She Fooled Us, but Don’t Discount Her Writing

It started a year ago with a call from a bright young man named Brad Sexton. He asked if my company was interested in a television series. I said I would read anything good. He said he was a manager of writers and that his client Riley Weston had written a spec pilot for a one-hour series called “Holliman’s Way.” Now, nobody really writes a spec pilot script, but I read it immediately and was stunned by how professional and knowing it was. I called Sexton and asked, “Can I meet the writer?” He laughed and said that his client had written Episodes 2 through 5 already--did I want to see them? I did.

This writer knew where to take the show, this was a real pro, and this hip family show about three very different teenage sisters might work. Again, I asked to meet the writer. Not only didn’t Sexton mention anything about the age of the writer, but from the writer’s name, I had no idea whether it was a man or a woman.

She came bounding into my office on an unusually cool day, bundled in at least two sweaters and a too heavy coat. “I wear a lot of clothes to hide behind because otherwise I look too young to be taken seriously.” Indeed she looked about 15. She told me about her background and why she wrote this pilot. She was a child actress, home schooled and came here when she was 16, one of those “Mom and the kids in a car heading for Hollywood, trying to land a TV series.”

After about an hour, I asked just how old she was. She said she was 18. I said that it was wonderful that she was so bright and able to create such a classy little TV series at that age. But I empathized because I wrote my first script, an episode for “Bachelor Father,” when I was 15. I wrote an episode of “The Twilight Zone” the same year, and at Riley’s “age” an episode of “Flipper” that landed me Jay Sanford and International Famous Artists (now ICM) as agents. When I visited their New York offices, Marvin Josephson and Ralph Mann (the agency bosses circa 1964) spent two hours hovering over me, introducing me to their colleagues and asking my advice on casting. They had never met an 18-year-old television writer before either.

I sent “Holliman’s Way” to director Arthur Allan Seidelman, who had made a name as a television movie director and was looking to develop a network or cable series. He called and said it was terrific, but asked if we could make it a little more “edgy.” The three of us met in my office. Riley wasn’t really happy about “edgy.” But I invited her to accompany me to a screening of Seidelman’s CBS movie that starred Della Reese. Riley was very sweet, and seemed genuinely excited about meeting the cast and crew and spending time with “grown-ups.”

I had no reason not to believe that she was 18. She didn’t even appear to be that old. The former agent in me said that her extreme youth should be used as a marketing tool. But at least in one instance, the gimmick cut the wrong way. I took “Holliman’s Way” to the Metropolitan Agency, where Seidelman was then handled. They never took the pilot seriously, or at least the agent in charge--since departed--didn’t, because the writer was “just a kid.”

I was infuriated with him because we already had two industry veterans who reacted positively to the material on the basis of what was on the page with no knowledge of her “youth.” Because the agent knew the “truth” beforehand, he held it against her. Nothing happened for her until manager Sexton brought her to UTA, where they jumped at the chance to market her age. OK, I was fooled. UTA was fooled. The “Felicity” producers were fooled. Disney was fooled. Fooled but not conned. The rest, as they say, is history.

Except that the truth is this: Riley Weston, or Kimberlee Kramer, as the papers reveal her birth name to be, is a terrific writer who looks very young. Do we hold that against her because she and her manager (who turns out to be a former husband) fudged on her age?

I read a recent listing for a veteran film, TV and stage actor that said he just turned 43, but I knew he was a decade older.

People lie about their age for many reasons. I think it might not have been as newsworthy if Riley Weston had claimed to be 22 rather than 19, but it doesn’t take anything away from what she can do on paper with words. And that’s really the bottom line, isn’t it?

Arthur Axelman put aside a writing career to enter the mail room of the William Morris Agency in 1972, where he began his career as a literary agent. He founded the agency’s television movie department in 1976 and packaged 150 films there before leaving after 20 years, as senior vice president, to produce television and film.