The Corners You Know & The Corners You Show

A LITTLE LESS than two months ago, just before I left Toronto, I sat in a club in the west end and watched three Canadian TV writers pay tribute to a friend.  

This was at the WGC Screenwriting Awards, a fete that's known for having the fastest, no B.S. show on the block.  In fact, once upon a time (before my time) I have it on good authority that the "winners" used to be chosen by throwing a dart at a dart board. Or something like that.

Anyway, on this night, Malcolm MacRury (ZoS, and the upcoming Crash & Burn (formerly Lawyers, Guns & Money,) Peter Mohan, (Blood Ties, Mutant X, The Bridge) and Peter Mitchell (Cold Squad, Traders & too many other shows to count) stood up and feted David Cole with a rather unusual tribute: Two grand (which they raised themselves) that would go to one of the night's winners. It was meant to be "mad money" -- to be spent not on research, or on a computer -- but on something impractical or fun; something that made life better.

This was meant in tribute to Cole, a longtime Canadian TV scribe who died last year.  Famous for his sense of humor, Cole had a long and sometimes bumpy career.  Like a lot of us, he had his share of troubles, but everyone who knew him spoke of his laugh and his sense of humor as his most enduring quality.

I met Cole only briefly, toward the end of his life, when we worked together on an animated series. I freelanced a few episodes, and he story edited -- taking the brunt of the contradictory notes from three different international broadcasters. Such is the gig.

On one of those afternoons, Cole and I got talking about the other thing that we had in common.  I had replaced him on a show a couple of years before.  This show, a sci-fi drama that shot in South Africa, had had a famously tempestuous development history, which resulted in the departure of the entire first writing team.  As one of the replacements, I went on to see a bunch of craziness, and learn an awful lot. After freelancing for years, this had been my first steady gig.

That day, Cole and I swapped stories about the show -- I heard about the insanity that preceded my arrival, and caught him up a bit on what followed his departure.  We shared a bunch of good natured laughs about it all.

What I didn't tell him; what, in fact, I never told anybody up til now (and you'll keep it to yourself, won't you, gentle reader?) was that part of what had gotten me through that experience, and part of what shaped the way I framed and learned from that experience, was David Cole.

See, when I went to Cape Town, I didn't just take over Cole's job (though at a much lower level; I was green as hell,) I took over his flat.  

Amidst the flat owner's many books and sundries, there were a couple of things that Cole had left behind.  One of those things was a yellow legal pad.

The pad wasn't full; there were only about fifteen pages there.  A few were filled with an unfinished, unaddressed letter. It was personal;  I gave it a cursory glance and threw it away.  But next, there were a series of notes -- notes that detailed his growing frustration with the show and the process that would eventually cause him to leave.  These notes were hilarious, and scabrous, and though they didn't really reflect the show that I'd eventually help to shape and craft -- they did presage an experience I'd have on another show a couple years later.

The notes came from a place of a writer who was frustrated and at the end of his rope by being boxed in, let down, and punk'd about by a creative process that divorced the decision-making from the creative.  It was a series of jots that I never forgot. And it was my introduction to the way that Canadian TV of the time sometimes went wrong.

Because it was so hard to finance, the producers of Canadian fare wielded tremendous power. Unlike the U.S. system of TV, you didn't rise through the ranks of the writing department to assume control of the creative enterprise.  In in its simplest form, the person who filled out the forms and got the financing called the shots.  Many of these producers cut their teeth as line producers, often on U.S. service fare that shot in Canada.  And eventually they grew tired of this; constantly having to take orders from Americans. Couldn't they call the shots, finally? Couldn't they be the creative force?  

So came the rise of the Canadian "Creative Producer." 

Now, to be fair, some of these creative producers were creative and collaborative. But most of them weren't writers, and didn't have that skillset. So they hired writers. And, not to put too fine a point on roughly a jillion stories I've heard over the last few years -- but often, they abused them.  There was resentment, maybe, because they couldn't do what the writer could. There was entitlement, surely. They thought nothing of engaging a "word slave" whose job it was to take poorly ordered cocktail napkins and wild whims and "write them up," as if it was as easy and as dull an endeavour as cleaning out a closet. 

More often than not, this resulted in a terrible disconnect. Writers that did well did so because they were "easy to work with" and not "good." Writers who were good, and who fought for a creative vision, were tagged as difficult, and became stressed out and miserable because they weren't having a good time writing, and found themselves having to take marching orders from people who didn't understand story, the process, or even how to talk to writers.

