On Story—The Golden Ages of Television 9781477316955

Citation preview

On Story—The Golden Ages of Television

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On Story

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The Golden Ages of

Television a u s t in f il m f e s t i va l e di t e d b y

Maya Perez and Barbara Morgan for e wor d b y

Noah Hawley

u n i v er si t y of t e x a s pr e s s

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aus t i n

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Copyright © 2018 by Austin Film Festival, Inc. Foreword © 2018 by Noah Hawley All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2018 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Perez, Maya, editor. | Morgan, Barbara, editor. | Hawley, Noah, writer of supplementary textual content. | Austin Film Festival (Austin, Tex.) Title: On story : the golden ages of television / edited by Maya Perez and Barbara Morgan ; foreword by Noah Hawley. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018. Identifiers: lccn 2018003960 isbn 978-1-4773-1694-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-1-4773-1695-5 (library e-book) isbn 978-1-4773-1696-2 (nonlibrary e-book) Subjects: lcsh: On story: presented by Austin Film Festival (Television program) | Television authorship. | Television—Production and direction. | Television producers and directors—Interviews. | Television writers—Interviews. | Television programs—History. Classification: lcc pn1996 o67 2018 | ddc 808.2/25—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003960 doi:10.7560/316948

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Contents

Foreword by Noah Hawley vii Acknowledgments ix Biographies xi Introduction by Maya Perez 1 1 . com e di e s Up Close with Garry Shandling (2004) 7 Up Close with Greg Daniels (2008) 11 Arrested Development: A Conversation with Mitchell Hurwitz, Moderated by Paul Feig (2009) 19 A Conversation with Alec Berg, Moderated by Pat Hazell (2011) 31 Orange Is the New Black: Up Close with Jenji Kohan (2013) 43 Web Series to HBO: Up Close with Issa Rae (2015) 45 A Conversation with Carl Reiner, Moderated by Barry Josephson (2015) 50 A Conversation with Marta Kauff man, Moderated by Barbara Morgan (2016) 56 New Girl: A Conversation with Elizabeth Meriwether, Moderated by Beau Willimon (2016) 65

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Up Close with Paula Pell (2016) 74 Up Close with Alan Yang (2017) 77 2 . dr a m a s Oz: Up Close with Tom Fontana (2003) 91 The X-Files: A Conversation with Chris Carter, Moderated by Damon Lindelof (2012) 94 A Conversation with David Chase, Moderated by Barry Josephson (2012) 100 Lost: Up Close with Damon Lindelof (2012) 107 Up Close with Marti Noxon (2012) 116 Breaking Bad: A Conversation with Vince Gilligan, Moderated by Barry Josephson (2013) 120 A Conversation with Vince Gilligan, Moderated by Álvaro Rodríguez (2013) 128 Rectify: A Conversation with Ray McKinnon, Moderated by Barbara Morgan (2013) 133 House: Up Close with David Shore (2013) 141 Justified: Up Close with Wendy Calhoun (2014) 144 The 10-Hour Movie: A Conversation with Cary Fukunaga and Noah Hawley (2014) 147 Mad Men: A Conversation with Matthew Weiner, Moderated by Robert Draper (2014) 161 Better Call Saul: A Conversation with Peter Gould, Moderated by Barbara Morgan (2015) 171

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Foreword noah hawley

Is a story about a story ever as interesting as the story itself? Or do magicians have the right idea: never show them how the trick is done? Because then they’ll see it was all just a trick. There was no magic after all. And yet we are curious beasts. And greedy. When we love something we want more of it. All of it. This explains The Fast and the Furious 91, Furiosity! It also explains the hunger for insight into how the stories we love to watch were made. We study photographs of Kubrick and Nicholson as they divine madness in the subterranean hallways of the Overlook Hotel. We look closely, trying to discern the moment when art was born. Filmmaking is a collaborative art, requiring hundreds of conspirators. This means that the architecture of every great fi lm and television show was the product of a process—spoken out loud, schematics drawn up, proofs reviewed, decisions made. Actors had to be cast and coached: the things they did to get into character, their feuds and affairs all part of the DNA of the object we love. What does it mean? we find ourselves asking directors on junkets, forcing them to turn subtext to text. And yet the magic of the trick we love—my god it’s full of stars—stubbornly refuses to be decoded. We watch these stories again and again—not because their every secret has been revealed, but for the opposite reason. In this way every great film is the Zapruder fi lm, in which a president is assassinated before our very eyes (each shot documented with a timecode), and yet no matter how many times we watch it, we still don’t know what happened. And so we watch it again. Sometimes, however, the act of research, the inquest into how the thing we love was made (and why) broadens the experience of watching vii

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it. The context of its creation—the details of the fi lmmaker’s influences— makes us say aha! Something important clicks into place. Something that doesn’t ruin the magician’s trick, but enhances it. You hold that something in your hand. It’s called a book, but you should think of it as a key. It will unlock many rooms, inside of which lie the truths you seek. Art, you see, is not the film itself, but the experience of watching it. It is a relationship between fi lm and viewer—the magic happens in the air between your eyes and the screen. You are the magician, is what I’m trying to say. Not a passive viewer, but a fi lmmaker yourself, working intimately with the director, the writer, the cast. So read on, and do your tricks.

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Acknowledgments

Foremost, we wish to thank the exceptional screenwriters whose conversations make up this book: Alec Berg, Wendy Calhoun, Chris Carter, David Chase, Greg Daniels, Tom Fontana, Cary Fukunaga, Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, Noah Hawley, Mitch Hurwitz, Marta Kauff man, Jenji Kohan, Damon Lindelof, Ray McKinnon, Elizabeth Meriwether, Marti Noxon, Paula Pell, Issa Rae, Carl Reiner, Garry Shandling, David Shore, Matthew Weiner, and Alan Yang. These artists generously shared their experiences, their writing and business practices, and their advice, and we are indebted to them. We also wish to thank the moderators who guided the conversations so deftly: Robert Draper, Paul Feig, Pat Hazell, Barry Josephson, Damon Lindelof, Álvaro Rodríguez, and Beau Willimon. Thank you to Sonia Onescu and Trey Selman for their readiness, editing, and organization; this book would not have come together without them. We are grateful to the following people for diligently transcribing hours of panel conversations: Shere Daniels, Caleb Dobbs, Jane Flores, Alex Gadway, Catherine Gillam, Colleen Hoofard, Felicia Jaramillo, Gabrielle Lindgren, Yus G. Marto, Sonia Onescu, Amy Marie Smith, Jeff Storms, Logan Ann Taylor, Paul Vance, and others. In particular, we’d like to recognize Travis Neeley, who has painstakingly transcribed the lion’s share of panel discussions for the On Story Project. We are so pleased to again be working with the University of Texas Press, and we are thankful to David Hamrick, Jim Burr, Sarah McGavick, Lindsay Starr, Lynne Chapman, Nancy Bryan, Lena Moses-Schmitt, Cameron Ludwick, and Sarah Hudgens for their assistance in putting this book together and getting it out to the world. ix

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Thank you to Rocky Schenck for allowing us to use his stunning photograph for our cover. Thank you to Deena Kalai, Esq., for her friendship and legal guidance with the On Story Project. Thank you to the following individuals for their help with and continued commitment to the On Story Project and this book: Miguel Alvarez, Katy Daly, Nan Foley, Jo Huang, Erin Hallagan, Colin Hyer, Eva Mikes, Brian Ramos, and Roy Rutngamlug. Thank you to our family and friends for their encouragement and unwavering support. Thank you to Fred Miller, Marsha Milam, Mary Margaret Farabee, Bill Wittliff, Rick Pappas, and Barry Josephson for being there from the beginning. Finally, we thank everyone who, over the past twenty-four years, has helped to make the Austin Film Festival and the On Story Project what they are today: screenwriters, fi lmmakers, moderators, interns, volunteers, attendees, sponsors, festival members, and board members. We are grateful for your stories, curiosity, encouragement, and enthusiasm. The world will never tire of great storytelling.

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Biographies

Alec Berg’s television credits include Seinfeld, where he was a writer and executive producer; Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he was a writer, executive producer, and director; and Silicon Valley, where he currently serves as a writer, executive producer, and director. His feature fi lm work includes writing the screenplays for The Dictator for Sacha Baron Cohen, The Cat in the Hat (which was made into a terrible fi lm), and Eurotrip (which he produced and co-directed and is excellent). He has also done extensive rewriting, having worked on fi lms for Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, Will Smith, Ivan Reitman, and Robert Zemeckis. Alec has been nominated for numerous Emmy Awards, a WGA Award, a DGA Award, and a Razzie (yes, for The Cat in the Hat; it’s that bad). Wendy Calhoun is a series creator developing content at multiple broadcast and cable studios. She’s currently writing and executive producing FX’s No Place Safe, a miniseries about the Atlanta child murders to star Emmy winner Regina King. Her past credits include co-executive producing and writing for the historic first season of Fox’s hit series Empire. In addition, she’s written and produced for ABC’s Nashville, FX’s Justified, ABC’s Revenge, and NBC’s Life. Calhoun wrote and directed the virtual reality short Left Behind, sponsored by Google and honored as “Best in VR” at Digital Hollywood 2016. She received a 2010 Peabody Award and WGA Best New Series Nomination for Justified. She received her second WGA Best New Series Nomination in 2012 for Nashville. Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, Calhoun studied fi lm and television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

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Described by Time magazine as a “televisionary,” Chris Carter created one of the most successful television franchises of all time with his awardwinning The X-Files. The show ran a remarkable nine seasons on Fox and spawned two feature fi lms, several comic book and video game adaptations, and a six-episode limited series in 2016. The X-Files is still seen today in over sixty countries. The impact of Carter’s series is such that in 1997, Time named him one of “The 25 Most Influential People in America.” Chris also created the shows Millennium, Harsh Realm, and The Lone Gunmen. In 2018, The X-Files returns to television once again with ten brand-new episodes on Fox. David Chase has produced, written, and directed critically acclaimed television shows such as the influential, Peabody Award–winning HBO drama series The Sopranos. Inspired by William Wellman’s The Public Enemy and his early years in New Jersey, Chase created and developed The Sopranos. It is the most financially successful series in the history of cable television and is acknowledged as one of the greatest television series of all time. The show, which premiered January 10, 1999, won a multitude of awards, twenty-one Emmys and five Golden Globes among them. Chase’s directorial feature fi lm debut, Not Fade Away, was selected as the centerpiece of the fiftieth New York Film Festival in 2012 and was released by Paramount Pictures in December 2012. Chase’s writing and producing credits include the classic NBC show The Rockford Files, the acclaimed television movie Off the Minnesota Strip, the eighties incarnation of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Northern Exposure, and the civil rights drama I’ll Fly Away. Greg Daniels is a prolific television writer, producer, and director. He was awarded for his writing on Saturday Night Live, Seinfeld, and The Simpsons. He co-created or developed and showran the first seasons of King of the Hill, The Office, and Parks and Recreation. Daniels is currently producing and he directed the pilot for People of Earth, and he is producing and writing a new animated series with Louis C. K. and Albert Brooks. Robert Draper is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and National Geographic and a correspondent to GQ. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. A Texas native, he now lives in Washington, DC.

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Paul Feig is a multitalented creator, working successfully as a filmmaker, writer, producer, and author. Feig’s most recent film was a reboot of Ghostbusters with a female-led cast, which Feig directed from a script he cowrote with Katie Dippold. Before Ghostbusters, Paul wrote, directed, and produced the female spy comedy Spy, Feig and McCarthy’s third collaboration. Feig’s other recent fi lms include the buddy cop comedy The Heat and the hit comedy Bridesmaids. Earlier features he wrote and directed include I Am David, based on the Danish book of the same name by Anne Holm, and Unaccompanied Minors, based on an episode of Ira Glass’s This American Life. A three-time Emmy-nominated writer/director and DGA Award winner, Feig is also known for creating the beloved and critically acclaimed series Freaks and Geeks, and for serving as director and co-executive producer of The Office. For his work on Freaks and Geeks, Feig was nominated for two comedy writing Emmy Awards, one for the pilot episode and one for the series finale, which he also directed. Feig has directed multiple episodes of the television series Arrested Development, The Office, Nurse Jackie, Bored to Death, Weeds, 30 Rock, and Mad Men. He has served as a co-executive producer on both The Office and Nurse Jackie. In 2008, his work on The Office earned him an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Direction in a Comedy Series for the hour-long episode “Goodbye, Toby,” and in January of 2009, he won the DGA award for Direction in a Comedy Series for the episode “Dinner Party.” Feig directed the hour-long episode “Goodbye, Michael,” Steve Carell’s last episode. Tom Fontana has written and produced such groundbreaking television series as St. Elsewhere, Homicide: Life on the Street, Oz, The Philanthropist, Copper, and Netflix’s Borgia. He has received, among others, three Emmy Awards, four Peabody Awards, three Writers Guild Awards, four Television Critics Association Awards, the Cable Ace Award, the Humanitas Prize, a Special Edgar, and the first prize at the Cinema Tout Ecran Festival in Geneva. Fontana serves on the boards of Stockings with Care, the WGAE Foundation, the NYPD Police Museum, DEAL, The Creative Coalition, The Acting Company, the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and Center for Creative Voices in Media. Cary Joji Fukunaga’s work as a writer, director, and cinematographer has taken him from the Arctic Circle to Haiti to East Africa. His television

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work includes directing and executive producing the first season of HBO’s acclaimed mystery drama True Detective, for which he won an Emmy for outstanding directing. Fukunaga made his feature fi lm writing and directing debut with the critically acclaimed Sin Nombre, followed by the fi lm adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, both released by Focus Features. His third fi lm, Beasts of No Nation, released by Netflix, was an official selection at the Venice, Telluride, and Toronto film festivals and earned Idris Elba Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Best Supporting Actor. Fukunaga is currently in production on his upcoming Netflix series, Maniac, starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill. Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and co-creator of Better Call Saul, was born in Richmond, Virginia, and raised in Farmville and Chesterfield County. He received the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Award in 1989 for his screenplay Home Fries, which was later turned into a fi lm starring Drew Barrymore and Luke Wilson. As a writer and executive producer on The X-Files, Vince shared Golden Globe Awards in 1996 and 1997 for Best Drama Series. After writing and directing the Breaking Bad pilot, Vince received the 2009 Writers Guild Award for Episodic Drama. The series went on to win five more WGA Awards and was twice honored by the prestigious Peabody Awards. Over five seasons, Breaking Bad won sixteen Primetime Emmy Awards, including the 2013 and 2014 Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, and fifty-three nominations, including Vince’s three nominations for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series. Widely praised by fans and critics alike, the debut season of Better Call Saul garnered seven Primetime Emmy Award nominations and was named Outstanding New Program by the Television Critics Association. Peter Gould began his fi lmmaking career at the USC Graduate Film Program, where he won the Nissan Focus Award for his student film. He went on to write screenplays and pilots for HBO, USA, Showtime, TNT, CBS, and FX. For all five seasons, Gould was a writer for the Emmy Award– winning series Breaking Bad, also serving as executive story editor, producer, supervising producer, and eventually, co-executive producer. In Season 2 of Breaking Bad, Gould wrote the episode that introduced criminal attorney (emphasis on criminal) Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk). As Breaking Bad concluded its run as a series, Gould and co-creator Vince Gilligan decided they weren’t finished with the shady lawyer; together they con-

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ceived the spin-off prequel—Better Call Saul. A New York native, Gould now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter. Noah Hawley is an Emmy, Golden Globe, PEN, Critics’ Choice, and Peabody Award–winning author, screenwriter, and producer. He has published five novels and penned the script for the feature film Lies and Alibis. He created, executive produced, and served as showrunner for ABC’s My Generation and The Unusuals and was a writer and producer on the hit series Bones. Hawley is currently executive producer, writer, and show runner on FX’s award-winning series Fargo and Legion from FX Productions and Marvel Television. His most recent novel, Before the Fall, debuted at number two on the New York Times Best Seller list. Pat Hazell is one of the original writers for NBC’s Seinfeld, a Tonight Show veteran, and a critically acclaimed playwright. He is recognized for his genuinely funny Americana humor in his productions The Wonder Bread Years, Bunk Bed Brothers, A Kodachrome Christmas, and My Life in 3D. He is currently working on an original musical about being the victim of your own circumstances entitled Grounded for Life. Mitchell Hurwitz is an Emmy, TCA, and WGA Award–winning writer and producer possibly best known for creating and executive producing the genre-breaking television show Arrested Development. Initially made for Fox, the series returned to television as one of the original madefor-streaming series for Netflix in 2013, and it is currently in preproduction again for the streamer. The show has topped many lists of the best shows of all time, and through its four-year run it received twenty-five Emmy nominations—of which Hurwitz took home three, two for writing and one for producing. Currently Hurwitz’s production company has a multiyear first-look deal with Netflix to produce and create original series for the internet TV network. So far, the pact has yielded Lady Dynamite, a show Hurwitz co-created for Maria Bamford, and the Will Arnett series Flaked. Prior to his work at Netflix, Hurwitz co-ran Tantamount Pictures—a production pod under Sony Pictures Television—where he executive produced several shows and created others, including Running Wilde with Will Arnett and Sit Down, Shut Up for Fox. Prior to that he co-created The Ellen Show, and created the NBC comedy Everything’s Relative, where he first worked with his comedy hero Jeff rey Tambor.

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Barry Josephson is a veteran of the entertainment industry with a wealth of diverse experience in fi lm, television, and music. Josephson’s credits include the international hit comedy Dirty Grandpa, starring Robert De Niro and Zac Efron, and the critically acclaimed box-office smash Enchanted, starring Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey. Josephson is also preparing a number of feature projects, including Circle of Treason at Focus Features with Massy Tadjedin (Last Night) directing, The Dive at Twentieth Century Fox with Francis Lawrence (Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2) set to direct, and Enchanted 2 at Disney with Adam Shankman (Rock of Ages) set to direct. For television, Josephson produces Bones on Fox, the AMC period drama Turn: Washington’s Spies starring Jamie Bell, and The Tick on Amazon. Jenji Kohan began her writing career on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air after graduating from Columbia University. Her series writing credits include Mad About You, Tracy Takes On, Sex and the City, and Gilmore Girls. In 1999, she was honored with an Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series for her work on Tracy Takes On. She has developed and produced multiple pilots and series, including Showtime’s Weeds, which ran for eight seasons and garnered her the Writers Guild Award for Best Episodic Comedy for the pilot entitled “You Can’t Miss the Bear.” Her latest project, Orange Is the New Black, is now streaming on Netflix. Kohan is the daughter of thirteen-time Emmy Award–winning television writer Buz Kohan and accomplished novelist Rhea Kohan. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, journalist/author Christopher Noxon, and three children, Charlie, Eliza, and Oscar. Damon Lindelof was born in New Jersey to a schoolteacher and a banker. He was also born a writer, although it would take over twenty-five years to figure that out. In 2004 he met with writer-director-producer J. J. Abrams to create a television series about the survivors of a mysterious plane crash—Lost. After six years, 120 episodes, and many unanswered mysteries, Lindelof finally left the island. Since then, he has worked as a writer and producer on Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, World War Z, Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Tomorrowland. He is currently writing and producing the third and final season of HBO’s critically acclaimed The Leftovers, which he fiercely defends as “not as depressing as everyone says.” He also wrote this bio.

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Ray McKinnon is a writer, actor, director, and producer. He has served the last four years as creator, executive producer, writer, and director of the Peabody Award–winning Rectify. In a career spanning two decades, McKinnon steadily built an impressive resume, including memorable roles on FX’s critically acclaimed Sons of Anarchy and the award-winning HBO series Deadwood. He’s also appeared in series such as NYPD Blue, The X Files, and Matlock. Big screen credits include The Blind Side, Footloose, Mud, Take Shelter, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Apollo 13, and Bugsy. As a fi lmmaker, he produced and starred in the critically praised indie feature That Evening Sun and garnered an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. McKinnon has frequently collaborated with his friend Walton Goggins and his late wife, actress Lisa Blount, under their Ginny Mule Pictures banner. Their debut fi lm, the McKinnon-penned The Accountant, won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short in 2002. Their first feature, Chrystal (written and directed by McKinnon), was selected for the Sundance Film Festival’s prestigious Dramatic Film Competition in 2004. Elizabeth Meriwether is creator, executive producer, and writer of New Girl. The single-camera series has received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Television Series—Comedy or Musical, a Writers Guild Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Television—New Series, a Critics’ Choice Television Award in the category of Best Comedy Series, and a Television Critics Association Award in the category of Outstanding New Program. Meriwether wrote the feature fi lm comedy No Strings Attached, which starred Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher and was directed by Ivan Reitman. In addition to her screenwriting, Meriwether also has written several off-Broadway plays, including The Mistakes Madeline Made, Oliver Parker!, and Heddatron, a robot version of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Barbara Morgan co-founded the Austin Film Festival in 1993 and has served as the sole executive director since 1999. Barbara developed and produced the film Natural Selection and co-produced the feature documentary Antone’s: Home of the Blues. Both films were released internationally. Most recently, she produced the documentary feature Portrait of Wally and the narrative feature Spring Eddy. She developed and produces the TV and radio series Austin Film Festival’s On Story, currently airing on PBS stations across the country as well as on Public Radio International. Barbara co-edited the books On Story: Screenwriters and Their Craft and On Story:

Biographies

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Screenwriters and Filmmakers on Their Iconic Films, both published by The University of Texas Press. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her daughter. With hundreds of hours of television under her belt, Marti Noxon is one of the most prolific writer-producers in television today. Currently, Noxon has several television series on the air, including Bravo’s Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce, Lifetime’s UnREAL, and CBS’s Code Black. Up next for the multihyphenate is the highly anticipated drama Sharp Objects for HBO, which is an adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel of the same name and will premiere on the cable network in 2018. She is also in the works on the series Dietland for AMC, based on Sarai Walker’s bestselling novel of the same name. Among Noxon’s past television credits are some of the most beloved and critically acclaimed series of the past two decades, including Buff y the Vampire Slayer, Grey’s Anatomy, Mad Men, Private Practice, Brothers & Sisters, Glee, and Prison Break, to name a few. Additionally, Noxon made her feature directorial debut in 2017 with the powerful fi lm To the Bone, for which Noxon also penned the screenplay. Loosely based on her own personal experience with eating disorders, the fi lm premiered in competition at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival to strong reviews and quickly sold to Netflix for $8 million, making it one of the highest sales to come out of the 2017 festival. Paula Pell was a writer for Saturday Night Live for twenty years, starting in 1995. She also wrote for the sitcom 30 Rock. Pell has collaborated numerous times with Judd Apatow, providing additional writing for the films Bridesmaids and This Is 40. She is currently teamed with Judd in a recurring role on the Apatow-produced series LOVE on Netfl ix. Pell has appeared in several episodes of 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation. She has also appeared in dozens of SNL sketches. Pell voices Gadget Gal in the Hulu original series The Awesomes and voiced a character in the Pixar film Inside Out. She also had cameos in the fi lms Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues and the Oscarwinning Birdman. Sisters, starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, was Paula Pell’s first produced original screenplay. With her own unique flare and infectious sense of humor, Issa Rae’s content has garnered over twenty-five million views online and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress for her hit show, HBO’s Insecure. Issa’s web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl was the recipient of the

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coveted Shorty Award for Best Web Show, and her first book, a collection of essays, is a New York Times Best Seller. Issa has graced the cover and pages of major national media outlets, including Essence, The Hollywood Reporter, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, CNN, Vogue, and Time, with appearances on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Good Morning America, The View, and more. Twelve-time Emmy winner Carl Reiner is best known as a co-star on the legendary television program Your Show of Shows; the creator and co-star of The Dick Van Dyke Show; and director of such feature fi lms as The Jerk, All of Me, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and Where’s Poppa? As an actor, he has starred in such fi lms as The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming and the Oceans movies with George Clooney and Matt Damon. He teamed up with Mel Brooks on the Grammy-winning 2000-Year-Old Man comedy albums. Reiner has written twenty-two books, including the three volumes of his memoirs, I Remember Me, I Just Remembered, and What I Forgot to Remember, and eight children’s books, including Tell Me a Silly Story, Tell Me a Scary Story (a New York Times Best Seller), Tell Me Another Scary Story, and You Say God Bless You for Sneezing & Farting! His most recently published book is Too Busy to Die, and two books due for publication in the near future, Carl Reiner, Alive at 95, Recalling Movies He Loved and Approaching Ninety-Six, the Pix I Love Viewing and Loved Doing, bring the total to twenty-four. Reiner was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1999 and received the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize in Comedy in 2001. Austin Film Festival regular Álvaro Rodríguez is a writer whose credits include the fi lms Machete and Last Rampage as well as From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series and Chicago Fire for television. His interview with Oscarwinning screenwriter Ted Tally appears in On Story: Screenwriters and Filmmakers on Their Iconic Films, also from The University of Texas Press. Garry Shandling began his show business career in 1977 as a writer for Sanford and Son and Welcome Back, Kotter. In 1981, he made his first appearance on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson and went on to guest host the show many times. Shandling made his first cable comedy special for Showtime in 1984, and two years later he created his first television series, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, for the network. Running for four years, the show

Biographies

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was nominated for several Emmys and won many Cable Ace Awards. In 1990, Shandling did his first HBO special, Stand-up. In 1992 Shandling created The Larry Sanders Show for HBO, which ran until 1998 with a recordbreaking seventy-eight Emmy nominations. Shandling won the Emmy for Best Writing in a Comedy Series the final season of the show. Shandling hosted the Emmy Awards in 2000. The show received critical acclaim and its highest rating in fourteen years. He returned to host the Emmy Awards in 2004. He has also hosted the Grammy Awards a total of three times. Most recently, in 2014, Garry reprised his role as Senator Stern in the Marvel blockbuster Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which was directed by Anthony and Joe Russo. Shandling first joined the Marvel Universe in 2010 for Iron Man 2. Shandling’s fi lm credits include What Planet Are You From?, Hurlyburly, Love Affair, Town and Country, Over the Hedge, and The Jungle Book. David Shore was born in London, Ontario. He received a law degree and pursued a legal career before becoming a writer and moving to Los Angeles. Shore created and ran what was at one point the world’s most watched television program, House. He is married with three children. Matthew Weiner has been entertaining audiences for two decades, most recently as writer, creator, executive producer, and director of Mad Men, one of television’s most honored series. He also worked as a writer and executive producer on The Sopranos and several comedy series, and he made his feature fi lm debut in 2014. Weiner studied at Wesleyan University and earned an MFA from the USC School of Cinema and Television. Playwright and screenwriter Beau Willimon earned an Academy Award nomination for his work on The Ides of March, adapted from his play Farragut North. He made his first foray into television as the creator and showrunner of the Emmy- and Golden Globe–winning House of Cards. Through his company Westward Productions, he is currently producing several fi lms. Alan Yang is the co-creator, executive producer, and a director of the Netflix series Master of None, for which he received the 2016 Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Comedy Series. The show was nominated for four Emmys, including Best Comedy Series, and was the recipient of a Peabody

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Award, an AFI Award, and the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Comedy. Previously, Yang was a writer, co-executive producer, and director for Parks and Recreation, for which he was nominated for an Emmy in 2015. He can also be seen on-screen in episodes of Parks and Recreation playing bass in Mouse Rat, the rock band fronted by Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt).

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On Story—The Golden Ages of Television

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Introduction m aya p er e z

We are delighted to continue our On Story book series with this new book, On Story—The Golden Ages of Television. We’ve planned for this book since the beginning of our relationship with the University of Texas Press in 2012, and having just wrapped the seventh season of our TV show, Austin Film Festival’s On Story, which airs on PBS-affi liate stations across the country, we thought the timing right. Additionally, we have begun the process of digitizing and transferring our archives of almost twenty-five years of Austin Film Festival panels and post-fi lm Q&A recordings to The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, making them accessible and free to the public, and launched our On Story podcast and radio show, the latter in partnership with Public Radio International (PRI). We were ready to move on to this next project. David Chase (The Sopranos) was the recipient of the inaugural Austin Film Festival Television Writer Award in 2000, and since then our audiences have been the fortunate recipients of insights, stories, and advice from such influential television creators and writers as William Broyles Jr. (China Beach), Glenn Gordon Caron (Moonlighting), Gary David Goldberg (Family Ties), Howard Gordon (24), Hart Hanson (Bones), Mike Judge (King of the Hill), Callie Khouri (Nashville), Norman Lear (All in the Family), Thomas Schlamme (The West Wing), David Simon (The Wire), Darren Star (Sex and the City), Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars), Kriss Turner (The Bernie Mac Show), John Wells (ER), Larry Wilmore (The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore), James Wong (American Horror Story), and so many more. So, how did we select the final twenty-four transcripts included in this book? It wasn’t easy. From hundreds of recorded panels, we pulled those

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that focused on a sole TV creator or writer discussing his or her show and/or work in television. Hence, no John Ridley on American Crime chapter, as when he attended he mostly discussed his work on Twelve Years a Slave, and no Phil Rosenthal on Everybody Loves Raymond chapter, as the AFF panels on which Rosenthal participated have been group discussions. From this reduced group of transcripts, we whittled the stack down further to have a good representation through the years of television, so as not to be too past or current heavy, and we wanted a balanced number of transcripts representing drama and comedy. It was important that the content be diverse, both in creators’ voices as well as in genres and styles, so that further helped us determine which transcripts to keep. Finally, UT Press reminded us that there was a word count limit. Our next decision was how to organize the collection. Dividing it into two sections, Comedies and Dramas, seemed like a no-brainer until we considered that shows like House, Better Call Saul, Orange Is the New Black, and others terrifically combine both. We briefly considered adding a third category of Comedy/Drama, or Dramedies, but ultimately decided to let the Television Academy’s Emmy Awards be the arbiters of genre and so have grouped the shows and their writers in the category for which they received nominations and wins. Finally, what accounts for the order of the interviews? We debated ordering the conversations chronologically, either in order of the writer’s most notable work or in order of main years of professional impact. But then where would that have put Issa Rae (creator of Awkward Black Girl and Insecure), Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad and co-creator of Better Call Saul), and Marta Kauff man (co-creator of Friends and Grace and Frankie)? Their respective iconic shows are years apart. As you’ll see, we went with neither, instead organizing them in order of the date of the conversation. We hope this doesn’t confuse you, but in reading (and rereading) the transcripts, we saw that the writers often reference other shows and events that weren’t on air or occurring at the time of their show. In addition, they sometimes reflect on a show that is many years behind them, and we wanted that passage of time to be more clear. In putting together this book, we noticed that the most significant shift in the conversations about writing for television is that it now includes online streaming outlets like Netfl ix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and others. With these new outlets, not to mention the gratifying, quick development-toproduction process afforded by television, more fi lm writers and directors

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are flocking to TV, the prestige of the medium has increased dramatically, there are more distribution opportunities, larger budgets are allocated, and show creators have more creative control. But what hasn’t changed is the power and importance of writing a compelling story that holds the viewer, creating characters whom audiences enthusiastically welcome into their homes (and mobile devices), putting together a writers room, and, of course, the disappointment of getting cancelled. The following chapters are transcripts from recorded conversations and  interviews at past Austin Film Festivals. We edited them for clarity and length, and, when possible, each of the participants then reviewed and made corrections and edits as they saw fit. We are grateful for their time in person and on the page. Any errors are ours. This collection of conversations—spanning the decades from the 1950s to today—explores what writing for television looks like through the eyes of the creators and writers of some of the best shows on the smaller screen. How did they get their start in television? How have they dealt with themes and subjects important to American audiences? The content covers everything from breaking racial barriers to creating mythologies to the impact of fans’ feedback on the storytelling to the frustrations of binge-watching. There is nothing quite like the experience of hearing great writers talk about the works that have moved us, shaped us, and reflected us. In this book, these illustrious creatives explain the process and practice of writing for television and offer invaluable advice through example on how to build a career in television. We hope you get as much out of this book as we did in putting it together.

Introduction

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Up Close with Garry Shandling 20 04

I went to Los Angeles from Tucson to pursue a writing career. I had no intention of performing. In fact, when I was struggling at The Comedy Store, I was the guy who was, at the same time, submitting spec scripts to M*A*S*H and Sanford and Son. That’s where my primary interest was. I started to get hot as a young writer and was writing for several different shows, and thought, “My God, if I don’t stop, I’ll never explore the performing.” So I got back into the club. I went up on amateur night and said, “Well, I’m going to give this a shot and see what it feels like” because I got bored writing those network sitcoms. I think my shows are drastically different in that you can’t tell from one episode to the next where it’s going to go, and in network shows there was a formula. There was a formula on Sanford and Son. There was a formula on Welcome Back, Kotter. I went to the story editor after my third script and said, “How have you done this for four years?” He said, “Burned out at twenty-five, huh?” [laughter] I just had another calling. I had a calling to do something different and out of the box and follow my own voice. I didn’t have much of a choice. I was in pain writing the same kind of thing over and over again. I had a knack for joke writing, so the scripts were funny, but there was no further exploration of human behavior. I wasn’t being tested. So, for my own personal growth, I moved aside. I was at a typewriter—I still to this day don’t know much about computers, but I go to a place that has laptop dancing and I like that. [laughter] Anyway, I was sitting there and I had three assignments and I was writing a pilot—it’s always been my pattern—and I thought, “Am I going to be doing this the rest of my life? I don’t want to do this day in and day out.” I kind of froze. I was in pain. 7

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It’s Garry Shandling’s Show

So, I went in and quit these shows. I was a very successful writer and the assignments were mounting, and I quit. I started working in clubs and within three years, Jim McCawley, the talent booker for The Tonight Show, saw me and booked me. Then, ironically, NBC came to me and said, “We’d like you to develop a sitcom for NBC.” This was in 1985. I had just left sitcom writing and was moderately experienced, and I said, “I want to do a show about a comedian and a comedian’s life with his platonic girlfriend and his buddies.” The head of NBC said, “Well, we can’t do a show about a comedian. People can’t relate to that.” And I said, “And I want to talk to the camera,” and they said, “Well, we don’t want to do that.” So I went to Showtime because they said, “Do anything you want.” I developed the first series but ended up writing as much or more than I did before and said to myself, “This is too much writing.”

The Larry Sanders Show

That was another choice I had to make in my career. I was guest hosting The Tonight Show and had to decide if I wanted to host a talk show. I was offered a lot of talk shows, and that’s when I had the idea for The Larry Sanders Show. I realized a show about a guy who hosts a talk show is more interesting to me, because I have a saying: “The only thing crazier than being on TV every night is wanting to be on TV every night.” The exploration of a man who needs to be seen every night is fascinating to me. I remember sitting at a table and having to make the choice of whether to develop The Larry Sanders Show or, ironically, host a talk show. I wanted Rip Torn from the beginning and HBO first said, “We think he’s a little too old.” And I said, “Well, have you seen this guy act?” There’s usually no response to that. One of the funniest things I had seen was Rip in Defending Your Life, the Albert Brooks movie. He’s stunning and hilarious and loaded with personal issues. I said, “Let’s bring that to the character,” and I knew it was going to be a handful. I called him up to have a meeting, and he was very protective and didn’t want to read. Some actors don’t want to audition, and I said, “Well, Mr. Torn, if you don’t want to read, I respect that, and I’m not asking you to read as an audition. I just have no idea if our chemistry clicks. I’d just like to get a feeling. That’s all I’m asking. There’s no one else in the room. There’s no one taping it. It’s ac-

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tually for us, as actors. But if you don’t want to read, I support that.” He took a beat and said, “Ah, fuck it.” He proceeded to read a scene as Artie, and it was electric. He’s a genius in many ways. That character was originally patterned after Fred de Cordova on The Tonight Show, but Rip took it to a different place and made it his own. Larry Sanders was a show where actors were really given respect for their instincts. Anyone who really had an instinct about what felt right for their character was supported. We would adjust things, and I would adjust things, and we could feel in the room what worked in a scene. Many times Rip would say, “This isn’t right, this doesn’t feel right, Artie wouldn’t say this.” So, I would go, “Okay, let’s examine it.” That’s why Rip Torn was able to function for so long, because he was listened to. He doesn’t have great communication skills when he’s not listened to. But do any of us? The Process of Writing

It’s shockingly deep and challenging. I’m not kidding. The process of writing and the layers—if you really go at it—are painful. You start with what is your point of view about life, if you’re me. I think if you’re the kind of writer you want to be, you look at your point of view about life and ask: What is life about? What is being a human being about? How are we all trying to cope and deal with these drives that the ego has versus our heart? And where is God? And is there a God? You start that deep, quite seriously. Then you look at the characters and make sure you have the conflicts you need. There are two different issues when you’re doing a series. You have to be able to get a real overview of life and what people are doing, what their behavior is—and their behavior is usually covering their pain. Then you can begin to explore the interaction between the characters, and then you can make it funny. I don’t believe you can do one without the other. I think a lot of people get really confused because they think there’s some formula—it’s two guys at the beach who have an apartment, and it lets them get girls, and we’ll put that on the air. It’s not going work. I hosted the Emmy Awards three weeks ago. I did this piece, I said, “I can’t tell one reality show from the other. I was watching one the other day, and it takes place on the street. The gardeners were arguing with the contractors, and I said, ‘Well, this is interesting. Let’s see which one gets elimi-

Garry Shandling

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nated.’ Then a garbage truck pulled up, and the garbage man formed an alliance with the contractor. Then a woman, who was a hooker I guess, walked up and rang the doorbell, and I realized I was watching my security camera for forty-five minutes thinking, ‘This is not a bad show. I think I could sell this show, What’s in Front of Garry’s Door?’” I’m onstage, remember, and I went on to say, “So I know there’re executives here. If you’re interested in this show, What’s in Front of Garry’s Door?, I’ll be here for three hours.” Now he shall remain nameless, but a guy came up to me and said he knew it was a joke, but, “The truth is, I think there’s something there.” I still learn from reading scripts because I get lazy and think, “Oh, I can slide by,” but you can’t. It’s hard. Writing is hard. I burn myself out writing. I stopped Larry Sanders because I was writing too much. I couldn’t write eighteen episodes. We were doing eighteen episodes, and I was writing fifteen episodes, and couldn’t write anymore.

I was the guy in the clubs who would come in with a yellow legal pad. I was always working on my jokes. It’s all the same. It’s just looking and searching. A lot of guys didn’t do their work as comics. The guys that did, I mean, [Jerry] Seinfeld is a fantastic writer, stronger than anybody realizes. But the writing is hard. I’ve never started with an overall concept. Even the idea of Larry Sanders, people go, “Oh, it’s about a guy who hosts a talk show.” But it actually isn’t. It’s about our own struggles to be successful and the search for love. I had a fantastic acting teacher named Roy London, who passed away a few years ago, who instilled in me this idea of exploring ourselves to the deepest degree. I only used that show to explore those things and that’s what drove it. It was couched in the form of this guy who had a talk show, and you could say funny things that happen on a talk show, but the reason it worked was something deeper. It was about people and my point of view of needing approval and what happens behind the curtain when we’re in our private moments and feeling real insecurities. That’s what that show really is. Then you make it funny or it’s indulgent. There’s a fine line there. Which I think I just crossed. [laughter]

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Up Close with Greg Daniels 20 08

The Road to SNL

After college, I moved to LA with Conan [O’Brien]. We had never been to LA, and we got an apartment in a weekly apartment rental place. We shared a car, we shared an apartment, we shared an office, we shared a towel. We drove each other crazy. We got let go from Not Necessarily the News because they were having cutbacks, and then we went to work on this show called The Wilton North Report, which was a very high-profile failure. It was sold to us as the guy who had produced SCTV and Letterman was doing a new show. And we were very excited because we loved both of those shows. We found out later that it was the line producer of those shows, which means that basically he didn’t really have any creative input in those shows, and he had a very ambitious plan for The Wilton North Report, which was supposed to be an hour a night with no musical guests or interviews. It was just all comedy segments for an hour a night, was his plan. And it destroyed itself very quickly. But I remember sitting in on a meeting with him where he had the board on the wall with all of the things that he anticipated for the first couple of shows, and it didn’t add up to an hour. And I was like, “You know, you have five-minute sketches and it only adds up to like thirty-six minutes.” So that was a weird experience where the show just exploded in the air in about a month. It was very interesting, though. I learned a lot about what not to do. Howard Klein was our manager, and he managed to get us an interview with Saturday Night Live. We almost blew it in the meeting because

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we got there, and first of all, Lorne Michaels said, “Would you like some wine?” And we were like, “No, no.” Which was the wrong answer, we found out later. Apparently you’re supposed to accept his hospitality. And then he asked us, “If I hire you, how will I know it’s going to work out and you’re going to be good and funny?” and we said, “Ah, you really don’t.” We didn’t really sell ourselves. So we almost didn’t get the job, but then they tried us out. I felt very intimidated because this was really big-time stuff and the actors there were so talented. You would sit in the writers room, and Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz would come in making fun of each other and playing the piano and making up lyrics on the spot, and they were just so talented. It was very intimidating. Seniority

There were older writers there who had different niches. Bonnie and Terry Turner, who later created Third Rock from the Son and That ’70s Show, were writing there. And Jack Handey was there, and he wrote the most wonderful, crazy pieces, and Al Franken was there. He and Jim Downey would write the big debate sketches, political stuff. Conan and Bob Odenkirk and Robert Smigel and I were the younger writers; we used to write together as a group. A lot of times we would try and write that first sketch that was like a combination of whatever news events were happening that week, because if you had a good one, you knew you would get a sketch on the air because they needed to be topical. If you were just writing your own passion project sketch, a lot of times you’d get elbowed out of the way by the senior writers. “Mr. Short-Term Memory” was one that the four of us wrote together. And my main contribution was basically one moment in that sketch, which was when he—you know, it’s about a guy who has no short-term memory, and he goes on a date, and he doesn’t remember why he’s there. And maybe the weirdest moment was when he takes a bite of food, and then a second later he doesn’t remember that it’s in his mouth. And he gets completely freaked out, and he thinks somebody’s pushed chewed-up food in his mouth, and he doesn’t understand how that happened. And after that episode aired, Jim Downey, who was the head writer, made a big deal selecting that moment as being what he thought was the funniest moment on that episode, and that compliment gave me the confidence

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to keep going for a year because you didn’t get a lot of praise there. Saturday Night Live is not a very hand-holding place, and they pit people against each other a lot of times. It may be different now, but it was very competitive when I was there. Larry David

I got the opportunity to do a telephone pitch with Larry David, and I wanted to work on Seinfeld more than anything. I really loved that show. He took a lot of freelance ideas, and the way he did it was you were able to talk to him on the phone for basically as long as you could hold his interest. So I came up with twelve different ideas and went through all of them as quickly as I could. And he’d go, “Meh, no, move on.” And I’d go to the next one. The one that really intrigued him was a story that had happened to my dad. It was a real-life story of how we lived in New York and he had a car, and if you don’t want to pay for a garage and you want to park on the street in New York, you have to move your car every other day. And so I remember, growing up, my dad would spend like forty-five minutes every other day, circling around in his car, looking for a parking space, which is really difficult in Manhattan. And one day he found one, and he started to back into it, and this other guy who wanted it fronted into it, trying to aggressively steal his space, and he wouldn’t move. So I told this story to Larry David, and he immediately saw how good that was from the point of view of conflict and being a New York story and funny. So I got the chance to do that as a freelancer, and that was an interesting experience because I did three completely different drafts of the story with Larry giving me notes. And then, ultimately, he rewrote it top to bottom when it aired. So he could have just bought the story and written it himself after the phone pitch. But the thing that was great to me was that I was able to work with him and sort of see how his mind worked. And then I used my last draft of that as my writing sample. The Simpsons

I got there at the end of Season 4, and they were very aware that this was an incredibly good show; they were in their prime. When you left the room to write an episode, you worked until midnight every night on that episode. A lot of times, in later experiences I’ve had, when I’ve left the room,

Greg Daniels

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I’ve been like, “Oh, thank God, I get a vacation,” you know, “for ten days, and then the last two days I’m going to write this thing as fast as I can.” But people were really dedicated there. You just worked nonstop. Saturday Night Live was extremely exciting because it was a live show, but The Simpsons was the opposite of that. It was a cartoon, and you never left the writing room, and the writing room was in a really crappy, fallingapart, motel-looking building on the Fox lot. People would say, you know, “Boy, what a fun show to work on,” because they confuse the fact that the show was brightly colored and fast moving with the experience of working there. There were a bunch of really good writers there, including George Meyer, and sometimes we would get on a roll, and it was kind of like jazz. And people would top each other, and the conversation and the story would get to a place that no one person could ever have thought of. That’s the best part of comedy writing, period. King of the Hill

I went from The Simpsons to what’s called a development deal, so I had a little office on the lot, and I was trying to come up with new shows. Mike [Judge] had written the first draft of King of the Hill, and it was kind of in development hell. They liked parts of it, but they didn’t want to make it the way it was. I read it and thought it was fantastic. I loved the sense of humor of it. So I signed on to produce and rewrite the show, and eventually it got picked up at Fox. It was a very fun ride in the beginning—a lot of work, but we had a lot of fun. I wanted it to be different from The Simpsons because around the same time, there was a show called The Critic that was coming out, and they had kind of taken the sensibility of Season 5 or 6 Simpsons and turned that into a TV show, and I felt that was the wrong way to go about it. I thought you needed to go back to Season 1 Simpsons, when it was really sort of slow and family based. I wanted to make it different and didn’t want it to be parody and like Springfield didn’t exist. I wanted it to be really specific, and obviously the show that Mike had first written was set in Texas. I thought it was really good to be specific, so I wanted to get writers from Texas, but you can’t fi ll a whole staff like that. I mean, it was hard enough to find three, and we got Johnny Hardwick and Jim Dauterive and Cheryl Holli-

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day, who wasn’t actually from Texas, but her agent knew that I was looking for Texas talent and said, “Well, you’ve got to have Cheryl. She’s trash. Her mother taught her to smoke to keep warm.” Which was true, and Cheryl was also a stand-up, and so she was one of the first writers. And then I just fi lled it out with people I thought had written the funniest spec scripts I could find. I had read maybe four hundred spec scripts, met probably fifty different writers, and hired ten. The very best way, in my opinion, to write is to write in a group setting where you’re the boss. Because then you get all the advantages of other people’s ideas and enthusiasms, and if you don’t want to use them, you don’t have to use them. That’s the very best. When you write with a partner, you have to find somebody that you really respect because it’s incredibly frustrating to have to use an idea just for the normal, human give and take. If you’re equally set up with somebody, you’ve got to kind of split it.

