young lifts Humanitas to new heights.

The Learning Curve of Robert Crais

After a decade on TV staffs learning craft, Robert Crais translated his lessons into lucrative crime fiction.

10 The Job by Neil Landau Why revise? Your first draft’s perfect.

Richard Stayton

This Extraordinary Thing

Mary McNamara

12 years. 2,939 pages. 87 characters. Good. Evil. Steve Kloves.

12 Tools by Louise Farr The science and fiction toybox.

When Steve Met Jo

J.K. Rowling

The author emerges from under her invisibility cloak to reveal how Steve Kloves scripted Harry Potter. DEPARTMENTS

A Man in Trouble

2 Fade In

Pat Sierchio & Sandra Berg

56 Fade Out

A Jerry Lewis you’ve never seen: screenwriter extraordinaire. 42

The Sidekick

Pat Sierchio & Sandra Berg

Cover portrait of Andrew Davies by Barry Marsden

Drummer Bill Richmond adapted to Jerry Lewis.

Contents portrait of Steve Kloves

An American in Paris

Maria Elena Rodriguez

Everything you need to know about teleplay markets in France.

The Magazine of The Writers Guild of America, WEST

FADE IN

MARK HANAUER

THis issue OF Written By explores the art of adaptation. We visit Andrew Davies in England to discuss his legendary adaptations of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. We learn how Robert Crais transposes the teleplay structure into crime fiction. We travel with screenwriter Steve Kloves on his 13-year odyssey with the Harry Potter series. Screenwriters adapting novels are often attacked by readers or authors who want every paragraph of their favorite book to appear on the screen. Steve Kloves has clearly escaped that danger, and this issue includes an exclusive appreciation by none other than Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. What’s an even greater challenge than adapting a popular novel? For many screenwriters, it’s the effort to transform current events into compelling drama. How do you create suspense when everyone knows how the story ends? What happens if the true-life characters appear on the news so often that they start to seem like members of your family? The champion example of this difficult genre remains the 1976 political film about the Washington Post newspaper investigation of the famous Watergate burglary that led to President Nixon’s resignation: All the President’s Men, screenplay by William Goldman, based on the book by Post reporters Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein. But wait. Is there a credits cover-up? Robert Redford recently alleged that William Goldman did not write All the President’s Men. Who does Redford imply should have received full credit? None other than himself and the film’s director, the late Alan J. Pakula. On the classic film’s 35th anniversary, Redford claims that Goldman’s screenplay efforts proved so disastrous that, had the movie star not taken over the writing, the film would have imploded. “Redford booked rooms at the Madison Hotel, across from the [Washington Post offices], for one month, and he and Pakula repaired [sic] there to redraft the screenplay,” writes Michael Feeney Callan in “Washington Monument,” a chapter adapted for Vanity Fair from his forthcoming Robert Redford: The Biography. “About one-tenth of Goldman’s draft remained in the end.” Let me repeat, for the record: Redford, the film’s co-star, alleges that the dean of American screenwriters, William Goldman, did not deserve his Writers Guild Award, Academy Award, and numerous others given for adapting the 1974 book by journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Yes, All the President’s Men is a famous film about a major incident in American history. But why is this issue of attribution important for the readers of Written By? As I began to investigate this contentious topic, I gradually realized that it goes to the heart of what our Guild members face every time they stare at a blank page. The creation of All the President’s Men is a textbook example of the mix of hard work and frustration, craft and creativity that result in a pitch-perfect screenplay. Although I’ve never met him, William Goldman was my first screenwriting guru. I analyzed his original scripts, especially Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Great Waldo Pepper (the Sundance Kid role made Redford a megastar). I studied how the mae2 •

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stro adapted his own novels to the screen: Magic, Marathon Man, The Princess Bride. His craftsmanship proved even more compelling when applied to other authors’ work: Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, Stephen King’s Misery, Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far, Ross MacDonald’s Harper, and of course All the President’s Men. So I emailed William Goldman, asking if he wanted to set the record straight in Written By. I received a gracious rejection: “Thanks for thinking of me. It was not a happy experience, and I don’t want to write about it any more.” A chapter in his indispensible Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting provides a more detailed explanation: “…If you were to ask me, ‘What would you change if you had your movie life to live over?’ I’d tell you that I’d have written exactly the screenplays I’ve written. Only I wouldn’t have come near All the President’s Men.”

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Credit disputes can get ugly. Who wants to fight the Sundance Kid, the once-handsomest star of them all, a prominent liberal activist, revered by the public and media as the quintessential good guy? AARP the Magazine even made Redford its cover boy last month. Still, Goldman’s tough: When actor Chevy Chase, struggling with incoherence and a teetering career, demanded bizarre revisions for a draft of Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Goldman simplified matters by saying, “Fuck it, Chevy. I’m too old and too rich to be bothered.” Still, such arguments often boil down to she wrote/he wrote what, when, and where to whom. Unless there’s a paper trail, no substantial proof exists. But I’m a former daily newspaper guy who wants to know. So I gave myself an assignment to set the record straight. If Goldman only wrote 10 percent, so be it. If Redford, despite having not a single screenplay credit and but one story credit in his career, did write 90 percent of the script, so be it. My investigation begins in the newspaper vaults. Had there been a credits controversy back in 1976 for All the President’s Men? Had Robert Redford and Alan J. Pakula claimed to be participating writers? No. The final credit became just as Warner Bros. proposed: Screenplay by William Goldman, based on the book by Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward. Next stop, the invaluable Writers Guild Foundation Library. That cozy corner is no elitist members-only club. It’s a populist sanctuary where anyone—WGA professional or private citizen, magazine editor or Vanity Fair fact checker—is welcome. You can’t remove material or make copies, but you can research its treasure trove of scripts, and you can take notes. In the library I discovered a paper trail. I found All the President’s Men, second draft, dated September 25, 1974. I found the “pre-rehearsal” version of March 1975. And the July 7, 1975, draft, including numerous revised pages and scenes dated 6/5/75 (k), 6/8, 6/27, 7/3, 7/10, 7/11, 7/17, 7/18, 7/21, 7/22, 7/23, 7/24, 7/28, 7/30, 7/31, 8/6, 8/7, 8/8, 8/14, 8/15, 8/19, 8/26, 8/27, 9/22, plus omitted sequences. Each a “Screenplay by William Goldman.” I read each to the final fade out. Afterward, I recalled Goldman’s

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misery, recounted in Adventures in the Screen Trade: “I’ve never written so many versions for any movie as for President’s Men. There was, in addition to all the standard names, the ‘revised second’ version and the ‘prehearsal’ [sic] version. God knows how many.” Each opens with the president’s burglars breaking into the Democratic National headquarters at the Watergate complex. Of course, minor alterations abound: the 9/25/74 draft starts with a failed break-in—the team tried more than once before ineptitude finally led to their arrest—but at the scene of their capture, the dialogue and action are the same. The March 1975 pre-rehearsal draft starts with the famous close-up of a manual typewriter key hammering onto blank paper. Same with the 7/11/75 draft. All three drafts end with the two reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, typing at their desks at the Post while we learn that all the president’s men have been indicted. Nearly a year’s writing with nary a major change, turned in by Goldman. And so? In the Vanity Fair article, Woodward says, “Bill gave the start point and the ending, and those never changed.” Is that referencing Redford’s 10 percent claim? Between each script’s start and finish, I found similar, sometimes identical scenes throughout. Complete sequences of dialogue carried from draft to draft to draft, verbatim. In each, we cut from the burglary, to Woodward receiving the assignment for covering the arrests, to the arraignment of the Watergate burglars. Action and dialogue in court is the same, except for very minor alterations. Each has the incongruous presence of a high-priced, elegantly dressed lawyer in the seedy courtroom telling Woodward, “I’m not here.” Burglar James McCord telling the impatient judge, in a whisper, that his occupation is “security consultant… for the Central… Intelligence… Agency.” In each, Woodward asks, “Who’s Charles Colson?” And in each, Met-

ropolitan Editor Harry Rosenfeld answers, “I’m glad you asked me that…” Because, Rosenfeld explains, had Woodward asked the Post Executive Editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee, he’d be fired for his ignorance of White House politics. (Colson was President Nixon’s “hatchet man.”) In each of the three drafts, a scene of a bookkeeper for the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) being cornered in her home by Bernstein, fearfully describing how massive amounts of campaign contributions funded illegal activities. Those unforgettably dramatic, sinister scenes in the parking garage at night with FBI informant Deep Throat? So much remains identical in each draft, with the climactic scene always occurring when Woodward explodes in rage and the informant decides to finally be overt, growling, “Get out your notebook. There’s more…” Cut to Woodward telling Bernstein their lives are in danger, and then the panicked reporters rush to Bradlee’s house after midnight. There the notorious editor delivers the film’s famous speech—“nothing’s riding on you except the First Amendment of the Constitution”—that concludes, “But none of that counts as much as this: you fuck up again, I’m gonna lose my temper.” Are some scenes found in one draft but not the other two? Of course. The 7/11/75 draft contains a romantic interlude suggested (demanded?) by Redford because Carl Bernstein had insisted that his character be a charming seducer. But even with intrusive, experimental subplots that vanish in later revisions, the essential structure of the final movie remains. And, according to Goldman, that’s what screenwriting is all about: structure. He should know: Three of his scripts were voted by Guild members into the WGA hall-of-fame’s 101 Greatest Screenplays.

Get Out Your Notebook

Yet something obviously went terribly wrong during the process. What made this particular experience so miserable for the revered Oscar-winning professional? A veteran survivor who’s endured every conceivable form of treachery from the Hollywood studio system? Documentary extras on the twodisc special edition All the President’s Men provide insights. In one, Telling the Truth About Lies, Woodward recalls that, “Goldman took me to a hotel room when he started working on the screenplay. He said, ‘Now, don’t look at notes. Don’t look at the book. Just talk.’” In the same documentary, Goldman adds, “Woodward was a fabulous help to me… I was terrified because everyone [in the story] had been in a newsroom. My goal was not to Hollywood it up.” How could he have known that the goal would become not to Washington it up? After six month’s work crafting a first draft out of chaotic history, Hollywood became the trustworthy party while D.C. journalists behaved like entry-level agents. As a courtesy, and to gain the Post’s cooperation, Goldman’s first draft was provided to many of the journalists associated with the story. The script that Redford approved and that prompted Warner Bros. to give a “go” to the project? At the Post, it was copied, circulated, and greeted with derision, hostility, suspicion, and gossip. “Bill Goldman put a lot of work into the script,” says Bob Woodward in the Vanity Fair article about Redford, “but it wasn’t accurate to the Post.” This statement could read two ways: 1) The script didn’t accurately portray the newspaper’s work; 2) the Post staff couldn’t accept a true portrait of themselves. Goldman’s research had included access to top-level editorial meetings, during which he copied verbatim the staff’s dialogue. No one was satisfied. They were not in it; they were in it. They were named;

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they were not named. Sure, we said that, but it makes us look like clowns. The printing press isn’t like it’s described. Publisher Katharine Graham’s office isn’t like it’s described. Following an inordinate silence, the notes began coming. And coming. By late summer 1974, Bernstein and Woodward typed a memo to Redford concerning the first draft: “Because the film [i.e., screenplay] works so well, we are understandably reluctant to recommend any fiddling which might affect its basic quality, the great feel and texture that it has, etc. So, following are some minor points—mostly of fact— and then some more general thoughts… The Rosenfeld line about Colson’s sign, ‘After you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds etc.’ It seems to us that this works badly—too heavy, makes a statement that is out of character with the subperb [sic] understated quality of the rest of the film [i.e., screenplay].” (Note: Colson’s profane line stayed. The typed memo is in the Harry Ransom Center’s Woodward/Bernstein collection at the University of Texas.) The Post later published an exhaustive lifestyle story on the production’s impact during a two-week location shoot (“When Worlds Collide: Lights! Camera! Egos!” by Tom Shales, Tom Zito, and Jeannette Smyth, April 11, 1975). The story employed unnamed sources (“a New York journalist”) to make negative, false descriptions of Goldman’s screenplay. And it reported gossip at face value: “The first draft, written by Goldman, was apparently a loser, though [producer Walter Coblenz] says movies are never shot from first drafts anyway… Bernstein and Woodward read the script and did not like it. Redford asked them for ‘suggestions.’ But, instead, Bernstein and writer Nora Ephron wrote their own version. [Neither Bernstein nor Ephron had written a screenplay before this.] Redford read that. He didn’t like it. ‘A lot of it was sophomoric and way off the beat,’ he says. Goldman read it. He didn’t like it. He hadn’t written it. Rewriting of the rewrite commenced. 6 •

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“Pakula says he doesn’t want to comment on the script until the movie has been made,” continues the paper of record. “Coblenz says, ‘William Goldman is our writer’ and that’s all there is to it. Redford says the talk about script squabbles is ‘a mushrooming cloud.’ He intends to let Post editors and others involved see the finished script, but they have no legal right of approval. They cannot demand anything. But they can refuse to let their real names be used.” In the midst of naïve opinion trading, Goldman the professional worked on, supplying all those revised pages in the 7/11/75 draft. Pakula and Redford responded with contradictory notes. After absorbing the Post demands for more “accuracy” about journalists and their daily routines, a gathering despair is revealed by Goldman’s introductory comments in the March 1975 prerehearsal draft: “this is the ross macdonald version: Watergate looked at primarily as a mystery. It is too long. It is not interested primarily in personal relationships. It attempts to show, step by step, how the reporters got their story. It does not have Woodward’s social or personal life yet… Whatever else it may lack—it was turned in a week ahead of schedule. The author would like that fact remembered.” Goldman was signaling his dissatisfaction with contentious, ambiguous, contradictory notes, as well as the treachery he felt about the unsolicited Bernstein/ 2011

Ephron amateur revision. (After reading it, Woodward said to his partner, “Carl, don’t you know Errol Flynn is dead?” After reading it, Redford encouraged Goldman to borrow parts from it.) Please him, please her, please them. Dustin Hoffman’s Bernstein suddenly had girls, so Redford’s Woodward required a love interest. The Post editors wanted less humor and more noblesse oblige, so out went dramatic license and in came “authenticity.” Reporters wanted a serious lifestyle POV that somehow elevated their work, while Redford sought “an affirmative statement and not another negative commentary about Watergate.” Near the climactic scenes in the March 1975 pre-rehearsal draft, Goldman declared his independence. Page 141: “this is where the source burning scene would come but i am not writing it for this version. My reasons are as follows: (1) it is a complicated long scene to put down; (2) we are terribly late in our story; (3) it would mean, here, two hours into the movie, we are bringing in an entirely new character, the FBI agent’s head to whom they go, and I think that is unnecessary and confusing…” After deconstructing the proposed scene, he concludes: “… if we’ve got anything going by this point, I can’t conceive of much an audience will be less interested in than the reporters misbehaving. However, if the scene is requested next time through, I shall be only too happy to oblige.” Could this be why Redford says in Vanity Fair that after this “reluctantly reconstructed script” was delivered, “All hope was lost. Alan [Pakula] hated the script, and we immediately made arrangements to rewrite it ourselves… I was furious, but to what purpose? The friendship was gone…” Or maybe it was Goldman’s next “aside” that enraged Redford. “What I would like to do,” Goldman wrote, concluding his commentary on page 141, “is cut from the FBI saying ‘fuck you fuck you fuck you’ and locking his door to the following…” You don’t have to read between the lines to get that Freudian point.

