Postgraduate Work: First, Get Real

Reunion. Eight months after graduating from USC’s School of Cinema-TV, eight students from my advanced television writing seminar meet again in our former classroom. Reunions are bittersweet. Now we gather at night, the comforting predictability of school assignments, and the company of hundreds of others taking the plunge into the industry with them, all gone.

A few of the former students are thrilled to have professional assignments. Others--still mailing samples they wrote in school (called “spec” or speculative scripts), trying to get agents--claim they’re not jealous. Right.

I’ve taught students like them for a decade, holding out the prospect that hourlong episodic drama in shows such as “ER,” “NYPD Blue,” “Homicide,” “Law & Order,” “The X-Files” and others offer opportunities for the most incisive, challenging writing they’ll find anywhere. Now the industry is dotted with stars of previous classes--not just mine but those of other USC professors. It’s a hot time for new TV writers.

The graduates gathered tonight understand the power they’d wield in television and feel responsible for what they give the public, quick to put down gender and ethnic stereotypes and relationships that don’t seem real. It’s an attitude not typical of earlier generations. Credit for it goes to the trailblazing series they’ve studied, and to living in a multicultural America very different from what was reflected in earlier decades of TV.

Andrew “Drew” Landis and Julia Rosen became writing partners at USC. Brought to the United States from South Korea during the Amerasian adoptions in the ‘70s, Drew worked in politics in Washington before entering the Graduate Screenwriting Program. Julia grew up in Los Angeles and made films that won festival competitions.

Together, they wrote speculative scripts for “ER,” “NYPD Blue,” “Early Edition,” “Party of Five,” “Frasier,” a drama pilot and two features before graduation. That portfolio got them signed by an agency, a TV-movie deal and a possible position on a new series. Credit all those sample scripts, and their certainty about television.

Drew: “An agent asked at one of our first meetings why we want to write for television. It’s because when I watch, I love the connection to the continuing characters, and having experienced that, I want to translate it every week.”

Julia: “For me, it’s that feature films nowadays are comedies or spectacles. But you go anywhere in the United States and everybody is watching ‘ER’ and they know all about those characters. The way to reach people and talk about real subjects and get to people’s hearts is television.”

Wendy West wanted to write TV since she was a child. “I found an old diary, pink, with bunnies. I was excited to see what I did as a child. But when I opened it, I found pages and pages of ‘Today on “Alice,” Flo said kiss my grits’--whatever was on TV each day.”

Her “X-Files” spec script won her a staff writer position on a WB series, “Three,” but the experience hasn’t been as she’d imagined.

“I feel a little left out. My first script was not exactly what the show is. Working in the real world, you need to be a chameleon. That doesn’t mean losing your voice, but you have to adapt to the style of the show you’re writing.

“So much of film school is spent trying to find your voice, so it seems counterintuitive to think you should lose it somewhat. But only somewhat.

“I guess we’re waiting to see the stamp of a Wendy West script, but you can bet on someone falling in love or at least tripping over her own heart.”

Still hopeful, Wendy tells the group: “A good day is like our class for eight hours. One of the reasons I went into television is I like collaboration, knowing people are there to help you get through the outline. You’re not alone the way you are with a feature.”

The yearning for community echoes among them, all single, in their 20s. Gib Wallis wrote and performed plays off-Broadway and on London’s fringe before film school. Now he works as an actor while looking for a writing agent. He chose television because “with features, if they want somebody to rewrite you, how much of the original vision is left? With a TV show, even if you’re the youngest and you’re rewritten, they have to see you at lunch. You have writers working with writers, so they understand.”

That’s his dream. But it doesn’t quite match the past months. “Right before graduation, I sent out 50 query letters and, to my surprise, I got six meetings, and I thought I’d hit the jackpot with people wanting to read my ‘ER’ sample.

“They said, ‘Give us several weeks.’ But every time I called, I got this response of, ‘Now’s not a good time.’ Finally they wanted to hear back from me in July--only the TV staffing season ended in June. I told them I’d hoped they would have read it in time, and they said, ‘Oh, we’re glad we got your script, but there’s no way we’re going to read it because we’re staffing now. We’re trying to get jobs for the people we already signed.’ I felt there was this little window and I wasn’t able to get into it quite soon enough.”

Eric Trueheart has a degree in English literature from Harvard but is equally frustrated since finishing his master of fine arts. He wrote five spec scripts, but “it’s extraordinarily difficult to get people to read. . . . I’ve had a lot of time to think about what it means to be a writer.”

