No Meaner Place

January 27, 2010

“Self-love is the instrument of our preservation.” Voltaire

Filed under: Conversations With, Feature Films, Lemmons — Tags: , , , , , — Neely Swanson @ 10:34 am

Eight Pieces for Josette by Kasi Lemmons

What: Saul Ressnicoff, one of the world’s great concert pianists led a conflicted life, one that his neglected but devoted daughter Edie challenges herself to unravel after his sudden death on stage during an encore at Carnegie Hall.

Who: Saul’s final choice of music for his encore at what would turn out to be his very last concert was a birthday present for his daughter and archivist Edie, 30.  Lyrical and sad, Edie is transported by a piece that she is unfamiliar with; she is unable to ask Saul about it for he has a heart attack on stage and dies.  At his funeral Edie spies a mysterious, beautiful black woman who disappears almost as quickly as she is noticed.  Soon after, Edie and her mother Lillian are informed by the family attorneys of a codicil to Saul’s will; a provision that bequeaths a set of music entitled “Eight Pieces for Josette” to a young woman, Sunday Eubanks, in New Orleans. This is a composition heretofore unknown by Edie and both the discovery of the music and the mystery of the bequest upsets Edie’s world enormously; as her father’s archivist, the only role in his life he allowed her, she had been certain that she knew all of his work. Upon further investigation, Edie discovers an unfinished letter among her father’s possessions:

Dear Sunny, we’ve come to a dangerous place.  I must put an end to this self-indulgent, wretched charade before it’s too late.  It’s not fair to you.  It’s not fair to my daughter.  Let me explain…

She also finds a handwritten manuscript entitled “The Josette Variations,” one of which she recognizes as the encore he was playing at the concert; wedged within the manuscript is a telegram and faded photograph. The photo is of a theatrically beautiful woman with dramatically white skin; the telegram reads:

Thursday the thirtieth – the evening bells – I’ll be waiting – Josette.

Edie sets out on a path of discovery and against all advice, she takes off for New Orleans to find out why her father would will something so valuable to the mysterious Sunday (Sunny) Eubanks, a woman she finds singing in a jazz club. Edie is determined both to discover her father’s relationship with Sunny and to prevent her from gaining control of the music manuscript.

Sunny, the mystery woman at the funeral, is no pushover and lets Edie know in no uncertain terms that she will fight.  Edie sends Sunny the manuscript, but also, discovering that her father had paid the rent on Sunny’s jazz club, immediately stops payment.  Still, Sunny will not give up and, upon Edie’s return trip to New Orleans, Edie discovers that, contrary to her previous belief, Sunny was not her father’s mistress; Edie decides she must dig deeper, gradually bonding with Sunny in the search for her connection to Saul and the elusive Josette; a trip that eventually takes them both to Paris.

No Meaner Place: In this feature film script, Lemmons has found a perfect mix of romanticism, character growth, and atmosphere traveling from the stage of Carnegie Hall to a sophisticated flat in Manhattan; from the French Quarter (written pre-Katrina) in New Orleans to Montmartre in Paris with classical music and jazz as a background.  Although it is apparent all too soon what the relationship between the girls is, it is the path of discovery that both travel that widens the sphere of this story and the layers of hardness and hurt that are gradually peeled revealing hidden beauty.  Their biological relationship is less important than the truths both eventually uncover about and within themselves.  The journey is the message and it is a journey well worth taking.

From a studio standpoint, and this was a script “in development” at Searchlight (where it should have found a perfect home if they had ever put it into active development) after being in turnaround from Warner Brothers, this is a small movie, very much an independent in a shrinking independent world.  Though the “independent” movie is becoming increasingly rare and a tough sell at a large or even midsize studio, this story has the possibility of expanding from the art house niche as it is both a self discovery “romance” and buddy road pic.  Lamentably it is a marketer’s world and this will hinge on the poster, but within the several themes, a strong “poster” and message will emerge.  Further, despite the locations, this would not be an expensive film to make, as I’m sure Lemmons has already outlined in her many dealings with both studios.  Her experience as writer/director on “Eve’s Bayou” and “Talk to Me” show that she is highly skilled at economically produced, well developed character films.

Life Lessons for Writers:  There is no expiration date in the features world, just a need for enormous patience and determination.

Conversation with the Writer:

Neely: I fell in love with your storytelling with “Eve’s Bayou” and have to admit that I’m slightly intimidated because there’s already a lot out there on you.  You started as an actress and have some impressive credits.  Do you still take acting jobs or are you now permanently behind the camera?

Kasi: I’m pretty much permanently behind the camera.  I’d take an acting job if a friend offered it or I was directing something and I thought I was perfect for the role.

Neely: Is there anything you would have liked to have done…a role that you’d like to have played?

Kasi: I don’t think about that anymore.  I just don’t think about being in front of the camera.  But I still act – I act out all the roles I write, I just act them out inside myself when I’m writing.  It’s part of my writing process.  Acting was my first love.  Now I get that emotional release when I’m writing characters.  As a director, I’m passionate about actors.

Neely: I was immediately intrigued when I saw that you were born in St. Louis, had roots in Louisiana and then moved to Boston.  We spent 10 years in St. Louis after college (Washington University) and my husband’s best friend Fred grew up in St. Louis and his wife, my best friend, had roots in Louisiana.  African American, they lived through segregation and desegregation in both locations.  As a child in St. Louis you would still have been living at the tail end of that era and moving to Boston wouldn’t have been a lot better because they had all those South Boston busing riots in the 70s.  What do you remember of your childhood in all three places?

Kasi: I feel as if I grew up in a place that would be called St. Louis Tuskegee, Alabama because I spent an extended amount of time with my grandmother in Alabama.  In St. Louis I was surrounded by black society and was really unaware of race in any distinct manner. My mother was a psychologist, she got her Master’s at Washington University, and my father was a biology teacher. That all changed when I moved to Boston with my mother after my parents’ divorce.  I remember the first time racism was mentioned was when my mother, who was going to Harvard for a PhD, tried to get an apartment in Boston and felt that they were using unfair housing practices to keep us out. I was the only black girl in my elementary school and it’s there that I had my first encounter with racism.  I had to fight it everyday. Going from no experience with racism in the cloistered St. Louis society to racism in Boston was shocking.  I ended up loving Boston, though, because my mother was much happier and I went to an incredible high school, Commonwealth, and made lots of life-long friends. I still feel very close to Boston; maybe because I had to fight so hard.

Neely: You discovered acting at the Boston Children’s Theater after moving to Boston.  Did it lead to a professional acting career or did that come later?

Kasi: I discovered a love of performing and became myself there.  My first job came about because of the Boston Children’s Theater when an agency called the theater on behalf of a local TV show.  They were looking for someone to play the first child to integrate a classroom in a daytime courtroom drama called “You’ve Got a Right.”  It was my first experience auditioning and I got the role.

Neely: You started out at NYU/Tisch and transferred to UCLA where you majored in history.  Has that background in history informed your work? Any particular time period of history?

Kasi: I left Tisch for UCLA because I wasn’t yet done with academics.  I was interested in history, which continues to inform my work as a writer.  I studied the French Revolution.  I was fascinated by the bloodiness of it; the storming of the Bastille; the massacres, the aftermath.  It wasn’t tidy.  There were waves of execution; it was horrible and bloody and righteous.  I then went back to New York on a grant to study at the Alvin Ailey School.  It was fabulous; I danced all day.  Ailey had a big impact on me.  I gained a huge appreciation for the aesthetics.  I was moved by the aspect of the beauty and the fleeting nature of it – using the body to make art; it truly shaped my aesthetic view of the world.

I continued acting in commercials and little theater before going back to school in film at the New School for Social Research.  I went there with an interest in directing and cinematography.  I was interested in the image.  I wanted to make documentaries but my first film broke the rules because I used a fictional voice-over.  This was the first time where I saw myself as a filmmaker, and so did others.  The Black Filmmaker Foundation gave me a screening of my first film.  I believe it was part of a series of shorts, and significant members of the film community attended.  Spike Lee was there.  After that, Spike would always ask me, “When are you going to do your your feature?”

All this time I continued acting to support myself and I started to get more important roles in television and the theater.  I got my supporting role in “Silence of the Lambs” when I was attending film school.

Neely: At what point did you start viewing yourself as a writer?

Kasi: I guess after film school.  I was writing the whole time. I wrote plays based on personal experience and I would write scenes for my friends to do in acting class.  A turning point occurred when I auditioned for the Cosby show. Boldly, I asked him to look at the film I had made.  He wasn’t interested but he did say he was looking for writers.  I immediately said “I’m a writer!” He gave me a week to write a scene between a married couple – he doesn’t want a kid; she does and she doesn’t know how to tell him she’s pregnant. Excited, I returned to give him my scene and he had completely forgotten about it, he wasn’t even there and had to be tracked down.  He told me to give it to his associate Matt Robinson who read it and recommended me.  On the basis of that scene I was hired by Cosby to work on a screenplay for him with two other playwrights, P.J. Gibson and Lee Harkens.  It was an incredible educational experience and Bill Cosby became a true mentor to me.

