Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  In addition, when Season One began, Dawson’s Creek was not only a happy set on which to work, my understanding is that it basked in what I have heard repeatedly described as a kind of magical glow. The cast and crew were all hunkered down, filming and living, in Wilmington, North Carolina, far removed from smog, traffic, and the standard trials and tribulations of show business. James Van Der Beek and Josh Jackson were roommates and great friends. The cast was bonded. However, by the middle of Season Two, the personal relationships of the actors, as well as their personal feelings about the scripts they were given, became a factor in how the show was written and produced.

  Now, it’s not uncommon for actors to have problems, particularly when they become celebrity actors. When I was working at Universal, Gerald McRaney had some very big and emotional “story issues” very early on when Major Dad was trying to find its way. However, I watched Universal’s studio executives rectify those problems in a swift and unambiguous manner, which was beneficial not only to the show and the studio but to the actor as well. But by the time Dawson’s Creek was born, powerful autonomous studio executives had gone the way of the powerful autonomous studio. The actors often called the network and the network often placated situations. But the only true protection the actors had came from their creative leader, their showrunner. And by the middle of Season Two the Dawson’s Creek showrunner, according to sources associated with the show, was holed up, writing scripts piecemeal and trying to hold it all together.

  By the middle of Season Two, barely a year into the life of the show, the coexecutive producer had “left” (though of course he was paid for the whole season), stories were not being developed on time, production deadlines were missed, and scripts stopped showing up when they were supposed to. This meant that sets could not be built. Directors could not prepare. Roles could not be cast. Actors could not understand their character arcs. They couldn’t even learn their lines. Scenes, not scripts but individual scenes, written out of context would simply appear on set in the morning, moments before they were to shoot. It’s no wonder that Dawson’s Creek was going south. One former writer on the show during this time characterized it as “the Nixon White House.”

  “It will definitely return to a first-season sensibility,” promised the WB’s Jordan Levin in an interview with Entertainment Weekly about the time I was hired. “Dawson will have something to say, instead of the cast reacting to bigger-than-life plots.”

  How did a promising and important show get like this?

  One of the first things you have to understand is that Dawson’s Creek was not just a television show. It was a launching pad. When I worked at Ogilvy & Mather, we made commercials and placed them on TV shows. A decade and a half later, TV shows like Dawson’s were the commercials.

  This played out in many ways. The most obvious was in advertiser-bought product placement. By no means was the WB the first entertainment outlet to use product placement. Forrest Gump chugged Dr Pepper. E.T. loved Reese’s Pieces. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were big fans of Domino’s. But Dawson’s was one of the first TV shows to accomplish the seamless amalgamation of entertainment and merchandising. Before the series debut, our actors appeared in J. Crew catalogs. All four of them. Once on the air, they wore J. Crew clothes on the show. In Season Three American Eagle became the “official Dawson’s Creek” clothing provider. Our characters drove Ford automobiles that were provided by Ford for this purpose. Boxes of footwear from a variety of companies cluttered actors’ trailers. And it wasn’t long before actual story lines were written around the products. Now called “product integration,” TV writers performed duties that were identical to the ones done by copywriters at Ogilvy & Mather, making it clear that The Truman Show was in no way just an impossible spoof.

  One of the best ways to understand what happened is to look at how music was used on the show. The WB, a TV network, did more for the failing music industry than Columbia or Epic or any of Sony Music’s brands ever could have. Dawson’s featured pop music prominently throughout all episodes. Songs were often earmarked during story sessions at exactly the same time that stories were being conceived.

  This was a great setup for the studio. A band would give Sony a discount or just waive the license fees for their songs, allowing Dawson’s to play a hot band’s music fairly cheaply under scenes. In return, at the end of an episode, the show would replay five seconds of the band’s music while showing a shot of the band’s CD cover.

