Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (40 page)

Wendy West: “I’ve been working in hour-long drama — I worked on some interesting shows that got cancelled, a medical show and a crime show. One was called
Gideon’s Crossing
and the other,
Line of Fire
. I never wrote crime in your class but that seems to be what I do. If there’s not a dead body I feel like something’s missing now. I think it’s interesting because you encouraged us to write from our heart and the business is just about writing what sells. I knew this guy from last year’s show and I got a meeting on a current show and it was between me and another person and he helped me get it. So I owe him — a lot.”

Gib Wallis: “Around three years ago the Mark Taper Forum was doing this thing, and I got tapped to do artistic response to the events of 9/11. I wrote a one-act play and that was cool because I always loved theatre. It was a 65-seat theatre and there were people sitting in the aisle. Then enough people began requesting plays for different things.

“Since I still have a day job, it’s been an interesting challenge to keep being inspired. When you’re in film school, you have great people around you to talk about story and character but when you go out, there are a lot of people who want to talk about selling things or setting things up. I’m a member of a playwrights group called Playwrights Six and, for me, to meet with people regularly to talk about the art — that was my favorite part of film school.”

Julia Swift: “Drew [Landis] and I have been together for eight years. We did a pilot with Regency and the WB based on a weird part of my life and that was very interesting and fun. When you write a pilot you have the flexibility and the salary, which is great. But writing my own life was very difficult because I had this strange life growing up that I’ve always tried to hide. We were at a meet-and-greet at CBS and the executive pushed me to [talk about more ideas]. So I told him about growing up in a mob family, half in Vegas and half in L.A.

“The story was about the year I went to college. My father turned my grandfather into the FBI and took off. I watch
The Sopranos
and it pisses me off because Tony is tough at work and nice at home, which is just wrong. It was interesting because we would be on the phone with network executives and the character’s name is Maia, but they would call her Julia. They brought on Carlton Cuse as a producer and we loved him, and he said to Drew, ‘Your assignment is to go home and get Julia drunk and ask her questions about her family.’ And we did! We got pages of stories that would blow you away. We gave it to Regency, and they loved the stories. But it ended up being too ‘complicated.’ The emotions weren’t all on the surface and Carlton and the studio wanted it to be more complicated, and the network wanted it more on the surface. So that was interesting, learning whose advice to take.

“Now we’re pitching a new pilot, more drama, and we have a studio that wants to go out with us, but the executive called us and he might be moving, so who knows? As long as you keep those relationships you can move with them, but it’s difficult.”

Andrew Landis: “What makes our partnership work is being able to communicate honestly five or ten times a day. It’s better than working alone, to get someone else’s eyes to see what I don’t. Having a strong partnership puts everything in perspective.”

Kelly Souders: “Three years ago was right before
Smallville
so I was writing grants for the Science Center and I didn’t have a car.”

Brian Peterson: “We’d partnered up and were working on these pilots. I’d taken a job transcribing EcoChallenge tapes. Then in one year we got a pilot with Fox and were on staff on
Smallville
. It was interesting because which do you take — the pilot or the staff — and we really debated that. “After my writing credit on
But I’m a Cheerleader
, I needed to go into meetings with ideas. I got a couple of rewrites but then we had to start over in TV. It’s great, though, because we learned as much in working in TV as we learned in film school.”

Kelly: “In your class we really learned to write a scene, the shape of it, when to come in, and that we use everyday.”

Brian: “The work-shopping we did in class, learning what notes to take and what not to take, was great.”

Kelly: “On
Smallville
right now, we’re rewriting other writers, dealing with production, writing our own scripts, dealing with the scheduling. People in the room tend to either be really good at story or really good at character. For us, we make a great team, but it’s funny because our strengths and weaknesses are similar. For us, the story is always a weak point and, over the last three years on the show, we’ve really learned a lot.”

Brian: “Being on a staff we have such a great group of mentors, you have a built in support group, we know about each other’s lives.”

Kelly: “It makes a big difference because we landed on a show where the people above us are really smart. We’d been working together for years but on our own time so it was more relaxed and we weren’t depending on each other to pay our bills. Suddenly to have that switch in 24 hours was a struggle, our first couple of days on that show. The end of the first day, Brian was ready to lop off my head and, at the end of the second, I was ready to lop off his. Now, after work we’ll go to dinner or to a play so we’re able to separate the friendship from the work relationship.”

I asked a question for entire table: If you could talk to your own young self at USC, what advice would you give?

Eric: “Get a day job because it takes forever to earn a living, but there will be breaks. A job will be a financial and psychological safety net. It gives you that freedom to figure out what you’re doing without having your life depend on it.”

Kelly: “Wendy gave me a magnet, ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’ For me, I think this is a longevity race. If you can keep at it and hang in there, then do it.”

Brian: “Have samples in a lot of different genres because people like to read different shows. Keep updating, keep going. Just as soon as someone says there’s an opportunity, you can’t wait a week or two weeks, you have to give them a script.”

Drew: “You have to network a lot more than you’re comfortable with. You really have to force yourself when you’re done with your writing to meet people. Your agent can only do so much, and a lot of the jobs come from what you hear.”