Neely: Were you tempted to act in “Eve’s Bayou?”  Which role would it have been?

Kasi: I wrote “Eve’s Bayou” for myself.  It was actually a combination of short stories that I had written that kind of coalesced into a story that kept telling itself in my head, complete with flashes of lightning.  When I started writing it, I didn’t know whether it was a novel, a play or a screenplay.  When I realized it was a screenplay, I realized I was writing the role of Mozelle for myself, figuring one day when I was old enough and my dresses were getting a little tight I’d be ready and I’d find someone to make the film and I’d play Mozelle.

Neely: How did you get the money for “Eve’s Bayou” and how long did it take – what was the process? Can that same process work for “Josette?”

Kasi: I wrote it and then showed it to Vondie (note: Kasi is married to the actor Vondie Curtis Hall) who was so moved that he insisted that I show it to my acting agent, who in turn gave it to Frank Wuliger who became my writing agent.  Frank thought it was doable so we started looking for a director to attach to it.  Frank also found me work as a writer and I wrote whole scripts in between my various writing jobs.  Then on the morning of my birthday I woke and I realized that I needed to direct it because I had written a delicate piece of material and the best way to protect it was to do it myself.

Once I decided to direct it, Frank hooked me up with Cotty Chubb (of the insurance family).  Cotty encouraged me to direct a short film called “Dr. Hugo” to show what I was trying to do, which he and Frank personally co-financed.  “Dr. Hugo” was festivaled and is on the DVD of “Eve’s Bayou.”  In “Dr. Hugo,” Vondie played a sexy doctor who pays a house call.  While a child waits outside, the doctor seduces the patient, the child’s mother. It functioned sort of like a pilot for “Eve’s Bayou” and was integral in getting me the directing job.  People really responded.  In going for financing we sent around a package that included the short film and the “Eve’s Bayou” script.  Sam Jackson read the script and wanted to be that sexy doctor.  When Sam came on board, he was the ammunition to get Tri Mark to make the film.

Neely: I ask because it seems as if the environment has changed considerably in the case of independent features.  “Eve’s Bayou” successfully crossed over to all audiences and age groups because of its universal family function/dysfunction dynamic. “Eight Pieces for Josette” is almost mainstream compared to the quasi spiritual voodoo that rests at the soul of “Eve’s Bayou,” and yet I suspect that finding the financing and distribution for this beautiful film has been more difficult.

Kasi: It has been really difficult.  It would take the right combination of actresses.  So many have expressed a deep love for the script but I still can’t get it made.  I wanted Halle Berry to do it.  I could also imagine Thandie (Newton) and Nicole Kidman; or Halle and Naomi Watts; Halle and Julianne Moore.  It was a reflection on a different time. I thought it would be interesting to have two women who were paralyzed by not knowing their parents’ history.  Josette is set in the present, but circumstances cause the two leads to reflect on the generation before, the generation of their parents, which at the time I wrote it was the late sixties. A very romantic era in Paris.  As time went by, I realized it would have to be the seventies.  That’s cool too.  I always imagined the actresses in their thirties, so that would work.  But if I don’t get the film made soon, then they’re going to be reflecting back on the eighties. I suppose the eighties in Paris were romantic…but it’s not the same.  So I need to get it made soon.

Neely: I loved your view of Paris.  I so love Paris, its history, its warmth, its people (yes, I did say that), its language, its everything.  I’d kill to work there on location someday.  You know the character of Coco de Crécy in “Eight Pieces for Josette” triggered memories.  There was a star dancer/singer in one of the famous Parisian music halls in the 70s who was called the “new Josephine Baker” and it drove me crazy trying to remember who she was.  I did everything I could think of; finally I emailed a French cousin and she did the research (because she couldn’t remember either) and came up with the name.  It was Lisette Malidor.  She was from Martinique and she was discovered selling programs at the Casino de Paris by the famous French choreographer Roland Petit.  He created the show at the Casino de Paris where his wife Zizi Jeanmaire, a famous ballerina, was headlining and he put Lisette in the chorus.  Within a couple of years she replaced Zizi and was the toast of Paris, eventually headlining also at the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère.  Performing nude bothered her at the beginning but she eventually came to understand this quote from Josephine Baker, “I wasn’t really naked. I simply didn’t have any clothes on.”

Kasi: I had never heard of her until you sent me the information!

Neely: One of the things I like best about your stories is the palpable atmosphere.  In “Eve’s Bayou” one could feel the thickness and humidity.  In “Eight Pieces for Josette” it starts out chilly in the rarified and sterile air of an aesthete Manhattan contrasted with raucous, disheveled and smoky New Orleans, the contrast of black and white, so to speak; and ending with the freer, warmer, environment of Paris where it still seems as if all things are possible and accepted.  How do you do that?!

Kasi: I don’t know.  I’m very familiar with the three places.  It’s intentionally a very romantic view of Paris.  I compare the story to opening a beautiful box of old jewelry. I’ve written about twenty scripts, some more atmospheric than the others, but all share the theme of “crossed boundaries.” I like to write about the grey areas of humanity; no one’s all good or bad – not completely heroic and not completely villainous; good people behaving badly.  I’ve written only one totally villainous character because I couldn’t find any redeeming qualities – Bull Connor.

I recently spent 6 weeks in Paris working on the screenplay for a project called “Strangers in Paris” under the auspices of a program called “Autumn Stories” that was co-sponsored and co-financed by the WGA, SASEM and the Ile de France Film Commission.  They select four established writers with screenplays that take place in Ile de France and put us up in an Abbey outside of Paris and help us research our subjects.  My family was able to join me for the last week of my stay.  Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to work on “Eight Pieces for Josette” under the same circumstances.

Neely: You also directed and did a rewrite of “Talk to Me.”  What kind of changes did you make to the original script, or rather, where in the process did you enter? How much of your rewrite appears on screen and how did the final writing credits read?

Kasi: I came on first as a writer but didn’t receive screen credit.  The script was already well framed and I loved the project.  My entrée into the project was strictly as a writer.

Neely: Your talent for casting is amazing.  “Eve’s Bayou” is a veritable who’s who of African American actors.  In “Talk to Me” you had the incomparable Don Cheadle, but you also cast one of my very favorite under the radar great actors – Chiwetal Ejiofor.  How did that directing assignment come about?

Kasi: After I came on board as a writer and fell in love with the project, I fought for that directing assignment.  I love Chiwetal.  Another actor had been chosen for that part but he fell out because of the deal and then the movie fell apart.  Months later when Don was still on board, Chiwetal was on a short list to play Dewey Hughes.  We got a great call from his agent saying that Chiwetal, who was in New York, was willing to meet us on his way back to London.

Neely: Interesting sense of direction.

Kasi: I know.  So he came in and Don read with him on the spur of the moment.  The chemistry was instantaneous and that was it.  He was our Dewey!

Neely: Did you know that you had three Kelley series regular alums in “Talk to Me” – Don Cheadle (“Picket Fences”), Vondie Curtis Hall (“Chicago Hope”) and Taraji P. Henson (“Boston Legal”)?

Kasi: I’d never thought of it before.  All three are amazing.

Neely: Do you still write plays?

Kasi: Not in a long time, but I have an idea I’d like to pursue. I have lots more ideas than time.

Neely: We already spoke of casting hopes for “Eight Pieces for Josette”, which leads to a related question – do you ever write characters with certain actors in mind?

Kasi: As a final note on the casting of “Josette,” when I get it made it will depend on who will be the right age at the time. It’s age-specific.  Fox Searchlight came close to making it but now it’s mine again.  I will make it.

Neely: When I googled you one of the sites that came up was “Who is Kasi Lemmons dating?”  You’ll be happy to hear that the only picture that popped up was your husband Vondie Curtis Hall.  Both you and Vondie have cast each other in small roles in the films you’ve written and directed.  Who is he going to play in “Eight Pieces for Josette?”

Kasi: I need to correct you on that because I’ve given Vondie significant roles in my previous films. I’m not sure he’s in this one.  Maybe at the beginning he was Buzz.  We’ll see.

Neely: You were out scouting locations last week for your new directing project.  What is it and how far along are you?

Kasi: It was for an HBO film on the Duke Lacrosse case.  I’m directing it.  We’re at the point of making up lists of potential casting choices.  Filming will start in April if everything goes according to plan.

Neely: I can’t wait to see it and hope that I won’t have to wait much longer for “Eight Pieces for Josette”.

January 20, 2010

“It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.” – Winston Churchill

Filed under: Conversations With, Palmer, Pilots, Pilots not produced, Writers — Tags: , , , — Neely Swanson @ 11:18 am

King of the Road by Michael Oates Palmer

What: Detroit is undergoing a retrenchment crisis and Baker Motors will go under if drastic measures aren’t taken.

