Written By February/March 2012 : Page 8

WRITERS’ROOM OUR TURN Written By celebrates industry recognition. W hile covering the annual Hollywood rites known collectively as Awards Season, Written By found itself being rewarded by its own industry. The 2011 FOLIO: Awards, the nation’s largest competition for magazines, included Written By. During a gala ceremony in New York, FOLIO’s Eddie awards recognized the best in editorial, selected from nearly 2,000 entries across more than 100 categories. Finalists received either Gold, Silver, or Bronze awards. Written By earned three Eddies. Not surprisingly, all were in writing categories (as it should be, since the magazine represents the Writers Guild of America, West). But it was a surprise when two cover stories ranked first and second in the Best Written single article category, Media/Entertainment/Publishing: F.X. Feeney’s June 2010 cover story on Ray Bradbury, “A Lion at 90,” took a Gold (first place). Mary McNamara’s September 2010 cover story, “The Secret Life of Emma Thompson,” earned a Silver Eddie for second place. McNamara won another Silver, this one in the Best Series of Articles category. She shared recognition alongside an author you might have heard of: J.K. Rowling. McNamara’s “This Extraordinary Thing,” about Steve Kloves scripting all but one of the Harry Potter films, bookends an earlier Eddie-winning McNamara article for Written By. In 2001, she profiled Kloves before any of the film adaptations were released, and that cover story earned McNamara her first Eddie. For the magazine series, Rowling, contacted by Written By, accepted a series of lengthy email questions from McNamara. Rowling then shaped those questions into an exquisite memoir of her decade-long collaboration with Kloves: “When Steve Met Jo.” Alas, Rowling did not make an appearance at the Folio: Awards ceremony to personally accept her Silver Eddie. Open the Pod Doors Ben BlAcker’s nerdist Writers PAnel offers A listen in on the room. cided to start his own live panel show and podcast. “The Nerdist Writers Panel” is recorded in front B of an audience at Hollywood’s Meltdown Comics. The shows benefit the 826LA, the national nonprofit tutor-ing organization. The writers onstage at “The Nerdist Writers Panel” tend to be a mix-and-match of estab-lished names (Damon Lindelof, Jeff Greenstein, and Peter Tolan) and those still at the staffing level. With Blacker moderating, what ensues is a sort of group Inside the Actors Studio, only among TV writers who each have their own career paths to share. Take the panel that featured Glen Mazzara, an ex-ecutive producer of the AMC series The Walking Dead, David Slack, a writer on the CBS drama Person of Inter-est, and Norm Hiscock, of NBC’s Parks and Recreation. Slack had moved to hourlong drama after spending years writing for animated TV, while Hiscock began his career as a sketch comedy performer in Calgary before becoming a writer for the Canadian sketch series Kids in the Hall.Mazzara, meanwhile, was a relatively late-bloomer. He’d worked for years as an administrator in a New York hospital while writing spec scripts on the side; when he finally moved to L.A. to break into TV writing, he got a meeting at Nash Bridges,only to suf-fer a panic attack, sweating through his suit. Such anecdotes foster a loose atmosphere that can yield instructive nuggets. Mazzara, for example, elabo-rated on a repeated flaw he sees in the spec pilots he reads as an executive producer on The Walking Dead. “What I find is a lot of people are writing stories about revelation,” Mazzara said. “About where the main char-acter is passive, and they’re a low-level analyst and then all of a sudden they find out their boss is involved in a plot to take down the president or something. So it’s all that zoinks moment. That’s not good drama. If you look at Tony Soprano, if you look at Vic Mackey,” he said, referring to another show he had written for, The Shield, “if you look at Nurse Jackie, those people are the most interesting people in their world.” Blacker has been gratified to hear praise for the podcast from fellow TV writers he knows and those he doesn’t. He contrasted the everyday conversations between writers with the more in-depth glimpses into various writers’ rooms the podcast elicits. “I’ve been flattered by all of the working writers that are listening to the podcast,” he says. “We who work in TV really love TV, and we want to know what’s going on in the rooms of the shows that we love.” —Paul Brownfield 8 • WG AW Written B y FEBRU AR Y/MARCH 20 12 en Blacker, a writer on the CW series Supernatural, wanted to hear TV writers talking process and de-

Writers Room

