Interview with JERICHO and HUMAN TARGET's Robert Levine: Part III - Writing Season Two of Jericho

Part I - Climbing the ladder as a writer's assistant
Part II - Working on Jericho's first season

Unsatisfied with the ratings, CBS canceled Jericho after it’s first season, but passionate fans refused to let the show die. Organizing via fan sites and fan message boards, they began a campaign to revive the show. Playing off of a line in the finale where Skeet Ulrich’s character quotes General McAuliffe’s defiant “Nuts!” in the face of superior German forces demanding his surrender, they sent over 20 tons of nuts to the CBS offices as a show of support. The effort paid off, and CBS, intrigued by the passionate response, began arranging Jericho’s return.

What was it like in the offices when you’re hearing about this massive fan response, by the way?

Well, we weren’t in the office. I was sitting at home. It was crazy.

Are you surfing the internet, seeing the reactions and all of that?

You’re mourning the show, you’re mourning this thing that you worked your ass off on and you love everyone involved. You’re hoping so much that it would come back – and then all of a sudden you’re hearing these rumblings of what’s happening at CBS with the peanuts, and they’re reconsidering. And especially for me, it was my first show, my first staff job. It was very hard to get. It was a long journey. It’s like, “Am I gonna have to start all over again or what?”

Then three weeks later I’m back at work. It’s insane.

So they told you straight out “It’s seven episodes and we’ll see…”

Yeah, which was great because we could just conceive it as a movie. Three acts. We knew where we wanted to go. We knew the milestones. We broke that thing very quickly.

And that was an effort in the room? It wasn’t like [executive producer] Carol [Barbee] comes in and says “Here’s the master plan. You guys conform to it.” How is a master plan for a season developed?

For season two Carol’s first question was “how do we resolve this cliffhanger and then where do we want to go from there?” And I think by then we all had a pretty good idea what our mythology for the show was. Jon Steinberg was a big source for a lot of vision for that story in particular. Jon was one of the original creators of the show. I think it was always in his mind that the show was a show about civil war. That it would eventually get there once it got through that stage of being a mystery show. For Jon I think it was almost as interesting a story once you knew what was happening [outside of Jericho]. What happens next? The government is gone, the country is split in half. Jericho is deep within one half of the country and they are not the good guys. And [dealing with] what happens.

I think we knew that we were telling a French Resistance story. We were telling a story about an occupied city and we knew that at a certain point, our people would rise up. [The question was] at the beginning of the season, they’re given everything back, so why rebel?

They get everything they were missing in season one, so what do they have to complain about?

Suddenly you’re back within the warm embrace of Uncle Sam, or in this case the ASA, so why would you rise up? Why would you fight that? We knew it would have to be big and would have to be something that would be really terrible and sad. That’s where the conversation started. We talked a lot about the character of Stanley (Brad Beyer). He owns a farm and at the beginning of the first season he was going to lose the farm to the IRS and in the second season he gets the farm back. His debt is wiped clean. And by then he’s got this woman Mimi he’s in love with, he’s got his sister Bonnie with him and everything’s working out for him. That was where the gravity started circling that “this might be where…”

Might be where “The Bad Thing” has to happen.

I think it was Jon Steinberg who said “What if we killed Bonnie [Stanley’s younger sister?]” It was one of those ideas where – these ideas happen a lot in a writers room. An idea is spoken outloud and there’s a very visceral reaction to them. And a lot of times that reaction is “No! That’s horrible! That’s awful!” Then you realize the strength of the reaction you’re having is in many ways advocating for that story point.

Because you’re not playing it safe…

And it’s doing everything that you’re demanding of the story, where you need something horrible. Very quickly I was like “Well she’s gotta go down fighting. She has to go down defending her home” and then we start talking about that family. We have this character Mimi (Alicia Coppola) who Bonnie (Shoshannah Stern) hated at first, who was the outsider, and now they’ve come together. So it would be wonderful if Bonnie died defending Mimi, who she had essentially welcomed into their family. So it all started to make a lot of sense very quickly. Then the whole season mapped out from there.

And Bonnie’s death is your episode! So everything in that conversation is everything you have to service in your episode.

Once I knew I was writing episode four I knew that I was killing Bonnie.

So you’re probably like “Well, at least I’ve got a great ending.” Is it harder or easier to write an episode when you have so much predetermined for you by where it falls in the through-line?

Easier.

It doesn’t kill spontaneity or anything?

I think it’s better. There’s still plenty to figure out. There always is. The challenge of that episode was the other story.

Because this is where Jake (Skeet Ulrich) and Hawkins (Lennie James) bring Heather (Sprague Grayden) into their alliance. You’ve got Heather betraying Beck (Esai Morales), and a lot of other plot threads… Was there a point where you looked at your To-Do list and thought “How am I gonna fit all of this in?”

The first hurdle of that episode was talking about the town – what was the rest of the town doing, knowing that the Bonnie thing was going to sneak up on the story and the audience… what is happening at the beginning of the episode that’s keeping people interested? That took a lot of conversation… and we always go back to “What comes into town that like a stone thrown into a pond, starts all the ripples?” And it became – money. They reintroduce money to Jericho. We were always trying to do this – taking something that’s very familiar and tweaking it a little so that it’s weird. [For example] we take a flag that looks like the American flag, but we flip the stars and stripes. So if you looked at it from a distance it would look normal but then the closer you get to it the more disturbing it is. In this case we did it with the dollar bills. They look like our dollar bills but they’re a different color and they say “Allied States of America” instead of “United States of America” and so that got everyone very excited.