Who: A cancer is growing in the Detroit headquarters of the nearly insolvent Baker Motors, aspirant to big three status.  When alcoholic reviled General Manager Ed Thornhill becomes road kill in an accident because of his abhorrence of seatbelts, the shambles of poor production, bad book keeping, cost overruns, labor unrest and general disharmony becomes undeniable and the Old Man, as the CEO is known,  appoints an outsider, the Ivy League-educated, Robert McNamara look-alike, Dick Pratt, appointed over pretty boy, company-culture drenched Baker Motors lifer Jack Mileski. Jack, the best cheerleader Baker Motors could ever hope for is blindsided by the Old Man’s disloyalty and will stop at nothing to undermine and destroy Pratt.  Pratt, an outsider in every manner of speaking, still clings to his intellectual life in Ann Arbor with his political activist wife and autistic son.  Jack, on the other hand, revels in the trappings of success with his big house, beautiful, bored wife and angry teenage son.  For trappings are what they are – symbols of success – to show off but not necessarily care for.  His celebration with the family at the local country club on the evening before Thornhill’s funeral was, to say the least, premature.  His solace is taken at the home of Cassie, the beautiful young African American Baker Motors cafeteria waitress.  There is a familiarity between them that speaks of a long term secret relationship involving a “love child.”  Ellen, Jack’s wife, bored out of her mind with Jack and her life in suburbia has her own extra-curricular activities with Cliff.  There “solace” is carried out in low rent hourly motel rooms – delicious, illicit sex and nothing but.

Jack’s true love is cars – Baker Motors’ cars and especially his new baby, the Mariah; and it’s all personal because he has already promised the assembly line that they will continue with its production and that production will be nowhere but in Detroit.  Dick Pratt, however, has other ideas and this is where a battle of Shakespearean proportions will play out between them because Dick Pratt is not a car person, he’s a money person and after going over the books, he realizes that the situation is worse than even he imagined. The sloppy bookkeeping reeks of fraud:

Pratt: You are the Vice President in charge of assembly.  How much did it cost to assemble each Renata coupe?

Humphries: How much do you want it to cost?

Pratt: I think you misunderstood.  I’m not talking about our goals for the future. I’m just asking what it’s cost in the past.

Humphries: And I’m saying to you. For the purposes of your accounting. You tell me how much you want it to have cost. And I’ll give you that number.

In order to right the company drastic measures will have to be taken and he may have to move operations out of Detroit, cut production, cut jobs, and certainly cut the Mariah.  Knowing that his pet project is on the line, Jack informs Cliff, his close friend and chief stylist of Baker Motors, that he must find a way to cut design costs on the Mariah. Cliff, believing that the company’s fortunes rest with designing a car similar to the VW Bug, resists until:

Jack: You’ve been sleeping with Ellen for ten months.

Cliff: You’re crazy.

Jack: Don’t do that. Give me a little credit. That I know what’s been going on. You’re wondering, how long has he known? Since it began.  Since you had the idea of it in a drunk daydream. I’ve let it go on as long as I have. Not for her sake. Or mine. But for yours.

Cliff: My sake?

Jack: I need you on top of your game. I know the women, they always help you with that. Remember the six months, years ago, when you got religion? When you didn’t drink? Didn’t screw? You turned in the worst work of your fucking career. (beat, then) You’ll never commit to any of them, buddy. I’d rather my wife be with you, than some guy who might actually try to take her away.

Jack walks over to Cliff.

Jack: The Mariah can save this company, Cliff.

Cliff, annihilated by this conversation, barely manages to speak.

Jack, looking for more angles, discovers that Dick’s departure from Ford was precipitated by mental issues and begins to look for ways to use this capital to his advantage beginning with undermining Dick’s fragile family.  At Jack’s urging, the Old Man forces Dick to move his family from their home and friends in Ann Arbor to the tony, acquisitive suburbs of Detroit; he then torpedoes Dick’s plans to scrap the Mariah and move part of production to Arkansas.  The only concession is that Dick will be allowed to consolidate production in Detroit, closing one plant and throwing hundreds out of work.  Jack has won this battle but the war is far from over as his lieutenants, tiring of his autocratic leadership, slowly start to defect to Dick.

A resonance with today’s difficulties in the automotive industry?  You betcha! Except this is 1966.

No Meaner Place: Is this Pulitzer Prize winning material?  No, of course not.  This is a great big juicy soap opera and what the world needs every so often is a great big juicy soap opera where everyone is sleeping with everyone else and tensions abound and villains wear black hats and the setting is something we all understand.  Although clearly influenced by the “Mad Men” phenomenon, which may have been viewed as an impediment, there should still be room for a period piece that has clear resonance to today’s troubled times in Detroit (or at least what’s left of it).

American Motors, troubled in the 60s, did last into the 70s with a car that saved it from the grim reaper for a few years – the Gremlin, a joke punch line that predated the move to compact cars at GM, Ford and Chrysler.  It would have been fun to follow the making of that car and the eventual dissolution of the company, again predating the troubles of today.

Where would this go?  Who cares?  The characters are fun, the setting is familiar and written in such a way as to limit production costs – hell, Michigan is looking to fund series and features that would come to Detroit and use the abandoned automotive facilities still standing. AH!  To return to an era of conspicuous consumption, haves and have-nots, hypocrisy, financial mayhem, creative accounting, war protests, campus unrest, labor union strife, and a president with a funny name who has a clear domestic agenda and a very flawed foreign policy.

Life Lessons for Writers:  Altogether now – NBC, a company living out its own soap opera.

Conversation with the Writer:

Neely: I’ve actually been aware of your writing since 2003 when I read your spec pilot entitled “Gracie Mansion” when you were a staff writer on “West Wing.”  I vaguely remember that one of the things you brought to the table was a background in politics.  Is that correct?

Michael: Yes.  It’s really a family background thing.  I was steeped in politics at an early age.  My maternal grandfather was president of a Teamsters’ Local in Philly; he was a dyed in the wool Democrat.  My paternal grandfather got involved with left-wing politics in California; I guess you could say he was something of a Socialist.  He went to Berkeley with the guys involved in the Manhattan Project; his degree was in engineering.  His Socialist background kept him off the oil rigs he was trained to work on because he couldn’t get a security clearance so he ended up working at a meat packing plant as a renderer – it was as bad as it sounds.  My mother dropped out of Penn to be a political reporter in the 60s at UPI.  After she left UPI she became the deputy press secretary to Eugene McCarthy during his ’68 Presidential campaign.  She met my dad at Berkeley when he was student body president from ’68-’69.  Later he was the head of another student organization that got him on Nixon’s Enemies List.  Dad went to Yale for law school and Mom went to Yale for Divinity School.  They were there with both Clintons – they were supposedly on the Clintons’ first double date — and I have this great picture of the four of them where you either go “Wow! Look at Bill Clinton’s hair!” or you go “Where on earth did your mom get those boots?”  My parents divorced in 1981, and they shared custody; it was all very civilized and everyone got along.  My mom married my stepdad, Bob Shrum, in 1987.  Bob had a big career in politics, first as a speechwriter for George McGovern and Ted Kennedy and then later as John Kerry’s chief strategist.

I never really wanted to get involved in politics because I’d already seen behind the curtain; I wanted to work in film and TV and went to AFI toward that goal.  But when I first tried to land a TV writing job in 2001, there was talk of a writers’ strike and all the jobs dried up. So I went back east to New York for a job as a speech writer for Mark Green who was running for mayor.  It was a great job for a writer.  I went from writing speeches about reforming trash collection, and then 9/11 happened, and suddenly I was writing a eulogy for the fire chaplain who was killed.  I came back to LA after Mark lost the election to Bloomberg and I landed a staff writing job on “The West Wing.”

Neely: You’ve come a long way as a writer as far as I’m concerned.  You’ve always leaned toward soap opera, first with “Gracie Mansion,” then with “Gonzo,” and now with “King of the Road.”  With each pilot you’ve dug deeper and fleshed out your characters more so that now you’ve reached a point where there is depth in both the situation and the characters.

Michael: Well, you always hope that’s the arc your writing will take.

Neely: I remember that Margaret Nagle was somewhat taken aback when I referred to “The Eastmans” as a soap opera, but quite honestly any character-based series with a serial thru-line is, at the root of it, a soap opera.  Any comments? Agree? Disagree?

Michael: Fundamentally, I guess I agree, although writers recoil from the term, because it brings to mind Linda Evans and Joan Collins in a cat fight.  I prefer the phrase “character-oriented drama.”  I always loved the work of Zwick/Herskovitz on “thirtysomething;” and Josh Brand and John Falsey’s shows “Northern Exposure” and “I’ll Fly Away.” “Homicide” was an ensemble show with serialized character arcs, so that was, in its own way, a soap opera, too.  They made me want to write for TV.  “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” “The Shield,” even, to a certain extent “The Wire” all fit into that rubric.

There’s an art to writing a good “Law and Order.”  Plot is hard and a good mystery plot is hardest. But I was a character writer who kept getting put on procedurals and it wasn’t a good fit.  In character dramas, you’re less interested in the process of the job, and more in how the job affects the characters and how the other characters affect the characters. Luckily things have opened up a bit since 2003 when it seemed like everything was a procedural.

When my producing partner on “King of the Road,” Laverne McKinnon, and I took it out there, eventually selling it to Showtime, we embraced the term soap opera.  We thought of it as a Trojan Horse – emphasize the salacious, sexy soap opera parts of the show to sell it, so that we could also explore themes that might at first glance seem more cerebral or intellectual. FX specializes in male-oriented soaps. The audience loves these shows as long as they are set in interesting surroundings.  You know, legal shows and medical shows don’t work if there’s not a courtroom or an ER.  There has to be a place for them to connect. I’ve always been drawn to ensembles.