The Office

It took me like six months to even sign up for that. My agent had given me a tape of the English show, and I didn’t watch it because I didn’t know anything about it, and it had a boring title. So a month after he gave it to me, he called me up and said, “Come on, you’ve got to make a decision on this. I have to give it to somebody else.” So I watched it—I stayed up until like two in the morning to finish it—and I thought it was incredible. I called him at eight the next morning and said, “Can I still get in on this thing?” I was so impressed with it, and I just really wanted to meet the creators of it. I wasn’t sure I was going to do anything with it, but I thought, “You know, I got a chance to learn from Larry David by doing one episode; maybe in the meeting I’ll figure out what secrets Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have.” So I had a meeting with them, and it turned out that they were huge Simpsons fans and that their favorite episode was one that I had written called “Homer Badman.” We hit it off in the meeting, and eventually I ended up saying, “Alright, I’ll try and do this because I love the show so much.” But I never thought the original series was going to air in America because in past situations, like when Norman Lear did All in the Family from a British show, you’d never seen the British show that it was based on because they never

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showed it over here, so you didn’t have any point of comparison. All in the Family was a great show, but it might have sucked compared to the English one. Who knows, it might have been an even better show in England. And then after I signed on to do it, they started airing the British Office here on BBC America. And all of the coolest people in comedy were talking about it, and I started to really sweat bullets on this because I was like, “God, everyone’s going to compare them; what do I do here?” So it was very nerve-racking. They look really different, but both The Office and The Simpsons have no laugh track. They have a lot of humor in the background. They have a large cast. They often have multiple storylines. They have a deluded, less-thansmart lead. They have moments of humanity and warmth. There’s a lot in common, I think, between them. The Office is closer to The Simpsons than it is to According to Jim, for example, even though it’s live action. And I feel like there’s a lot about King of the Hill that reminds me of The Office in the sense that there’s a lot of slowness and awkwardness and a lot of specificity in both. The fact that Scranton is really specific, we use that a lot on The Office. It’s a small town, and we respect it and don’t make fun of them for being in a small town. We tried to do that on King of the Hill and not come at it as outsiders but come at it as we identify with the people that are comic characters. So there’s a lot of similarity.

Hiring Writer-Performers

I was a huge fan of Monty Python when I was a kid, and they were all writerperformers. Saturday Night Live had a lot of writing and performing overlap, and the previous show that I had worked on, Not Necessarily the News, was the opposite, where the writers practically never met the cast. I felt like it was really good to combine those things. And you can’t do it on a lot of shows. Like if the show is Friends, for example, there aren’t a lot of men or women as good-looking as that cast who have bothered to develop their comedic side. They just didn’t need to. It’s amazing how funny Jennifer Aniston is, considering how good-looking she is. But the thing that’s great about something like a mockumentary set in a small office in Pennsylvania is that however you look is fine. You’re supposed to look real. I went to see B. J. Novak do stand-up, and one of his jokes was: “I just graduated from college, but I didn’t learn anything. I had a double major,

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psychology and reverse psychology.” And I was like, “Wow, that is a good joke.” So I hired him off that joke, and he had written, I think, a spec for Arrested Development that was really good. But he was also a performer, and I knew I wanted to hire writer-performers. So I said he could be the character of the temp, and it’s not really as big of a role as the other four guys in the main title sequence, but, you know, the fact that he was the first hire, he got in there good. He was a great asset to the show, and he’s one of the funniest writing talking heads that we have. Everybody else was hired after B. J. Mindy was a New York playwright who had written a play called Matt and Ben, in which she and her white, female partner played Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Mindy played Ben Affleck, which is really cool casting and unusual. I saw their play, and I thought she was a great writer, too. Michael Scott is very politically incorrect, and the fact that she was an Indian American woman was also great, and I knew she was a great actor. I really hired her to be a writer, but then we had this “Diversity Day” episode, and it was just too perfect. She did a great job in it and eventually bent the character to her will. Originally, she wasn’t anything like the way she is now, you know. The way she is now is much more like Mindy’s creation of her single-minded need to look better and better on camera and be a younger and fresher person. I had really made her be kind of an immigrant character, and she was like, “That’s not me,” and she really turned it around. Paul Lieberstein was a writer from King of the Hill. We didn’t have all of the guest characters cast on the first table reading, so we just went around and gave the writers different roles, which is what you typically do at a table reading. The president of the network was there, and after Paul read the character of Toby, he said, “Who was that redhead? Make him be Toby. He’s great.” So we put him in. And then every cut we got the first season, Kevin Reilly kept saying, “More of him. He’s where your funny is.” And the cool thing is that Paul had never really acted before this, and the biggest guest actors who come to do the show, the person they most want to meet is Paul. They are so impressed by his acting style because it’s so effortless and low key.

Greg Daniels

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I started as a runner, like a gopher, for this production company Witt/ Thomas/Harris. My dad gave me some very good advice. He said, “Really dress up for it,” and I borrowed his sport coats. We had the same build, and he had these tailored sport coats, so I must have looked like I had tons of money. I had nothing—I was spending more on dry cleaning than I was earning—but his advice, which I think is really interesting, is, “You want to create a mismatch to get noticed in a business setting.” He had lived through David Geffen and the music business, those guys with thick glasses and suits handling musicians, and David Geffen came along and he was dressed like an artist. He was dressed in a T-shirt and torn jeans, and it worked. When I was coming up, all the runners, everybody was wearing torn jeans and shirts, and I felt a little silly, but I was young enough to just trust my dad. He said, “Dress nicely,” and I got noticed immediately. I remember when the boss pulled me in and said, “You’re one of the brightest guys we’ve had in here in a long time,” and, like, this is based on the sport coat. [laughter] This was stunning to me. And he made me his protégé. So it was like a simulation of self-respect. It wasn’t actual self-respect, but it is interesting that how we comport ourselves does have an effect. That stuff gets noticed, and I worked my way up through the ranks. If you can get in through the gates a little bit, it’s the people who show up to work every day—because it’s a business in television. It’s not like a film; when you do a film, you can dine out on that for a year. In television, if you can get in those gates and show up to work every day and be a supportive, creative person, you’ll get noticed. I really believe that. That’s how I did it. ★ mitchell hurwitz

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Arrested Development: A Conversation with Mitchell Hurwitz Moderated by Paul Feig 20 09

Beginnings

paul feig: I was lucky enough to work as a director on Arrested Development, which is one of the greatest shows of all time. What was the inspiration? What was the genesis of Arrested Development? hurwitz: Ron Howard had seen some work that I had done prior to Arrested and wanted to do something that was vérité. This was actually while the British Office was being made, but neither of us knew that, and he had this very renegade idea of having two crews run around. His driving thing was that he had done both drama and comedy, and he had done single camera and multi-camera, and the commonality seems to be when you get a lot of chances to do material, it gets funnier, and the problem with television comedy was usually you’ve got two takes. So suddenly, there’s this new technology, which is that the video cameras you use require less lighting, and there’s suddenly this new vocabulary because of all these reality shows that you can have things look a little worse, and as a result you get a lot of chances at doing the material. So he wanted to do a documentary-style thing that was multimedia and, more than anything, he really encouraged me to take risks. I had come up through Witt/Thomas, which was the company that did The Golden Girls and Nurses and The John Larroquette Show and Blossom. The Golden Girls was great, a great show, but it was a very locked-down, formulaic shop, and so I was chomping at the bit to try something new, and he completely gave me the cover to do it. So I went off and started thinking, “What is the show about?” I used kind of an artificial construct, and I think a lot of writers do this.

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I recently did a show where I based the few characters on the ego, the superego, and the id. You know, just little templates like that, that become invisible to the show but at least get you through the creative process a little bit. And so what I used on this family of four was what someone had told me they had read about in some psychology textbook: that there is this paradigm of matriarch, patriarch, craftsman, and clown. It’s a very winning paradigm. It exists in Leave It to Beaver, probably in Seinfeld, in The Wizard of Oz. So I started there, even though, again, it’s invisible in the show. It certainly went away after I started fleshing out the characters, but I thought of Michael and Lindsay, who, at the time, I thought were going be the center of the show, as the matriarch and patriarch, and the craftsman was Buster, who was kind of the academic, and the clown was the magician. And then, like anything, you start mixing the colors, and Buster becomes more clownish. It kind of goes away, but I started with that idea of these four siblings, which I think was also in Faulkner; there are these four siblings in The Sound and the Fury. It just seemed to have some substance to it, and then I started building out and they became multidimensional characters. I’d been in sitcoms for so long, where, because of laugh tracks and because of the constraints of time, you do one thing, you know. You have a character be a dumb character, and I just really got into writing these elaborate backstories. Somewhat capriciously—I didn’t know that I wouldn’t be able to fit it on camera—but I had a magician who was dating a Spanish soap opera star whose children hated him. I had this whole mythology there—he drove a Segway, a little vehicle for him. Vehicles for everybody, and the academic was a cartographer but was also an Indian drummer who also had panic attacks and gave whole backrubs and was a mama’s boy. He had, like, fifteen attributes in the backstory, and I even had in the pilot that he was going to get involved with this other woman named Lucille, not realizing that there’s anything Oedipal about it—that he just really wanted to make a go at his mother’s doppelgänger. [Paul laughs.] And, you know, Ron is such an innate storyteller in a way that I really wasn’t, and maybe am not yet, but his instinct was, “I think you need an event, I think you need a crisis,” so that’s why the setup for the pilot was George Sr. being arrested for security crimes. I remember someone at the network said to me, “I don’t know if this is gonna be in the news by the time this pilot comes out.” Cut to 2009, and we’re all, like, holding cups, we’re begging for pennies. It’s still very popular it turns out, stealing money. [laughter] That didn’t go out of fashion, as the Fox executive suggested it might. 20

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So it was a long gestation period, and for some reason, I was naively optimistic about it. I thought, “This could be a great show!” And even Jason Bateman, who agreed to do it after he saw the pilot, called me and said, “Hey, it was actually pretty good.” I said, “Well, did you not think it was going to be good?” He goes, “Ah, I didn’t think it was going to be that good. I mean, I liked it, but I didn’t think it would be commercial,” which says a lot about him in a really good way. He was courageous about doing something like this. feig: When you said that Ron wanted to do it vérité-style, was it always intended that it was gonna be a documentary, or when did that part of it come in? hurwitz: Yeah, he had that idea from the start. I was actually going to do more documentary, but then I saw the British Office, and I felt like that was their territory. I love the stuff you do on The Office. I’m very covetous of it. feig: Well, that was interesting because having worked on both shows as a director, on The Office, the whole thing is the interactivity with the camera, and I remember trying a couple times on Arrested to have that, and we always ended up cutting it out. I remember we had a thing with Buster when Liza’s broken up with him: he’s like, “I don’t want to be fi lmed anymore,” and he put his hand over the camera, and it was so funny, but I think that ended up getting cut. hurwitz: That may have been cut because the challenge on that show was that we tried to do eight stories for eight characters, and it was a twenty-minute and forty-five-second show. Twenty minutes, and so we cut everything extraneous, which was kind of a shame because a lot of the best moments were little ad-libs. It works so great on The Office because they all know they’re on camera, and they’re in that place, but we had characters in prison. I mean, there were all of these questions that begged, “Who’s in there with them?” feig: Well, the way we shot it in The Office, we do straight documentary style and always shoot two cameras, and they can never be where another camera would see it. So you can’t do, like, I’m gonna do your close-up over my shoulder, and then we’re gonna come around and do one over— hurwitz: Interesting! feig: Yeah, and on Arrested, we didn’t have it, so we could mix it around. In a way, that made it harder to have the characters look in the camera, because it’s not, it— hurwitz: It wouldn’t make sense. Mitchell Hurwitz

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feig: Right, it wasn’t true to how documentary works. I think it was smart because it gave you so much more you could do story-wise and some of the absurdity of the physical comedy. hurwitz: Yeah, it’s interesting. When we started this, I thought it would be strange to have people aware that they’re being observed. You know, Ron Howard made that movie EDtv; it was about a guy whose life was on TV, right? What a crazy idea. And I remember a lot of the critics at the time said, “Who would do this?” It turns out, everybody will do this, and it’s gonna be very interesting. This next generation is people used to being on camera. And they used to be uncomfortable. Remember that? On talk shows? You can still see clips on YouTube of people uncomfortable on camera. feig: Well, that’s always been my problem with reality TV: it’s not reality. Because if you are aware there’s a camera in front of you, you will behave differently; you will perform for the camera. I’ve always said the only reality television there ever was was Candid Camera, because that was pure, unguarded reactions of people not aware of the camera. But what I love about Arrested is that, even if it’s not documentary per se, just the handheld, you’ve got everybody used to that feel, which, I think, as a director, is the greatest way to do television comedy because it allows you to be fast and spontaneous. hurwitz: Yeah, it’s arguably the way to do a comedy. In fact, there have not been that many comedies that are really about the camera setups and the shots. I kind of feel like Raising Arizona was one of those, and I didn’t know until recently that Barry Sonnenfeld was the DP on that. I did a pilot with Barry, and he’s very much about the camera. Malcolm in the Middle did that, too. feig: Well, the documentary-ish style puts the onus on the performance and on the writing, which I like about it. Even though I admire Malcolm, it was sort of our nemesis when we were doing Freaks because we were trying to be naturalistic, and they went on and we didn’t. hurwitz: I guess it’s like writing journalism, you know. You try to keep yourself out of it, you don’t get to use the word “I,” and that has always struck me with comedy with cameras, too. It’s like, “Oh, look at the director.” You’re always going for the unexpected to a certain degree with comedy, and that’s why comedy can get stale so quickly. At least when we did Arrested, it was very much about okay, go against expectation. It’s what

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Steve Carell does so well on The Office. He will go against expectation. You think you know what he’s gonna say, and he’ll just go the other way. And he’ll do it small. So, yes, for us it was very much an experiment in being straight and believing it. feig: And again, because of that style, because we’re cross-shooting in this documentary style, Steve, you know, gets it scripted, and I can say, “Steve, change this up, or take a shot,” and he’ll do it and have it on camera, so you get all these reactions. There’s nothing worse when you’re shooting standard, where, generally, you have to go close-up and a wide shot with your two cameras on the one character. We’re having conversations then like, “Okay, this changes that up, come around and do it on the other side.” So somebody gets into an improv situation and they do this great moment, and there’s nothing more disheartening than when you have only one side of it. Then you have to come around to the other side of it. “Can you guys do that again?” And it never happens again with that energy. So thank you for making that happen and for bringing it to American TV. Now, I was always fascinated by you in the editing room because for you, the editing room was just an extension of the writers room. Would you talk through your process of how you do that? hurwitz: I would say the creative experience for me is all about losing control, regaining control, losing control, regaining control. I’m constantly balancing those two things. If I had my druthers, I would have complete control over everything, but it wouldn’t end up very good. You know what I mean? You have to lose control a little bit, even with your own original material, you know? You start to write one thing where you imagine writing or breaking a story for something, and it goes somewhere else and it feels frustrating. It’s not what you had in mind, but it’s trying to take you there. So that was very much the experience with post [production], where I would labor with a group of writers, we would develop something, and then get something that made us laugh. Then it would go to the stage, and new voices would come in. The voice of the director and the voices of the actors would make it this freewheeling kind of different thing, and I can go to the stage and even partake in that and pitch things. Then I would go back into post—and that was just me alone with an editor again—and start trying to force everything into being what I wanted it to be. I would spend endless hours in post. I would go to the first cut of the thing and be so discouraged. This happened fifty-three times. feig: Oh, it’s the worst thing in the world.

Mitchell Hurwitz

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hurwitz: And by the way, those episodes, that first cut may not have been bad. It may have been perfectly good; it’s just not what I thought it was going to be. I remember I’d walk around that Fox lab, and I’d call my wife and I’d say, “No, I’m not gonna be home” because I planned to be working all weekend, just furious, and she would say, “Why don’t you just let it be bad? Let it be what you think is bad,” and that freed me up. It let me think, “Okay, yeah, I’ll just tweak it a little bit.” And then I got back into the fun of tweaking it, just trying to find the fun of it. But you know, television’s such a factory. In its purest form, at every point there is a first draft, and, as a creative person, one of the hardest things to stomach is a first draft. It calls upon your image of yourself; you write a first draft and it destroys your notion of yourself as somebody who might be able to write. [laughter] Like, the last thing you want to find out is that you can’t write, right? But of course you can’t. I mean, nobody can. It doesn’t come out of the pen correctly, which is a lesson I constantly learn. I still struggle with it and I still get very, very discouraged—in a far more immature way than I should, having done this for this long. And then I go to the stage, and I’ll see the first run-through. Now I’m in a more rarefied area because I get to have that experience, but I still see a first run-through, and I’m devastated. “He’s playing it angry, which kills this other thing. Nothing’s funny, I don’t even know where to begin. Why is he yelling at him?” But it’s a first draft. Everybody has to understand that things change and things progress, and then I go to post and I have the exact same experience, and I take it very personally, and I think, “I can’t do this and the show’s not good and I’m a fraud and it doesn’t work,” and the answer is, hard work is so much more a part of this than talent is. And the more hard work you do, the greater chance you have of being talented. That great book Outlier, it really makes that point, and it really drove it home for me. It’s like, all of these really successful people, it’s hours doing it, it’s showing up to work. feig: Well, it’s total insecurity. If you’re going into a show, going into development, it’s always like, “Okay, this is when they find out I don’t know what I’m doing.” hurwitz: Yeah, I like saying that to people because I remember going to seminars as I was trying to break into the business and feeling like, “What are they complaining about? You know how to do it.” We’re all kind of the same that way. Yeah, we’ve had breaks, and we moved to LA, and we

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did certain things that made it easier to get in, but if you struggle with it, that’s okay. That’s part of it. feig: I feel like the only people who love to write are bad writers, because writing is all about rewriting and about going, “No, I can’t do this.” I know so many people like, “I love to write; I’ll kick out fifty pages in a day!” It’s like, “Well, I can do that, too, I guess.” hurwitz: And there are people who get a lot of success that way, but I think the greater number of people who have success really have to challenge themselves and face some ugly truths about themselves. The other thing is loss, and how choice is loss—that Isaiah Berlin quote, “Life is choice, and choice is loss”—and I actually say this to myself when I get stuck on a plot point. It’s loss, but not doing it is also loss. “Life is choice, and choice is loss.” You can do that indefinitely. You can do that with your whole career. And if you do make a choice, and if you do commit to whatever it is that’s in front of you, you will find your creative expression. Whatever it is, you will find something that calls upon your life and your skills and talents. feig: I find it’s less about ideas, ultimately, and more about execution. hurwitz: I guess so, which is also kind of daunting. feig: It’s terrifying. This is an old example, but when Big came out, there were two body-switching movies right before it, and so I remember when Big was coming out, we were all rolling our eyes, like, “Oh brother, what a dumb idea,” and suddenly, it’s this amazing movie. hurwitz: It’s true. Style is everything. feig: I’ll never forget, after I did my first episode, you guys asked me to do the season finale, and when we shot something on a boat with George Sr., and you and Jim Vallely were obsessing over these boxes that had “Maddas” on them, and I was like, “What?” And it was all about getting it in the mirror—Saddam backwards—and I was just like, “They’re in such hyper-detail.” I mean, half the time directing the show, I’d be like, “I don’t know what they’re doing.” hurwitz: Well, what was so great about working with you is you’re open to change and open to play. You have to be in control as a director, and yet you would also be like, “Great, let’s play.” It’s a very challenging thing to do. And as a result, there were obvious accidents that happened. But like that was a plan, a kind of a ham-fisted one, but we wanted to find out that he was involved with Saddam Hussein, and we wanted to have enough clues in prior episodes that it would make sense.

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There was one where Buster was about to lose his arm and we had him on a bench that said something like, “Army Official Surplus Supply,” or whatever, and he was sitting on the bench so it just read “Arm Off.” [laughter] And that was planned. We thought, “This is so great.” Something for people to find, you know. He’s about to lose his arm, and it says “Arm Off.” And then the next season, someone said, “That was so clever how you had Charlize Theron”—I don’t think we did this on purpose—“sitting on a bench that said ‘Wee Brain’ because she played someone who was mentally challenged.” And that was not on purpose. She was sitting on a bench that said “Wee Britain” and she was sitting on “it.” It’s like chance favors the well-prepared. We were into those kinds of details, and certain details like that fell out of the sky. feig: Oh, that’s hilarious. Well, before your show, I was the crazy, overprepared director who would storyboard and shot list and all this stuff, and while that’s fine, I think for aspiring directors, you never want to show up on set without a plan. You always want to know what you’re gonna go to first. I think it’s also limiting because I wasn’t able to be in the moment of, like, “Let’s see what happens.” And what happened because of your writing schedule was that sometimes I wouldn’t get the script until the day I started shooting, which, honestly, was the greatest, freest thing for me, especially with this vérité style because then you kind of go in like, “What do you got? Let’s make it happen.” hurwitz: You were amazing that way. And I have to say about supporting people—it’s a great way to live your life, but it’s also a great way to break into show business. If you really do approach it as being in support of the people who you’re working for, you can accomplish a lot and you can get great respect and get supported in return. I was so behind all the time because I didn’t want to let go of the scripts until I was happy with them. Directors would give me such a hard time, the studio would give me such a hard time, and then you came along, and despite your own personal needs, you were like, “I want to help. So what do you got?” “They’re gonna go swimming and lose an arm, and we need something at the beach. I don’t know what yet, but there’ll be a scene at the beach.” “Okay, do you think you’ll need buildings behind it?” “No, no buildings.” And we just gave you the tiniest little shreds and then you would show up and read the script on the set, think on your feet, and not take it personally, and, as a result, you were a better director. I kept going back to

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you because I realized that I could really rely on you. I could trust your instincts when you said you didn’t agree with something. It was like, “Great, he knows what he’s doing.” And that was all because you were like, “Okay, I want to support Mitch, and Mitch is underwater.” I don’t know why you came in with that, but you did. That’s what I try to do when I’m developing other people’s shows now: I really try to make it about them. You know, what does this person need right now? feig: Well, that comes from having my show, where I felt like I would micromanage our directors like crazy. TV directing is a great gig to get in, ’cause you always get to work and you get to experiment with stuff, but at the same time, the worst TV directors are the ones who come in wanting to bring their agenda to it. What you need to do is come in with your plan—have your vision for it—but you need to be able to turn it on a dime if the showrunner says, “That’s not what I envisioned.” hurwitz: The flip of that is probably true in fi lm: that if you’re writing for film and you’re fortunate enough to get to work with the director, and the director says, “I want something here, I need something darker,” you try to find a way to support that. You try to find a way to use your own creativity to support that. Not to sell out, but to say, okay, that’s what he needs, he’s the boss in this situation, just like the executive producer is the boss in TV because they’re the person who’s there every week maintaining the consistency, talking to the network, and all of that. feig: But it all goes, ultimately, to collaboration—even though the dynamic in TV is it’s more the executive producer runs it. In film, it’s more the director runs it. But collaboration is such an important thing, especially in comedy. You never do yourself any favors when you cut off voices of other people, but you need to have the ground rule that while everyone has input, you get to say, “But if I don’t use it, don’t freak out.” hurwitz: And listen, that is a challenge. You feel that, I’m running a show, I’m so underwater, why are all these people talking to me? And the skill to learn as a director, as a writer, as anyone who’s collaborating, is to try to stay open and true to yourself. You want to be defensive; you want to put your back up; you want to say, “Do you know how long I’ve worked on this? Do you have any idea how much thought I gave it?” If you can, get out of taking things personally and try to listen. You don’t have to take the advice, but try to listen. You will improve because of it. feig: Definitely. The fire I went through at the beginning of Freaks was

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because I’d come out of this little rarefied world where you write a joke and you hear this voice and you hear the delivery, so when the person says it and they don’t say the syntax, you’re like, “No, it’s wrong!” And I learned to free myself. You assemble this amazing group of talented actors who you hired because they brought their own personalities and their thing to it, and you give over to them. Let’s talk about casting. You thought Will [Arnett] had never done comedy before— hurwitz: He’s a comic genius, and I think he had done comedy. First of all, he had the fortune of being married to Amy Poehler, who’s so funny, so he very easily could have been the husband that says, “Well, she’s the comedy person. I’m kind of a drama guy.” And he’s so funny. He’s just bursting with funny. I remember we auditioned all these guys in front of Sandy Grushow, and Sandy didn’t like any of them, and he turned to me and said, “This is how projects die, Mitch. Okay? You don’t have the mom and you don’t have the brother,” and he walked out of the room. And Deb Barylski, the casting director, said, “I got somebody, I got this guy in New York. His play just went away; he was doing this drama about Irish drunks or something.” And he came out and just immediately, he was the only one. I’d written this character very specifically, so I thought, “Well, this will be very easy to cast because there’s so much there. He’s dramatic and vulnerable, and, you know, the older brother doesn’t get put in charge,” and nobody even came close. And for some reason, everyone did a New York accent. Everyone thought the character was a wheeler-dealer, and I would say, like, “Can you try one without the New York accent?” And then they would just do it again; it was the craziest thing. And then Will came in. He credits me as saying, “Play the guy with a hangover,” which I don’t remember saying, but he played it like he just had so much money and so much success, and he’s just hungover from it. He’s a completely intuitive guy, hilariously brilliant. I remember Jason Bateman came in to a reading, and I really thought, “I don’t want to do the Jason Bateman pilot this year. I’ve got this special thing, and it’s weird and it’s quirky, and the network’s gonna love this guy and make me do it with him—you know, he’s this teen idol.” And he came in and he basically did exactly what he does on the show. Dry, small, smart. I remember I chased him into the hall and said, “Don’t go into the other auditions.” He said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah, don’t,” ’cause it was pilot season and he was gonna go somewhere. And then I brought him into

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Fox, and Gail Berman said, “Ah, I don’t want to do the Jason Bateman—” [laughter] and then she had the exact same experience I did. Interestingly, when we brought in Henry Winkler to play Barry Zuckerkorn, I actually thought, “Oh, it’d be really cool to get Garry Shandling for this,” because he had the Hank Kingsley connection and everything, but then I had Henry. I thought, “That’s kind of great,” and I remember Jason came to me and said, “Do we want to use, like, a TV guy?” [laughter] And then he went through the same thing. He was like, “I cannot believe I said that.” Casting is really an interesting thing. You have to let go of your prejudices, but prejudices are wired into our brain. We believe that they’re true. feig: Even though there’re so many examples in the last ten years of the reinvention of people, there’s a preconceived notion about them. hurwitz: It’s so much about the part. I had that experience as a writer, you know. I mean, I was given the chance to do Arrested Development, and it would have been easy to just see me as a Golden Girls writer. feig: Yeah, exactly. I think it was Leslie Nielsen who started the whole reinvention thing. How did you come up with Jessica Walter? hurwitz: That was that same casting director, Deb Barylski, who said, “I’ve got this woman .  .  .” Here’s an awful story. I brought out Jill Clayburgh, whom I’d done a show with. Jill never auditioned for anything, and I said, “Don’t worry, Jill. You know, Gail Berman was a Broadway person, which, by the way, doesn’t exist anymore. You don’t have network presidents or studio presidents that come from Broadway, or come from entertainment in any way. They’re all— feig: From accounting. hurwitz: From accounting and marketing, but Gail worked on Hurlyburly, which Jill Clayburgh’s husband wrote. It’s like, this is done. You’ve got this part. And Jill, Gail kept saying, “I can’t wait till Jill’s here, I get to see Jill.” So Jill comes in, she says, “All right, I’ll audition,” flies in from New York, does this great audition, leaves the room, I turn around to Sandy Grushow and Gail Berman, and Sandy Grushow says, “No.” And I burst into a sweat immediately. I’m wearing this tight shirt, and I remember a little trickle feeling, [Paul laughs] and I just couldn’t take it, and I said, “Well, she’s a really amazing actress. She can do anything.” “Mitch, she’s not right for this role. She’s sweet, she’s lovely. This woman shouldn’t be sweet and lovely.” “Yeah, but she doesn’t have to be sweet and lovely.”

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“Mitch, the answer is no.” I look over at David Nevins, who’s the other executive producer on it— like, looked to him for help—and I watched his eyes go up to my brow, and then look down. [laughter] I’ll never forget that. feig: Oh, that’s the worst. hurwitz: Yeah, and as we’re in this session, my phone rings. I look down and it says “Jill—cell.” Oh, God. So that was kind of a horrible experience, and they brought in Jessica as a fail-safe, and Jessica was, you know, born for it. There’s kind of this warmth under the cold, harsh thing that she does. And I’ll never forget her saying to me in front of her daughter, “This woman that you’ve written, Lucille, is so much like my mother,” and her daughter goes, “Her mother.” [laughter] feig: On that note, how did you make the family so believable and easy to relate to? hurwitz: Well, I’ll find little motifs, even if it’s plagiarism, frankly. I remember doing one of my first pilots, thinking, “Okay, how many characters are on Cheers?” And, “So what are the relationships, what do you need?” Everything does become personal in a creative expression at some point, so there’re two answers to it. One is that it’s about tone. So much of what we’re talking about is about tone, because I’m sure in your family you never had somebody join the Blue Man Group. That would be so broad, and yet you probably have had somebody take themselves too seriously, or want to pursue something that everyone else in the family knew was absurd, so the specific doesn’t matter—it’s the attitude that goes into it. And the other thing you do is pull from your life, whether you like it or not, and there was a lot in my family and a lot in my wife’s family. My wife’s mother, whose name is Lucille [laughter], recently asked me, “Why is the mean lady named Lucille?” [laughter] Th is is a woman who, in the sixties, when Kennedy was in office, visited her oldest daughter in her first year of college and said, “Congratulations, you now weigh more than the president of the United States.” It was just such a cutting, mean line, but it was witty, and she had this kind of austere quality. And Mary Jo’s—my wife’s—brother’s name is Gek, which I thought was such a great name, but it was his initials—G.E.K.—and there were just all of these little things that I pulled, and it became personal at the end. And I will say that the episodes never quite gelled for me until I got the personal part of it.

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A Conversation with Alec Berg Moderated by Pat Hazell 2 0 11

pat hazell: You’re an executive producer, writer, and director on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and you were a writer on Seinfeld. What is that process from the moment you pitch, to deliver a script, to shooting? alec berg: One of the first shows I ever worked on was a gem called Herman’s Head. That was run in a very traditional sitcom way, which is that all the writers sat around a table. Everybody pitched story ideas until you came up with an outline, and then that outline was given to one of the writers to go away and write for a few days. Then they would bring it back and all the writers would sit around the table reading that script and rewriting it. When I got to Seinfeld, the process was very different. You’d sit in your own office, and you’d come up with your own ideas by yourself. Then when you managed to catch Larry and Jerry between something else they were doing, you would run the ideas by them. They would say yes or no, or “I like this,” or “I’m not sure that’s a Kramer idea; maybe that works for George.” So you would start to build this outline on your own, which I preferred. I think once you get past three or four people in a room, it’s massively inefficient. Creatively you have ownership of it and these are your ideas and it’s written by you. I know a lot of sitcoms write as a group, and they just rotate the credit. The process for me on Seinfeld was always much more enjoyable, which was: these are my ideas; I’m invested in them. So you’d get to the point where you had an outline, and you’d run that by Larry and Jerry and hopefully they would go, “Okay, go away and write it.” Then you’d go away and write it, and then usually one of three things would happen: they would go, “Thank you very much, we’ll take it

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from here,” and you were locked out of the process, and Larry and Jerry would rewrite it themselves; or they would give you notes; or, every once in a while, the true flattery would be that they would say, “Good job, we’re gonna read this script at the table.” That was always the supremest of compliments. Larry and Jerry had desks that faced each other, and they would go through the script and write notes on it longhand. When they had four or five pages done, they would hand them to a writers’ assistant, who would type them up. The writers’ assistant would come out with pages, and you would literally rip them out of the guy’s hand because you wanted to see what they had written. It was an amazing experience because it was so exciting to see what they were doing with your stuff. But it was also so humiliating because what they were putting in was so much better than what you had, and so much simpler. You’d just go, “God! I had that, and yet I didn’t. . . . I never put it down.” And then on Curb, the process is very similar to Seinfeld, except there’s no script. What we write is probably an eight- or nine-page, single-spaced document where each scene is a paragraph. If you were to watch the show and tell somebody in extremely detailed terms what just happened in that scene, that’s the outline we work off of. There are a few jokes and funny lines in quotes in that paragraph, but nothing is written out in dialogue form. Basically, we do 98 percent of the work of writing a script, but we just don’t go that final step and put actual words in people’s mouths. hazell: But it becomes casting-critical— berg: Absolutely! The casting process is fascinating because there’s no script given to actors. A lot of people love that, and a lot of people lose their shit when they come in and go, “What do you mean? What do I say? I don’t understand.” What most actors are given is just a slip of paper that says: “You are Larry’s electrician. He’s having a conversation with Jeff about what he’s doing tomorrow night when you hear he has an extra ticket to a musical, and you offer to go with him.” And that’s all they get. Then they come in and improv the scene. As long as they stick to what that is—the basic story points—they can take it wherever they want. That’s what ends up happening on the set every day. We get that and we do the final rewrite and the final dialogue touch-ups and the last pass of the script on its feet as we’re shooting it. A lot of times, you’ll watch a scene and go, “It’s not working the way it’s written. Instead of this leading to this, we need to flip those two things.” So you’ll be rewriting with the actors between takes.

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Much like Seinfeld, Curb is all about the stories. That’s where we start: it’s story ideas. We never say, “We want to do something where Larry looks vain.” It’s all about what are the funny things we could start with, and then you start mixing and matching. Does this funny thing go with this funny thing? Or, wait, this is about Larry getting in a fight with a guy and this is about a guy who sells Larry something. What if those two guys are the same guy? You start to join things like that, and it really is like math. You put it up on a board and go: “What if this thing from column A is the same? What if we merge those scenes and then that argument can happen here, and then you know, we need something—oh, I remember we had this funny idea for a fight where Larry argued with this guy about that thing— maybe that’s what they argue about here.” You start plugging those things in, but it all starts with just: What are funny things? Almost invariably, they are kind of real, weird things that happen. I remember on Seinfeld, writers would come in and pitch ten story ideas and nine of them were, “Here’s something that would be funny for Kramer.” Then one of them was this weird, funny thing and you’d go, “Who did that happen to?” Invariably, the real thing that happened to somebody they knew was the funniest thing and was the right thing. There’s a nuance to reality that feels not sitcom-y. There’s no way you’d come up with that. One of my favorite examples: we did a Seinfeld episode where Kramer’s walking down the street and he sees the old Merv Griffin set in a dumpster. He sets it up in his apartment and his apartment becomes like The Merv Griffin Show, and people come in and he has guests and panels and bumps people. You could sit in a room for a million years and you’d never go, “I know! Kramer finds the Merv Griffin set in a dumpster.” But a writer was walking on the street in New York and he saw the old Merv Griffin set in a dumpster and thought, “I don’t know what this is, I don’t know how to use this, but that’s really weird and funny.” Larry has a notebook full of notes on every time he goes out in public and is uncomfortable; he writes something down. We try to pull as much stuff from real life as we can, like when we’re thinking about characters. You’re just trying to invent; particularly in comedy, you’re trying to come up with combinations of people that will create comic tension. So who are two or three or four funny people to put in a room together? That was one of the amazing things about Seinfeld. Every character had an interesting comedic relationship with each other character. That’s what you dream of when you’re drawing it up.