“You can only write what you can make play,” Goldman says in the Writers Guild Foundation’s Writers Speak DVD. “It’s all about the story. You’ve gotta think, I can make this play.” After that draft, Goldman knew he couldn’t make all those notes play. No writer could. But he dutifully plowed on and on, “writing blind,” trying to make notes meet ends. Finally: “It ended when the phone stopped ringing.” That’s when Redford says he came to the rescue. In the Vanity Fair article, Redford describes his writing process: “Spending long hours driving around with Woodward and Bernstein as they continued their investigation of Charles Colson, an indicted Watergate conspirator… ‘This was exactly what I’d wanted Bill Goldman to do,’ says Redford. ‘We needed to get in there with those key figures, to dig into the life.’” It is to laugh. Wait, There’s More

But my investigation still needed absolute proof, a final draft, to obliterate Redford’s claim. After reading those three early versions in the Foundation Library, I resumed my search, trolling from industry libraries to Internet sales sites. Finally, I walked into Larry Edmunds Cinema and Theatre Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard. Among the many screenplays for sale in three-holepunch format was an unnumbered, undated draft lacking a title page. It had been Xeroxed so many times that it appeared transparent. For $16 I took that All the President’s Men home and, after reading and comparing it to the film, concluded that I must have found the final draft. How did I know? Even without a “screenplay by” credit, the script had William Goldman’s distinct signature on each page. Whether unconsciously or intentionally, Pakula and Redford’s work on the script had circled back to Goldman’s drafts. Goldman was the sole author of All the President’s Men. Period. End of paper trail. However, one can’t help but be concerned about Robert Redford’s memo-

ry. I’m haunted by that unforgettable line from Sunset Boulevard, written by Charles Brackett & D. M. Marshman Jr. & Billy Wilder: “Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture. They think the actors make it up as they go along.” But what does it imply when the actor thinks he makes it up as he goes along? That’s another investigation for another journalist. This one didn’t require a Deep Throat. He just required a script. But I suspect that Goldman couldn’t care less. In the Writers Guild Foundation’s Writer Speaks DVD, taped a year ago, Goldman says of All the President’s Men: “It doesn’t matter if you had a shitty experience on a movie. The movie itself is what matters.” That’s a consummate pro talking. Besides, his ultimate vindication had come in a June 14, 1992, Washington Post story. Headlined “Journalism’s Finest 2 Hours and 16 Minutes,” written by Ken Ringle, it’s the final judgment by the newspaper of record. “There are countless examples of such dramatic license in the film All the President’s Men,” concludes the Post staff writer, “and both as viewers and as journalists we can probably thank God there are. For few of us thought it possible to fashion from the tangled opacity of the Watergate scandal a film even remotely watchable by those outside the ranks of the politically obsessed. After all, there were more than 40 people involved in the Nixon administration alone—so

many the book version needed the cast of characters listed on the opening pages. The supreme triumph of Goldman’s Academy Award–winning screenplay is the way it slices through that kelp bed of interlocking relationships and, quite literally, cuts to the chase.” This “Fade In” essay isn’t an episode of Cold Case, the recently canceled TV series where attractive detectives solved old crimes. But studying the various drafts of All the President’s Men helped me further understand the mix of creativity and hard work that go into any screenplay. Writers write, and actors—for the most part—speak their lines. After reading Goldman’s script, that distinction seems both clear and indisputable. —Richard Stayton, Editor

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Written by Neely Swanson

fre d ri c c h arpentier

TAKE FIVE

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The Trojan Horse Humanitas gets inside Hollywood’s gates, thanks to Cathleen Young.

ying on an ice pack, staring at the ceiling of her home office, Cathleen Young was still recovering from the blowback of a painful divorce and suffering the effects of both a herniated disc and what seemed like a permanent stall in her writing career in longform television, a format declared dead at the time by the major networks. How could she find a way to reinvent and reinvigorate herself? Although Young had joy in a new marriage and their toddler twins, she was not yet willing to concede her writing career. Serendipitously, a letter arrived announcing a job search for a new executive director for Humanitas. Humanitas was founded in 1974 by Father Elwood “Bud” Kieser, a Paulist priest. It was created to encourage writers to celebrate the kinder, gentler side of humanity. One way to achieve this goal was to award television programs “which affirm the dignity of the human person.” Although the organization is not affiliated with the Catholic church, Father Frank Desiderio, C.S.P., the late Father Kieser’s successor, has a position on the Humanitas Board of Directors. The Humanitas Prize for television was originally awarded in the 90-, 60-, and 30-minute categories. The prize has since been expanded to include categories in feature films, PBS/cable, children’s animation, children’s live action, Sundance features, as well as an Angell comedy fellowship and a student fellowship. A special award for excellence is occasionally given, usually to writers of a news or documentary program. Throughout the year, Humanitas also sponsors “Master Writer Workshops” and panel discussions led by prominent writers and producers in the industry. Young was well-acquainted with

Humanitas, having won the prestigious award in 1985 for writing A Place for Annie, a Hallmark Hall of Fame production starring Sissy Spacek. Since 1996, she’d also been serving as a trustee for the organization. But executive director? The requirements of creating a budget and running an endowment were far beyond what she felt qualified to do. “I can’t even do Quicken,” Young said. “I certainly can’t run an endowment.” Still, the idea intrigued her and instead of tossing the announcement, she taped it to her computer. Finally, she finally was asked to meet with Father Desiderio and Chris Donahue, the former executive director who had moved on to a producing career. Young was hired as the new executive director in 2007. Patterns had been set long before Young: sponsor writer workshops, host a luncheon for nominees, award monetary prizes funded through an endowment. Using an analogy from Greek mythology, Young observed that “Humanitas is like a Trojan Horse, but there are no soldiers inside. We need to get some soldiers inside, and we need to storm the village gate.” Act Two

Thus began Act II for Humanitas. Young created a script development fund to support emerging talent, called New Voices. With the help of John Wells and Marshall Herskovitz, Young came up with a wishlist of potential Script Development Trustees for the nascent project that included many of the best writers in film and television today. Young reached out to each, explaining her vision for the project and making a pitch about taking fuller advantage of the Humanitas brand to increase opportunities for writers. “Ninety-nine percent said yes before I even had the New Voices piece in

“Humanitas is not about who you know, but the words on the page,” explains Tom Fontana. “That is why the award is untarnished. You can’t buy the trophy. You can’t campaign for the votes. You have to earn the recognition from your writing. New Voices operates from the same mandate.” place,” she says. Not only did they become trustees, each made charitable contributions to the Script Development Fund. As she explains about the trustees, “They wanted to help. That’s the goodwill that has been built up by Humanitas over almost four decades. They were the soldiers who went into the Trojan Horse to storm the studios.” But like all second acts, the work would be unfinished until the key to a third act could be found. Young was well aware that they could blow through the initial funds with only a few good scripts to show for it. How best to encourage new writers, promote their work, and maintain an ongoing fund? Act III came clearer into focus when Young discussed her dilemma with Steve Levitan, executive producer and co-creator of Modern Family, who originated the idea of getting studios on board by donating blind script commitments to the project. Levitan remembers it slightly differently. “Cathleen is sweet to credit me with coming up with the final piece of the New Voices puzzle, but she had all the building blocks in

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Written by Neil Landau THE JOB

And You Call Yourself a Writer? Whips and chains and first drafts: Mea Maxima Culpa.

m a self-delusional writer. I put on my cape and convince myself that while other mere mortal writers might be required to revise endlessly, I’m that rare breed of superwriter who can leap tall tales in a single bound and produce a draft so sterling that it will need not a single revision. After I type the end, I put my draft aside for a couple of days to revel in my brilliance. My first reread of said manuscript is a gentle skimming. I stroke my originality, my inventiveness. I adjust, massage, cut and paste. I’m just rearranging the furniture. But it’s all there. It’s all good. I’m wise, profound, and prolific. Touched by the divine spark of God. Definitely ready for the next step, which means providing my good friend and “trusted advisor,” Luna, with what I am now officially calling my “first draft.” Luna says she’ll read it that afternoon and call me that same night. In the meantime, I take myself out to lunch on a pure writerly high, so sure of my accomplishment that I bring a pad along to start brainstorming toward my next project. No dallying idle hand for this auteur. The phone rings. It’s Luna. ME: So . . . what’d you think? LUNA: Well . . . there’s a lot of good stuff here, but— FREEZE FRAME. This isn’t going well. First of all she buried the lead: “Congratulations!” And worse— LUNA: I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear, but it’s rough. Very rough. It still needs a lot of work. A lot. Hello? Still there? Simultaneously, my mind is a jumble of thoughts: I hate her. She’s wrong. She’s cheap, stupid, and has no life. She hates me. Her harsh critique is her way of punishing me. She’s consumed by envy for my Godgiven brilliance. I should quit writing. I hate myself. 10 •

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I’m an impostor. Shut up and listen. She’s a fresh, objective opinion. You can trust her. She only has your best interests in mind. And, most prominently, as she reels off her litany of my manuscript’s many defects, which she categorizes as “larger concerns,” I know in my bones that she’s right: My script sucks. No, that’s not true. It doesn’t just suck. It super sucks. Luna is honest. Direct. Brutal. But

I seep out of body and look down at myself and say those six dreaded words: And you call yourself a writer? extremely nurturing. She reminds me that I go through the same process of self-delusion every single time. And the subsequent lengthy revision process. ME: Should I be embarrassed? LUNA: Are you insane? Of course not. The only reason I’m able to be so wise here is because it’s not my own manuscript. If it were mine, I’d feel as lost at sea and fucked as you feel. ME: Thanks. Luna has the next several hours free. Would I like to meet her for coffee and go through her notes, page by page? I tell her I’ll call her back and do what 2011

any neurotic, self-deluded, and now constipated writer would do in this situation: I go for a second opinion. And a third. Sure enough, there’s a consensus. I seep out of body and look down at myself and say those six dreaded words: And you call yourself a writer? Mourning Your Own

I compile their myriad notes. Most are consistent. Some are contradictory. All are smart, thoughtful, well-intentioned, and encouraging. I’m daunted. Overwhelmed. Not sure if I’m up to the task. I devolve into Elizabeth KublerRoss’ five stages of grief: Anger. Fuck! Shit! Dammit to hell! Why did I want to write this stupid, contrived, motherfucking story anyway? What a monumental waste of time. Denial. They’re all smart and talented writers, but they’re all off base on this one. I’m a misunderstood genius who will only be appreciated a hundred years from now when I’m defrosted. Bargaining. I’ll call each of my sage trusted advisors and try to finagle them to let me off the hook. Maybe the ending really does work? Or else I’d bargain with them to agree with me that the story should be put to rest because clearly it’s not viable. Best to cut my losses now instead of wasting more time. All of them vehemently disagree and demand that I suck it up, lick my wounds, and get back to work. (Although Luna, being from the Bronx, tells me that I should do whatever the fuck I want because, let’s face it, no one’s gonna give two shits about this script anyway because no one gave a rat’s ass about her last script and everyone in this business is an asshole.) Depression. I take a pad and pen to bed and nap for several days, waking intermittently to take a bong hit. In this dream state, it is my secret hope that little writer elves will enter my office and magically transform my leaden script into

By drafts 3 or 4, I’m ready for Luna’s discerning eyes again. I tell her it’s a pageone rewrite. I tell her this is technically my first draft because all the other ones were merely exploratory rough drafts. She says, “Whatever, dude.” I ask her when she became so wise.

and growing stronger and breaking free. So while my script might be in a state of flux that resembles a giant turd, inertia isn’t an option. I’ll steel myself, regroup, banish my ego from the room, and I’ll get the work done. Okay, hold it. Backspace. A few words about ego. It sounds good to say I “banish my ego from the room.” But that’s bullshit. I’m competitive as hell, and my ego is probably what will see me through the rewrite. The truth is, I still crave that “Congratulations!” from Luna. I’m not writing it for myself. I’m writing for approval, love, adulation, money, and fame.

She tells me she learned it from me. She quotes a line I’ve often used when commenting on what she refers to as her requisite Shitty First Drafts: “It’s fiction, Luna. It’s always fixable.” She’s right. She did learn it from me. The irony is, my most valuable trusted advisor of all used to be one of my students. Here’s what I’m left with: Writing involves a fair amount of S&M. The whips and chains are pens and toner cartridges. The blood is red ink. The wounds are revisions. The work-in-progress manuscript is a living organism, capable of feeling pain, but also capable of healing

Oh, God, I’m spiritually inept. Morally bankrupt. There are too many voices in my head. Who do I listen to? If “they” say it’s good, does that mean it really is good? Why do I care so much? And if I didn’t care so much, would I persevere as a professional writer? I don’t know anything anymore. And yet, it’s the not knowing that humbles me and helps me be courageous. The irrepressible imagination, the Muse, I don’t know how it works or where it comes from—as long as it comes. I’ll leave out a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a pot of coffee, a line of cocaine. Whatever it wants.

gold. I wake up clutching a soggy copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and my mouth Velcroed shut with cottonmouth. Acceptance. I copy the file. Paste it into a new template, and label it draft 2. Clean slate. Time to start anew. Resurrection

Because my trusted advisors can only advise. It’s up to me to sift through their multiple points of view and make sense of the chaos, all the while retaining my own voice. That’s the tricky part. Too much feedback—no matter how well-intentioned and constructive—can become destructive to authorship. We have to stay open to new ideas and suggestions. At the same time, we must remain protective of our own ideas and inspirations. And once the beast is tamed, my ego tends to simmer down, and I can focus again and reclaim my estranged work with renewed vigor and dedication. So by the time Luna finally grants me kudos, it’s practically irrelevant. And I’m left with the fruits of my labor: my official ready-to-sendout-into-the-marketplace “first” draft. Okay, I’m not totally delusional. If I’m lucky, I know there will still be many more drafts to come: studio notes, network notes, producer notes, director notes, actor notes, production notes. Writers always want to be finished. Every writer I know has abandonment issues, yet, ironically, at some point in the process, we’re all required to abandon our work and move on to the next project. But we don’t ever really finish. At some point we just need to let go. I once asked the late, great poet/novelist Grace Paley how she knew when a work was finished. “I check for the lies,” she said. To me, she meant that she scours the text for anything inauthentic—and cuts it out: heavy-handed exposition, forced plot elements, easy resolutions. Trite, predictable, obvious, go away. It’s not finished until every word rings true.

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Written by Louise Farr TOOLS

The Science of Storytelling When writers and scientists meet, ideas marry.

cational organizations putting writers, producers, and directors together with key scientists and engineers. So, with the right chemistry of scientific smarts and screenwriter knowhow, the problem got resolved: Zoe Graystone (Allesandra Torresani), the teen daughter of gazillionaire computer genius Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz), sits on a rock, silhouetted against an unnaturally blue sky. She’s talking to her father’s lab scientist Philomon, on whom she has a crush. To be more precise—also to complicate matters — Zoe is dead, and that’s her avatar sitting on a virtual rock in a virtual world. “Look at the sky. And look at that tree. Exactly identical to that one over there,” she says, objecting that whoever programmed look-alike trees for this

virtual world took the wrong approach. “Living systems use generative algorithms,” she elaborates. “With a generative model, the system would use a basic generative kernel of a tree. Pow! An infinite variety of tree-like trees.” Philomon, turned on by Zoe’s excitement, brags, “I work with top-secret military robots.” Zoe breathes back, “That’s really hot.” They kiss, and there’s a cut to the Graystone family’s futuristic estate. Roberts’ original draft had worked, and there was nothing wrong with his science. But according to former showrunner Jane Espenson and Roberts himself, the scene became richer and more current thanks to MacIver, whose words Roberts used almost verbatim. “It was pretty impenetrable, but that was okay,” Espenson says about the lan-

A rt b y R T ammari e llo

our obstacle: Script a scene about the algorithm a computer scientist would use to create a convincing virtual world. You must find an emotional hook and include snippets of the science behind evolutionary robotics and computer graphics. Might be a tad unexpected, not to mention difficult, but that was Matthew B. Roberts’ assignment for the “Imperfections of Memory” episode of SyFy’s Caprica. Today’s tech-savvy audiences are poised to flip the channel if writers get it wrong. Knowing this, Roberts called Northwestern University artificial intelligence expert Malcolm MacIver, who became advisor to the show through the Science and Entertainment Exchange—one among a handful of edu-

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guage. “We didn’t need the audience to follow everything that was being said. We needed them to go, ‘Okay, these are clearly smart people talking about something that’s ringing true.’” A little sex helped the science go down, of course. “On the one hand, the audience is looking at it, wondering, Ooh, are they going to kiss?” says Roberts. “On the other hand, you’re shoving technical information down their throats, so when they come out of it they get the best of both worlds.” Scientists to the Rescue

Getting the best of both worlds is the notion behind the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which began in 2008, a project of the National Academy of Sciences. Earlier, the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center’s Hollywood, Health, and Society began offering consultations on medical issues, plus briefings, tip sheets, and a newsletter. Harvardeducated marine biologist–turned– documentary filmmaker Randy Olson founded Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project to draw attention to the deteriorating oceans. Not to be outdone, last year, the National Science Foundation launched its own flashy Science Scene website (“Smart Science for the Screen,” www.sciencescene.nsf. gov), inviting Hollywood to partner with government-funded researchers. To the same end, this year NSF joins the Entertainment Industries Council’s “Ready on the S.E.T. and . . . Action” program, with S.E.T. standing for science, engineering, and technology. Clearly something is up: Bringing the latest scientific and technological research to the public, while avoiding wince-making gaffes created in the service of storytelling. “We like to put out there that our goal is not to become the accuracy police,” says Science and Entertainment Exchange director of development Rick Loverd—himself a comic book and TV writer—who arranges introductions and think-tank type meetings between scientists and Hollywood. “What we aspire to do is

Writers’ requests to Bones consultants can be vague. “You say something like, ‘Well, we need some sort of animal to eat some sort of thing that when digested becomes something else,’” story editor Janet Lin says. “Most of the scientists we work with are very kind.” inspire writers with good science to then achieve their creative goals.” Writing for Caprica, the now-canceled prequel to Battlestar Galactica, meant interweaving religion, corporate and organized crime, dual family sagas, terrorism, and the moral implications behind artificial intelligence. “Oh, my goodness, so many different threads,” says Espenson. “They say it’s as easy to get things right as it is to get it wrong. No. Actually, it’s a little bit harder to get it right, because if you get it wrong you can just say anything.” Adding to the difficulty, writers had to obey the rules they created for Caprica that lead ultimately to Battlestar, with its armies of destructive robots known as Cylons. “The concerns of science didn’t make it any easier,” Espenson says. “We needed to have our robots, for example, not only be plausible scientifically, but they also had to make sense as precursors to the Cylons.” Luckily for the writers, MacIver was not one of those scientists who gnashes his teeth over Hollywood’s tinkering with scientific truths. Yes, audiences are savvier than in the past, he says: “You can’t just pass off any old sort of quantum consciousness beam, or whatever.” But he acknowledges that sometimes science has to be tweaked for the sake

of drama. “One thing that we can help them with is, if they want to do that, they’re doing it intentionally, not by mistake.” Skeletal Tales

Janet Lin is a story editor turned executive producer on Bones, where Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) deliver snappy forensic anthropology lessons laced with repressed romantic longing, all while examining festering body parts. Writers’ requests to Bones consultants can be vague. “You say something like, ‘Well, we need some sort of animal to eat some sort of thing that when digested becomes something else,’” Lin says “Most of the scientists we work with are very kind. They know that if it happened one out of 1 million times— it’s not likely, but it has happened— good enough.” For an episode about a nurse who accidentally murdered a doctor while trying to save his life, Lin needed a clue indicating that the killer had a medical background. She called Polk County, Iowa, chief medical examiner Dr. Gregory Schmunk. “I was thinking, Oh, crushed ribs from CPR. But he came up with this idea that there would be little pieces of plastic embedded in the bones of the groin area, because she used a plastic knife to cut the flesh open to tie his femoral artery. I would never come up with that on my own.” Schmunk first got into the consulting business when a colleague recommended him to Jerry Bruckheimer, who put him to work on CSI. “With Bones it’s usually someone like Janet who will call and just sort of flesh out a story,” he says. “They contact me a bit earlier in the course of the writing to get some ideas about how they might proceed, whereas CSI frequently has the answer before they contact me, and I just have to polish the edges a little.” Naturally, concepts erupt from other sources besides consultants. When Bones’ location people suggest-