  Of course, Sony was actually advertising for itself, as much of this music ended up on the million-selling Songs of Dawson’s Creek compilation CDs. In fact, though the show sometimes featured new indie-label artists, the vast majority of the music came from the Sony label. Shawn Colvin, Wood, Shooter, Shawn Mullins, Adam Cohen, Lara Fabian, Train, Five For Fighting, Nine Days, the Jayhawks, Pete Yorn, Splender, Wheatus, Evan and Jaron, Heather Nova, Jessica Simpson, all featured on the series, all featured on the compilation CDs, all on the Sony label. Many of these artists also performed at events like the Dawson’s Creek and Ford Focus music concerts. Critically acclaimed but little-known artists became overnight sensations after their songs ran on Dawson’s Creek. Paula Cole—not on our studio’s label but on our network’s label, WEA/Warner Brothers—became an international celebrity.

  And music was just the beginning. When our characters watched a movie, or when something played on television, more often than not it was a Sony title. When they played a video game, it was Crash Bandicoot, a Sony title, on the Sony PlayStation. Sony put out all the expected Dawson’s Creek paraphernalia, posters, calendars, T-shirts, and whatnot. Sony Consumer Products also aligned with WTAA International to manufacture a line of Dawson’s Creek bottled water, and with 1-800-FLOWERS.COM to release a line of Dawson’s Creek flower bouquets. Much of this stuff, as well as DVDs of the show, could be purchased at dawsonscreek.com, where fans could not only chat about the show, but tell us what they wanted to see next. The wishes of viewers had a very strong impact on the direction of the series. In fact, staff members were hired to interact regularly with fans online. There were Dawson’s Creek books and magazines, and promotional feature articles placed in other magazines that were owned by the network’s parent company, TimeWarner. New actors were planted on the show and given story lines in which they had relationships with the star actors, for the express purpose of spinning the new actors off onto their own WB shows. In the past, TV shows had their merchandising elements. I loved my Partridge Family lunchbox. But this was different. Commercialism was not simply a corollary of the show, it was the soul. We were not simply a pop TV series, we were a brand.

  Even before it premiered, Dawson’s was promoted like a major motion picture. One-sheets (movie posters) were all over bus stops. Movie-style billboards were all over town. There was a major radio campaign, a major television campaign, trailers shown to movie audiences in theaters. There are reports that the WB even hired a marketing unit of Procter & Gamble to leak an advance script of the show to teens in order to create word-of-mouth excitement. Never before in television history had there been so much advance buzz about a series. Forget about the kick-ass pilot ratings, Dawson’s Creek was quite literally a hit before it aired.

  So if you want to know what happened to Dawson’s Creek in its second season, you have to understand that there were really two Dawson’s Creeks. There was this whirlwind of synergistic merchandising and commercialism swirling around in a network-created vortex of buzz, fueled by controversy and press. And then there was the actual television show.

  Likewise, there were really two Kevin Williamsons. At the center of all this tornadic hype and money, there was the overnight star, the artist on the billboard, the legend. And then there was Kevin Williamson, alone at his computer—Kevin Williamson the writer.

  And Kevin Williamson the writer did the best he could do when confronted for the first time not with press interviews but with the realities of making a full season of twenty-two TV episodes. This was not
Buffy creator Joss Whedon, who had a fully realized show on his hands and was fully prepared to take it somewhere else if the network screwed with him—which he eventually did by taking Buffy to UPN in 2001. This was the result of what post–Fin-Syn Hollywood was doing to gifted and promising young writers in the late nineties. It was a result of the downfall of training that was once a fundamental part of the culture at places like MTM, and it played out in similar ways all over town during this time.