And hanging over it all was the peculiar Canadian siren song, that others would repeat almost constantly: "if you were really any good, why don't you go to the United States?"

Over the last few years, there's been a hard, long process of trying to make the case of the need for the person with the "Creative Vision" to be the writer; and for that writer to have access to the decision-making, the levers of power and also, too, the networks. The gatekeepers. The people who gave notes.  In the past, the idea was to keep the writer as far away from that as possible here.  

But for better or worse, many people started to realize that the "word slaves" approach wasn't the right one.  More frequent story rooms, showrunners -- writers who could execute a creative vision needed to have the space to do that, or the shows would forever suck.

Every gain in this area has been hard won. And not to sound like a broken record, but the shows that have been our greatest successes, whether you measure that by critical or ratings success -- Slings & Arrows, Corner Gas, Durham County, DaVinci's Inquest, Intelligence -- have come from having empowered writers.

There's been pushback along the way, of course.  It's very popular these days to pair with new or inexperienced writers,  the thought being that they're less likely to be "difficult" (ie: to know how to, or even think of pushing for a certain creative vision.)  A lot of times this backfires, because all it means is that you have writers who don't have the experience to fix something, and producers who value their control more highly than quality execution.)

I've said this before, and I'll say it again here.  Writers are no picnic.  We can be prickly and needy. We have huge egos, (not actor-sized, but still) and can sometimes spend a lot of time inside our heads. Anybody who's married or dating a writer, I give you full props. It's not easy.

Because part of the job is to be very serious about what you do, even if the thing you're doing isn't very serious at all. I was fortunate enough to spend a little bit of time a couple days back with Kari Lizer, who's the Showrunner and Creator of The New Adventures of Old Christine. She was full of stories of her time on Will & Grace, and the ups and downs of her own show.  She was warm and open hearted, and talked of a lot of hurtful lessons learned only through fighting for it.   Ron Moore, too, who dazzled so many of us with his re-interpretation of Battlestar Galactica, told several stories that mainly pointed to the need to stick up for yourself, and maintain your creative integrity, even if that means walking away at the hardest possible time.

It's strange to think of things this way, but here goes: the process of making a Friday Night Lights, or The Wire, or The Shield, is exactly the same process that results in Being Erica.  It's just as much work to conceive of, break story for, and execute a little confection like Ugly Betty or Reaper or Cupid as it is to make The West Wing.  You have to commit to it. And that requires a singular level of attention, and craft, and vision.

Awhile back, on Karen Walton's inkcanada discussion board, there was a thread about Great Canadian Television characters.  Someone brought up the character of Olivia on Street Legal, a CBC legal drama that ran to critical derision and great ratings in the late 80's, early 90's.  Olivia was a character who was nowhere on Canadian TV (arguably not really on American TV at the time, either) -- a tough, unapologetic, empowered working woman who wasn't afraid to use her looks or any advantage to get what she wanted -- but could just as easily get it another way.  Street Legal was fun, but it was by no means a great show. Yet that indelible character (which put Cynthia Dale on the Canadian showbiz map) shook up the show, knocked it on its ass, and made it memorable. It was great hearing comments in the thread from one of the people who'd brought that character to life; (David Cole had a hand in that, too) how she reflected in some ways the women they saw around them (these were all young lions, then) but didn't see on TV.  

It's through swapping these stories, stories of how stuff goes down, how it comes to be, that TV writers learn their true craft.  It's part of the reason I write this blog; it's the reason why people like me and Karen Walton, and many others try so hard to get writers together; to forge a community.

That's the framing with which I approached the entry I wrote over the weekend, where I took exception at a Canadian producer's comments on finding writers for Flashpoint.

Well, today in the Globe & Mail, freshly returned soccer cum TV scribe John Doyle takes exception to my comments, and rushes to the producer's defence.

That's all well and good.  Doyle's a fine writer.  I was singing his praises not two nights ago in Banff, at the St. James Gate pub, as a guy who got the value of making the cultural case for a homegrown industry.  The guy I was talking to grimaced.  No fan of the Doyle was he, but I grudgingly got him to admit in the end that the man was right more often than wrong.

But the thing is, being "right" has an awful lot to do with where you shine the spotlight, and how you choose to frame the discussion.  I know there are producers in Canada who probably hate my guts because of the way I write on this blog sometimes, and I know there are others who're just fine with me, because they, like me, think the quality of the product is the most important thing.  And who define quality the same way I do:  not "HBO" necessarily, but the best execution of whatever the thing is supposed to be) Creative relationships are hard to maintain at the best of times.  But there are many Producers and Writers who are close; who work well together even here.