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ed that the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific delivered value for money, the writing staff took a field trip. “We were like, ‘All right, we definitely have to find a body in the fish tank somewhere,’” remembers Lin. “We actually talked to all the people there and got tons of information about how you get a dead body eaten up in the tank.” There’s much laughter in the writers’ room, she says. “The sad thing is, you go in to see your dentist and he’s making conversation: ‘How are your kids? How’s everything going?’ And you’re, like, ‘Do you have any interesting bone clues for me?’ Whenever anyone breaks anything, you’re really interested to hear what happened. We’re cannibals.” It’s ironic, Lin believes, that the writers work so hard to get the science accurate when Bones’ audience is largely oblivious to it. “It’s white noise to the relationship,” she says. “What they write in about is, ‘Oh, my God! Did you see the way he looked at her in Act III?’” Anatomy Lessons

Viewers of medical dramas, on the other hand, tend to believe and absorb information they get from those shows. So Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes has a director of medical research in the writers’ room and a doctor-writer on staff. Her writers need strong stomachs as she sends them to watch surgeries. “Some of them love it and keep going back for more,” says Rhimes, a one-time candy striper who finds hospital tours “endlessly fascinating,” from operating room to morgue. “What’s different about this kind of a show is that a lot of times, for our story to work, we have to teach the audience something about the medicine first,” Rhimes explains, mentioning an episode in which surgeon Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) removes a giant tumor wrapped around a man’s spine. “We had to teach everybody what that tumor was, what that tumor could do, how dangerous that tumor was to remove, the effects of something like that, the risks, before you could actually even get them to enjoy the out14 •

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Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes has a director of medical research in the writers’ room and a doctor-writer on staff. Her writers need strong stomachs as she sends them to watch surgeries. “Some of them love it and keep going back for more,” says Rhimes, a one-time candy striper who finds hospital tours “endlessly fascinating,” from operating room to morgue. come of the story.” Rhimes pauses. “It’s not difficult when a science lesson is being delivered by Patrick Dempsey, but it’s still not the easiest buy in the world. I feel lucky and surprised on a weekly basis that we do it and people still watch, because you’re talking a lot of time about heavy science.” The hook, Rhimes believes, is to “make medical dialogue sound interesting and compelling and sexy—in a scientifically sexy way—so that I’m leaning forward in my chair to hear more of what you’re saying about surgery. Then I think you’ve got it.” Elizabeth Klaviter started as Rhimes’ assistant on Grey’s, graduated to medical researcher on that show and then on Rhimes’ Private Practice and is now Private Practice story editor. In her researcher period, she kept a bagful of medical ideas, gleaned from the news, to use when conferring with writers. 2011

“They’d say, ‘Well, my theme is faith.’ I would start pitching stories and we would discuss how they would fit, what the implications for our characters were, different places where I thought the medical story could work. If it didn’t work, I’d put it back in my bag for a different day.” Often a show results when a personal incident sparks Rhimes’ imagination. Stuck behind a cement truck while driving to work one morning, she wondered what would happen if it dumped its load into an open convertible. “I was like, ‘I dunno. Let me find out,’” says Klaviter, who believes her lack of medical background helped her initially on the job because she didn’t know enough to say a scenario was impossible. “What I was able to do effectively was know what story points Shonda was looking for and talk to doctors to answer the questions or to shape the story she was trying to tell.” Rhimes visualized someone arriving at the hospital completely encased in cement, with the Grey’s surgeons having to chisel the patient out. “We wanted reasons why they wouldn’t be able to remove the cement all at once,” says Klaviter. Interviewing her fiancé, who had been in the construction business, as well as concrete and cement specialists, Klaviter learned that a body stuck in cement would constrict. If circulation were released too quickly, built-up toxins could prove fatal. “So we talked to a trauma surgeon who helped us come up with ideas that would both impede and move the story forward and give our characters heroic moments, but not too quickly.” The task then shifted to figuring out how a person could get into that state. “We brainstormed and came up with the idea. Perhaps a teenager on a date to impress a girl he was smitten with would stay in a pool of cement while it dried. That’s how that story was born, with all of the beats Shonda needed.” Adds Klaviter, “If you need something that’s going to kill somebody in the fifth act, as long as you don’t have a

specific way you want them to die, we can make it work with whatever disease process we’ve come up with.” Think Tankers

Back at SyFy, the quirky dramedy Eureka is set in a mythical small town that is actually a government think tank for scientific geniuses. A strongjawed everyman sheriff, Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson), is on hand to solve mysteries and wonder at the strange goingson. Co-creator Jaime Paglia, an X-Files, Northern Exposure, and Twin Peaks fan, is the son of a scientist/artist and grandson of special effects specialist Tony Paglia, whose work included The Godfather, The Wizard of Oz, and South Pacific. Paglia, lanky and fashionably stubbled, figures he’s combining their interests and skills in Eureka. “I was very lucky that the first pitch I made I sold.” Deep in postproduction on season four, while beginning season five, Paglia is about to meet at the show’s Sunset-Gower Studios offices with advisor Dr. Kevin R. Grazier, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and former Battlestar Galactica consultant. Afterward, Paglia will head off to outline an episode. “I hate writing outlines,” he complains, “but you can get lost if you don’t.” At the start of the season, Paglia and co-showrunner Bruce Miller, an ER and Men in Trees veteran, put up a character story board covering 20 episodes. “We can map out the broad strokes—this’ll kick off here and culminate there—and we sort of do that for all the characters,” says Paglia. “We have a separate board that is all about the high concept, Astory, sci-fi stuff.” Then they go about marrying the two boards. Comments Miller, who runs the writers’ room with Paglia swooping in for a final polish: “Everybody thinks it’s about coming up with ideas, but it’s actually more about listening to other people’s ideas and trying to understand

where that idea is coming from, why they think it’s neat.” This season, there are 11 writers, including Paglia and Miller, up from eight at the beginning. “Anybody can sit around in a room and wait until it’s their turn to talk, but our people are very good listeners. We had a strict ‘no douche bag’ policy when we were hiring, and it held up well.” Everybody has a sci-fi sensibility, Paglia remarks. “Some of them are fanatics. I wouldn’t qualify myself as a sci-fi geek—I’m stronger with character. But everybody has different strengths across the spectrum.” Today, the writers’ room is packed as Dr. Grazier, an enthusiastic man with red hair and a staccato delivery, rattles off a series of science-themed suggestions to include in the next season: Supernovae? Ferocious giant bugs? Naked mole rats? “We’ve never done anything with lab rats. They’re fantastic,” Grazier says, hopefully. But it isn’t all on Grazier. Like Klaviter, Miller keeps a grab bag of scientific information culled from magazines, news, and the Internet. Other episodes spring from writers’ minds or from their wanting to pay homage to classic science fiction tropes. Tying high-concept stories to what they want to happen with their characters means taking a typical smalltown problem that could stand alone, but with science fiction to heighten the drama. “I hesitate to say formula.

I try to stay away from that. But that’s how we approach it,” Paglia says. “By having the characters be real and grounded, it allows viewers to suspend disbelief about the hyperrealistic backdrop of the science fiction. In that way, even though the stakes can sometimes be fantastic, or the trappings, the stakes for our characters are real. Are Carter and Allison ever going to get together? Is Jo going to break it off with Zane? Those are some of the bigger questions, and then we have the toybox of science fiction to play in. It kind of gives you limitless possibilities.” As he considered an episode about a boy who overdoses on a drug that he and Eureka scientists are taking to sharpen their thinking, Paglia pictured him racing into the night. Viewers would hear thudding footsteps, followed by a splash indicating that the kid was running on water. Paglia asked advisor Grazier how fast someone would have to run to stay on top of a lake. So fast, skin and muscle would continued on page 54

FOR MORE INFORMATION Entertainment Industries Council, Inc.: eiconline.org. NSF Science Scene: sciencescene.nsf.gov. Shifting Baselines: shiftingbaselines.org.. The Science and Entertainment Exchange: scienceandentertainmentexchange.org. Hollywood, Health & Society, USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center: (800) 283-0676 hhs@usc.edu or learcenter.org

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His books are readily available in 42 countries. Since 1986, he’s written 18 novels, mostly set in Los Angeles featuring private detective Elvis Cole and his mysterious partner Joe Pike. The majority of his books succeed, says Robert Crais, because of the craft he learned working

The Learning Curve of

Robert Crais Lessons for translating episodic writing into best-selling fiction.

on television staffs, from Quincy in 1978 through Hill Street Blues and Cagney & Lacey in the 1980s. Subsequent episodic credits on such series as Miami Vice and L.A. Law allowed Crais to survive while in pursuit of another passion: crime fiction. Following the publication of his first best-seller, L.A. Requiem, in 1999, his popularity has grown far beyond cult status. Critics compare Crais to novelists Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Ross MacDonald, and James Ellroy. He occasionally adapts his fiction into screenplays, but only his novel Hostage became a film. “The problem with any adaptation is that the screenplay is so much smaller,” Crais says, “so much less room in a script than in a novel. But once you accept that reality, then making the necessary cuts can actually be liberating. The joy is that I got to revisit characters that I loved.” When interviewing an articulate writer such as Crais, the best strategy is to interrupt as seldom as possible, keep your mouth shut, and listen to the king’s speech. I’m stepping aside and eliminating my questions so that his voice comes to you unadulterated. Here’s Robert Crais, telling his story in his own words.

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hen I was a young writer back in Louisiana, before I’d sold anything, I was a huge Harlan Ellison fan. His fiction and essays were enormously inspirational. Ultimately, it was reading his columns [published as The Glass Teat] that made the whole business of television seem accessible to me. I was just some kid in South Louisiana, what did I know? Everybody in my family were cops or hard hats. I was the alien who beamed down from the Enterprise. No one knew what to do with me. I grew up on the backside of the Florida Drive-In Theater in Baton Rouge. The drive-in was surrounded by a thicket of cane reeds, all swampy and marshy. At the back end of it, there were a couple of blocks with houses. I could climb up on the roof of my house and watch the movies. And it was so fucking loud because of the speaker trees. All the dialogue echoed. Every night, you’re trying to sleep, and you’re listening to some badass motorcycle dude in some cheeseball, shitburg motion picture. That’s all that plays the southern drive-in circuit—slasher pictures and motorcycle movies. All double bills and triple bills and low-class shit. It was a great way to grow up. A movie-making buddy and I had a Super 8 camera, and we used to make all these little stop-motion animated films. Gazillions of those fucking things, mak2011

ing movies all the time. I read everything, and I wrote everything. I desperately wanted to be a writer, so I was churning out science fiction, fantasy, a few westerns, crime fiction, and submitting to local, digestsize magazines, like Mike Shayne, Ellery Queen, that paid half a cent a word. And I didn’t want to be a hobbyist, meaning I wanted to make my living being a writer. Finally, after my fourth or fifth sale, I said, “This is it, I can either do a real job and stay here in Louisiana, and see what happens, or I should really take a shot at going for it.” Which for me meant moving to Los Angeles and seeing if I could crack into TV or the film market. So I moved out here at age 22 in the summer of ’76. Breaking In

I’d never seen a script before. There was a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard that sold secondhand scripts, not far from Musso & Frank. You used to be able to buy scripts for the current shows for $2.75. I bought scripts and literally ran the pages through my typewriter to measure: Okay, this is the tab setting. And then it was just a matter of studying the shows that I liked, wanted to write for, making up stories, writing them. I wrote a lot of spec scripts. I did all that kid-just-off-the-bus stuff, where you’d go to the Writers Guild—I got this actually out of one of Harlan’s columns—and at the Guild office they would sell you a list of all the agents who were signatory, for like $0.50 or a dollar. I got the names of who would be willing to look at material from neophyte writers and found an agent. The second script I ever wrote was a Baretta, the Robert Blake series. They bought the spec script, my first sale. Guy named Ed Waters was the supervising producer. He ran the writing of the show. The executive producer was a guy named Bernie Kowalski. The story editor was a man named Sid Ellis. I was the luckiest guy in the world, because here I was, a kid, and those were just

“I pretty much spent the first 10 years of my career on staff, on one show or another, always under contract, and it was a good life,” says Robert Crais. “When I decided I wanted to write books, I couldn’t take staff gigs anymore because there’s just no time to write books if you’re doing a show. I was living hand-to-mouth the first seven of my books. My wife was doing a great job of juggling credit cards.”

a year after that first sale, I wrote something like three teleplays for them, five stories. I was working, regularly, all for them, and then the show ended, and the very next year I get this phone call from Jack Klugman’s office over at Universal, wanting to meet me. So I went over there and ended up as story editor on Quincy, and that was my first staff gig. One week I’m swatting mosquitoes

the greatest guys ever. Ed Waters had come off Police Story where he’d written some terrific scripts. He was kind, generous, educated, willing to spend an inordinate amount of time with someone who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. So was Sid. But they put me to work, and april / may

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on the bayou and the next I’m standing on a soundstage with Jack Klugman. Paying Dues

I look at TV as my school, because I didn’t study writing or anything like that. I was really young, a baby writer, and then to be able to work with the people I worked with on the shows I worked on was an amazing education. From Ed Waters and Sid Ellis on the first show, and then to work head-to-head with actors, guys like Jack Klugman, and then Hill Street, where you have certifiably brilliantly creators like Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll. There was a guy named Anthony Yerkovich on that show who to this day I think is one of the finest writers ever to have worked in TV. It was just amazing to be around these people, see their work, see how they worked. The Cagney & Lacey writing staff was another amazing opportunity to learn. That can’t be duplicated in any other way. I don’t give a fuck where you went to college, university, whatever else you could figure out on your own. To be exposed to those people in an intensive writing situation, a real-world situation, where you’re creating and writing together, was an exemplary education. Most of the shows I worked on, especially when you’re talking about shows like Hill Street Blues or Cagney & Lacey, were known for the multidimensional aspect of their creative quality. The dialogue was superb. They were character-dependent shows. They ran complex, parallel plotlines, multiple plotlines, storylines, all at the same time, interweaving. The fact that they fit together so well, that they took those complex storylines, wrapped them, cut them together so seamlessly—all, of course, written—and to be a part of it, and watch masters, basically, and see how they spun that, see how they twisted and turned elements of the program in order to create that whole—that’s the 18 •

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education. These people go back to a scene and work the dialogue again and again and again, and throw it out, and edit it, always digging deeper to come up with just the right line, or just the right word. When you see them do it, and those are your teachers, that’s the lesson you model yourself after. If I look at all the reviews over time of my books, when I see all the reviewers again and again go back to the visual nature of my work, or the pace, I can attribute it to that experience, what I call my education in TV. Author, Screenwriter

I went through a period where I was trying to rebel against the work form. And I was trying to write books. I didn’t know how. TV is all very structured. You pitch a concept, and a lot of people talk about the concept, and then you’re required to come up with the beats. Basically, outline the story, and then everybody talks about the story, and then you write the teleplay and get notes. So I convinced myself that a true artist does not create like that. A true artist simply sits down at your word processor, your fingers kind of float over the keys, your eyes roll back in your head, and then suddenly you get to the end, and you’ve created art. There it is. Wrote itself. So I tried that twice. Didn’t write itself. Abject failure. Two novels that were complete disasters. After the second, I said, Maybe you should go back to what’s been working for you, and just think it out first, develop it first, and come up with the story arch, and here are your beats. In other words, outline your book. I was just trying to write one book that worked. After two failures, just please, let it work. I applied those TV-writing lessons and used the emotional elements I was dealing with at the time—my father’s death, my mother’s helplessness, will she ever be able 2011

to take care of herself—and these created private detective Elvis Cole. All the lessons I’d learned in TV worked and I had my first novel, The Monkey’s Raincoat. It did not sell right away, got rejected a bunch of times before we found a home. But then Bantam, my publisher at the time, surprised me. “We don’t want to buy this, we want to buy three. So you’ve got to write two more.” And I’d never actually considered that before. But then I thought this was fucking great. Before the book thing, I pretty much spent the first 10 years of my career on staff, on one show or another, always under contract, and it was a good life. When I decided I wanted to write books, I couldn’t take staff gigs anymore, because there’s just no time to write books if you’re doing a show. Most agents would probably try to jam you up and force you back into going on some show as a writer-producer. My agent at that time, a guy named Norman Kurland, was in 100 percent support of my crazy dream. When I would get close to finishing a book, he’d cook up all these trip deals, and lay in some jobs for me, so that I could jump right back on—doing a three-episode deal for some series or maybe a movie of the week and, later, a lot of pilots. I was living hand-to-mouth the first seven of my books. My wife was doing a great job of juggling credit cards. The fastest I’ve ever written a novel was six months, and that was the very first, Monkey’s Raincoat. It only took me six months because I was going broke. The eighth book, L.A. Requiem, took the longest, probably 13, 14 months, because it was completely different from any of the others. The first seven books were all written more or less in the classic Raymond Chandler paradigm for a private eye novel. Everything’s in first-person point of view of the narrator—in my case, Elvis Cole. So, they become relatively short, small books, because everything is seen through Cole’s experience. Then with L.A. Requiem, I wanted to tell a story about Elvis’ partner, Joe Pike. So I broke my pattern and concocted an entirely new

way to write fiction for me. I’d get into the things I learned in TV: parallel storylines, flashbacks. I broke point of view again and again. I had multiple character points of view. L.A. Requiem became the first of my books to hit the New York Times list, and every book I’ve written since then has been a New York Times bestseller. Each one has sold bigger and better than the one before. It’s all in the research. We always had technical advisors, whether it was coroners from my days on Quincy or actual police officers on the cop shows, going over the scripts. Those were lessons that were important to me as a young writer. Subsequently, over the course of all the books, I’m research intensive. The actual fact of it is way better than anything anyone can ever make up, and it comes about in the details. It’s never the large things. The small things make it real, and I think the reality is what people respond to. The very best part of a lot of the Hollywood work I’ve done is the collaborative nature of that work. The very worst part of some of the Hollywood work I’ve done is the collaborative nature of that work. We all go through it. Everybody says it, everyone has their stories to tell. I have mine. You give it your best shot, you turn it in, most of the time things go okay. Every once in a while things spin in such a way that you say I don’t want my name on that. There were a couple of instances, for whatever reason, I felt obligated to remove my name from a certain script and use

a pseudonym. The pseudonym I use— and it’s a registered pseudonym with the Guild—is Elvis Cole. So he is the only fictional detective ever in history who’s authored television episodes. For me, the special thing about books is that they are by their nature collaborative. It’s not a finished art form. It can’t be finished until a reader reads it. Because even though I’ve

punched out those words, I’ve selected them, I’ve put them in this order, when you read them, you’re creating it. Everyone brings their own point of view, their own baggage, their own perspective. Everyone’s inner movie is going to be unique. I came here because I love TV and movies, and still do. I just work in a different format now.