OUR TURN While covering the annual Hollywood rites known collectively as Awards Season, Written By found itself being rewarded by its own industry. The 2011 FOLIO: Awards, the nation’s largest competition for magazines, included Written By. During a gala ceremony in New York, FOLIO’s Eddie awards recognized the best in editorial, selected from nearly 2,000 entries across more than 100 categories. Finalists received either Gold, Silver, or Bronze awards. Written By earned three Eddies. Not surprisingly, all were in writing categories (as it should be, since the magazine represents the Writers Guild of America, West). But it was a surprise when two cover stories ranked first and second in the Best Written single article category, Media/Entertainment/Publishing: F. X. Feeney’s June 2010 cover story on Ray Bradbury, “A Lion at 90,” took a Gold (first place). Mary McNamara’s September 2010 cover story, “The Secret Life of Emma Thompson,” earned a Silver Eddie for second place. McNamara won another Silver, this one in the Best Series of Articles category. She shared recognition alongside an author you might have heard of: J.K. Rowling. McNamara’s “This Extraordinary Thing,” about Steve Kloves scripting all but one of the Harry Potter films, bookends an earlier Eddie winning McNamara article for Written By. In 2001, she profiled Kloves before any of the film adaptations were released, and that cover story earned McNamara her first Eddie. For the magazine series, Rowling, contacted by Written By, accepted a series of lengthy email questions from McNamara. Rowling then shaped those questions into an exquisite memoir of her decade-long collaboration with Kloves: “When Steve Met Jo.” Alas, Rowling did not make an appearance at the Folio: Awards ceremony to personally accept her Silver Eddie. Open the Pod Doors Ben Blacker’s Nerdist Writers Panel offers a listen in on the room.Ben Blacker, a writer on the CW series Supernatural, wanted to hear TV writers talking process and decided to start his own live panel show and podcast. “The Nerdist Writers Panel” is recorded in front of an audience at Hollywood’s Meltdown Comics. The shows benefit the 826LA, the national nonprofit tutoring organization. The writers onstage at “The Nerdist Writers Panel” tend to be a mix-and-match of established names (Damon Lindelof, Jeff Greenstein, and Peter Tolan) and those still at the staffing level. With Blacker moderating, what ensues is a sort of group Inside the Actors Studio, only among TV writers who each have their own career paths to share. Take the panel that featured Glen Mazzara, an executive producer of the AMC series The Walking Dead, David Slack, a writer on the CBS drama Person of Interest, and Norm Hiscock, of NBC’s Parks and Recreation.Slack had moved to hourlong drama after spending years writing for animated TV, while Hiscock began his career as a sketch comedy performer in Calgary before becoming a writer for the Canadian sketch series Kids in the Hall. Mazzara, meanwhile, was a relatively latebloomer.He’d worked for years as an administrator in a New York hospital while writing spec scripts on the side; when he finally moved to L.A. to break into TV writing, he got a meeting at Nash Bridges, only to suffer a panic attack, sweating through his suit. Such anecdotes foster a loose atmosphere that can yield instructive nuggets. Mazzara, for example, elaborated on a repeated flaw he sees in the spec pilots he reads as an executive producer on The Walking Dead.“What I find is a lot of people are writing stories about revelation,” Mazzara said. “About where the main character is passive, and they’re a low-level analyst and then all of a sudden they find out their boss is involved in a plot to take down the president or something. So it’s all that zoinks moment. That’s not good drama. If you look at Tony Soprano, if you look at Vic Mackey,” he said, referring to another show he had written for, The Shield, “if you look at Nurse Jackie, those people are the most interesting people in their world.” Blacker has been gratified to hear praise for the podcast from fellow TV writers he knows and those he doesn’t. He contrasted the everyday conversations between writers with the more in-depth glimpses into various writers’ rooms the podcast elicits. “I’ve been flattered by all of the working writers that are listening to the podcast,” he says. “We who work in TV really love TV, and we want to know what’s going on in the rooms of the shows that we love.” —Paul Brownfield Table Read books from our library Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made Mostly Painless By Joseph McBride | Vintage Books “When I started teaching basic screenwriting, I had my students work on original stories, but I quickly found that this was a mistake. Since they hadn’t learned the craft, many of their stories were weak and inadequate as film material. Most were hardly original and often were rehashes of TV sitcom formulas . . .The solution I came up with was to have