Eric: “Get a job on a show as an assistant. Just get in that environment, there are so many stories you hear of a writer’s assistant pitching an idea and the show using it.”

Kelly: “There are two freelance episodes we have a year and we give them to the assistants.”

Wendy: “My advice: Keep writing. The business has changed; they want to know what’s out of the box. It wasn’t that way when we were getting out of school. I got a job off a short story — it’s crazy. Also, it’s important to be in a writing group. I think those people who didn’t stay in a group just fell out of writing. It’s really hard to get yourself pumped up, but having a place where you have to produce every week or two weeks is valuable.”

Julia: “We were taught in school to write what we love and we came out thinking we’re going to write what we love but have some action in there. You can write a genre that’s not your dream genre but infuse that with you and the marketplace will respond because it has that bit of whatever makes you different.”

Wendy: “One of the things that I’m constantly reminded of is that this town is run on passion, which is great. But when we send out scripts, people are so afraid that they’re going to choose something that they’ll get fired over, or that the advertisers are going to pull the show. You have to wind through so many obstacles until you get to the final piece and then that’s pushed to the middle ground.”

Julia: “I think that as this generation raised on HBO grows, then something has to change because they won’t want to go back to that middle ground.”

Brian: “As you mature into the industry, you realize the venues that are appropriate for your work. Every major studio wants their Emmys and Oscars so they will support certain producers. So there is a chance to be an artist, but you really have to focus on it.”

F
OURTEEN
Y
EARS
A
FTER
G
RADUATING

Hard to believe — in 2011, fourteen years will have elapsed since these writers went out into the industry, hopeful and scared. Now everyone was so busy we couldn’t find a time when we all could get together, so we gathered at my house without Brian Peterson, though he was represented by his producing partner, Kelly Souders.

Some of the most revealing insights came privately after the tape was off. Wendy West had been nominated for an Emmy in 2010, and she told me her “arm candy” (her dates) for the Emmy Awards were her parents. Gib Wallis asked me to urge the readers not to become isolated. Eric Trueheart said he’s making the transition to hour-long this year. “I’m getting good responses to my spec pilot and my manager is sending my specs out to agents hoping to get someone in time for staffing season. So it seems after all these years of weirdness, I’m finally ending up where everyone else started ages ago.”

Kelly worried that her show’s budget would be mentioned in the book. Of them all, she seemed to have changed the most. As showrunner/executive producer of
Smallville
(along with Brian), capping nine years on that show, she juggles huge responsibilities at work, two children at home, and a house remodel. Though she said she was stressed, she exuded executive capability, the kind of seasoned professionalism achieved at high levels in a career. But when I looked back to her comments years ago, Kelly was the one who asserted about a feature script she’d written, “Every meeting I had on it was about toning it down. I’m not going to tone it down … You start getting protective of what kind of work you want to do.” And yet she has risen to a level where she scarcely has time to write at all.

Funny thing, she and Brian had just sold a pilot back in 2000, before they started on
Smallville
, and she told the group at that time, “We’d love to be in the situation to hire everybody at the table.” Well, she did hire Julia Swift and Drew Landis, sitting at the table smiling today.

Drew had also changed, it seemed to me. In his school days I thought of him as reserved and reticent to speak much about his personal life. Now he’d grown in confidence and this day he told us he was celebrating his second anniversary with his partner, since they’d been able to marry when same-sex weddings became legal in California. That’s an announcement we wouldn’t have heard fourteen years ago.

Former students 2010

Former students 2010

Gib, who always had a ready laugh, seemed to be carrying the weight of the world as a caregiver for his father. Back when they were recent graduates, their burdens were about getting jobs to pay student loans; life hadn’t quite happened yet.

Wendy seemed to have changed the least, though she’s now co-executive producer at
Dexter
, a highly regarded position earned through years of experience. I guess she’s one of those people with a portrait in the attic that’s getting old. She seems to be having fun as a writer (as does Julia) and I think that may be one reason they’ve been so welcomed onto writing staffs. Readers, that’s a tip for you.

I asked Kelly what has changed from when she was a writer on
Smallville
to now when she’s running the show, and also how she works with other writers.

Kelly: “The main difference is now writing is only about 15% of what I do. I miss it. That’s what I got into this for. I enjoy the other challenges but I do miss writing. That’s kind of common for the job — it’s much more about budgets and management, a lot of phone calls.

“The way our show works — a group of writers work together to break a story and do the rough outline and somebody goes off and writes it. In some shows writers go off to break stories by themselves, but we keep it together in the group. Multiple minds are better than one mind. It’s a very traditional writers room.”

I asked how Julia and Drew came on the show — was it their relationship from school? Kelly said no, “They had to submit a script. On our show, when all the submissions come in we take the front page off and put numbers on them and give them to a couple of people. At least two people read every script. The ones who get a plus end up on our desk and we actually read without knowing who it is. To me, there’s so much pressure from agents calling to say please put this person’s script at the top. That system didn’t work well for us. So we came up with this idea of anonymous reads.