Neely: Your rise has been steady since the “West Wing” with a heavy dose of legal – “Blind Justice” and “Shark” with a dose of whimsy in “Cupid.”

Michael: I feel as if there have been setbacks and strong years. But the biggest setbacks have led to even bigger opportunities.  I wrote “Gracie Mansion” as a spec after losing my job on “West Wing” when Aaron Sorkin left the show and the new regime arrived.  The first good thing that happened with that script is that it brought me new representation with Ann Blanchard and Lanny Noveck, then at William Morris.  I’d been unemployed for a year and they sent the script to Steven Bochco who hired me on his new show “Blind Justice.”

I liked working on my next show, “In Justice.” There are writers who do well when they are motivated by the fear of disappointing the angry parent.  I always did better wanting to please the good parent.  Every writer has been in the position of needing help in the beginning and it wasn’t until “In Justice” that someone took that kind of interest in me – Jeff Melvoin (“Picket Fences,” “Northern Exposure,” “Alias”) who was running the room on the show.  Also at about this time, Lanny knew I could use a big brother figure.  He said, “There’s a client of mine I’d like you to meet.” “Is he running a show?” I asked. “Not right now.  His name is Robert Nathan (“Law & Order,” “SVU,” “CI”).” He just thought we’d hit it off. Robert and I had lunch together – a lunch that went on for three hours; I felt I’d known him forever and realized I’d made a friend for life.  Both Robert and Jeff were and are so generous with their time and spirit, and were patient with a young writer’s arrogance and entitlement – it made a huge impact. I like meeting other writers with experience. I’m always going to do better with a grownup than a 32 year old comic book guy.

My next job was on “Shark,” but like most of the other procedurals, this one didn’t play to my strengths. Losing my job on “Shark” opened up the door to development and I sold three pilots in two years.  This led to my being considered for shows that were better fits.  I loved working on “Cupid,” Rob Thomas’s series where I also got to work with Jill Gordon (“The Wonder Years”), Cindy Chupack (“Sex and the City”) and Diane Ruggiero (“Veronica Mars”).  There is a quote by Tolstoy that reminds me of most writers’ rooms – “All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  This was a happy writers’ room; no one on “Cupid” was Machiavellian; it was pretty douchebag-free.

Neely: You came close on your pilot called “Gonzo.”  Where did you shop this one and what kinds of comments did you get?

Michael: This was a pilot I wrote on spec at the end of “In Justice.”  It was a pilot about war correspondents in Central America in the early 80s that I did as a writing sample, but Ann and Lanny sent it to a couple of executives at two small production companies.  One of the companies had a deal with Touchstone so an executive named Dan Pipski at Live Planet, the Matt Damon/Ben Affleck company, sent it over to what’s now called ABC Studios.  But ABC Studios was developing a war correspondent pilot with Shonda Rhimes so they couldn’t do it.  It then went to Adelstein-Parouse, who sold it to 20th Century Fox’s television studio.  But 20th didn’t feel it could work on network television.  Meanwhile, Scott Pennington, another exec then at Touchstone, saw that AMC was doing the “Mad Men” pilot and out of the blue just sent it to Christina Wayne, then at AMC in New York.  She loved it and wanted to do it.  At that same time, 20th released “Gonzo,” turning their deal for it into a blind script deal, allowing “Gonzo” to go to AMC.  Unfortunately, a year later, there was a change in regime and the new execs didn’t respond to it.  “Gonzo” originally arriving at ABC Studios changed my career.  That Scott Pennington would like it enough to send it somewhere he thought it might fit, to an executive he’d never even met, still blows me away.  As an interesting side note, a few years later I was at ABC Family to meet with an exec who was unavailable so they asked if I might be able to talk to someone in her place.  That someone was Scott Pennington, and I finally got a chance to say thank you.

Neely: Why did this topic – Detroit and the automotive industry – resonate with you.  It must have taken a lot of research.

Michael: Research is the fun part. I was a history major at Brown, and my honors thesis was about Congress going after rock ‘n roll in the 50s. My thesis advisor, Howard Chudacoff, one of the great urban historians, was a great influence.  For me, the best part of development is reading books.  With “King of the Road,” I was totally into baseball until I was 13, then and ever after it was rock ‘n roll — I was never that guy with posters of cars on the wall.  But a few years ago I was watching Errol Morris’ documentary “The Fog of War” about Robert McNamara, who before he was Secretary of Defense was one of the “whiz kids” that saved Ford Motors. Here was a guy who thought he could solve and explain everything with numbers.  That was a character I wanted to delve into.  I wanted to explore an America that used to make things and how when we lost that, we lost something essential. I wanted to explore how men work together and how they fight.  And how the worst wars sometimes don’t have a single drop of blood shed.  This was an “art vs. commerce” story – there were men who were first and foremost about the cars, and there were men who were instead, like McNamara, all about the company.  We’d already seen so many shows and movies about the late 60s, all focusing on the counter culture.  I wanted to go from blue collar to elite, go from Johnson to Nixon. It was a fantastic sandbox to play in.

I spent a year researching King of the Road, in part because I had two other pilots that were both still alive at AMC and ABC.  Once the AMC one, “Gonzo,” died, Laverne McKinnon, who was working as the TV producer for director Mike Newell (”Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Donnie Brasco,” “Harry Potter 4″)  and I pitched it to FX, HBO, and Showtime.  FX liked it, but passed due to fear of “Mad Men” similarities; HBO passed; and Showtime bought it.

Showtime had a very high-class problem: all of their shows on the air were working for them. This meant they had little in the way of needs — as evidenced by their not ordering to series any of the four pilots they had produced in 2009, including projects with prominent talent involved (a Peter Tolan pilot starring Matthew Perry, another project produced by Jenji Kohan, and a pilot directed by Tim Robbins). Out of thirty or so pilot scripts, they ended up only ordering one to be produced, a half-hour about cancer with Laura Linney attached, which was recently ordered to series.  Gary Levine and Danielle Gelbar at Showtime were very supportive of our project and took a chance on it, but the concern that FX had proved to be the concern that Showtime had — even though we felt there were real differences between this and “Mad Men,” it was still a show about men doing business in the 1960s.

It also probably lacked enough of what has become Showtime’s brand in recent years — a high concept with a jaw-dropping twist.  ”Weeds” is about a soccer mom… who becomes a drug dealer.  ”Dexter” is about a serial killer… who works for the Miami police department.  ”Californication” is about a sex addict… who loves his wife. Laverne and I tried to frame “King of the Road” in a similar way — “it’s a show about war… in the battlefield of American business,” but in the end, it might have been a show better suited for HBO or FX.

Neely: Brands change and shows go off the air, so maybe there’s hope. You’re absolutely right about how interesting the history is and maybe someone will revisit. There was just so much to tap into.  While I was trying to fill in some of the gaps I discovered the blood bath in the Fifties between Hudson, Nash, Packard and Studebaker and that George W. Romney, the former presidential candidate’s father, headed Nash Studebaker before becoming Governor of Michigan – yet another confluence of the two eras.

Michael: Well, in a way it was also a family influence that led me to this story.  When I was a kid, my Grandfather Ray, the Teamster organizer, would drive me around the industrial part of Philly and show me all the boarded up warehouses and point to one of them and say “Dead;” then to another and say “dead; and so on, many many times. I remember going through Trenton, NJ and there was this big sign that said “Trenton Makes. America Takes.” That world doesn’t exist anymore.  First there was the manufacturing in the Rust Belt; then it was moved to the so-called “right-to-work” South; and then everything was moved overseas.  We no longer Make.

Neely: I noticed that you are now working on “Rubicon” for AMC.

Michael: “Rubicon” is the show that beat out “Gonzo” in the production derby.  I’m working with some great writers on that show and am looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.

Neely: I noticed that Henry Bromell, who worked for many years on one of your favorites, “Homicide,” is the showrunner.  Please say hello to him for me.

January 12, 2010

“In those big floppy shoes and baggy pants, Bongo really should have assumed running for safety was a long shot.” – Shayne-Michael.com

Filed under: Conversations With, Feature Films — Tags: , , , — Neely Swanson @ 10:55 am

Bullsh*t by Ben Murray

What: “Gorgeous” Gordon Lippick was the hottest commodity on the bull riding rodeo circuit until he rode “Furious George,” the biggest meanest ugliest bull and crashed out of the money.  Years later Gorgeous is an alcoholic foul-mouthed rodeo clown bent on revenging himself on the long missing Furious.

Who: Once the handsomest, sexiest, most talented bull rider in the world, Gorgeous Gordon Lippick is now no more than a joke; a foul-mouthed, foul smelling, dirt poor falling-down drunk rodeo clown.  His rung on the ladder is so low it’s subterranean. Still haunted by nightmares of his humiliating downfall on Furious George, the bull with only one cloven hoof, when he crashed into a fence and slashed his leg, he dreams of nothing but finding the bull and killing it.  Still all attempts at locating the bull have failed.  Miserable sod that he is, Gordon thinks nothing of screwing everyone in sight in order to get the information he wants.