Draft of “Cranky Streets” for Hill Street Blues, teleplay by Robert Crais, story by Michael Kozoll & Steven Bochco

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At home with Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Andrew Davies.

ndrew Davies’ home is in Kenilworth, a small, historic town where Sir Walter Raleigh planted Britain’s first potato. I had assumed that Davies, being the master of period drama, would live in a house much like the ones in his adaptations—a mansion with a long gravel drive, a posh car, and a passel of servants. But Davies lives in a redbrick house that resembles all the other redbrick houses on his street. Like his middleclass neighbors, he drives a sensible car. Davies opens the door himself, no servant in sight. At age 73 and roughly 5’7,” wearing worn khaki pants and frayed canvas shoes, he looks more like a retired gardener than the King of Adapters, as critics have dubbed him. To get to his upstairs office, we go through his bedroom and past a rack of old shoes. In his office, pine bookshelves, filled with Victorian novels, line the walls. An old futon sits in a corner, covered by a white blanket. This could be the office of an English professor. But a screenwriter’s? Except for the BAFTA awards lined up neatly on a shelf and a snapshot of Davies posed with Keira Knightley, there are no signs of the industry. On the surface, he seems to be far from Hollywood too: a quiet, ordinary, unassuming man. But when it comes to the subject of adaptation, that’s when Davies can turn cheeky, bawdy, and a little cocksure. That’s when the king in him appears. And why not? His work sent sales of Jane Austen novels skyrocketing, has earned umpteen awards—including two Emmys, four BAFTAS, and three from the Writers Guild of Great

Britain (he’s also a WGAW member)—and launched the careers of Colin Firth, Matthew Macfayden, Carey Mulligan, and Knightley (at age 17 in Dr. Zhivago). Late Bloomer

Shortly after his 50th birthday, Davies decided to become a full-time screenwriter. For 30 years, he had taught literature by day (at secondary schools and, later, at the University of Warwick) and wrote, if we were to judge by the length of his résumé alone, during all the rest of his waking hours. He had achieved no small measure of success by the time he hit 40 but was reluctant to give up a job he loved. Twenty-three years later, Davies still looks as if he’d prefer to shift our interview into a tutorial. “I see adaptation and teaching as quite similar. Doing an adaptation is like doing a lecture on my interpretation of a novel but with millions of pounds for actors and special effects.” He says this with notable wonder, still amazed, he tells me, by his good fortune. “I remember ages ago trying to persuade kids that Pride and Prejudice was the sexiest novel in the English language. It’s a wonderful thing to prove your point by writing an adaptation that brings out all the qualities you see in a book.” During his formative years, Davies experimented constantly with new genres, styles, and mediums. “I wrote poetry and short stories, and it just came about that the first thing I managed to sell was a radio play. So I wrote more of them. Then Tony Cornish, a producer, suggested I write for the stage. At first I

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Davies studied the BBC’s popular soap opera EastEnders. “I love the way they handle multiple plotlines, moving between background and foreground. When I began working on Bleak House, I thought, This is the way to do Dickens—have the camera move quickly, pause only for lumps in the throat, keep cutting!” thought, Oh no, I can’t do that. Characters have to come on and talk for 20 minutes and I can never think of how to get them off the stage other than to say, ‘I’ve got to have a pee!’ ” But Cornish convinced him otherwise, so Davies wrote plays. Lots of plays. “And then I had children. And I thought, God, how boring some of these books are! So I started writing children’s books. Then I adapted them for TV.” He notes all of these accomplishments as if they are just items on a very long list, which, in fact, they are. Among his best-selling books is Conrad’s War, an uproarious tale about a 10-year-old boy’s obsession with guns that also philosophizes on the cruelties of war (one critic labeled it, “Heart of Darkness for middle-school children”). It won the highly coveted Guardian Award in 1978. Though he has written in virtually every medium, television has been his métier and mainstay. He estimates that he watches approximately three hours of TV per day. “I like working in television because the script is my own. I don’t have to worry about getting rewritten or replaced or fucked over.” He pauses and smiles. “I get more respect.” Davies’ career has evolved right along with modern television. During the 1970s, at the height of British television comedy, he began writing for sitcoms. In the 1980s, as satires came into popularity, he created the satiric series A Very Peculiar Practice, based on his university experiences. When political thrillers were all the rage in the 1990s, he adapted Michael Doebbs’ House of Cards to high critical praise. Then, as popular interest in “heritage cinema” grew, Davies concentrated on adapting classic novels for television, reworking George Eliot’s Middlemarch into a six-part serial for the BBC in 1994. The series was well-received, but it wasn’t until the follow22 •

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ing year, with the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, that Davies became a cult hero, as the man whose idea it was to have the buttoned-up Mr. Darcy (portrayed by Colin Firth) emerge from a pond in a clinging wet shirt, to suddenly become England’s #1 pin-up. Offers to adapt all manner of material began flooding in. He revised Othello for the BBC, transforming the tragedy into a modern crime drama with Othello as a black police commissioner working in London. He wrote several screenplays for Hollywood: Circle of Friends (1995, a modest success), Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001, a phenomenal success), Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason (2004, a disappointment), and most recently, Brideshead Revisited (2008, a disaster). His experience with the last is not a subject he likes to tread (another screenwriter replaced him midway through the project), though it helps explain why he prefers working in television. Stories of the Heart

Despite constant invitations to adapt contemporary fiction, and his occasional forays into Hollywood, Davies is most at home with the television classic. This is partly because “writers like Dickens knew how to tell stories of the heart.” It’s also because Davies’ format of choice is the televised serial, which allows him to capture a novel’s details and develop characters more fully. “Big novels need a big canvas,” he explains. Perhaps most of all, Davies prefers the television classic because he loves the thrill of the chaste—of eroticizing the seemingly asexual through small, subtle details. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Davies’ Pride and Prejudice is the best dramatization of Austen’s work ever to grace the screen, large or small. His equally acclaimed version of Dickens’ Bleak House garnered 10 Emmy nominations in 2005. When it aired in England, nearly 5 million viewers, or 27 percent of the available TV audience, tuned in. More surprising is the success he has with novels popular in the 19th century but which few people (let’s be honest) read anymore. His adaptation of Dickens’ Little Dorritt won 11 Emmy nominations and seven awards in 2008, including Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries. He also adapted Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1999), George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (2002), and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (2001)—all of them baggy monsters—to high acclaim. Though Davies is best known in England, where he’s something of a national treasure, he has faithful followers in America. “Andrew Davies needs to live forever,” proclaims one fan on a blog devoted entirely to the king. The show primarily responsible for his popularity here is PBS’ Masterpiece. Currently enjoying its 40th anniversary, Masterpiece (the racier new name for Masterpiece Theatre) is a far hipper program than in the days when Alistair Cooke played host, and Davies’ adaptations have played no small role in this revamping. “He’s our patron saint,” says Rebecca Eaton, Masterpiece executive producer. His vast and varied experience in televi-

sion, she believes, is what makes him so good at adjusting the classics for modern audiences. “A young, inexperienced writer would be terrified at the thought of adapting Jane Austen. But Davies moves right in and says, ‘C’mon, Jane, let me do a few things here. Just relax.’” When asked what he believes makes a good adaptation, Davies immediately responds as if he were in front of a classroom again. He straightens up. His voice becomes professorial, booming out the answer: “I’d say it’s when the original text comes to life again for a new audience and in a different medium. To do that, an adaptor must rewrite and reimagine.” As testament to this idea, a sculpture—made from a deconstructed book called Memoire—sits on his office coffee table, its form taken from the pages of another writer’s words.

The History of Histories

When Davies began adapting in the early 1990s, period drama was ripe for change. The Merchant-Ivory team had made the Edwardian Age irresistibly romantic. Their success paved the way for public television to offer its own sumptuous versions of the classics (such as Brideshead Revisited and the Granada Sherlock Holmes series). But these productions were slavishly beholden to the books that inspired them, and the audience they appealed to was an older cultural elite who liked their adaptations straight. “Broadly speaking, they concentrated on the period aspect too much, the quaintness and so on,” Davies expains, “rather than treating the ‘great books’ as stories about people like you and me.” So Davies stepped in. He lured audiences away from thinking that adaptations, like married partners, had to be faithful.

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To cut what doesn’t work, to experiment with tone and point of view, to add new material for modern appeal: these aren’t acts of betrayal; they’re acts of interpretation. He makes viewers realize that adaptation isn’t just about the relationship between a particular book and film (or series). He draws visibly, exuberantly, on numerous sources (including other adaptations), not in imitation but in homage—implying that his version is but the latest in an ongoing story whose genesis is rich and complex. This might be why he often adapts novels that already have a “definitive” film version, like Dr. Zhivago, Sense and Sensibility, or A Room With a View. He’s also happy to remake himself, if asked (he adapted Middlemarch a second time, for director Sam Mendes, several years ago). Davies has even opened up period drama—once a middle-class mode of edification for people presumed to have great literature stored somewhere in the back of their brains—for a much younger, less-educated audience. “I’m very pleased and proud that lots of teachers say my adaptations get working-class kids involved in stories that first seem so remote from them. Unless things have got some kind of relevance to us and the way we live now, there’s no point in filling up television with them.” One way he generates interest among younger audiences is to keep the pace fast. His version of Bleak House, which retains most of the novel’s multiple plotlines and 84 (yes, 84) of the book’s original characters, has the feel of a modern soap. For inspiration, he turned to the British soap opera EastEnders, one of the UK’s most-watched television series (seen on BBC One). “I love the way they handle multiple plotlines, moving between background and foreground. When I began working on Bleak House, I thought, This is the way to do Dickens—have the camera move quickly, pause only for lumps in the throat, keep cutting! ” Davies also makes good use of that quintessentially 19th-century genre, melodrama. Although it still carries a pejorative charge, melodrama is a resilient form of writing that shifts between different cultures and historical periods. It’s adaptable. The Victorians loved it, and, according to Davies, we still “have a vast appetite for it.” “When I came to the scene in Bleak House where Lady Dedlock says to her daughter, ‘I am your wretched, unhappy mother,’ I thought, Can we really do it like that? Then I thought, Let’s just try. So basically I copied it out of the book and most people, including me, found it very moving. Is this 24 •

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because our sensibilities have been debased by the likes of Simon Cowell? Possibly. More likely, people have always loved a bit of full-on emotional indulgence. My favorite songs are things like ‘I Who Have Nothing’ and ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart.’ ” Davies also sexes up the story whenever possible, adding a postcoital clinch here, a ripped bodice there. “It’s all because I took a seminar once with this storytelling guru.” “Robert McKee?” I interject. “What did you think of him?“ “Oh, I thought he was a frightful bully. But he does say some very interesting, stimulating, and helpful things, such as, ‘If there’s sex in your story, put it on the spine.’ At the time, I was doing a script for House of Cards, where there’s this middle-age editor sleeping with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Yes, why not?, I thought. And she can call him ‘daddy’ while they’re doing it! ” Davies loves this kind of talk, especially when it comes to discussing Miss Austen. “It’s all there, you know. There’s quite a lot of seduction, teenage pregnancies, and the like in Jane Austen.” He mentions the controversial sex scene between Willoughby and a 15-year-old girl that opens his adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. “Austen and Emma Thompson were way too soft on Willoughby. He is such a bastard, isn’t he? So I thought, Let’s see his true enormity. Then, I thought how great it would be to show the girl later with her baby, still hoping Willoughby will return to her. And the only person who comes to visit her is Colonel Brandon, with the news that Willoughby is engaged to some rich bitch.” Every once in a while, Davies makes a jaw-dropping alteration. Much to the disapproval of critics, he changed the buoyant tone of E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View by having George Emerson killed in WWI and his widow, Lucy, revisiting Italy 12 years later. “Having written the novel in 1908, Forster never imagined this could have happened. But millions of young men died in that war.” After a quiet pause, Davies observes, “Happiness like George and Lucy’s never lasts.” With House of Cards, he altered the storyline so that the editor, rather than throwing himself off a roof, instead throws the young woman he’s been sleeping with off the roof. “I thought it was a grand idea at the time. And there I was, typing away merrily. Then I saw it on the screen and thought, My God, that’s awful. And it’s all my fault.”

The Feminine Mystique

If some critics begrudge the sex and plot alterations, almost all acknowledge Davies’ gift for portraying women: Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, Molly Gibson in Wives and Daughters, Dorothea Casaubon in Middlemarch, Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda, Lara Antipova in Dr. Zhivago, Esther Summerson and Lady Dedlock in Bleak House and Dickens’ Little Dorrit. “Here’s this man of a certain age, happily married and a grandfather, able to channel 18-yearold girls from another century,” says Rebecca Eaton. “It’s preternatural.” He finds their story amid the novels’ multiple and convoluted plotlines, sometimes when the original writers failed to do so themselves. With Esther Summerson, Dickens struggled, preFreud, to capture the symptoms of repression but couldn’t quite pull it off; over a century later, Davies can and does. “In Bleak House, I tried to give Ada Clare an element of teenage randyness to take away that cloying feeling.” Asked why he finds it so easy to write about women, Davies shrugs, smiling coyly. “I was quite a romantic little boy. I would fall in love with little girls all the time. I also read these magazines my mother kept. There was one called Woman, full of celebrity gossip and beauty tips. I loved it.” Sometimes, Davies gives minor female characters more attention than their original authors—like Jane Fairfax in Emma, whom he sees as the book’s “disguised heroine… Emma and Frank Churchill keep telling everyone what a cold fish Jane Fairfax is. But I saw her as a passionate woman who’s probably already been seduced by Frank. She realizes he is not her equal, but

she cannot help it.” We discuss how many female characters in 19th-century fiction never get their stories told. I brought up David Copperfield, which Davies might adapt for the BBC. “There’s Agnes Wickfield and the lonely life she leads with her drunken father,” I point out. “Then there’s Little Emily—all the seduction scenes we never get to see. And what about David’s wife, whose only ambition is to hold the pencils for him as he writes? Is she really as dumb as David makes her out to be?” Davies is suddenly all potent and twinkly. “You make me want to go adapt it right now,” he says. At one o’clock, promptly, we walk down the street and lunch at a Thai restaurant he frequents. This is how Davies spends most of his days—at home in the mornings, a short break for lunch, then back home again to work. He loves Kenilworth, where he has lived since 1960, and hates Los Angeles. As we chat about the film adaptation of Emma starring Gwyneth Paltrow that rivaled—and trumped—his BBC version in 1996 (“What did you think of it? So pretty, wasn’t it?”), a bevy of women and their dogs sit close by. Davies becomes distracted by a terrier sitting at our heels. He regards the dog with a face so tender it would make most women just want to sit and hold his pencils (by this time, I notice how his blue eyes and shock of white hair make him surprisingly handsome, like a cuddlier version of Paul Newman). His own dog, Daisy,

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY 2011 The Three Musketeers South Riding 2008 Little Dorrit Brideshead Revisited Sense and Sensibility 2007 A Room with a View Fanny Hill Northanger Abbey 2006 The Chatterley Affair 2005 Bleak House 2004 Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 2002 Doctor Zhivago 2001 Othello Bridget Jones’s Diary The Tailor of Panama 1998 Vanity Fair 1996 Emma The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders 1995 Pride and Prejudice Circle of Friends 1994 Middlemarch 1988 Consuming Passions 1984 Badger Girl Diana 1979 The Legend of King Arthur 1976 The Signalman 1974 Bedtime Stories 1970 ITV Sunday Night Drama Thirty-Minute Theatre 1968-1970 Little Big Time 1967 The Wednesday Play