[Then] we came up with this thing where [the government] would loan you a lot of money and then turn around and want to collect on it and suddenly you’re in debt to them. That turned into… a scene where [our characters] are arguing about if this was the right way to go or not and Stanley could be a big voice in that scene saying “Guys, everything’s fine. What’s the big deal?”

Because you knew in the next episode that would flip.

Yeah, “Why are we talking about rebellion? It’s over.” On the other side of that we have Dale being the black market engineer saying “This is bad. They’re cutting us off. They’re making us dependant on them.”

And then there’s the Jake story where Jake has to bring Heather into the secret and she has to steal some information from a binder in Beck’s office that would lead Beck to finding that Hawkins has been hiding a nuke. Meanwhile, Hawkins has sent Beck on a wild goose chase, and I do want to talk a little about Beck. He turns into an antagonist, but he’s a sympathetic antagonist. You’re with his point of view the whole time. How did you guys land on developing Beck in that way?

We had a character at the end of season one played by Titus Welliver, who we were all fans of. He was a leader in the ASA and we had plans for him. He was gonna become the steward of the town…. It became a question of “How will Jericho remain an important town once the story gets bigger and bigger and bigger?” It’s important at the beginning of the show merely because it exists. It’s a place where people survived, where they’re far enough away from the chaos that they can continue to live. That’s a central question in any story: Why this character? Why this place?

As we got into talking about the second season [and why Jericho was important] it became a conversation about Beck. Beck was someone that we created to replace Titus’ character because we couldn’t get Titus back. And the idea was that he’d be in charge of Jericho. He would be someone that was principled, who thinks he’s doing the right thing, who is a tough character who initially presents as an adversary and then over the course of the seven episodes, has his eyes opened by Robert Hawkins to the reality of what’s happening in his own backyard, and ultimately turns.

And the idea was that he’d turn at the end of the show and if we every came back, Jericho becomes important because it is the one island among all the ASA where even the military commanders are in active revolt. It would become the epicenter of the resistance in a very real way – not just the townspeople but the military people.

I think that whole story was really well-built, by the way. You didn’t have anyone have to step out of character. There was never a moment where it felt like something was being done specifically to service the plot.

Yeah, because he’s a man of principle. and as soon as you can reveal to someone like that that he’s not working for the right people, he will make the right decision.

And Hawkins accomplishes that through a set-up where he sends Beck on a wild goose chase after a dead terrorist and lets him “find” evidence that Hawkins has had in his possession all along.

Yeah, the kabuki theatre, as we called it. That wasn’t in the story for a long time. I have a very specific memory of that too because we were deep into outlining the episode, I was being told to go to script, and I knew I did not have a Hawkins story yet. I knew enough, I’d been doing it long enough that I could tell [we were missing something.]

When you’re the writer of the episode – a lot of people will write words that end up in the episode, a lot of people will contribute – but there is always one person whose responsibility it is to shepherd the episode. And in that case that’s what I was doing and my sense was that we didn’t have a story there. We knew that Hawkins would get a mysterious phone call, that he’d be talking to this character who’d be telling him he was in danger, but the thing that we were neglecting to service was at the end of the previous episode, Hawkins had said to Beck, “I’m going to help you find this terrorist.” The audience knows that he has no intention of doing that because he is the person that Beck is looking for and that the person Beck’s been tricked into looking for is dead.

We didn’t consider it [when we wrote the previous episode] but the reality of the situation is that Beck is going to come in the next morning and expect Hawkins to provide things. There’s a lie that has to be serviced. And actually I was on the train down to Comic-Con that year for Jericho, with Steve Scaia and Matt Federman, some of my fellow writers, and I was saying “Hawkins has to follow up or he’s a fraud.” So that created a conversation of, “What if he walks into Beck’s office and says, “I saw Sarah Mason [the terrorist.]” He’s doing what he promised he would do, which is help Beck find his terrorist. Why would he do that? What is his ultimate goal with Beck? And we had to remind ourselves that the larger story is about Beck’s turning, Beck’s awareness.

So how do we get this evidence that Hawkins has into Beck’s hands?

Right. The trick is how does Hawkins put the evidence into Beck’s hands that he wants him to see, but do it in a way that Beck doesn’t suspect Hawkins of any foul play. So that’s the tension of the story, and then it all rolled out very quickly. The idea was “well, Beck’s not stupid so at a certain point we want to make it seem like he’s seen through the ruse that Hawkins has played out. And confront him about it, and play that scene out.” What does Hawkins do if Beck says “You’re lying to me?” Does he run for his life? [And] what the scene ended up being was that Hawkins calls Beck’s bluff and it turns out Beck was bluffing, that he didn’t know what to believe and he was hoping that Hawkins would give him an out. And the ironic thing is that everything Hawkins was telling him was true – except for his role in it, which was very cool I thought, the way it worked out.

