Creating Television: Conversations With the People Behind 50 Years of American TV
A Volume in LEA's Communication Series, © Copyright 2004
Robert Kubey (kubey@scils.rutgers.edu)
Director, Center for Media Studies (www.mediastudies.rutgers.edu)
Professor, Dept of Journalism & Media Studies, Rutgers University
How Does A Creator's Personal Style and Vision Survive In Television?
Each quote is followed by the page number in Creating Television where the full quote can be found.
Comedy writer Susan Harris:
A friend of mine wanted to write and she would show me scenes she had written and I said to her, “You’re not writing in your own voice. You’re writing in my voice, you’re trying to write in my voice.” I said, “You have your very own voice, find that.” That's what she went ahead and did and she’s a successful writer now. 133-134
Musical producer, Gary Smith:
The show comes from here. I'm pointing to my stomach. I'm not pointing to my eye or my brain. If it doesn't
work here, it doesn't work...I don't think things in the gut can be learned. I think this is intuitive. 239
Creator of Nickelodeon, Gerry Laybourne:
[Nickelodeon was] very much on the side of the kid. On the side of how do we make them feel better,
how do we make them feel not alone, and how do we make them laugh at some of the crazy things that happen
in their lives so they're not jaded by it? 471
Grant Tinker:
I have only two rules. One, you associate with the really superior creative people. It’s a great rule to live by.
Two, trust your own visceral reaction, your instincts. I guess mine are pretty good, if not great. God knows I’ve been wrong.
But if I live by those two rules, then everything seems to work out OK. 98
Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, co-creator, Allan Burns:
This group writing concept I just loathe. When we were doing the Mary show, of course, all the first ones were all Jim Brooks’ and my image, and we wrote a lot of the scripts in the first year or two. We had a vision, and we knew our characters, what they do, what they wouldn’t do. Now, it’s not unusual for a situation comedy to have 12, 14 writers on staff.. What kind of vision do you get from a group like that? You don’t. You can’t. 185
Question to Seinfeld co-creator, writer-producer Larry David: One of the things a veteran Seinfeld watcher appreciates is how intricately interwoven the plots often are, and how interdependent everything is. When did it occur to you to do that?
It happened in the episode called "The Busboy." It was maybe our tenth show. I was in Larry Charles' office and we were talking about the ending. Elaine's boyfriend had missed his plane to Seattle and was coming up to Jerry's apartment, and in a completely unrelated story the busboy was also coming up at the same time. And we thought it would be funny if they got in a fight in the hall. So that was the first time two separate stories ever connected. And then once that happened I thought, “Hey, this is great,” and it became a conscious thing to try and weave these stories together and it became fun to do it and very challenging.
Do you ever think you went too far with it?
You could point to a story or two where maybe it was a stretch here or there, but for the most part there's these lights bulbs going off.
The surprise element is very important. It rarely played as contrived. It must have been very hard to do, so the audience doesn’t see it coming.
Predictability was definitely something we always wanted to avoid. You’ll notice we never did any shows where two of the characters stopped talking to each other because you knew they would eventually make-up. We were very determined to try and do ideas that not only had not been done before but that no one else could do. 168
Question to Simpsons’ Creator, Matt Groening: One of the things that intrigues me about your show is that it would be difficult to do this kind of satire in another medium. It wouldn't work.
One of the things that always appealed to me about animation is the ability to take short cuts with storytelling. You can compress the story and you can have emotional things turn much faster. You can do satirical things, and because it's a medium which is considered frivolous and for kids, you can sneak up behind people and pull the rug out from under them. It's really a blast. 146
Most traditional cartoonists convey emotion by extreme exaggeration, and what I try to do is have my characters
start out looking grotesque but there’s an open quality to the line, and by shifting the shape of the eyeball just slightly
you can completely alter the mood of the character. I learned this from a book called How to Cartoon the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm.
There was a clear design to the characters which lends itself to the acting and then the animators make the characters act,
working with great recorded lines from the actors.
It’s a constant struggle, but we get effects that are beyond my wilder dreams and stuff that let’s me create beyond belief. 143-144
Question to thirtysomething co-creators, Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick: Would you agree that there often isn’t enough attention paid to story these days?
We had the benefit of two teachers at AFI who were cruel and relentless in their desire to reveal to us what the truth is of making film. They both believed that film itself is relentless, always moving forward, and it always must justify its existence. It can never be self-indulgent. It instilled in us the discipline of filling things up, and how you need to make scenes pay off. 159-160
Agnes Nixon, “Queen of the Soaps”:
Well, I just write stories for bigger paper dolls. I used to play paper dolls, long before I could read, and I would tell
stories with the dolls. I was maybe three when I started. I cut out the Sunday comic strip characters. I kept all the
cutouts in an old telephone book arranged alphabetically. I kept them segregated in terms of the characters and the
clothes they wore. I organized them and played like that for maybe five years. 69
Alvina Krauss at Northwestern changed my life. Alvina taught me acting and to know a character, not just when you
see them on stage or on the camera, but from the moment they’re born. You had to know what they’re story was....
And of course I write character-oriented shows. 70
To me, being good—that is, talented—is not nearly so important as perhaps doing good. I've always also tried to do public
service by presenting contemporary issues and disseminating information to viewers, among them teenage prostitution,
child abuse and wife abuse, alcohol, drugs, AIDS and racial prejudice. 72
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