the entire class work on an adaptation of the same published short story.” My Hollywood Misadventures By Allan Cole “Being a writer really isn’t different than any other small business. All the rules of business apply, including keeping regular hours, if you know what’s good for you. And you’d best show up to work (even if it is a short stroll from the living room to your home office ) washed, shaved, and dressed to meet with the Suits, if any should call. For Hollywood writers like us, this meant jeans with only a few holes in them, fancy cowboy boots, and a clean shirt of some sort.” The Gripes of Rapp: The Auto/Biography of The Bickersons’ Creator, Philip Rapp By Ben Ohmart | Bearmanor Media “The love/hate relationship he had with modern humor meant Phil just couldn’t leave TV alone—always writing scripts and submitting them through his agent and personal contacts. Occasionally, it paid off. The 1970s brought a lot of work and false starts, but there was nothing Phil liked better than the thrill of the game.” Mother Justification Graham Yost on creating—and killing—one evil mother. In Justified’s first season, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens eliminated a whole passel of Harlan County varmints, only to be met in Season 2 with an adversary who managed to surpass them all. Mags Bennett was a villain with a twinkle in her eye and poison moonshine in her jar. When she met her end in the gripping Season 2 finale, fans mourned their loss, including show creator, executive producer, and showrunner Graham Yost.He explains how the great and terrible Mags came into being, and why he had to let her go. Raylan and the show were based on the Elmore Leonard novella Fire in the Hole. Yost notes that Leonard enjoys the resulting FX show so much, he’s written more stories about Raylan. “We have the rights to the stories,” says Yost. “And because he’s Elmore, he understands the business.He said, ‘Just hang ’em up and strip ’em for parts.’” In one tale, Leonard created Purvis, a criminal patriarch. Yost and his team stripped one key part, turning Purvis into a woman. “We’d heard about a famous criminal matriarch in Harlan, Mags Bailey, who lived to be a hundred years old,” recalls Yost. “She nurtured kids, putting them through law school so the family would have lawyers to work for them. She was this charismatic character, very beloved, but also very dangerous. That intrigued us. So we kept the name Mags but came up with our own character.” And what a character she was. When her sons Dickie and Coover went behind her back to cash government checks from a neighbor that she had murdered, they drew Raylan’s unwelcome attention. To punish them, Mags took a ball-peen hammer to Coover’s hand, while telling Dickie she wasn’t going after him because he was already useless (he had a limp).“As it is, I have to hurt Coover, and I like Coover!” she declared, in a moment as funny as it was sick. Says Yost, “That’s basically a ripoff. In The Long Goodbye, the director Mark Rydell plays this thug and smashes a Coke bottle across his girlfriend’s face, and says to Elliott Gould, ‘Now, that’s someone I love!’” After Mags savagely destroyed Coover’s fingers (but as she kindly pointed out, not on his gun hand), the poor guy hugged her and cried, ‘Mom, I’m sorry, I love you,’ while she sat back coldly and contemplated her next move. (Margo Martindale’s Mags won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress.) How could Yost get rid of such an indelible character? “I felt that we’d pulled all the big story that we could think of at that point. We can’t just keep accumulating bad guys. We’ve always got Boyd,” says Yost, speaking of Raylan’s favorite nemesis. Boyd Crowder spent much of Season 2 trying to go good. It was, thankfully for viewers, a futile effort. “Part of the reason we came up with Mags last year is that we knew we needed another threat for Raylan, another focus, while Boyd got fully back into his badassery.” The writers came up with Mags’ exit strategy early in the season. “The ending gave us a target that felt satisfying yet surprising,” Yost notes. She poisoned herself while sharing some moonshine with Raylan, in a poetic scene that harkened back to the murder of her benighted neighbor. When it came time to plot out the season now underway, Yost didn’t try to top Mags. Instead, the new bad guy, Quarles, is a complete stranger to Harlan and its ways. “It just felt like would be fun, the idea of a bad guy coming into town saying, I know how to do this, I will show these hicks how to do it, and the trouble that ensues from that.” Quarles is a terrific character, in all his dapper psychotic glee, but there’s one hick who would have dispatched that sucker in the time it takes to swing a hammer. —Lisa Rosen

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