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arc. It’s just one thing after another.” was run over by an automobile last NoHe also wants to write a trilogy vember. “The trouble with dogs is that “In Dickens, young women are idealized of novels set in England during the they never live long enough, do they?” On the way back from lunch, a wom- to the point of absurdity and robbed of 1950s. “Every British writer casts the ’50s as all doom and gloom. I know an looking very much like a devotee of classic serials stares at Davies from across any autonomous sexuality—very inter- there was a shortage of everything after the war, but there was no shortage the street. I suddenly realize that I haven’t seen a single man in Kenilworth, except esting that, when, as we know, what of fun, no shortage of girls.” for Davies. It feels like Cranford. When I mention this fact to him, he laughs. “Yes, Charles D really wanted to do with very Family Life women come up to me all the time in suDavies’ plans for the rest of the day are permarkets, asking me what I’m working young women was fuck them.” to watch Wimbledon and play host at on or telling me how much they enjoyed a small exhibition for his wife, Diana, a a particular adaptation. It’s very pleasant, really, though sometimes painter. He and Diana celebrated their 50th anniversary the week it takes a bit more time than you want it to.” before, and a black-and-white photo of them on their wedding It might be a while before the women of Kenilworth see anday is on doors throughout the house. Slender as his pencil tie, his other 19th-century adaptation from Davies. The BBC recently hair a mop of waves, Davies looks like one of the Monkees. scrapped Dombey and Son and one of Trollope’s Palliser novels “We seem so young, don’t we?” he asks wistfully. “Like little dolls made out of cake wax.” from its programming. The station’s official statement is that it He politely insists on driving me to the Coventry train stawants to devote more attention to 20th- and 21st-century drama. tion, a 40-mile journey there and back. During the ride, we For Davies, this decision could prove dodgy. talk about his grandchildren, the kittens he and Diana just “What will you do next?” I ask, feeling protective about a adopted, and this year’s Kenilworth carnival. man who, with just one script, makes five times more than I Martin Amis once said that the literary interview doesn’t do in a year. reveal what a writer is like; rather, it reveals what a writer is “Well, I don’t have to do anything, do I?” he answers like to interview. For me, Davies was an elusive mixture of petulantly. English reserve and theatricality, propriety, and bawdiness. But of course, being Davies, that’s rubbish. His adaptation But what he’s really like, in his head and in his heart, is there of Winifred Holtby’s South Riding airs as a three-part serial this in the adaptations. He’s a romantic, drawn to the meanings conMay on Masterpiece. Written in 1936, Holtby’s South Riding veyed in a look across a room, the fingering of an object discardis a sprawling, panoramic novel about a Yorkshire village on the ed by a loved one. He’s a softy, who makes us weep for characters brink of social change. Davies’ adaptation turns it into a clever that suffer through no fault of their own (Molly Gibson, Esther reworking of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, giving us two Summerson) and those who do because of their faults (Lady unlikely lovers who face tremendous obstacles, the least of which Dedlock, Gwendolyn Harleth). He telepaths into the minds of is the country’s impending war. It also lavishes attention on the women and dead writers. Like the 19th-century societies he visheroine, Sarah Burton, a headmistress determined to create a its in his imagination, he loves the pleasures of hearth and home. magnificent girls’ school despite shabby resources and a laggard Nevertheless, he doesn’t love sentimentality or nostalgia. town council. Sarah is older, feistier, better educated, and randThere’s always a ruthless truth in his point of view. Who else could ier than Davies’ 19th-century heroines. She’s also something we say this of Dickens and women? “In Dickens, young women are rarely see on TV anymore: a bona fide feminist. idealized to the point of absurdity and robbed of any autonomous Topping off a string of classic series this season on Mastersexuality—very interesting that, when, as we know, what Charles piece that move us into the 20th century, including Downton D really wanted to do with very young women was fuck them.” Abbey and the new Upstairs, Downstairs, the Davies adaptaAndrew Davies has suffered his own heartache more deeply, tion of South Riding explores a moment in history meant to I suspect, than most of us. Midlife fame makes for a good story resonate with our own troubled climate. Sadder than most of but a sore youth. And though Davies’ private life is his own, his other adaptations, it feels like a serious, grown-up revisiting one wonders what lost loves might have inspired his poignant of the past—a harbinger, perhaps, of costume dramas to come, portrayal of Colonel Brandon and South Riding’s Robert such as a forthcoming feature, The Three Musketeers [screenplay by Alex Litvak and Andrew Davies]. Carne, who fell hard for a woman when they were young and Davies has also just completed his first biopic, about Marlene never got over it. “Fiction is the higher autobiography,” claims Dietrich, for the BBC, with Gwyneth Paltrow slotted to play the Saul Bellow. Perhaps the same is true for adaptation. lead role. “I like Dietrich’s practicality and her sense of humor. And I’m fascinated by how she treated people with such ruthNancy M. West teaches film and 19th-century literature at the Unilessness. Yet, she didn’t seem aware of it. Not at all. I’ve always versity of Missouri. She’s working on a cultural history of Mastertended to shy away from real people’s lives. There’s no dramatic piece Theatre called “England on Sundays.” APRIL/MAY

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This Extraordinary Thing After 12 years writing seven Harry Potter screenplays, Steve Kloves talks about his unprecedented achievement.

ven taking Hollywood’s penchant for hyperbole into account, few achievements in the movie industry can be considered Herculean. The making of Gone With the Wind, perhaps, or Apocalypse Now, surviving Cleopatra or Titanic. But these were group efforts, not the work of a lone figure assigned a series of seemingly impossible tasks.

Throughout the period of 12 years, Steve Kloves has written seven of the eight Harry Potter films (he sat out number five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, screenplay by Michael Goldenberg), turning 2,939 pages (Kloves used the British editions) of J.K. Rowling’s prose into more than 17 hours of film. He has worked his way through four directors (Chris Columbus, Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell, and David Yates), two Professor Dumbledores (Richard Harris died after making the first two films; Michael Gambon took his place), and the challenging maturation of the films’ main characters. We meet Harry Potter and his classmates when they have just turned 11 and follow them through age 18. Kloves has navigated the international dateline (he lived in Los Angeles while the movies were filmed in the United Kingdom), the Scylla and Charybdis of popular and critical demand—“Don’t mess with the text!”; “Be more creative!”—and the logistical impossibility of him having even one moment’s worth of writer’s block. If that doesn’t qualify as Herculean, nothing in Hollywood ever will. “I know now that I do have a certain endurance as a writer,” Kloves says, and even his grin, quick and tucked in at the corners, is an understatement. It is a mode of communication he prefers, the understatement, accompanied by a deadpan delivery

that flirts with sarcasm but never quite commits. “Because you do get tired. When I said ‘no’ to the fifth—a moment of insanity, which I made because they asked for my final answer on the wrong day—I thought I was leaving. That I needed to get away. But I was in the middle of writing Goblet of Fire; I wasn’t going anywhere.” For a moment he shifts into something approaching earnestness, because he wants to make certain that his tone is not mistaken for sarcasm, that no one thinks he is complaining, would ever complain, about the fact that he is now best known as “the guy who wrote the Harry Potter movies.” “Then I realized I didn’t want to go anywhere. That I had been given this incredible gift, to live in this world, to be part of this extraordinary thing, for 10 years.” Although he is referring to the world of Rowling’s creation, “this extraordinary thing” is not just the welldocumented magical draw of Harry and Hogwarts. Kloves consistently defers any praise to Rowling, who he considers a genius and a friend: “Her ability to create a world like this still takes my breath away.” No Witchcraft, Just Stagecraft

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guarantee their quality. Those who think it’s easy to turn a series of best-selling young adult novels into a series of bestselling young adult films should consider these two words: Lemony Snicket. Or these two: Philip Pullman. Both Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unpleasant Events and The Golden Compass bombed despite their literary and profit-margin pedigrees and casts that included Meryl Streep, Jim Carey, Nicole Kidman, and Daniel Craig. Even C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia has struggled after the initial success of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, despite generations of devoted readers. Not that any of those films would have been made at all if it were not for the Harry Potter films. Neither would Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightening Thief, How to Train Your Dragon, Nanny McPhee, Eragon, or even the Twilight films. Nowadays you can’t go to a theater without a dragon or vampire circling your head, but a dozen years ago, before the double-dip premieres of Harry Potter and the Sor-

Between the time Kloves said “yes” and the time the first film was done, Harry Potter was a worldwide phenomenon, which did not help Kloves’ job nearly as much as one might expect. “We always started off with the assumption that no one was going to go,” he says. cerer’s Stone and The Fellowship of the Ring, fantasy groveled in the darkness far below the lowest rung of genre hierarchy. No serious filmmaker would touch it. “When fantasy’s bad, it’s really bad,” says Kloves. “And it got a bad rap from Hollywood because it was tricky and expensive. I didn’t like fantasy. When I met Jo, one of the first things I said was, ‘You have to know I don’t like fantasy.’ And she said, ‘Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t like fantasy either.’ The reason Potter and Rings work is because they are about compelling characters. And I follow character.” Kloves doesn’t look like a man who has spent the past 12 years of his life up to his elbows in unicorns, spells, and magic swords. Tanned and compact, with reddish hair and a dusting of freckles, he looks like a guy who might coach your daughter’s soccer team if no one else volunteered. Sitting at a booth in Canter’s on Fairfax, he would, in fact, much rather talk about his kids, who are just a bit younger than Harry and his friends—the eldest is a college freshman. Even with the parental credibility, Kloves seemed an odd choice by Warner Bros. for adapting Rowling’s work—he was coming off the success of his original script The Fabulous 30 •

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Baker Boys and his adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys, both of which had streaks of dark humor but were irrevocably adult. He got an Oscar nomination for Wonder Boys and of all the projects he was offered subsequently, Kloves liked only Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, at that point a popular British book largely unknown to American audiences. He said yes before Rowling became the biggest name in publishing since Agatha Christie, at a time when red and gold still evoked USC rather than Gryffindor, when it was possible for Kloves to move about in public with a copy of the original manuscript for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire tucked under his arm. (Security subsequently tightened to MI5 levels.) He signed up for one movie and got seven. “The movie business plays tricks on you,” Kloves says. “I grew up with Five Easy Pieces. When I came out here, that’s what I wanted to do. And everyone smiled and said, ‘Okay, but now we’re doing Footloose.’” Yet each generation gets a version of Harry Potter—Star Wars or something comes into the business and shakes everything up. “I don’t want to see another courtroom drama,” he adds. “I want to do something that will shake things up.” Hidden Magic, No Tricks

When asked what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution, Mao Zedong famously replied that it was too early to tell, the implication being that a century was not long enough for the event’s true meaning to become clear. One assumes it won’t take quite as long for history to define the Harry Potter film series, but even as we head toward the final installment, it’s difficult to achieve any sort of perspective. Certainly the whole project is revolutionary—a series of highly successful films begun before the series of books on which it is based was finished. There is now an amusement park—The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Universal Orlando—based on the films. Yet after the initial fuss over the hubris of the epic undertaking, a certain complacency set in: Just as the books arrived with extraordinary consistency every year or so, so would the films, juggled here and there to grace the summer holidays or the winter, but each lovely and imaginative, with credits that read like a Who’s Who in Theatrical Britain and a core of child actors growing into adulthood before our very eyes. If only in accordance with the laws of probability, the series should have picked up a bunch of awards by now, but there have been no Oscars and relatively few nominations. There has only been sustained success and the assumption of same: The sun would rise, the sun would set, and each year would bring a new Harry Potter movie, and that movie would be good. When asked why a series so abundantly rewarded at the box office has been ignored each awards season, Kloves demurs. It’s a totally unfair question; demurral is a thinking

done and they look like they’ve spent three years in the White House. But Chris always looked the same. I don’t think he gets enough credit—he cast the film and that was perhaps the most important part of the whole thing.” After Columbus left, Warner Bros. offered Kloves the director’s chair; he thought about doing it for three or four days but decided against it because it would have meant moving his wife and two young children to England. “I thought it wouldn’t be good for my kids,” he says, laughing ruefully. “Now I realize it would have been great, and I realize this because they tell me, ‘Dad, I can’t believe you didn’t let us go.’” He shrugs. “It worked out pretty well anyway.” The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer

Although it is standard operating procedure in television, it isn’t usual in film for the screenwriter to serve as keystone. But Kloves stayed while the directors came and went. Work-

person’s only option. “It is going to be interesting,” he answers, finally, choosing his words carefully, “when, after all the hoopla of the last one dies down, there aren’t any more Harry Potter films. I look at the work that has been done here, particularly at Emma [Watson] and Daniel [Radcliffe] and Rupert [Grint], and I wonder if people understand what they’ve seen really—the extraordinary talent of these kids. I do think people have taken the series for granted.” Something no one involved in the actual making of the films ever did, which, Kloves says, might explain their miraculously consistent ability to please audiences. Between the time he said “yes” and the time the first film was done, Harry Potter was a worldwide phenomenon, which did not help Kloves’ job nearly as much as one might expect. “We always started off with the assumption that no one was going to go,” he says. “With each and every movie, we never felt a shred of confidence—just because the books are

great and popular did not mean that the films would be. And when one was, we assumed the next would not be. We were afraid our audience was getting too old, getting too bored, lured away by videogames and television shows.” In 2001, the first film broke the box-office record for a movie opening; the reviews, though mostly positive, were not spectacular, the main complaint being that Columbus and Kloves had been too faithful to the text. The pair began saying they were in it for the long haul, that they would adapt the entire series together. The next year, the second film, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, broke the records Sorcerer’s Stone had set and the reviews were more congratulatory, though some critics complained again of the film’s lack of originality. Columbus left the project. “I’m surprised Chris left,” Kloves says, some nine years later. “I know he got tired—he had the hardest job because he built everything from the ground up, including all the big sets, but he never changed physically. Some directors, they get

ing with four men whose personal and cinematic styles were very different taught him the importance of flexibility—Columbus, for example, needed him at hand for four or five weeks, Yates for four or five days. “It’s a hard job, directing one of these films,” Kloves says. “And I don’t think people understand that. I look at David Yates [who has directed four of the eight] and I just can’t believe he’s done it. You have to be good at everything, you need the imagination and the eye for detail, and you need a marathoner’s strength.” Fortunately, he says, he was not the only player in for the long haul—producer David Heyman, Warner Bros.’ Alan Horn, and Jeff Robinov were, he says, ideal overseers and every director inherited the wonderfully imaginative production team, including production designer Stuart Craig. “Each director would add one or two new sets, but whenever anyone saw the Great Hall of Hogwarts, they were stunned,” Kloves says. “Stuart is a genius.”

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The team was able to go the distance, Kloves explains, because they understood the genre: A series that was truly an epic, in form and function. “Here was the fictional tale of our time. It really is. In this ironic age, it’s a story of honor and courage told in a way that doesn’t make your skin crawl.” Being in the middle of it brought its own set of issues. Most adaptations occur after a work is finished, so the screenwriter has some idea of the overall message the original work was trying to convey, a larger understanding of the books’ legacy. Kloves didn’t even know how the thing was going to end. Rowling gave him a few hints, warning, for example, that Severus Snape (played by Alan Rickman) was not necessarily what he appeared to be and suggesting that he play up Dobby a bit more, as the house-elf would play an important role in the final books. But in many ways, Kloves was flying blind, plotwise. As the books grew longer, the task grew even more complicated—there is no app for collapsing 500 pages of action and

about the tale of the Deathly Hallows, I would have included that earlier on, as a story that was told, say by Mrs. Weasley, just so it wouldn’t have been so new. But by and large, I think I had a pretty good success rate.” He doesn’t much see the point of second-guessing, he says. “If Jo had had time to go back and rewrite things, she might have done things differently too, and who knows what would have happened then?” Kloves describes the one time he realized that Rowling was under the same sort of pressure the filmmakers felt. “I remember talking to her once when she was behind schedule— she had a hard street date and something wasn’t working, I think it was something with Dobby actually, and it was the first time she felt the story she had didn’t quite dovetail with past events and she had to figure out how to make it follow. Which she did, obviously. But it was only the one time. And that is pretty amazing when you think about it.”

When asked why a series so abundantly rewarded at the box office has been ignored each awards season, Kloves demurs. “It is going to be interesting,” he answers, choosing his words carefully, “when, after all the hoopla of the last one dies down, there aren’t any more Harry Potter films.”

When Universal Orlando asked for a script for the signature ride of its new Harry Potter’s Wizarding World, Rowling asked Kloves if he could please do it. So he wrote 16 minutes of original text for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey. “ ‘Follow me,’” he says dramatically, miming Gambon’s Professor Dumbledore beckoning parkgoers farther into the ride. “How often does a writer get to put amusement park ride on his résumé?” But no, he hasn’t visited Universal Orlando’s Wizarding World and has no plans to do so. He’s not a big fan of press events, though he did make the New York premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I, where the reaction of the audience seemed to prove his decade-long choice had been the right one. People laughed, people cried, and at the end told him how fabulously true he had been to the books, even though, he says, that script took the most liberties of any of the films. Indeed, the scene in which Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and Hermione (Emma Watson) share a dance that teeters on the romantic had lit up the fan blogs for weeks—such a thing never occurred in the book—but in the end everyone agreed that even if it was not true to the text, it was true to the character. Which is what Kloves has always tried to do. “When I first met Jo, she said she knew that the movies would be different than the books, and all she asked was that I be true to the character,” Kloves says. “Which is what drew me to the books in the first place. I think even Jo will acknowledge that the brilliance of Harry Potter isn’t the plot— it’s the relationships between the characters and the detail of this other world.” Critics were impressed with the more adult look and feel of Deathly Hallows, although the overall reaction was mixed, as it almost always is to the series; most top critics have been parsimonious with superlatives, sometimes in almost algebraically antithetical proportion to the box office reports. The

detail-packed novel into 135 pages of script. So Kloves spent days and weeks in conversation with Heyman and whichever director was at bat, clinging to the sightline of character as he decided which subplots to leave out, which details to highlight, which moments would resonate in future books. Suddenly, as Pottermania grew, he was not allowed to talk to anyone else—security tightened around all aspects of the project while the zeal and nature of the fans often peaked at hysteria. Kloves began to take his profile even lower, refusing interviews, staying out of photos, trying to keep himself and his family distant from the melee. “I stayed holed up with the books,” he says. “The rest of it happened the way it happened.” By the fourth script, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the filmmakers had caught up so closely to Rowling that Kloves realized many people were going to see the films before they read the books, which added a whole new set of pressures. “Jo’s world is so rich, so demanding. You need to service it without limiting your own expressiveness. And there is just so much in the books that cannot be in the films.” “I think I did a pretty good job actually,” he adds, uncharacteristically using the first-person singular. “If I had known 32 •

