No, not conducted by me – these are Banff World Television Festival video interviews with the House writer, about his session (part one), plus how the House writers work and a juicy detail about David Shore’s mathematical nerdiness (part two). This is the prelude to a couple of The Craft posts I have in the Blogcritics queue right now. I was going to post these videos with the links to those articles, but it’s going to be an overwhelming amount of verbiage to post at one time already.
I have more Banff posts in the works but this one was in the works before I left for the festival. It’s based on interviews with Christian Clemenson, an actor from Boston Legal, and a spokesperson for an organization called the Entertainment Industry Council, about their work on more accurate portrayals of health and social issues on film and TV.
Boston Legal Provides Evidence Of Hollywood’s Social Responsibility “‘Television’s primary obligation is to entertain,’ said Clemenson, who won a Guest Actor Emmy in 2006 and was nominated again in 2007 for what was originally supposed to be a three-episode arc, but is now a regular character. ‘But David Kelley in particular has this amazing ability to entertain while at the same time he’s slipping some powerful medicine down your throat, and you don’t even realize it. That’s wonderful television.'” Read more.
After submitting the post to Blogcritics, I was trying to remember how the EIC got on my radar. I’ve had it drifting in my head for a long time that I wanted to write something about them at some point. I’d heard of the PRISM awards but not the organization behind them until something brought them to my attention. I just couldn’t think of what. Then it came to me – a friend who knew someone who was somehow involved with an EIC event had sent me this close to a couple of years ago, because of our mutual connection to House writer Larry Kaplow – I’d interviewed him by that point, and we both ran into him after that at the Paley Festival.
A lot of what EIC does is too behind the scenes for even me to write about, but the organization intrigued me and appealed to my idealistic streak. A couple of years ago a locally produced TV show asked me about ideas for their (never materialized) series blog, and one of my favourites was the concept of writing posts about issues brought up by the episodes. Take House, for example: maybe someone from the Huntingdon Society could provide an article about what a diagnosis means to a real-life young woman contemplating family and career. (Good lord no, it wasn’t actually House I talked to. I’m picking an example most of you will recognize, is all.) I wouldn’t be the one to start this, but I love the even broader idea of a website that dissects TV shows from the social/philosophical/etc. angle, like a TV Squad with a conscience. It wouldn’t get the megahits, but it would be about something more meaningful than fannish musings.
Anyway … recently, the EIC sent a media release about their Congressional Mental Health Care Briefing and it seemed like a great opportunity to finally write something with a bit more of a fan-based hook. Though sorry House fans, despite the origins of my knowledge of the organization, there’s no House content. But as a slight bonus (slightly outdated), here’s an excerpt from that report that started it all:
“The problem with incorporating content from health and political organizations,” said Lawrence Kaplow, “is that as storytellers we tell stories, not messages. But in this type of roundtable discussion, competing messages gave rise to controversy, which was when I started to pay attention, as participants began substantiating their opinions with their own experience. And since whenever there’s conflict, there’s story, I probably walked away with four or five pretty good story/character ideas. Plus they fed me.”
I wish I’d come across this on time to include in the post linking to my “how to break into Hollywood” Blogcritics article because it fits right in. This is an excerpt of David Shore’s Master Class at the Banff World Television Festival in 2006, which I wrote about back then.
This bit comes right after he’s told the story about his first ever script sale, a freelance episode of The Untouchables, which he barely recognized when he saw the shooting script. The sound quality is poor but I have a transcript:
David Shore: What you come to grips with is you’ve got a lot to learn. Now I’m rewriting other people, but hopefully not quite that dramatically, because if you rewrite people that dramatically, they don’t stick around for long.
Terry David Mulligan: So why Los Angeles? Why not New York or London or Toronto?
DS: Los Angeles is where TV is. But that’s actually secondary. The only other writer in the world I knew was in Los Angeles. A guy I went to law school with moved there to be a writer.
TDM: And what’s he doing now?
DS: He’s still a writer. He’s still doing OK. He and his partner went down there and oddly enough, his partner I just hired to be a writer on House for this coming season. [The timing and facts work for this to be David Hoselton he’s talking about, but it seems odd that he doesn’t refer to the fact that he also went to law school with “his partner.”]