Doyle chooses to shine his spotlight one way; categorizing the Banff TV festival as an example of the lofty writers with pretensions all getting together. So far as I know, the last time that Doyle and I were at the Fest, it was two years ago. There was indeed a contingent of Canadian TV writers there, which at the time was actually unusual.  See, Banff has, in the past, been that wonderfully Canadian creation: a place where everybody (being network types, sales people, producers) talks creativity, while the creative people are nowhere to be seen. 

I'm not going to say that producing isn't a creative act. I've learned otherwise, through the wise counsel (and example) of several good producers. But Doyle's spotlight fails to illuminate the -- let's call it infiltration of Banff -- as part of the long fight to get TV writers in this country above the level of the word slave.

That's fine.  Everybody's allowed their contradictions.  Doyle points to Flashpoint as a critical success because it's commercial.   Yet his haranguing of the last show I worked on, The Border, has verged on the operatic; and that's a show that I always described as "a good cheeseburger" to anybody who asked.  He's also poked Being Erica quite a few times for being light and airy.

Doyle is not above playing his favorites, whether they be certain writers or certain shows.  Any longtime reader will know of his great admiration of Chris Haddock, or Mike Clattenburg of the Trailer Park Boys.  People at CBC are convinced he's out to get them.  Others have intimated darkly about some connection to CTV Globemedia influencing his reviews.  And to every single one of those people I say:  don't be an idiot.  Tom Shales might have been one of the best TV critics that ever wrote a word, and his prickliness makes Doyle look like a piker. 

If I wanted to, I could easily cherry pick certain examples from my own experiences and make Doyle's case for the majority of Canadian TV writers being full of themselves and pretentious.   

I've gotten angry emails over a blog entry where I contrasted a couple of shows.

I've had people send me emails talking about "we" when, far as I could tell, they were referring only to themselves.  

I've had people quote their New York Times reviews at me to refute something I wrote.

I had a crazy person rant at me for fifteen minutes a few months ago because I was somehow responsible for counselling, or promoting the death of art on TV. Or something like that.  I'm not sure.  I have a witness, though. 

I even have had the experience of the full-0f-themselves writer who took a mild joke I made about screenwriters in general, and used it to stir up trouble for me with some professional colleagues. It happens. 

But I choose to see these incidents, and others like them, as not representative of the whole of the experience, and the attitude, of the Canadian TV scribe.  There's plenty more stuff I could say on the subject, but that's all Inside Baseball, and despite what some people think, there's a whole heckuva lot that I *don't* talk about here.

Nope. No.  In the end, I choose to look into the corners I know, and show the spirit of what caused those three friends to get up and give away two grand to some other writer in tribute, because they know how hard it's been, and how hard it will continue to be, to maintain a sunny disposition and sense of humour in the face of the challenges of creation in this country.  A little mad money helps.  And so does a little community. That's the corner I choose to show.

My friend Mark (who co-created Flashpoint) came to Banff this year to do a panel talk on that show's success with an exec from CBS and his wife (and co-creator) Stephanie Morgenstern. He said before the panel, "Sometimes it's nice to come out and get a little pat on the head."

And it's true.  Mark and Steph have high powered agents with CAA now, and so have a little more than that head pat to help them through, but if there aren't always others to give that little pat, maybe it's up to us to give it to each other a little more.  That's the corner I choose to show. 

After four days in a mostly stuffy room, listening to speaker after speaker, a woman of my acquaintance (and fellow showrunner program participant) asked me last night at the Gate, "So are you going to Los Angeles?" And I shrugged.  Cause, man, all I know is that in five years, working in this job has taken me from Vancouver to St. John's to South Africa and back -- a crazy journey. So who knows, really?  I'd like to think that what we're fighting for here is the chance to play our craft as writers and not have to go to the USA. But maybe that's still a naive proposition. Still. That's the corner I choose to show.

Oh, and that guy who grimaced when I big-upped Doyle? You know how I got him to turn his opinion around?   I smiled and said, "come on, the guy's taken shots at me, too, and I'm still reading him."

And the guy smiled, nodded, and conceded the point. 

I'm pretty confident about the corners I know, and the corners I show -- to writer peeps and fellow travellers.  I loves me my cheeseburger shows and my lofty HBO shows. (And even my cheeseburger HBO shows...ahem True Blood ahem...)

I guess that's gotta be enough.