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hazell: I know I’d have run-ins with Larry when he didn’t want something. He can be really curmudgeonly about, “That couldn’t happen.” I don’t know if you ever had that experience. I had a real thing that I pitched and he goes, “Couldn’t happen.” I go, “Well, it did happen. You don’t have to use it, but it really happened to me,” and he’d go, “No, it didn’t.” I’d go, “NO! It did!” berg: But you can’t fight that. One of the amazing things about Larry is he’s immensely decisive about things, and he is always, always, always right. We’ve made the mistake of sometimes beating him into things; you go, “We really think this one is going to work. I know you don’t think it’s quite right, but just roll with it this one time.” Inevitably, what ends up happening is you’re on the set and you’re shooting it and he’s ambivalent and you’ve made a terrible mistake. You’ve put him in a position where he’s now shooting something he doesn’t like and he’s right. It’s no good because he doesn’t like it. If he believes in it and he’s immersed in it, it becomes great. But if he doesn’t feel it, it’s never going to be good. So as soon as he goes, “Eh,” you just go, “All right. Done.” When you work in network TV, at any given time you’re writing episode 8, shooting episode 7, editing episode 6, breaking stories for five other episodes, and dealing with the network on the episode you shot. There are days where you’ll work in some measure on twelve or fourteen different episodes, so you just get used to being able to change channels.

hazell: So to backtrack to the Seinfeld days, what was your first script? Was it in, like, Season 6 or something? “The Gymnast” or one of those? berg: That’s exactly right. We got there Season 6. My partner, Jeff Shaffer, and I had moved to LA a couple of years before, and we had worked with Tom Gammill and Max Pross. They were developing a new show for Fox, and we called them cold and said, “Hey, we’re trying to get into the business; will you have coffee with us and tell us . . .” That’s how we met a lot of people. If you’re not an asshole, you can call somebody and just say, “I know you’re busy; could you spare fifteen minutes to tell me how you got your start, or whatever.” And that’s what we did. We met Tom Gammill and Max Pross, and they had a show they were developing. They said, “Listen, if this gets a pickup, we’re gonna need people to write episodes. Keep in touch.” The show got picked up—it was a show called Great Scott that starred a then-unknown Tobey Maguire, and it was on Fox. I think they

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aired four or five episodes, but we went and we pitched them five or six complete episodes. We worked our asses off. Normally, if somebody says, “Hey, come in and pitch me some ideas,” you’ll go and you’ll pitch four or five ideas. We worked for weeks and weeks and wrote outlines to complete episodes. We just crushed them with the volume of what we went in with, and they were very impressed that we would spend that amount of time. They ended up finding one of the outlines satisfactory, and they said, “Okay, why don’t you write that one?” And that was actually our first paid writing job in television. We wrote that, and that was the episode they were shooting when they found out they were cancelled. So they shot a day of that episode before they were cancelled. That show was run by Castle Rock Television, who also produced Seinfeld, and Tom Gammill and Max Pross had a running deal with them. So when their show went down, Castle Rock said, “Look, we’re already paying you, so can you guys just go help out on Seinfeld?” They were looking for new writers, and Tom and Max suggested us. We wrote a bunch of story ideas and sent them off and never heard anything. Months later, we get a call from Tom Gammill saying, “Hey, Larry and Jerry read your ideas. How soon can you come over here?” I’m standing in my underwear on the phone at nine thirty in the morning, and I go, “I don’t know. I guess I can be there in forty-five minutes.” He goes, “Great, see you then.” So, we didn’t have any time to get nervous or freak out. Forty-five minutes later, my partner and I are sitting in the office with Larry and Jerry, and they just go, “Hey, we read your ideas, some of these are good. We like this, we like that.” We go, “Great. So, what do we do?” They said, “All right, have your agent call Castle Rock.” We went, “Okay,” and walked out not really knowing what that even meant. It turned out we were hired on the show. One of the ideas we had written in that list of ideas was that Jerry is dating a former Romanian Olympic gymnast. He’s not really that interested in her, but Kramer is obsessed with making Jerry sleep with her because he’s certain that because she’s a gymnast, it’s a ticket to an unknown world of sensuous delights. So Jerry sleeps with her and it’s just sort of ordinary, and Elaine’s giving him a lot of shit about, “What did you think would happen? Did you think you would be sort of the apparatus?” That was one of the ideas that found its way into the first Seinfeld episodes, so we started with that. I remember there were a lot of connections. My writing partner’s dad is a doctor, so a lot of our ideas were these bizarre medical things that had come up in Jeff ’s childhood. One of them

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was that Kramer has a kidney stone, so he’s prone to these insanely painful moments where he passes out and then wakes up and he’ll be fine. He was like a ticking bomb. You knew something bad was going to happen and he was going to pass that stone at some point. So that went into the show, and because Kramer makes Jerry sleep with the gymnast, now he has to go out with her for—I can’t remember, but I think there was a twoweek-minimum thing. So he’s forced to go to the circus because her old gymnastics friend is an acrobat, and Kramer passes the stone at the circus, and the guy falls off the wire. I just remember it was those connections— those were the big breakthroughs. hazell: And by Season 6, the show about nothing became the show about everything, and everything colliding at different places. berg: I think, initially, Larry and Jerry envisioned the show as just a couple of guys bullshitting about stuff. The story, and they put it in the show, is that they were at one of those Korean delis just joking around about the food and go, “This should be the show. This is the TV show right here. Just this.” And then I think, after twenty minutes, they realized that gets really old really fast, and the only way you can write a show is to actually have things happening. It just makes it so much easier to do comedy when things are happening. So, yeah, the whole “show-about-nothing” thing is a bit of a ruse. I credit Larry David for this; I think he really invented a new style of comedic storytelling on TV. The story style we would tell on Herman’s Head was very old-fashioned. It was a morality play. It’s: guy has two choices; he has the right choice or the easy choice. He takes the easy choice, and bad things happen. But in the end, he decides to do the difficult thing and make things right, and there’s a hug or a learning moment. Then there’s a joke at the end to undercut it, and the show’s over. On Seinfeld, the morality was always flipped. The guy has the easy choice or the right choice. He makes the easy choice and gets caught and he lies about it, which causes more trouble. Then he tries to wriggle out of it by blaming somebody else. Then he gets caught in that lie, and another bad thing happens, and in the end, he gets crushed. That’s how the show always ends. The show always ends with somebody getting destroyed for their terrible behavior. They’re petty and self-serving. The lesson is: next time I need to be more careful about getting caught. That’s the morality of the show, and it’s a very different style of storytelling than traditional sitcoms. 36

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The other thing Larry and Jerry did is when something happens in a Seinfeld or a Curb episode, that is the comedy. It’s not, oh yeah, there’s sort of a conventional dramatic situation with a lot of funny jokes in it. The story itself is the joke. By the end of Seinfeld, we were shooting twentynine or thirty minutes and having to cut down to twenty-one and a half minutes to air. There’s no room for freestanding jokes. If it’s not nailed down, it’s coming out. So the comedy has to be the story. If something happens in a scene and it’s not funny, there’s a problem. hazell: How do you control the scene length when there’s improvisation going on? Obviously you can cut around things, but when you’re giving the actors some freedom to get to the end of that scene, how do you contain that so you’re not overrun? berg: You kind of don’t. There are scenes, particularly with J. B. Smoove, who plays Leon—he’s a genius and you’ve gotta let him run—but there are takes where he’ll just go for fifteen minutes. Out of those fifteen minutes, there are three or four brilliant gems, and there’s a lot of other stuff. So in the edit, you put the gems in and you lose the other stuff. Larry spends a lot of time just standing there watching Leon and laughing. We try to cut around his laughs as much as we can. hazell: There was a high compliment in something I read the other night about the construction of the story coming back around. I think it was the one where Larry was talking to his doctor, who assumes he’s being abused by Leon because of the truthful nature of how Larry was playing that scene, where all of his answers were the denial of being abused. Just give us a little bit of overview of how that comes together. berg: I think that was one of those things of getting to a certain point and needing a comedic conceit to get us to the next thing. That was the one where Larry discovers that he lives next door to an abused women’s shelter. One of the women is particularly large and particularly strong looking, and Larry’s very puzzled as to how exactly she could possibly have been abused. He thinks she’s just claiming abuse so she can live in this very nice home. He decides he’s going to suss it out and asks her some questions and ends up getting punched in the face. Leon takes him to the hospital, and the joke is—and this has been a running joke that Leon lives in his house—that Leon doesn’t pay bills and Leon takes his food. Larry will ask Leon to move out and he won’t. So we got to this point where Leon has taken a battered Larry to the hospital and the doctor—and this was sort of based on something that happened to me when I fell down my stairs—anyAlec Berg

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way, the doctor ends up being dubious of how exactly Larry got punched. Larry didn’t want to say [it was] because this woman punched him in the face, and so the idea that Leon had been around and wouldn’t leave and was eating all his stuff, that all just worked into the idea that the doctor assumes they are a gay couple and that Leon is being abusive. Later, the doctor calls the police and they show up to arrest Leon, and there’s another guy who looks like Leon at Larry’s house who ends up getting arrested instead. Then they tell the guy that Larry is going to be moved to a safe house, and it all comes back around. hazell: Let’s talk a little about the difference between being a collaborator, creating and writing as a team, versus the lonely days of writing alone. berg: I didn’t really spend a lot of time writing alone. I’ve known both of the guys I work with since I was a sophomore in college. So when I first started writing, I was writing by myself, but I would always show it to them. I think that’s the greatest thing, particularly in comedy; you have to give it to other people to get different reactions, because comedy is so much about reversing expectations and not seeing where something is coming from. It’s just so hard to do that I don’t think I could do it that well by myself. It’s all about: did this surprise you, what’s funny about this, is this funny, is that funny, and having people you can just give stuff to and they can say, “This sucks,” and you’re not offended by that. You just go, “Okay, good. I’ll move on. I’ll get rid of that.” I was very lucky I ran into these guys when I did. I learned to write with these guys. Jeff and I graduated college a year ahead of Dave, so Jeff and I worked together, we moved to LA, and we started doing stuff. Dave, a year behind us, ended up working in New York. Then when Jeff and I got hired at Seinfeld a year later, we got Dave hired. So since the mid-nineties, we’ve all kind of been collaborating and working together. There’s just a shorthand at a certain point. If I’m adamant that something works and both of those guys think it’s shit, I gotta listen to that. Whereas when you’re writing by yourself, you fall in love with certain things and go, “No, no, no, this is good.” No matter how many people tell you it’s not, you sometimes trust yourself too much. A lot of people think a three-person writing team seems insane. How does that work? That seems so complicated. It’s actually so much simpler than a twoperson team because in a two-person team, there are so many times where I think it’s black, he thinks it’s white, and we’re at a standoff. Whereas now, we always have a third party, a tie-breaker. It happens a lot. Two people

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will have a discussion or an argument about a point, and the third person is basically watching it like a tennis match—then just makes a decision. hazell: Don’t you also find when writing for any of these characters— Larry or Jerry or anybody—that you have to spend time learning how to write for voices and comedy styles? It’s like you’re a mechanic— berg: Oh, absolutely. I think that’s one of the things that make features so difficult: none of these characters exist. You have to invent them, and then you’re learning their voice at the same time that their voice is being created. Whereas in TV, I had the advantage with Seinfeld of having seen thirty or forty episodes before I went in. I knew who those characters were and knew what they sounded like and what they would do and what they wouldn’t. hazell: When you did Seinfeld late in the seasons, you did the Puerto Rican Day thing. It was like: How do we put these people in a bigger crisis? How are they gonna behave in that crisis? And it caused some controversy— berg: It did. It was nonsense. We basically wanted to do a concept show like the Chinese restaurant or the parking garage. One of these shows where they’re stuck in a place and stories come out of them being stuck. A couple of us who had lived in New York had had the experience of the Puerto Rican Day parade. It goes right up the middle of Manhattan, and traffic stops. You cannot get across the island. It’s this giant traffic jam. And somehow, the news of our doing a show about Puerto Rican Day got out, and there was this immense uproar about, oh my God, it has to be racist because it’s the Puerto Rican Day parade! Which, really, it was about a traffic jam. It had nothing to do with culture at all. So that was the controversy— hazell: Other than the flag, because I think the flag was being burned. berg: Okay. All right, I guess, in theory. If you wanna split hairs, that’s fine. I will grant you that. But I contend it was misinterpreted. [laughter] hazell: How do you deal with notes or things that come from somebody else in the industry who may not be a comedy writer? berg: I think the key thing is to understand the spirit of the note, not the letter of it. A lot of it is learning how to say, “I hear what you’re saying, but your fi x is incorrect. Let me propose an alternate fi x that addresses your note, that actually solves the problem and doesn’t make it worse.” Honestly, there’s a huge difference. I think some people know how to give notes, and some people don’t. “We’re concerned this section makes the

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guy seem unlikable.” That’s a note. “Change this to this because the audience likes him more.” That’s a shit note. That’s not a note, that’s dictation. I think there are smart people who can read scripts and say, “I don’t understand why he’s so compelled to do this. We need to address that.” Fair enough, I get it. You didn’t understand, okay? I get that. But “He needs to be more this” or “We need to change that,” that’s where you get into trouble. Sometimes you can reverse engineer those notes, where they say, “He needs to be more like this,” and you go, “Okay, I get it. I understand why you’re saying that. You’re saying that because you feel he needs to be more likeable. Let me throw this at you.” I think the reality of it all is that nobody knows what the hell they’re doing. About 30 percent of every person is convinced they’re a complete fraud and they’re going to be discovered at any minute, and so what they’re doing is, they desperately want people to go, “That’s right! You’re smart!” So if you say, “That’s a very shrewd observation; let me address that,” and give them the fi x, you can say anything. Because after you’ve said, “You’re right!” they’re going, “Yeah, I’m right, and now he’s doing things because I’m right.” At a certain point, some of it’s just gamesmanship. But some of it, even though the note is terrible, some of it is rooted in something that actually makes real sense and can make things better. hazell: I think that’s a big take-home, because most people’s natural instinct is to become defensive. berg: Of course! I’ve always said, only half-jokingly, if you treat every executive as if they’re 100 percent wrong, 100 percent of the time, in the end you’ll come out ahead. [laughter] Pushing up to the Line: “Larry vs. Michael J. Fox”

berg: We needed a reason to get Larry thrown out of New York, so that was one of the things we were trying to engineer as an ending to the season. Then we had this idea—and I don’t think it was Michael J. Fox at first—but it was the idea that Larry runs into somebody with Parkinson’s disease. Initially, the joke was that he thinks the guy might be mad at him but he’s not sure. The guy’s claiming he’s not, but the guy hands him a soda and Larry opens it, and it explodes all over him. He can’t tell whether the guy shook it up on purpose or whether it’s just Parkinson’s. So, that was the kernel of the idea. Then, because we were going to New York, we real-

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ized Michael J. Fox would be the perfect guy for this. Larry called him and ran the idea by him, and he thought it was hilarious and wanted to do it. The other idea we had been playing with for a long time is how young can a child be gay? Are there four-year-old gay children? In my life, I have run into six-year-old kids and you go, “That kid’s gay. He’s gay. He just is.” There was a lot of discussion that came out of that. “Well, isn’t gay about sexual preference, and does a six-year-old have any sexual proclivities?” So then it became, “Well, he’s pre-gay. When he’s old enough to have a sexual preference, it will be same-sex.” We taught that kid actor nothing. We gave our casting director an outline and we talked about the character, and she said, “Oh boy, all right, I’ll start looking.” A couple weeks later, I got an email that just said, “I found the kid.” Curb auditions are not scripted, so when the casting directors pre-read actors, they’ll just sit and tape a conversation with them. And this kid came in talking about how Judy Garland was his favorite actress, and he’s eight! Meet Me in St. Louis was his favorite movie of all time— it was to die for. He was exactly who he was. Larry’s biggest concern was, “I wanna make sure his parents know what the show is about. I wanna make sure that everybody is on board. I don’t want anybody to be watching this at home going, ‘Oh my God, they hoodwinked me and they made me look bad. They had our kid do something that’s going to get him hassled or whatever.’” So, we were very open about it and his parents were completely on board, and there was not a note given in terms of performance with that kid. He was the kid he was cast as. So that was another one of the ideas that kind of folded into the show. We probably spent two, three, sometimes four weeks with a whiteboard in our office: “Okay, this could connect to this and then this could happen. Okay, what’s the next beat of that story? Well, you’ll go here . . .” We came up with the idea that Larry likes to idly draw Hitler mustaches on magazines. Then that connected to giving the gay kid a sewing machine, and the kid sewed a swastika because Larry was drawing a swastika. But this is the thing: sometimes people say, “Oh, you should never joke about that.” Nonsense. I don’t think there’s anything on earth you can’t joke about if you do it the right way. I’m not saying be tasteless and foul and low-brow, but if you say you can’t joke about that, I think you’re giving that an enormous amount of power. A lot of what comedy is is demystifying these important things and making them things you can talk

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about. I’m not saying we did a great public service, but I do feel like there were conversations about that episode where people go, “You know, I guess there are eight-year-old gay kids. I wonder what that’s about.” We’re just here to elevate the collective. That’s really what it’s about. You have to push right up to the line and hopefully not go over it. In order to make it exciting and dangerous and adventurous, you have to push for those things. I would much rather have a small contingent of people who are fanatical fans and an equal number of people who just hate the show than a lot of people who feel like, “Yeah, it’s all right.” Passion on both ends is preferable to general indifference. If you’re gonna go after the people who fucking love something, you’ll get people who fucking hate it, too. And that’s okay; that’s fine. I’ve never worked on anything that’s as polarizing as Curb. I’ve had so many people tell me they can’t stand the show. It makes them crazy: “My palms sweat. I hate that guy!” Curb is the first thing I’ve ever worked on where there’s no “they” at all. There’s just us. Most of the things you work on—oh, they’re gonna have a problem with that, or they’re gonna feel this is too racy, or they’re gonna want us to do an alternate line for that. There is no “they” on Curb. If you told me Larry was paying for it himself, and we were shooting it so he could have a DVD of it to show his friends in his living room, the process would be the exact same. That’s the true joy of it. We sit down, we figure out what we want to do, and we write up these outlines. Larry sends them to HBO as a courtesy, and they’ll call him and tell him how great they thought they were. I actually asked him the first time he sent an outline when I was working there, “Do they ever call and say they don’t like something or they want you to change something?” And he said, “God, I wish they would ’cause I could tell them to go fuck themselves, and I wouldn’t have to do this show anymore.” When Larry first got there, he just said, “Listen, I don’t need the money. I don’t need to do this. If I’m going to do this, it’s because it’s a joy and a pleasure. I get to do what I want, and if you’re cool, let’s do it. Otherwise, I’m outta here.” And they agreed and it worked.

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Orange Is the New Black: Up Close with Jenji Kohan 2 0 13

I read [Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison], and the two main things I loved were the stories and these women. Piper Kerman described great characters who had really interesting stories. I also love prison because I’m always looking for these crossroads in life where people are forced to interact with others. There’s this notion that we all live in this big melting pot, but we don’t. We live in a mosaic, where all these little pieces rub up against each other, but they don’t mix that much. So, as a writer, I’m always looking for these places where people are forced to mix, and very often they happen in underground economies, like in Weeds, or in prison. Places where all sorts of humanity fi lters through and they have to deal with one another. That’s where so much fun and friction and tension can come from. I came out of half-hours. That was my early training, where it was three jokes a page, and it was a lot of work. I think a lot of the humor in Orange comes out of character and situation. I find that easier because I find every thing funny, even when it’s really inappropriate and dark and gets me in trouble. It’s a relief to not have to do those jokes. But I think the humor is necessary. I don’t understand the dramas that don’t have humor. I don’t think they reflect life. People use it to survive and get through situations, and if something is straight and dry, you’re not doing your job. You’re not reflecting life. It has to have that mix. Piper was source material, but I didn’t want to have to follow her life. Plus, I don’t think she wanted her life, specifically, portrayed on the screen. So after the first episode, we moved on and created our own world. It became its own world. Piper is a great technical adviser and fan. She reads all

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the scripts and gives us notes like, “That wouldn’t really happen.” Sometimes she’ll be personal because she really doesn’t like the real Alex, and she’s like, “How can she go back to her?” Like, it gets really personal. She keeps saying, “Can she have, like, a big, black, hot girlfriend for the next season?” She mostly writes, “This is accurate. This is not accurate. This is something you might want to be thinking about.” Piper had come into this because of her girlfriend, so homosexuality was certainly going to be addressed. There was also a character in the book we loved who was transgender. We wanted the real thing, so we only auditioned transgender actresses, and Laverne [Cox] came in and took that part. She’s great. You also want to pay homage to what’s come before you, and while the genre of women-in-prison movies is exploitive and larger than life, you had to have your big, butch lesbian, and you had to have a few of those things in there. It’s a prison drama, and look, you’ve got to represent the population, and a percentage of the population is gay, so it’s going to be there. Then there’s the phenomenon of gay-for-the-stay, and that’s just very basic and human: the need for contact and the need for love. So we wanted to explore all sorts of sexuality and what it does for people and what need it serves for people, and it’s all very fluid. You’re always going to get into trouble because “You’re a white lady! How can you write for a black woman or a Latina woman?” I’m a writer; I use my imagination. I also do a lot of research. I know a lot of people and I base characters on people I know. Or, I invent a character and I get to know that person. I don’t feel like I should be limited in who I write because of who I am.

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Web Series to HBO: Up Close with Issa Rae 2 0 15

A lot of my inspiration comes from observation and from being just generally uncomfortable.

I made a web series my senior year in college. I’d been trying to break into the industry with a writing partner by writing a feature, but the notes and feedback we got were mostly along the lines of, “Uh . . . nobody’s checking for this right now. Could you add more white characters?” This was not what I was trying to do, so I created a web series called Dorm Diaries. It was about what it’s like to be black at Stanford. I rented the library camera, shot it, edited it, and put it online. It started spreading to other colleges and I was like, “Wow, this is dope. I literally just put something out there and people are consuming it and enjoying it, and that’s cool.” Two years went by, and I graduated and didn’t really continue the series, but it was always in my head. I spent time in New York, and New York wasn’t really going like I hoped. I just wrote in my journal, like, “Oh, um . . . I’m awkward, period. And black.” And that was like, “Whoa!” [laughter] “That’s me! Like, I didn’t even know that!” I mean, I knew I was black, but that’s crazy how the awkwardness kind of informs that. So I decided: before someone takes this idea, I should shoot it myself in the same way I did for that first web series and put it out. I’d done two web series up to that point, and Awkward Black Girl was the third one. The other two I kept trying to shop with that same kind of wack feedback, and so I was like, “If they’re not going to accept these other two ideas I think are somewhat mainstream, they’re never going to believe an awkward black girl exists. So let me just put it on the internet and see what happens—” and here I am. 45

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There was a lot of hesitation at first because I was never in any of the other two series. The first one was just my friends acting. They didn’t know it, but they were just playing archetypes of themselves, like, “Oh, this is the school ho.” They’re all like, “Yeah, I’ll play it! Thanks for thinking of me.” [laughter] Then the second one was my brother and his rap group trying to make it in LA, and that was like a mockumentary. I would read the negative comments for those first two and I’d be like, “Oh, sucks for them.” Putting myself out there creatively is one thing, but putting myself out there face-wise is totally different. I tend to write what I want to see. With Dorm Diaries, I was missing A Different World. Not to even compare it because looking back, it’s really rough, but I was like, “I want to see some version of it. I want to tell my version.” My second web series, The F Word, was kind of influenced by The Office, but it was motivated by not seeing enough diverse characters in certain series. So, my tone is basically, what do I want to see?

I knew something had sparked after the first episode. I put it online and it started spreading without me doing anything. Publications picked it up, and people were saying, “You know, I didn’t know what I was before, but now I can come outta the awkward closet.” That was really special to me. The production schedule was to release an episode the first Thursday of every month. The first week would be dedicated to releasing it. Second week: writing. Third week: preproduction. Fourth week: shooting, then editing and releasing it. We were working on it daily, every day of the year, because there were twelve episodes. And that was part of the process because it just kept growing with each episode. Around the time we launched our Kickstarter, Pharrell’s creative manager, Mimi Valdes, contacted me and was like, “I’m working with Pharrell on this venture, and he wants to talk to you. We love your web series.” At the time, Google was trying to do their version of digital television. They funded a hundred channels, and his channel was one of those, and they decided to relaunch Awkward Black Girl. It helped to get us a lot of attention, but it also started feeling much bigger to me, like when we got cursed out for putting the finale up late. We really tried to get it out, and it was just a long episode. It was complicated. We said it was going to come out like January 11. People had scheduled watch parties for a 12-minute episode and were like, “How could you

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do this to us?! We stayed up all night!” We ended up uploading it the next day, and people were just over it. So then I was like, “Wow, people want to kill me for this. This is valuable.” We ended up being reviewed in the New York Times, and ShondaLand called me in to see what else I had. I pitched them an idea for a series called I Hate LA Dudes, and it was an eye-opening experience because it felt like, “This is my chance,” and I had the mentality of, “I’m going to do whatever it takes.” ShondaLand understood my voice, and they were amazing throughout the process and were very patient in terms of guiding me through network television. But I just wasn’t ready for the studio network part. That really was eye-opening, in that they gave notes that were sometimes conflicting. I was very literally trying to address them and ended up making a show that wasn’t really my vision. It wasn’t what I expected at the end of the day. It just wasn’t good, and they ultimately passed on it. It all stopped at the script. The way networks and studios work, while they’re under the same umbrella, they don’t necessarily have the same vision. By the time I turned in the script, because their notes were so contradictory, they had already picked up two or three shows about dating in your twenties. So, in addition to not being good, there was already tons of material covering that. It was devastating at the time. It was a lesson to me to be firm in my vision. I respect Shonda so much. I respect her team so much, and I didn’t feel I’d get another chance like that again. Insecure

That door closed, and a month later, HBO called. They were like, “Hey, we heard you’re available . . . [laughter] We heard you’re not working with ABC. Do you have anything else?” They called me in to pitch what turned into the series. That was two and a half years in development. It’s a very long time, but they’re known for it. Every single time I told someone, “Oh, I’m developing with HBO,” they’d be like, “Oh! Good luck. ’Cause you know, they’re slow.” I was like, “Pff tt.” And then I learned. HBO knows what they want. They’re slow because they can afford to be, and they end up producing great stuff. They’ve really helped transition the series into something that’s even closer to me. I think I went into it wanting to adapt to them, and they were like, “You need to tap into what makes you ‘you’ more.” The finished product is so close to me, so very much me, and I couldn’t be more proud.

Issa Rae

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I really enjoyed the collaborative process. I initially sold the show to them, and then they were like, “You need a showrunner,” which is what they typically do for new writers. My management company and agency happened to represent Larry Wilmore, and they were like, “Oh, you should meet with him and see if you guys vibe. Maybe he can be your supervisor or showrunner at the end of the day.” So we met up, and we bonded and clicked. I really loved him so much. At the end of the meeting, he said, “You know, I would love to write this with you.” I was like, “Heck, yes! Please do.” So we ended up collaborating on this series together. He really brought himself down to my level, in the sense that he was really part of my life. We were just having conversations on his rooftop, and I didn’t know they would end up being a lot of the material and foundation for the show. He kind of taught me a new writing style, and that was the most pleasant part of the collaboration. Even getting notes from HBO, he was really good about navigating what notes to take and what notes meant. It was a huge learning process for me. Performance Pressure

For this particular project, it was very frightening when we were shooting the pilot because I’d been behind the scenes for so long. Everything was going great in terms of picking the team. I’d put so much effort into finding the right showrunner and finding the right director. That was a process, because it had to be someone who understood the material and story I was trying to tell so I’d still have a voice in the process. Everything was going right in terms of the team, and then I came to the realization that, “Oh, shit, like, I’m the only reason this show will fail. If I’m not on point, then I’ve sunk my own ship.” I realized I had to take off the producer hat and the writer hat, and focus on the performing aspect. I was terrified. People definitely let me know like, “Maybe you shouldn’t focus on the color of this wall. Maybe you should actually practice.” And that was helpful. Confidence

It just comes over time as you continue to create. You start to worry less about failing and “Does my stuff suck?” After a while, you have to be like, “What else do you want to do?” Any time I have a feeling of not being good enough, or being ungrateful for what I’m doing, I just think about my last

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shitty job. I’m like, “Uh-uh. I can’t. Do you want to go back?” And the answer is no. That propels me to move forward. Like the worst that can happen is that people don’t like a project you do, and it’s fine—that’s why you’re a writer. You can come up with tons of other ideas. You just have to continue to do what it is you came here to do, to believe in yourself to a point where you continue to produce. People forget. People are so fickle, and rejection is just part of this business at the end of the day. I always have in the back of my mind, “Someone’s going to do this idea! And they’re going to do it better!” That really propels me. When you think about yourself as a writer, no one’s doing what you’re doing, the way you’re doing it. You have to really think about what authenticity you bring to the table. This is literally my story and my life; who else is going to do that better than I can? Well, someone probably could, but that’s the process you have to consider. You can’t let that stop you from doing it.

Issa Rae

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A Conversation with Carl Reiner Moderated by Barry Josephson 2 0 15

barry josephson: By way of introduction, I just want to say that Carl Reiner is a legend. carl reiner: I know that. [laughter] josephson: What’s remarkable about today is that fifty-four years ago, in 1961, The Dick Van Dyke Show was launched. But before we get to the origins of that show, I want to talk about you writing on Your Show of Shows and for Sid Caesar. reiner: Well, on Your Show of Shows I was an actor. I was a writer without a portfolio. In other words, I was allowed into the writers room after the first few weeks. I was always writing my own material, so I felt badly I wasn’t going to contribute. I remember one of the head writers, a lovely man, Mel Tolkin, said, “You’re nothing but a friggin’ actor; get out of here,” and I never forgot that. Anyway, one day I came in thinking, “I’m never going to get to use my double-talk languages that I do.” I did them in my act, and Sid Caesar was the master. But nobody ever did double-talk in foreign languages. I thought, “I’ll have to put that to bed.” And one night, I got the idea; I said, “Hey, why don’t we do foreign movies? Take foreign movies.” He said, “What are you talking about?” I went over to Sid and double-talk sold him a pack of cigarettes. He haggled with me, he bargained me, and it became a sketch. And that’s when I was allowed into the writers room. josephson: So, basically, that was your first pitch. And on that show, there were so many great writers. Mel Brooks was a writer on it. reiner: I considered that my college. Mel Brooks, when I came on, was working for Sid Caesar for thirty-five dollars a joke or something like that. It wasn’t until a year later that Max Levin put him on the payroll for a hun-

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dred dollars a week. Max didn’t like him because he was so obstreperous. He used to throw lit cigars at him and say, “Get out of here!” As I said, it was my college education. At the very beginning, there were Lucille Kallen and Mel Tolkin, who were two Canadians, and Joe Stein, who wrote Fiddler on the Roof. Then Neil and Doc Simon. He wrote thirty-eight full-length plays, comedies, and movies. I always considered him a genius. Not only the quality of the work but the volume, and everything he did was a hit. Then there was Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart—the wittiest human being who ever lived—and Mike Stewart, who used to be our typist. He wrote Bye, Bye Birdie and Candide. So I listened and learned. josephson: And then after Your Show of Shows, Sid Caesar had his own show. reiner: Yeah, it was Caesar’s Hour. But I never had a credit, because the credit belongs to the writers. Right after Show of Shows, the review format disappeared until Carol Burnett, ten years later, brought it back. Maybe the most gifted actor ever. I consider her the lynchpin. josephson: You’re right; the hour-dramas were taking over. reiner: Hour-dramas and situation comedies and horses and guns and westerns. I was being offered situation comedies, and my agent, Harry Kalcheim, kept sending me scripts. They weren’t very good, and my wife, in her infinite wisdom, said, “Why don’t you write one?” And that’s when I wrote a show called Head of the Family. We sent it to Harry and he sold it to Peter Lawford, an actor who wanted to be a producer, and he put up the money for a pilot. I said, “If I’m going to have a pilot and do it myself, I better have a bible for other writers who come along.” So I wrote thirteen episodes. I did the pilot with a girl named Barbara Britton, a lovely actress, and Morty Gunty and Sylvia Miles playing the other two major parts. It wasn’t very good, and I just said, “Well, that’s it,” and I started writing fi lms. Then I got a call from my agent, who said these scripts were lying on his desk. So we brought Sheldon Leonard in, who worked with Danny Thomas, and he said, “I love these scripts!” He said, “You won’t fail, Carl. We’ll get a better actor to play you.” [laughter] He suggested Dick Van Dyke. I went to New York, saw this extraordinary performer, and then it became The Dick Van Dyke Show. Writing is it. You’re alone with a pencil or typewriter and an empty piece of page. It’s like getting lost in the woods and finding your way out.

Carl Reiner

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The Dick Van Dyke Show

josephson: Obviously you saw the trend of situational comedies and the things that were working. reiner: I was going to write a show about what I knew. What I knew about was a happy marriage. I Love Lucy was two against each other, and in my world, it’s two against the world. So I didn’t dig those shows. What we dealt with were the problems that come up in marriages and the solutions to them. Everybody else in the world has a home life and a working life, and when I wrote it, I said, “What do I know about? What am I going to write about?” I’d never written a show. I’d written comedy acts. So I’ll write about that. So I wrote about my life, and I said, “Everybody’s life is similar, insofar as the relationship we make with friends, neighbors, and family.” I said, “I’ll write about that,” and so that’s what I wrote about. josephson: It’s unusual in a way. Lucy occasionally went to see where Ricky worked, but for the most part, situational comedies took place in the home. reiner: Yes, and it started with Honey, I’m Home. I remember, when I first wrote it, I met one of the executives at CBS or someplace, and he said, “This is very good, but nobody knows about comedy writers. That’s something they don’t know about.” He said, “What if we made him an insurance salesman?” I said, “Wait a sec. When you come home and start talking about what you did at work, who wants to hear about insurance?” I said, “But when the product is jokes, and you’re making up a good joke and saying, ‘Is that good enough?’ people will laugh at what you’re working at.” He was convinced. That was the best part of it; that the work he was doing was something that got laughs. The sitcoms on networks today suffer because they’re only twenty minutes. They don’t have the room for anything. The beginning, the middle, and end. It’s usually a series of joke, joke, joke, joke—instead of relationships.

josephson: Let’s talk about the cast of the show, which we all revere so much. Mary Tyler Moore is Laura Petrie, Dick Van Dyke is Rob Petrie, Rose Marie, Morey Amsterdam . . . So Sheldon Leonard says to you, “Dick Van Dyke.” reiner: Dick had been in so many shows and so many things. He thought it’d be a waste of time, but when he read the scripts, he changed

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his mind. He lent to it his body and creativity that is unshakeable. He’s probably the most versatile performer ever. josephson: You built the promotion into the title. So after you find him, you have to find your Laura Petrie. reiner: I saw about two dozen girls. I told Sheldon, “I don’t know what I’m looking for.” He said, “You’ll know when you see her.” And one day, a girl walked into my office. She was reluctant to come because she had gone on a few auditions and not done well. You could see that she didn’t want to be here, and I said, “Would you read a few lines with me?” I gave her a script, and she read the first word and it was just like, “Whoa.” Whatever it was, I heard a ping in her voice. I’ve said that before: there was something in her voice. I got off my chair, I went over and grabbed the top of her head and said, “Come with me, young lady.” I walked her down to Sheldon Leonard’s office. I let go of her and said, “Here she is.” What a force of nature she was. josephson: How much did the actors influence the writing of the show as it evolved over time? reiner: Well, you always pitch to the strength of the actors. When you find out they’ve got a talent you didn’t know they had, that’s the best thing you can find. This group had so much talent. Rose Marie—she can sing, she can dance. Morey—he played the cello. His face changed; he played for real. Everyone saw that, and we drew on that. Mary—she was a wonderful ballet dancer. When she and Dick did their soft-shoe, those were my favorite shows. For one thing, seeing Mary and Dick do a soft-shoe, I just melted, but it also made it much easier for me to write a show. Instead of thirty-eight pages, I only had to write twenty pages; the rest was dancing. josephson: There’s a classic episode where she gets a faucet stuck on her toe and she’s in a tub. And you had her wear a coat. reiner: That was the only time we had a bit of an argument. They have a romantic weekend in New York, and Dick is in the living room putting on a fake moustache. She’s in the bath, and while in the bath, she’s like, “Oh my goodness, I got my toe stuck in the faucet. I can’t get it out!” He said, “Wait, I’ll get,” and he starts to run to the door and bangs through the door. He almost breaks his shoulder, and she says, “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!” She says, “There’s a glass mirror here, and it may fall in the tub!” and he says, “Cover yourself!” She says, “I can’t reach a towel,” and he says, “What have you got?” and she says, “A washcloth.” So, he says, “Do the best you can with it!” Anyway, the thing was we never saw Mary. It was her voice

Carl Reiner

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coming, and she complained to me. She said, “You know, I’m doing a radio show and everybody else is doing a television show. I’m never seen!” She was upset, and I said, “Mary, wait, listen to me.” I said, “I am giving the men in the country the possibility of imagining you nude in a bathtub,” and she said, “Oh, okay.” Then she was comfortable. And it was one of the funniest shows. josephson: It seems like so many people in this show were people who were selling jokes. But you didn’t have a traditional writers room when you started. You wrote fifty-eight scripts. reiner: I was alone in the beginning. The first thirteen were mine. Then when I started getting help, I rewrote. I was my own story editor. So I was alone for a long time, and after the first or second year, I started going nuts. And then my nephew George Shapiro came in with two guys, Bill Persky and Sam Denoff. He showed me a script they’d written, and it wasn’t any good; it was obvious they hadn’t seen the show. I told him I didn’t want it. He told them to watch the show, and they wrote another script. I didn’t want to look at it because I didn’t want to reject them again. But he said, “Read it,” and it was “That’s My Boy??” It turned out to be one of the funniest shows we’d ever done. So Persky and Denoff came over and started writing scripts for me, and I made them co-story editors so I didn’t have to be alone. Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson came on very soon after that, at the end of Season 2 or 3. josephson: You were writing in that room, sometimes rewriting, sometimes shaping. I imagine those read-throughs with that classic cast and those people wanting to contribute was a remarkable thing. How did you manage that process? reiner: If you have an ear for something that’s good, it goes right in. Everybody was able to contribute something that wasn’t on the page. That was the selectivity of the producers, but that was a gift. It made my life possible to create an atmosphere where they wanted to contribute; it’s making a landing strip for people who have things to put up. josephson: Where did you do your rehearsals? reiner: We rehearsed around the set. It was a three-camera show, so we had a live audience. But the pilot was a one-camera show. You had to show it to an audience and capture their laughs. But we had a wonderful setup where the audience—we always got laughs—and if a thing didn’t get a laugh but we thought it was important enough, story-wise, or humorous enough, we left it in. That way you wouldn’t be suspected of fake laugh-

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ter. We had a guy named Charlie Davis who captured the laughter. If we cut a scene off abruptly, the laugh would cut off abruptly. If there was a big laugh—“HUP!”—we wanted to trickle off at the end of scenes. But he captured all of our laughter in his laugh machine, and he used it for all the one-camera shows. When Norman Lear started All in the Family, I said, “I’m going to give you a present,” and he said, “What?” I said, “I’m going to give you my schedule.” I said, “We rehearse it on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Friday, a run-through, then you go home with the script. You do work on the script Saturday and Sunday, fi x the show up, and then on Monday you bring in the new show and shoot it on Tuesday. So you’ve got seven days of work on each show instead of five.” He took that and he used it on All in the Family, and, of course, All in the Family changed everything. The main concept of humor is surprise. When you expect a cliché and you don’t get it, you get something original. You’ve got to be unexpected: just when you think there’s no way a joke can emerge, one emerges. You have to have truth, too. You can’t make up something that people don’t have any background for.

Carl Reiner

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A Conversation with Marta Kauffman Moderated by Barbara Morgan 2 0 16

marta kauffman: I met David Crane at Brandeis. At the time, we were both actors taking a class together and someone offered me to direct a production of Godspell. I said to David, “Would you be in it?” And he said, “No, but I’ll direct it with you.” And that was the beginning of our relationship. After that, we started writing together and realized it’s much more fun working on this side of the table—not as much rejection—and that’s how we started. We were doing musical theater for many years in New York, and we had a play off-Broadway. This was 1985, and an agent came in and she said, “Why aren’t you guys doing TV?” And we said, “Dunno.” And she, to this day, is my agent. She’s the one who got us to switch over to TV. barbara morgan: Let’s talk about Dream On, because I remember when that show came out, it was such a unique concept. kauffman: We were HBO’s first comedy. Universal had all these hours and half-hours of TV that they didn’t know what to do with. It’s a huge library, and they had a million people come in and interview for the job of trying to turn it into a series. So, when they scraped the bottom of the barrel, they found these two musical theater writers. We talked about how we grew up on television and how much it influenced our lives, so that’s where it started. When we first pitched it, we had to pitch it to John Landis, who was the executive producer. So we wrote the pilot, and he came to New York to give us notes, and his note was, “Make it funnier.” That was it. I actually don’t remember pitching it to HBO, but obviously we must’ve because they picked it up, and I think we did six seasons. We had to do an enormous amount of research, watch a million of those

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things, and then we had research guys who we’d write, you know, “The clip we’re looking for is something like this,” and they would do the research. And we discovered at a certain point that if it was shot I think after 1960, and the person was still alive, we couldn’t use the clip. So we’d see these perfect clips, and we’d go, “Oh, please be dead, please be dead.” And then we would get to use the clip. morgan: So how much did your musical theater background help you? Do you think it gave you an advantage? kauffman: I think it’s two things. One of them is because we wrote lyrics, we learned rhythm. And the rhythm of lines is very meaningful. We would argue about if it’s a comma or an ellipsis, because it changes the rhythm. So I think in that way, it really helped, and we were self-taught. We never took a writing class. We were thrown head first into Dream On and had never done TV. We were very lucky that we were trusted enough to do this sort of guerrilla television out in the middle of nowhere. So I think it helped. It mainly taught us how to be self-sufficient. Friends

kauffman: We had done two pilots and one of them went, and it was bad. And the next year, we had written two more. When we went to pitch Friends, I remember David and I sitting around talking about what kind of series we wanted to do. We were a group of six people in New York. We were all we had, we were all there by ourselves. Four of the six turned out to be gay, and we are actually all still close after all these years. Th is was our group. What we talked about is, it’s about that time in your life when your friends are your family. Because once you have your own family, things change. When we went to pitch it, I remember driving down a street in LA and seeing a place called Insomnia Cafe. That really grabbed me. The idea of a place where people are up all night drinking coffee. So that was one of the things that birthed the idea of Central Perk. Honestly, I feel like the stars were aligned. Everything was right, because that pilot wrote itself in three days. We just got out of the way and let it go. And the rest was magic. morgan: Who came up with “The One About,” and did that get confusing over time? kauffman: No, it never did. I was actually talking about this to someone yesterday who said he was on set for one of them. I said, “Which one?”

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And he said, “The one with . . . ,” and that’s why we did it. Because that’s how people talk about them—“Did you see the one where . . . ?” So, the hardest part was picking the story that if we said it, you’d remember which episode it was. You know, “The One with the Lesbian Wedding,” you get. “The One with the Prom Video,” you get. “The One with Pretzel,” you won’t get. morgan: So what was going on in the television world around the time? How were you prepping for the life of your show? kauffman: Seinfeld was on. That was the closest comparison, but we’ve always said, “They don’t hug on Seinfeld.” We wanted our show to have warmth. We wanted these to be people you wished you were friends with—that you wanted to hang with and have a beer or a lasagna with. We weren’t, at the time, like anything else on TV. After the first, I think, three episodes, we jumped into the top ten, and then within a season we were in the top five. So it was a pretty quick success with the audience. After we did that first season, suddenly everybody’s trying to do shows about groups of young people, and I kept saying, “It makes no sense,” because TV is not a formula. You have to be lucky and hit the right feeling at the right time. After 9/11, one of the things we saw happen was that people flocked to Friends because it was comfort. I like the idea that we do comfort TV. There are plenty of beautiful shows. Comfort is not what they offer. If anything, they make you uncomfortable, and that’s part of what they’re trying to do, and that’s great, but that’s not what I do. The other thing we kept saying to ourselves: “We want to do something that we would watch.” Once you get started on your show, you don’t think about the success. You don’t think about the other things that are on TV. All you think about is what’s the good show I want to do, and you throw your whole life into it. morgan: The first season, did you have any big battles with the network? Did they try to shift that comfort zone you built? kauffman: One of the things they really wanted was an older character in the coffee shop. We called him Pat the Cop. You know, some older person they could get advice from. And we refused. That was one of the times we just said, “Absolutely not.” We believed if the stories are universal, people will watch. And they did. We got to prove them wrong on that. In the pilot, Monica sleeps with someone who slips her a line, and the head of the network felt she deserved the treatment she got because she slept with a guy on her first date. That was another fight. We had several of them

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along the way, especially because the Standards Department was so rigid. Coming off Dream On, where you could say all kinds of words and show all kinds of things, and we’re now at a network where you can’t say the word “nipple.” It was like ten years before you could say “vagina.” You could say “penis” somewhere in the middle, but “vagina” was way down the line. So we would have those kinds of arguments. They really were hesitant about the lesbian wedding, which turned out nobody cared about. They just didn’t. So yeah, there were things along the way, but once we got to about the fourth season, after a table read, the network would turn to us and say, “What do you think?” Because we were much harder on ourselves than they were on us. Our standards were way higher. morgan: I mean, obviously you’re not thinking at this point that you’re going to be on for ten years, but were you thinking of where your show was ultimately going to go? kauffman: Not at all, and fortunately, Friends is not Lost, where you hope there was a place you’re landing. We didn’t have to do all those twists and turns. You create characters, you put them in a situation, you create relationships, and then you see what happens. Until an actor comes and breathes life in the character, you don’t know who’s got chemistry. We didn’t know Matt LeBlanc was really funny playing dumb. We had no idea Joey was dumb. And he was really good at it. Really, really funny at it. So that changes things as you go on. Story-wise, all we really had a sense of was that season. Originally, we only had thirteen episodes. It wasn’t until we were at episode 10 that they said, “All right, you have more episodes.” So you can’t really plan for the end of the season because you don’t know what they’re going to tell you. morgan: Did you have a fairly continuous writers room over time? kauffman: We had executive producers on the last season who started as staff writers in the first. Generally, people who wanted to stay got to stay. A lot of people wanted to move on and do their own stuff, which is great. Many of the writers have done extraordinary work. Our writers room started smaller and got bigger as the years went on, primarily because the schedule for the writer in multi-camera is brutal. You have to keep moving forward with new stories and new outlines and all that stuff. You start with a table read on Monday and do a rewrite after that, which generally wasn’t too late unless none of the stories were working, and then you wanted to throw yourself out the window. You would have a runthrough on Tuesday, just for us, and that was around three or four o’clock.