TDM: And what told you that you wanted to be a writer?
DS: You know, it was one of the great stupid decisions of all time. In hindsight, there’s absolutely nothing … I was practicing law full time and I said you know what, I think I want to be a writer. The smart thing would be to write a little bit and figure it out from that. I was a partner in my firm. I quit the firm, got in my car, drove to LA, and then I started writing. I had no reason. I look back, I can’t understand it. I honestly look back on it and go, I can’t figure this out.
TDM: Even Neil Young had the guitar and a hearse to sleep in.
DS: I went down there, bought a computer in LA, started typing. I don’t know. So to everybody else, that’s what you should do.
TDM: Did it flow out of you?
DS: No! It was terrible. It was funny, I figured I’d write features and so I spent like six months writing this spec feature and gave it to my friends to read. And then I spent about a week while they were reading it writing a spec TV script, and they read both of them and said, you know, maybe you should do TV. I did better work on it. I don’t know, it may have just been because it was the second thing. The more you do it, writing is rewriting, the more you do it … you always look back on your own stuff … hopefully. I’m very leery of writers who are in love with their own stuff. You look back on your stuff hopefully you’re able to see the flaws, learn from them, and move on.
TDM: Writers are a quirky bunch, aren’t they? They’re like the drummers of the business, the Keith Moons.
DS: Uh, yeah, OK.
(This isn’t in the clip, but TDM went on to recount something about Keith Moon having piranhas in his bathtub, so DS said well, I don’t have piranhas in my bathtub. He really wasn’t going for that analogy.)
In finding my David Shore Banff post to link to, I rediscovered his own words about why he doesn’t believe in following the dictates of the audience, as was so controversial in my recent article on online fans: “Ultimately you have to write what you like. If you’re writing to your audience, you’re screwed. It’s very basic: you won’t do it as well.”
That mammoth “craft” post is kicking my ass so I threw together this one for Blogcritics instead – a few anecdotes from Banff speakers about how they got into the business:
Breaking Into Hollywood Any Which Way They Can “Suddenly desperate to support a family and aware that writing the Great Canadian Novel wasn’t the quick road to riches (but screenwriting is?), Hart Hanson started faxing pitches to the long-running Vancouver-based The Beachcombers. After the 15th fax, the executive producer relented, inviting him for a meeting.” Read more.
I meant to post this earlier but got caught in the onslaught of Banff/TV, eh? posts … rememberHouse writer David Hoselton’s funny bio from the Banff festival site? To recap, before recounting his path to Hollywood, he complains: “Law school was a mistake. Being a lawyer looked cool on TV. Halfway through second year law at U of T, I discovered that television lied to me.”
Well, TV critic Jaime Weinman of Maclean’s Magazine hilariously riffed on that theme:
Moral of the story? Instead of being lied to by television about the law, go into television and lie to us about medicine instead. There are people now who, seeing episodes of House written by ex-lawyers, will go to medical school and discover that medicine isn’t like House told them it would be, so they’ll get jobs writing for lawyer shows, inspiring a future generation of Davids Hoselton and Shore to go to law school and, later, write medical shows. And thus goes the cycle of renewal and rebirth.
Here’s my latest Banff fest article on Blogcritics:
Online Fans Represent TV’s Vocal Minority “Does Eric Millegan’s fate in the Bones finale still have you fuming? Can’t stop talking about Hugh Laurie, Robert Sean Leonard, and Anne Dudek’s powerful performances in the House season ender? Pondering Swingtown, looking forward to Sanctuary, and can’t wait for the boys of Entourage to return? Like many fans, maybe you’re expressing those thoughts online … and maybe the people behind those shows are reading. During various sessions at the Banff World Television Festival, TV writers, producers, and directors commented on their reaction to that instant, online audience reaction.” Read more.
All my Blogcritics Banff articles so far are gathered here. I’ve still got several I want to write, and am working on a mammoth one on a couple of The Craft sessions that I’m trying to make less mammoth, but now that I’m back at work the flow of articles will slow.