A kid comes up to him.

Kid: Hey mister! Mister Gorgeous!

Gorgeous: Fuck you want?

Kid: I got you what you asked for.

He hands him a six pack of Genessee.

Gorgeous: Oh. Good work. You find the other thing?

Kid: Yup.

Gorgeous: Up front? You kidding?

The kid shakes his head, “no.” Gorgeous roots around in his pockets, comes out with a Band-aid, some Tums, a dollar and a mint.  He hands it to the kid.

Kid: That’s it?

Gorgeous: Actually I need the Tums.

Kid: A dollar?

Gorgeous: What are you, buying a Lexus?  You’ll get it. What do you got?

Kid: I saw it – a round hoof with no dent in it. My friend Joey showed me.

Gorgeous: Are you completely certain?

The kid nods and Gorgeous laboriously rises, favoring one leg.  He takes a blue pill, swallows it with beer.

Kid: Why is you leg hurt?  Did a bull stab you with its horn?

Gorgeous: No, it shot me with a crossbow, douchebag. Now c’mon, show me.

False trail, this time it was a horse, follows false trail, next time a droopy cow, all the while Gorgeous finds new ways to piss off everyone.

INT. THE RODEO RING –NIGHT

Gorgeous lurches forward wasted.  As he gets to the center, a bull and rider erupt from the chute and charge toward him…The bull…charges for Gorgeous, who runs for his life.  He barely escapes as the bull runs out.  Gorgeous pants, feels something rising in his gut.  He staggers to a barrel and PUKES into it in one great heave.  He stands up, relieved, and then another clown stands – the one in the barrel.

Gorgeous does, however, have one fan – “Tupelo” Tom Cody, a young wannabe cowboy who, despite the abuse, believes that Gorgeous can help him get a spot on the circuit.  Soon he has another one when he passes out in a corral.

He moves to get up and she grabs him by the arm to help.

Bobbie Joe: Easy. Just thought you might want a little help.

Gorgeous: Yeah well I don’t. I don’t need help from…

Bobbie Joe: Bobbie Joe Slayton.

Gorgeous: From you or any other lesbian, Bobbie Joe Slayton.  In fact, I’m tired of people offering me things. Next person offers me something, I’m going to tear out their goddam liver, take a big bite, then wipe my ass with the rest of it, got it?

Bobbie Joe: I just thought you might want these.

Gorgeous: What?

He looks around, realizes he’s in the corral for the children’s pony rides – in just his skivvies.  Around him is a ring of shocked parents and toddlers.

Gorgeous: Oh.

Bobbie Joe wants to break the barrier and become the first female bull rider and she needs Gorgeous’ help to do this.  In return she will help him locate Furious.  Progress is made.

No Meaner Place: “Bullsh*t” was Murray’s thesis script at the USC School of Cinema in the MFA writing program for which he received distinction from his thesis professor, Howard Rodman, a well respected screenwriter most recently nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for “Savage Grace.”  Murray was one of my students in “The Entertainment Industry Seminar” in 2008. Following the end of the semester I was approached by several of the students to read their scripts and give them notes, which I did for everyone…everyone but Ben.  I had no notes to give him.  I loved this story from the first page to the last.  Everytime it looked like this profane adventure was going to go in a conventional direction along came a twist and off it went in a different direction.  Every time it seemed that redemption was around the corner, Murray stayed true to his character’s nature.  Gorgeous is, for all practical purposes, unredeemable but not bad.  Certainly he’s no “hooker with a heart of gold,” but neither is he The Devil, just a devil.  Bad things have happened and been done to him.

Never has profanity been used more creatively and the situations are filled with pratfalls and slapstick although veering toward the violent but to hilarious effect yielding a true cinematic vision.  He has created three dimensional, delightfully down and dirty characters that any actor would relish.  Will Ferrell was born to play this derelict.

Amazingly, there has been very little interest in the screenplay.  It has been optioned by a small production company, for which he is very grateful; but this is a large summer-scale movie and deserves studio backing, as well as interest from a first tier agency.

Life Lessons for Writers:  Sometimes when you’re right you have to wait until they figure it out; and with features it’s all about the waiting.

Conversation with the Writer:

Neely: As previously noted, Ben was one of my students at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and like all of his classmates was required to write either a feature or a pilot as his Masters Thesis project.  “Bullsh*t” was that thesis, receiving distinction from Howard Rodman.  What everyone needs to know about Ben is that he’s actually quite mild mannered, extremely polite, and quite deferential (or at least that’s how he is to his professors…).  He even warned me about the profanity before I read the script (so obviously he knows the real me as much as I know the real him).  So, Ben… Where the hell did this come from?

Ben: Well, from two different places, I guess.  I covered some rodeo for a tiny newspaper in Colorado.  They wanted a different angle and I decided to write about the bulls and the breeders as a way into the cowboys.  These are very small regional rodeos with cowboys hoping to move up to the bigger leagues.  Three are maybe a dozen competitors with an audience that numbers in the hundreds.  When it came to writing my script, I wanted to stick to something that would stand out in this crappy rodeo circuit.  Originally it was going to be the story of a girl making it in rodeo but then because of my own profane tendencies the story of the clown came in and then took over.  ‘What would be an obsession for the clown to have?’ and it developed into the idea of the clown assassinating a bull.

Neely: Like most of the MFA students you had a career before going back to school.  Please describe your trajectory from college to grad school.

Ben: I majored in journalism at a school no one has heard of called St. Michaels in Vermont because I thought it was one way to satisfy my need to travel.  Immediately after school I boarded a plane and got out in the town of Sitka, Alaska for a job that had already been set up for me.  It was actually more of an internship than a job covering community news – city council, school boards, fishing competitions, and bear stalkings – reports of bears stalking people in the woods.  Sitka was on an island of 10 miles of dead end roads that was over-populated with bears.  After 6 months I flew to Boston to work for monster.com which was quite hip at the time.  It drove me crazy for a year where I wrote articles about jobs and interviews.  But then I read this piece about someone working in Antarctica and I had to go.  I fought hard to get any kind of a job there and I ended up as a janitor at McMurto Station for 6 months. I tried to put some of those experiences in the pilot that you read; but I’ve tabled it for now. Then I came back and floated between Boston and Alaska before getting the job in Colorado.  Eventually I ended up with a job in Europe, primarily England and Germany, where I covered the U.S. military.  It was an amazing job, covering the military overseas which included a stint covering combat in Iraq for 7 weeks.

Neely: What was your impetus for going back to grad school?

Ben: I was stationed in Bavaria.  It was very isolated, very German and very depressing and I decided that maybe I should go back to school.  As I had flirted with film in college, applying to film school was the only thing I really wanted to try so I sent one application only (to USC) with the idea that if it hits, I’ll give it a ride.

Neely: You are at the beginning of your career, the first “breaking in” part, as Phoef Sutton might have described it.  What have you been doing since graduation?  How are you keeping a food on the table?

Ben: My day job is writing articles about social issues for the social-action website of Participant Media.  They were producers on “Good Night and Good Luck,” “Syriana,” and “An Inconvenient Truth.”  It’s not scintillating work but it keeps a roof over my head.

Neely: What kind of meetings did you get out of “Bullsh*t?  Anybody get offended?

Ben: Actually they’ve been few and far between, mainly with managers who liked the script and wanted a general meeting.  I sent it out a lot.  Some responded that “it was a bit strong for their taste,” but no one came out and said they were offended.  I got a couple of follow-up meetings but so far no real nibbles for representation.

Neely: How were you able to get it out there?

Ben: The big hook was the USC script list.  USC sends the list all over town and I got a lot of requests from that as well as requests from my meetings at “First Pitch.”  Howard Rodman was a big supporter and handed it to Stuart Cornfeld at Red Hour Films, and that led to an informal meeting on the set of his latest pilot.

Neely: Well, even though it didn’t go anywhere with him, you never know.  Everything in Hollywood has a long gestation period. I understand it’s been optioned by Andrew Lauren who produced the “Squid and the Whale.”  Any idea where he plans on taking it?

Ben: They do smaller financing but they’d like to step up a bit with a bigger budget.  They’d like to attach some actors before going out for more money.  They want to put together an attractive package before going to the next phase.

Neely: What has the development process been like?  What about the notes?

Ben: The option was predicated on their original notes which were some pretty good character notes.  They wanted to flesh out the villain so he wasn’t just a “black hat” and develop Gorgeous’ side kick a bit more, give them more dimension.  They also wanted more of a rooting interest for Gorgeous; to get the audience on his side quicker, which is tricky because you don’t want to make him really likable.  Since then it’s been variations on those scenes.  They wanted to eliminate the Gorgeous love story (note: this arc was not mentioned in the above synopsis) which, while psychologically difficult for me did end up opening up the room to further develop the other characters.

Neely: What about the development process when you were writing the script for class?

Ben: There was a scene that I absolutely loved that I had to drop.  I still think about it, it was so vivid and I was desperate to make it work.  This cowboy, one of the secondary villains, had a hormone condition that gave him absolutely perfect breasts and I had a sequence where Gorgeous was trying to deal with the cowboy while he was pumping his breasts.  I loved the imagery but sadly it’s for a different film.  It was way too over the top and I didn’t discover that until I did a cold read in class.  It was clear it didn’t fit.