The other thing I thought was cool was that everything Hawkins shows Beck about Sarah Mason, Valente, etc. was all stuff that we had played in the show. We’d seen that evidence be collected, and we were able to pay off something that maybe we didn’t originally plan to, but the story organically creates a place for that stuff to come back into play. So that was cool.

If anything, I would have guessed that story was part of the master plan because it seemed so pivotal so it’s funny to hear it came in so late in the process.

I think when I left the writer’s room, the story was that [Hawkins’ source] calls and says that they’re going to find the bomb [that Hawkins has been hiding], [Jake and Hawkins] recruit Heather, she tears the page out of the binder [that would lead to the bomb] and almost gets caught, and that’s the end of it. And I’m was looking at it [and realized] “Robert Hawkins is doing nothing in this story. He’s sending Heather in to do the difficult thing. This will never work.” I knew enough that you don’t sideline Robert Hawkins in an episode of Jericho. That’s probably the thing I’m most proud of in that episode is that we figured that thing out. Then the easy part was the Bonnie stuff.

Because that dictated so much of the rest of the season.

We always knew we had that, and that by the end of the episode no one was going to care about the rest of it.


Part IV - Writing the Jericho comic book and getting an agent
Part V - Writing for Human Target

Interview with JERICHO and HUMAN TARGET's Robert Levine: Part II - Working on Jericho's first season

Part I - Climbing the ladder as a writer's assistant

We continue our conversation with writer Robert Levine. After CBS picked up Jericho, executive producer Carol Barbee hired Robert – her former assistant – as a staff writer on the serialized drama. Jericho was set in a small town of Kansas following a nuclear attack on 23 major cities in the U.S. Cut off from power and communications, the town’s folk spend much of the first season trying to fend for themselves and figure out a new way of life. As luck would have it, Rob’s first episode, “Crossroads”, deals with a significant turning point in that ongoing storyline.

I was wondering, when you got assigned episode nine during Jericho’s first season, how much of that particular story exists before it reaches you? I assume there’s some sort of master plan for the season, and how much do you know before you get to episode nine and how much do you have to bring to it?

It depends on which episode, where it falls in the order. Obviously the later it falls in the order probably the less specifics you have [ahead of time] in terms of what happened immediately before. Carol’s attitude – which I think was the smart way to go about it – was this is a serialized show, this is a show with a huge mysterious element. It’s very hard to write a show like that, especially under the gun, if you don’t know where you’re going. And a lot of those mysteries and those answers were not fully worked out by the authors of the pilot.

“We’ll figure it out when we get there,” sort of?

Yeah, which in the era of Lost, I think is not necessarily perceived as a problem but it certainly presents problems once you get into the actual writing of the show. Now, I don’t watch Heroes, but my understanding is that show’s become very muddled and schizophrenic and overwhelmed with characters – and I have to believe it’s because they didn’t know where they were going, and in a need to put a show on the air every week they just crammed in more and more mythology and more and more mystery and none it ever really resolved.

As a viewer of Heroes I would absolutely agree with that.

Lost is this amazing thing because they’ve managed to turn that frustration into just part of watching that show. The experience of the show is not knowing, but I think on Jericho we were wary of that. Carol was smart. She came in and the very first question she asked when the room was together was “How is the first season going to end? What do we want the end of that first season to be? Let’s aim for that.”

The idea became that by the end of the first season we would know more about what was happening outside of Jericho. [The premise of the show was] essentially the government is gone [following nuclear attacks on 23 major cities in the U.S. The town of Jericho has] no food, no power, no police.

It’s a frontier town in modern times, more or less.

Exactly.

And there are other towns they come into conflict with, and your episode landed smack in the middle of that set-up there.

It’s interesting you say that because that was the milestone we eventually created for the end of the season. We said that at the end of the season, Jericho will be under attack from a neighboring town. And we will end the season on the note of “Here comes the opposing town. They are superior in numbers, superior in firepower. Will our people survive?” And that’s what it ended up being. [As we started working it out] we didn’t know who those people would end up being, we didn’t know exactly why.

But you knew you had to build that in over the course of the season. “We’ve got to introduce this other town, we’ve got to populate the politics of this somehow, it’s got to lead to this conflict…”

Right, and then from there we started working out where will individual characters be by the end of the season. Jake (Skeet Ulrich) and his father, obviously we talked a lot about where they’d be in relation to each other. They started out the series very estranged. By the end of the show they have become very close. I think we realized very early on too that they were occupying a lot of the same space in the show in terms of who would be the leader and so that brought us to the idea – it was pretty late in the show but it became something we wrote to – that Jake’s father would die.

And then Hawkins (Lennie James), who’s the mysterious---

Coolest character ever.

I think we knew by the end of the show that whatever his secret was, it would be revealed to his wife and to his family and possibly to certain people in the town and that he would become a member of the town and that he would be joining us in that fight in whatever capacity.

Essentially what you do is you start to work back from there. So you have a milestone for the end of the season and then you create a milestone for half of the season.

Like structuring a screenplay only you’re doing it over 22 hours rather than 2 hours.

