I go out for drinks with Ted, eat with the director and Carol Barbee, and talk with CBS and Paramount executives who are being sent by headquarters to see how the shoot is progressing.
Parts of the pilot shoot go well, but others do not. The problem is not cast or crew, but locations. The sites we're shooting at are simply not very high tech. The hospital is a small, now closed community hospital a short drive from Pittsburgh. The interior scenes simply don't look very cutting edge. It's clear that the local crew, however eager to help, sometimes slows things down.
One scene involves an exterior shot at an airport at night. We have a rainmakerâa fire truck with two big wind machines. We're going to duplicate a hurricane. The problem is, it's already raining hard. It's March in Pittsburgh, and it's cold. One of the local wind machines, which we need for the shot, won't start. No wind, no hurricane. Time after time, the crew tries to start the thing. It nearly catches, and then dies. It's a giant fan the size of a truck, and everyone on set is paying attention to its troubles. I can smell the starter fluid they're spraying into the carburetor of the machine's old engine. Finally, after dozens of tries, the old engine kicks into life. The whole set erupts in a cheer. It's nice, but we're two hours behind schedule. I calculate the cost in my head, just like an accountant is doing back in Hollywood. More than a hundred crew, paid overtime, for a couple of extra hours. It's a $10,000 delay, and it's because some old engine wouldn't start.
I fly back to USC, tired and thrilled. In a mere six weeks, I'll be graduating. My goal is simply to get a passing grade in each class. I've missed some school, but I've got a heck of an excuse. David Howard, my writing instructor in the scene-crafting class and the author of several bestselling books on screenwriting, chides me for missing class: “Are you saying a pilot shoot is more important than here?” He's kidding, of course. Howard tells me the scribe of THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, Amanda Silver, was one of his first writing students. I tell him a few tales about the pilot. Jack Epps, the guy who first heard my pitch, is also interested in finding out more about my adventures. When the pilot was announced, Jack was one of the first to write me a very nice email congratulating me on the good news. I'm now part of the inner circle on campus. I sit in Epps' office, and he gives me advice on navigating Hollywood. Callaway, who is thrilled with the status of THREE RIVERS, is just a phone call away. Howard, the screenwriting guru, is happy to spend time talking scriptwriting.
It's a happy time and a relaxed time. It's the first time in film school that I have time to shoot the breeze for an hour and not worry about it.
Meanwhile, Barbee is editing THREE RIVERS. We'll find out in May if we get chosen to be developed into a series. For whatever reason, and I can't explain it, I'm less nervous and worried about going to series than I was about getting a pilot made. My hope originally was just to get a pilot. Once that happened, I'm in uncharted water. A series? With my name in the credits? It's just too difficult to comprehend.
Graduation is approaching, and the networks are announcing the new fall schedules at the same time. Like having a stroke and have plumbing pipes burst on the same day, the timing is too clever by half. I'll get my MFA and find out whether my television show goes on the air all within the same week.
The events become a bit overwhelming. As a result, I relax. My mom and dad and Julie and Lara and Maria and Sophia all fly out for graduation. Carl and Irene host us all. I rent a big SUV that can carry nine passengers. We drive to USC for the graduation ceremony at the Shrine. It's hot and crowded and my kids are bored. They listen to speeches by screenwriter and GREY'S ANATOMY creator Shonda Rhimes (the very woman I dissed in my first TV pitch when Jack Epps was filling in for Callaway, a fact I feel bad about as I listen to her very compelling speech) and Laura Ziskin, the big-shot film producer. My kids have no idea who these people are. Then the students get to march across the stage. The announcer is an administrator at the film school with whom I've become friends. He's an opera singer by night, a college administrator by day, and he's got a deep, resonant voice. As I walk onstage, I tell him to say my name really slowly. He does it. “Steve Booooooooooooooman!” He sounds like a professional wrestling announcer. The crowd laughs. My kids think it's very funny. I get a big hug from several faculty, and afterward we take pictures in a sweaty mass and hug classmates and mill in the hot sunlight until my kids can't take another minute of it. So we go.