While at USC, Eric was mentored by Glen Morgan and James Wong, then on “X-Files,” now executive producers on Fox’s “Millennium.” “They were great letting me look in on the process. But they’re so busy they haven’t read anything--even though I wrote a ‘Millennium.’ ”

With television hard to crack, some graduates accepted jobs rewriting features, such as Kelly Souders. Having grown up on a ranch in Missouri, she wrote fiction before entering the USC Graduate Screenwriting Program, where the feature screenplay she wrote for her thesis won the writing division’s highest honors. Kelly discovered that “without the episodic TV class, the feature would have been a real struggle. I had to take someone else’s character in someone else’s story and put the structure together, and I learned that in episodic.”

She’s emphatic: “The quality is in television. I can’t tell you how many times I came out of a theater and said, ‘I’m never going to a movie again.’ These big action things have no characters. It’s like marketing people put the film together. And then you watch ‘NYPD Blue’ and ‘ER’ and it’s the best writing I’ve seen.”

They long for believable characters, and more of the spectrum of people in the real world. Wendy describes “Homicide” as “amazing” in its depth of internal issues among African American characters. “The scenes between Andre Braugher and James Earl Jones were riveting--how Pembleton [Braugher] was conflicted over covering up to protect a black hero.”

Other students point to episodes on “ER” when Eriq LaSalle’s character Benton coped with the illness of his mother--how refreshing to see African American women written with dignity. They’re aware that the main cast includes Latinos in “Law & Order” and “Chicago Hope,” and Asian and Native Americans on “Star Trek: Voyager.”

Michele Takahashi, now analyzing scripts for a production company, wrote an “X-Files” spec script that sprang from a Japanese Shinto ritual. “I tried ‘X-Files’ because they do cross-cultural stories, like the Guatemalan vampire goat and the Chinese occult. I tried the same subject for features but it’s a hard sell. Agents told me not to do a mainstream feature where the main character is a minority. But on ‘X-Files,’ Mulder and Scully take you into different cultures.”

Wendy agrees. “We have role models in TV we don’t have in features. It’s great to see women doctors sticking their hand into someone’s body to save his life. It’s not just this season. Believable women go back to ‘Cagney & Lacey,’ who had real relationships--they weren’t just cops, or sex objects. Back then it was a big deal that women wrote that series. Probably they had to fight for it to be truthful.”

Not everybody is into the fight. At least, not right away. I see Brian Peterson around campus, no longer in jeans, wearing a tie. He took a job at the school until he has more scripts.

“After graduating, you really have to figure out who you are again,” he says. Heads around the table nod, understanding, as Brian continues: “We were all zombies in the last month of school. We all felt so much was riding on our feature thesis, and we were supposed to start off the block with a big bang. I sent out my query letters and went home to Montana and regrouped. It turned out my feature [script] wasn’t useful for [getting jobs in] television. A couple of agents called me back and said, ‘I loved your ‘ER,’ it was great.’ And I said, ‘So?’ And they said, ‘So? So where’s your other TV scripts?’ ”

It’s easier to return to the ideals of writing than cope with waiting. They retell moments from shows we studied, like Dr. Greene losing a patient in childbirth on “ER,” a controversial issue in “The Practice,” gutsy innovations on “EZ Streets,” true relationships on “My So-Called Life.” Michele admires “series that cut askew, subversive like the episodes on ‘X-Files’ and ‘Millennium’ that laugh at themselves.” Gib likes “shows to experiment with the narrative. Some of that is in ‘Ally McBeal,’ interweaving her fantasies in a way that’s provocative.” Brian wants “a world I can see come to life, like ‘Twin Peaks,’ that created its own world.”

Revisiting friends. Shared goals. Tonight it’s easier to get fired up about politicians who want to censor their art than to deal with getting assignments that compromise it.

Eric argues, “In one of Bob Dole’s anti-TV campaigns, he complained about ‘NYPD Blue,’ saying the last good cop show was ‘Dragnet.’ ‘Dragnet’ was a cartoon. If people want cartoonish versions of morality spelled out, they’re welcome to it. But the realistic dramas are supremely moral because they’re grappling with issues everyone is trying to grapple with, struggling to come up with moral answers to them.”

Kelly: “Television gives people a clear moral choice: the on and off button. I don’t watch certain shows, but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be on. There are shows I could never be interested in because they don’t have enough honest reality. To me, that dishonesty is as damaging as violence.”

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 eight 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.