Right. Exactly. I think in terms of my episode, the milestones we knew would exist were in episode 8, our characters would make their first trip outside of town and that it would be to save Johnston’s (Gerald McRaney) life, Jake’s father, the mayor of Jericho. He would become sick and need medicine and the only place that could provide this medicine would be two towns over. The town ended up being called Rogue River, the episode was called “Rogue River.” It was the episode immediately before mine.

We had come up with these great villains called Ravenwood. They were private military contractors. The idea was that our guys would go into this town that was essentially a ghost town and they’d confront these guys who were outlaws, running all over the state pillaging with abandon and hoarding supplies. They would find our characters, we’d confront them, we would get away but they would catch a whiff of us and follow us back.

So the first big question of my show, episode 9, was “Do they come back to Jericho in my episode? Does Ravenwood follow us back?” And it became obvious early on that we needed that.

You couldn’t put it on hold for three weeks, or until sweeps or whatever.

Some of us [wanted to.] Some thought they should be the sharks in the water. That they should be out there and they should be a threat for later. We didn’t want to – pardon the expression – “blow our wad” with these great villains. It was a decision made by the higher ups that this was a great cliffhanger to end [episode] 8 on – the leader of the contractors played by D.B. Sweeney finds the driver’s license of one of our guys so he has our address and they’re headed our way.

So the story congealed around that. They’re armed, they’re lethal, we already know that they will kill everyone in the town and not blink an eye at it so what do we do? And how do you make an hour of television out of that? Obviously they’re not going to come in and overrun the town, so what’s the story?

“How do you stop them at that point and make it dramatic and don’t make it cheap?”

Yeah. Somehow it came to – and it sounds silly, but “do we blow up a bridge? Do we create this fake bottleneck that we end up defending?” That becomes the question. “This is how we stop them. Is it worth it? Is it not?”

And it’s a great way to get several of the characters in conflict with each other. They’re arguing over the merits of doing that and the impact on the town. And a lot of personal dynamics into people’s antagonism towards each other as to who takes what side. It seemed like a really great way to get that conflict going so it’s about more than just the standoff with these bad guys.

Yeah, it’s funny you say that. You’re touching on what we ultimately learned was… if there was any formula to Jericho – and it was a show that resisted that – but I think we realized that the best kind of Jericho story is: something comes down Main Street – whether it’s evil military contractors, or marines in a tank, or radiation, or news of the plague, or winter or whatever, something comes down Main Street and it ripples through the town. That’s how you make an episode of Jericho. The opening is about this thing arriving, and the dramatic question becomes: “what do we do about it?”

In this case it became these contractors showing up and saying “We’ll be back in two hours and if you don’t open your doors to us, we’re gonna kill everybody.” [The other thread I had was from] a story we had in the pilot about this woman named Emily (Ashley Scott) whose husband had been on a plane and in the pilot she was driving to the airport to meet him and she gets into a lot of trouble, but he never shows up. So there’s a question for her of is he alive or isn’t he? In episode four, she realizes that the plane landed safely so there’s potential that he’s out there and then the idea was that in my episode it would be her wedding day and we would tell a story about what do you [when the day that would change your life arrives] and he’s not here? And even if he were here, none of it would be the same. It was an interesting story. It was never a story that we actually did again, I think.

I was gonna ask about that because I noticed your episode was the one episode to have this fantasy “what might have been” version, and I noticed that the experiment wasn’t repeated again. So what that your inspiration or was that something that came out of the room? Or was it just “This kind of story isn’t our show?

It was a little bit of all of those. It was all of that. For better or worse we had to deal with it. Her husband’s out there… so it was just about how do you tell an interesting story with that concept? And that’s just where we arrived it. It was a weirdly introspective story that I don’t thing we ever tried to recreate. I think it came off okay, but it was an episode about somebody sitting in a bar feeling sorry for themselves for most of the episode.

I think you gave a lot of great material for the girls there. I think specifically Sprague Grayden [as Heather] got a lot of great material to play off of Ashley Scott in that bit. And I think that’s the first time they got any extended time together on the show so you got to write the girl bonding.

Right.

Is there a difference in writing female characters interacting with each other as opposed to male characters?

I don’t know that I acknowledge any difference. The challenge with that story was – you always have A stories and B stories and sometimes one has very little to do with the other. I think you’re always trying to link them somehow thematically if you can. You always want it to feel cohesive and it was especially a problem in this episode because there’s this hugely dramatic thing happening just outside of town – guns and shooting and these guys are going to come in and kill us all, and we’re gonna blow up a bridge.

And the internal politics of the town are coming to a boil and you’ve got these father and son conflicts… and then you’re cutting to these two people in a bar, as you said.

Yeah, and even at the earliest stage the network was saying “It’s weird that [the women] aren’t aware of what’s happening.” And they were right. But if these two women are e too aware then we’re not going to be telling this story – they’ll be picking up a gun and fighting. So it was a challenge to insulate them.

It works as a pressure valve in a way, because you’ve got some other scenes come to a boil on the tension and you kind of need to step away from it – both to make us relax and make us go “Wait! Get back to that! What happens next?” I think it works, but I very much noticed that the fantasies didn’t get repeated in later episodes.

You see that a lot in a show that’s that serialized. You see a show trying things and not necessarily repeating them. I like it for the most part. I just remember the challenge of trying to break it and write it in time. We were still under a lot of pressure from the network and studio at that time as far as defining what the show is and what they wanted to see.