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Then we would give notes, come back to the writers room, and that’s when the rewrites started. On Wednesday, they had to have the script by nine that morning. Wednesday, it’s another run-through for the network and studio, another set of notes, and another rewrite. Thursdays, we would do camera blocking, and that was another bunch of rewrites. So, the schedule was completely brutal. As time wore on, we had to add more people because we just couldn’t do it. By the last two seasons, we figured out that we should have an early room and a late room, and that a late room will follow one episode and then you switch it, so not everybody is there until three in the morning every night. We ended up, including me and David, with fourteen. It’s really fun sitting around with fourteen hilarious people. Even at three in the morning. One time we were doing a rewrite after we had shot a show, and I stepped out to use the bathroom, and that night I was the only woman in the room. I walked back in and sat down. We’re talking about stuff, and all of a sudden, one by one, the guys stand up and stretch, and they’ve all taken their pants off. [laughter] The Characters

morgan: Was it constricting to have such a big ensemble cast? kauffman: Actually, what was difficult was having to do three stories. We had made a commitment to that, and that made it hard, unless they were all doing one story. In some ways it made it easier because you had this beautiful well of possibilities. We could go anywhere with these people. The constrictions had more to do with twenty-one minutes to tell a story, and teaser, three acts, and tag. That’s what was difficult—you have to shoehorn your story into this format. I think, except for Joey, each of the characters has a piece of me or David. David’s got a lot of both Chandler and Ross in him. Yes, I’m the person who wants to close the marker until it clicks. I have that control-y, bossy thing; it’s terrible. But I also have a little bit of the Phoebe thing. I was raised probably to be like Rachel. I hope I’m not that, but the characters came from us sitting around. We weren’t even talking about us, but you’re always part of the character that you’re writing. We were talking about people we knew—the ones who made us laugh, the ones we felt like we could wrap our minds around. Like, I understood Monica, the mother hen. I got the woman who’s at the center of it, but she was a little differ-

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ent when we started. She was a little tougher. You’re inspired by people you know; you’re inspired by things about yourself that you either think are funny or neurotic. morgan: So when Friends became sort of zeitgeist, was there pressure in the writers room to keep that going? kauffman: We didn’t experience that, because we were working. We had to come in every day. We had to come up with twenty-four episodes, and we had to shoot twenty-four episodes. Then we had to read hundreds of writers for the following season. So we didn’t think about that, ever. It was always surprising to us. I can remember walking through the airport and every magazine cover was one of the cast, and I was like, “What? Whose show is that?” morgan: Can you name some scenes you’re particularly proud of? Where you really felt like you created some deeper, richer things within the relationship amongst those characters? kauffman: There were things like “The One with the Prom Video” episode, at the very end, when Rachel crosses the apartment and goes over to Ross and kisses him. We knew people were invested in that relationship, but we had no idea how invested they were. It got such an uproar from the audience. That was surprising and thrilling. Even more surprising was when we discover Monica and Chandler in bed. We thought it was just gonna be a really funny, uncomfortable thing for the two of them and thought it would be really awkward for the six of them. We had to stop because people were screaming so much. Screaming. We literally had to stop and wait. That was surprising. It always felt so good when things were emotional and funny at the same time. People talk about “We were on a break”; well, that happens to people. I loved Ross and Susan in the closet when Carol is giving birth, because I think they have a really interesting argument where he basically says, “Every day is lesbian mother day.” This is dealing with real hurt that he was feeling, and that’s my favorite stuff to write—it’s funny and it’s emotional. morgan: So you were your audience. kauffman: We wrote a show that we would watch. That was our goal. Grace and Frankie

kauffman: The project came about when a lovely woman I met on a trip said, “We should work together sometime.” We had lunch, and she said

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to me that Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda wanted to do TV. I thought she meant together, so I called my agent and said, “I heard Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda want to do a TV show together,” and she said, “I don’t know; I’ll call you right back.” Twenty minutes later, she called me back and said, “They do now.” So now we had to come up with something. And I should just say, my producing partners, Robbie Tollin and Hannah Cantor, are the spine of this show. So Hannah and I were sitting in a car, trying to come up with ideas. I had an idea—and this was before Transparent was on the air—that Jane’s character would be married to a man and they get divorced and she comes back as Lily. But Transparent was happening, and so Hannah thought that they don’t like each other and their husbands fall in love and get married. So that was her idea. morgan: How did it get to Netflix? How do you get into that space? kauffman: We started working with Jane and Lily, pitching it to them and getting their input. Once we had a formal idea, we pitched it everywhere. We always knew we did not want to be on network TV. We either wanted to be on paid cable or Netfl ix, and we got very lucky to get more than one offer. But we also felt strongly that Netflix was the place, and here’s why: after you write the first episode, they don’t call it a pilot, they call it a first episode. If they like the script, you go straight to thirteen episodes. You go right into production. So, Netflix wanted it and they were our number-one choice. The idea of going straight to thirteen is fascinating, because that was so exciting! It’s a blessing and a curse because you don’t have a pilot to make mistakes; the learning curve happens while you’re in production. It’s like being on the scariest roller coaster in the world. It was very frightening, ’cause you just don’t know, but we hit our stride after the fourth or fifth episode. We started to get a sense of where the line between comedy and drama is. Part of that was it being their first self-produced comedy. They kept saying, “More drama! More drama! More drama!” And then at one point they went, “You know what? You can make it funnier.” We were like, “Ugh, thank you.” We always meant for it to deal with real things. I mean, you don’t get to talk about dry vaginas in other areas except Grace and Frankie. That’s where you can talk about it. There are so many people going through this, and we kept thinking, “There’s this great audience for it.” The big surprise has been that the audience has a much wider age range than they ever expected . . . than we ever expected.

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My hope is that, like Friends, it has universal stories. Even if we’re talking about dry vaginas, it’s universal stories. It’s about starting your life over. Who doesn’t want to think about starting their life over if they’re in a bad place? I was shocked that people in their twenties were watching it and enjoying it, and I think, especially for women, they’re going, “I will be there one day.” Casting

morgan: So, I want to talk a little bit about your casting process. Did your theater background help you figure out how to cast these shows? How much did you have to do with that? kauffman: It has to start with the casting director. This person is going to bring you people. The hope is that the casting director shares the vision you have, and that’s very often a relationship that has to develop. Tracy Lilienfield did our casting for Dream On, so we had a relationship. What has helped in casting more than anything is that I was an actor for a period of time. I love actors. When I write, I think like an actor. I have to think: Could I, even as a lousy actor, make that transition? Could I go from here to there? Does that make sense? How do I get there? Why am I crossing the room? I think that’s what helps the casting process. You have this gut feeling if it’s real or not. So Jane and Lily were a given. At which point, we’re like, “Oh my God! We have Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin!” That was just crazy. When we started casting the men, that was a much trickier process because Netflix had some strong opinions. We knew it was going to be offer-only because they love having names. I mean, look who we’ve got: Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston. They’re ridiculous. They’re the nicest people, and these four are pros. They come in, they are prepared, they are on time. They know their lines. They have good actor questions, they are observant. Jane Fonda knocked my socks off when we were doing the pilot. We were shooting in a grocery store, and her products—the character’s products—were on a shelf. And before we shot it, she calls me over, and I was like, “Uh oh.” She calls me over, and she points to the shelf of products and says, “They’re too expensive.” She was right. It never occurred to me to look at the prices. The four of them deeply understand their characters. They all work very differently. Martin can be laughing and talking one minute and telling stories and eating rice, and, the next minute, cry. Jane works from

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the inside out. Lily loves her props and her wigs and sort of needs those things that affect her character. Sam just comes in with a performance. They work hard, these four who’ve had these extraordinary careers. They are kind and they work hard and they are gracious, and I think everybody should have the opportunity to work with people like that. morgan: I love how you used the secondary characters in Grace and Frankie to really drive the stories with the two women. It seems like an almost implausible concept, and yet it works really well. When you got that first season out of the way, did that shift how you’re looking at it for the future of the show? kauffman: The concept for the show gave us a very clear first season, and it gave us a pretty good roadmap for the second season. But the concept kind of plays out. So now it has to be about: What does it mean to start your life over at a certain age? What does it mean when you’re in your seventies and your body isn’t what it used to be? And not in terms of beauty—because let’s face it, Jane Fonda looks better than I ever have. But what happens when your body starts to reject the things you want to do? We love that arena, but it doesn’t give you an arc. So it becomes more difficult to find the organic way because Netflix doesn’t like an episodic feel. They want one thing to lead to another to lead to another to lead to another. They call them chapters rather than episodes. So that’s the challenge now: we have to find the fabulous way to tell stories that don’t have to do with their being divorced.

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New Girl: A Conversation with Elizabeth Meriwether Moderated by Beau Willimon 2 0 16

beau willimon: Can you talk about how you started your relationship with Fox? I think you were developing Sluts, a show that was about four young women sort of at the beginning of their adult life, trying to figure things out, but this was before Girls. elizabeth meriwether: I had no experience with Hollywood, and I got this blind script deal off a ten-minute play I’d written. They put me with a producer on the Fox lot I’d never met. If you don’t live in LA, you’re just on conference calls all the time, and they’re sort of horrible. I was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’d be going into a McDonald’s in Times Square, trying to pretend I’m this professional on these conference calls. Anyway, I’d written this long list of ideas for shows and then at the very end, as a joke, it just said, “Sluts.” I get on the conference call, and the producer who I’d never met before was like, “So, we’re gonna go forward with Sluts,” and I was like, “What? No!” I had all these brilliant, thought-out, really intelligent ideas. So that was my introduction to Hollywood. It had an eye-catching title, but it was really just a very bad version of Girls, if Girls had been made, like, five years earlier for network, which would’ve been terrible. It was before Bridesmaids, before everything, and the notes were like, “I don’t understand how she can like sex and be smart.” Those were the conversations I was having. It really is amazing how much has changed in ten years, and it’s really great. But when we were making Sluts, people really didn’t know how to do a show with only women and were really uncomfortable with the idea of a woman as a lead. willimon: Did Sluts lead naturally into New Girl? meriwether: I had this horrible breakup at the time. Like, this re-

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ally bad, on-and-off-for-six-years college thing, and I was sobbing on the streets of New York, and you showed up and took me to a diner and bought me French fries. Beau does an amazing Daff y Duck impression. And actually, I talked about this friendship in the pitch for New Girl, because it was a moment of my life when—obviously, I have a ton of women friends—but it was a moment when I knew if I called a female friend, she would’ve cried with me. Instead, Beau showed up and kind of told me to shut up, and did a Daff y Duck impression, and I was like, “Oh! Like, male friends are different and kind of good in a way.” willimon: When you first started developing New Girl, did you have a pretty clear sense of these four initial characters from the get-go, or was that a bracketing experiment in trying a lot of different things out? meriwether: Modern Family had just come out, and I was coming up with ideas for shows and was like, “Oh, I guess I should do a version of Modern Family.” I kind of fell into that trap that happens in Hollywood, where you just re-create something that already exists because it sold. So I was like, “I should think about generations of a family.” It was terrible, and I went in to the producer and pitched something, and he said to me, “You have to just write from your own life. You have to write something that you are proud of because 99 percent of shows fail. Everything fails in TV. It either fails at the script stage, it fails at the pilot stage, or it fails after one season, so just make something good. Make something you can be proud of and write from your own life. Write about your friends, write about something you know really well.” And I remember that moment. I went home and just started thinking about you, and I started thinking about other friends of mine that were men, and that was when I started working on New Girl. I knew the Nick character, I knew the Jess character, and at one point, it was almost gonna be like Will & Grace with Nick and Jess, but obviously, Nick’s not getting anything. willimon: But from your earliest conception, did you see them getting together down the line? meriwether: I always thought Nick and Jess were going to get together, and they may still. I love romantic comedies. I think they get a really bad rap. They’re very dead right now in Hollywood. It’s almost a dirty word, and I think a lot of romantic comedies moved to television. I always sort of saw New Girl as a love story between two friends, a man and a woman who are friends. willimon: How early in the process did Zooey get cast? She’s such a

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particular actor with such a clear, unique voice. How much did that inform the writing? meriwether: I wrote it about me. I didn’t have an actress in mind, and I heard she might be interested. Then she came on, and I immediately started writing for her. In television, you have to write to the actors you have instead of holding onto characters in your head and trying to shoehorn the actors into those characters because, especially with network comedy, it’s all about the chemistry. It’s all about who these people are, and, I mean, we’ve now done well over a hundred episodes, and to be able to do that— the actors aren’t playing themselves, but there has to be a lot of themselves in the characters. That was advice Jake Kasdan, who directed Freaks & Geeks, gave me when we did the pilot. It’s all about the casting with comedy, and you have to really take time and make sure the people you cast have amazing chemistry together, and we did that. There were so many auditions. We saw so many people, and we read everybody with everybody else, and Zooey, to her credit, came in. She didn’t have to, but she came in and read with a bunch of guys, and we sort of built the cast that way, by seeing who was working well together. What was great about that was the audition process became a time where we were actually able to rehearse the pilot. Coming from theater, I think that’s one of the hardest things: there’s no time for rehearsal with film and television. Maybe more with fi lm, but the pilot audition process became a workshop for me, a chance to hear the pilot out loud. I wrote extra sides for all the characters so I could test what the actors could do, and I rewrote the script based on what I was seeing in the audition process. It’s amazing, ’cause your pilot is picked up, they’re gonna shoot it, and you feel like it’s perfect. Like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I got through that level of a video game!” Then you put it on its feet with actors in an audition setting, and you literally hear it 125 times, and you hate it so much. You hate all the jokes, you hate everything, and I think it’s important to always keep working on it. I don’t understand these people who think they have the perfect script, and they stop. I think you have to work with the actors and keep refining the script. By the time we were shooting our pilot, all the actors had worked together and rehearsed together. It was a big help that we did that. willimon: Can you think of a specific example where you were introduced to a story element that responds specifically to the strengths of an actor?

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meriwether: I’d written Max in a more shallow way. I’d written it like Jersey Shore. Then Max came in and there was this, like, crazy neediness. Like, this emotional neediness that I saw in him, and I thought, “This is amazing. Of course! This is why we love this guy, because he wants to be better. He doesn’t want to be a douchebag; he just can’t help it. That’s Max!” That was an amazing moment for me, and the douchebag jar was something that came out of seeing Max’s audition. Obviously, this is a guy who wants to be better. So he’s putting money in ’cause he’s trying to remind himself not to be a douchebag, and that idea came out of what Max brought to the audition process. That changed the character, and I think it really helped that character. Otherwise I don’t think people would’ve cared about him, and that would’ve been bad. willimon: When the show got picked up, you’re suddenly staring at, potentially, twenty-four episodes—I mean, just for the first season. It’s a ton of story. meriwether: It was terrifying. I’d never been on a television staff. I didn’t know what I was doing—I genuinely didn’t know what I was doing. I wrote a thirty-page script and now I was in charge of two hundred people. It was really one of those situations where I was like, “I can’t believe that’s how it works,” but I had a lot of help. The studio gave me amazing showrunners, but I really was learning on my feet. I have made every mistake you can make as a showrunner, and I’ve learned from them. willimon: Can you give us a sense of how you want the season to end? meriwether: It’s tough with network comedy. With different seasons, I tried to have a plan, and we always end up veering off the plan. As opposed to cable, with network, you’re making it as you’re shooting it, and you’re editing it and you’re writing it at the same time. So you can start to see when things aren’t going the way you want them to go. Then you can course-correct. So you can have a plan, but I think it’s rare with network to be able to totally stay on that plan. willimon: But, for instance, when Jess and Nick kiss for the first time and you begin that whole storyline, did you have a sense of it being around the middle of Season 2, or . . .? meriwether: No. That was Kevin Reilly. He was president of Fox, and he was like, “We need something big.” It was about ratings. So we needed something big to happen, and I think it was always going to happen but we just didn’t know when. We actually table-read it without a kiss at the end. Then we had the meeting with Reilly, and we were like, “Oh, I guess

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they should kiss.” That’s the kind of thing that happens in network. It’s not Netflix; it’s not HBO. You don’t get to perfectly map out everything and make it happen. You’re dealing with ratings; you’re dealing with feedback constantly. They’re sending you angry tweets from people. You really have to take a lot of information and see your way through. To be honest, a lot of the time, I fail at that. I got caught up in different things. So, the kiss ended up being a great thing, but it really just came out of him saying, “We need to get something going here.” willimon: The one time I visited you on set in Pasadena, I show up to video village, and I’m waiting for you to come from wherever you are, and Prince walks by, and I’m like, “Is that Prince?” How did that come about? meriwether: Nothing is really planned out. I get calls where it’s like, “So-and-so wants to do this show,” and you’re thinking, “Oh, is there a place we can fit that person in?” We approached Prince to be the man Cece lost her virginity to in the “Virgins” episode of Season 2, and we ended up with a stand-in playing the back of Mick Jagger ’cause we couldn’t find him. What came back to us from Prince was he didn’t want to do something that dirty on the show, but he loved the show. And I was like, “That can’t be true—that’s something they tell you when they pass.” But then his manager got in touch with us at the beginning of Season 3, and he was like, “He’s serious, he really wants to be on the show. He loves it; it’s one of the only shows he watches.” And I was like, “What?! Okay, sure, yeah, I think we can find something for Prince.” [laughter] Then we found out from the network we were gonna be the show directly after the Super Bowl, and we immediately knew this had to be the episode we were building around Prince. He was incredibly involved in an amazing way. He really cared about the details. He was sending script notes, and he almost dropped out at one point. The first time I spoke to him, he was telling me that he was dropping out, and I was like, “Give me forty-five minutes. I will rewrite the script and send it to you.” And I did, and he stayed in. It’s been a crazy six years, and that whole experience was probably the craziest and the best. willimon: There’s network and there’s everything else. Do the rigors of notes and iterations in network achieve a form of perfection? meriwether: Well, it’s more perfect than House of Cards. [laughter] My mother-in-law, by the way, loves House of Cards and hates New Girl; she’s always telling me that. But I don’t think it’s about perfection. What’s amazing in the six years we’ve been doing this show is television has com-

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pletely changed. The fact Last Man on Earth is on Fox right now—that show would’ve never been on Fox five years ago. They’re doing everything right on network because they don’t really know what works anymore. I think it adds this level of insane excitement, and it can result in things that are better than you could ever plan. Do I wish I had time to write it, shoot it, and edit it the way they do in cable? Absolutely. Just for my own sanity and the good of the show. But I think there’s this fun, insane, up all night, just throwing stuff at the wall thing with network. I think the kiss in “Cooler” ended up being amazing, and ended up better than if we had planned out every little detail. But it’s a mixed bag. I’m sure there are network showrunners better than me who are able to plan stuff out and not listen to Twitter. But for me, it’s been this amazing experience of letting go and moving forward and not holding onto things and not being a perfectionist, because that’s what I was at the beginning of the show. I really had to learn to keep moving, to keep putting stuff on the air, to keep making episodes. That was exciting and great; there is a fun to that. I think a lot of showrunners and creators and fancier writers are fleeing similar work for that reason. I think that’s what’s awesome about it, too. There’s so much against you with network. There are so many obstacles. There are so many levels of notes—you can’t say anything, you can’t swear. We couldn’t say “vibrator.” We had to say “sexual pleasure machine.” It’s really crazy, but with all those limitations and those obstacles, you can land in a place that’s better than you thought. There is a scene where Schmidt was going to June Diane Raphael, Sadie’s character, and asking how to pleasure a woman. Since she’s an OB/ GYN, we’d written a scene with dirty words in it, and we got notes back that we couldn’t do any of it. So we did this last-minute rewrite that was just nonsense words. It was like, “So, you grab the churro.” It ended up being about churros because we were eating churros in the writers room. You just end up with this completely other thing that can sometimes be better than you’d ever thought it could be. The flipside of that is you can put a lot of shit on television sometimes. Hart Hanson, who created Bones, said about network, “There’s always one episode every season that’s just genuinely bad.” He calls it “the melon.” I guess there’s this thing where you cut a melon in half at a picnic and it attracts the ants. So you put it next to the picnic and keep eating so you don’t have ants. That was an important lesson for me in network: to not try and fi x those broken episodes, to be like, “Okay, that episode is broken

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and not working.” Instead of spending all my time trying to fi x it, let it be the melon. Let it be the bad one and keep moving forward. Lessons Learned

meriwether: One of the biggest ones was to let people help. When you’re coming from theater or fi lm and you go into television, especially network, it’s a really collaborative process. It’s been going on for years; nobody’s reinventing network television. It still works the way it works, and if you go in and think, “Oh, I’m gonna do it completely differently,” it’s just a bad way to go into it. There’s a reason for the writers room. You have to embrace it. You have to embrace that you have other writers who can help you. For the first two seasons, I was taking scripts, telling the writers they did a good job, then writing it completely over from page one. Usually, the night before the table-read, I’d stay up all night, sleep in the office, and then at the table-read, the writer of the episode would be like, “I didn’t write a word of this.” I wasn’t communicating what I wanted from the show and what I needed. That’s been my biggest journey: learning how to tell people and tell writers what I need. The more I learned how to communicate, the better the drafts came in, and the less rewriting I had to do. It took me so long to figure that out. The other thing is, you can get stuck in such a bubble. You’re working so hard, you forget to have a life. You forget to get out into the world. I think that was Season 3 for me. I’d been doing it for so long. I’d been literally sleeping at the office, living there, and I was living and breathing the show too much. I just had no perspective. I’ve always been an overachiever, a perfectionist-type person. That was a huge journey for me, learning that I needed to have a life. I needed to have balance in my life. The same for all my writers and all of my actors and everyone who worked on the show. Everyone needed balance, too. That was actually a huge moment for me, and when, I think, the stories got better. Because people had time to leave work, go home, and have something funny happen to them. Then they came in the writers room the next day and pitched it, and the stories became less navel-gaze-y, less inside baseball. What I was really interested in with this show was writing men: showing these male characters who are just as insecure and weird and emotional as any woman.

Elizabeth Meriwether

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willimon: When writing a pilot and establishing secondary characters, are there any rules of thumb on how to fill in the rest of the world? meriwether: That’s what’s really cool about sitcoms: the math of it. You have your lead character, and you know that lead character’s weaknesses and strengths. Then you really have to think how each relationship to the lead character needs to be different. Each supporting character has to offer something to that lead character, and then individual characters need different relationships they offer each other. When I was creating Schmidt, I was thinking about the different stock comedy characters and what’s worked through the years. I knew I wanted Nick to be a little bit more tortured, a little bit more feminine, neurotic, and tortured. And I really felt I needed a strong, male presence. You’re doing those sorts of equations in your head, and I think if you’re working on a pilot, a good thing to ask yourself is, does every character have a really separate relationship with the lead character, and separate relationships with each other? If you feel any redundancy, that needs to go away. That needs to change because that’s the fun of sitcoms: there’s a problem, and then everybody has a different way of approaching the problem. They all should have the wrong way of approaching the problem. Nobody’s good and totally right and totally smart. Everybody has to have bad ideas. You have to create a world of characters who have bad ideas for how to handle problems. I think it’s really fascinating. That was a thing with Winston that was really difficult because I didn’t quite know what he brought to the other characters until the third season. I didn’t really know what he brought to Jess. There aren’t a ton of Winston-Jess episodes in the first couple of seasons. I just didn’t know what that dynamic was, and now we do it all the time, but that took a long time to figure out. That’s the fun of sitcoms: there’s a problem, and then everybody has a different way of approaching the problem. They all should have the wrong way of approaching the problem.

willimon: Did the relentlessness of the joke-telling in New Girl come from somewhere personal in your life? [laughter] meriwether: I love jokes, and that’s another thing about network I love. I love cable comedies, but a lot of time they don’t tell jokes. I almost think there’s a sense of, like, “We’re a little too cool for jokes,” or something. All the comedy is weird and slow and has to come from one char-

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acter looking at the other character, and then they say something softly. [laughter] Network is about jokes, and I love writing jokes, and New Girl, for better or worse, has so many jokes in it. The tricky thing with jokes is to not lose the character, to not sell the character out for the sake of the joke. There’ve been times on our show where we’ve done that because in the writers room, you’ll hear a constant stream of jokes being pitched. Some of them are very funny, and you’re tempted to put that joke in the script. But if it sells out the character—if the character wouldn’t say that or wouldn’t have that point of view—you can’t put it in. That’s the job of the show runner a lot of times: protecting the characters and not getting tempted by the jewels offered by the writers room. I’m not an amazing joke-writer, but I love jokes, and it was really important to me that the show was genuinely funny and not just sad people staring at each other. Writing Comedy

meriwether: The worst episodes were the ones that had too much story, like, there’s too much going on. Whereas, the best stuff for a comedy is when the story’s pretty simple. You’re just allowing the characters to go off on a weird tangent. That’s where the comedy is—in the middle of the most high-stakes moment—somebody’s like, “But wait a second, I hate your backpack.” With comedy, it’s about what’s happening in front of the camera. I mean, you obviously need characters, you need to know what the story is and have set pieces and obstacles rising, but this has happened to me so many times—where you take it to the table-read and everyone’s laughing. You’re sitting there, being like, “I’m so good. I’m such a good writer. I’m so funny.” And then you put it in front of the camera, and it’s not funny at all. Comedy is either funny or it’s not. So you have to be ready to throw a different joke in there. But laboring too much over the script for a comedy is not always the best way of getting the results you want. People reading it get tired of the jokes, even though the jokes were genuinely funny in the first draft. Then suddenly they’re like, “I don’t know if this is funny anymore,” and I’m like, “No, you’ve just read this joke twenty times.” For me, comedy is very high stakes about something that doesn’t matter. It’s finding a character who cares a lot about things that don’t matter to a lot of other people.

Elizabeth Meriwether

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Up Close with Paula Pell 2 0 16

After college I toured some shows, and this group of improv people in Orlando asked me to be in their night of sketch comedy. They were like, “Just write a character and come out and do it,” and they did a sketch comedy pilot called Chucklehead and I ended up being in it. One day I was sitting in the green room and I got a call, and my agent at the time said, “Are you sitting down?” And I said, “Yes,” and she said, “Saturday Night Live saw the Chucklehead tape and Lorne Michaels wants to meet you.” I had grown up obsessed with SNL—I watched the very first episode—and I had a big Panasonic tape recorder I used to audio record it, ’cause I’m old and we did not have machines that you could watch it again. Anyway, I was like, “Well, is it an audition?” and they were like, “No, they just wanna talk to you.” So I went in, and he was three hours late. It was ’95 and they had fired everyone that year, and he said, “You know the show is a phoenix and it has risen many times, and this is another one of those times we hope it rises.” When you sit down with Lorne, he starts into conversations sometimes where you’re like, “Did we have half the meeting already? Did I black out and they brought me back to life, and now I have amnesia and we’re starting the second half of the meeting?” He said, “We’re looking for one more writer, a female writer.” My whole body like cartoon cracked and crumpled because I thought, “I’m not a writer.” I didn’t know how the place worked. All I remember was there were a lot of Harvard guys, and all I could picture was that I’m gonna be sitting at a table in my dream place with ten dudes from Harvard who are super crazy smart and they’re all looking like, “Who hired Kathy Bates?” [laughter] I was so terrified. It all seemed so bizarre and weird and quick. I droned on and on, just babbling, then finally said,

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“I’m not really a writer,” and they were like, “Well, you wrote all the stuff we saw, right?” I said, “Yeah,” and they said, “Well, you’ll figure out the rest.” That was a big realization for me. I’ve met many people who do not consider themselves writers until you point out they write stuff, be it in a journal or a blog or whatever. SNL

The first year or two, I was just trying my hardest to give as much as I could and all that, but it took a couple years. I always kind of hid behind the actors, like, I was responsible for a lot of things that were starting to become very popular characters, but no one really knew me. I mean, people at the show knew me, and the cast knew me, but the outside world didn’t know me. Twitter ended up being an amazing tool for me to attach my name to funny. If someone was a comedy nerd, they knew my stuff from behind the scenes, but most people did not know who I was. When I went into the outside world, outside SNL, and tried to get hired for stuff, they didn’t know me and didn’t know my voice, so I was having trouble finding rewrite jobs. I had specialized at SNL in rewriting people’s sketches; I’d help them with jokes, help them with the endings. I was like a doctor in a lot of ways. I tried to do it in movies, and they would not hire me because I didn’t have a movie script yet. Then, because of Twitter, I started meeting all these comedy icons I grew up admiring because they would follow me. So it was a weird comedy tool to get my name out there. At SNL you really have to be behind the scenes as a writer. You can’t come out at the end of the sketch and go, “That was mine!” Nobody gives a shit. I mean, the show does and Lorne does, and they’re appreciative, but you’re not gonna get any sort of recognition. I never really wanted the recognition, ego-wise. I wanted it work-wise. I wanted to be able to go into other rooms and have people know what I was responsible for. I’ve started to perform again, which was very weird at SNL because if you’re a writer, you have to really serve the cast. You have to write things for your sketches and the cast. It’s not like you’re there trying to edge your way in. I came from a family where it was like, “Don’t be pushy.” It took me fifty-something years to speak my mind. So I really put my acting side away for years. Then as I got to know all those people who left and did shows, like Tina [Fey] and Amy [Poehler], they would say, “We want you to play this part.” They knew I performed because I’d do a bunch of shtick

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in the writers room, but I didn’t want to be the one who tried to push it; I wanted someone to ask me to do it. So I started to do things on 30 Rock and Parks and Rec, and then a couple years ago, it just clicked where I was like, “Yeah, why not. Nobody cares, no one’s keeping track of it now. I’m not competing against my friends. I’m not a different type than them.” So I started doing smaller roles. Gay-Themed Jokes

James Anderson and I were the only gay people on the writing staff for a long time. In the early days, we would write things that were gay themed, and at SNL he had an idea for this medicine called Homocil. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that commercial. It’s basically Will [Ferrell] looking out a rainy window thinking, “Do you have anxiety? Do you feel like something’s . . .” He sees his little son doing a baton routine. It’s all about parents who think their kid’s gonna be gay and it’s a medicine for them. It’s like, “Take a pill, calm down, it’s not your fault.” So it’s the most pro-gay thing ever. Everyone at the show was so worried we were gonna get this big gay backlash. It’s when I came out at SNL, ’cause I was in a meeting and I’m like, “Well, I’m gay. I can speak for every gay person, and they’re gonna love it!” [laughter] Everyone was like, “Jesus, really?!” No one knew I was gay. So on a bigger picture—not just about being gay—anything that’s diverse comedy did come from that straight white man sausage fest. It came from stand-up. It came from that world. Women were kind of the token women, but when you really look back—like with Elaine May and Joan Rivers—those were the ladies that had to maintain their kickass self. Because in my era, there were amazing women that came in and blew it away! Like Molly Shannon and all these people. I learned at SNL that funny rises to the top. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you are the funniest person there, and you’re a writer, and you’re female, it doesn’t matter. If you’re a gay guy, it doesn’t matter. That’s not always true in movies. I feel like movies are still pretty much a sausage fest that we’re trying to infi ltrate with our agenda, our female and gay agenda! [laughter]

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Up Close with Alan Yang 2 0 17

I was born in the inland empire of San Bernardino, California. It’s about an hour and a half from LA, and it’s very different culturally and spiritually from LA. It’s like a blue-collar Orange County. I went to high school in Riverside, which is right by San Bernardino, and to give you an idea of what Riverside’s like, it’s where Vince Gilligan wanted to set Breaking Bad because there are a lot of strip malls and meth labs. It was an interesting place to grow up, and it definitely affected me. My parents are from Taiwan. They’re both immigrants, and when I was younger, I didn’t want anything to do with writing from that point of view. I was like, “I want to prove I can write anything. I don’t want to be the guy who writes Asian things.” Fortunately, at that stage of my career anyway, I was working on other people’s shows. I worked briefly on South Park and then I was on Parks and Recreation for a long time, and those were shows created by other people who gave me the opportunity to learn and become confident enough in my own ability to get more in touch with what is specific and unique about me. Even though you might deny it when you’re younger, people have different approaches to how they mature and how they come to terms with who they are, and I’m still doing it now. Just to give an example, like, my high school was very diverse. It was majority-minority, by which I mean white people were probably fewer than half the population. It was probably 40 percent Latino and 15 or 20 percent black, and when you would walk around at lunch, it was de facto segregated, where you could walk around and be like, “The Latino kids sit here

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and the black kids sit over there; the white kids sit over here.” I remember a girl had a crush on me, and she passed me a note that said, “Why don’t you ever have lunch at the Asian tree?” There was a tree with, like, the four Asian kids in the whole school. They all ate at the same tree, sadly eating their packed lunches. There weren’t that many Asian kids, so I learned to get along with everyone, and that was a big part of forming who I became later and teaching me to get along with all different kinds of people. Obviously, in Master of None we explore that a little bit. There’s an episode that’s basically about Aziz’s parents and my parents. A lot of that is factual. Like, we’re not actually very good writers; that’s just stuff stolen from real life. We wrote down what our parents told us and then shot it. When I was a kid, I would watch whatever was on TV, and sometimes that would mean I’d be watching a sitcom called Empty Nest, which is about a retired white doctor in Florida. Why am I, an eight-year-old Asian, watching this sixty-five-year-old white guy? That’s all there is! That’s all I’ve got! There isn’t a show about a kid like me, and now there is, right? So that stuff changes. We have this landscape of four hundred, five hundred shows now, and to me it’s a little bit of making up for lost time. It’s not about the number of shows, but we’re working as a body of existing culture that we’re all aware of, and that we’ve lived with, and that’s who we know of as heroes and protagonists and villains and all of that stuff, and it’s all part of us already. I’m writing about my life; it’s not like, “I’m gonna write an Asian show!” That’s not what the show is. It’s not what the show is at all. Harvard Lampoon

I went to Harvard, and the Lampoon is this comedy magazine. The Lampoon is a truly weird place, and the magazine’s kind of garbage. Like, no one works hard on it, but you go there and it’s really kind of a college version of a writers room because you go in there and you’re incredibly intimidated. There are fifteen people who have more experience than you. They’re really funny, they’re really mean, and there’s pressure on you whenever you’re talking: Is this guy going to be funny? Even when you’re watching TV, Is this guy going to be funny? You’re scared to talk, and that’s how some people feel when you’re first on the job. You go to the writers room, and you don’t know what it’s going to be like. You know, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are there doing the Cartman voice and pitching, and then you

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have to pitch. That’s scary, man. It’s really scary. The Lampoon was a good training ground because you go in there and you have to sort of break the ice, and people hate you at first, and then maybe you say a few things that are funny, maybe you say a few things that aren’t, and you learn, and you just want to hang out with these really smart, funny people. Conan O’Brien worked there, Greg Daniels, who created The Office and King of the Hill and Parks and Rec, worked there, and going back, Robert Benchley and John Updike. So there’s a long history of talented writers who worked there. Parks and Recreation

It actually started with this baseball blog that I wrote a long time ago, Fire Joe Morgan, which was a baseball commentary blog, by which I mean it’s really crazy. I was living in New York and was on an email list for people who watched baseball together sometimes, and it sort of became a place where whenever you were watching TV and heard someone say something stupid or read something on the internet that was stupid about baseball, you would copy and paste it into an email and send it to the list and be like, “Can you believe this guy said this?” And then write some jokes making fun of them. Eventually, the volume of these emails became so overwhelming that people started writing to the lists, saying, “Hey, guys, if you’re gonna write this many emails making fun of baseball commentary, please don’t do it on an email list. Like, this is for meeting up and stuff. Go start a blogger account.” So one of us started a blogger account, and two of the people who were crazy enough to keep writing on this account were me and this guy Mike Schur. Mike and I wrote on the blog literally every day for, like, three years. Long story short, two years later, Mike gets what is at the time listed as The Office spin-off, which was very interesting, and I was like, “Oh, I should send my pilot over to Mike.” Mike read it, and he was like, “This is good. You know, Greg is the co-creator; he has to read it also.” So I waited a few months for Greg to read it, and then Mike, Greg, and I met, and Greg was like, “Well, fortunately, I’ve read two million of your words of comedy writing over the past three years, and I know you’re funny,” so that probably helped a little bit. That’s how I started on Season 1. There were very few writers in Season 1. We only did six episodes, and there were, like, five of us. We were still figuring the show out, and, you know, it was a spin-off for

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a long time before it became Parks and Rec. Anyway, that’s how I started on that show, and it was such a fun run there. Generating Stories

The way a writers room like that works, you break almost all of the stories as a group. You come in before the season and we do what we call blueskying, which is like, “Okay, man, we have a whole season of television to write. What are our big ideas that might be possible?” You talk about arcs, you talk about what might happen for each character. For example, the end of last season the government was shut down. How are they gonna make up that deficit? So you might pitch, “Oh, they throw a big harvest festival, and it’s a big gamble, and they’re gonna put a lot of money into it, but they think that if they do it right, they’ll make money back and make up the deficit.” Okay, that seems to lend itself to other ideas. So one of the episodes that fits into that arc is one where they have to publicize it; they go on the media, they go on a radio show. You do one where you’re getting the vendors, so that starts flowing, and you start writing down notecards, and from that point, you have tons and tons of corkboards covered with ideas, and then you start paring down. On Parks and Rec, Mike was the showrunner, so he goes through and picks ideas he likes, and starts splitting the room up and dividing it into who he thinks might do a good job writing a specific episode. And sometimes you’ll write someone else’s idea, and then I’ll write your idea. It’s all very symbiotic. Even when a script has your name on it, it’s got jokes from everybody. Even when a script doesn’t have your name on it, your jokes are in there; you all have ideas in it. It’s all very cooperative in that sense, especially on a show like that. The Characters

Mike and Greg had written a pilot, and a lot of the characters were in there: Leslie, Ron, Tom, and April’s in it a tiny bit, and Rashida’s character. But, as all good writers do, they wanted to test those characters, and test the strength of the story and the whole setup of the show, and that show evolved and changed so much. Even in those early days, every character had their own board, and we were like, “Okay, let’s talk about what Leslie might do in this situation, what Ron might do in this situation, what Tom might do.” That’s like the iceberg. When you do that work, what you see

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appears above the surface of the water, but all of that work is lifting it up above the surface and 90 percent of the iceberg is below the surface. You’ve done a lot of that legwork. You’ve done a lot of this background stuff, and it really comes into play when you’re writing the characters. And I would say in all cases on that show, the actor starts really informing the character, as well. I mean, you wouldn’t believe how much stuff we stole from Nick Offerman’s life, from Amy’s life, from Aziz’s life. Chris Pratt’s character was designed to be a guest star who was supposed to be written off the show in episode 6 of Season 1. Thank God we kept that guy around, because he’s so likable. So we changed his character completely. It was like, “Well, this guy’s a human golden retriever. We can’t make him an asshole on the show; it makes no sense. He’s the most likable human being anyone’s ever met, so let’s keep him on the show and just tailor the character toward him.” You have to be nimble, and that’s also the beauty of television: it’s a character-driven medium. I know that’s a cliché and you’ve heard it before, but it’s really true because otherwise, why are people tuning in? They’re tuning in to hang out with these people, especially on a show like Parks and Rec, which, you know, it’s not Breaking Bad, where it’s a cliff hanger: What’s gonna happen? Who’s gonna die? You would be a fool, I think, to not take the essential elements from these human beings who are playing the characters and imbue the character with their characteristics in some cases. I can’t stress enough how phenomenal a work environment that show was, and it was an open secret in the industry that that was the best job. Honestly, my number-one problem when I would direct episodes of that show was like, “Guys, like, stop talking to each other.” The whole cast was friends, so if they were in a group scene, they would just want to talk to each other. “We’ve got to shoot the show! You guys are too happy.” They’d be hanging out with each other, and believe me, that’s not the case with every show. And you can feel the spirit of that coming out in the tone of the show itself. It’s a very sunny, optimistic show, and everyone is having a really good time making it. It was a really lucky experience. Master of None

Master of None is a little different in that Aziz and I write most of the stuff on that show. We have a great staff, obviously, but it’s fewer episodes, and

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hence, there’s less need for generating ideas for a twenty-four-episode season. We sold that show to Netflix much earlier than people realized. We sold it while we were working on Parks and Rec. Every year, NBC would say, “Yeah, we don’t know if [Parks and Recreation is] gonna come back,” so me and Aziz sold the show, and then Parks and Rec got picked up for Season 7, and he and I went back to work on that show. In the meantime, we had another year to think about the show, and the show we pitched to Netflix was a little half-assed. It was like, “He’s Aziz, and he’s single, and he has friends. It’s in New York,” and they were like, “We want it!” So we took a month off Parks and Rec, and we were like, “Wow, we have this massive opportunity, and how lucky is it that we get to make our own show, and specifically at a network that will probably give us a fair amount of creative freedom? We can’t squander this.” What were we going to do that’s ambitious and original and just something we haven’t seen before? We were in a hotel room in New York running into a brick wall, and I was like, “You know, man, whatever happens, my dad grew up in, literally, a hut in Taiwan with his two brothers and a single mom, and he had so little that he had a pet chicken, and he had to kill his pet chicken and eat it for dinner. Like, that’s where he was in life, and now his son gets to fart around New York and come up with ideas for a TV show he gets to make. So whatever happens, this is all gravy, right? This is all crazy, and an unbelievable set of circumstances had to convene to make this happen.” And Aziz is like, “Is that story true?” I was like, “Yeah, it’s totally true.” He’s like, “That’s so insane. That’s way more interesting than any dumb idea we’ve talked about all day. That should be the show.” And that was kind of a light bulb moment for us, where it was like, the show can be anything. That episode is the second episode, and it has nobody from the first episode in it except Dev, the main character. So once we had that, it was literally all this stuff from my real life where, you know, I’m a dick to my dad, I can’t communicate with him, he emails me articles from The Economist. All that stuff is in there. That is 100 percent true. It actually was an instance of life imitating art, where we called our dads and just learned more about their lives, because I didn’t know anything about him. I actually went back to Taiwan in December with my dad for the first time since I was seven, and he showed me his hometown. That’s the stuff that’s really meaningful to me, and that’s the stuff we want to put in, because we’re actually passionate about it in real life and it’s affecting our real lives.