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Amusement Park Wizard

the bigger picture of Rowling’s creation. Emma Watson recently announced she was taking a break from her studies at Brown to focus on publicity for the final film. Kloves might never have been a big part, or fan, of the publicity machine, but his role in the project is huge and undeniable, as is the fact that he misses a process that consumed the past decade of his life. “I do wonder what I would have done in my 40s, what stories I would have told, if I hadn’t been doing Harry Potter. When you walk through one door, you close another. But I wouldn’t trade Potter for anything—you have to follow character wherever it leads.” He has said that the thing he regretted most about not writing Order of the Phoenix was that he missed out on writing Luna Lovegood’s film debut, and that it was the tantalizing richness of the characters, and then the performances, that drew him back in with The Half-Blood Prince. “This was an impossible movie to write,” he says, “because so much of it is memory. Which is why I wanted to do it, because it was

phenomenal success of the books—credited with saving the publishing industry and reinventing the young adult market—threw down a serious critical gauntlet, and fantasy is rarely taken seriously as cinema; many industry watchers were shocked when critic’s darling Peter Jackson announced he was doing The Lord of the Rings. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, received the most universally glowing notices of the series thus far for its darker, wilder sensibility, while four, five, and six were often treated like CSI spinoffs—if you like these films, then no doubt you’ll like this one too. And when Warner Bros. announced it was splitting the final novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, into two films, there were, predictably, howls of joy—Two more films instead of one!—and derision—How much more money does the studio expect to milk from this franchise? Kloves wants to go on the record repeating that the decision was not the studio’s—it was his and producer Heyman’s. “Alan [Horn, CEO of Warner Bros.] called and said, ‘Obviously from the studio’s point of view, two films are attractive in some ways, but the decision is yours.’ David and I had months of conversation about it.” Initially, Kloves was relieved that there would be two films—the U.K. edition of the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is more than 600 pages long, the American more than 700—but soon realized it wasn’t going to be any easier split in half. In some ways, it was more difficult. “Which part of the story goes where? How far does the first film go? How do we tell the story of the three brothers? I thought we had all this time,” he says with a self-deprecating laugh, “and, of course, we didn’t.” The fact that a large portion of the novel’s first half is a rather static journey into a semi-magical forest—Kloves’ dance sequence livens it up considerably—made Deathly Hallows a difficult adaptation, no matter what. Some critics took issue with the pacing and its refusal to catch viewers up. “We made a decision right away that the price of admission was you had to know what had gone before,” says Kloves firmly. “Otherwise, the thing would have been impossible.” Others thought it was a splendid setup for the finale and lauded both Kloves and Yates for giving the series a new maturity. That pleases Kloves, partly because it’s nice to get good notices, but mostly because he happens to agree. He thinks the two final films—Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II will be released this summer—are works that both effectively cap the series and stand alone as films. “People are going to be surprised with the last one,” he says, breaking with his reliance on understatement to add: “It’s pretty amazing.” It’s an odd time for Kloves—he has been done with Harry Potter for more than a year, but the project itself is far from over. The final film will be preceded by much pomp and publicity. No doubt its release will be followed by much debate over the legacy of the series and where it fits into

impossible. And although it is not a perfect movie, I look at it now and I think some of the performances are among the best in the series. “That’s what I miss,” he emphasizes, leaning over his coffee. “I miss writing for our cast, I miss writing for the kids. We really were—are—a family and it’s strange not to see them, strange not to be writing for them any more.” Kloves is moving on to other projects, including an adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, again for Warner Bros., a project he has been “living comfortably with” since the Potter epic’s start. Mainly, though, he’s waiting for a character to come along and tug at his sleeve, to make him look up and sit down, like he did 13 years ago when he first read of the boy with the broken spectacles and the crazy scar—The Boy Who Lived. “It’ll happen,” Kloves says. “It always does.” Mary McNamara is the Los Angeles Times television critic. She is the author of two mystery novels, Oscar Season and The Starlet. APRIL/MAY

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Rowling

When Steve Met Jo Harry Potter’s creator remembers her collaboration with Steve Kloves.

was kept informed about the people who were in the running to adapt the script, but it wasn’t my call. I heard that Warners was interested in having Steve Kloves do something for them and had been looking for a project that appealed to him. I believe he was shown a few things. He told me that Potter was the only one that interested him; I don’t think he was just being nice. I knew he’d written and directed The Fabulous Baker Boys, which was a big plus because I loved that film and everything about it. Nevertheless, I was incredibly wary before I met him. He was going to butcher my baby. He was an established screenwriter, which was just plain intimidating. He was also American, and we were meeting shortly after a review of the first Potter book in (I think) the New Yorker, which had stated that it was unlikely the British idiom would translate to an American audience. You have to remember that my first Warner Bros. meeting did not take place against a backdrop of massive American success for the novels. Although the books were already very popular in the U.K., it was still early days in the U.S., and I therefore had no real means of backing up my opinion that American fans of the book would rather not have Hagrid “translated” for the big screen, for instance. Steve and I were introduced, in L.A., by David

Heyman, the producer, and we almost immediately went into a lunchtime meeting with a big studio executive. Three things happened within a couple of hours that caused every qualm to vanish and made me adore Steve, an attitude from which I haven’t deviated in 13-odd years. Firstly, Steve turned to me while food was being ordered and said quietly, “You know who my favorite character is?” I looked at him, red hair included, and I thought: You’re going to say Ron. Please, please don’t say Ron—Ron’s so easy to love. And he said: “Hermione.” At which point, under my standoffish, mistrusting exterior, I just melted, because if he got Hermione, he got the books. He also, to a large extent, got me. Lunch proceeded, and the senior exec held forth, dominating conversation. It swiftly became obvious to me that in spite of all the effusive praise of the novels he was pouring forth, he hadn’t read a page of them. (A reliable source told me later that the exec had read “the coverage,” which he always felt was more useful than reading the original material.) Next, he began to suggest things that would need changing, primarily Harry’s character. “No, that won’t work,” Steve said pleasantly. When lunch was over, David, Steve, and I went off for coffee together. On the way, Steve opined that you had to tell “them” up front what would work

“It’s been an intense relationship, forged under unusual circumstances.

Steve has come closest to being

inside the world with me—actually, he has been inside the world with

me, but always a year or two behind. Nobody else has come close to that. The sheer length of the collaboration has made it unique.”

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and what wouldn’t. No point prevaricating. I was now in a state of profound admiration. When it was time to say goodbye, I wrote my email address down for Steve on the back of a torn receipt in my wallet. He read the address, then flipped over the receipt and said, “Penny Black—what’s that?” I said: “It’s the make of the top I’m wearing.” He tucked the receipt away muttering, “I just like knowing stuff like that.” As odd names on scraps of paper are perennially fascinating to me too, that clinched my feeling that I’d met a kindred spirit. The important thing to know is that I had complete confidence in him, from that one meeting in L.A. He’d said enough during those few hours together to

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convince me that he had a real connection to the characters. As we subsequently agreed during our decade-plus email conversation about the books, when you strip away all of the diversionary magic, the Potter novels boil down to the characters: our relationship with them and theirs with each other. Under the Invisibility Cloak

We started emailing back and forth pretty much from the moment I got back to Scotland. We hardly ever talked on the phone; in fact, I remember calling him once from Germany, where I was on tour, about some script issue, and he sounded absolutely thrown to hear my voice. I think he’d forgotten I had one. Anyway, with a 12-hour time difference between L.A. and Edinburgh, email was a practical and successful way of collaborating. Steve would ask me questions, sometimes about the background of the characters, sometimes on whether something he’d had one of them say or do was consistent with what had happened to them or what would happen. He very rarely took a wrong turn; in fact, I’m struggling to remember any occasion when he did. He had a phenomenal instinct about what each character was about; he always plays that down, but he made some very accurate guesses about what was coming. Actually, I’ve just remembered the only time he did get something wrong, and it was a funny one. We were at a script read-through for Half-Blood Prince at Leavesden, so for once we were side-by-side in the same room. I hadn’t read the very latest draft, so I was hearing it for the first time. When Dumbledore started reminiscing about a beautiful girl he’d known in his youth, I scribbled dumbledore’s gay on my script and shoved it sideways to Steve. And we both sat there smirking for a bit. I don’t think he ever pushed to know what was coming next. Odd, really, when I look back; except that I’ve got a feeling that as a fellow writer,

he understood that I needed some space. There came a point where my bins were being searched by journalists; keeping tight-lipped was a way of giving myself creative freedom. I didn’t want to be tied down by expectations I’d raised; I wanted to be at liberty to change my mind. But I did tell Steve a few things. I used to share what I was doing as I was doing it. I remember emailing him while writing Goblet of Fire and telling him that I had backstory on Hagrid that I wanted to put in, but I was wondering whether it wasn’t too much, given how big the novel was likely to be. He emailed back saying, “You can’t tell me too much about Hagrid. Put it in.” So I did. Inevitably, things had to be cut between novel and film. It never bothered me. Steve’s a compassionate surgeon. We couldn’t make eight-hour-long films, and I’d rather have had him wielding the scalpel than anyone else. It’s been an intense relationship, forged under very unusual circumstances. Steve has come closest to being inside the world with me—actually, he has been inside the world with me but always a year or two behind. Nobody else has come close to that. The sheer length of the collaboration has made it unique. He’s become a great, real friend. I remember, on a subsequent visit to L.A., the two of us ended up in a bar at my hotel, sitting at the only table where we were allowed to smoke, like a pair of pariahs. I said to him: “Do you ever feel like you’ll be found out?” And he laughed and said: “All the time. All the time.” That was the same conversation when he told me that Dumbledore was “burdened with knowl-

edge.” So he might not have got Dumbledore’s sexuality right, but he understood something much more fundamental. These days we don’t need to email for work purposes—we just do it to hang out together in cyberspace. I’m always trying to get him and the family over to Scotland. He’ll fit right in, this sardonic, freckly guy with a nice line in black humor. He tells me he works better when it’s raining; he should buy a holiday home here.

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Written by Pat Sierchio & Sandra Berg

A Man in Trouble

D e n i s e T r u s c e ll o

Jerry Lewis, writer? Absolutely.

“The writer is God!” Jerry Lewis shouts this during our interview at the South Point Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas where he’s in preproduction for his 45th annual MDA Labor Day telethon. If anyone has earned the credits to make such a hubristic claim of omniscience, it’s this writer, director, producer, and actor. During a career spanning eight decades, his films have grossed more than $800 million. In 1997, he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his work for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. In 2009, he was awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Academy Award. And at age 85, Lewis shows no sign of slowing down. He’s written six screenplays in six years and is currently working on an upcoming Broadway musical version of his classic The Nutty Professor. While much has been written about Lewis’ career as a performer and innovative director (he created the video assist device in 1960, which quickly became an industry standard), there has been almost nothing documenting his work as a writer. Nowadays, Lewis shies away from most interview requests; however, being a strong advocate for the Writers Guild of America, the WGAW member jumped on board without hesitation for this request. Jerry Lewis’ career began with solo nightclub performances. His comedy act consisted mainly of pantomiming to records. In 1946 fate brought him together with an unlikely comic

soul mate, a handsome Italian singer 10 years his senior named Dean Martin. With Lewis writing their routines, Martin & Lewis quickly became the hottest act in night clubs, with Dean playing the role of the suave adult crooner to Jerry’s frantic juvenile maniac. Within three years they landed a multi-picture deal with Paramount producer Hal Wallis and brought their act to radio and the small screen as rotating hosts of The Colgate Comedy Hour. After 16 films together, the popular duo split in 1956, exactly 10 years to the day that they began. Lewis launched his solo career producing and starring in The Delicate Delinquent. Originally intended as a Martin & Lewis project, the film was reworked with Lewis contributing (uncredited) to the screenplay written by the film’s director Don McGuire. Lewis went on to make The Bellboy in 1960, expanding his actorproducer role to include screenwriter and director, which placed him in an elite group of film auteurs that at that time included Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles. For his next film, The Ladies Man, Lewis took another unlikely partner as his co-writer, jazz drummer Bill Richmond. Together they scripted eight of Lewis’ most popular films, including The Nutty Professor. Lewis admits that he’s a nine-year-old boy at heart. That childlike character is still evident when he makes a quick trip through the telethon production room on his Rascal Scooter, playfully sputtering out engine noises. After finishing up a meeting with his telethon staff, he sat down with us for twoand-a-half hours.

Written By: Does writing come easy for you? Jerry Lewis: Oh, God, yes, and it’s joyful for me. When I had

idea that would’ve taken seconds, but I loved doing it so much I was there for 40 minutes.

to write because the deadline was getting close, I loved being responsible and making it. Anyhow, to sit down and write something that will move human beings is my excitement and has always been. When I get an idea, I start to write like I was electrically motivated. Like 220 power right up my ass, and I’m sitting there writing. And when I get on a roll, you can’t come near me, you can’t interrupt me. I’ll roll and write for an hour—overwritten of course, certainly much more material than necessary, but I get on a roll. I’ll go home tonight and around two in the morning I’ll get a rush—and I’ve stopped battling it—I just get my robe and go downstairs and sit down. I was going to make a note of this

For Martin & Lewis, when you wrote the routines, was he there with you? Oh, no, no, no. I wouldn’t write two words if he was there with me, unless I had to do a rewrite or something pertaining to that performance, because I’m never a foot or two away from a Selectric [electric typewriter]. They’re in my dressing rooms, in my cars. I’m never so far away that I can’t hit an idea. Since Dean was working solely as a singer before you teamed up, did you find it difficult to write routines that he could perform? APRIL/MAY

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You didn’t even tell them the story? I didn’t know what the hell it was! But this is January 2 and I’m opening on January 4 at the FontainebA Solo Act leau [hotel in Miami] in concert. I Where do you draw your ideas from? From the place that I live and On March 9, 1973, WGAW member Jerry Lewis walked the picket go to Florida that night on January breathe and earn my living: a man line outside Universal Studios (above). (Opposite page) In 1947, 2. I had to rehearse on January 4, in trouble. There’s nothing funnier Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis first began performing legally as so the night of the second when I team. After a variety of guest radio performances, Martin get in—I had a Selectric—I proceed on the planet than a man in trouble. one and Lewis began hosting their own radio series in 1948. to write 165 pages in the next nine Did you ever see what a man does days. So much good visual stuff you can’t believe—it was when he stubs his toe at night? If you had the lights on, you’d my best work. Well, next to The Nutty Professor, I think have the funniest fucking footage that any comedian could create. That’s a man in trouble. See a man making eggs in The Bellboy writing was one of my big prides because I the morning and he puts his finger on the hot stove. He does wanted to make an episodic movie like we used to see when a dance Fred Astaire would envy. Seeing a man fall into an we were kids. Wonderful sketch, laughter, then move on. open pit is funny. But to me, my sense of humor, is I want to And I love the rhythm of giving an audience a laugh, look, see the man miss the hole. Anyone can fall in. laugh, look, laugh, examine, look, expect a laugh—and it’s a wonderful rhythm for the creator. So I got a crew from Hollywood that all arrived on January 7—a crew of 180, to be After you and Dean split up, what lead you to write your exact—and on January 10 I rolled on the first scene of The own films? Not many people were doing that in 1960. Bellboy. No, they weren’t. I was motivated by Frank Tashlin, who I wrapped it up on February 28, about 42 shooting was probably the best comic writer we had in the picture days. I had a ball. business, for about a thousand reasons. And it came about in a strange way. I go to New York to meet with Barney The screenplay was 165 pages and the movie runs 72 minBalaban [president of Paramount Pictures 1936–1964] and utes, and your character had no dialogue until the end. Does the marketing people to talk about the release of my film that mean you wrote all of the visual bits in detail? Cinderfella. I said to them, “I know you people want a Oh, yeah. I wrote the whole thing out. Jerry movie in the summer.” We worked with that schedule for a number of years. I said, “You can’t release Cinderfella Did you write all of your films that way, knowing you were in the summer. I need it as a Christmas film.” I had spent going to star and direct? a couple hundred thousand dollars on recordings on colA normal writer-director script will probably run 120 to orful discs of the Cinderfella story for the kids. That was 140 pages, and we all know that. When I give you the screenplay for The Nutty Professor, you’ll see 371 pages. If you take all planned in making the film. Now Paramount wants to the physical material out of the script, you’ll be at 120. For stick it out in the summer? I said, “Barney, I’ll give you every bit that I wanted as a prop, or a wardrobe, or a dress, or a Jerry movie for the summer.” He looks at his desk and even a curtain, I drew a picture of what I wanted. My heads says, “It’s January 2, what are you talking about?” I said, 40 •

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pa g e 4 0 : c o r b i s / pa g e 4 1 : g e tty ima g e s

“Barney, I have committed to you for the last—how many years—and every commitment that I shook your hand on has been there, and you never questioned it, and you never had to remind me that I made the commitment.” He said, “I know all that. What do you plan to do?” I said, “I plan to shake your hand and commit to delivering a Jerry film by the 30th of May so they go into the exchanges by July 20 and we’re into the theaters by mid-August.” He and the marketing people talked about the project for the next two days—they didn’t even know what to call it.