That’s also around the time it feels like the show shifts a little bit to being a bit more action-oriented. Is that something that was in the master plan, or is it something that as you get into that episode you realize it works so you follow that for a while?

We were a show that a lot of people didn’t know early on what it was. There was confusion on the network end and I think Carol, Jon Steinberg, and the other producers… they did an admirable job of trying to say to the studio and the network “We know what the show is – let us make it.” That’s a hard battle to fight. We’d fight it every second on every decision. For that show, [the network was saying] “We want action. We want soap. We want teen stories… We want five different shows.”

Does that environment make it difficult to develop the characters? Because there are some characters who might thrive more under one conception of the series but when the show shifts, they might not fit so well, it seems.

Early on they’d say things like “We think the three main characters are Hawkins, Jake, and Dale (Erik Knudsen).” And it’s like “Oh. Okay.” So you try to write to them, but you write to Dale and it’s like “What is Dale’s story that is unique and interesting?” And it ended up that there were a lot of scenes early on of teenagers partying – stuff that as you get deeper and deeper into the show stands out as not fitting. You’re seeing the process [of the show searching for identity] playing itself out on the show.

But that’s normal for any first season show. I’ve got to ask about Heather because she sort of disappears for most of the rest of the season after episode 13 before resurfacing in the finale. She was one of my favorite characters so I really felt that absence. Was that part of the design to make her so likable and then take her away so we missed her, or a case where the character didn’t fit where the stories were going?

It was a lot of things. It was certainly not a reflection of anyone’s lack of interest in the character or the actress because we all loved Sprague and we thought she popped. She had great chemistry with Jake. I think everyone acknowledged that. The problem was that you have a pilot episode in which you’re saying that Jake is in love with Emily, has always been in love with Emily, and you’re telling that story. That locks you into that story, you have to tell it. Carol’s feeling and also what she was being told by the network was that [Emily] is Jake’s love interest. That’s the story you work with. Sometimes a show’s able to breathe organically and you follow stuff that works better and sometimes you’re held to stuff.

In that case I think it was primarily about “Well, [Heather] will not be a love interest for Jake. Emily is the love interest.” And then there was a weird thing because they [Emily and Heather] were both teachers and they filled similar roles. But I think Heather [going off to the other town at the end of episode 13] created that character. What she saw, what she learned and then what she comes back as, I think, solidified the character and made her unique. She’s someone who has a little more edge to her. We’ve seen her be smart, savvier and less of just another teacher in town, just an appendage. She becomes essential. It just took her going off and almost dying. I think we were all happy with where she ended up and in season two she really had a much more integral role.

I like that, and I noticed she was just a guest star in season two. Is that one of those things you have to do just to balance the budget?

In season two a lot of those decisions were about budget. We were given seven episodes. It was basically about CBS trying to figure out if this massive [fan] response that they’d seen from the show being canceled was reflective of anything they could get to reflect in the ratings so they were willing to let us have seven episodes to prove it or not.

Part III - Writing Season Two of Jericho
Part IV - Writing the Jericho comic book and getting an agent
Part V - Writing for Human Target

Interview with JERICHO and HUMAN TARGET's Robert Levine: Part I - Climbing the ladder as a writer's assistant

A few weeks ago, Robert Levine was generous enough to grant me an hour and a half of his time to trace his career in TV writing. Robert is currently a writer and executive story editor on Human Target and he’s been a staff writer on Jericho and Harper’s Island, as well has having writing credits on Judging Amy and Close to Home.

Like many writers in this business, Levine broke in by working as an assistant to show-runner Carol Barbee ( Jericho, Swingtown, Three Rivers) , and that’s where we begin our conversation.

How did you end up getting a job as Carol Barbee’s assistant?

The short version is that I started as an office PA on Judging Amy, which was a show that I just sent my resume into. I got hired because someone I knew through friends worked on the show and had been there several years so she put my resume on the top of the pile. So I started that job, probably 2003, and that’s a very, well you probably know…

Yeah I’ve done that too. Making copies, answering phones and so on.

Yeah, and the longer version is that I’d been in TV before that. My very first job – the reason I got into TV and wanted to be a TV writer – was… I’d been out in LA close to a year. I’d been interning, just for free and really struggling, trying to PA, freelance, whatever, and didn’t really have a good idea what I wanted to do. I’d always wanted to be a director in college, but you come out here… and you really don’t know where to start. I got really lucky because someone I knew through [college] … her dad, Steve Feke, had been a TV producer. He was going to China to do a show with these two producers. They were going to do this very weird thing where they were going to skip the whole pilot process altogether, go to China, shoot 22 hours of show, fund it themselves and then bring the whole thing back to the States and sell it as one big thing.

So like a negative pickup on a series.

22 hours. Shoot the whole thing in China. Build the studio we were gonna shoot at, bring all the cast from the States, bring a lot of the talent from Australia and Europe, but most of the crew would be native Chinese people… This happens now, more so. Fox does this, a branch of Fox does this. They don’t shoot a pilot, they just order a show and shoot it very cheaply. I don’t know if it’s quite worked out for anything. It certainly didn’t work out for this show.