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We really wanted to fi lter it through what our lives were like. We wanted our show to be a little bit more grounded, a little bit more cinematic, and reflect what we were going through. We were thirty-ish guys living in New York. The character in the show’s a lot more adrift than Aziz. Like, Dev is not playing Madison Square Garden in the context of Master of None, but on the level of his inner life, it’s like, okay, you’re a little bit adrift; you can’t make up your mind. That was relevant to us, and that was some of the tone of what we want to get across. Practicality-wise, we wanted to make sure our work environment was similar to Parks and Rec’s in that it’s friendly, there’s no yelling, we don’t stay late, we treat everyone with respect. These seem like really basic tenets, but they’re not true of every show. At the same time, that’s our first show, and I still remember being on set the first or second day and suddenly there was some crisis. I mean, there’s a crisis every day, but something was going on, a decision needed to be made, and Aziz and I are looking around like, “Man, who’s the dad on set to take care of us?” And then we’re like, “Oh shit, we’re the dads! Oh my God! We’ve got to make this decision! This is insane!” So it’s a learning process, and we try to hide our utter confusion. But it was really fun to get to create your own show and be at the helm and make those decisions. Whether they be correct or whether they be wrong, we were really happy. Writing Process

One of the pieces of advice I would give to anyone who’s trying to write is if you can just write some every day, it’s a miracle, and you’ll probably be unbelievably successful because everyone I know, even the most successful writers, it’s so hard to get motivated. It’s so easy to say, “I don’t have anything. I’m just gonna get a burrito or something.” To me, the number-one thing is that initiative. If I can sit down and not look at other stuff and just write for an hour, two hours, and knock that out before lunch, I feel great. As far as inspiration and stuff like that, your guess is as good as mine. As I said before, a lot of material for me is personal lives. To me, that’s the best stuff. What’s something that really impacted me? What’s something that made me cry, or what was something really funny? Anything that makes you feel strongly, write it down, keep a note of it. Those moments are things that will be specific to you and you’ll be able to put into stories. Maybe not on a literal level, but capturing the way you felt or the way a situation developed, even in a vague sense.

Alan Yang

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In some cases, it is literal. The thing with my dad, that was literal. But in other cases, it may be more metaphorical. It may be a sense of rejection you feel, or it may be a sense of longing or nostalgia, or any of those moments that really hit you. Those, to me, are the powerful moments in movies and stories. You want it to have a feeling of universal truth where people can relate to it, and oftentimes the way you get there is through something that really affected you personally because it’s gonna ring true. Aziz Ansari

We’ve known each other for a long time. When I got hired on Parks and Rec, I was a pretty young dude, and Aziz had just gotten hired, and I remember some of my friends telling me, “You’re gonna really get along with this guy. You’re both twenty-five. He’s really funny, and he grew up in a weird small town, and his parents are immigrants, and you kind of sound the same.” I was like, “I don’t know this guy at all. I’m sure I’ll meet a lot of people on the show,” and I did, but the first time I met him, I was like, “Oh, we kind of like the same stuff and we have the same sensibility, and we like to go out to eat a lot, and we like to travel.” And then we just started hanging out a lot. We just trust each other. We didn’t even work together that much on that show because he was an actor and I was a writer, and he’s not in the writers room and I’m only on set when it’s my episode or I’m directing, so it was kind of a leap of faith for both of us to be like, “Okay, we’re gonna barcode this partnership creating this show.” We just got along and we trusted that we’d also work well together, and we do. We have a lot of commonalities, like we’re both very obsessive and we both have an Asian work ethic, and one of the best parts of the partnership, I think, is that we don’t take things personally. You can criticize something that’s in the script, or that’s even in his performance, and it’s never personal. It’s always like, “Yeah, I’ll do better.” Writing in Partnership

Season 1 especially was very collaborative. We’d have the writing stuff during the week, and we’d get ideas, and we’d steal ideas from our personal lives. For instance, the “Nashville” episode, where Dev and Rachel spontaneously go on a date to Nashville overnight, that was based on something that happened to our writer Sarah Peters, where she was in college and a

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guy was like, “Hey, I know this is crazy, but what if we went to Nashville for our first date?” And it went horribly. It was the opposite of what happens in the episode. It was a disaster, but we thought that was an interesting idea. And it was also based in some research we had done where first dates are more likely to succeed if you’re doing something outside your comfort zone with each other, if you’re doing something exciting, like skydiving or something. So that was that, and by the time we convened the writers, Aziz and I had already written four or five scripts. We had written “Parents” and “Ladies and Gentlemen” and “Plan B” and “Hot Ticket.” They were rough versions and they got a lot better, but we had the germs of those ideas. We’d get more ideas during the week, and then on the weekends, Aziz and I would meet and pound stuff out. We write drafts way too fast on that show. Generally on a show, you get a week or maybe two weeks to write a script, and Aziz and I would write a draft in a day or two. It’s a bad first version, admittedly. It may be twenty pages—it may not even be a story yet—but we just like to get it out there and have something to look at. That was really collaborative, like he would write ten pages, and then I would write ten pages, and then we’d go back and look over each other’s work, fi x stuff, and go line by line. So it was a lot of typing and passing the computer back and forth. Season 2 was a little bit different, where sometimes we weren’t in the same room, and I’d write a draft and then he’d write a draft, and then we’d switch and we’d go over them. It’s just faster that way sometimes, and that way we were also not at each other’s houses seven days a week. Season 2

Season 1 was based so much on stuff that happened to us, and we had thirty years of life experience to write about. But you don’t want to be the band that only puts out an amazing first record. Not that the first season’s amazing—I’m just saying, theoretically, you’re The Strokes and you put out an amazing first record, and then the label wants the next record in a few months, and all you have is, like, two songs you wrote while you were on tour for the first record. So, similarly to that, we were like, “Hey, can we get a little bit of time?” ’Cause if we were gonna base the second season on personal experience, on things that had happened to us, it would have to be about doing press for Season 1, ’cause that’s all we’ve done for, like, a month. Again, and it’s a huge luxury, and we were so grateful to Netflix for

Alan Yang

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letting us do that, but I think it paid off because stuff that happened to us is in Season 2, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think it’s really a thing where our analogy was: look, if you’re making a movie and it comes out and people do respond to it, you generally don’t have a gun to your head being like, “Where’s the second movie?” No, make the next movie when you have a thing to write about. Isn’t that going to make a better product? That makes sense to me. It started to develop pretty organically, but one of our priorities in making the show was that we don’t want any of these episodes to feel disposable, or like it’s fi ller, or like it’s just connective tissue. Look, it’s an episode. This should feel not only like a complete story, but like there’s a bigger idea or emotion or something larger than just this story. I think the titling of the episodes helps, too, where it’s like, “Okay, this is about this.” We want every episode not necessarily to have a theme or to be about an issue, but to have something bigger behind it, some larger reason to exist, that you’d be proud to show this single episode, and someone could watch it even if they weren’t a huge fan of the show. Balancing Work

I don’t want to spread myself too thin. So, if we’re shooting Master of None, I’m probably not writing anything else. That is a fourteen-hour-a-day job, sometimes more. It would be bad for me to be writing other stuff. It would not come out well. If I’m either writing or editing or doing some other phase of the show, I might have time for one thing on the side if I can carve out an hour before work or after work and then work on the weekends. But you should feel really passionate about this thing. The same thing goes for if you have a day job. There are plenty of writers who have day jobs and they wake up at five a.m. and write from five to seven, or whatever. You need to have that level of passion for it. Otherwise you shouldn’t be doing it, because there’s too much rejection, there’s too much uncertainty and instability for you to go into it unless you have that amount of passion for what you’re doing. Lessons Learned

I worked very briefly on South Park, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone are such geniuses, they’re such great writers, and I worked on Parks and Rec

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with Greg Daniels and Mike Schur, and Greg and Mike are both so great, too. Greg has done a thousand episodes of TV, and there’s nobody more different than Trey Parker and Greg Daniels. Greg is a nerd, a social experimenter, and he’s a professor, and Trey is, like, crazy. But in terms of writing and story breaking, they have so much in common. One thing they always talked about was the primacy of story, scene, and character. Honestly, forget about jokes. Matt and Trey used to say a thing in the writers room: “No one’s laughing if they don’t care about the characters.” Number one: Is this a scene, a situation that I care about? Are these people that I care about? Does this seem like a real situation? And so those two men, who could not be more different, would always hammer, “Forget the jokes!” Sometimes, they’d even dismissively call them gags. “We’ll do the gags later. We can write that in the script phase.” But when we’re talking about writing, we’re talking about: Who are these people, how are they behaving, how are they motivated, and what is the situation that is compelling the audience to keep watching? Greg would always have these four principles in any story, and almost every story has them. Not everyone does, but if something’s wrong with your story, it’s probably missing one of these four things: motivation, stakes, turns, or escalation. Really quickly, motivation is: What does a character want, what is motivating the character? Stakes is: What does the character stand to lose if they fail? Why is this story important? Why should I care? Turns, obviously, are surprises in the story. And then escalation is: How does it get worse for the character? How does that situation develop into something that’s even worse? It’s very basic stuff, stuff you might learn day one of a screenwriting class, but if the script you worked on for a year isn’t working, go back to these fundamentals and it might be one of these things.

Alan Yang

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Oz: Up Close with Tom Fontana 20 03

I’m a big believer in institutions. In terms of doing a drama series, I think there’s something wonderful about these buildings that existed before we came into them and that will exist after we’ve stopped going into them. Whether it’s Saint Eligius Hospital or the Baltimore Homicide Unit or the Oswald Prison, these buildings echo their past and will continue to echo after the series is history. Institutions are America. You can find American values and questions in those places. A cross-section of people comes through these places at some point or another. I’d been trying to peddle a prison-type show, not Oz, at broadcast networks for years. While I was trying to figure out what to do with my idea, HBO was looking to do their first drama series, and they had had great success with Sheila Nevins’s prison documentaries. So there was this odd confluence of events where I walked in at the moment they were looking for something no one else would do. The wonderful thing about HBO is they don’t have any preconceived ideas. They trust the writer. They didn’t really know what they wanted and, at one point, they suggested maybe it’s set in the future, and I played with that and it didn’t really work. Other than that, the only thing they ever said to me was, “Make sure it’s something you could never watch on NBC.” They never censored me in the six years we did the show. They would occasionally say, “Where are you going with this?” I’d say, “Oh, read the next script, then you’ll see.” They really got what we were trying to do from the very beginning.

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Writing Oz

What I did with Oz was sit down at the beginning of the year and write, say, all the scenes for Beecher’s character for all eight episodes. Then I would take those pages and put them aside. Then I’d write O’Reily’s stuff for those eight episodes and I’d put those aside. I would go through each of the main characters and write their individual story. Then, when I was done, I’d take the scenes and go, “All right, I have to create a first episode now.” That’s when I would start to slide things in: for the Said story, we’re gonna go this far, and in the O’Reily story, this far, and the Beecher story, etc. I’d put them together, and that’s how I’d do episode 1, episode 2, episode 3. Invariably, somebody would’ve died in episode 3 that I had written a scene for in episode 7. So that was always tricky to maneuver, but, for the most part, the process was an enormously satisfying way to write. You could keep your eye on that character’s development, and you could talk to the actors about where their character was headed, because you had a clear sense of what you were doing for the whole season.

Knowing When to End

I knew what stories to tell in the sixth season, but I wasn’t sure if I had a seventh season in me. It was the kind of decision I needed to make before we started the season because you tell stories in a certain way if you’re gonna do two more years, and another way if you’re gonna end the show. I had long conversations with HBO, and the decision was tough. Mostly because we had a great crew and a great cast. But I got to a point where I thought I had put a lot of the main characters through too much. Take Beecher’s character, for example. There isn’t anything more I could do, in terms of him rising or falling. That character was headed toward a specific kind of redemption, and that’s where he needed to be. After that, the viewers would’ve said, “Well, there he goes again.” I could either get rid of everybody and start with a whole new cast and tell a whole bunch of new stories, or I could end the series. I thought, “I don’t really want to go to work every day and not be there with the original group of people who inspire me and make me laugh.” As a writer, one of the things you worry about is the show becoming a parody of itself. You take a show like Law & Order, which is a classic fran-

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chise. They’ve made them for a million years, and they will continue to make them for a million years. The rhythm of Dick [Wolf]’s show is very specific. But a show like Oz, it’s all about this explosion and surprise. You can’t keep that going for a million episodes without becoming certifiable. We ended Oz on a high note, and I’m proud of that.

Tom Fontana

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The X-Files : A Conversation with Chris Carter Moderated by Damon Lindelof 2 0 12

damon lindelof: What was the genesis of The X-Files? chris carter: The genesis was a conversation between Peter Roth and me at the Fox commissary where we both expressed a love of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Peter Roth is probably one of the half dozen or so people who is responsible for The X-Files’ success because he was such a dogged cheerleader for that show. lindelof: Peter has said that when you guys were talking about Kolchak, he got it in his head that vampires were gonna be the main heavies or an integral part of the design. He was very excited about this because at the time Anne Rice novels were very popular, and you put your foot down and essentially said, “This is going to focus on extraterrestrials and otherworldly visitors. That’s the world I wanna play in.” Was that happening at the pilot stage? carter: I was interested in aliens and had met a guy who was a psychologist. He gave me something called the “roper poll,” a scientific survey that showed that 9 percent of America believes in aliens and extraterrestrials. Then something like 4 percent believe they’d actually been abducted, so I thought, “That is so great, a built-in audience” [laughter], and lo and behold, people were interested in aliens. I was interested in them because it was a great entry into the supernatural and the unknown. I wanted to tell a lot of stories, different stories, and I didn’t want to tell just alien stories. I knew that would be the core and ultimately the mythology that we pursued. lindelof: Are you a Mulder or a Scully? Sometimes it felt like the ongoing debate was between Mulder and Scully, the believer and the skeptic.

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carter: I think I’m both. I think, like most people, I want to believe. I have a sense of something greater out there. I always said The X-Files was, in the end, a search for god— small “g” in this case—but it really was the search for answers. I still believe science is actually going to be our way into most of the philosophical questions of our time, so Mulder and Scully are equal parts of me. I heard their voices loud and clear when I developed the show. carter: What’s it like for you to see the legacy of your show? Can you identify the strains of DNA in other shows that have built upon what X-Files did? carter: I take no credit, and that’s not being disingenuous. I built on so much that came before. We really capitalized on something people were doing when I was a kid, which was horror and scare with Night Gallery, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits. Those were shows I loved and lived with as a kid, and X-Files is the direct descendent of those shows. This idea of a mythology is something we could take credit for. I think we deserve some credit because we worked so hard through nine seasons to make it a mythology. lindelof: The X-Files was incredibly scary, and I’m hard pressed to think of anything that is as unsettling as an episode like “Home,” where I just so vividly remember the Peacock family and the mom under the bed. It freaked the shit out of me. How do you integrate horror into your work? carter: We live in a scary world, so I’m scared of the same things everyone’s afraid of. I call them “the general public’s fears.” I’m scared of violent death just like everyone else, and so we capitalized a lot on that. The show really was a series of paranormal murder mysteries, and so it’s not all that different from some things on TV today. lindelof: Obviously, there was overlap between The X-Files and Millennium. What was it like for you to be dealing with launching a new ship while maintaining the one already in the water? carter: I was contractually obligated to do a second show, and The X-Files was more work than any one person could do, but luckily I had really good people working on the show. Millennium was developed during the third season and aired in the fourth season of The X-Files. What I didn’t anticipate was the reaction of David and Gillian: “Oh, you’ve got something else you’re working on . . .” That was actually a shocker to me and it took me by surprise. I felt bad about it because I had promised them that as long as they did the show, I would do the show. That’s a big promise to

Chris Carter

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make, especially in series television, because who knew it would go nine years, and I felt if they signed on, I needed to sign on. So, I did the first season of Millennium and it was really hard doing two television series, and not only that, we were doing The X-Files movie that same year. lindelof: There is a tonal difference between the shows, although they occupy more or less the same world. What was it like creatively to switch gears between those things, and was there bleed? carter: I think as Millennium started and it went into its own dark places, The X-Files, because of people like Darin Morgan, Glen Morgan, Jim Wong, and Vince Gilligan, they were elevating The X-Files into another realm. They were exploring a new range of stories—comedic stories, stories that were not necessarily vampires, werewolves, ghosts, or telekinesis—so the shows actually, in a weird way, fed off each other. The darker we got with Millennium, the lighter X-Files seemed to get. lindelof: I can’t think of any TV show that so boldly started to create its own complex mythology. In managing those mythologies, do you feel like you’ve sort of figured out the right balance between asking questions and giving answers? Not that I’ve ever struggled with that. [laughter] carter: The way we dealt with mythology on the show actually came about by chance. If you look at the first two episodes of The X-Files, which are the pilot and “Deep Throat,” they really are the first two mythology episodes. There was a story, “E.B.E,” in the first season that could be considered a mythology episode, but it scurried the mythology a little bit. The show that ended the first season, which was “Erlenmeyer Flask,” was another rock we built this giant pile on. In the second season, we did two shows named “Colony” and “End Game,” and those were really watershed moments when we realized we could tell two-parters and people would come back. They were actually better as two-parters than as single shows, so we found a way to tell the mythology episodes. They became a feature and hallmark of the show, and I was just fortunate it worked out that way. lindelof: When you’re plotting out a mythology that’s gonna have certain revelations or turns of story over numerous seasons, what was it like not knowing how many seasons it would run? carter: It was hard because the show was popular through the fifth season, where most shows are on the downhill slide in the fifth. I think The Simpsons was the highest-rated show on the network, and they weren’t about to shut us down, so we kept going. We moved from Vancouver to Los Angeles, which was a huge thing to do. People predicted our failure be-

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cause we were moving from a place where the atmosphere was moody to a place where the atmosphere was sunny and bright. But there we found all kinds of new ways to tell X-Files stories, including on The Queen Mary, in the desert, and just new things we were able to come up with. So actually, it was a blessing in disguise. I will say it was hard to give up the all-star team in Vancouver. We had really put together a fantastic crew who knew the show, who were completely invested in it, and all of a sudden we just said, “We’re taking it away.” lindelof: I hate answering this question when I get asked it, but I’m compelled to ask because you did over two hundred episodes: Is there anything you would change or do differently? Or was it necessary to kind of make those mistakes in order to listen to what the show was telling you? carter: You make all these choices when you put together a mythology about what the story is and what the characters are doing and how they feel about it. You make choices and go down avenues, and each choice is either a limiting choice or it amplifies others. What I found through the first four seasons is we made all these choices, and then all of a sudden the mythology started to tell itself. We had made so many choices, you couldn’t duck any of them; they were there to be dealt with. It was almost magic around the fourth season that the mythology took on a life of its own. Even when I went back and read the summaries through nine seasons— which is still amazing to me; we did that many episodes because we just kept our heads down the whole time—I’m just amazed at how interesting the mythology was at the very end. Some people said it was too complicated, but for me it holds up completely. It holds water and it becomes complex. lindelof: On the subject of serialized storytelling, there are pitfalls. Scully can’t remain a skeptic forever; there’s a point where everyone was saying, “Scully is still a skeptic after everything she’s seen?” Then you cross over into now, and she’s a believer. And then the fan community says, “I want things to go back the way they were.” How do you modulate that? carter: You just go with your gut. I mean, you can’t really listen to the fan community because you would drive yourself crazy. There are so many voices out there shouting what to do, and there were some really strong voices. I certainly paid attention in the first season to what people were saying about the show. There was one letter I got that affected the way I did my work, and you can see the result of that in the season finale, “Erlenmeyer Flask.” I think it ended up being one of our best mythology episodes.

Chris Carter

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The letter was from a woman named Terry Berube, and I remember this because I actually named a character after her in “Erlenmeyer Flask.” Her heartfelt advice to me was that the episodes are only as interesting as Mulder and Scully feel invested in them personally. During the first season, I felt what we were doing with the stand-alone episodes is they would play as a “dust your hands off at the end” murder mystery, and we would go on our way. But the episodes—and this actually led to the power and quality of the mythology—the episodes where Mulder and Scully were in this search for the truth, the ones where we were invested in the characters and the idea, they were the best episodes. I really took that to heart. Mulder & Scully I go back and read some of those scripts now and think, “We did that so often; did people fall for it every time?” But actually it was speaking to the heart of the show. I was interested in this search for the truth and these two characters who shared in that search, which, for me, is the ideal relationship to have. If you could have a relationship in life in which you actually shared something outside of you, that’s absolutely the greatest bond you could have. There’s so much more tension and sexual tension between best friends. That’s what Mulder and Scully were. I say the secret to the show was that Mulder loved Scully and Scully loved Mulder; that’s the heartbeat of the show.

lindelof: Speaking of your best episodes, my personal favorite is “Jose Chung’s from Outer Space.” It was brilliant and risky and meta and wholly original. Did you realize just how special it was as it was happening? Were you worried at all that crossing over into a more self-aware space and commenting on the show itself would potentially impact its reality or stakes? carter: It was a risk, but the original risk was taken with an episode called “Humbug” in the second season. That was a Darin Morgan show, and it was very self-aware and made Mulder into something of a fool, which was a risky thing to do. Darin’s episodes always pushed us far out of our comfort zone and really pushed the network and studio out of their comfort zone. When we did “Humbug,” they actually made us market test the show to make sure people would laugh at X-Files, and when people loved it, they aired it and it was fine. But there were probably a lot of peo-

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ple who didn’t get “Jose Chung’s from Outer Space”; in fact, I know one of the biggest fans doesn’t like any Darin Morgan episode. Personally, I think they’re some of the best episodes we ever did, but there was something for everyone. We were expanding our range and lightening the show in a way it needed to be lightened. It just couldn’t have gone on as intense as it was for nine seasons. lindelof: Speaking of other writers, one of the things you did as showrunner is you found these incredibly talented diamonds in the rough, like Vince Gilligan, who’ve gone on to create incredible worlds themselves. What are the traits you’re looking for when you staff ? carter: I got so lucky in the beginning of The X-Files, and it didn’t have to do with reading material; it had to do with just keeping my ears open. Someone had told me what great writers they thought Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa were, and I banked that away. I remembered Paul Brickman, the guy who wrote and directed Risky Business, had read a Vince Gilligan script and told me what a great young writer he was, with a real voice and a particular point of view. I banked the names Morgan and Wong, who were so important to the success in the beginning, as they were writers Peter Roth had worked with at Stephen Cannell. They came not only with their stories to tell, but they actually gave us the way we would work. They brought in what we called “the board,” a bulletin board with 3 × 5 cards. That became the way The X-Files was plotted every single episode. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I love a good conspiracy. My distrust of authority comes from the fact that I was a child of Watergate. That happened right in my formative years. It was really a big deal to me, and All the President’s Men is still one of my favorite movies; it’s one of the best movies ever made. Those things fueled that distrust of authority for me and in the show.

Chris Carter

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A Conversation with David Chase Moderated by Barry Josephson 2 0 12

barry josephson: Did writing come from a frustration with getting a film made or getting into the business? david chase: I went to Stanford in the MA program. I made a student fi lm there, which got into a short fi lm circuit. The fi lm cost twelve hundred dollars, and I got six hundred back from this circuit. But the reason I went to writing is because I knew that fi lm—you can’t use it for anything, except it earned six hundred dollars in some Reno, Nevada, film circuit. But a script, my friends and I reasoned, a script is a real thing. You can write it, and it might be just as amateurish as that film, but you might be able to sell it or get it made. It would be like a piece of real property, in a sense. So, that was the reason. It wasn’t frustration; it was a tactic. josephson: Was working for Stephen Cannell the first mentor relationship you had? chase: No, I had a mentor before him, a guy named Paul Playton. Because I had done one network show, I had to join the Writers Guild. And the Guild went on strike in ’73. I hadn’t worked in two years, and I said, “What kind of union is this?” I guess I thought, “They didn’t get me a job. Why should I go on picket duty?” I don’t know whether I thought there’d be a hiring hall and they’d say, “Any dialogue guys here? All right, Chase, you get in the truck, and you get in the truck . . .” [laughter] That’s what I pictured. But because I was a member of the Guild, I had to stay on picket duty. And I met this guy who was, at that time, twenty-eight years old. He had been the story editor of Mission Impossible, and he was a genius with story. That show was all story and very little character. I remember Steve Cannell told me later that this guy Paul, you’d give him a story, he could

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throw all the cards up in the air and put ’em back in this thing, and the story would work better. So I worked with him for a while. I learned a lot from him. He had a way of doing it so that the story always flowed in an unexpected way. It was very hard to anticipate where his stories were going. In network television, that’s a negative, actually. josephson: What did he think your talent was? Had he read a sample? chase: I think the story surprised him. I’ve always had a knack for writing dialogue. So on that level, he probably responded. That’s where I learned how to rewrite. At that time, we worked a lot with outside writers. We were really up against the schedule; we didn’t have enough time—we had nine episodes—and we’d get scripts in from freelancers, which always had to be rewritten. That’s where I finally learned how to do it. I mean, cut and paste, cut out this piece of a scene and put it together with that, then add some dialogue—real veterinarian stuff. The Rockford Files

josephson: Jumping to Cannell, what were the lessons he gave you? Because he obviously was such a master at the time, and Rockford was such a unique show. chase: He used to say all the time, “What are the ‘heavies’ doing?” At that time, when people were trying to plot out the story, they’d say, “Rockford wakes up as a bullet comes through the window of the trailer. Rockford goes outside, and he sees the car speeding away. Rockford jumps in his car, and he goes after it. Later that day, Rockford is at the bank, and he thinks he sees the same car.” On and on and on. Cannell was the one who taught me to say, “Even though the writer of that screenplay probably knew who the ‘heavies’ were, he wouldn’t go over there and see them in action.” By saying “What are the ‘heavies’ doing?” he would cut to the “heavy,” and that did a couple of things: it relieved the boredom of the initial story and also showed you these other characters. So these two stories would come together like that: Rockford on his investigation and the “heavies” on their plan. Sounds pretty simple, but it wasn’t. I mean, for me that was a revelation. josephson: What do you think was the endearing part of that character? Was it how [James] Garner played it? Was it that Cannell and you understood how to write for him? chase: I think it was a couple of things. But it all started with Garner.

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I mean, the guy’s just tremendously magnetic, and it feels like you might know him. As good-looking as he was, he had a down-home quality. The other thing is that it was based on Stephen’s life. Stephen had a very demanding, critical father who was very successful. I think he wanted to come up with a different kind of father for Rockford. That was the character of Rocky, who was not particularly successful but just a really sweet guy, and really easygoing. I think that was the key to it. I think that relationship was the backbone of the show. josephson: So it really did feel like a family. Like an odd family. chase: Yeah, it did. I mean, there was never any mother around, or any sisters or cousins, or anything like that. Usually, on a lot of TV shows, they bring in the cousins from wherever, but we never did that. And yet it felt like a family. josephson: And why didn’t he do that? Was his instinct to stay with the characters and the criminals so it was more colorful? Or do you think that was enough of a family? chase: I know this is what I thought. I really don’t want to give myself too much credit for that show. It was his show; I just worked for him. But that was bad TV, when they’d bring in the cousin. I remember my wife and I used to watch—when we had no money and everything—we used to watch Medical Center. We watched it as a joke. Every other episode, somebody would come to the hospital and the main character’s boss would say, “Joe, why are you so involved with this case?” And he’d say, “Because these people brought me up after my parents got killed in a car crash.” [laughter] Or, “She was my next-door neighbor after my parents got killed in a car crash.” [laughter] All these people from his former life to motivate him for being invested in his job; I never got that. We always thought that was very funny. Stephen was very—here’s what he did, which no one else was doing: he talked about the money. Rockford made two hundred dollars a day, plus expenses. He didn’t do things for nothing. He didn’t do things because somebody was blind. He didn’t do things for any other reason. No pro bono. No missing babies on the doorstep. They used to try to get us to do that kind of stuff. But he would never—he always did the right thing, obviously, he was a moral person—but we didn’t get him into things because he knew the priest from the church where the crucifi x was missing from or something like that.

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The Sopranos

josephson: I’m going to jump way forward to The Sopranos. What was your first thought? Was it Tony’s character, was it always a series, was it about family? What was the inspiration? chase: The inspiration for that show was that my mother was a difficult personality. She was pretty much like the woman on the show you saw. My wife used to tell me all the time, “You gotta do a show about her. She’s hysterically funny.” She really was. She was famous in our family for being outrageous, and inappropriate, and having boundary issues. Whenever we would go back East to hang out, my cousins and my aunts would corner us in a room and say, “Ooh! Aunt Norma did this! And then she did that!” For example, one time I was at home and we were going to my cousin’s house, and she said, “I have to bring them this milk. I don’t want it to go bad.” So we had to bring this milk and a bunch of other crap. We went down there and we get to the garage, and the milk falls on the floor of my cousin’s house and breaks—and the milk already was bad. She was just trying to get rid of something that was a problem for her. She didn’t care how inconvenient it was for anybody else. This is just one small example. But those kinds of things, my wife used to say, “You gotta write about her; she’s incredible.” josephson: But did you feel tortured? Was it harder for you? chase: No, I knew it was funny, too. I ate for free for a long time, telling stories about my mother. You get with people and you start talking about your mothers, and I could always trump the house. So I knew my wife was right, but I couldn’t figure out how I would do that. Then I was working on a show I created called Almost Grown and I was telling people about her, and somebody on that show said, “You should write a thing about a TV producer and his mother.” I thought to myself, “Who would be interested in that? A TV producer is not a very sympathetic character.” I didn’t know how to generate the stories. I mean, it’d be about a TV producer and what—she doesn’t like his car? So I was trying to break out of the TV business, and I thought, “What would make a good movie?” I thought, “Maybe if the guy wasn’t a TV producer but was a mid-level mobster. He’d be a tough guy; he’d be a killer. He’d be all those things, and yet he’d be the victim of his own mother, where he had no power in his relationship with his mother.” I had that idea and hung onto it. I was going to do it as a movie, and then I changed agents

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at one point. I went down to my new agency and they said, “Well, what do you have? What do you want to do?” I told them that, and they completely disregarded it. They said, “Mob movies are dead. Mob comedies are dead. Come up with something else.” Fortunately, I listened to that. Then, maybe two years later, I signed a deal with Brad Grey’s company for a TV development deal. They came to me and said, “We believe you have it in you to do a revolutionary television show.” I’d never heard that anyone wanted to do revolutionary television. They said to me, “We believe you have it in you to do a historic show.” I didn’t want to do historic—I wanted out of TV. The reason I was taking those development deals is because they paid a salary while I was writing screenplays on the side. But when they said that, I was like, “Wow, that’s quite a compliment.” So it made me want to take it seriously. They said, “How would you like to do a show like The Godfather for television?” And I said, “No, I wouldn’t want to do that.” I pictured those old cars, and those big overcoats, and all that stuff. It had already been done. I said, “No, I’m not interested in that at all.” Then I was driving home, and I remembered this idea I had about a mobster in therapy. josephson: A mobster in therapy. It’s amazing to me that, in that first season, it’s so charged between Tony and his mother. Was that a way for you to express yourself a little bit, in the sense of, like, well, were you respectful of your own mother? Like, when these crazy things were said and done, did you just laugh and so on? chase: A lot of these things were happening to me. I remember one time my mother was making some veal cutlets. She was holding this big ceramic platter in one hand to put the veal cutlets in as they came out. I said something to her, and she started banging on the platter with the fork, going, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t know . . .” A chip fell off the platter, and she kept on going until she had this one little shard in her hand. So I remember watching that—I was probably like eleven—and I thought, “What the fuck?” So I knew there was stuff to be mined there. When I was going through it, it was very distressing. It was preventing me from doing what I wanted to do. It was the same old stuff over and over again, so I didn’t take it as amusing at the time. The Cast

chase: As soon as we got in business with casting, they started saying, “Jim Gandolfini, Jim Gandolfini, Jim Gandolfini.” I said, “Who’s that?”

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Then I remembered him from the movie from the Elmore Leonard book Get Shorty. And I thought, “Oh, that guy, that guy, yeah.” He came in to read but stopped in the middle and left. Then he was supposed to come in three days later, and word came back that his mother was very ill and had died. It turned out she had died long before that. There was this dance for a long time. It’s funny, because he’s not self-protective at all as an actor; he’ll do anything. A lot of people will say, “I won’t do that.” Or, “I won’t take my clothes off in that situation,” or, “No, you’re not going to show me masturbating, are you crazy?” He’ll go for it. He may not like it, but he’ll do it. But for some reason, he gets concerned when the time comes to actually do it. The first day of shooting, his nerves got the best of him. So he finally came to my house, and we put him on tape there. He was great, and that was that. josephson: How did music influence the episodes or moments in the show? chase: It was 90 percent music I was a fan of. Usually, we would make the show and then I’d see what was going on and think, “Well, maybe that song would work really well there.” There were a few times when Tony was singing along to something—which we had to get the rights for—and we had to know ahead of time. But most of what we would call the source music or scores—which is half and half—was selected later during the editing process. I had a whole lifetime of music to draw from. I used a lot of my best stuff, and it was in my head. There’s a great radio station in Los Angeles called KCRW that just has the most amazing playlist. I had listened to that radio station for thirty years. In fact, the theme song for the show, Alabama 3’s “Woke Up This Morning,” I heard on KCRW. Development Process

josephson: When you were writing, did you think beyond a first season? He’s traditionally a very powerful character. But he’s in therapy, and he’s powerless with family and powerless with so many things. Was that a theme that was very important for the first season? chase: It just was what it was. That’s what I wrote. But I have to describe the development process of TV. Most ideas, most pitches, don’t get bought to be turned into a teleplay. Maybe one out of twenty-five pitches. Then, of the ones that do get written as a teleplay, very, very few of them

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get made into pilots. Of the pilots that are made, very, very few of them are bought as series. Then, of the ones that get bought for series, the ones that stay on longer than a year—it’s like a tiny, tiny percentage. I’m not trying to be glib about it; I just never thought the show was ever going to go on. You have to be really realistic: “Well, they’ll make the pilot, then they won’t make the show.” But they fooled me. When they said, “We’re going to do one season,” I thought, “Well, fine, we’ll do one season.” Unlike regular television, we were done with the whole first season before it went on the air. It was in the can and everything. I remember all of us felt this way. Edie Falco said to me, “Well, that was fun, but, you know, I guess that’s the end of that.” ’Cause we all felt we had so much fun making it that somehow or other this would not stick. It was really nontraditional. We did the first season, and they did not come to me right away. Even though it was a big success, they did not say, “We want a second season as soon as possible.” They just didn’t say anything. I went away on vacation for a month or two, and nothing came from them. Then when I came back, I heard people on the street saying, “Where’s Pussy? Where is Pussy?” And I thought, “What? Really?” And they said, “Yeah, your show is huge! And people want to know what happened to that character. Where did he go?” And I thought, “I have no idea.” Then they came to me and said, “We want to do another season.” So I had to come up with another season, figure out where Pussy was, and all that. They did that every season until the last two seasons, when Chris Albrecht said to me, “You ought to think about how many more seasons you want to do this. Do you want to do two more seasons? You ought to think about how you want it to end.” That was his idea to give it an ending. Most drama shows just get cancelled; they’re over. He said, “You should think of a way to end this.”

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Lost: Up Close with Damon Lindelof 2 0 12

The Light Bulb Moments

Those moments are fleeting, but they’re magical when they happen. Professional athletes describe this idea of “the zone,” where suddenly it just feels like—if you’re talking about basketball—every shot they put up is going in. I’ve experienced that. But the first time you experience it, you have the hubris to think you’re never going to miss a shot again, and then that goes away. So the next time it happens, you realize that it’s fleeting, and you cherish it all the more. I think the way you articulate this as a storyteller is this idea of, like, “Wow. I actually knew what I was doing without realizing I knew what I was doing.” Much more often, I’m experiencing the exact opposite of that, which is, “What the fuck am I doing?” You have to go on faith and faith alone, especially when you’re telling a story over a very long time. In the case of Lost, not knowing exactly how long it would go, there was a tremendous amount of, “Is this all going to fit together the way I want it to?” If you’re a writer and you’re writing a short story or a novel, you have a lot more control over your universe. It’s just you and your pencil on the paper or fingers on the keyboard. But when you’re collaborating on something as large as that show, it’s so much bigger than me. It’s all the other writers, the directors, the actors, and, yes, the audience. We all become a part of that journey together. And those moments where we all collectively say, “Oh my God, nailed it!” Those moments were very rare, but sometimes they did happen, and it was magical. It makes you suffer through all of the anxiety to get to the next one.

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The Sideways World

We spent a lot of time talking about that. We started talking about it the minute ABC agreed to end the show. As writers—and this is enormously challenging and frustrating—what we’re figuring out is: What am I working toward? What’s the end of this thing going to be? For the first two and a half seasons and midway through Season 3, we had ideas as to where we wanted to go. But no one told us where the finish line was, so you can’t pace yourself accordingly. We kind of got depressed and despondent thinking that the show was about to collapse under its own weight, in terms of having to keep creating mythology to give this show story. It didn’t feel like we could be wrapping anything up. This entire construct was really personified by the flashback storytelling nature of the show. So if you were talking about Lost to someone who had never seen those first two or three years, you’d say, “Well, every episode is an episode where there are these guys having these adventures on this crazy island, but every episode just takes one character and tells this little short story about them before the crash.” So we’re getting to know these things about them. Sometimes those stories are mundane; sometimes those stories are revelatory. Obviously in the first season, every time we did a character’s first flashback, it was like, “Oh my God, Locke was in a wheelchair? Hurley was a lottery winner?” These people chose not to speak about themselves, but when we had to do the second, third, fourth Hurley story or Locke story, we had to start exploring new territory. We all knew the flashbacks were going to run out. We were going to reach a point where one of the things we could do to slow the storytelling down was to introduce new characters. We introduced these survivors of the tail section in the beginning of the second season. For some, it was highly successful, and others not. But at the very least, it was like, “Oh, I’m just hungry to know about any new character who’s coming into this show.” When we introduced Ben Linus, we knew we had a winner. When we did flashback stories for Ben, we could kill two birds with one stone because we wouldn’t just be learning about this guy but about the history of the island. Because he, unlike the people who were on Oceanic 815, had spent his entire life there from when he was a kid. But ultimately, those were just stalls. We knew we couldn’t keep introducing new characters. The audience wants to spend time with the characters they know. So we had this idea

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that we were going to start doing flash-forwards. We were going to jump forward in time to what we called the middle of our Lost story, after several of the people and the Oceanic Six were going to get off the island. We’d see what their lives were like off the island. We would dramatize it by these flash-forwards. But we can’t do that until they give us an end date. Well, a miracle occurred, they gave us an end date, and we pulled the trigger on that idea. We Trojan-horsed our first flashback/flash-forward in the Season 3 finale. We made it look like yet another, “Oh my god, Jack is drunk. He’s got a beard, he’s miserable. It’s going to be another one of these.” And it turned out to be our first flash-forward, which was an enormously exciting storytelling mechanism. But even then, in the space between Seasons 3 and 4, we knew we were going to be committed to a fourth season of flash-forwards, and we knew we were going to burn through those, too. Because once the Oceanic Six came back to the island, that device was going to have worn out its welcome. Not to mention the audience needs to feel fi xed: “Am I looking forward? Am I looking back? What am I doing?” So we started saying what the final season of this show was going to be: How do we get off the island? What’s our mechanism for that? Because the show, each episode of Lost, is a balance between island storytelling and off-island storytelling. One of the things we were really interested in and passionate about, and crazy enough to take on, was this idea of purgatory. It was very much in the DNA of the show from the beginning to the end of “Tabula Rasa,” which is the first episode after the pilot. Jack and Kate are sitting on the beach, and he says to her, “You know we all died in that plane crash. This is our opportunity to start over.” He’s speaking metaphorically, although the audience sort of caught on. The question we got asked the most over the course of the first season was, “Are you making it up as you go along? Is this purgatory?” Once we started having a conversation with the fan base, we openly said, “No, this is all really happening. This is not going to be An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. This is not purgatory.” However, we wanted to tell the purgatory story. I think we were really excited about the idea that we knew we were eating shit the entire show about not answering questions. When the show ended, there was no way we could successfully answer every question satisfactorily for everyone. So what we said was, “We’re going to take on a question nobody expects us to take on, and we’re going to answer that. And let’s shoot for . . . what happens when you die? Let’s go

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for that one. Let’s present our version of an afterlife.” We didn’t call it The Sideways in the writers room; we referred to it as the Bardo. Which, for those of you who haven’t read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, it’s essentially a concept of when you die, you don’t know you’re dead. It’s sort of like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Your journey is about coming to the revelation that you died. Once you come to that revelation, you are ready to move on. We just thought that was awesome. But we also knew if we unleashed it avertedly in the final season, and basically messaged to the fans that that’s what we were doing, it wouldn’t work. The show functioned in a space of mystery, and we wanted to keep it there, so we had to Trojan horse that idea, too. So the entire construct of Season 5 had to be, when we start doing these sideways episodes—if we don’t want people to think it’s an afterlife—what are we supposed to make them think it is? And the answer was, it’s a time-travel thing. It’s a paradox. It’s a “what if?” story. So at the end of Season 5, we’re going to explore the idea of, can you change the past or the future? Is it possible? We’re going to lead to this culminating event, where they detonate this atom bomb. They create the incident, which is the same incident that ends up bringing them there. We close that loop. But if we start the next season with this idea of the plane never crashed, maybe people will think we’re doing an alternate story line, showing them this is what happened if they were successful in not detonating this bomb. But all along, we were designing it like that. If you watch the Season 6 premiere, where Jack and Locke have their first meeting and Jack sees Locke in a wheelchair, you realize, “Oh my God. On the island, Jack still doesn’t know Locke was in a wheelchair when he got on that plane.” The conversation they have was really starting to lay the pipe for where we were eventually leading this “nothing is irreversible” idea. Influence of the Fan Base

It informed it, but I don’t think it changed it. Most of the time, the fan base is essentially just functioning as, “We like it or we don’t like it.” Then you have a very impassioned part of the fan base that’s saying, “We don’t like it and here’s how you should be doing it.” This leads into this thing I find fascinating. There are two questions we got asked over and over again and I still get asked. Question number one is, “Were you making it up as you went along? How much of the show was planned out?” They want the

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answer to that question to be, “We weren’t making it up as we went along. We totally had a plan. The plan was rock solid. This was our mythology, and that’s what we’re going to do.” That’s what they want the answer to question one to be. Question two was, “How much impact do the fans have on the storytelling? Can they change or affect the storytelling?” They want the answer to that question to be “Yes! Absolutely. You guys change our minds regularly. If you have a good idea, we are going to steal it from you and put it into the show.” If we had a plan and never deviated, we would ignore the fans, because nothing you could say to us would make us deviate from the plan. If we ignored the fans, then we can’t have a plan. So the question becomes, can the show live in some sort of Venn diagram overlap between the two? I think it did. We had ideas we were passionate about, but the fans could affect our level of enthusiasm about those ideas. By the time people saw something that sucked, we already knew it sucked, and we had already made plans to get around it. Because we were ahead of you guys, we knew that Nikki and Paolo sucked. By the time people were saying Nikki and Paolo suck, we were figuring out how we were going to dig ourselves out of that mess. The real place where fans’ voices were heard intensely was, who were the characters they were really responding to, and what were the stories they needed to know more about? Also, what were the questions that popped up that really didn’t matter to us as writers, that the fans became super passionate about? Carlton [Cuse] wrote a piece for Vulture where he talked about Hurley’s weight as one of these things. Hurley’s a big dude, he’s on this island, why isn’t he losing any weight? We’re not going to tell Jorge Garcia that he’s got to starve himself, especially since we needed to do flashbacks. But the question just kept coming at us, and we realized, this isn’t a cute question; this is seriously starting to impair people’s ability to grasp the reality of the show. As crazy as Lost could get, there needed to be these things that grounded it, and so we wrote an entire story line that spoke to Hurley’s hidden DHARMA ranch dressing stash. So we began dealing with that, and I think when we did the Season 3 finale and did the first flash-forward, we were like, this is really cool. We like this. We just didn’t know until that episode aired that the fan base was at an I’m-going-to-stop-coming-to-church place on the show. So we felt like we had to take a bold risk to keep everybody in the house. We weren’t sure whether or not people were going to dig it. Then we sort of got an instanta-

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neous yes and audiences were like, “We’re going to go with you from here.” That was huge because had the opposite happened, it’s very possible we would have cut bait on the flash-forwards or tried to do something else. I follow what the fans are saying very closely, and although it’s probably not the healthiest thing for me to do, I feel like it’s absolutely mandatory. When you’re playing in universes—either of your own construct or somebody else’s—I think of myself as a fan. I never forget what it feels like to engage in somebody else’s work, and the ultimate culmination of that engagement was knowing—or feeling—they care about us. It was important to me while Lost was on to have an ongoing conversation with the fans, and even now that it’s done, it’s important for me to hear the good and the bad. It also gives the fans an opportunity to hear what I was thinking or why I made some of the decisions I made. Influences

Gaming is a big part of the storytelling I do. When my father was really into games—particularly early, text-based computer games—you’d go and explore worlds and would start out, “Go east. Go north. Throw ax.” But it gradually became more involved, and I loved the idea of a world that only expanded. It was dark, but as you trudged through it, it illuminated more. I felt that was a really effective way of storytelling that also made me feel like I was in control of it. But the reality was I wasn’t in control at all. If the programmers didn’t want me to go through that door, I’d die when I touched the doorknob. They could really guide you through that land, so I feel that was a big influence. The other kind of seminal moment in my storytelling was Twin Peaks. My father would videotape it when it was on, and as soon as it was over, we would rewind it and pause on frames. I remember my dad rigging up a rudimentary system of the backwards masking in Twin Peaks, where people would talk backwards. Nowadays when that happens, you just go on the internet, and within five minutes of the episode ending, someone’s already done the work for you. I miss that idea of doing the work yourself, of feeling, “I’m the first person who dug for this particular treasure and found it. I don’t know what the fuck Agent Cooper is talking about, but I know I care.” We would sit and talk endlessly about who we thought was responsible for killing Laura Palmer, and when the show started getting into a more supernatural space, it engaged us on an entirely different level.