Neely: How much of you is in Gorgeous and would your friends agree?

Ben: The language is me, well at least among my friends where I use the F-bomb quite liberally.  I can’t lay claim to a being a decade-long alcoholic at the bottom, but after a few beers I definitely sound like Gorgeous.  I just chose to apply my most vulgar self to the fiction.

Neely: What else are you working on?  How are you mining that diverse background of yours?

Ben: I’m part of a new program at the USC film school called “First Team.”  They try to pair someone from each discipline – writer, director and producer – to come up with a script, a budget and a marketing plan.  Then the film school sends it out to select agents and production companies.  It was by application open to any alumni and they took 30 from each discipline.  My feature is another R-rated comedy and it’s due in a couple of weeks; so we’ll see.

Neely: As one who is not from around these here parts, how are you adjusting?  Do you get restless to go back into the wilderness?

Ben: Only just so well.  It’s complicated.  LA is a real challenge and I’d rather be out in the nowhere doing something interesting day-to-day.  Covering the military was the highlight for me.  Here I’m writing so much it’s an isolating experience.  I was happier when I was adventuring in someway; it generated better stories.  Like Antarctica: there I worked 10-hour shifts cleaning hallways and then, later, driving buses in 24-hour daylight to airports made out of floating sea ice. Awesome. Do I get restless to go back to the wilderness? I would leave for Antarctica tomorrow if someone offered it. Really. Or Siberia, maybe, or Afghanistan to cover the troops.  L.A. – I just try to good naturedly hate it here.

Neely: I wish you well and hope that someone reading this will be in a position to help you get a good agent and push you in the direction you want to go.

January 6, 2010

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner

Filed under: Conversations With, Cosin, Pilots, Pilots not produced, Writers — Tags: , , — Neely Swanson @ 9:57 am

“Chapel Hill” by Elizabeth Cosin

What: Lucy Remington Wright finds herself at age 38 back where she began so promisingly with a daughter to support, no education and on her own for the first time in fifteen years.

Who: Lucy Wright received a triple blow when she discovered that her husband, George, a newly appointed partner in Lucy’s father’s Manhattan law firm, had been cheating on her, that her father knew about it and that the SEC was closing in on George for investment fraud.  Soon to be divorced, Lucy, all of whose assets and property have been frozen by the SEC, packs up her rebellious 13 year old daughter Zoe and decides to move back to the one place where she had felt support, comfort and promise – “Chapel Hill”, NC.  She had left college to marry George and now feels an irresistible pull to start again where she left off.  Zoe, a child of Upper East Side privilege is very none too happy about this decision and begins plotting her return before they have even left the state. Already arguing about radio music on the drive out of the city – Lucy likes James Taylor, Zoe likes Eminem and there is no twain there:

Zoe: You kidnap me to Hicksville and I don’t even have my iPod anymore.  What’s the government want with it anyway?

Lucy: Probably for homeland security.  Spook the terrorists.

Zoe: It’s not funny.  I really love my iPod.  I need it.  Especially where we’re going.

Lucy: You know they have running water in “Chapel Hill”.  And electricity, too.

Zoe: If it was so great, why didn’t you stay?

Lucy: I dropped out of college to marry your father.  I guess right now that’s not looking like the smartest thing I ever did, huh?

Living arrangements in “Chapel Hill” are abysmal and Lucy’s work prospects are even worse until Garland Rucker, a friend from her past, offers her a receptionist job at his chaotic legal aid office.  Lucy immediately digs in and reaching out when she encounters the desperate mother of a Muslim student who has been expelled from the University because of a cheating scandal.  As the mother explains, her daughter, a star student and champion soccer player, couldn’t possibly done what the school alleges, but the daughter refuses to defend herself; Garland has closed the case because of the girl’s lack of cooperation.  A preliminary, off the books investigation leads Lucy to believe in the girl’s innocence and a possible conspiracy on the part of another student and a powerful faculty member.

Zoe has seemingly adjusted well at school, having attracted the attention of the popular girls.  Her comfort is short lived, however, when she participates in a hurtful scheme concocted by her new “friends.”  Zoe, alienated by her surroundings and feeling abandoned decides that she will return back to New York and live with her father.  Lucy, hurt by Zoe’s decision, supports it nonetheless, making sure that Zoe knows that she will always be there for her.

Zoe exits the First Avenue bus terminal.  She sees a man holding up a sign with her name on it.

Zoe: where’s my Dad?

Driver: He had to leave town for a few days.  Everything you need is at the apartment.

Zoe: When will he be back?

Driver: He didn’t say.

She soon returns to her mother, determined to make the best of what she still considers a pitiful situation.

No Meaner Place: Cosin has written a warm, interesting character piece that, in the best tradition of both comedy and drama, is essentially about a fish-out-of-water adjusting to a new, smaller aquarium.  The character of Lucy, though wounded, is a strong, resilient role model who decides that in order to move on with life she needs to start back at the point where she made her first missteps, as she realized almost immediately that leaving school and marrying George were colossal mistakes and that making the best of bad situations isn’t the same as moving in a positive direction.  Zoe is a marvelous depiction of a teenager with all the contradictions of personality that exist –petulant/enthusiastic, hateful/loving, rude/considerate.  As in all well-constructed pilots, we know who these characters are and eagerly await their growth and learning curves as they face new circumstances.

CBS commissioned this script in the 2005/2006 pilot season for possible launch in the 2006/2007 broadcast season but did not produce it to pilot.  I would still like to believe that it is unusual for something of this quality not to get a green light.  Researching that pilot season on Studio System I found that of the 121 scripts that CBS bought, 28 were produced – 12 dramas (among which was “Orpheus” by Nick Meyer), and 16 comedies. The shows that premiered in the 2006/2007 broadcast season were “Smith,” “Rules of Engagement,” “3 Lbs” (reshot from the previous pilot season), “The Class,” “Jericho,” and “Shark” – 4 dramas and 2 comedies, only one of which, “Rules of Engagement, may still be on the schedule.  Elizabeth was in excellent company as Ed Bernero, Denise Di Novi, Tim Kring, Barry Sonnenfeld,  Barry Schindel and Shane Black all wrote scripts that went unproduced.

The good news in this bad news situation is that since this very well written script was not produced, it will within a short time return to Cosin’s control; and as she writes of a universal situation, it does not have an expiration date.  More interesting, though, would be to try to interest the CW or a cable network such as Lifetime to take this to series.

Life Lessons for Writers:  If they don’t make it you’ll get it back. But better yet, if they don’t make it the first time, find a reason for them to make it the next time.

Conversation with the Writer:

Neely: Elizabeth, in the interest of full disclosure, everyone should know that we’ve been friends for a long time.  That being said, sending me your script was risky because I have always told you how I felt one way or the other – sometimes good, sometimes not.

Elizabeth: I’ve always respected your opinion and knew you’d be honest about it. I’m just glad you liked it.

Neely: You now live up in the Sonoma region.  What prompted the move?  Don’t you find it more difficult to maintain a footing as a working writer when you’re away from the scene? I’m sure that part of the incentive for living far from the maddening crowd (the actual expression is “Madding” but since that refers to sheep and you’re closer to sheep up there than you would be down here, I changed it) is the love of gastronomy you share with Ignacio, your partner.  I can envision the two of you giving Alice Waters a real run for her money.  What did you serve at your most recent dinner party?

Elizabeth: The main thing that prompted the move was worry about the real estate market and a possible writers strike. Both of us are freelancers and our income isn’t consistent so the prospect of facing a mortgage in uncertain times was daunting. We took a chance and put our Santa Monica house on the market and got a great offer. After that, it was deciding on where to go from there. We picked a small town in Sonoma where we’d vacationed a few times and think we’ve found our forever home.

While we adjusted to small town life very quickly, work-wise it’s been a lot of trial-and-error.  Early on, I probably didn’t get down to Los Angeles enough and then we had the strike and the only trips I made to L.A. were to walk the picket line. But I think it’s possible I needed the time away from the “big city’ to regroup and also to re-examine my creative life, to ask the tough questions of what I wanted to write and more important to finish projects that for one reason or another were gathering dust.

I started getting down to LA a lot last year and have a regular crash pad there which has made it easier to be consistent about going. I’m there for a week or two every few weeks and it’s worked out great. At first, I kept the move quiet but I’ve found it’s helped more than hurt. First, I’ve got way less stress in my life and second, people love the idea that I had the “guts” to make such a big move and to live in an idyllic place.  They have no idea how easy it is though – and it’s not like I’m that far from L.A. – six hours by car or an hour by plane.

Plus the one great thing about living away from L.A. is being away from the L.A. scene. It’s not only the various distractions, it’s the expectations that can really crush a writer’s spirit. Down in L.A. you’re always hearing about who did what when and everybody’s in the business and the pressure can get to you, no matter who you are.  Up here, the pace is slow and steady, people don’t care what you do for a living and there’s a great creative vibe that comes from people who work the land, or in kitchens or as artists. I’m sure that sounds like a cliché, but when I was living in L.A. I didn’t see how much I was caught up in stuff that doesn’t matter. I mean I take myself way less seriously up here. My friends and family count this as a good thing.