Anyway, my friend comes to me and says “my dad needs an assistant to go over there for him for however long it’s going to take to shoot 22 episodes.” And I had nothing else going…

So if someone offers you a job…

Why not, you know? I had no idea what I was getting into. So that was actually my introduction to television because Feke… had been a movie guy first and then he’d been a TV guy for longer. He said to me the reason you do TV versus movies is because if you are a writer you are the creative center of the show. As opposed to a movie where there are 40 writers on one movie and the director and the producers are really the ones making the decisions. As a writer, you could toil on a movie for however long and your name’s not even on it and none of the work you do ever reaches the screen, whereas in TV you’re making all those decisions and you’re writing something that you’re gonna see produced. You know that so you get that gratification of “I wrote it. Someone’s gonna shoot it, see if it works or not.” He kept saying to me “That’s why you do TV.”

The other side of that coin is that the production schedule is so compressed. You have to produce, effectively, a movie every eight days, whereas a movie schedule could be anything from 45 [days] to whatever. They have all the time in the world. In TV you have to shoot seven and a half to eight pages a day and that really dictates everything. It dictates how you conceive the show, the sets that you use, the characters that you use. It’s all about how are we able to produce an hour of television in eight days, over and over and over again? Without stopping. Because shutting down in TV is death. It’s a freight train. Once it starts, it just keeps going.

So we got [to China.] We had a certain number of scripts [but once you start figuring things out] a lot of the things [you thought you could do] you can’t do. A lot of things about the show don’t work, you’re writing to certain characters because they’re better actors… It requires new scripts and changes to the scripts and my boss was in a position where he was effectively doing it all himself so you could look down the road on the schedule and see that there were these two scripts that hadn’t been written yet, just waiting there. They were like this chasm that this train was threatening to ride into at any moment.

I’d seen what Feke had been doing for a while, and a lot of times I was his proxy in meetings with people, and because I’d hear him talking about it all the time I’d absorb what his vision was for the show. So it was very easy for me to sell his vision or say, “Well, he’s not here but this is what I think he’d say he’d want.” I was a grunt, but I was learning how to run a show.

So at a certain point I was just like, “I could write an episode of this if you want me to.” And he just kind of looked at me and it was so crazy at that moment that I’m sure for him it was like, “Well what do I have to lose?” He was like, “Yeah, you know you’re gonna have to write it in like a week and I was like, “Ooookaaaay.” I ran back to my apartment and hammered out the script for this thing. Two weeks later they’re shooting it.

That’d be cool.

I was like “What?” It did seem crazy.

Sorta surreal being on stage, seeing your words being performed.

Dennis Hopper saying words that I wrote two weeks earlier in my apartment? It was cool, and from that point forward was where I got into the idea of it. But we finished the 22 [episodes] and then it never led to anything so I essentially had to start over [when I came back to L.A.] but at least I had it in my mind that this was something I could do. So I pursued it but eventually that lead to me just having to get a job as a PA at Judging Amy just to get my foot in the door of a network TV show. I tried to get writers’ assistant jobs, but those are pretty hard to get.

I worked a year as an office PA on the off-chance that at the end of the year, somehow I’d get a shot at working for the writers. It was a big gamble and I can’t tell you how close it came to not even working out. The season finished and I’d worked really hard on that show – it’s not a hard job, just the hours are long and you have no time to actually work on your writing either.

At the end of the fifth season of the show, they changed show-runners and almost all of the writing staff left because of this regime change, but two of the writers stayed. They were Carol Barbee and Barry O’Brien – and Carol became co-executive producer, sort of the second-in-command of the writers and above her they hired a guy who’d never written the show before to be the show-runner. But because she became the co-EP, Carol got to have an assistant and by the skin of my teeth, I met her. I think I either lobbied Amy Brenneman’s assistant or I lobbied someone over there to just get my name in front of Carol. Thankfully she’s just this very even-keeled person, so for her it was as simple as “Yeah, somebody wants to do the job, I’ll let them try. Or at least I’ll meet with them.” So I met her, she’s an incredibly friendly, down-to-Earth person, and just told her, “Yeah I want to write and I know everyone on the show because I’ve worked here for a year and everyone on the set. If you ever need to go to set I could tell you who everyone is.” It made sense to her so she was like, “Why not? You can be my assistant,” which was like the world to me.

Then I got another lucky break. Four weeks after they started the new season, the new show-runner left and Carol became the show-runner. So now I’m working for the boss and all of a sudden her office is the writers’ room. That show was in its sixth season and they had a non-writing executive producer on that show. Joe Stern ran casting and post-production.. The only thing Joe Stern didn’t run was the writing, so Carol was free to just focus on the writing – which is not normal. Especially nowadays. Nowadays they want one person to do everything, and it’s impossible for one person to do. But that show had a very stable foundation in terms of “Joe handled that stuff; Carol was in charge of the writing.” She could run the writers’ room all day, which meant that I didn’t have to man the phones all day. I could sit in the writers’ room with her and that was where I learned how writing for a show works.

The [new] writing staff were all sort of new writers for the most part. Carol and Barry were veterans. Everyone else was pretty much just a staff writer, coming up – their first job or second job, maybe. So it was a very democratic room. There wasn’t a lot of egos or anything because everyone was just learning and getting their feet so it was a very good environment to just learn how it works.