I’m going to New York to open at the Copa, and I’m hoping my partner is going to be there like he said he would, which he was. I wrote an hour-and-20-minute act on the train from Los Angeles to New York. I didn’t complete it, but I got probably 60 percent of it by the time we arrived in New York, and then in the next three days at the Plaza I finished it. So I worked for a couple of days until he came in. I talked to him about what I had written, and it was significantly more than what he did last time he was on stage with me. But then I get my partner in a rehearsal hall and he went to it like Esther Williams would in a pool. He never missed a beat. I had tears in my eyes after the show.

of departments loved working with me. Like giving candy to a baby because they had no questions. If they had a suggestion for an idea that wasn’t in the script, they could tell me about it, and if I hadn’t included it, I’d stick it in. They knew they had the freedom of being free with the director who’s also the writer, producer, and actor. I had the best time doing it all because I was protecting what I wrote. There has to be some creative protection and it’s got to come from the creator. No one else is gonna do it. The writer is God, folks! And people should start to remember that writers are God One. And the director—God Two—doesn’t get going without God One, so here we are. Pay respects to the writers, you schmucks! The writer is the least recognized creative artist on the planet, the least because he didn’t demand it. So he’s to blame and I blame every other writer that didn’t step forward and say, ‘There’s a couple of things I need to have, starting with respect and with deportment that makes me proud of being a part of this union.’ You don’t have to be an intellectual to make that speech. Getting back to The Bellboy, what made you decide to direct it as well? I first went to Billy [Wilder] to direct The Bellboy, and Billy sat me down and said, “What the hell’s the matter with you? This is your chance to direct.” I said, “Myself?” He said, “No one knows better than you if you should print it or not.” I couldn’t pay him $2.5 million to do the film—I was spending $900,000 to make it, so I had to do it in-house. And Frank Tashlin said, “Do it. Not only would it be good for your budget, but it’s going to be your shot.” And then that morning I said, “Dear God in heaven, watch over me. I’m walking downstairs to tell 180 people what to do and I’m not sure I know what the fuck to tell them!” The first night, I had been going about 29 hours and I was really tired, but I had to call my dad after my first day. I said, “Dad, guess what? I found out I know a lot of stuff I didn’t know I knew.” He said, “I knew.” Barney Balaban called two days later and said, “We can’t give you the money for this movie because I just found out it’s a silent picture.” I said, “Barney, you’ve got to get new spies. This is the noisiest fucking movie you’ll ever hear.” It’s the kid who doesn’t

talk until reel 10. I said, “Barney, I own it, that’s fine.” It cost me $999,000 and to date we’ve made about $270 million with that negative—all going to my children. Didn’t you send The Bellboy script to Stan Laurel? He would call me and tell what not to shoot. I never went against what he said. I went like that [crossing out gesture] when he said, “27A—you don’t need to do that, son.” I said, “Stanley, please forgive me, I was on a roll,” and he would say, “Yes, you got greedy, but that was okay.” He was very sweet. He was protective because he watched my bones get made during The Bellboy. He saw all of that. He was stunned when he saw my energy at 7 a.m. and saw the same energy at midnight. The 7 a.m. shot I sent him I sent alongside the 12 o’clock shot. Between 1960 and 1962 you made four films that you also wrote. Were the scripts written in that two-year period as well? Yes, I had deadlines to meet. Doing it for a scheduled time has been the bane of the creative existence. The timetable. The great line, “Is it good?” “No, but it’s ready.” You cannot allow that. Now the writer who hasn’t had a job for a year and needs the money is gonna compromise. He’s gonna defeat his own integrity because he has to feed his family. He’s got to do that. How do we prevent that? How do we make it so a writer never has another moment of pain? Because the stuff that would come from them would be three times better than what it is under this condition. If you start with pain, you’ll never go anywhere. Start with love. I thank God I have not had to sit down to write under duress but one time. [Lewis declined to identify the incident.] It almost took my heart out. It was such a painful process. I don’t want to write funny when I’m sad. I want to write funny so they’re not sad. Well, that takes responsibility, so I can’t bring my trauma to the work. The work cannot be imposed upon by my bullshit. Richmond and Lewis

Bill Richmond co-wrote almost all of your films with you. Why was he such a good writing partner for you? Bill Richmond, we worked together so well. He was my continued on page 50

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Written by Pat Sierchio & Sandra Berg Portrait by Tom Keller

The Sidekick Bill Richmond, drummer and writer.

ow does a jazz musician from the Midwest go from playing in the big bands of Harry James and Les Brown to cowriting a string of hit films with comedy icon Jerry Lewis? The unlikely partnership of Lewis and Richmond has produced eight films, two television shows, and one lifelong friendship. When it came time to go solo, Bill Richmond segued into a successful television career that earned him three Emmys and a Writers Guild Award before retiring in 1995 at age 74. Richmond was a successful drummer playing for some of the biggest names in music, including Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Nelson Riddle, and Frank Sinatra. During his stint with Riddle and Sinatra, he caught the attention of Jerry Lewis, who hired the drummer as backup musician for his stage act. It didn’t take long before the comic and the jazz man discovered they shared more than an appreciation of Laurel and Hardy. “We became almost instant friends,” explains Richmond during our recent interview at his Calabasas home. “In the first place, I truly thought he was funny. Not in his act necessarily, but being around him—really funny in a way that I think is funny.” Lewis felt so strongly about his drummer’s natural comic sensibilities that he hired Richmond to co-write his film The Ladies Man (1961). “I could only imagine him going to whoever was running the studio at the time: ‘Jerry, what’s your next picture going to be?’ The Ladies Man. ‘And who’s going to write it?’ ‘My drummer! You got a problem with that?’ That was his attitude.” Lewis had already hired another writer with whom he paired Richmond, a rising young comic by the name of Mel Brooks. As Richmond remembers, “Those egos clashed.” After two weeks, Brooks dropped out and Lewis replaced him with himself. Richmond and he became writing partners for the first time. A novice when it came to screenwriting, Richmond decided to learn the mechanics of his new job by studying scripts from Paramount’s library. He learned the craft quickly,

but it was his sharp instincts that enabled him to become a successful collaborator with Lewis. “Early on I realized that every comedian starts out writing their own material,” he explains. “They create themselves. You’re creating for a guy who started out as a dumb act with this little record player playing in clubs—he couldn’t talk, couldn’t tell jokes, all he could do is be silly and pratfalls. I realized, I’m not going to write funny dialogue but I’m going to try and put him in that situation.” As an example, Richmond points to a scene in The Ladies Man with Lewis and actor Buddy Lester. “I wrote Buddy coming in to pick up his girlfriend and he’s a mobster. He says some dialogue to Jerry: ‘Don’t touch her, don’t go near her, don’t even look at her,’ and then Jerry’s on his way. Kathleen Freeman has kissed Jerry on the cheek—he has a big lipstick smear on his cheek. He goes to Buddy Lester and says, ‘She’ll be right down,’ and Buddy is very upset. I just wrote up to that point. After that? I would say he ad-libbed close to 10 minutes. We did one take of him and Buddy in that scene with the hat. It was so hysterical everybody on the set would put things over their mouths to keep from laughing. My point being is that I didn’t write the funny stuff—nobody wrote what he and Buddy Lester did. I realized that’s what I had to do, that was going to be my job from now on, writing scenes where he could do his thing.” Although he and Lewis worked closely together when creating their eight screenplays, Richmond learned a lot about comedy and timing. But he did not learn much about story structure from his mentor: “[Lewis] was not interested in story. Everything was so episodic, no matter how he wrote it. The second act for him was to string together a whole bunch of different things and put them in different places, and then go onto the third act and finish that in about 15 minutes.” What he did learn became an invaluable lesson on how to write for comic icons. “I went onto Carol Burnett for five years—the same thing about her. If you created something APRIL/MAY

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INT. FOYER – EVENING Herbert (Jerry) walks to the front door and opens it to reveal a very menacing gangster (Buddy Lester). HERBERT Can I help you? WILLARD Yeah, get out of the way. HERBERT (terrified) Right, no problem.

You got it.

WILLARD I came here to pick up my girl.

I’m gone.

HERBERT I’ll go get her.

WILLARD Over, O V U R, over. HERBERT

He runs for his life.

INT. HALLWAY – EVENING

He runs out, but quickly returns.

ing all over for the stops him and begins gush Katie (Kathleen Freeman) job. his g way he’s been doin

HERBERT (continuing) I forgot to get her name.

KATIE kind and You’ve been so sweet and s just everything...all the girl love you.

WILLARD It’s Abigail, stoop. HERBERT That would be Miss Stoop, right?

Willard grabs him by the shirt almost knocking him down. HERBERT (continuing) Wrong, right? And who shall I say is calling? WILLARD Willard C. Gainsborough. Now beat it. And don’t get near her. Don’t touch her. Don’t even talk to her. HERBERT I’ll stay totally away from her.

He continues running tick kiss on his cheek. She plants a big juicy lips for his life. INT. GIRLS ROOM – EVENING

rs and exits. riend is waiting downstai He tells the girl her boyf ING INT. WAITING AREA - EVEN

news. oaches Willard with the Herbert confidently appr HERBERT te. She’ll be here in a minu

WILLARD (staring) on your cheek? Hold it. Is that lipstick HERBERT I can explain.

WILLARD Cause if you do, it’s over for you.

Willard boils even more. He sits down, petrified.

HERBERT Over like the end, curtains, like that kind of over.

WILLARD sitting on my hat? Wait. Do you know you’re

ieves the squashed hat. Herbert gets up and retr HERBERT head? Shall I put it back on your Please do.

WILLARD

. hat back on Willard’s head Herbert gingerly puts the

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, ke, three-minute dy play a one-ta edy veterans that Jerry and Bud com nt and poi s s end thi fri at It is longtime tion of what two hilarious exhibi setup. ple sim a h wit can do autobiography, turned up in the on of this scene of the iti one ogn rec was , it lly t tha Incidenta Mr. Welles wrote .” les Wel on Ors “This is in his life. he had ever seen funniest things for Orson If I had written man in trouble. is? I put a Lew as ry edy Jer com for d g tin Jerry define in his mouth. Wri ds wor put ld Welles, I wou mouth. his foot in his

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“He was my drummer in a 36-piece orchestra,” says Jerry Lewis of Bill Richmond. “He was incredibly good, but his sense of humor and his ability to transmit that sense of humor was overwhelming. I sat him down one night at the Fontainebleau when I was writing

The Bellboy. ...I said, ‘When we wrap this up, I want you to work with me on Ladies Man.’ ” she really liked and she’d spark to it and say, ‘I can do something with that,’ you had it made. So I kind of had my finger on that. You have to put them someplace where they can do their thing.”

g e tty ima g e s

TV to the Rescue

As the film industry struggled to survive in the mid-1960s, Richmond conceived the story for The Family Jewels. “My wife and I had gone to make out our will at a lawyer’s and there a question came up: ‘What if both of you are killed in a plane crash, then what happens to your children?’ The lawyer said that sometimes they pick a brother or a close friend or a cousin or whatever it is. I started to think about what if this guy dies and he’s in the same dilemma, and he decided to have the girl live with each of these four or five brothers for a couple of weeks.” By 1967, Lewis’ contract with Paramount had run out. So the comedian took his act back to television, bringing Richmond along as a staff writer. The Jerry Lewis Show ran for two seasons before being canceled in 1969. Richmond had to find out what work would be like without Lewis. To his surprise, he found the switch remarkably easy. “I just walked right into television. I did Laugh In—they hired me in a minute.” As was the practice back then, Richmond was teamed up with another writer, Alan Katz, and the two were in charge of writing weekly monologues for Rowan and Martin. When variety shows began to decline, he moved into sitcoms, a natural transition. “As I did sitcoms—and I did quite a few—they became easy. Coming up with stories was always easy for me. I could write line, joke, line, joke. I could write that forever. I’m not saying I was great at it or anything, but I was good

at it. I could do it.” Richmond had a long and prolific career in television selling scripts to various series, writing specials (the AFI Salute to John Ford), and as a sitcom staff writer. Eventually he was given the seat at the head of the writers table on Welcome Back, Kotter and later Blossom where, according to his colleague and now wife, Emmy-winner Saria Kraft, “He created this sense of camaraderie, an atmosphere that was so positive and so relaxed.” A valuable lesson learned from his early days with Lewis and before. “The sets were wide open. Everybody laughed,” recalls Richmond. “[Lewis] was the first one to allow an audience on the TV set. He put up big signs outside that said, ‘Come on in and join the party.’ Being a jazz musician, same thing, you’re free to do anything you want. And the freedom to say anything stupid was another thing that I reached on every show I did—old jokes, stale jokes, bad jokes—put it out there. Nobody’s going to say that it’s crap, not while I’m running things.” After retirement, Richmond doesn’t seem to miss those writers’ rooms anymore, especially since he took up painting a couple of years ago. Of course, he still picks up his drumsticks and jams. Throughout the years, Jerry Lewis gained a reputation, unfairly or not, as a difficult man to deal with. But according to Richmond, he’s never known anything but love and support from his old partner during their days together. And today, at age 89, he still speaks fondly of the man who changed his life. “My writing partner happens to be a major movie star—a powerhouse in the industry in those days as far as box office. He’s arguably my best friend. He not only made me a writer but handed me a career.” APRIL/MAY

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Written by

Maria Elena Rodriguez

An American in

Paris

Before joining a l’atelier de scenarios, study Napoleonic law.

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ge 19, I packed my suitcase and duffel bag and joined a long tradition of poor American exchange students in Paris. Armed with language-lab French and youthful swagger, I got the double immersion course. That year the U.S. dollar plunged against the franc and the universities went on strike. Thus began my real education. Between cheap cinemas, cafes, day jobs, strikes, and demonstrations, I came to know French culture in ways never mentioned in the curriculum. Years later, I’ve returned as a TV writer. I’m back to meet with production companies on a series I’ve developed. This time I’m old enough to know I have to do more homework. So I study French TV as much as I can from the U.S. and during housesitting trips to Paris. It helps that I can still speak the language. But since there are so few French-U.S. TV coproductions, I have to start with the basic facts. The first two facts are contradictions: The French government is fiercely protective of their culture and support film and TV industries with tax funds and legislation on a scale unheard of in the U.S. French audiences are voracious consumers of American movies and TV shows (both dubbed and subtitled). Ratings for U.S. series trump French series. What do the French watch? A quick survey of the five major French networks reveals a large number of recognizable U.S. and U.K. series on the program schedules, such as Castle, Bones, Desperate Housewives, The Tudors, Pacific, Medium, and NCIS. The reasons for this are more financial than cultural. Like most of Europe, television in France started out as state-owned public broadcasting. Until the late 1980s, most domestic programming consisted of public affairs, documentaries, kid shows, sports, variety, and talk shows. Today French TV is a mix of public and commercial enterprise supported by advertising, government subsidies, or paid subscription. Ironically, the majority of the one-hour series on French airwaves is American-made. How is this possible? Commercial broadcasting in France is approximately three decades old. Advertising license fees are about half of what they are on U.S. networks. Cable, satellite, and digital service exist, but only the pay TV network Canal Plus produces original programming. Until recently, most primetime weekly “fiction” (scripted drama or comedy) series got a sixto eight-episode per-season order compared to our 13, 22, or 24. Some limited series get two to three 90-minute TV movies interspersed through the year. Some two-hour telefilms (known as “Unitaires”) also get a theatrical release. The majority of French fiction series never go beyond the first six to eight episodes. Since French is spoken in only a few countries abroad, these shows don’t export well. This means no incentive to produce more than eight episodes. A few hit shows, such as the police dramas Julie Lescaut and R.I.S.: Police Scientifique, return every year and sometimes get a larger order of 10 or 12 episodes—but these are the exceptions. This leaves much broadcast real estate to fill. Successful U.S.

series with 22 to 24 episodes easily cover the 10 p.m.-to-midnight block on all the French channels. British, Canadian, and German series fill some French timeslots, but the U.S. remains the undisputed supplier. We simply outproduce everyone in the number of episodes and in the genres the French want to watch. Voici les Differences

French viewers who say they prefer U.S. to French-made series cite better production values and faster pacing in storytelling and direction. Subtitles or dubbing don’t bother them. Except for nudity, French series can be quite conservative. Lower budgets in French productions don’t allow as much coverage in the filming or special effects. Casts are smaller and no French movie stars head up their own shows. Long scenes of dialogue between characters are common and feel distinctly European and stagey when compared to American narrative. The years and years and volume of U.S. series had an impact on French-made programs. Most noticeable is the change in the length of their dramas from the original 90 minutes to 52 minutes. (Most of our U.S.-made drama episodes are now 41 to 44 minutes long.) Now French TV comedies usually run 26 minutes. Daily soap operas are either 52 or 26 minutes long. Just as in the U.S., cop shows have always ruled French airwaves. Today, French policiers often have a procedural element that looks and feels like our crime procedurals. Ensemble casts are common in cop, lawyer, and doctor shows. French series led by women cops and judges are well-established. Diversity in casting is also improving, with even mixed-race romances and marriages onscreen. However, French society does not require its public or cultural figures to be the “heroes” that Americans expect in network shows. Cops, judges, lawyers, teachers are not always likable with a central flaw. Doctors are civil servants in France, not “saints” working 24/7 to save lives. Napoleonic Law does not presume innocence until proven guilty. Cops don’t read perps their Miranda Rights. And moral ambiguities abound in serious French dramas. A “network” show is often closer in tone to an American cable or pay-TV series. Advertisers don’t hold the same power and influence as they do in the U.S., but French shows must still earn enough ratings to get renewed. While U.S. shows mix comedy and drama in one-hour series, the French rarely cross the two. Dramedy is considered an “AngloSaxon” (U.S. or U.K.) entertainment idiom. A French 52-minute series can be serious drama (Braquo), family-friendly fare (Josephine, l’ange gardien), or light adult show (Alice Nevers, le juge est une femme). French comedy tends to be big and broad, which might explain why they revere Jerry Lewis. Dry, sardonic, or satirical humor is found in books, newspapers, magazines,and political cartoons. Some topical TV efforts like Les Guignols de l’info reAPRIL/MAY

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semble Comedy Central’s The Daily French TV professionals acknowledge that their don’t know what you’ll get. If the show is crap, you have to broadcast Show—performed by puppets. all six episodes of crap.” In French series, act breaks are One thing French writers, pronot well-defined by cliffhangers, industry is in crisis but argue that imitating ducers, and executives agree on is scene “buttons,” or dialogue zingers. Rhythm is not set by escalating American shows is not the answer. They point out that writing is the major weakness of their TV series. The big issue: conflict or a ticking clock. There money. Only 2 percent to 5 percent are no five breaks to accommodate commercials. Advertising plays in that an official French version of the franchise Law of the average French TV series budget is devoted to writing. In the long clumps at the beginning and end of the program, plus just one & Order: Criminal Intent (Paris: Inquete Criminelle) U.S., writing comprises 10 percent to 12 percent of a series’ total costs. break at the middle. If you ever Writing staffs, the backbone of tried to record French shows in the pre-DVR days, your efforts proved and an “unofficial” version of Grey’s Anatomy American TV series, exist on only a small number of French TV shows. maddening. Shows begin at odd times, like 6:25, 7:45, 8:35, or 9:55 (L’Hopital) turned out to be expensive experiments Known as l’atelier de scenarios (stup.m. rather than on the hour or dio of story), they were used on the half-hour. To the French, interruptcomedy Kaamelott, the WWII periing a show several times just to sell that did not translate into great success. od drama Un Village Francais, and more commercials is prostitution. the contemporary immigrant drama This is slowly changing, but not without serious cultural debate. Fortunes. Two writers’ rooms run simultaneously on the daily soap Plus Belle la Vie. Budget and European copyright laws make it difficult to hire a staff on all series. TV writing is largely What Do They Think of Us? freelance. It makes economic and production sense with only Opinion in the French TV community is divided regarding eight episodes. But as any TV writer knows, it can take five or American TV series. On the one hand, they praise our insix episodes before a new series truly hits its stride. Most French novation and perceived “freedom” to crossbreed genres and drama scripts are completed before shooting starts. The writers create new formats and concepts beyond the typical policier have moved on to their next jobs and don’t have the chance to and soaps. They marvel at our immense budgets for art dido rewrites on set. rection, casting, locations, and special effects. At the same The training of film and TV writers in France also lags behind time, some deride the predictable, formulaic, simplistic plots that of directors. France has a distinguished playwriting tradiof many U.S. shows. The “factory”-like system necessary to tion, but screenwriting was usually done by an auteur director crank out a 22-24-episode order year after year seems like a working alone or with another writer. The results can be brilvulgar tradeoff of industrial volume for artisanal care. liant or unbearably dull. Most French series don’t get to develop The money and manpower necessary to catch up with the writers from season-to-season. Even a returning series often American machine would require a huge philosophical shift starts over with a new group of writers each year. Quality can in French media. Should art run like a factory? Many French suffer. Nearly all French film schools offer courses or majors in TV professionals acknowledge that their industry is in crisis screenwriting, but only the Conservatoire Europeene d’Ecriture but argue that imitating American shows is not the answer. Audiovisuelle (CEEA) has programs specifically in the 52-minEven an official French version of the franchise Law & Order: ute or comedy formats. There, “story room” skills like pitching, Criminal Intent (Paris: Inquete Criminelle) and an “unoffipunch-up, rewrite, and critique are taught. This school is funded cial” version of Grey’s Anatomy (L’Hopital) turned out to be by the government and a consortium of French TV networks, expensive experiments that did not translate into great success. production companies, and writers’ unions. Frederic Krivine, former president of the Union-Guilde des Nobody gets rich writing for French TV. Their average script Scenaristes and creator of long-running cop series P.J. and Un Vilfees are on par with our WGA minimums for basic cable series. lage Francais, points out that with lower production budgets, a There are no “overall deals” and very little development money French “clone” of a U.S-style series is bound to look like a cheap to flesh out new series ideas. The position of creator/writer/proknock-off. If the original U.S. show airs on the same network that ducer showrunner is still rare. The auteur theory exists in TV week (or several times in a week), why would a viewer watch the only in that a creator or head writer often writes or co-writes all cheaper-looking French-made show? French writers must be able six to eight episodes. One director often directs all of a season’s to create their own new formats and genres, but these “must comshows. Everything is subject to network approvals. Good reviews pete with CSI on TF-1 and Desperate Housewives on M6.” from TV critics can bolster a series that receives only medium Krivine believes in the U.S. practice of making TV pilots. ratings. But great ratings won’t necessarily get you a bump in pay He says the French system of ordering six episodes means or a better production budget. you’re “broadcasting the prototype.” Without a pilot, “you 48 •

