Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (39 page)

Left to right: Julia Swift, Andrew Landis, Kelly Souders

Left to right: Wendy West, Gib Wallis, Julia Swift

Left to right: Eric Trueheart, Wendy West, Gib Wallis, Julia Swift

Julia: “NYPD
Blue
and
ER
challenge people in ways people who watch shows like
Touched by an Angel
wouldn’t want to be challenged. Those people know they’re not going to leave with a sick feeling. They want the issues simpler, but for emotions to still be there. There’s room for that.”

Eric challenges Kelly: “If you were offered a job, could you write for one of those “angel” shows?”

Kelly: “I don’t think so. I’d be pushing away my experience. Though they say never say no to your first job.”

Ah, jobs. That punctures the debate. I lead the conversation back to school. Looking back, what counts?

Drew: “Me and Julia finding each other.”

Julia: “We’re able to have an extended version of our class all the time. You learn the questions. Do you have the act breaks? Where do your moments come in? Whose scene is this? What’s the arc of your character? You go through them, one by one, and make changes until wow, this works. Before, I wrote from my heart but had no idea how to make it powerful. When we graduated, we turned to each other and said Thank God.”

Kelly: “For the rest of your life when you’re sitting at a computer you’ll be hearing your teachers in your head. You hope what they’re saying to you will help you work.”

The seven former students turn to me as if I have one more lesson, some secret I know. I do know that five years from now those who refuse to give up will have “made it,” as generations before them did. They’ll do it by writing unpaid script after script until the craft comes naturally, by learning nuts and bolts on shows they’ll one day leave off their resumes, and finally by not losing sight of the great writing they studied on television today. Beyond craft, they’ve come of age in a “golden era” of television dramas. They’ll stand on the shoulders of those giants.

T
HREE
Y
EARS
L
ATER

(The following article appeared in
The Los Angeles Times
, July 5, 2000)

Three years after graduating, they meet again. They had been MFA students in my class, a few months out of school and mostly out of work, when
The Los Angeles Times
first ran a feature on them. Since then, six other classes have come and gone through my course in writing episodic television drama at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, each with its own angst and triumphs.

Now the former students meet in my backyard on a sunny afternoon to talk about what happens when
Variety
(the entertainment trade daily) names you one of “The Ten Writers to Watch,” and exactly how much unemployment pays; how exhilarated you feel rising to co-producer of a TV series, and how you find out your show is cancelled; how to avoid letting producers know you’re pregnant, and being single with no time to date; how a chance meeting can luck into a break, and yet old friends are what keeps you going.

While they were in school, I predicted that any of them who wanted a TV writing career enough, who didn’t give up, would have it within a few years. Now, let’s see.

Brian Peterson went home to Montana after graduating then returned to a job in the Dean’s Office by day, while sending out his scripts by night. The next fall, director Jaime Babbit, who had an idea for a movie,
But I’m a Cheerleader
, made an offer. Some offer: write a screenplay for no pay.

But Brian sparked to the subject: “a cheerleader whose parents send her off to rehab because they suspect she’s a lesbian, but she discovers she really is gay, and at rehab she falls in love.”

Brian says, “I spent a whole year rewriting it for nothing, and then it finally got shot. It was the kind of thing you dream about: you see these hot pink signs that say ‘Cheerleader,’ and you say, ‘Oh my God, that’s mine.’”

While the film was screening at festivals,
Variety
named Brian one of the “Ten Writers to Watch.” Despite that, “every time
Variety
mentioned
Cheerleader
they said Jaime wrote and directed it. People who don’t know better have this love affair with writer-directors.”

Brian concluded, “After that experience, Kelly and I started pitching pilots for TV.”

That’s Kelly Souders, whose thesis script, “My Slut Mom,” was optioned by a producer soon after we last met. But Kelly asserts, “Every meeting I had on it was about toning it down. I’m not going to tone it down.”

For about a year she co-wrote another feature with an actress, but that hasn’t been produced either. So she was also looking toward TV, and they remembered an idea they’d had at USC, and their agent got them meetings.

“Everybody we’ve met in television has been fantastic, 180 degrees from features,” Kelly says. The team sold their pilot, and “we’d love to be in the situation to hire everybody at the table,” Kelly offers, to a round of cheers.

In the time from their 20s to pushing 30, from being outsiders to working in the industry, Kelly says, “You start getting protective of what kind of work you want to do. It’s easier on your self image,” to which Brian quips, “But not always on your checkbook.”

Everyone groans with understanding, even Wendy West, who was the first on a series staff. Wendy laughs that she was also first to discover that unemployment pays $230 per week, when that series was cancelled. But a producer she’d met there invited her onto yet another show… which didn’t make it on the air either.

“The way we found out was we opened up the paper and it said we were being suspended. Meanwhile, our sets were being built. In fact, there was a delivery of lumber that day.”

But she had made more relationships. So, when one of the producers moved on to the
Law & Order
spinoff,
Special Victims Unit
, he brought Wendy along. Now in her second year on the show, she was promoted to story editor, and this coming year she will be a co-producer.