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After J. J. and I wrote our Lost outline and they green-lit the show off that outline, we had a meeting with Lloyd Braun, the godfather of Lost who really championed it. He was like, “I love this outline, but just promise me this show isn’t going to be Twin Peaks.” This was my first meeting with a network president. I had been in the TV business for five years but never at that level. I felt this guy trusted us, but I took real issue with what he said and didn’t know if I should put my foot down. But J. J. said something to the effect of, “Hey, look. You’re using Twin Peaks as a cautionary tale almost fifteen years after it went off the air. We aspire to be as impactful as Twin Peaks. Better for the show to be a disaster that crashes and burns in twelve episodes—or in the case of Twin Peaks, just over thirty—that people will remember, versus something that’s not really special or aspiring to be anything else.” When he said that, Lloyd acquiesced, or maybe just chose to fight the battle at a later time. It was this fundamental inspiration for me that I was very passionate about, and I didn’t want to lose that. The End of Lost

We’d been lobbying for an ending of the show almost from its inception. We knew we were going to run out of certain levels of storytelling. More importantly, if you have a mystery-based show and it’s an episode of Law & Order, the mystery is solved by the end of the episode. You feel selfcontained and move on. But with Lost, it was serialized, so we knew that these mysteries needed to have solutions, so we actively started lobbying for an end to the show. Then the show premiered and it had huge ratings, and ABC was like, “This is a nonstarter, we’re never going to end the show.” We told them it was going to start to suck, and they just said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” It was enormously frustrating early in the third season of the show when it started to suck. We were able to say, “See, this is what we were talking about. We haven’t phoned it in. We’re still trying our best, but the show is trying to tell us that it needs to move out of this modality of everybody getting locked in cages and not being able to move forward.” They had a decision to make when Carlton and I essentially said we were going to leave the show. We weren’t contracted beyond the third season of the show. We said, “We’re going to leave and you’re going to have to let somebody else run it into the ground, or you can take what’s behind door number two, which is keep us on but end the show.” We wanted to end the show after five seasons. That was our plan. They

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said, “Well, about how many episodes is that?” We did the math and said, “It’s about forty-eight more episodes after we finish Season 3.” So, they asked if we could split them into three seasons of sixteen episodes each. When they said that to us, we realized they were going to let us end the show. It was so thrilling for us to tell people that Lost was going to end. Everybody who was concerned about how long they’re on this journey, we were going to define it for them. It’s almost unprecedented outside of a cable space. Cable shows have a lot more power to end on their own terms. But for broadcast shows and in Season 3 of Lost, despite the fact it was sucking, it was still a top-ten show. So when they let us do it, we were highfiving, wanting to have a big pizza party, thinking we’re finally going to get to execute everything we had been talking about. Then it hit us like a ton of bricks after about ten minutes of celebrating: “Holy shit, we have to end the show. How are we going to do that with any degree of satisfaction?” At the same time we got our end date, within about three weeks, The Sopranos ended. We were almost unanimous in our love for The Sopranos ending. We thought it was perfect without even realizing why it was perfect. That was terrifying because it was like, “Well, shit. How are we ever going to step up to that?” Then, in the wake of The Sopranos ending, we started hearing all this negativity from the fan base, like “It’s a cop-out” and “What did it mean?” You asking those questions defeats the entire purpose of the way David Chase chose to end it. We started arguing with Sopranos fans, and in the space of that argument, we realized there was no ending we could come up with that wouldn’t be highly divisive. Once we embraced that idea, we were no longer afraid. We just knew it was going to happen, and if you listen to our podcasts in the fifth and sixth seasons of the show, we said over and over, “We know it’s going to happen. We know there will be people out there who are unhappy with the level of resolution for some of the mysteries. There are going to be a lot of people who don’t like this ending. We don’t know what the scale is going to be—it would be great to get it at fifty-fifty.” People sometimes come up to me and look around and are like, “I liked the last season of Lost.” And I’ll be like, “Who’s following you? I promise not to tell, but you just made my day.” It’s almost as though by liking the last season of Lost, you feel like you’re a silent minority. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I feel like the legacy of the show, while it was on, was that it was highly divisive. It required a tremendous amount of patience and stamina, and with that patience comes frustration. But that’s the way it lived, and so that’s the way it should live on. 114

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It sounds clichéd, but we really cared about the characters more than we did the mythology. The characters had to drive the mythology for us. Each character was on a certain level of parabola, and when they reach the end of their arc, that was it for them. You either killed them off or kept them around. But we thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if they all needed each other to come to the end of their arcs?” When people ultimately look at the show and say, “Why did I go on this journey?,” there are people who say, “I wasted six years of my life.” Then there are people who say, “I’m not sure why I went on the journey.” Finally there are those who say, “I know why I went on the journey.” For the people who know why they went, I think it’s that all these people were lost, but they needed each other to resolve and get found again. Not to get all spiritual, but it wasn’t something that could happen in a vacuum. It wasn’t something that could happen internally. Since Jack was the guy who we started the show with, he was going to be the last image of the show. He was a guy who was struggling with all these ideas of his own self-worth and competence; he really struggled with the idea of spirituality. When he opens his eye in the first moment of the show, he’s only learned of his father’s death twelve hours earlier. So him coming to terms with the fact that his dad is dead, we were going to overlay that with the idea of him coming to terms that he was dead, too. It was okay now to, for lack of a more fanciful term, let go. That was going to be our ending. We knew that. We knew that for quite some time. What was the path we took there? There was a lot of planning. There was also a lot of improvisation, but I don’t think we ever wanted to deviate from that idea.

Damon Lindelof

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Up Close with Marti Noxon 2 0 12

At one point, I was writing screenplays and television and plays; whatever you wanted, I would write it. I was trying all these different things, and the best advice I got was when someone said to me, “You need to focus on the one thing you really want to do.” At that point, TV seemed like a better bet, as feature writing was more of a boys’ club. It’s better now, but at the time it was really hard. So I spent the next couple years writing samples and studying television scripts and really just doing that. The one thing I want to become is a creator and not an awesome second. So I feel like I have to get a little crazier and a little more megalomaniacal. When I was working for Matt Weiner, I learned so much from him. Part of your job as a television writer is so different from writing for film; it’s more collaborative. It’s very much about my voice and what I bring to it. There are some shows that are just a piece of commerce and nobody has the vision, and those are the worst to work on ’cause nobody exactly knows what it is. It’s a constantly moving target. Some of the best people in the business know how to convince the studio and network that everything is okay. It’s like they know what they’re doing even when they don’t. Then there are shows where somebody has this singular vision, like Mad Men, like Buff y [the Vampire Slayer], like Grey’s [Anatomy], where that showrunner has such a strong personality that your job is to service that vision. Part of the reason I have been successful in television is because I come from a dysfunctional family and so I’m a chameleon. I learned how to adapt to all kinds of personalities; the more unstable and terrifying your childhood is, the better able you are to deal with someone whose personality changes every single day. Generally, the people who are in charge of the show—and this is the worst idea in commerce, to take a writer and put 1 16

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them in charge of a two-million-dollar-a-week enterprise. Like, you have 115 employees, this giant budget, and you have to write the best thing you have ever written every week; those people generally go crazy. They go crazy and I have been that person. I went crazy, so my job as the second is to go—deep breath—“Okay, you know you’re talented; it’s all gonna be all right.” Every personality is different. For example, Matt [Weiner] likes to fight. Like if you say, “I think Don Draper would do this,” he’ll get into it with you. He’ll tell you you’re wrong and you’ll fight, and then maybe an hour later he’ll be like, “You know, I’ve been thinking . . .” So you have to be willing to fight. Then with Shonda Rhimes it would be, “I don’t have time, I don’t have time,” and so you just put it on the page for her. I wrote sometimes eight versions of an episode until she was like, “Yeah, okay, now we’re good.” So I was just a writing machine. I’d write eight to twelve hours a day on that show. I didn’t spend time in the room; that’s all I did. People would bring me outlines and I’d write them. On Grey’s they were much more organized. But on Private Practice it was just like, throw it against the fridge and see if it sticks. Every show is different. Buff y the Vampire Slayer

People always ask me two things: Why do you think Buff y lives on, and why do you think you get hired for different kinds of jobs? I think it’s because at the core of that show, it’s about growing up. It’s not about winners, it’s about losers. It’s about feeling unseen and insignificant. Even Buff y, in a way, doesn’t have the life she wants. So when we would sit in the room, we would talk about things we went through as kids. We didn’t talk first about a monster, we talked first about what Buff y was going through every episode. It had to be about some journey for her. It always came out of personal experience. It was always, “This fucking thing happened, and I feel fucked about it.” The show was very personal. There was a lot of revelation, a lot of private stuff that went on. The longer I write, the more I’m clear that for me, the more I expose the things I think are the most shameful and I’m most embarrassed to show, the more people relate to what I write. That groundwork was laid in Buff y. The best thing I learned from Joss Whedon is when you’re running a show, you have to be secure in your own abilities. I think the worst showrunning comes out of fear that you’re not good enough. So what happens is you read everybody’s script and you find fault with all of them, and then Marti Noxon

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you become the hero who comes in and saves them all. Fortunately, when I’m writing on television, I know that’s the enemy, so I’m much better at letting people do their own work. If I see real problems, I’ll go in and fi x them. But if there’s the luxury of time, or if it’s a future script or pilot script, then I’ll just do a little tweaking. Cable vs. Network

Cable television writing is really different from network writing. I’m doing a pilot for SyFy with M. Night Shyamalan, which is awesome. Talk about a big personality. He has been great, and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know him, but that has six ad breaks in one hour. The crafts of network TV writing and cable writing each have their own rhythm and demands. Working on Mad Men, I had to be broken of the idea of theme and act breaks. I remember asking Matt early on, “Are we doing theme? What is the theme of this episode?” and he was like, “Fuck theme!” I was like, “Okay . . .” And then I felt this incredible sense of relief. It was such a palate cleanser after network. I loved Grey’s Anatomy and I loved Private Practice, but we had to hit theme in every conversation. Like if the theme was about magic, somebody said, “Well, that was magic. Wasn’t it magic? I think that was magical.” And if you wanted the network to calm down, you just, like, dropped theme in the end. It’s a ritual. It’s meaningless sometimes because you change the theme three times based on what you just wrote. You’re like, “I think the theme’s not magic anymore. I think it’s parking tickets.” To me, a lot of times it’s a boondoggle. It’s just a way of reassuring everybody it all fits together. Life isn’t like that. Also, working with directors, it’s the inverse of feature directors in television. Generally, they always bring their vision to it, and it’s a collaboration. On some shows, like Buff y, those directors really had to take direction from Joss and me, or whoever on set was there to take Joss’s notes and make sure that director followed them to the letter. It must have been frustrating for those directors. Once a director really showed visually they had the style he liked, they gained independence from that process. But when I’m running a show and working with a director, I’m pretty much telling them how I want it to be. You can tell most directors do not like taking notes, especially not from a lady. Directors are such a different breed; as soon as they get a movie, they just stick it to you. Meanwhile, I’m going to rewrite your script because I’m also a writer. Many directors are 118

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like, “No, I’m a writer, too.” Then you get to set and you’re like, “What happened to this scene? There is no sense of the trajectory.” And they’re like, “I just did a little work on it in my trailer with my assistant.” On every show there’s a production meeting, where you go through every page of the script with the director. You talk in detail about every costume, every character, every decision from top to bottom. You talk about that with the department heads, so hopefully everybody is on the same page. It’s amazing how often people are not on the same page. It’s incredible how many times you’ve drawn the picture and then it comes out totally different. So you have a one-on-one meeting with the director and talk through every scene—this is the moment you want to get. Sometimes they do whatever they want, but most of the time there’s a long process before you get to actually shooting where you’ve communicated what you want. Whether you’re gonna get it is a whole other thing. Permission to Suck

I’m very fortunate that, for me, writing is therapy, as well. I usually have more than one thing I’m working on, and that really helps me. Some people can’t work that way, but if I have one script I can put aside and go to the other thing, generally I can get re-energized. So if I’m toggling between two things, I usually find it makes both of the experiences better. There are times when I’m stuck, but I think my TV experience taught me to just write bad until you can write better. Just write, and then you go back and you might be like, “Oh well, that day’s work is shot,” but you keep that momentum. I’ve given myself total permission to suck and then go back and revise, but for my first drafts, I try not to think too much. I try to let instinct kick in, and that’s the best thing that can happen. I was fortunate that I wrote my first script without any expectation of it selling, so it was very personal and people responded to it, and then I was like, “Oh, man, maybe I’m a writer.” You know, for five or six years, I wrote and it was really like a grind. Then something happened. I think it’s probably when I got the craft under my skin a little bit. I’d done enough of those hours that finally structure and those things fell into place more naturally. Then suddenly something happened where I’d kind of lose time and—still to this day—feel characters speak to me and have things happen that I didn’t know were going to happen. I almost feel like I’m getting to watch TV, which is one of my favorite things to do. Marti Noxon

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Breaking Bad: A Conversation with Vince Gilligan Moderated by Barry Josephson 2 0 13

I have spent my whole life scared. Frightened of things that could happen, might happen, might not happen. Fifty years I spent like that, finding myself awake at three in the morning. But you know what? Ever since my diagnosis, I sleep just fine. And I came to realize it’s that fear—that’s the worst of it. That’s the real enemy. So, get up. Get out in the real world, and you kick that bastard as hard as you can right in the teeth. ★ walter white

barry josephson: I’m such a devoted fan of your work. Talk a little bit about the process of jumping from film to television. vince gilligan: I grew up wanting to make movies, and I was very blessed to get to make movies. A big reason I got to make movies at the beginning of my career was because of a gentleman named Mark Johnson— he was our executive producer on Breaking Bad. The Virginia Film Festival had a screenwriting competition, and Mark was a judge. I was one of the winners, and he liked the script I wrote—Home Fries—and he’s been my mentor in the business ever since. Getting to write movies was a wonderful experience, but TV has been a more satisfying experience creatively. Once you’re fortunate enough to get the job, you have to write well, and you have to write very rapidly, and you have to write well rapidly. You have to go forward with courage, and you have to do that Malcolm Gladwell gut check; you let your gut be your guide. What you’re writing is going to be made real; it’s going to have actors saying those words you wrote. It’s going to have a whole crew of people shooting and asking you about props and if this location will work for the gas station you described. It’s the reason we all got into the business—

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not for the money, not for getting invited to parties—we get into this business to see our work made real. You get that in TV in a way most people don’t get in the movie business. It’s wonderfully satisfying. I liken it to the old studio system of the forties, where writers would be under contract at MGM or Columbia, Warner Brothers, Paramount, or wherever. They’d be typing away—they didn’t get paid as much as they get paid now, but on the other hand, their stuff this week was being shot as an A picture. They were staff. They had job security, and more importantly, the stuff they wrote got made. It seems like the TV business is as close to that as anything there is now. Another great thing about TV is it doesn’t have to be an absolutely perfect world in any one episode of television. Television is the aggregate of many episodes. Movies are so much harder because they have to be perfection within an hour and a half. josephson: Talk a little bit about the crash course that was The X-Files for you. There were so many episodes, so many really terrific writers, such a great staff. gilligan: It was a great job. I watched the very first episode when it started in 1993, and it was a show I was a fan of right from the get-go. I was talking to my agent, and I said, “Have you seen this new show called The X-Files?” It had only been on about five or six times at that point. I said, “It’s great; you’ve gotta check it out.” And she said, “Oddly enough, I’m related to the guy who created it. I’m his wife’s cousin. Would you like to meet him next time you’re in California?” And I said, “Yeah!” Well, one thing led to another and, I realized in hindsight, they were in the midst of Season 2 at that point. They had been so successful that the twenty-four order they got that season had been bumped to twenty-six. josephson: Unheard of. gilligan: Twenty-four’s insane. I mean, twenty-four episodes in a season is already insane. But twenty-six, even more so. They were just barely treading water. They needed some fresh bodies. More cannon fodder. So I wound up writing a freelance episode late in Season 2. Then I got the offer to join the staff. At that point, I politely declined. After the freelance episode, I actually said, “Can I write another one? I’d love to do another one. Could I do it from Virginia?” And he said, “No, this is the time you either join the staff or you don’t.” I said, “Well, that means moving to California, and I just bought a house, and I’ve got my girlfriend back in Virginia and my whole family. I’ve got my roots back there. No, I’m sorry, I can’t do it.”

Vince Gilligan

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That’s how deluded I was that the movie business was going to keep me financially solvent and satisfied. I had a movie script that I thought was going to be really successful and commercial, and it was met with a collective yawn. At that point, I had lost my Writers Guild insurance, too. I had gone four, five, six quarters without making any covered earnings. josephson: Here comes motivation. gilligan: Here comes the dramatic motivation to call up Mr. Carter and say, “I misspoke several months ago, when we last communicated! I had the impression that you thought I said no, when really . . .” They were very nice to re-extend the offer, and I loaded up my S15 Jimmy, like a miniature version of the Beverly Hillbillies. In all honesty, The X-Files was a tough gig. I knew the attrition in the writers room was very high, and I did not expect that I would be able to satisfy Chris’ desires or needs because I was so lazy as a screenwriter living in Virginia, playing video games all day, and eating Cheetos and watching VHS tapes of movies. josephson: Let’s talk about Breaking Bad. Your original pitch for the show—tell us a little bit about that inception. gilligan: Well, X-Files ended in 2002, and I was in the wilderness for a couple of years. I wrote two episodes of two different TV shows that my friend Frank Spotnitz from the X-Files had created, and pitched a couple of pilots that went nowhere, and I was on the phone with a buddy of mine, Tom Schnauz, from NYU, goofing around. We were worried about the fact we didn’t have much in the way of income. We joked about what we should do next, like be greeters at Walmart or prepare people’s taxes. All that stuff we’d not be capable of doing. But he said that he’d read something in the New York Times about a meth lab in the Bronx that made a bunch of little kids sick. And he said, “Hey, let’s put a meth lab in the back of an RV!” And we joked around, but all of a sudden it struck me—I’d be interested in studying and examining a character who would do such a thing, if he were a guy like me or Tom. In other words, like a dopey, middle-aged guy who had never previously broken the law. Such a person would be interesting to examine: Why would he do such a thing? Then the cancer element came in and whatnot, and I got very excited by this idea. I said, “Hey, I think I could do something like that,” and he says, “I dunno, whatever.” I got very excited, and I don’t say that lightly because I am pretty self-censoring, in the sense that I come up with ideas and then the inner critic starts saying, “Well, that doesn’t work because of this and this.” Except this was one of those rare ideas that, in hindsight at least, I remember it hitting me like

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a “eureka” moment. It probably was not that dramatic, but that’s the way I remember it. I came up with the first episode, and I went in and pitched it to Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, who run Sony Television, and it got made. josephson: Tell me about their faces when you pitched. In other words, “You know . . . and then he gets cancer . . .”—they’re not hearing, potentially in their minds, the most commercial premise. gilligan: Exactly. I get nervous pitching, but I was so excited about this that this started out more fun than usual for me. I was more positive than I usually am. I think in hindsight, I was about to turn forty years old, and Walter White is having the world’s worst midlife crisis. I was thinking in terms of midlife crises, but I was pitching to these guys, and their eyes started to look like deer in the headlights. They were listening the whole time, but they looked a little bit horrified. I remember it felt like an outof-body experience because I kept pitching, as I always do with pitches. I write a document up, typically something like eight to ten pages. Then I commit it to memory as best as I can so I can kind of turn my brain off and just verbally pitch it. But typically once you get rolling on it, some part of your brain shuts off, and I started to see from some other viewpoint in the room. Not literally, but it felt that way, like an out-of-body experience— “God, these guys really hate this thing. Why did I think this was going to work?” But my mouth is still going; I’m still pitching. And they said, “Wow, wow, okay . . . So, we’ll think about that.” And I thought, “Aw, man, I guess that’s not gonna happen.” Then they called me a couple days later and said they were going to go forward on this project. What happened in the interim was—I only found out not that many years ago—they went to their boss, Steve Mosko. Then to the big boss, Michael Lynton, who runs Sony. They pitched it to him, and he said—and to his credit, he has admitted this to me, he hasn’t tried to change history on this—“That is the single worst idea for a TV show I’ve ever heard!” He literally said that. “That is the single worst idea for a TV show I have ever heard.” But to his credit, he said, “Listen, this is what I pay you guys for. I don’t see it at all, but you guys seem very excited so . . . it’s your job!” Leaving Walter White on Set

I would watch Bryan Cranston play this very dark man, and he never seemed to take Walter White home with him. I think he is more mentally

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or emotionally healthy than I am on some level. I’m being a little funny, but I’m kind of not. He is a very fine actor with an amazing talent. He has innate talent, and he also has this skill set that he’s learned over thirty years of acting. I’ve seen him many times on the set talking about the baseball game last night with the grips and the assistant camera man, and the AD says, “Okay, roll camera,” and he’s saying, “So anyway, the last inning was . . .” Then, boom—he’s Walter White. He turns it on, turns it off, and he doesn’t take it home. Maybe if he were here, he’d say, “Well, I took it home a couple times,” but by and large, he didn’t seem to. I, on the other hand, took it home. Walter White was in my head twenty-four hours a day for six-plus years. It’s hard not to see the world through his eyes, especially when that’s your job: to see the world through his eyes so you can put words in his mouth and embody his actions or let him tell you his actions, as it were. The best moments of writing these characters are when they tell you what it is they’re going to do next, and then you sort of type it. Living with that guy in my head for years, I started to see the world as a scarier, darker place—danger lurking around every corner and people out to get me. I’m making it sound a little dramatic, but there were times when I was having too much of this guy in my head. Satisfying the Audience

Toward the end, and all along, really, we were wanting to end it right. We wanted to satisfy the audience. We wanted to give Walt and Skyler and Jesse, and everyone on the show who’s still around at that point, a satisfying ending. That consumed us for many months. We spent almost a year going into the final eight episodes. We were very lucky to have a long lead time. My six writers and I had a long lead time in which we were able to think of every possibility, outcome, and end we could humanly conceive of. We discarded a great many ideas, sub-ideas, and sub-sub-ideas, and the big concern all along was keeping it real. We wanted to keep the characters authentic to whom they had always been but also give them a satisfying conclusion. We hoped the audience would say, “Man, that was just how this thing should have ended. I don’t have any major regrets.” That consumed us. I had a lot of sleepless nights worrying about that. TV doesn’t usually afford you the luxury of time, during which you can think of ideas and discard them. Sometimes you just have to go with your first idea. We were all lucky on that show that we had time to chew ideas over in a way that was 124

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more akin to what a screenwriter gets than what a television writer gets. I will always be grateful to AMC and Sony for giving us that time. The Writing Process

The most important part of the writing process on Breaking Bad was the “breaking” of each episode. That was done as a group effort. There were seven of us in the room and then our writers’ assistant, Gordon Smith. He would sit at the head of the table and write down everything we were saying, like a court reporter. We would sit around for hours on end and “break” each individual story as a group. That would involve us looking at the corkboard and writing down each individual scene, or beat of a scene, on a little index card and thumbtacking them up there. That was the heavy lifting part and was also the least fun part, but it was the most crucial part. If I could do nothing else on the show, if I could never visit the set, if I could never say “yea” or “nay” on a prop or a costume, if I could never discuss a location—that was the one thing I couldn’t miss doing. That’s what I was truly getting paid for: to oversee and help steer the story, the ongoing story. So we’d all sit there asking ourselves fundamental questions over and over again: What’s Walt thinking now? What’s on his mind right now? What’s his fear right now? What’s his obstacle? Skyler, same questions. Jesse, same questions. We would slowly and laboriously put these index cards up. We shot a time-lapse in the room of us “breaking” an episode. It’s twelve days in the writers room distilled down to, like, four minutes. We’re all moving at supersonic speed except that board behind us. Nothing much is happening for days on end. There’s three or four days in there where no cards go up. It’s not that we were just wasting time; that was the job. It was painful. Each of these episodes took, on average, maybe two to three weeks to “break” and figure out on that corkboard. Then, and only then, would the writer of that episode go off and write like a ten-tofourteen-page outline, in great detail. That was an important document because that was the first thing the crew would get. It was so detailed that the prop guy could prep, locations guy could prep, or the woman who did our costumes could be thinking about them. After that document was written, then the writer would write the forty-five-to-fifty-five-page script. It was laborious, but luckily we had the time to do it. josephson: A season or two into Breaking Bad, did notes stop coming from the network? gilligan: They never stopped. Truth is, I didn’t want them to stop. Vince Gilligan

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Here’s the thing about us writers: we love notes and we hate them. Notes are like a really foul-tasting medicine that we know is good for us, but it doesn’t taste good going down. There’s a huge world of difference between a good note and a bad note. We soon identify the people who give us good notes and differentiate them from the folks who give bad or meaningless or hurtful notes. The studio and the network reduced their number of notes they gave us along the way—it kind of trickled—and sometimes they didn’t give us any. We were very blessed that we were not buried in an avalanche of notes like a lot of good shows are. Usually, of the five or six notes we’d get, there was always at least one or two good ones that actually helped the script. Everyone always says, “Ugh, executives are all stupid and they give terrible notes.” That’s not true. That’s an unnecessary stereotype that is not always true. Episodic vs. Serial

gilligan: It’s very different. On the Venn diagram between the two, there’s plenty of overlap in the middle, but X-Files was an interesting job. We could go off and fart around for a while and not be seen by Chris. We could work on our own; we could work at home sometimes; we could work in our own offices. Sometimes we’d steal a golf cart, take a bottle of scotch, and drive to the far end of the Fox lot. We’d drink a little bit and work. But it was very episodic and more like writing movie scripts. Then every certain number of days, you’d be expected to come in and pitch what you had come up with. I’m making it sound like all we did was goof off, but we worked hard. It was a little lonelier doing it that way. Breaking Bad was very different because I felt a little lost when we had fewer writers in the room. We had seven writers total, counting me, but it was sort of “Ten Little Indians.” Once production started, the writer would take their episode and be off writing. The writer of the episode before that—the one that was already completed—would be on set in Albuquerque helping out with the director to get it shot the way it was meant to be shot. So we go from seven writers in the room to six to five to four. I think we “broke” the last one with only two or three of us. But we were lucky. I really liked all the writers, and they all liked each other, and it was a really nice room to be in. There was a lot of laughter. The job itself was hard because you’re staring at a corkboard for ten hours a day, trying to see where the TV episode is, but we had a lot of fun. Even though we had months of

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lead time, we worked and had to use the time wisely. But we did it with a lot of laughter, which made it a lot more palatable and bearable. The Netflix Effect

gilligan: It was a wonderful thing. Streaming video on demand, as embodied by Netflix as well as iTunes and Amazon, is just a wonderful thing. It’s a wonderful technological innovation. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say it really helped keep Breaking Bad on the air. It hit at just the perfect time for us. If you could only see episodes by watching them first run or in the limited repeats AMC did, people would not have been able to catch up. Once we’d started to slowly reach that critical mass where folks would say, “Oh, man, you’ve gotta check out this show Breaking Bad,”—if Netflix hadn’t come along when it did, you’d say to your friends, “I’ve been watching this on AMC; you’ve gotta check it out,” and they would try to watch it, they wouldn’t have been able to find it, and they’d have given up looking for it. But, like potato chips, you got these episodes one after the other on Netflix. It really helped us take off and kept us on the air. It helped us thrive, so I’m all for it. Even though I’ve never binge-viewed anything myself, I am thankful for it! I am so pathetically old school. I watch a channel called MeTV; it’s just old episodes of Columbo and Twilight Zone and Perry Mason. I sit through the commercial for the scooter and the commercial for the colostomy supplies, and I just sit there patiently like Aunt Bee or something, waiting for Perry Mason to come back on. I am an advertiser’s dream.

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A Conversation with Vince Gilligan Moderated by Álvaro Rodríguez 2 0 13

álvaro rodríguez: When you were creating [Breaking Bad], how much of it was a revelatory process in the evolution of the show, and how much of it was clear from the inception? vince gilligan: I love that word, “revelatory.” I think it was mostly a revelatory process. The one exception being I knew from the beginning this would be a story, ultimately, about a good guy turning bad. It would be about a guy willing himself to become bad through what seem to be external forces working on him in the beginning, but ultimately, because “I did it because I liked it.” I think it takes him sixty-two episodes to come to realize it himself. The rest of it was very much a revelatory experience. I was lucky to know Bryan [Cranston] and work with him before Malcolm in the Middle. Malcolm was a wonderful show, but if I had only known Bryan from Malcolm in the Middle, I would’ve never had the foresight or imagination to think, “Hey, Hal from Malcolm in the Middle ought to be Walter White.” I just wouldn’t have been capable of making that imaginative leap. But luckily for me, I’d worked with him on The X-Files. He played a very tough, very hard-bitten, nasty, creepy character, and when he walked into that audition on The X-Files—this was about 1998, or maybe ’99—I didn’t know him from Adam. I hadn’t seen him before because he’s such a chameleon. rodríguez: Can you talk a little bit about the collaborative process on the development of the show? gilligan: This was nothing if not a collaborative process. So much so that if you were to ask me, “What about the moment in Breaking Bad where this happened? What about the moment where that happened? Who came

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up with that idea?” I’d be hard pressed. A sort of group mind takes over in the writers room and you—and it’s that great old cliché—it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit. Every now and then I remember who came up with a particular idea, just because I remember the joy in their voice when they said it or the fact I was eating a particularly good Big Mac at the time, but most of the time I don’t remember who said what in the room. Casting

gilligan: Jesse Pinkman would not be what that character became if not for Aaron [Paul]. Originally the plan was to kill him off at the end of the first season, but it goes beyond that. Aaron Paul has an innate sweetness and love of life and love of other people. He’s just a good, sweet, positive person who makes you feel good when you’re around him. Unintentionally, that wound up subconsciously rubbing off on me and the writers when we wrote this character. In that first episode, he’s kind of a prick. He still had the likeability that Aaron himself possesses and exudes, but the intention was that he was just kind of a prick. He wasn’t supposed to be all bad or good—none of the characters are all good or all bad—but my point is he’s a different person as the episodes progressed because of what the actor brought to the part and who the actor was. But Jesse is a character so ill-equipped to be living the life he’s living, and to be doing the job he’s doing. One of the many sins of Walter White is that he doesn’t let this kid go. He keeps him manipulated. He keeps him dancing on marionette strings because he needs him. He selfishly keeps him in this life, in this role he should not be inhabiting. He shouldn’t be a criminal. Walter White seems like the antithesis of a criminal when we first meet him, but he really was meant to be a criminal. Jesse Pinkman, contrary to how we meet him, should never have been a criminal. Most of these wonderful actors were brought to my attention by our casting people, Sharon Bialy and Sherry Thomas. Bob Odenkirk was a rare example of someone that the writers and I talked about as an archetype. We always talk about archetypes. Sometimes the archetype you’re talking about is someone you’re never gonna get, like a Humphrey Bogart-type. But that’s helpful to talk about with your casting people and amongst yourselves. Then we’re all on the same page, talking about the same character. We talked about archetypes when we came up with Saul Goodman, and

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we, in the room, talked about Bob Odenkirk on Mr. Show. I wondered if he’d be interested, if he’d like to do something like that, and thankfully he said yes. I had never met him prior to Breaking Bad, but the first time I communicated with him, he said, “I wanna talk about this. So tell me about this character.” And I said, “His name’s Saul Goodman.” He said, “You realize I’m not Jewish,” and I said, “Well, neither is the character. There’s a whole explanation in the first episode when you meet him.” Once he signed on, the big thing for him was he said, “I wanna talk about my hair. Do you have a minute? I want to talk about my hair.” He said, “I’m picturing a guy—tell me if I’m wrong—business in the front, party in the back, kind of a mullet. I wondered if your hair gals, can they give me some kind of an extension or something?” And I said, “I’m sure we can, absolutely.” That hair, that was 100 percent his idea. The hair in the back is not his. [laughter] But the mullet, that was 100 percent his idea. Same for Bryan Cranston. When we first got to our production office in the pilot, Bryan said, “Let’s talk about my look. I’m picturing this disgusting little moustache on my upper lip that lies there like a dead caterpillar. I want the hair and makeup folks to bleach out the color. I think I should be about 186 pounds, like a fighter, like a boxer at the weigh-in.” Sure enough, he showed up within a quarter of a pound of that. He said, “At 186, I get the muffin-top thing. I’m sort of pasty, and we should put enough makeup on me that my skin looks like it’s never seen the sun.” So that was all the actors saying, “This is how I think I should look,” and I was like, “That’s great.” Narrative Strategies

gilligan: I wouldn’t say it was a conscious effort from the get-go, but you notice watching that pilot episode that it opens with a flash-forward— when he’s in his underpants at the RV and leaving the message for his family—and then we flash back in time, to the beginning of act one. The reason for that was a very meat-and-potatoes schematic one. It was me as a writer thinking, “I’m gonna take a very bland, milquetoast guy and turn him into a bad guy. But if I start off bland and really take the time to set this character up for the audience, he’s gonna be a bland character for the first act or two.” I really wanted to grab the audience. I wanted to grab them immediately and give them a reason to watch. I wanted to hook them from the start, so it just made logical sense with that problem I wanted to

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solve to begin at the end. It gave us a little tease, but a mysterious kind of a tease, where you’re like “What the hell is going on here?” Then you pop back to three weeks earlier, and you learn who this man is and why he is what he is and what he’s about to do. So having done that in the pilot, it felt like a good sort of idiom, and we wound up doing it in a number of episodes. We would pop back and forth through time when it was earned and when it felt organic and proper. And it was always to show something we’d previously not seen or were unaware of, like, why is there so much animus between Gustavo Fring and Tio? Then you go back in time and see this whole sequence that we were never aware of, and in fact, sometimes the writers and I were not even aware of until a week or two before. [laughter] rodríguez: If Jesse had died at the end of the first season, what would Walter be doing the rest of the series? gilligan: You’d be surprised how little I was thinking ahead. And it’s not that I didn’t want to think ahead. I think the best answer is Jesse was gonna die horribly and very cinematically at the hands of some really bad hombres, and Walt was gonna feel very guilty about that. I was thinking very schematically, very mechanically. Remember the old trailer for the movie Commando where Schwarzenegger is just strapping on the bandolier, the machine gun bullets, the grenades, and the rocket launcher? Walt’s not that kind of guy, but Walt would have been loaded for bear at that point and he would have gone for revenge. That would have driven Season 2—his need for revenge. I figured he just needed entry into the business, and once he got in the business, he would be in it. Then he would find his own way. But I realized that it’s harder than that. Aside from the fact that I wanted to keep Aaron Paul around, I realized this is a long journey of getting into this business. If it’s gonna be a journey of one step forward and two steps back, Jesse needs to hang around. It’s so great to have all these writers and actors and directors helping you come up with this thing. It’s more fun to not think too far ahead. You think as far ahead as you can, but sometimes if you think too far ahead, you risk being rigid in your thinking and risk leaving even better ideas thrown aside. rodríguez: Did you feel like there was any story that you still had to tell, or did you feel more like, this is it? There are rumors of spin-off shows, a Saul show . . . gilligan: Yes. A Better Call Saul show. It’ll be fun continuing to write for Bob. Because it’s a prequel; we’re hoping that we’ll occasionally see, well, the sky’s the limit. It will take place before everything you saw. Who

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knows who could visit? Like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, who knows who could drop in? But the answer to the first part of the question: I feel very content and at peace. I’m sorry it’s over for strictly personal reasons because it was a wonderful, personal experience, but I feel like we ended at the right time. There were folks, Bryan Cranston chief among them, who said to me, “Are you sure you wanna end this? Because I’m telling you, we’re all having a good time. We’re all feeling very creatively satisfied. These things don’t come around every day. This may be the highlight for all of us. I want you to think it through and not end it too soon.” It wasn’t about money or anything with Bryan; he just wanted to make sure I was sure. I said, “I think we have about twelve to twenty episodes of story in us.” We arrived at sixteen with our two production companies’ input. So we knew sixteen episodes out that that was as many episodes as we would have. There’s going to be some fun stuff we come up with for Better Call Saul. It’s the same universe, but it’s a different solar system. I can’t think of this in Walter White’s story. I’m at peace with it. I don’t lose any sleep. I have not yet awakened in the middle of the night and said, “Oh my God, we shouldn’t have done this.” Thank goodness.

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Rectify : A Conversation with Ray McKinnon Moderated by Barbara Morgan 2 0 13

My relationship with the South is complicated. My relationship with my hometown is complicated. My relationship with life is complicated. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just complicated, and part of the reason I think I write is because of those conflicts and complications of those relationships.

ray mckinnon: When I was younger, I thought I could be the South Georgia version of Timothy Leary. Remember the context—I was maybe sixteen and heavily medicated. I thought I could be a seeker of a sort through hallucinogens. That didn’t work out very well, though I can’t say it was unexpanding. Another, slightly more baked, teenage idea was that I might be a writer. One of my parents’ best friends, Eugene Patterson, was from my hometown, and he became a journalist who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his writings regarding the Civil Rights struggle. It was the time of Watergate, and journalism was really sexy. I liked to write and was told by some that I had a talent for it, but my first year of college, they didn’t say I was brilliant or whatever it was I thought I needed to hear. I was so insecure that I really didn’t have anything to say. (And I really didn’t yet.) I didn’t yet have that, “I’m going to write no matter what, and I’m going to put it out there no matter what.” I was too easily deflated. Many young people, and I was no different, don’t understand how much hard work, trial and error, any craft is. It was before Malcolm Gladwell’s “ten-thousand-hour rule” that is required before one becomes proficient at something. So I kind of wrote in the closet for well over a decade—accidental good fortune. Then I got into acting, which was very difficult, too, but at least the 133

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words were written for you. It took a long time to figure out how to be competent in that field. Just like writing, in acting you have to develop a craft, or most of us do. So I was focused on becoming as good an actor as I could be, but the whole time I thought I’d one day tell stories on film. It seemed like the perfect marriage. So I continued to write during that period, and I showed it to hardly anybody—which, in hindsight, was a really good idea. For some writers, we need lots of seasoning time before the critiques start coming because more important than craft is originality— to me, anyway—and oftentimes, originality gets beaten out of you before it has time to sharpen. Eventually, I wrote something that wasn’t so embarrassing and showed it to my future wife, and she got it. She got me. Without her support, her pushing me, her praising me, I never would have made it as a writer or fi lmmaker. There are many things that have inspired me: certainly where I am from, the family I grew up in, issues that rile me or move me. But I am also inspired by other storytellers, and beginning, oh, about fifteen years ago, a lot of my inspiration came from television. For me, that was the beginning of the new Golden Age. It wasn’t films so much anymore. Films are shooting for a wider target, and even the quasi-independent films were taken over by studios. The real independent fi lms weren’t really getting a voice anymore, but in television, anything could happen. The HBO shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under were really inspiring to me. I was like, “Wow, this is really good storytelling.” Not just good TV show storytelling, but just plain good storytelling. It opened a door for my imagination. Rectify It was providential or ironic or whatever the word is. When I moved to Arkansas, within a month I met Lorri Davis, who is Damien Echols’s wife. This is before I wrote Rectify. I told her, “This is going to sound weird, but I’m going to write a television show about a guy who gets off death row. I don’t want you to think I’m exploiting Damien or that story, so I’m not going to read anything about his case.” After I wrote Rectify I gave it to her to read, and that was kind of a big deal. I definitely followed his case after I wrote the pilot. Damien’s is an amazing, heartbreaking, and inspiring story. And he is an amazing person.

