Written By Summer 2012 : Page 39
Written By LisA rosen portrAits By JiLLy WendeLL Here’s the hustle: Neal Caffrey, brilliant forger, thief, and con artist, is caught by intrepid FBI agent Peter Burke after years of pursuit. In a work-release program from prison, Neal is given a tracking anklet and uses his criminal mind to help Peter solve crimes. Not gritty crimes that re-quire initials in the show’s title—fancy crimes, complete with bon mots and ascots and scandals of the louche leisure class. As Neal and Peter work together, their mutual respect blossoms into an uneasy friendship. Both are aware that at any moment one might betray the other. Far-fetched? Sure, until you recall that the cat-and-mouse caper Catch Me If You Can was based on the true tale of con man–turned– FBI consultant Frank Abagnale Jr. “I always imagined White Collar starts where that movie ended,” says co-producer Jim Campolongo. “There’s so much more story to tell.” None of that was part of creator/executive producer/show-runner Jeff Eastin’s original pitch however. He envisioned a darker story. “Everyone wants to do The Shield ; they want that grit,” he says, seated in his office. He points to a Shield poster leaning against a wall behind him. (Shawn Ryan broke in and left it there, one of a series of exchanged pranks.) Eastin first thought of a Vic Mackey–type cop convicted of killing his partner and then released on a tracking anklet to solve crimes. Fox Television Studio (FTVS) wanted to take the pitch to USA, a network built around shows with beautiful people excelling at what they do. Eastin realized his pitch didn’t fit their bill. “So FTVS said, ‘Why don’t you run it through the USA ‘Blue Sky’ filter?’” He did, and it came out looking like a million bucks. Or bearer bonds, as the case may be. Worried that Neal would still come off as too dangerous, at the last minute he added Kate, Neal’s star-crossed lover, “to hu-manize him by making him a romantic, which helped the series quite a bit,” says Eastin. “Even though we’ve moved on from that mythology, it gave him a passion outside of being a crook.” On the Make Also remarkably, Eastin had never been to Manhattan be-fore he shot the pilot. He and his writers work out of Wood-land Hills, California, and travel to New York for their epi-sodes. Says Campolongo, “Sometimes I’ll call a good friend who lives in New York, and say, ‘I need to rob a bank in Harlem—what would you suggest?’” They rely on FBI consultant Tom Barden and alleged con artist Simon Lovell for technical assistance. “Simon is great with particular beats, like how to make picking a lock for the 17th time interesting,” says executive story editor Channing Powell. As entertaining as the cons and heists are, they’re secondary to the conflicted relationship at the show’s core. “The A-case is so hard, in part, because it has to be simple,” says story editor Dan Shattuck. “We’re not trying to do CSI s, where every act is a different suspect. As a rule, we try to know our bad guy and the crime up front, and then it’s all a matter of what we do to take him down and how do we have fun in the interim.” That includes everything from base-jumping off skyscrapers to sunken U-boats filled with stolen treasure. It’s laced with the kind of snappy banter that fills Howard Hawks movies. It all, improbably, works. The show’s fourth season premieres July 10. The Setup In a sea of crime procedurals, it’s unusual to find one that can revolve around a Degas instead of a dead body. “The cool thing about white-collar crime, especially art crime, is that it’s the one place where the crime itself is beautiful,” Eastin says. That concept informed the setting. “I said at the beginning, ‘This isn’t down-in-the-gutter New York. We’re going to show it like they shoot Sex and the City and make it gorgeous.’ ” Neal’s quite debonair himself, calling up Cary Grant from To Catch a Thief, which, remarkably, Eastin has yet to see. What’s more improbable than the show itself is how the writ-ers ended up working on it—starting with Eastin. A small-town boy in Colorado who discovered Super 8 cameras about the same time Star Wars came out, he spent his childhood alternately saving up to buy film and shooting it. “My dad’s an art teacher,” he notes—Aha! The art connection!—“and probably unlike most parents, they encouraged this. They’d hold the pole that held the flying saucer on the string.” Attending Colorado State University–Fort Collins with a ma-jor in Computer Science, back when that meant programming and punch cards, he walked into the lab one day and surveyed his surroundings as if for the first time. “There were all these heavy guys with beards and pasty white skin, never getting any sun, and I thought, I can’t do this .” Switching to broadcast journalism, he found a sympathetic professor who unearthed equipment from a SUMMER 20 12 WG A W Written By • 39
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