That night, Carl and Irene, even after putting me up in their house for two-and-a-half years, take us all out to dinner. We go to Cal Tech, where Carl has faculty privileges. The campus has a gorgeous private dining room, exceptionally formal. We have a huge dinner, course after course. It's very expensive. When we finish, I slip out and talk to the manager. I want to pick up the tab, but the manager says, “That's not possible. Only members of the club can sign for meals.” When I come back to the table, Carl is smiling triumphantly. He's paid the bill already. He knows what I was trying to do. I tried to outsmart the rocket scientist and failed.
During this time, I'm waiting for a call from Ted. We could get early word any minute about the fate of THREE RIVERS. It's Friday. Network announcements are in New York during the coming week, but early word leaks out before that. Shows that are picked get the green light to hire staff, setting off a mad dash of musical chairs among writers looking for a gig.
Saturday morning, I'm up at six to shuttle my family back to LAX. I need to clean my belongings out from Carl and Irene's house. Whatever happens in the future, it won't be the same arrangement I've been enjoying. At midafternoon, my old pal Tom is flying in. I need to move my stuff back to Minnesota and wait for word on the future of THREE RIVERS. I figure being on the road will be helpful. Anything is better than just sitting around in L.A. being nervous. Tom has agreed to join me for a road trip, just like old times. Movement is good. I won't be in New York; that's for the network brass.
Tom entertains Carl and Irene while I pack. Carl and Irene look sad. They've enjoyed my constant stories, my late-night comings, and my early-morning goings. Since I arrived on their doorstep, they've clucked over me and fed me. Now I'm packing up the Pontiac. Film school is done.
At 6
P.M.
, I'm ready. Tom and I are heading to Vegas for the night. After that, we're planning to travel through the high country of Colorado on our way home. I give Carl and Irene a big hug, and tell them I'll see them again soon. Tom takes some pictures of us to record the moment. Then Tom and I get in my car and drive away.
We don't talk much on the drive to Vegas, just listen to some tunes from his iPod. The sun is setting behind us as we cruise down the highway. The future will be very different for me, whatever happens. That's the only thing I know.
We drive into Vegas in the dark. It's always beautiful at night. It's a cliché, I know, but coming across the desert in the dark and seeing the brightness of Las Vegas is simply beautiful.
The recession of 2009 is in full bloom, so the hotels are pretty quiet. Tom and I pull onto the strip. We're going to stay at the Monte Carlo. It's a discount hotel on the strip, big and cheap, and I have a hunch no real high-rollers stay there. Years earlier on a cross-country road trip, Tom and I had stayed there and checked in behind a huge woman with a cigarette burning in her mouth who demanded to stay on the thirty-first floor. It became one of our inside jokes. After that, we'd adopt a low smoker's growl and say, “When you want to stay in a real classy place, make sure it's the thirty-first floor of the Monte Carlo.”
Now we're going to get a room. It's going to have to be an upper floor, of course. I pull into the parking lot. It's hot in the dark night. Tom and I get out and stretch. My phone rings. It's Ted. He's short and sweet: CBS is going to order thirteen episodes of THREE RIVERS.
I don't know what to do, in all honesty. Tom and I get our bags and walk toward the entrance of the Monte Carlo. It's about 11
P.M.
I'd graduated from USC the day before. Tonight I've learned news that will put a lot of money into my bank account, more than enough to cover the costs of going to film school. I've just done what no other student at USC has ever done while in film school.
When we stand at the check-in counter, Tom tells the woman that we'd like to stay on the thirty-first floor or higher. She nods blankly. “I should tell you, my friend here just sold a TV show,” he says. “To CBS. It's going to be on your television. You can watch it.” She nods again. Her blank expression doesn't change. She gives us a room on the fourteenth floor.
Film is a funny thing.
It's all based on tricking the mind to think that a series of static images, if they are shown at twenty-four frames per second, are actually moving. They are not. They are just still pictures, frozen in time. Only when they are put in motion do the pictures come to life.
A few days after the network's pickup of THREE RIVERS was announced at a big splashy event for the media in New York and lots of stories were being written about it, I took Lara out of school for a day and we drove to a nice dog breeder far outside Minneapolis. I had promised the kids we'd get a dog when I finished film school. Lara picked a cuddly and oh-so-cute brown puppy that slept in her arms like a baby. We bought the pup, and it slept in her arms for the entire two-hour drive back home.
THREE RIVERS premiered in October 2009. It was scheduled on Sunday nights, 9
P.M.