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24th Annual Les Experts: Miami

Meanwhile, viewers and advertisers vote with their eyeballs and wallets. The highest-rated series on French TV is CSI: Miami (Les Experts: Miami). It commands the biggest license fee of 2 million euros per episode and generates 6.98 million euros in advertising revenue. By comparison, the venerable Julie Lescaut costs 2.4 million euros per episode to produce and brings in 3 million euros of ad revenue. French producers and broadcasters are at a crossroads. In 2008, Sarkozy’s government initiated reforms for the “audio visual” and broadcast industries. These included financial incentives to produce more indigenous product plus a mandate to create product that will better sell abroad. French networks responded by ramping up their volume of original series. Arte greenlighted eight new series this year. Companies are seeking international partners for co-productions. Some of these efforts are English-language shows—acknowledging English as the lingua franca of the widest audience. Two new French series in English are in the pipeline, both headed by writer-producers with major U.S. credits: Tom Fontana (Homicide, Oz) is executive producer of The Borgias; Andre & Maria Jacquemetton (Mad Men) are the showrunners of Versailles. (Another series on the Borgias airs on Showtime but is produced by a U.K./Irish team headed by writer-director Neil Jordan.) The state-owned France Televisions (France 2, France 3, France 5 channels) will transform from a partially ad-supported network back to commercial-free public television. Funding to support it will come from new taxes on mobile phones, Internet providers, plus higher taxes on the commercial networks (TF1, Arte, M6, Canal +). These private networks will be allowed to sell more advertising time—up from the current six minutes per hour to nine. Whether these changes stimulate innovation or bring better opportunities for French writers remains to be seen. Until something spawns the first Golden Age of French television programming, they’ll be watching American shows.

2011 Nevada Film Office Screenwriting Competition

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Jerry Lewis, continued from page 41

drummer in a 36-piece orchestra. He was incredibly good, but his sense of humor and his ability to transmit that sense of humor was overwhelming. I sat him down one night at the Fontainebleau when I was writing The Bellboy and said, “Why don’t you be my intern?” I talked him into watching what I did— putting together the mindset that got me to finish the other 55 pages because when Bill came up one afternoon I was at 110. And I wasn’t writing by numbers, I was writing by material. I had 130 index cards on a cardboard 35-feet long, seven-feet wide. And I would take the Volkswagen joke from over there because it was jamming against a wonderful visual joke. So I took it out of reel eight and put it in reel two, and it worked like a son-of-a-bitch. It got funnier, I couldn’t understand it, but it got funnier than it was in reel eight. So Bill helped you with structure? No, he just watched what I did. In

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The Bellboy I used him in a cameo as a performer; he did an impression of Stan Laurel. Then I said, “When we wrap this up, I want you to work with me on Ladies Man.” When you wrote with him, did you work in the same room? Oh yeah, just like we’re sitting— either on my boat, in my office, my home, or in the car going to Palm Springs or Chicago. How is it you’re able to find humor in almost any slice of life? You better. Wouldn’t you like to find humor in the Holocaust? Do you know why it’s important? Because you mention it. Keep it alive, or it will happen again. Whether I’m right or wrong about that, I don’t know. [In 1972 Lewis became involved in a Holocaust film titled The Clown Who Cried, but the film was never released due to legal complications. Lewis directed, cowrote, and starred as a German clown

2011

who is imprisoned in a concentration camp.] The human condition is the best story we have. I’ve watched it. The sad thing for all of my peers is they never get out and see the people. The human condition is glorious, the most wonderful thing to take time to look at. I used to go to the corner of Trafalgar and Main [in London], sit in a limo with a driver and my camera, and shoot pictures of people waiting to cross the street. I would then take the photographs and write a quick adaptation of what I thought their work was. It wound up being the funniest crap I ever had in my life. I had a book of 87 people. I had laughed so hard at what the pictures were telling me to write. It’s important to be an observer. Yes! What would help students a lot is basic common sense. It’s not something we can find. There are no classes for this. The most critical element for the human being is common sense. It’s a gift, because it’s an attribute that

comes with genetics, or DNA, or the optic nerve. But if you got it, it opens doors and breaks down walls and introduces new methods of creating. Is there anything that you regret not having made? I turned down Some Like It Hot. I said, “Billy, if I put a dress on for an eight-week picture, you’d really see a schmuck. It wouldn’t serve you. I hate the idea. I’d give you performances that are so far less than what I’m capable of, I’ll fucking ruin your movie.” He said, “You’re crazy.” I said, “Let me be crazy.” That was the day I went from Jerry Lewis in the eyes of Billy Wilder, to Jerry Schmuck. From that point on when I saw him, Billy would call me “Mr. Schmuck.” You’re a busy man these days. Are you working on a screenplay? I have one going and to have had to stop killed me. I have seven. Six are done. I haven’t even discussed them. The six

have taken me since March 2004. I hate to leave a piece unwritten. I relook at the material and I’m so excited about it, because every date of every script oddly enough had about a seven-month differential. This one was January, and that one was July. But then I saw the writing was trashy a little on number four. So I put a red mark on number four and I want to re-examine what I did there. I’m sensitive to doing poor work. I’m supposed to do good work, so I’m conscious of bad work. Every good writer wants you to see his best side. He’s never going to show you the scratches or the X’s. You’re 85-years-old, where is all this energy coming from? When you hit 85, a unique development within the individual happens and it’s this: I start to tell people a joke, and to make the joke work, you embellish the beginning. I’ve been embellishing so much I’m forgetting the finish. So I’m starting to tell everybody the story from the end. The energy keeps

coming. I’m 85-years-old and I am on what is known as elation. You’ve said that a writer will tip his mitt and he can’t hide himself in his writing. What did you mean by that? A writer tips his mitt the moment he sits down. He lets everyone in the world know exactly where his head is. How much of yourself do you see in your writing? When I’m writing, I’m not nine. What I’m writing about is nine. Jerry’s nine—he’s never been any older. Jerry can do what a nine-year-old does. Jerry cares about humanity like a nine-yearold does. And Jerry’s charity and love for the human condition is so overpowering that it adjusts his head and his life. And I want everyone to have what I have. When did you first discover that you were funny? When the doctor hit me in the ass.

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place,” he says. “So it was pretty easy to see the next step should be getting the studio on board. The person who deserves the real credit is Dana Walden. She was the first studio exec to say ‘yes’ to New Voices, which gave Humanitas a powerful spring board to get more industry support.” Dana Walden at 20th Century Fox Television listened to Young’s expanded pitch: “You already know Humanitas. If and when I bring one of your overalls a project they love by one of our New Voices, or if I bring a ‘freeball’ with a great project, can I know that there are two blind scripts waiting for us at 20th?” And, as Levitan pointed out, Walden said yes and New Voices was off and running. Young then approached Jeff Gaspin at NBC—done! Looking at the list of Script Development Trustees (or, as Young refers to them, her bench), Nina Tassler and David Stapf of CBS viewed the project as a win-win for everyone. Soon Paul Lee at ABC, Sue Naegle at HBO, and Kevin

Beggs at Lionsgate were on board. What was now called the New Voices Initiative had the potential for 12 blind scripts to be written under the supervision of a Script Development Trustee. (John Landgraff at F/X recently came on board, making the blind script total 14.) The launch of the New Voices Initiative was announced on Deadline Hollywood. It works like this: An idea is pitched to a trustee, the trustee comes on board because he or she likes the pitch, and then it is presented to the studio. Upon approval, the studio allocates the blind script. Humanitas doesn’t bear the burden of financing the project, acting merely as matchmaker between the “New Voice” and the trustee. Several projects have already been greenlit to blind script: at CBS with Gary David Goldberg mentoring Neil Cohen; at ABC Christian Trokey is working under Marc Guggenheim’s supervision; and at 20th Ali LeRoi has partnered with Luisa Leschin, and Hart Hanson is supervising Will Pascoe. Tom Fontana is readying projects for both Jerome Hairston and ®

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Chris Caleo for presentation to NBC. LeRoi was the first trustee who attached to a project for the New Voices Initiative. LeRoi’s decision was intuitive: “I like her, and it seemed like she was a great person and it seemed like she had a good idea. So it was a little leap of faith for both of us to just kind of go, ‘I like you, you like me. Let’s see what we can do.’” Trustee Gary David Goldberg was very close to Father Kieser. Still, when Young initially approached Goldberg, he had mixed feelings. By his own admission, he’d left television years ago and had no interest in going back. Nevertheless, in the end, as he remarked, “If I don’t do this, then I’m shutting down an opportunity for a writer, and I wasn’t comfortable with me being the one to close that door if by participating, I could open it for somebody.” Fontana was immediately onboard with the New Voices Initiative and Young’s efforts. He was impressed with how she was able to secure the possibility of 14 blind scripts. “Name me a producer who has ever pulled that off? She has created a groundbreaking model for Humanitas—a nonprofit—by acting as a matchmaker and a launching pad in the for-profit world. And guess what? We are all enjoying the ride.” Fontana describes the ride: “Humanitas is not about who you know, but the words on the page. That is why the award is untarnished. You can’t buy the trophy. You can’t campaign for the votes. You have to earn the recognition from your writing. New Voices operates from the same mandate.” All sincerely hope that the New Voices Initiative opens up a new avenue for underrepresented writers. Goldberg notes, “There are some really, really good writers who are obviously being overlooked for reasons that have nothing to do with their talent level. And there’s a whole world there. There are 8 trillion channels. I mean, we should be able to make room.” Goldberg elaborates further: “In a way we need fresh eyes looking at the whole idea of network television right now. And that’s what we can get with what Cathleen has put together here.” Or, as LeRoi so aptly puts it, “If you end up with 10 more scripts from guys from Harvard, what’s the point of that? Those guys certainly have plenty of opportunities and entrees into the business. It’s not even necessarily ethnicity when you’re talking about New Voices. It’s more avenues. Where are the writers coming from? The Hollywood pipeline for success in the writing career is not what it used to be. So I think you just have to expand your horizons and look in different places and look to different people for the next story.” Act Three

Young has found her Act III. But television is no longer a work in three acts—try five. Without realizing it, she is well on her way to Act IV with an offshoot of the New Voices Initiative, her “10 to Watch.” Just as the trades highlight upcoming acting and directing talent, Young would like to do the same for new writers. “10 to Watch are gifted writers we want to shine a light on because we view them as the next generation of Humanitas winners,” she says. “And it’s not about who

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Tools, continued from page 15

flay off bones, Grazier said. In other words, impossible. “I thought for a minute, and I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to do it,’” Paglia remembers. “‘So how fast would he have to run to make it plausible for you to have your name on this episode?’ He’s, ‘Okay, roughly 587 miles per hour.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, we found the happy medium.’” Paglia worries that compromise might stick in Grazier’s side. “But we said, ‘We’re going to do this because we think it’s a hot, interesting story and we hope you’ll suspend your disbelief a bit.’ If we come up against something that’s just wrong, and so clearly just wrong that we will look foolish, we try to find a way to tell it right.” WRITING A BROADWAY Planning a seaMUSICAL OR PLAY? son finale, Paglia asked Grazier for Maybe I can help interesting visuals to accompany “Lee Johnson has the instincts of a a storyline about successful producer, and the courtly the reversal of the manner of a good psychiatrist.” Earth’s magnetic – John Patrick Shanley poles. The conCALL TO FIND OUT HOW versation led to Clifford Lee Johnson III hydrogen and ox347-229-7998 ygen atoms splitclj3@clj3.com ting, which in

turn led to the Eureka sheriff’s daughter diving into a swimming pool where remotely controlled experimental sensors implanted under her skin burst the water into flames. “It was one of those moments when I felt [both] the creative side of the writer and the scientific mind of the advisor,” says Paglia. But consulting isn’t always easy. “I never got any instruction: ‘Please tell us how lines 20 through 30 seem,’” says Caprica’s MacIver. “I always prefaced my contribution with, ‘I have no idea whether this is relevant to you. Do what you want.’” He remembers a writer calling him once about a plotpoint. “It was a bridge to jump over, because I was trying to understand what narrative goals he had and how I could help him render something realistic with regard to science. He was under a lot of time pressure, so we were scrambling. It wasn’t trivial to communicate, I must say.” Understanding that, the Science and Entertainment Exchange often facilitates at the meetings they arrange between scientists and TV and movie writers. “Both are very creative fields, but they’re creative in slightly different ways,” says former Exchange director Jennifer Ouellette, who believes the system works best when writers come in early in development—correcting misinformation late in the game can throw off an entire plot. Not that she’s rigid. “You’ve got to understand,” she says, “that in Hollywood, story comes first.”

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But bad sci-fi movies have handed down years of misinformation, bemoans Grazier, who hopes his consulting can help. And not just for the sake of science, but for the science of storytelling. He has taken four screenwriting courses, co-authored a book, The Science of Battlestar Galactica, and written pilots of his own. “The screenwriter tries to keep the audience engrossed in his or her vision, and when you make a technological gaffe there are some people who say, ‘Hey, not!’ Instantly they’re transformed from being immersed in your universe to a person sitting in a room in the 21st century watching TV. The goal is to do that as little as possible.” Like Paglia, Grazier agrees that stories are interesting when the people, as well as the scientific facts, seem real. Over his cell phone, he launches into an imitation of the once typical Hollywood mad scientist: “‘If vee use zese chemicals, vee vill get X,’” he lectures, assuming a heavy middle-European accent. “And there was always a nerdy guy in a lab coat with a hot daughter. Now, scientists are interesting people. They’re sometimes quirky, absolutely true. But some of them don’t seem all that abnormal.” Some scientists even have hot daughters. Some are sexy, as in CSI. And sometimes both apply: In Caprica, the scientist with the hot daughter was Eric Stoltz. For the upcoming pilot for Caprica’s sequel, Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, there’s no news yet about any scientist characters or their daughters—hot, nerdy, or otherwise. Take Five, continued from page 53

you know, or who your agent is: It’s about what’s on the page.” As for Act V? Humanitas has just optioned its first book: Why My Wife Thinks I’m an Idiot by Mike Greenberg. With the author writing the script, it has already been set up at ABC where an as-yet-to-be-named New Voices trustee will join the project. But working in Hollywood also requires connections. And Humanitas has that in abundance. “We are extremely pleased with the wonderful support the industry has given the Humanitas New Voices,” says Humanitas President John Wells, “which pairs gifted writers with our Humanitas trustees, who are among the most acclaimed and successful TV and film writers and producers working today.” “I have been involved with Humanitas for many, many years,” Fontana says. “What Cathleen has done is make us all see with new eyes. She has ushered in an exciting new era at a venerable Hollywood institution. While we will always honor the writers of today, now we can empower writers to tell the stories of tomorrow.” Reinvention in a three-act structure? Cathleen Young is the author of her own destiny and has found a way to supply Humanitas with the soldiers needed for her Trojan Horse; or as she puts it, “Humanitas: Changing the world one story at a time.” APRIL/MAY

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F A

Reality-television programs, which feature real people engaged in real activities rather than professional actors performing scripted scenes, are increasingly popular. These shows depict ordinary people competing in everything from singing and dancing to losing weight, or just living their everyday lives. Most people believe that the reality these shows portray is authentic, but they are being misled. How authentic can these shows be when producers design challenges for the participants and then editors alter filmed scenes? Do people benefit from forms of entertainment that show socalled reality, or are such forms of entertainment harmful?

Pencils Up! In the writing section of this year’s SAT test for college applicants, a controversial “prompt” on Reality TV (above) challenged students to develop an argument to support a position on the issue. “As a nation, we should do all we can to encourage students to become better writers,” explains College Board chief Laurence Bunin. “The ability to write is critical to compete and succeed in the 21st-century economy.” If you were taking the SAT test, how would you answer? We’ll reprint the most provocative, compelling submissions from WGA members in the next Written By. Send your submissions to WrittenBy@wga.org.