Wendy: “It’s wonderful, exciting, fantastic. [Executive Producer] Dick Wolf is so smart and talented; it’s not an accident he is where he is. His notes catch exactly the little things you know don’t really work, but you tell yourself, well, nobody will pick up on this. Then he sticks his finger in it, and you say, all right, all right.”

Wendy looks warmly over at Andrew Landis and Julia Rosen. “Last year Drew and Julia were on the lot so it was more fun because we could get lunch.”

Drew and Julia teamed up before they left school, and armed with sample scripts for five different series, they garnered an agent before anyone else, and they won contests. Julia observes, “Producers need something that says other people think you’re good.”

They nabbed their first real job on
Hercules
, “by going in and pitching something outrageous,” Julia says. Drew adds, “They have people on staff who are going to write the show, so you can only bring something that’s yours.”

Between
Hercules
and the staff of the short-lived series
D.C
., Julia married Andrew Swift, a producer on
True Hollywood Stories
, and became pregnant.

The only one of the group who is not single, Julia confides, “I hid my pregnancy while we were working on
D.C
. People think if you have a newborn you’re not going to work, and that’s not true for me. In order to be a good mother I have to be a happy mother.” As it happened,
D.C
. was cancelled before the baby was born, and the team found themselves out of work, anyway.

Everyone at the table has done temp work while waiting for the next writing job, but Brian warns, “People don’t see you as a sexy writer if you have a day job.”

On the other side, Eric Trueheart, far from his Harvard literature degree, is writing an animated feature,
Guy Futomaki: Ninja Temp
, which he sold to Fox. “It’s the story of a trained Ninja. His clan has been destroyed and he’s forced to come to America where he can only survive by doing temp work.”

Eric’s route to the sale was “Hollywood,” in the worst sense. “I had a so-called agent who wouldn’t sign me, but he mentioned
Guy
to a studio executive. So we go over, and there’s this 24-year-old development guy in an expensive shirt. I told him, you know, it’s animated. He said, ‘We’re thinking live action.’ I said, ‘We’re thinking like
The Simpsons, Beavis & Butthead
.’ He didn’t get it, but he started pitching it around town without us, when he didn’t have any rights to it.”

Eric shakes his head, “It was classic Hollywood. It’s not that these guys are evil. They’re just driven and oblivious.”

Ultimately, Eric made his deal with Fox, but his success on the fringe began doing Web work at the company run by Steve Oedekerk (writer of mainstream comedies like
Nutty Professor 2
). There, Eric made a friend who occasionally asked him to write for their Internet shows. He worked on
Thumb Wars
and
Thumbtanic
, for which he also appeared as a thumb.

With an edgy reputation growing, he landed a staff writing job on Nickelodeon’s new animated series,
Invader Zim
, which Eric describes as “torqued,” while
Guy
is developed.

“It’s the first time getting a steady paycheck for writing. It’s a weird experience.”

Now immersed in Hollywood, they speak of staying in touch with what’s real. Drew and Brian are training to run in the Chicago Marathon to benefit AIDS Project Los Angeles. And Drew, who was brought to the U.S. from South Korea during the Amerasian adoptions of the 1970s, wishes he saw more faces on television who look like the friends everyone here has, people of diverse backgrounds.

So, it turns out, three years after graduating, my prediction came true: those who went for it succeeded in beginning their careers. Now they ask: what will they do with their new-found status; what really matters?

S
EVEN
Y
EARS
A
FTER
G
RADUATING

The class reconvened in my backyard in August, 2004. Kelly Souders had gotten married. Julia Swift showed us photos of her “baby,” now grown into a beautiful little boy about to enter kindergarten. Now everyone present was drawing at least a partial income from writing and several had been able to quit their day jobs. We began by passing the tape recorder around the table, each writer bringing us up to date since we last met. As enthusiastic as I’d known them as students, though wiser, they offer their experiences to you:

Eric Trueheart: “Three years ago I was going into animation, which was a great education working on a staff. There were only three writers on the whole show including me and a comic book writer who didn’t know much about structure but was really funny. Actually, I learned a lot about comedy sitting on that show. You spend time crafting a joke but sometimes a scream can just be really funny. Then it was cancelled so I was fired.

“I’ve also been working on my own comedy show out of a warehouse that’s been the pick of the week in
L.A. Weekly
—
The Ministry of Unknown Science
— and we do these elaborate shows that are part-live, part-video. We were repped by CAA [Creative Artists Agency] for about a year but we discovered they had certain ideas how to promote our show that were different from the way we had envisioned it. So in the process we learned that what an agent can really do is step in at the last minute and help.

“Then there’s just the constant therapy and self-evaluation that all creative people must do. I thought I was going to graduate and be all set, trained to do this stuff. I’ve been trained — it’s like dental school. I still think hour-long drama is great but I haven’t had the chance to do anything in it yet. And I’ve had a lot of trouble finding how I sell myself in the industry, but it’s been like Zen. Now I’m in on another animated show. I’ve sort of fallen into animation but it doesn’t pay nearly so well and it’s not Guild.

[In other words, the production company is not a signatory to the WGA Minimum Basic Agreement, which means that writers have no protections on payments or working conditions and do not receive guild benefits such as health and pension.]