Eastern, 8
P.M.
Central, following 60 MINUTES and THE AMAZING RACE. It was a hugely high-profile spot. Before THREE RIVERS hit the air, the critics' reviews were mixed. Some liked the show a lot; some were dismissive. The good news is that more than nine million people tuned in for the premiere. The bad news is that CBS expects its shows to have more than nine million viewers. On another network, those numbers might mean success. But CBS is the No. 1 network and, like playing for the Yankees, it's put up or shut up.
Those of us with our names on the show endured a roller-coaster ride. The slim ratings dropped more in the second week but then held steady and even crept up a bit. There was the hope, however little, that the ratings would climb more. They didn't. To be fair, our competition was brutal. We were against DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES on ABC and NFL SUNDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL on NBC, two highly rated shows. Overruns from Sunday-afternoon CBS football games meant we were often airing late in major markets. In addition, the network wanted the lead surgeons all to be heroic. I had originally pitched the show to be darker. I felt it would have been stronger with more conflict between the transplant surgeons, but that's Monday-morning quarterbacking. Whatever the reason, we were consistently at the bottom of the rankings.
The week after Thanksgiving, CBS announced it was pulling THREE RIVERS off the air. For two sweet months, I'd had my name on the front of a show on television. Then it was over, mostly. The news sucked, but because the entire journey up to that point had been such an unexpected gift, I didn't cry any tears. And with our ratings it wasn't a shock. Thankfully, CBS kept shooting the entire slate of episodes, which they then ran in the summer of 2010, when fewer people watch TV. The good news is I got paid very well, and I got to put on my résumé the fact I had a show on the air from 2009 to 2010. It's right there on IMDb.com. Looking back, the amount of toil and effort that went into creating this show was astounding. Many very talented people worked extremely hard on THREE RIVERS. The set itself was huge. Paramount knocked out the walls of two adjoining soundstages and built a connecting hallway between them to give us extra space. The whole enterprise was breathtaking in its scale. It was like building a warship, which then sails out of the harbor all proud and sparkling clean . . . and is promptly sunk in battle, to the dismay of everyone onshore.
The transplant community loved the show, and the money was very nice indeed. Julie and I paid professionals to landscape our backyard that summer and I didn't have to lift a shovel. Julie bought some furniture. We paid off debts. I acted like a Hollywood knucklehead and bought a shiny new sedan with a 415 hp V8 and a stick shift that was, fittingly, one of the last Pontiacs ever made before GM killed it off, too.
The experience was worth more than the money, by far. I met and worked with some exceptionally talented people. I learned a whole lot about how television networks really work. I have great contacts and good friends. The entire experience was also remarkable for what it did to my time in graduate school. For a year, I was the belle of the ball at USC, and it opened doors and helped me meet people I never would have met had I not gotten so lucky.
THREE RIVERS is now history, forgotten by most people like yesterday's newspaper. But I'm occasionally reminded of the reach of one short-lived television show. I've heard many secondhand stories of people being receptive to organ donation because of THREE RIVERS. After the series aired, the organization Donate Life America and pharmaceutical maker Astellas conducted a nationwide survey and found a 6 percent jump in adults' willingness to register as organ donors, something they attributed to THREE RIVERS.
And I just got an email from a friend in Japan who is watching rebroadcasts of the show there, a year after it went off the air in the United States. Meanwhile, the star of our show, Alex O'Loughlin, became the leading man in CBS' very popular remake of HAWAII FIVE-O.
For me, life has only gotten better. I'm developing a new television show, and writing more stories, and I'm doing them with people I once only dreamed of working with, so keep your eyes peeled for more details. My family is doing terrifically, and my health is good, as is Julie's, thank you very much. My brain functions fine. I've had zero stroke-related issues, knock on wood. I take my blood thinners every day and I'm on a first-name basis with the nurses in the blood-draw lab. But I haven't slowed down. I still shave with a razor blade, I still use a firm toothbrush, I haven't given away my sharp tools, and I still water-ski often and hard; when I recently crashed and cartwheeled across the water going in the neighborhood of fifty miles per hour, I surfaced, made certain my limbs were still attached and my ribs weren't broken, and I took another run. Other than a nice big black-and-blue bruise on my rump, it was all good. So not much has changed in my life.