How did that translate into you getting to write an episode? Did you go to Carol and say “Hey, I’ve got an idea?” Or did she come to you and say “I know you want to write?”

It was a little of both. There’s different opinions on this, but I feel like you always want to say you’re a writer because that’s your intent and for the most part people will respect that. It’s like, of course you’re not in this business to be an office PA. You’re trying to get somewhere, why not say it? “I’m a writer.” Carol knew that. At the same time, I was careful not to be a nag about it. My priority was to be her assistant, to do whatever she needed. Luckily I was able to sit in the writers room and still do my job effectively.

A [writers] room is something that’s very organic. It’s one long conversation, essentially. If you listen enough and you’re good at reading where the room’s going and what problems people are trying to solve, you can start to speak up and contribute and pitch ideas. Any good room, I feel, should be a democracy where the best idea wins. It doesn’t matter who it comes from. That was the case on Judging Amy so if we were ever talking about a character I felt I had a take on or a story I felt I had a take on, I could pitch it and it would rise and fall on its own merits. Just contributing in that way, I think, made Carol realize that I was someone that might be able to do this.

On any given show, they’re supposed to assign one or two episodes to a freelancer who’s not a member of the staff. They’re supposed to be for writers who have worked in TV but didn’t get staffed so it’s a way to make sure that people like that can still have an income, health insurance, all that stuff. They also end up being opportunities for assistants on the show or people who want to rise up through the ranks. There were two that year and Carol assigned both of them to assistants on the show. I did not ask for it, but by then I had pitched stories.

So did she come in and say, “You’re doing episode 17, by the way?”

Yeah. It was amazing. A dream come true. Of course I knew on the board that the episode hadn’t been assigned yet, so I was anxious and she’d already assigned the first one to [another assistant] so I was hoping I’d be next. By then I’d pitched stories for other people’s episodes that had essentially been written and shot.

So you’d had your ideas heard already.

Yeah, though for her I’m sure it was a risk. Not that big a risk. The risk to the show-runner is “Well, I’m gonna get a script that I’m basically gonna have to rewrite from page one.” But we had a very close staff that worked very well together and because I think they were so young and just starting they were extremely helpful in terms of everyone helping everyone else. She assigned me the episode and I came back into the room with my ideas, and Judging Amy was very formulaic in that you knew what you had to pitch. You had to pitch a case for Amy, a case for her mom, and a personal arc.

So I came in with those and I pitched them. The room absorbed them, we worked them out. I stepped out, I wrote my outline. Everyone on the staff reads my outline before Carol even sees it. I get their notes, I revise it. By the time Carol gets it she’s getting something that’s been heavily vetted, in very good shape. Same thing for the drafts of the script, and since it was the sixth season Judging Amy was such a well-oiled machine. We were so ahead of schedule compared to other shows I’ve been on. You were able to write three or four drafts of the script before it went to the studio or network – before it ever went to Production. When Production got a script, that script was in very good shape. So I was able to write a draft, get all the writers to read it, get their notes, incorporate their notes. By the time it landed in front of Carol, it was the show.

So it wasn’t a case where you watch the episode now and go “Well, there’re two lines of mine in there.”

No, they were my ideas. And there are ideas in the show that are real stories of mine. For example, the personal story is that Amy’s daughter decides to be a vegetarian. It kind of knocks her mom for a loop because up until then she’s been a very straight-laced character and then all of a sudden she’s dressing in army fatigues and she’s got a nose ring and going out with a girl with red hair and she’s not eating meat so Amy kind of freaks out about it. Which is [based on] something I did when I came back freshman year of college and told my mom I’m not eating meat anymore. It was a problem for her and one of her solutions was… she knew I would eat fish… so she started putting shrimp and fish into everything she made for me. You know, like when you want a dog to eat a vitamin, you hide it in the dog food. So I wrote that in the script and it stayed. In terms of a first experience writing…

Sounds like a dream experience!

Pretty much a dream, yeah. You can’t imagine it happening in a more supportive environment. I went with Carol to another show, I wrote another freelance for her on that show and then by the time she was on the pilot for Jericho, she was willing to staff me as a staff writer.

Part II - Working on JERICHO's first season
Part III - Writing Season Two of Jericho
Part IV - Writing the Jericho comic book and getting an agent
Part V - Writing for Human Target

Friday Free-for-All: Orson Welles

I've been waiting a while for the right time to post these infamous viral clips. This is Orson Welles' classic outtakes from a Paul Masson wine commercial.



And this is the audio recording from a voiceover session for a frozen peas commercial. This is the infamous bootleg that inspired voice actor Maurice LaMarche's impression that was feature on The Critic and later became the basis for Brain on Pinky and the Brain.

BEST WORST MOVIE to get theatrical release!

Awesome! BEST WORST MOVIE, the documentary I raved about after I saw it at AFI Fest last fall, is getting a theatrical release. I just got this from producer-director Michael Paul Stephenson's email update. Below his email, you'll find the official press release:

"BEST WORST MOVIE" GETS THEATRICAL RELEASE
Area23a to Release Award-Winning Doc About The Worst Movie Ever Made

After four grueling years of green blood, sweat and troll tears, I can finally announce that our film BEST WORST MOVIE will be released in theaters this spring.