This year I rented a small office in town which has been a real godsend. It’s on the second floor of an old winery building – a small room with no windows to the outside, no phone. It’s a great environment for writing – I find there are days when I totally lose track of time.

When I’m not writing, I have this amazing landscape all around me. It’s like living in France or Italy – all these rolling hillsides and vistas that go on forever and the two-lanes that snake around past old farmhouses, giant oaks and of course acres of vineyards. That’s just what I see on a routine drive into town . It’s been more than three years now and I haven’t tired of it. I mean I love L.A. and I can see living there again, but it’s pretty amazing how much a little quiet, a lot of beauty and almost total lack of traffic does to lower your stress level and improve your general disposition. And even better, it makes you pay attention a lot more to the things around you. As a writer, that’s invaluable and I think maybe something I forgot to do when I was in the middle of the rat race.

Of course, the proximity to the land is part of the great adventure – exciting too because we’re practically at ground zero for this country’s burgeoning new fresh food movement. As you know we’ve been big fans of great food and there’s nothing like living practically on top of it. We buy almost everything at the source from meat to cheese to fruits and vegetables – it’s a rare meal where I don’t know exactly where my food came from or who grew and/or farmed it. Ignacio has flourished here too and has collected lots of fans among the locals, farmers and chefs included. Our last dinner party was Christmas Eve. We had broccoli and leek soup with foraged chanterelles, fresh pasta with hand-picked local crab and local rack of lamb marinated in garlic, olive oil and as Ignacio says “all the herbs the lamb eats”.

Neely: You’ve written a series of three mystery novels with a terrific protagonist – Zen Moses, a zaftig detective who is a lung cancer survivor – much like yourself.  I always thought it would be the perfect vehicle for Camryn Manheim.  I was disappointed that it never made it to series – again it was CBS that passed, but what about that third book?  (This has been an ongoing conversation between us for some time).

Elizabeth: I still think Zen would make a great TV series but we sold it at the wrong time. Former Paramount exec Stacey Adams  (now with CBS) and Kelly Edwards (who I think is also with CBS now) were the big fans of the project but I think CBS really wanted another procedural – and why not? They had so much success with the CSI franchise and shows like Without a Trace and Cold Case. Zen is really a character drama masquerading as a detective show – closer to, say Rockford Files than CSI and while I was willing to explore the potential of it as a procedural, I think everybody involved knew my heart wasn’t in it.

Neely: I look forward to reading a new version, one that stays closer to your vision.  It’s been my experience that passion projects that are “adapted” to a studio’s proposed need rather than the “need” of the work or the artist never turn out as intended by either party.  One can always insert a procedural element – which by any other phrase is just a mystery to be solved – in a work of detective fiction (for, after all, what is detective fiction but a mystery to be solved?).  I still believe that the audience is hungry for character.

Elizabeth: At the time, CBS wanted Zen to be a cop, partly because they were worried about where the cases would come from.  I understand a lot of this came from the trouble the networks have had in developing detective shows with female leads. Their ideas and choices were interesting and I tried to make them work but I think ultimately we just had different visions for the show. I’m not wed to Zen as written in the books – I realize I will have to make changes to adapt it to TV, but there’s one or two elements I just didn’t want to move off of and that was where we got stuck. I’m grateful that CBS believed in the project in the first place – maybe we’ll revisit together one day.  I’ve been working on a new version of the pilot, my update of and homage to the detective genre. I’ll let you know if I pull it off.

Neely: You have one of the most interesting backgrounds that I’ve encountered.  As I recall you were a sports writer.  How did that start and is it still ongoing?

Elizabeth: Sports writing was a job I sort of fell into but grew to love. I definitely learned more about writing well from sports writing than any other job I’ve had. The single most defining moment of my life (so far) was getting lung Cancer in my 20s. When I got sick I was writing for a metro newspaper covering business but when I came back, I was kind of casting about for a new direction.  The initial prognosis wasn’t good and there was a period there where I was forced to consider my own mortality. Nobody wants to have those thoughts ever but especially no one in their mid-20s and to say it rocked my world would be an obvious understatement. Those uncertain weeks really made me reconsider my place in the world, my future, my life and what I would do with myself if I didn’t have a lot of time left. One of the people who helped me through was the sports editor of my paper and he’s the one who convinced me to try writing sports – after all, I’ve always been a big fan. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done but I really learned about myself as a writer and was great training for my leap to fiction.

Neely: What an inspiring story, especially that you were nurtured at a time you needed it the most.  I’ve always followed sports writing because I’ve always considered it the best writing in the paper.  Historically some of our greatest American writers wrote for the Sports Pages – Ring Lardner (Chicago Tribune), Damon Runyon (New York American), both famous for their short stories; Jim Murray (Los Angeles Times) and Red Smith (New York Times) both of whom elevated sports writing to the art of the essayist; and Roger Angell (New Yorker) whose annual wrap-up of the baseball season is reason enough to subscribe to the magazine.  I have particularly liked the books on baseball and baseball figures written by David Halberstam and George Will.

As a journalist and professional writer, what do you think has been the impact of the internet on the business, in general, and on writers, in particular?

Elizabeth: Probably this is sacrilegious to say but I think the Internet has killed journalism. There’s just way too much emphasis on getting the story first and way too little on getting it right. Bloggers don’t have to follow any of the rules of reporting or sourcing and too many rumors and incorrect stories fly around the Net too fast to make proper corrections or for wronged parties to respond. It’s a mess.

For fiction writers, the Net has been great though. Especially for authors – bookstores, publishers and authors connect easily through sites like Twitter and Facebook and fan, retail and publisher sites. No genre author can or should embark on a publicity tour without getting a presence on the Internet.

Neely: Living in Sonoma, you must miss the sports action.  Who do you root for up there? You can’t still be a Clippers fan, can you?

Elizabeth: I’d be lost without my DirecTV.  I get to follow my favorite teams – the Mets, NY Giants and Knicks from the comfort of my living room.  We make occasional trips to see games in Oakland and San Francisco.

Neely: Let’s talk a bit about “Chapel Hill”.  Why Chapel Hill? What’s the connection?

Elizabeth: No connection at all. Except that when I first started as a sportswriter in Washington, DC, I covered the ACC conference in football and basketball and I used to drive down to the Raleigh-Durham area at least a couple of times a year. That sign in the pilot where the distance is replaced by a basketball score is real — I remember seeing it once on one of my trips.

“’Chapel Hill 15, Wake Forest 40’ Someone has scrawled out he mileage and replaced ‘15’ with ‘85’, so it reads like a lopsided basketball score.”

When I was thinking of a town, I wanted to use a place that had a liberal arts college and a varied population ethnic and class-wise — a spot that could be part small town, but burgeoning new city.

Neely: Was this an idea pitched to you or did you come up with the premise?

Elizabeth: It all started because I wanted to write something outside the procedural world where I’d been pigeon-holed – I mean I just came off a run of working for shows like Law & Order: Criminal Intent,  24 and Dragnet and while it was awesome and certainly paid the bills, I wanted to write something different, show my character chops. The original idea was pitched to me by Charles Segars who produces as well as runs development at Scripps Networks (Fine Living and such). He liked my work and I loved his sense of characters and situations (and loved working him) so we set out to try to come up with a pilot together. He had a grain of an idea, kind of a like a female version of the hero in The Paper Chase. I loved the concept but I knew I needed to make it personal to me to really get my head around it. Charles was really generous in allowing me to take the story where I felt it should go and I ended up writing a spec pilot we both were proud of. It’s not that much different from the CBS version,  a little more set-up and slightly more comedy.

We tried to sell it over two cycles but got no takers – probably because the original had almost no procedural elements at all.  As I talked about earlier, I had sold my detective novels to Paramount but we couldn’t agree on a tone or approach. I was trying to save my deal with them when I brought up “Chapel Hill” over lunch with execs at Paramount and CBS – all women. I actually pitched it on the fly with no preparation but it worked because I’d been living with it for so long, I knew the characters cold and I believed in them and I had a definite clear idea about what the show was about.

Lucky for me they loved the concept so we set about re-conceiving it for them. It’s often in vogue for writers to whine about development execs and notes from the suits, but developing “Chapel Hill” was a great experience all around. Kelly Edwards and Jonathan Axelrod were the producers and they never stopped believing in me and the trio of Julie McNamara, Leigh Redman and Stacey Adams at Paramount plus Laverne McKinnon at CBS were all very supportive of the project and gave awesome notes. In fact, a note Julie gave me was critical to making the end of the show work.

Martha Williamson came on to help guide and focus the story and she was a wonderful mentor throughout the process. She took the time to understand my vision and never once tried to impose hers on it. I remember going off to write feeling very confident I’d deliver a solid script.