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certain transformation in a relatively short period of time. I never thought of [Rectify] that way. I wanted to see what would happen. I wanted to see [Daniel Holden] take his baby steps. I didn’t want to see him transform in ninety minutes. It didn’t interest me. But I wasn’t sure if anybody else would see it that way, ’cause it doesn’t have the narrative engine that even Mad Men has—it has the ad agency and the backdrop of the sixties. But it was something that I would’ve liked to see. If you’re a writer, that’s maybe the most important thing. If you’re going to write something, it should be something you would like to see. What’s always shocking—in my case—is that other people might want to see it, too. barbara morgan: Did this story pop into your head from something you read about people who’d been exonerated? mckinnon: Not so much popped as festered. DNA technology that allowed cold cases or post-conviction cases to be reopened was beginning to dispute convictions of inmates all over the country. There were people who prosecution had said did a certain crime, and the DNA science said that they hadn’t. There were a number of cases in Illinois about a decade and a half ago that came into the national spotlight about people who had been on death row or life without parole for twenty years whose convictions had been overturned by DNA evidence. You would see these men at a press conference, looking a bit in shock, really, by the turn of events. They would get the stock question, “Well, what are you going to do tonight?” And they might say, “I’m going to go have a beer and have a steak with my family,” or, “I don’t know, I’m going to go watch a movie.” That was as deep as the sound and visual bite got. What sparked my imagination was thinking what the next day would be like for them, after the hoopla died down. To think, “What would it be like to be in a room that’s not a cell when you wake up? You can actually open the door and go out in the hall and out in the big, wide world.” I was curious about how surreal that must be for those men; what kind of acid trip that must be like. That was the genesis of Rectify. I wanted to tell a story about a guy who had been a thoughtful, sensitive teenager before he was condemned to die and put away in a box for almost twenty years. I wanted to see what he would be like after that experience—when he was released with no “how to make sense of my life now” manual. I was also intrigued by the psychology of law enforcement. There’s a group psychology that people on the prosecution side get caught up in. They often stick with their original narrative no matter what, and they’re going to re-try that person no matter what. I was interested in exploring Ray McKinnon

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that psychology, and, again, that psychology can’t be explored in ninety minutes. Finally, I love stories about family, because they’re the most charged. We all have families, and we know how—well, maybe some of you don’t— but how messed up and interesting and hurtful and loving families can be. They’re such a wonderful petri dish to see what grows. morgan: There’s a lot of space in your show, a lot of quiet time. How difficult is that to explain to a team of people who are on the other side of the show? That seems antithetical to what is generally expected in TV these days. mckinnon: I never thought of our story as being slow. If the silences or spaces between the words are fi lled with behavior, then it doesn’t feel slow; it feels full, at least to me. I think our show did require a different kind of commitment from the audience. In hindsight, I think that those who were and are attracted to our show on some level had a need and desire for this kind of reflection of the human experience. Initially, I think the people in power are so afraid someone’s going to turn a channel. It’s not an irrational fear; it is a risk. You don’t know if a modern audience has that kind of concentration. It’s more like a novel. And, to be frank, Rectify never attracted a large audience. But it did attract a faithful one. And to my great fortune, Sundance and AMC allowed me and my collaborators to tell our story as long as it needed to be told. All the way to the end of a new beginning. If this was ABC, they wouldn’t be doing this show—nor would most any content platform. And they might be more involved in creative decisions. Not that Sundance and AMC didn’t weigh in, but I think they felt like it was more of an auteur’s vision. In fact, because they offered a support system, I didn’t have to worry about passing out flyers after the show was made, like, “Please come see my show, please come see my show.” It was a luxury to know that I could make something and somebody would see it, as opposed to many of the indie films I have made or been a part of. morgan: So you wrote the script for Rectify and then you got a call out of the blue from Mark Johnson asking, “Hey, what are you doing?” Is that what happened? mckinnon: It was. I knew I couldn’t pitch that story, so I just wrote the script. I knew that a pitch could be easily misinterpreted and it would be very difficult to pitch the tone and pace. There aren’t many writers I know who can hit that sweet spot every time. I sure can’t. But with Rectify, I

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felt like, for some reason, I hit my sweet spot. I gave it to people I trusted would tell me the truth. So before it went out, even though not easy to get made, I knew it was a worthy piece of writing. At least I wouldn’t get things thrown at me. I hadn’t written in two years because I was too busy passing out those flyers. I really had doubts that I could still write. Part of this Rectify exercise was to face that fear, and part was a genuine curiosity of where Daniel and the story might lead me. I think that’s an ongoing theme with me and probably a lot of other people. It’s that self-doubt. But yes, Mark called me two weeks after I had written it. I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of years. The reason he called was that somebody had mentioned my name in his office and said something about Chrystal. They liked Chrystal and he said, “I haven’t called Ray in a while.” So I said, “Well, I’ve written a TV pilot.” I could hear his eyes glaze over—it has a particular sound. [laughter] But he read it, and on a Saturday two days later, he called and said he loved it. He’d be a “friend of the court” or of any capacity I wanted. So I thought, “Well, maybe I should bring him in more officially.” And even though I already had connections with AMC, Mark came on board. That’s how that happened. morgan: What is it like working in the writers room? Especially coming out of your film world? mckinnon: I’ve discovered most writers aren’t people who should be in a room for long periods of time with anybody, much less with other people who shouldn’t be in a room with people. But now you’re putting four of these sometimes antisocial people in the room together for long periods of time, and lots of dynamics happen. It’s not for the faint of psyche. It was a real challenge for me in a quasi-managerial/adult way to be both the boss and somewhat humble enough to not be the dictator. It was a fine balance. There are periods of creativity in a room and periods of lull. The room is useful because you’re trying to put together a much bigger puzzle of an entire season, and it’s really difficult to keep all the parts in your head. I found it really useful to be in the room with bright, committed people. It forces you as writers to be more disciplined, and think about the story, and continue to get things done. morgan: Obviously, you have an idea of how you’re going to end it. How does that fit into the way you write? mckinnon: Well, you don’t know what the endgame is with the network. You don’t know if you’re going to do it for one or two seasons— that’s always up in the air—so that’s different from a movie. And as the

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actors inhabit the characters, they affect your worldview of the micro and the macro of the story; it becomes more symbiotic. Initially, you’re thinking about so many aspects of the story. You’re thinking about why people get wrongfully convicted. It’s because we, as a society, put pressure on the system to give us closure on something that is inexplicable, like rape and murder. So this pressure causes the machine, the prosecution, to sometimes do things that are unethical or illegal or negligent, or they’re just so convinced of a narrative that they set out to prove it. This causes people to be sent to jail who shouldn’t be sent to jail. Sometimes people get away with murder. They never get caught, and that seems so unfair. But that’s the way life is, and that is hard to take. So artificial closure occurs with wrongful convictions. As storytellers, we want to have some understanding of our human existence. We often seek closure in our stories, as well. Just like prosecutors. I’m really intrigued by that strange connection. Perhaps we writers don’t find out who did it in our story just like in real life. That was my original thought about the ending of Rectify. I felt, if it’s built the right way and that does become the endgame, though it may be frustrating to us as human beings, hopefully it won’t be frustrating to us as an audience. Or at least not disingenuous to how we set up the show from the beginning. morgan: Is Rectify mildly based on one person you read about, or is it totally fictional? mckinnon: It’s pretty much totally fictional. I purposefully didn’t see any of the West Memphis Three documentaries, and I listened to about as little of all real cases as possible. I was living in Arkansas at the time, until after I wrote the first episode of Rectify. I just didn’t want to be influenced by that the WM3 story, in particular. I wanted it to be a fictional piece. I didn’t want to do a biopic, and I didn’t want to be hemmed in by reality. Part of what fiction allows is to tell stories in ways you can’t tell in nonfiction. Tonally, it’s just a different art form. I wanted to have the freedom to go where the imagination took me, to allow for the goat man if I wanted. It also allowed me to imagine what a life so restricted was like. The flashbacks of Daniel in prison gave us a sense of why he is the way he is in the present—why he lives so much in his head. The restrictions of prison allowed him another kind of freedom: to let his mind go wherever it wanted. His incarceration was like being in a very severe monastery, where you didn’t have all of these outside influences, and that allowed him to

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think in ways we can’t think in the busy, everyday world. Then when he’s released, he has all this physical freedom. So much so that by the third episode, he can’t deal with that freedom. There are too many choices. There’s nothing but choices. It’s just overload. So he goes back to his room. His slightly bigger version of his cell. We all imprison ourselves somewhat. I mean, I can do most anything I want to do right now. I have enough money. I can’t buy a yacht, but I could go to Europe or Panama City. I have choices, and yet I’m still very much restricted by my fears and my habits. So that’s an interesting thing to explore with all these characters. Each character is on their own existential journey, and each has their restrictions. Daniel is the most poignant; he has the most to overcome and has hopefully the most transformative of these journeys. What I’m doing, I think, is subconsciously using them, the characters, to find meaning in my own life. Over and over and over. I think that’s what a lot of writers do. This story also has its share of comedy, but it’s a different kind of comedy. I think one thing that happens in arch Southern writing is everybody has a sense of humor except people from the South. The outsider does, but not the Southerner. They evidently have no ability to have a sense of humor about themselves because they are either too stupid or too unaware. This certainly doesn’t represent the South I grew up in, so everybody has a sense of humor in Rectify. When you mix Daniel, who’s this alien, with his stepbrother, Ted Jr., who’s a good old boy, it’s ripe for miscommunication. Then born out of that miscommunication can be comedy and, later in the season, tragedy. morgan: I’m particularly interested in those scenes where you talk about him going back to his room as if that’s his cell. Is that something you spent a lot of time talking about in the writers room, or does that come out of analyzing somebody who’s just spent nineteen years in a box? mckinnon: I think it started with me, but we definitely talked about it in the writers room. We’re still talking about it this year. There are so many elements to it. All of these people in Daniel’s world have expectations of who he is and what he should be. They’re all projecting their own interests, their own hopes and dreams and regrets and prejudices onto him while he’s just trying to get through the day. Even when Daniel tries to not engage in the world, he still causes problems just by being there. In the writers room, we discussed that his sister, Amantha, was twelve when he went to prison. This is all backstory, but it’s really important to talk about if

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you’re a writer. She was twelve when she decided, “You know what? I’m going to get my brother out of prison, and I’m going to dedicate everything I have to that end, and when he’s out we’ll all live happily ever after.” So by the time he gets out, she’s thirty to thirty-two. She’s spent most of her life trying to get her brother out of prison. She has all these expectations of what kind of brother he’ll be when he gets out and how that will fill her up—make her whole. Then he doesn’t play the role correctly and that upsets her, but she doesn’t want to admit that because it shows how selfish she is. So by the time the show starts and you’re making the first episode, and you see them come together when they see each other outside the prison, there’s all this history imbued in the story. I think it’s really important to talk about the backstory with the actors, to talk about the ramifications after his arrival and the complexities of that. If you’re into that kind of storytelling, that kind of interpersonal dynamics between flawed, paradoxical people, which I am because of rule number one: write what interests you, then you might like it.

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House : Up Close with David Shore 2 0 13

In terms of literature, Sherlock Holmes inspired me. Whenever you see a character who isn’t what was expected, it inspires you, not to do that character but to do that—to find something new. Jim Rockford was a hero who got beaten up as often as he beat up the other guys, and that always stuck with me. Sipowicz from NYPD Blue—it was guys like that I looked at and said, “Wow, I haven’t seen that before.” Which is daunting because so much has been seen before, and it’s a bad approach to go, “What hasn’t been seen before? A man with a green face—no one’s ever seen that on TV.” I think what it comes down to—and I’m sure what it came down to in those situations—is creating something and not being guided by what came before, but just going, “What is real?” You just keep asking yourself what’s real, and you’re going to wind up with something that hasn’t been done before because it’s going to be your voice. With House, I would sit around and stew for hours a day for weeks and weeks, just thinking about the character and situations the character might be in. How he would handle it, which is a little difficult to answer when you don’t know who he is yet. I knew the medical world that he would be in and had a general idea of wanting a guy who wasn’t afraid to tell the assholes they were assholes to their face as opposed to waiting until they were out of the room. That was the inspiration to some extent. I remember going to a doctor, and I was wasting the doctor’s time because there was nothing wrong with me. There had been something wrong with me when I made my appointment, but by the time I got there, there was nothing wrong with me. It was a teaching hospital, and eight different doctors examined me. And they had to be thinking, “What an asshole;

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why is he wasting our time?” Because that was the truth. But they were very polite, and I remember I thought, “Why are they being polite to me?” I remember thinking, “As soon as they leave this room, they are going to mock me.” And I just remember thinking it would be interesting to have a character who didn’t wait until he left the room to mock somebody. These things are difficult and tricky and take time, and there are no short cuts. House was sold in the middle of August, and I didn’t start writing anything until late December. Which is not the way it’s supposed to work in Hollywood. I was taking too long, and I was delivering it late. But I think it benefited from having months and months. At the time I was thinking, “I’m wasting time, I’m wasting time,” but in hindsight I don’t think it was wasted. The Stories

A lot of the B stories on House started off as little funny things that somebody would tell us. A friend of mine was panic stricken because her son had this red rash all over his body. They didn’t know what to do, and it was there the next morning and they went to the doctor, and it turned out he had taken a bath and then fallen asleep on their red couch. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him. The more serious stories usually started with hearing about a symptom or just hearing about a person who, say, never lies to their children. Somebody would say, “I set an example for my children, so I never, ever lie.” And we thought, “Okay, how about making that person a patient? What would they go through?” Number one, is that even true to begin with? Number two, can we push them to the point of breaking, and, more importantly, is that good? Is that right? And then we have House dealing with the beauty of lies and the importance of lies. And then we find the disease to go with it and work it all out, and we have a mother and daughter who never lie to each other. And then challenge House’s views. It was just a simple idea of a character and a character trait that House didn’t agree with. Another story was a great symptom that wasn’t a symptom: a guy who was happy, just purely happy, and House deciding that’s a pathology. And then we’d usually leave the ending ambiguous: House still believes it’s a pathology but with something in the back of his mind going, “No, that guy was happy. Why is that guy happy?” We didn’t use the writers room that much. At the beginning of the year,

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and then once or twice more in a given year, we would all get together and discuss character arcs and where we were going to take the show. The writers would pitch me their character ideas and their medical story ideas, because we needed both. A big part of my job was, once we figured out the arc and I heard those stories, going, “Okay, this story about a patient that can’t lie, that would go nicely with House lying to Cuddy.” It was very important that we thematically tied them together. Not so obviously that we were hitting them on the head, but enough so that we could have the two stories work together. Those medical scenes always had to be personal scenes at the same time. Many writers have said that writers enjoy having written; we don’t enjoy writing, we enjoy having written. House has inspired me the most and is the thing that I’m most grateful for, but that doesn’t mean I’m waking up in the morning and going, “Yay, I get to go to work.” But I was coming home going, “Yay, I did something that really meant a lot.”

David Shore

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Justified: Up Close with Wendy Calhoun 2 0 14

If it was just the “Fire in the Hole” short story, if that was all that we had of Elmore Leonard’s work, it would’ve been a very different show. Luckily, we had a treasure trove of source material. We had decades of phenomenal Elmore characters to mine for Justified, so what started as a short story adaptation for the pilot blossomed into a rich drama honoring his voice. The series became a celebration of crime and western fiction developed by an iconic American author. For me, showrunner Graham Yost and Elmore Leonard were the draw. After reading the characters in Karen Sisco and When the Women Come Out to Dance in Elmore’s work, I was hooked. His female characters are strong. They’re women who drive story with unapologetic attitude. I didn’t want to miss the chance to adapt elements of his female characters for television. Also, Raylan Givens is an iconic cowboy. I’m from Dallas, Texas, and I can’t resist a hat and boots. [laughter] I was on the show for the first two seasons, and digging into writing the character Boyd was a highlight for me. Developing Justified was a fascinating process in the writers room. It’s difficult to map out the beginning, middle, and end of any series. It’s hard to know what a show is until it’s born and starts to grow. In Season 1, we were figuring it out week to week, and we shifted our approach midway through writing it. The first six episodes of Season 1 were designed as traditional close-ended procedural stories. I wrote the seventh episode, and it still had a one-off procedural A-story, but it launched our shift to more serialized storytelling. We, the writers, were all dying to spend more time in Harlan. We wanted to know more of Boyd’s backstory, which informed Raylan’s backstory. The history we created helped us pit these two—antihero and hero—against 144

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each other. We knew that eventually, we wanted them to be on the same side of a fight against a shared enemy. It was really interesting to craft because the audience got to experience the development of the series as it morphed and unfolded each week in the back half of Season 1. By Season 2, we were fully committed to the serialization. It was reflective of how technology was impacting television. More and more shows were recorded digitally, and as time-shifted viewing became more common, creatives began to embrace serialized storytelling. For example, Breaking Bad became a phenomenon when it was available for viewers to binge on Netflix. After years of one-off episodes and information-driven procedurals, audiences were eager to watch shows with deeper character development and more novelistic plots. Instead of thinking of singleepisode villains in Season 2, I brainstormed on developing a season-long antagonist for Raylan centered in Harlan. In many ways, the birth of Mags in Season 2 came from my desire to take advantage of serialization made possible by new technology. Mags

Mags is just awesomeness. Before I pitched the idea for Mags’s character to the writers, I remember thinking, “Ava wielded a gun in the pilot, so we’ve already established the women on this show are as ballsy as the men. Why not have a murderous matriarch?” I mean, as a mother myself, it was incredibly satisfying to present a powerful mother as a villain with a complex drive and worthy plan. Much of her lore came from Elmore’s stories about the Crowe family. We decided her main goal was to protect her land. She had valiant environmental interests and a greater purpose than typical TV villains. I still marvel that we committed to a sixty-yearold woman as the formidable foe for our gunslinger hero for an entire season. The character was unique, but the casting of Margo Martindale was genius. Margo embraced Mags. She delivered an on-screen persona unlike any I’d ever seen. Her performance challenged us to raise the bar on our writing for her. To this day, the creation of Mags is one of my proudest achievements. Changes in Television

The way I tell stories has changed over the past decade. Twenty-firstcentury audiences are exposed to technology that’s constantly evolving. Wendy Calhoun

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This generation appreciates entertainment that’s fully immersive. They’re gamers who enjoy virtual reality and demand authenticity. They like playing the hero in a first-person scenario. They like drawing their own conclusions about themes. I’m conscious of satisfying viewer expectations when I develop series ideas for them. I try to imagine what I think audiences will enjoy today, five years from now, and ten years from now. Although the way I tell stories keeps maturing, the classic bones of most narratives, the basic building blocks of story—hero, villain, goals, obstacles, twists, etc.—remain the same. I think there’s definitely a new tide in television. It’s exciting. Television is no longer the bastard stepchild of feature film. I don’t even think of what I create as “TV” anymore. I think of it as serialized content. Technology has provided us with tools to make all content more cinematic. The audience should feel satisfied whether they’re watching shows on a gigantic screen or on their phone. It’s no longer just talking heads and walk-andtalks on limited soundstages. Filmmakers can deliver movie experiences with shorter schedules and lower budgets. In the pilot of Justified, Michael Dinner paid homage to iconic western movie visuals that were beautiful and cinematic. They were not what you’d expect to see on a small screen. The costs of special effects and graphics are more affordable, too. While we have more bells and whistles, serialized content continues to be a writers’ medium. The best storytellers are playing in this arena. Performers seeking meaty material can find outstanding roles here. There’s no stigma anymore. A-list feature actors are gravitating toward playing long arcs. Years ago, the idea of Halle Barry or Jennifer Lopez being the lead of a series was unthinkable, but times have changed. When I sit down to write, I think, “Okay, this character better be fantastic because the sky’s the limit as to who could be cast in this role, who could direct this scene, and who may choose to watch it.”

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The 10-Hour Movie: A Conversation with Cary Fukunaga and Noah Hawley 2 0 14

It was always intended to be this eight-hour series. They said, “It’s eight episodes, one director; we’re gonna marry cinema with television,” and I was like, “Okay, who’s gonna buy that?” ★ cary fukunaga

cary fukunaga: Nic Pizzolatto and I are repped by the same management company, Anonymous Content, that put True Detective together. I had mentioned to my reps that I was interested in television, thinking they’d send me some pilots to consider. I wasn’t looking for anything longer, but after Jane Eyre, the idea of making a long-form film was very appealing. So my manager, Michael Sugar, comes back with this pilot spec that Nic had written. I read it front to back, which is rare, as I usually give up by page twenty. I called Sugar back immediately and said I was interested, and he tells me there was a mix-up; I shouldn’t have been sent the script, as Alejandro Iñárritu was potentially engaging. It was a letdown, but six months later they asked me if I was still interested. Nic and I met in New York, and we talked about movies we both liked. Obviously, a writer’s vision and a director’s vision can be vastly different in the same way a husband’s and a wife’s view of the world can be. You have to make sure you want the same thing, that you have the same values. We found that what we wanted was similar enough to move forward with it. That’s how it happened. I came on board, then Matthew McConaughey came on board, and then Woody Harrelson. It was a pretty attractive package. The studios at the networks really wanted it, and I was surprised. I never know why anyone wants something. Two guys in a car,

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you know? But we made a deal within two weeks of pitching. Then Nic had to write them all, so that was the next step. noah hawley: It’s not a sexy story, but MGM, who owned the rights to Fargo, had come back from the ashes of bankruptcy one last time, looked at their library of titles, and reached out to FX to say, “Would you be interested in this property?” And FX said, “Yes.” I had developed with FX before, and they said, “We’d like to do Fargo as a show. We’re wondering if you can do it without Marge.” By which they meant any characters from the movie, because who else would come back? I said, “What is it if it’s not the characters from the movie or the story from the movie?” Basically, they were saying, “Can you make us a Coen brothers’ movie?” So I came in and pitched them my take on it. I said, “It’s not a series. You can turn it into Picket Fences, but that’s the wrong approach. It has to be closed-ended, because at the end of the movie, Marge goes to bed and her husband got that three-cent stamp, and you think tomorrow is going to be a normal day, and that’s what makes the movie unique. If tomorrow is another crazy Coen brothers’ case, you can’t call it a true story anymore.” The true-story aspect was another fun thing to play with. I said, “It’s got to be an anthology. It’s got to have a beginning, middle, and end, and if we do another one, it’s got to be a separate story.” FX had made American Horror Story, so they understood that paradigm, and they were in. fukunaga: This anthology thing, it seems to be the zeitgeist. We wanted to do something that felt like it came out of a single world, a solid vision. So what Nic, who’s a novelist, did was basically write a novel. The idea was to get a feature fi lm–world director, feature fi lm–world talent, package it, put it out there, and see who wanted to make it. We met with all the major networks, and HBO was the most aggressive about it. So much so, we were making the show within six months. hawley: In terms of what to keep, it was just an instinct, really. I guess it was the bottom line to say, “Well, first let’s see what made Fargo Fargo, structurally and creatively. What is the identity of a Coen brothers’ movie? There are so many.” Obviously, you don’t meet Marge until thirty minutes into the movie. You start before the crime has been committed. It’s not a whodunit. You’re meeting Bill Macy, or in my case Martin Freeman, before you’re explaining the events leading up to the crime. It’s more interesting. One of the major things I said coming in was, “We have to figure out what’s our Mike Yanagita”—Mike Yanagita being the character from Fargo who calls Marge out of the blue from her old high school days and she has

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lunch with. He tells her the story about the girl from high school he married who got leukemia and died, and he’s just so lonely. Then she finds out he’s making it all up and the girl’s not dead and he’s got a restraining order. You’re like, “Why is this in the movie? It has nothing to do with anything!” So I said, “That’s the most important part of the movie Fargo in terms of thinking about the TV show.” It’s like, “What are those elements?” My answer for why that’s in the movie is because it’s one of those things that says this is a true story. You say, “Well, that has to be true. Why else is it in the movie?” That was the fun of it all, to hide under the auspices of making a Coen brothers’ movie and say, “Well, I’ve got to have a ten-minute parable sequence in here, right?” For any of the nonlinear, nontraditional storytelling we did, I could say, “Well, I’m just making a Coen brothers’ movie here . . .” That was very liberating. It’s not something I necessarily would’ve been allowed to get away with on my own. So much of this process is dealing with very smart and creative corporate executives. We had these conversations a lot in prepping, casting, and getting ready to make the show. They would say to me, “You know it’s not a comedy.” I would say, “Well, I think that’s kind of the wrong word.” In the example I gave them, I said, “Imagine I cast Javier Bardem and everybody’s high-fiving in the halls, and then I gave him that haircut from No Country for Old Men, and you’re all horrified. The Coen brothers gave him that haircut, and they laughed at his face for thirty minutes, but there’s nothing funny about it in the movie. It’s funny to them, but it’s a totally unsettling detail.” fukunaga: Were you a big Coen brothers fan before this to be able to break down the tone and the style of their general body of work? hawley: I was. I’ve seen all their fi lms. I love the breadth of the work they do. Obviously, we had to sit down and figure out how to make a Coen fi lm. It’s one thing to write the script and say, “This feels right”; it’s another to make the movie. You can’t call Joel and Ethan and say, “How do you guys make a movie?” They’re not interested in that; I think they would be horrified by that. So it was studying the fi lms. We came up with rules. We didn’t have a single director, we had five who all had to make the same movie, so there were certain things that we came up with: they shoot with wide lenses, they don’t shoot with long lenses; they never pull focus between two things. There was a whole list of things we did and angles that we would use. In some ways, it’s like they were the omnipresent director we were trying to get everyone to respect.

Cary Fukunaga and Noah Hawley

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fukunaga: Tone is a tricky thing, especially if it’s slightly off, approaching farce. I think the Coens do tone masterfully. That line they walk between the absurd and the real is endlessly captivating. By the time I got to episode 6 in True Detective, there were definitely things, because of fatigue, that started to lean toward absurd in my execution. No Country for Old Men was actually an early reference for us because it was a crime story where the traditional details in solving the crime or resolving the story were the least important. They made these jumps that exist in the McCarthy novel, like they didn’t show the Josh Brolin character being killed. You’d think in a traditional movie they wouldn’t have made that choice, but they did. It’s a purposeful omission that speaks directly to the tone and kind of story they wanted to craft—or avoid. hawley: You were part of the sale, right? Obviously, the feature business works like, “Here’s what I want,” director-to-writer way, whereas TV tends to work writer-to-director. What was the script development process? Was there a process where you and Nic would work the scripts before you turned them in to the network? fukunaga: We developed as scripts were being written. I would talk about what I felt I needed more of, and HBO would give their notes. He was generating material, and I was there to guide him in a way that felt right, but generally, it all felt very good. In that sense, it wasn’t traditional television, and it wasn’t traditional cinema. I wasn’t the one in charge, and he wasn’t the one in charge. It was new territory for all of us, even HBO. hawley: A lot was made of your amazing tracking shot. Breaking that episode, was it about the shot, or did the shot idea come after the script? fukunaga: The shot is not written in the script, but once it was decided it was going to be one long tracking shot, all departments knew it was going to happen. Therefore, everyone had to plan accordingly during a production meeting for that block of shooting. I think I pitched that when we were in prep, even in preproduction, “This scene, I want to do as a one-er.” I think I also asked for two helicopters that day. I said, “Either you give me two helicopters, or I’m doing a one-er.” hawley: Did you shoot all ten of them in a block, or did you do it episode by episode? fukunaga: We shot as if it was one long fi lm. We were cross-boarding the Hart House, and we shot the first four episodes in a matter of days. They had to change over the house to make it later in time at one point, so we shot something else for that time period. We’d come back and shoot

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the house out and be done with it. We shot all the CID pretty much in one chunk of time. What that does, though, is it gives you zero latitude later on as you’re starting to cut and go back and change things. Even on Deadwood, I hear, Milch got to go back and reshoot scenes if he wasn’t happy; meanwhile, the producers at HBO were saying, “Nope, we don’t reshoot anything. We don’t know what you’re talking about.” We didn’t do one pickup shoot for eight hours of storytelling. For me as a filmmaker, that’s much higher stakes; climbing with no rope basically means do or die on the day of shooting. hawley: We would go and pick up additional stuff. I’d be in the editing room and I’d go, “We’re really missing this character. We need another beat of this character.” There was a scene I added in episode 3—it was just Martin Freeman sitting at the table, bleeding in that space, with blood on the floor and everything. It puts you back in his mind in a more sympathetic way, and then you’re moving forward with him. You need to have that leeway once you’re in editing. Were you editing while you were shooting? fukunaga: We were. I cut the first couple episodes while we were shooting the seventh and eighth episodes. And we could only prep up to five because there weren’t scripts for six to eight at the start of production, so all that was happening at once. All heads of the departments had to go an hour before call to look at locations, have production meetings at lunchtime, and usually another technical scout after shooting. Then I’d go to the editing room for a couple of hours. Saturdays were also scout days. That lasted for twenty weeks. hawley: We had eight of the ten scripts before we started shooting. I think there was a worry that if we block-shot three episodes at a time, we’d begin to lose a little orientation. I mean, it was a really linear story. fukunaga: We had four time periods and four different hairpieces all in nonlinear scripts. Anne Rapp was our script supervisor up until the end of preproduction, so she had to organize all that information in her head, which means she had Nic in her head. I think the idea, as one of the producers pitched it, was that we were totally capable of cross-block boarding this whole thing and shooting it in one block as if it was one long feature fi lm. I think anyone with television experience would say that’s production suicide, because usually you have teams hopscotching and sharing the load. You have teams prepping and teams shooting. Instead, we were one team doing everything, which meant that Jenny Eagan, our costume designer, was working day and night on Saturdays and Sundays, as was the

Cary Fukunaga and Noah Hawley

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art department and pretty much everyone else. We wouldn’t even see costumes for certain things ’til a day before. If I had notes, she would have to work all night to change it; there was zero extra time. You can hold that pace for a certain period of time, but that’s why I never intended to do a second season. hawley: We had seven and a half days per episode. It’s never enough time, and we ended up shooting two units. It was all hands on deck those last two episodes because of the scale of the storytelling. In most commercial television, an hour is forty-two and a half minutes, but FX said, “Look, whatever the length of the episode is, we’ll air it,” so . . . fukunaga: Did you structure your episodes understanding where there’d be commercial breaks? hawley: No, there were no act breaks in the script. I just figured I would sit in a room in post[-production] and figure out where to put commercials. I’m not of the mind-set that people don’t turn the channel because the last thing they saw was crazy dramatic. People are either watching the show or they’re not watching the show. fukunaga: Yeah. If I binge-watched shows like Mad Men, I’d never know where the commercial break is. Was John Landgraf your main guy on [Fargo]? Were you ever afraid he knew the story better than you did? [laughter] hawley: There was a time I tried to trick him. I wrote the first script and then I got a series order. I think that was February. We couldn’t shoot until the next winter, so I said I would write them all, but I said, “Give me four writers in a room, and we’ll take ten weeks and we’ll break it all. I’ll give you outlines, and then I’ll probably write two or three scripts at a time.” Most networks wouldn’t have let me do that. I spent my ten weeks with the writers, and I gave them a 115-page outline for the remaining nine episodes. So I had a three-hour notes meeting with the network, and John Landgraf, who’s the CEO of that network, sat across from me and talked about the outline. It was clear he’d read it multiple times. He talked about the themes and the characters, and these are not normal conversations you have. fukunaga: We pitched to FX, and it was the same week we pitched to HBO and Showtime. We gave them a seven- to eight-page bible beforehand and two episodes. In the meeting with FX, Landgraf spoke about every character and the nature of the show as if he were the one pitching it:

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where they were headed, what their background was, a complete psychoanalysis of each character. We just sat there and listened in awe. The key is to not have every character sound the same or be the same. ★ noah hawley

Cinematic Touch

hawley: My responsibility as a writer in television is to be a fi lmmaker. The bar has been raised by HBO and Breaking Bad and shows like that. It was very exciting for Vince Gilligan to have four or five pages without dialogue, where the camera is telling the story. That’s cinema, and that’s so much more exciting. I’m happy to write dialogue, but if I can figure out a way to tell the story with a camera, that’s the ultimate for me, especially in a region where people are so inarticulate and unable to communicate with each other. You’ll understand what they want even though they can’t say it out loud. I got in the editing room to cut that first episode, and Adam Bernstein, who was the director, had delivered a great cut to me. But it was cut like TV in my mind; you’re cutting a lot and you’re going into close-ups early, because TV is a medium of this. Basically, I just stripped that back. We stayed in the master. I mean, there’s one scene of Martin Freeman and Billy Bob Thornton in the emergency room, and we’re literally on this low, wide shot forever. Then Billy gets up and moves next to Martin, and that’s when we cut in. It’s the tension of that. The minute I go to singles, the tension is gone. There’s something about seeing who’s talking and seeing who’s listening that feels like a movie to me. The critical thing was I turned in the cut, and John Landgraf called and said, “I’m not worried that people are going to turn the channel because it’s too slow.” It’s not something you ever hear, but that was liberating to me, to say, “The show has a pace, and if we’re lucky, it pulls you in and it’s not going to feel like anything else.” fukunaga: I think there are many facets to why it would feel like cinema. I think part of it is priorities. I think television started with other priorities, and craft was not one of them. I think caring about craft is one element that’s changing the face of television. It looks better. It feels better. It’s generally crafted better. I think it’s what made True Detective more attractive to a wider audience. It had a mash-up of two different agendas.

Cary Fukunaga and Noah Hawley

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Where Nic comes from a much more literary background—he would’ve been just as happy having Matthew and Woody talk to each other on a black stage for eight hours—I’m more of the school that says, “I would love a scene to work without words.” If I could tell a story without having to feed it via dialogue to the audience, that, to me, is a much more clever way of telling a story. So our sensibilities were different. Anywhere I could, I’d strip away the excessiveness of talking and just open it up, meaning it could be quiet—it could be a landscape, or it could be details about the characters that didn’t need explanation. It could mean we have a couple minutes that are just observing this world they’re inhabiting. You look at shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, etc., and I would argue they didn’t know where those shows would end up when they started. The writers created some plots for you along the way, but it’s the characters you’re there for. Anthology, on the other hand, must have a plot because it must have an ending in one season. That, in and of itself, is driving feature fi lm storytellers to move into television. I never have a character do something out of character for themself. There’s no manipulation once the character is embodied in some way or form. That character exists in my head now. They’re real. Even when you take them out of the script, they still live somewhere. ★ cary fukunaga

hawley: I think there’s a sense of urgency that’s required to pull people through. Obviously, crime, unfortunately, creates a genre to tell a story because someone does something wrong and then it’s, will they get caught and will they be punished? For me, plot is never enough to tell a story. In this world, the drive always had to be a character drive, and not in a schmaltzy way. The biggest rule: melodrama was not available to me. That’s not Coen brothers, and God bless them because the world is better off without melodrama. It had to be character that was really pulling us through. The great thing about Billy Bob wasn’t his mustache-twirling, arch-villain traits. His biggest drive was to see how far could he push civilized people to act like animals. Can I get this kid to piss in his boss’s gas tank? That’s just as important to him as, can I blackmail this guy for a million dollars? That made him a very dynamic character where you never really knew where he was going. For Martin Freeman’s character, he’s pushed to commit this crime, and then there’s this question, is he going to get away with it? Th at’s what drives you. That’s what you’re watching for

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the first couple of hours. Then you realize, “Wait a minute, he’s doing more than just getting away with it. We’re learning something.” People love Malvo and they hate Lester. I think that’s a really interesting dynamic. I think it’s because Billy’s character is a scorpion when you meet him, but Lester was wearing human clothes when you met him. So you’re judging Lester by those standards. That’s the hard part about starting with a dead body. There’s this whole story you’re not showing, which, in some ways, is the story that’s really going to invest you the most. It’s, who is this person and how did they die? It’s a mystery that you can only solve at the end. To have every crime occur on screen and everyone involved know in advance makes it more character driven and less plot driven, I think. TV is always so open-ended because it’s meant to last for a hundred years. Every step taken along the way is a step toward the end, and if you know what the end is, it really helps you sculpt those journeys going forward. I like the idea of playing with the orientation and sense of disorientation in the audience. Some people will watch live on TV and some people will binge-watch and some people will watch years from now. We try to start each episode with, “Where are we?” as a sense of disorientation. So if you’re binge-watching, there’s a little bit of playing around with people’s expectations and the tension of trying to be aware of what the audience wants to happen. fukunaga: In True Detective, we were able to pepper all the clues about The Yellow King and Carcosa and the stars throughout the show; the lawnmower in episode 7 doing circles—just little things like that. That’s something I came up with when we were shooting that day because I knew everything we were doing in sequence. I felt confident I could make a definitive choice like that. hawley: And you didn’t have those scripts, but you knew what the solution to the case was in the beginning. fukunaga: Yeah, we knew they would eventually solve it. That was a big thing. We knew there’d be resolution. We also knew these two guys would ultimately end up being friends, riding into the sunset. Sound & Music

hawley: I started as a musician, and I work with the same composer on the show. I started talking to him at the outline stage. He and I had dinner

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when Fargo was just an outline; we talked about the Carter Burwell theme and the music from the movie. Once Fargo got greenlit, he started writing and I was location scouting, listening to ten pieces of music in the show that are hugely important in terms of tone. You hear that main theme, and you know where you are and you know what you’re making. Sound-wise, so much goes back to No Country for Old Men. The idea that the Coens, on a certain level, are really horror movie directors—there’s that same “don’tgo-in-the-basement” tension they do so well. The one sequence I’m thinking of is Josh Brolin sitting on a bed in a hotel room. He dials down to the front desk, and you can hear the phone ringing, and nobody picks it up. Anton Chigurh is in the hall, and you’re just sitting there, and there’s no music. There’s nothing and you’re straining to hear anything. You realize how big a character sound can be in a show, and so we always played around with that. There’s a washing machine in the first episode that became a musical instrument in our score. That sound theme was used whenever Lester was tense and the world was closing in on him. We spent a lot of time on sound design, and I think it’s things like that that elevate it. The problem with TV is you work at such a pace that you can’t do this level of work. You don’t have that luxury of time. You’re always writing what you’re shooting tomorrow. So this gives us more time to really focus on those details. fukunaga: I think we’re more attuned to sound than anything else. So a lot of the time, when I’m constructing sequences or even the pace of a sequence, I’m trying to imagine, “What is the sound going to be? What’s the dead space? What’s the connective tissue, if there is any? Is there going to be a score?” When I’m directing, I’m trying to create an overall experience, and part of that experience is me trying to put myself in the place of the viewer experiencing it for the first time. So when I’m shooting it and constructing it and editing it and designing it, I’m trying to find all the elements in there. I want to amplify that experience or heighten it to a point that’s going to be the most effective for the viewer. So sound is where I spend a lot of that time. hawley: In the end, someone says, “This is how the scene is cut; this is the music or whatever.” In the traditional TV model that’s the showrunner, and yet you had this two-headed animal. I’m interested in that process because at the end of the day, someone’s cut goes in as the final cut. How did that work for you and Nic? fukunaga: It was a lot of bartering for time and space. When we got

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down to the cuts, though—like director’s cut, producer’s cut, or HBO signing off on it—there were differences. Sometimes, there were extended arguments about things that no one else would ever notice, but we were all in agreement on the essential elements. Is it an efficient process in terms of decision-making? I’d say no. Unless the two people have always been collaborators, in the way the Coen brothers are collaborators—then again, they’re brothers; maybe you just need to be family. Otherwise, it’s a hell of a process. Because in television, specifically because of the change of guard of directors, typically, the showrunner is the single voice, and we had no showrunner, at least not one entitled as such while we were actually making the show. hawley: As I said to the network, you can’t make a Coen brothers movie by committee. It’s hard to make anything by committee. Even though it’s a collaborative effort, those directors who did me the honor of working on my show did amazing work. But part of it was about the boundaries. TV directors tend to know the role they play: they’re going to shoot it, they’re going to give you their cut, then they’re moving on to the next thing. It’s the chemistry of the people involved, because the reality is there’s too much job for one person. You want to have a director and producer say, “You do your cut and then I’ll come in and do my thing.” If they know what the end goal is, and they’re good at their job, how great is that to come in and not have to do a lot of heavy lifting? But that often takes time, over the course of the series, of finding those right bodies to help you in the process. The Coen Brothers’ Reaction

hawley: The quote from Ethan Coen was, “Yeah, good.” [laughter] Which, as far as I can tell, is a rave. Those guys live in a bubble, and we want them to live in that bubble because that’s the bubble they need to live in to do the work they do. They read the first script I wrote and were very complimentary about it. They said, “Look, it’s not our medium. We don’t know the medium.” We told them we were going to have a ninety-minute premiere and the episode was sixty-eight minutes long, and they were like, “What’s the other time for?” And we’re like, “Commercials!” [laughter] It’s not their medium. They’re like, “Go off and make your show.” It was great to hear. We sort of forced them to watch it because people were going to ask if they’d seen it. It was really empowering for them to say, “We like what you did; go keep doing it.”

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The Structure

hawley: An episode is an episode. It’s got to have an arc. There has to be a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it all has to fit. That’s why I like to do these cold opens or digressions or parable sequences. Usually, on commercial television, musically, you build to an act-out. It’s like a dramatic piece of music that swells to whatever. How odd is that, just swelling to a second of black, then your music coming in? Structurally, it was interesting sitting in the room with these four writers and not having act breaks. It breaks people’s brains a little because you’re used to doing this artificial— they find another body or you find out the guy’s sleeping with his mom or something, then you go to commercial. It’s like, “Something dramatic happened!” We were just focused on what happens next. You want to build to some sense of, “I can’t wait to watch next week.” It’s not always a cliffhanger feeling. fukunaga: Nic had worked on The Killing, and when I asked him about the red herrings and cliff hangers at the end of their first season’s episodes, he said he definitely didn’t want to do those either. So one extreme is Top of the Lake, where the episode would just end. You’re like, “Oh, wait. That’s it? I’m going to watch the next one now because that was a bizarrely simple chapter break.” It’s a big middle finger to cliff hangers. I really liked Top of the Lake. That’s a compliment, the middle finger comment. In True Detective, we walked the line a little bit. As much as we didn’t want to have false things grab you in the end, HBO wanted the first episode to end in a way that made people feel they had to watch the next episode and talk about it. So that was a concession, but as we got into it, we knew each end was natural and didn’t ring falsely.