You'll find the official press release after the jump, but I wanted to drop you a quick note to thank you for joining our email family and for being apart of this adventure over the past few years.

I’m as tied to Best Worst Movie as any one person can be to a film. ‘Troll 2’ has been a defining factor in my life since I was 10 years old, and Best Worst Movie seems like a culmination of this era. To see it on a big screen, to watch the outpouring of love from the fans after a screening, and to see the enthusiastic and thoughtful support is at once relieving, rewarding, incredibly surreal and meaningful.

If you had the chance to see BEST WORST MOVIE on the festival circuit and liked it, or if you'd like to see BEST WORST MOVIE in your city... we need your help spreading the word about the theatrical release. SHOUT IT OUT! Request it in your city, ask your theater to book it, write about it, sing it, dance it, tweet it, eat it, just don't... piss on it!

We have plenty of cool surprises in store. And if you haven't already, please take a lightning-quick second to say hello:

1. Drop by our Facebook family,
2. TEXT "TROLL2" to 83043 (Yes, it's free).
3. Follow me on Twitter.

hospitably,

Michael Paul Stephenson
Producer & Director - BEST WORST MOVIE
Website: http://www.bestworstmovie.com
info@bestworstmovie.com


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press contact:

Liz Berger
(212) 277-7558
Liz.Berger@42west.net


AREA23A TO RELEASE “BEST WORST MOVIE”

New York, NY (February 24, 2010) – Area23A, the event-based film distribution company formed in January by industry veteran Richard Abramowitz and Kirt Eftekhar, founder of Ocule Films, announced today that it will theatrically release the award-winning “Best Worst Movie” which has been an official selection in over thirty film festivals. The documentary had its world premiere at South by Southwest and has received several awards including the Top Ten Audience Favorite at Hot Docs 2009. Area23a will open the film in Austin, Los Angeles, New York and other markets to follow this Spring.

In “Best Worst Movie” Michael Paul Stephenson makes his directorial debut by exploring one of the worst and most critically panned movies ever made, Troll 2, which he starred in twenty years ago as a child.

In 1989, Italian director, Claudio Fragrasso cast small-town dentist Dr. George Hardy and a group of unwitting Utah actors in the ultra-low budget horror film, Troll 2. Soon after its disastrous release, Dr. Hardy retired from his short-lived acting career and returned to dentistry in his hometown of Alabama, unaware of the legions of fans that would one day recognize him as a cult movie luminary.

“Best Worst Movie” reveals the improbable heartfelt story of an Alabama dentist-turned-cult-movie icon and an Italian filmmaker as they come to terms with their internationally revered cinematic failure.

Stephenson and his wife, Lindsay Stephenson produced "Best Worst Movie" under their production company, Magic Stone Productions. Brad Klopman also serves as a producer.

Of the acquisition, Stephenson says “Our movie – that we have devoted the last four years to – can not be in better hands than with Area23a. They have demonstrated their ability to skillfully handle specialized films in a crowded market place. The recent success of “Anvil!” is only the most recent example of Richard’s expertise in theatrical film distribution.”

Abramowitz adds “We are very excited to bring ‘Best Worst Movie’ to theaters across the country. The movie has been generating both incredible word-of-mouth and critical acclaim through the festival circuit. Audiences are appreciating the film’s humor and are also moved by its homage to bad movies and, at least in this case, the good people who make them.” Said Eftekhar, "Keep your eyes open: we're bringing a "Best Worst Movie/Troll 2" party to your town soon..."

Area23a is currently distributing the acclaimed “Soundtrack for a Revolution,” “The Mighty Uke,” “American Harmony,” and “They Came to Play.” Later this year it will release Sandy Cioffi's “Sweet Crude."

The Bitter Script Reader Fan page on Facebook

Well, I finally gave in to the last social network (that I know of) and joined Facebook. It took way more time than should have been necessary, but I finally figured out how to sync Tweet-Deck with the page. (I guess the problem had something to do with creating a fan page before I'd created an actual profile?)

Anyway, as arrogant as it is to be counting "Fans" it's even more pathetic to look at that counter and see ZERO fans, so please feel free to join the page, start discussions and whatnot. Otherwise I'll be forced to create a bunch of fake IDs to boost my fan count and I can't see that ending well.

The Bitter Script Reader Fan Page or just search Facebook for "Bitter Script Reader."

Tuesday Talkback (on Wednesday): Screenwriter scams

We had a good Talkback post last week as you guys weighed in on the merits of InkTip, so I figured that it might be good to put that knowledge to use again this week.

I hope I'm not opening up a huge can of worms here, but I'm putting out an open call for anyone to post on any screenwriting-related scams they've come across. I'm thinking of something along the lines of submitting your script to an agency only to have them tell you that you must pay $50 for another (secretly affiliated) company to do coverage on the script.

Awareness is the enemy of these scams so let's educate each other.

However, it's not a scam if you paid for coverage and got back notes that you didn't like or agree with. That's something between you and the coverage service. But feel free to post any contests or services that are clearly illegitimate.