If I learned anything developing this script it was the importance of getting your whole team to believe in your show and in you. The crucial part is selling both – you and your show. Or more precisely, that you are the person they need and can trust to deliver this show. Every successful show has a steady leader at the creative helm, someone who will not compromise on the singular vision of the series, someone to make sure all the varied moving parts adds up to one big idea. The clearer your vision, the easier it is to get everybody on the same page. “Chapel Hill” was a true collaborative process and throughout it, I never felt like the network or the studio didn’t believe in my vision for the show or tried to impose their own over it.

Neely: I know it had to be heartbreaking because it was one of your best scripts and telling 100 stories would have been easy.  Seems to be just another case of the right script at the wrong time.

Elizabeth: It was terribly heartbreaking I admit. Though when Nina Tassler called me personally to say CBS was passing, I also thought it was going to open some other doors into development. So I was feeling hopeful for my future anyway. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find another pilot to work on together. I’m not sure who said it originally but I love the expression that Hollywood is a place where you can be encouraged to death.

Who knows why some shows get pick-ups and others don’t – mainly I imagine “Chapel Hill” wasn’t procedural enough (that’s a lot of what got added in the development process).  Still, I’m hopeful that shows like it will make it onto the air more now that we’ve seen successful character dramas. My favorite at the moment and the one I think that has a real kinship to “Chapel Hill” is “Friday Night Lights.”  It’s so brilliant, especially in the inter-relationships of its characters.

I love the way it investigates the deep inner world of small-town life and the people who live there, relying on emotional truths rather than familiar clichés. These are the places I would have wanted to explore in “Chapel Hill.” It was one of the rare scripts I’ve written where I can really say I know the characters, they’re based on real people I know. I mine a lot of true-life stuff for my Zen novels but those are fantasies. I mean I totally enjoy writing them but I felt “Chapel Hill” was going to give me a chance to create a rich landscape about a place and the characters that live there and the way their choices and mistakes weigh on themselves, their hopes and dreams and also about rising to the occasion when your life veers off course in ways you never expect. In a funny way, writing “Chapel Hill” made me a better novelist too.  My new novel is in some ways a connection to what I was trying to do with Lucy and Zoe – different characters and places but the emotions are very much of the same family tree. I’m not denigrating my Zen novels by any means – I’m really, really proud of Zen as a character but I grew up faster than she did I think and while I have every intention of returning to her adventures, I really needed to go to this other place in my writer’s heart first.  Who knows if I’ll make it work but then it’s supposed to be about the journey anyway, right?

Part of this has been theme and like almost all writers, I find I keep returning to the same themes over and over again. I don’t do it consciously, it sort of evolves on its own. “Chapel Hill” turned out to be about one of those themes, in this case it was the idea of starting over,  changing your life – making a big leap of faith into your future away from something comfortable and into some great unknown.  Of all the things I write about, this is among the most personal for me. I’ve uprooted my life more than once – moving out to L.A. from the East Coast was one of those times. First, the move was in part precipitated by surviving Cancer and wanting to make a big change in my life. I had a job waiting but I only knew one person in L.A. and didn’t even have a place to stay lined up past a week or two. The drive itself was an adventure – I had an idea of where I wanted to go but basically I just followed major roads and figured the route out as I went. To me it was a great new beginning, something I felt I had to do no matter what  — kind of like the kid in “Into the Wild.”  I considered for maybe 3 minutes that it might suck being far away from friends, family, living in a big, new city, etc. but I never once considered what the cost would be to those people. Here I am on my great adventure and my parents are sort of grieving over me moving 3,000 miles away – this mere months after almost losing me to Cancer. They never once told me not to go and have been great anchors for me along the way, but since I moved out to LA we see much less of each other. I think by now they know I made the right choice but there will always be a tiny bit of guilt that I wasn’t physically closer to them, no matter that we talk on the phone every other day.

What’s a writer to do with that kind of shit but to write about it and that’s where I started with Lucy. Sure, her motives are ultimately noble but what’s the affect on Zoe who has as many reasons to want to stay in New York as Lucy has to leave? It’s not a reach for her to feel she is being dragged along on someone else’s adventure.  In imagining the future of the series, I thought a lot about their relationship and especially how it’s Zoe who has made the biggest sacrifice. I was looking forward to exploring how this affected both Lucy and Zoe and what it would mean for their relationship. That’s why Lucy has that moment in the pilot where she lets Zoe go – it’s as much symbolic as it is literal. She has to do this, even though it goes against everything she feels is right and it’s at that moment when Lucy really understands the big responsibility she’s taken on – that it’s not just her journey alone. I love that scene when she meets Zoe at the bus station. Those are the moments writers live for.  I was really looking forward to seeing this relationship grow and change over the course of the series  – I know it would have been fun to write. As you can tell, I loved Zoe. She’s a perfect character because she’s an age where kids want can’t wait to grow up  but are still holding on to their last gasp of her childhood. Of course, like Lucy she has no idea she’s crossing a line. We hardly ever notice stuff like that until we’ve lived through it.

Neely: What about a different avenue?  Since CBS Studios is behind it, have they considered selling it elsewhere, or rolling it to next season?

Elizabeth: I think at this point, it’s back in my hands. I’d love to pitch it elsewhere – I have some ideas to update Lucy’s character vis-à-vis the recent financial crisis faced by the country. But I could easily see this on TNT – something to pair with the fabulous “Men of a Certain Age,” for example. And I’ve never given up hope that CBS will take another look at it – it’s really perfect for them and isn’t it true that “women of a certain age” (I won’t use THAT word) are in vogue these days? I’m so proud of that script.  I entered it into the WGA Writer Access Contest and won in the Diversity (women) division.

Neely: Congratulations.  But in some ways it is ironic…I never considered women, as a group, to be a minority.

Elizabeth: I know.  But if you look at the writing staffs of current programs you will find very few women. You’d be surprised how many shows don’t have any women on the writing staff.

Neely: What’s up next for you?  Have you been in town to pitch?

Elizabeth: I’ve got a new novel I’ve been working on. It’s not a Zen novel. The character is an LA cop on leave for a psychological problem and he ends up investigating a crime that forces him to confront his family’s past. I’m very excited about it and hope to have a publisher in early 2010. Then there’s the as-yet unpublished third Zen novel Zen Justice which may also see the light of day in the New Year.

I’ve done a lot of pitching the last couple of years – I’ve been out with two major projects in particular. One was a cop drama with a writing partner where we came this close to selling but I think in the end it was just too risky for most places.  I’ve got a new project with two young producers that I’ve excited about – a sort of character cop drama that takes place in another small southern town – which I’m just finishing a script for.

I also have a couple of spec pilots. One is a crazy cable drama in the vein of “Out of Sight” called “Small Crimes,” and the other is about a female cop who is haunted by her dead ex-partner called “Magic Hour”.

And finally, I’ve decided that 2010 is the year I will direct my first feature film. I’ve got a script I’m working on that I’m going to shoot on a shoe-string budget up here in wine country with an almost all local cast. It’s a story that I’ve wanted to tell for a long time and I can’t think of a better place to tell it than my little bucolic town.

Neely: All of that sounds fantastic and I can’t wait to see what happens.  Also, I still think there’s a home waiting for “Chapel Hill”.  I’m so happy to hear that you are pushing harder than ever.  As Phoef Sutton remarked in an earlier “conversation with”,

When I started, I knew it would be hard to break in; I didn’t realize that I’d have to continue to break in.

Please keep me posted and finish Zen Justice because I want more Zen Moses (and because I don’t think you’re done with her yet)!

As a parting note, I loved your “advice for young writers.” The following is an edited (for length) version:

It doesn’t matter what anybody says or how much work there is or who gets gigs on the Who You Know circuit or who the best unemployed writer or unpublished script is. It doesn’t matter. None of it does. What matters, what always will matter now and forever, is the work.

And not just any work but your work. What matters is if you are one of those people who are hard-wired to write then write you must do, no matter if it pays the bills or not. No matter what anyone tells you. No matter the prospects of getting paid or published or even printed on glossy white 3-hole punch paper. No matter what, period.

Because if you are one of those poor suckers, you already know the gospel by heart. You ain’t in it for the money. Only a fool becomes a writer to get rich. You’re in it because you’re in it and there’s no way out of it. You’re here because you have no choice, because there are forces at work well beyond your control that compel you to turn that glob of gray between your ears into words and sentences, paragraphs and chapters, dialogue, scenes, acts, to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or blood to stone. Because you have no fucking choice.

If it’s in you, you know. And if you know, then you don’t need anybody to tell you that you’ve just turned on to an endless two-lane between the voices in your head and those voices on paper making any kind of sense, the latter so far out on the horizon, you can’t be sure if it’s home or a thousand-foot death drop off a cliff.

I’ll tell you what you say to that young kid just starting out or to the reflection in your mirror on those days when you’re certain you’ve either written your last good word or the last word of yours anybody will ever read. You remind that kid (and you) that nothing will ever matter more than the work, that on this crazy, winding, frightening, amazing, wondrous, magical and sometimes fucked up ride that for sure has been chosen for us and not vice versa, the only thing you’ll ever have any control over is your craft. And nobody can take that away from you. Not if you don’t let them.

Check out Elizabeth’s blog on photography –  www.shyonelung.blogspot.com

Neely Swanson

neely@nomeanerplace.com

Powered by WordPress