The Business Model

hawley: In TV, you have a network and a studio. Usually, the studio makes the show and they sell the rights to the network to air it. These days, the network traditionally makes their money off advertising and the studio makes their money off the back end: foreign sales and syndication and all that. The commercial TV business isn’t as good as it used to be, but what’s exciting now is they’ll try anything to make money, so that’s good for us. [laughter] fukunaga: Yeah, HBO doesn’t work on commercials. They work on

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subscription and do pretty well with that. Then on shows like True Detective, they can sell it to other television networks around the world. The artists get to participate in that, which is a great aspect of that model. In features, why are movies two hours long? It’s such an arbitrary number. As a feature fi lmmaker, it still bothers me ’cause sometimes stories are two and a half hours and some are eighty minutes. Why make it unnecessarily longer or unnecessarily shorter? It’s the model of exhibition, where they want to pack in a certain number of screenings per day. If they miss out on a screening across the entire country across the entire world, you see all these accountants tolling lost dollars. In terms of television, eight to twelve or thirteen episodes is a nice, even amount of material they can sell around the world. The key thing to an anthology is that “anthology” inherently means there’s going to be another one, whereas a miniseries, there’s nothing else after that. So the chance of seeing another Band of Brothers—well, it’s probably not going to happen. It seems like there’s no model for that anymore in a post-DVD market. You’ve got to sell something that’s going to have another season, something that builds on a brand and public awareness of it. The studios and networks have inflexible rules I still don’t quite understand. I really wanted to shoot anamorphic, but because there’s a precedent of not having shot in anamorphic for HBO, they weren’t going to allow me to do it. If they said no to Scorsese, they’re definitely not going to say yes to me. Sometimes it’s frustrating, but it’s a negative that comes with the positives of working with an established studio. hawley: Yeah, they live in dread of the word “precedent”; it’s such a huge word in Hollywood. They never want to break their precedents. What’s the definition of Hollywood? It’s a place where everyone’s running to where lightning just struck. [laughter] On Bingeing

fukunaga: As a viewer, I like having everything at once. As a creator, I want people to wait. In that sense, I’d still want to binge a show from HBO, so I’d wait until all the episodes or most of the episodes were released. hawley: It’s tough given the amount of detail and meaning we try to put into these things. It’s not always a compliment to hear, “I watched your show in a day.” It’s sort of like, “Great, and then did you go back and watch

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it slowly?” Some people do, and God bless them, but I don’t know. I think there’s something about living with a story. Part of what I’m trying to do is to engage your imagination, to put stuff out there that’s going to make you live in the world of the show for longer than the time you’re watching the show. You’re going to go away from an hour of True Detective and you’re going to be thinking, “What does that all mean?” I’d hate for you to miss that fun part because you couldn’t wait to see what happened next.

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Mad Men: A Conversation with Mahew Weiner Moderated by Robert Draper 2 0 14

robert draper: How does it feel after all these years to be taking leave of this character? matthew weiner: It’s pretty strange. Another showrunner told me this before: “You’re going to get so many goodbyes that it’s going to dilute.” It’s funny, because you have so many moments on the way where it’s like, “They love it; they’re going to buy it.” Then they have to see this, and they want to see that, and they have to talk. Eventually, you just get a fax in the middle of the night saying you sold your show and to show up to work yesterday, and you’re like, “They can’t start on Monday; I don’t have a contract!” I didn’t have a contract until after I had been working for a year. You don’t know when to celebrate, even on the way there. It was like that on the way out, too, but there were a couple of moments where I was like, “Oh, this is the last scene I’m ever going to write with this character. It’s the last time we’re going to see them. This is where I’m leaving them.” It’s a part of you, but your characters have an independent life. Of course, it’s your imagination and the conglomeration of ideas from all the other people. I mean, I have a very intimate relationship with my work, but so much of how I feel is determined by other people. When I look up and see somebody welling up with tears, that’s the worst part for me. When I’m, “Hey, I guess that’s the last scene we’re writing with that guy . . .” Then I look up and somebody is about to cry. “Oh, yeah. I’m sad, too.” [laughter] Origins of Mad Men

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of this man in his mid-sixties telling the story of his life in the twentieth century. Everything he’s saying is a lie. It has an almost The World According to Garp-like, picaresque quality to it—coincidences and ironies and so forth—as he’s going through the twentieth century. It had been my impression that the people who ran the twentieth century were from a world of poverty and somewhat inauspicious backgrounds, which they lied about because they were ashamed they survived it. I wanted to tell a story about real life so had written this screenplay, The Horseshoe, but crapped out on it around page eighty and ended up getting a job writing in television. I worked for a few years and enjoyed having a job, but I was not enjoying the constant compromise of the job. I was surrounded by some of the smartest, funniest people, but at a certain point—this was a generation who should’ve gone to law school, but they were like, “Oh, TV writer. That’s a good job.” You can tolerate only so many A-students in the comedy room. That’s not useful. [laughter] They’re better off on the network side of things, analyzing, because being a great student doesn’t always prompt creativity. So I started thinking about this advertising thing. I wrote the script and gave it to my agents. They didn’t read it, whatever. Cut to five years later. It was 1992 when I started writing this thing that I crapped out on in 1997, 1998. Then I write Mad Men in 1999 and it gets me my job on The Sopranos in 2002, and I’m there for four and a half years. Then right near the end of it, AMC expresses an interest in this script. It’s seven years old, and they’re like, “Okay, we love the pilot. What else are you going to do? We need to know what the story is.” And I was like, “Oh, I’ve got so many notes.” I knew it was a TV pilot and had many ideas. But I go back and I can’t find anything. I have nothing. So as I’m looking through this box of crap, I find that script for Horseshoe, and the image of the last scene was of my character Peter. His mother’s name was Peggy, and he has just left his body. He has switched bodies with a guy in Korea and left his body at the train station. He delivers his own body—that Tom Sawyer moment of going to your own funeral—and his half-brother is running after him as he’s going away. He’s actually in the bathroom stall on the train and he’s having sex, because that was part of his character, that was his escape. And then it dissolves to the train coming into the station, and he gets out. It’s ten years later and he’s an adult and he’s got a trench coat on, and his wife and kids run up to him. That’s the last thing I wrote. So Don Draper, the guy in this pilot, whether I realized it or not, is that guy. It’s one story. So I went into AMC after doing a lot of work on it, and I said, “The story 16 2

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of the first season is the fact that nobody knows this man has this identity and he looks perfect. We’re going to find out he has this haunted past, that he has another man’s identity.” The pilot was always about identity. The only note they gave me was they wanted me to have some indication of this in the pilot. So I added that scene with the Purple Heart. Then I also added the scene with him looking at the fly in the light because that was my way of saying the Joseph Smith thing: this could be any time. There are always flies in the light fi xtures. Light fi xtures still look like this. That was the story I presented them. I knew where it was going to end, but I didn’t know if they were going to make anything beyond the pilot, and I didn’t know if they were going to make anything beyond the first season. There was always a three- or four-month delay afterwards. draper: Talking about technology reminds me of the episode about the computer. It looks like the slab in 2001. weiner: That was not an accident. I wanted to say that computer was spectacular. It took up a lot of space, and everybody knew exactly what it was. Watch Metropolis. The idea that robots are going to replace humans is a pretty old idea. That’s why we put it in the creative lounge. I was more interested in the idea of it as an avenue for the feminist movement, and we made allusions to it many times in the show. I found it fascinating that even though there had been this huge wave of feminism in the fifties, and before that with suff rage, it’s not a new idea. Politics Don doesn’t vote, but he’s a Nixon man, certainly when the agency’s called upon. And you can see why he’d pick Nixon: he doesn’t like Kennedy’s entitlement. I’m like Peggy; I’m not a political person. I hope my actions as a writer are political in some way, but I don’t have the stomach for it. Peggy’s more of an idealist. And idealism is frequently punished. It’s not realistic. That’s why it’s called idealism, and I demand it. I don’t respect cynical people. I respect cynical attitudes, but I don’t believe in them. Roger has the aura of cynicism, but Roger is like a child. Roger’s like, “What do you mean, other people think different things than me?” That was his realization on LSD—that other people had thoughts.

draper: There’s this scene at the end of “Time Zone”—I don’t know if “pivotal” is the right word for this scene, but the one on the airplane with Don and the classy brunette woman feels pretty close to it. Matthew Weiner

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weiner: The idea is, can this man change? After he cannot control his impulses and forces the company to merge and eventually gets caught by his daughter; that is irreversible. That is the worst thing that ever happened to that man. He has his secret. His wife knows. His ex-wife knows. His co-worker knows. But he never wanted his children to know who he was; forget about seeing him sleep with a neighbor or cheating on their stepmother. I think by the end of that season, that moment of him telling the truth to Sally about who he is and admitting the shame, was a chance for him to be on some path of change. When we come back, it’s the shortest distance we’ve ever done between seasons. I realized him being fired from the office was not something I wanted to skip ahead to. I wanted people to live with the problem. It was only eight weeks. Don is still fired, and the ambiguity—this is one of the great things about using reality in your show: you get to put in a leave of absence. A leave of absence means, “Go get another job,” and Don was like, “Well, they never fired me.” If you have humility, people don’t come back from leave. They really don’t. They’re supposed to move on. So I love the idea that Don didn’t know what to do. Of course, the big lie is he hasn’t told his wife he’s lost his job, and people do this. This is not new. For Don, it’s not delusional. He could’ve told Megan that he screwed up the way he did. He told her they were moving to California, and then he stayed. He should’ve given up and moved on, but there’s something about him that wants to write this thing at work. There’s something about him that doesn’t want to go to California. There’s something about him that doesn’t feel as close to her, but he doesn’t know that yet. The whole episode was built around—this sounds really pretentious out of context, but giving Don a chance to say, “Have I broken the vessel? Has my behavior extended to the point where there is no repair? Have I destroyed everything to the point where I can never make it right again?” Don’s whole life is about a fresh start. When you have children, forget about your life. That’s what tenacity’s about, it’s dealing with failure and all these other things. You get advice and you get a fresh start. You grow apart in your relationship and it becomes diminished and you want to start over. I love the idea, just as a theme for that half-part of the season, that Don is really sorry, but no one cares. draper: Well, he confesses to this strange woman on a plane and exhibits good behavior. weiner: I think he’s just trying to figure out how to be faithful: “I

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messed that up; it led me down a terrible path. I’m going to try and make this work.” He’s got the cute stewardess on the plane a couple episodes later who he would’ve had sex with in another episode. I think he feels guilty; the guy’s always had a conscience. That’s how Jon Hamm got that part. Jon Hamm exudes conscience. He exudes confidence and a lot of other things, but he was the only person who I was auditioning for this show that I felt could wordlessly express a conscience. There are a couple things that go on in that scene. The other one is about his alcoholism, and I know it ruins the show to point out that the guy drinks too much. Neve Campbell’s character’s husband died from drinking, and so the question is, can Don reform and work his way back? The whole tension of these first seven episodes is: What is Don going to do? How’s he going to do it? What’s his secret move? How’s he going to triumph? He couldn’t just go into work and do his job. It’s the first time he’s done it in the history of the series. I felt he knew what Billy Bragg says in that song, “Virtue never tested is no virtue at all.” That’s what that scene with Neve Campbell is about. draper: Yeah, but the very closing scene is of him looking for a warm seat. weiner: He’s out there in the cold. Nothing good has ever come from this guy telling the truth. Maybe he’s not telling it at the right time, but he has absolutely no behavior modification that could happen from telling the truth. When he finally tells Meg he lost his job, it’s the end. He doesn’t trust anybody. You can’t just suddenly turn around and say, “I’ve changed; here’s who I am. You can trust me. I’m not going to be that guy anymore.” It’s not like people don’t believe you. It’s that they don’t care. Forgiveness, it’s really rare. Authenticity

weiner: I made a decision early on to not make it an amorphous thing. The entire show could’ve taken place in March of 1960, and you could’ve had Kennedy die at the end of Season 4. But I come in with a thematic concern for the season and a story I’m telling. It’s always from the subconscious: “What’s going on in my life? What’s going on in their lives? What’s the next stage in the character’s life?” At a certain point, Peggy was almost too old to be single when the show started, and this becomes more of an issue for her in the story of being a woman. I was very excited about doing a

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story about a woman who is somewhat young and sexualized at work, and her response is to put on a wig. It turns out she’s pregnant, and that was storytelling. I wanted to tell a story about how she was gaining weight that first year and how it was protection on some subconscious level because she was not being left alone and was taken much more seriously with some pounds on her. That’s a story, and that’s not political and it’s not idealized. I don’t want it to be a history lesson. I want it to feel like it’s real. Here’s a perfect example, and this goes to story and everything: let’s say you’re going to put a book in somebody’s hand. That’s very symbolic. They could be reading sonnets of Shakespeare or something, or you could say, “What were people reading?” We were just talking about this the other day because of Gone with the Wind. Even first editions aren’t worth that much money because there are so many of them. There are millions of them. You go and find a book from 1936 and you get excited. Remember, the Gone with the Wind movie made twenty-five million dollars in 1939 at ten cents a ticket. Every human being on the planet might have a copy of this book. That’s what I like to have there. Is it symbolic? Yeah, sometimes it’s symbolic because, “What’s everybody in America doing reading Catch-22?” That’s a really complicated, heavy-duty literary book. Well, guess what? They are feeling what eventually became the credibility gap. They are feeling a dissociation between logic and what’s good for everybody and the law. So it’s always story first, ideas later, and you know what? If it’s on your mind, it’s an issue. You’d be surprised what’s on your mind when you start telling the story. draper: You have captured this era and this industry with such a granularity. It’s easy to forget that before Mad Men, there really wasn’t much about all this. weiner: There are two television shows about advertising that succeeded. There was Bewitched, which I saw plenty of; it was in syndication. I wasn’t allowed to watch TV as a child, so that was something you could sneak and watch in the middle of the day when no one was around. My parents used to come home and put their hands on the TV to see if it had been on. Which is incredible because my dad, in particular, loves television so much. He’s a neuroscientist, and that is his drug. But they thought it was bad for you, and you were only allowed to watch it on the weekends. To pretend Bewitched was not an influence is a lie. The other show is Thirtysomething. When that was on the air, there was so much about it that was relevant to my life. I was not that age. I had

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no material belongings. But it was kind of a wish fulfillment and had an intimacy to it—the way they talked about advertising and, particularly, Miles Drentell’s character. I knew what they were writing about, which was network television. But that’s the limit of advertising as an entertainment form. There were a lot of ad men in the fifties and sixties as characters because it was perceived as the ultimate American job. It had a creative element, and you made a ton of money. The issue of business and art in conflict is a great source of entertainment to the American public. It’s one of the tropes of Hollywood, where they just tell you, “All that matters is that life matters, and we’re important, and don’t worry about it. You’ve got to sell out a little bit, and you’ve got a beautiful family.” This was a genre, and I was trying to explain that when I sold the show. There was a period, from the hucksters on, where the executives and big businessmen and their families were the source of a lot of entertainment before the Westerns took everything over. Then it became the legal drama. The Defenders was the quintessential legal drama of the period when Mad Men takes place. It was a father and son who were defending some crazy-ass cases and stayed close to each other. E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed are very virtuous. Out of the social consciousness of the true Golden Age writers—Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling, and Reginald Rose—who were looking toward real life, contemporary life, to explain the contemporaneousness of something like The Apartment, it’s just hard to imagine. It could be documentary in terms of its attention to real life, even though it’s high-toned and satirical, and people repeat a lot of things that people say, and it has an exquisite plot. In terms of researching the ad men themselves, there were a couple history books that were university press publications, but not many. This project was my mistress. I had a job during the day, and I paid somebody to do research for me. It’s probably disappointing to people when they meet me and ask, “So, your dad was in advertising?” And I’m like, “No, this is a work of imagination. I don’t want to intimidate you, but I made it up.” [laughter] It is a little intimidating, I guess. I’m not just putting people I know into a context. Don isn’t a historical figure. This isn’t some crazy guy with a hat going across the West. This is a guy with a wife; he’s cheating on his wife and has obligations and has to live with that person. The minutiae of the timelessness of human interaction was the part that excited me. A lot of it is about the changing of the ways and what’s tolerable in language. These

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are emotions that went underground, and we haven’t diluted them. A lot of people’s prejudices are inherited. They are socialized, and they rarely extend to actual interactions; they are generalizations. I don’t compare my experience to anyone of color’s experience, but I’m a white minority who has lived within earshot of perfectly decent people’s feelings. I thought it was worth discussing who we were, and Don Draper being from a world of poverty, and not having to state the economic divisions. He is not a WASP, and it was interesting to make that person the outsider. Of course, he’s the best ad man in the world because he’s just watching everything. Longevity

weiner: This was ninety-two episodes, and you can’t repeat yourself. The truth is, you don’t know how long it’s going to be. It’s been a gift to skip six months and let the audience wonder, “What the hell happened?” Then spend the first couple episodes and have some critics say, “Well, it’s clearly 1963 because you can see it from the newspaper.” I put that in there, but what happened is not there. I started the second season with, “What happened to Peggy’s baby?” She looks thin; she’s great. The last time we saw her she was in the hospital giving up her child. Everybody’s fine; she’s back at work. How the hell did that happen? It’s good. It gives you a couple episodes of story. It usually gets resolved around episode 5, but then you get to start a new story. I read that Twin Peaks was all supposed to take place within two weeks, and the writers were doing backflips to make it happen. I am a devotee of that show, and I had no idea. They were like, “How do we end with school? It’s Saturday!” I would’ve never known, and you need to have your rules in the writers room. I like that each show, to me, and with a few exceptions, happens about a month apart. At the beginning of one of the seasons I worked on The Sopranos, Janice is married to Bobby Bacala. She loses her ring when she’s cooking, and the whole family’s over there, and I’m like, “How are they going to know that?” David’s [Chase] like, “She’s married; it just happened,” and I go, “But we didn’t see the wedding,” and he says, “Do you really need to see that? Do you want to see that? Isn’t it just better to see the dynamic with Junior and everything? She’s married and she’s got his kids, and it’s Janice.” He was absolutely right. The idea of not being committed to being the next

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day was very helpful for us. It’s fun to start a new story every season and not even worry about that. The great thing about getting to do this show over ninety-two episodes is you’re not selling the show anymore. It’s its own world. It’s something I love about The Simpsons and loved about The Sopranos and Seinfeld. You were expected to know what was going on in that world. You were supposed to laugh, even without seeing him, when someone says, “Newman!” That’s your job. When Don Draper says, “Sal wouldn’t stop talking about Joan Crawford,” the audience laughs because they know Sal is gay, but Sal doesn’t know he’s gay. There are little things in there where that’s the world. You get to a certain point where 1968, in Season 6, was really about the kind of repetition that comes with midlife. Don’s id is out of control. He’s back where he was, cheating on his wife. His childhood is unstoppable in his life, as happens to men at a certain point. You think you’re avoiding that, but the more settled you become, all of a sudden, it’s just constant. That’s not my childhood, but I wanted that to be a metaphor for the year. There is a critical opinion I can’t seem to shake and don’t have any control over it. The audience owns their opinions of the show, and this is something not only have I grown to understand, but appreciate. I think it’s kind of amazing, but you do want to be understood also. This constant trope of the story about Don being out of touch is confusing to me, because Don’s not out of touch; Don is eternal. Don is not a faddist. Don is not connected to the world. This is not about young people or aging or anything. This is about a man who has way bigger problems. He does not care about The Beatles because he knows he’s going to die. That is the world he’s living in. I think we’re all there, eventually. The Beatles are great artists and part of entertainment and culture, but part of that is to distract us. “Here’s the new fall season. What are people wearing this season? Do we feel like being different this year, or do we feel like being the same?” If we’re all doing it, we’re the same, but that’s the distraction of it. So taking 1968 and saying, “The world has had enough of the way things are. A change has to happen. People are going to the streets with weapons, even in the United States.” I tried to show it had been going on for years. By 1968, the riots have been going on for three or four years. We’re talking about hundreds of people killed, hundreds of armed conflicts, and federal troops being called in. There is something real. The populace is not respecting the authority that exists. That is a big deal, and it’s happen-

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ing all over the world. Then it ends with Richard Nixon being elected, the Soviets rolling into Czechoslovakia, everybody getting massacred in Mexico City, and the Paris students go back to school. By the time Bobby Kennedy’s running, the war clouds everything. The war is a symbol, and the war is good for simple people, too. It’s clearly wrong, but the complexity of having to stand up to the government and participating, for that generation, is shocking. The origins of the show were always like, “Are you going to shock someone who grew up in the Great Depression with anything?” I had a line in there where Don says, “I once saw someone throw a loaf of bread off a truck in the Depression and a bunch of men fighting over it. That’s what this meeting looked like.” It’s shocking to us because we depend on order and civility and freedom of speech in this country. So to see something like the Chicago riots and to hear people chanting and to know the whole world is watching—this is America; this isn’t supposed to happen. I think if you had heard tales of the Bonus March when you were growing up, or had lived through any of the union struggles, or had lived through the deprivation of the Great Depression and seen a lot of people with no work, it’s not going to be shocking when you see it. It’s going to be a kind of, “Here we go again.”

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Beer Call Saul: A Conversation with Peter Gould Moderated by Barbara Morgan 2 0 15

barbara morgan: How did you all decide to create a spin-off of Saul, of all the spin-offs you could’ve made for this show? peter gould: Almost as soon as Saul Goodman was introduced in Season 2, Vince [Gilligan] started joking, “Wouldn’t it be fun to do a Saul Goodman spin-off ?” And it became an ongoing writers room joke: “This idea is too ridiculous for Breaking Bad, but maybe someday on the Saul Goodman show . . .” And slowly, it went from a joke to a possibility. Some of the writers thought it was a great idea; others would shrug, “Saul Goodman? Really?” Personally, I was a little anxious about it. A Saul Goodman TV show? It just seemed too good to be true. In my experience, up to that point, very few good things ever happened in show business. We’re having so much fun on Breaking Bad—people are really digging it—do we want to push our luck? What would a Saul Goodman show be, exactly? But Vince loved the idea, and we both loved the character. Vince and I also really enjoyed working with the group. So the idea of continuing on, keeping the band together, or as much of it as we could, was very appealing. As Breaking Bad started winding down, Vince and I started taking long walks around Burbank. We were in a really unusual position for writers in Hollywood. Normally, you slave over a pitch or a script and hope that someone might be interested in making it. But before we really knew what the show might be, Sony and AMC were already very interested. So we took a long beat and tried to make sure that it was worth doing. There’s always pressure, but this was a new kind of pressure for me. I was so worried that somehow we’d tarnish the reputation of Breaking Bad. One question that helped to focus our thinking was a simple one: “What problem does

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becoming Saul Goodman solve?” We didn’t have the answer, but somehow knowing the question seemed to help. Bob Odenkirk was a major factor, too. I’m convinced none of us would be talking about this show today if anyone else had played that role. Bob brought something to Saul Goodman that wasn’t on the page: earnestness. Saul Goodman is the most earnest conman in the world. He’s trying to talk you around to his point of view, and he really, really wants you to buy in. Finally, after a couple of weeks of tossing ideas back and forth, it started feeling like there might be something worthwhile to explore. Looking back, you might ask, “Well, why not a Gus Fring show? Why not a Hank Schrader show? Or a Hank & Gomez?” But building a show around some of these characters felt as if it could lead us down the same path we’d already explored in Breaking Bad. Another thing, there wasn’t really that much Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad. We saw Saul in his office, dealing with Walt and Jesse and Mike, but rarely saw him by himself, and we never saw him go home. Those empty spaces can be really useful. The more we thought about it, the more intrigued we became. I’m making it sound more calculated than it was, really. The truth is it just felt right. When we started the show, one of our biggest concerns was, how do we let the audience know Jimmy McGill is not Saul Goodman? Jimmy’s trying to be a good guy; he’s struggling to be more or less a decent person. Saul Goodman, the man he becomes on Breaking Bad, seems to have no conscience at all. We were worried that Breaking Bad fans would see Saul Goodman when we were trying to introduce them to Jimmy McGill. How were they going to understand that any time this guy meets someone, he doesn’t have some secret agenda? When he seems to be straightforward, he is straightforward? That was part of the reason why, in episode 2, there was the life-and-death confrontation involving Tuco Salamanca and the skate twins. We thought to ourselves, how do we test this guy? How do we prove the character is who we think he is? So we devised a litmus test. Tuco is ready to murder these two skate rats, and it’s Jimmy’s fault. Now, Jimmy has a chance to get away from Tuco with his skin intact and he’s about to do it, but something keeps him there—his conscience. Jimmy’s anything but a tough guy, yet he stands his ground, stays in this hideous situation, and wheedles and argues and cajoles. Finally, and very reluctantly, Tuco agrees not to kill the two skaters; instead, he settles for breaking their legs. The inspiration for the sequence was to prove to the audience (and ourselves)

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that Jimmy isn’t Saul Goodman yet. Saul Goodman would’ve never been out there in the first place. If you said to Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad, “I’m going to kill these guys, but you can leave if you want,” he’d be gone so fast there’d be a sonic boom. morgan: Can you talk about the kismet of how Saul even came about in Breaking Bad? gould: There were a couple of reasons Saul came about. The first had to do with Tuco Salamanca. Our intention when we started Season 2 was that Tuco Salamanca was going to be the big problem for Walt and Jessie. George Masteras wrote an incredible introduction for Tuco Salamanca in Season 1, and Raymond Cruz played the hell out of it. Tuco just leapt off the screen; he was a wonderful, vivid character and a great foil for Walt and Jesse. When we started Season 2, we began by laying out a structure that centered the drama on Tuco vs. Walt. We’d done some significant work when suddenly we found out that, holy shit! We can’t have Tuco! Unbeknownst to us, Raymond Cruz was already a series regular on another TV show! Oops! Suddenly we had to reconceive Season 2, and at the time we thought it was a terrible loss. But in the long run, it was for the best because without Tuco, Walt and Jessie were out on their own. They had to figure out the world of drug dealing without a boss to do it for them. Instead of our heroes working under the thumb of this terrifying bad guy, they’re left to their own devices in the great big world. Walt and Jesse aren’t idiots, but they’re certainly not ready to run their own drug empire. That led to the thought, “Well, what are the things that go wrong for these criminal novices?” And very quickly we landed on one of the most basic problems for any criminal enterprise: “What happens if one of your guys gets arrested? Well, you need to call a lawyer.” Someone to get them out of the immediate hot water, but also someone who can eventually act as their advisor—their underworld tour guide, if you will. And while that was cooking, one morning Vince came in and said, “What if there’s a guy named Saul Good? Like, ‘s’all good.’” We laughed, and then another writer said, “Saul Goodman!” And so Saul Goodman was born. [laughter] Having said all that, I think there was a vacuum on the show. Looking back on the first season, most of the characters had comedic moments, but the comic center of those early episodes was Hank Schrader, played by Dean Norris. All that changed at the beginning of Season 2, when Hank had this incredible shootout with Tuco—there’s that guy again. Hank seemed okay, but in fact, the brush with death left him with all the

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symptoms of PTSD. That change deepened Hank Schrader and took him to places we’d never expected, but it also drained the comedy out of the show. So, in a weird way, Saul Goodman brought the comedy back into the universe. morgan: I’m trying to envision how you guys started to come up with who Saul really is. Not for Breaking Bad, but for this show. This guy is incredibly resourceful, and mostly to get himself out of the trouble he got himself into because he’s a little morally ambiguous. gould: The single biggest challenge for us starting Better Call Saul was that Saul Goodman seemed happy with himself on Breaking Bad. We asked ourselves, “How is that dramatic? What’s the burr in his saddle? What’s the problem that he’s dealing with?” That was an obstacle because ultimately, I certainly like Saul Goodman, but I don’t think I loved him. I don’t think I understood what got under his skin. So the question was, what does he really want? You could say, “Saul Goodman wants money,” but what a dull thing for a character to want. You try to look underneath. What’s gnawing him from the inside? What is underneath that smooth surface? Back to our original question: What kind of problem does becoming Saul Goodman solve? We thought a lot about how he grew up, about how he got to Albuquerque. And, gradually, this person emerged. One of the things I look for in any character is their vulnerability. If I don’t know how a character can be hurt—if I don’t know what that person has to lose—then I don’t have a real grasp on him or her. I’m looking for vulnerability, and one big thing that creates vulnerability is having people who you care about. When we have people that we love, we’re all hostages to fortune. So who does Jimmy McGill care about? And from that question a new character emerged: Chuck McGill. An older brother who’s as straitlaced as Jimmy is crooked, a brother who Jimmy cares about, who Jimmy wants to impress, but also a brother who’s dependent on Jimmy. Somehow that relationship deepens Jimmy; he’s more than a man struggling to get ahead for himself. No matter how complicated it gets between Chuck and Jimmy, Jimmy cares about Chuck. He loves his brother, and that humanizes him. And, of course, eventually we learn there’s a woman in Jimmy’s life, the somewhat mysterious Kim Wexler, who is played by the wonderful Rhea Seehorn. The idea was that Jimmy and Kim have had a history together. At first, we didn’t disclose that much about that history; we weren’t sure about the details ourselves. But one thing we knew for sure right away: she’s very important to Jimmy, perhaps as a confidant, perhaps as some174

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thing more. As the first season wrapped up, we started to understand how vital Kim is to Jimmy, and a lot of that had to do with the wonderful chemistry between Rhea and Bob. Somehow, you want to see these two together. Now it looks very much like Kim is the love of Jimmy’s life, and, boy, does he have a lot to lose. morgan: Why did you start the show with him in the future at Cinnabon? gould: Two reasons I can think of off the top of my head. If we’re telling the story of Jimmy McGill’s descent, it’s a good guess he’s going to become successful by doing things we think he shouldn’t. We think a lot about the morality of what the characters are doing, and I think the audience does, too. One of the joys of fiction is that there can be a kind of karmic balance to the world. Somehow, it felt satisfying to remind ourselves and the viewer that, no matter how high Jimmy climbs, in the end it’s all going to add up to nothing. When all’s said and done, he’s going to end up in the ashes. Not that running a Cinnabon is a bad thing—but it’s sure not Jimmy McGill’s heart’s desire. So that was one reason. But there’s something else, too. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but when we started talking about the show, we assumed it all ends the moment Walter White walks into Saul Goodman’s office. But the more we thought about it, the more it occurred to us . . . maybe not. Maybe there’s more to say about this character after he’s changed his name from Saul Goodman to Gene the Cinnabon manager. Could be that’s not quite the end of the story. morgan: In this show, you’ve done such an incredible job with flashbacks. Especially with Mel, this whole creation of a piece of Jimmy’s life, by going backwards to this guy who doesn’t even exist in the world of 2002. Where did all that come from? gould: That’s an interesting question because flashbacks can be a very dangerous tool. As dramatists, our job is to express character through action, through the choices the characters make in the here and now. Sometimes you see writers and viewers, and even executives, mistake history for character or history for psychology. But you can sometimes illuminate how they got to be who they are. That was something we thought about a lot. I remember the day we decided to start the series, we spent a lot of time thinking about Jimmy’s life. After the first few weeks of Better Call Saul, we could have written a pretty complete biography of Jimmy McGill. And once we’d done that, we had to decide where the show started. After all that groundwork, we finally zeroed in on the idea of starting the show after Jimmy’d left the HHM mailroom and struck out on his own. Peter Gould

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We called them “the nail salon years,” and the more we talked about it, the more obvious it seemed that that’s where the story begins. The approach was different on Breaking Bad. Occasionally, we would ask ourselves, “Well, how did Walt get like this? Why haven’t we seen Walt’s mother? What was the story with Gretchen and Elliot?” But we didn’t begin Breaking Bad by talking for a month about Walter White and Jessie Pinkman and who they were and how they got that way. We would talk about them endlessly as we went, but there wasn’t that initial period of investigation and brainstorming. I mentioned Marco, played by the magnificent Mel Rodriguez. Some of my favorite ideas come out of the nuts and bolts of problem-solving. As we were coming up to the end of Season 1, we had a couple of big puzzles to work out. First of all, episode 109 presented us with a particular question. Tom Schnauz wrote and directed that episode; it’s the one where we reveal that Chuck has been working against his own brother all along. It’s a powerhouse! That episode felt so climactic to us, it could easily have been our season-ender. What can possibly follow that? We had another problem, too, and this one was a bit more technical. The episodes were not playing to the length we expected. Turns out this show has a very different rhythm from Breaking Bad. The first few episodes, in particular, played much faster than we anticipated. There’s a rule of thumb in filmmaking that states that one page of script translates into one minute of screen time. I wish. The truth is one page can play as thirty seconds or three minutes. It all depends. In the case of Better Call Saul, the scenes played very quickly in the front half of that first season. In retrospect, I can see a couple of reasons that might have happened. For one thing, Jimmy McGill thinks a lot faster and talks a lot faster than Walter White. Bryan Cranston as Walter White has a unique rhythm. He takes his moment, he savors it, plays it out. When Bob plays Jimmy McGill, he is more mercurial. Bob flips, he moves, he changes his rhythm, he gets intense, he pulls back. You can’t take your eyes off either one of them. Anyway, whatever the reasons, the episodes were on the short side. In particular, the fourth episode of the season—the one where Jimmy plays his big billboard stunt—was much too short. It was nobody’s fault, just a product of us learning how this show works. Now, the network is very generous with us about letting us have a little bit of flexibility with time, but we also want to make the best use of every minute available. And our show’s structure gives us a very simple way to expand an episode—add 17 6

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a new teaser. The teaser is the sequence that comes before the main title, and often our teasers consist of flash-forwards or flashbacks or images that somehow inform the rest of the episode. So, great! Add a teaser. But . . . what’s it going to be? So here we were, right toward the end of production of our first season, with these two tricky problems. First, how was the season going to end? And second, what was the new teaser of episode 4 going to be? Somehow, I felt we needed to solve the problem from earlier in the season first. And then, out of the blue, one of us had the image of this big guy in a suit, lying flat on his back in a dark alley. That’s all it was, just an image. But in that moment, Marco was born. Like we always do, we started asking ourselves questions: “Who is this guy? What’s he doing in the alley? Why’s he important?” Once we realized who Marco was and what that teaser was for 104, then suddenly, 110 snapped into focus. And they both centered on this new character, one of the few people on this earth who Jimmy trusts and cares about. morgan: One of the things I love is this whole reference to the Alpine Shepherd boy and the Hummel figures. But how did you come up with the talking toilet? gould: That’s pure writers room goofing around. Just to remind everyone, that episode takes place after Jimmy has done his billboard stunt; now he’s finally got clients. But what kind of clients does a publicity stunt bring to him? The sequence where Jimmy goes and meets his prospective clients is about as broadly comedic as anything we did in the first season. In that sequence, Jimmy meets the fella who’s trying to start his own country, and then meets the inventor of the talking toilet, and then finally meets the lady with the Hummels. To me, it’s very funny, but it all emerged logically from the circumstances in the story. You see in the local newscast that a lawyer has rescued a worker who fell off a billboard. Who’s going to go to the phone book and call that lawyer? You know it’s not going to be some banker in a three-piece. It’s going to be someone who may never have spoken to a lawyer—someone who wants a decent, even heroic lawyer. Like the commercial says: “A lawyer you can trust.” morgan: Let’s talk about Mike Ehrmantraut. Because Bob Odenkirk is so overtly funny, and funny is not a word you think of when you see Mike. But they have such a great rapport on camera, and Mike becomes a little more human when he’s around Jimmy. How did you figure out how you were going to weave those two together? gould: The character of Mike started off as a one-off on Breaking Bad. Peter Gould

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He was created to serve a purpose in a single sequence at the end of Season 2. But as soon as we saw how Jonathan played the character, we knew we were seeing something unique and special. Jonathan brought so much depth and soul to this underworld fi xer, you could immediately sense that there was more to his story. Right from the beginning of Better Call Saul, we knew we wanted Jonathan on the show; Mike and Jimmy go together like chocolate and peanut butter. You have a guy who can’t shut up to save his life, and you have a guy who speaks as if each word costs him a hundred thousand dollars. They were just magic. It’s a classic pairing. Of course, the core of the show is how Jimmy McGill becomes Saul Goodman. But Mike Ehrmantraut has a road to travel, too. How does a Philadelphia cop become a killer for hire? In some ways, we’re telling two stories of descent, two stories of characters who are in the process of becoming darker versions of themselves. I can’t picture Jimmy McGill picking up a gun and shooting somebody, but on Breaking Bad, he’s constantly recommending that someone get killed. For the life of me, I don’t know how he gets to the point where his go-to solution is, “Why don’t you put a bullet in his head?” Likewise, Mike Ehrmantraut might have been a dirty cop, but he’s absolutely not a killer for hire. In Better Call Saul, we find out, yes, he’s killed people, but for revenge, not money. So what made him change? Understanding that is one of our biggest challenges going forward. If the show lasts long enough, we’ll get to see that whole process, and hopefully, it won’t make us miserable. morgan: There’s a piece of Chuck McGill that feels a little LA Law-ish, like he’s a character out of that nineties world. How did you decide to bring in this trial lawyer world? gould: Right from the beginning, Vince and I were worried about the legal aspect of the show. Neither of us has a legal background, and we’re painfully aware that there have been tens of thousands of hours of terrific legal dramas already. So we said to ourselves, “This isn’t a law show; this is a crime show.” I still think that’s true, but maybe I’m fooling myself. There turns out to be more law in this show than either of us expected. Fortunately, we have the help of consultants and people in the writers room who understand this stuff much better than we do. We’re particularly lucky to have Gordon Smith with us. Not only is Gordon a wonderful writer, but he also has a terrific sense of what might work for us legally. When we started the show, I spent about a week sitting in courtrooms in downtown LA. Later, the whole writers room took a day sitting in on

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random trials. And what we saw is that, amazingly enough, there’s a side to the law that we don’t usually see in movies and TV. We sometimes call it “boredom in the court.” Of course, we never want to bore the audience, but giving a sense of the legal assembly line, the shuffling of papers, the odd silences seemed fun and different. Later, of course, our story pivots on a class-action lawsuit over overcharging at a nursing home chain. It’s not the most sexy case in the world, that’s for sure! But my working theory is that if it’s enormously important to our characters, it will be important for the audience, too. I hope it’s working. Chuck was initially conceived as a character who was almost perfectly ethical, but helpless as a baby. But that was before we saw what Michael McKean would do with the role. Chuck McGill, as played by Michael McKean, is a much more imposing character than we ever expected. I remember the day we shot the very first scene between Chuck and Jimmy. I’d written the scene, I’d gone over every word dozens of times, but when I saw Michael and Bob perform it, it knocked me on my ass. There’s a point in the scene when Chuck says, “I will get better.” Michael went to a place I just wasn’t expecting. You could see immediately that Chuck was more than a helpless burden for Jimmy to take care of; he’s pained and prideful and someone to reckon with. After we saw that, we went back to the writers room and started thinking, “Wait a minute, we know what Chuck is to Jimmy, but what is Jimmy for Chuck?” We saw a dimension to our character that we hadn’t conceived. Gradually, we realized that Chuck was the one who’d blocked Jimmy’s legal career. If we had written the whole season first and then gone out and shot it, we would have never understood that. And here’s one of the incredible things about serialized television: actors can completely change the way we see the characters. Not through discussion—although that can be valuable, too—but through sheer performance. That also happened with Jonathan Banks on Breaking Bad. You’d watch him and think, “Oh, wait a minute. I thought I knew who this was, but Jonathan’s performance is telling me there’s more to this story.” The Writers Room

gould: We are so lucky. It’s a brilliant, entertaining group of people in that room—a real murderers’ row. Most of the time, it’s a fun place to be, but there are moments when it feels like being stranded in a sequestered jury. When we start off, we’ll talk for roughly a month about the whole sea-

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son and where the characters are, where they might be going. As the days go by, we start latching onto ideas. Usually, they’re pretty specific—a shape to the story, a sequence, a scene, an image. In our room, the key pieces of equipment are Sharpies, 3 × 5 cards, and corkboards. The first bit of visible progress is when we put up numbers for each episode and start to jot ideas for what might happen in each of them. Most seasons, we have a lot of ideas pinned under episode 1 and 2, and then fewer and fewer cards for the later episodes. Having said that, once we start breaking the individual episodes, we almost never look back at the broad-strokes stuff. We spend most of our time talking moment-to-moment in each individual episode, and a lot of it boils down to Rubik’s Cube–type problem solving. That might sound almost mechanical, but it’s anything but. The biggest, most difficult question we ask is, “Where is his or her head at? What does he or she want right now? What is he or she going to do next? What did that mean when that happened four episodes ago?” For instance, at the end of Season 1, Jimmy says to Mike, “I know what stopped me, and it’s never going to stop me again.” When I wrote that scene, I had ideas about what it meant, but then when we started Season 2, we took a closer look and asked, “What does it really mean? What does it mean going forward?” We like to try, as much as we can, to build on what we already have instead of introducing new elements. You can always turn the story on new elements—“Well, now, a crazy character comes in and does this or that.” But we’re very reluctant to introduce a lot of new characters and a lot of new storylines. We really try to get the most out of each event, each decision our characters make. So, we’ll talk for a month or so, and then we break an episode. By “breaking an episode,” I mean outlining it in great detail. We use that large corkboard I mentioned before and pin up cards. Teaser . . . Act 1 . . . Act 2 . . . Act 3 . . . Act 4. If you Google this, you can find photos of a few of the Breaking Bad boards, and the Saul boards are similar. The thing that’s the most troublesome is almost always the characters’ psychology. I will say sometimes the Mike Ehrmantraut material seems to come faster than the Jimmy material. Jimmy is complicated; he’s changing episode to episode and moment to moment. Figuring him out takes some time. Many TV shows go through a process called tabling the script. The writer goes off, writes a draft, and then everyone on the staff sits together, turning pages and giving notes as a group. We don’t do that. We

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try to have all the creative, group work up front, during the breaking process. We’ll write the cards out and our writers’ assistant, Heather Marion,* takes extensive notes. We try to frontload as much of the struggle as we can. The goal is to send the writer out with a story worked out in as much detail as we can muster, so we spend a lot of time trying to make the stories as bulletproof as we can. [*Note: This was accurate at the time of the interview. Heather was our writers’ assistant in Seasons 1 and 2. However, after writing the Season 2 finale with Vince, Heather joined us as a writer for Season 3. At the moment, Ariel Levine is our writers’ assistant.] Breaking the episodes is the first act of creation on the show. I find that I can predict how long most of the work will take. You can write a script in a certain number of days; you can shoot an episode in a certain number of days; you can edit in a certain number of days. But getting the story just right is much more difficult to pin down. Best-case scenario is that we break an episode in two weeks. There have been some tricky ones that took us well over a month. That can get scary because the longer it takes to break an episode, the less time we have for the rest of the process. Of course, the studio and the network are important to the process. At some point early on in the season, we’ll do what we call pitch-out. Vince and I and the rest of the writers sit around a table, and there’s this conference call, and we pitch as much of the season as we know. We pitch out the first few episodes and then where we think it’s going. After that, they get outlines of each episode and give us notes on those, and then they get drafts and give us notes on those. Overall, it feels very collaborative. Usually, they’ll give us enough rope to hang ourselves. We’re very lucky, and I would say the success of the show certainly helps, but the process was pretty much the same in Season 1 of Breaking Bad, when the show was not yet a success. There was no track record at that point, and Sony and AMC were still really supportive. I’m glad to report we’ve never heard, “Can’t these guys be more likeable?” or, “Can’t you make it like some other show?” We’re working with really good people who believe in us and believe in the show. So if it doesn’t work or if it doesn’t reach the level we hope it will, it’s on us. We can’t say, “Oh, the studio made us do it; the network made us do it.” That’s mostly a really good thing, but it also means we have no excuses.

Peter Gould

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