  You see, once you cut through all the urban legend and all the PR releases, what you had in reality was a kid from the South with a cool personal story who had once sold a screenplay but who had never ever worked in network television before. With no mentor to help him, no experienced writer to train him, no studio to back him, with a powerful network that had an agenda and the only creative consistency coming from a producer who did not write, Kevin was in a tough spot. He tried not to believe his own press. He tried to rely on writer’s instinct and the passion that had got him here, but running a TV show takes a hell of a lot more than that, especially when you are on your own. As one high-level producer on the show put it, “Kevin started believing his own hype.” In the end, Kevin’s own words to Entertainment Weekly summed it up: “It’s best I’m not part of it this year.” And though there are various and differing accounts of under what terms he left, he left. The one-time “voice of a generation” moved on from his hit series to develop, write, and produce Wasteland, Teaching Mrs. Tingle, and Glory Days, a path with many more downs than ups that would ultimately lead him back to Dawson’s, years later, to cowrite its final episode—when it was, in fact, a very different show from the one he had once created.

  Two weeks to the day after we started Dawson’s Creek Season Three with Tammy Ader at the helm, we were joined by Alex Gansa who, it was explained to us, would be a co-showrunner. Now, I will not recount the experiences where I had seen or heard of this sort of arrangement enacted before, because I think even the layman is savvy enough to understand that this was destined to be about as successful as putting two captains in charge of a nuclear submarine during wartime.

  Here’s the best and most succinct way I can explain the situation. During the very first hour of his very first day of work, Alex told all of us that not only was this show something he didn’t really get, but that he was essentially doing it for the money and because next season he would get to develop full-time. He then proceeded to tell the entire room of writers and assistants a story about how his personal corporation, Cherry Pie Productions, got its name. It was a rather off-color story told with masterful detail about how when Alex was a little boy he came upon a man in the woods who was performing cunnilingus on a menstruating woman.

  At that point, on his first day, the story room understood his assertion that his sensibilities were probably not quite in line with those of a coming-of-age teen soap.

  How much of the decision to hire him was due to a lack of confidence in Tammy I cannot be entirely sure, but I don’t think it was significant. I know that the intent was there well before Tammy began working in the story room, and I know Sony loved her and I know she had proven herself to be an excellent producer on shows like Party of Five and Sisters.

  What you have to understand is that Columbia TriStar’s corporate strategy was known throughout town as “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.” During the gold-rush years of the nineties, CTTV was always a leader in development and pilot production, but 1999 was a record year. That season I started on Dawson’s, CTTV was producing more pilots than any other studio in Hollywood. They also rang up about $75 million in writer development deals, like Alex’s. You see, with no network to guarantee access for their shows, and getting pushed around by pip-squeak little start-ups like the WB, the best CTTV could do was develop as many shows as possible and hope that something stuck.

  And when something did stick, like Dawson’s Creek, they applied this same thinking to staffing. I know it seems crazy, but CTTV wasn’t the only company behaving this way. This was the corporate pathology throughout Hollywood at this time.

  So, along with the corner we were painted into from the previous season, Alex now had to deal with the tracks that Tammy had lain, and these were quite different from the ones that he would have set forth had he been in the room two weeks earlier. It was tense. Gina’s hair-twirling increased with startling velocity. Tammy’s knee began to shake for extended periods of time under the table. I pitched an ever-imaginative amount of bullshit. And Tom kept silently grinning. Alex, not to be outdone, I suppose, produced an odd device that he brought to work with him, a Batchler sheep castrator, which he would grip in his hands whenever he was forced to take a call from an increasingly freaking-out James Van Der Beek. Paul was on the verge of a heart attack.

  And on top of all of this, the more we sat in that insane room, the more we realized that the damn show wasn’t about anything. The network PR’s little slogan sure was nifty: Can four friends grow up without growing apart? But try writing that every week. Try breaking that into acts and scenes and beats. What does it mean? The fact is, we had no doctors or lawyers or cops, nothing inherently driving the story every week. We had a theme, and a pretty place to shoot, but no franchise.

  You can just imagine the kinds of absurd stories we came up with over the next few weeks. Bad girl Jen Lindley (Michelle Williams) somehow became the head of the cheerleading squad. Along with the world’s most provocative cheerleading outfit, we had her in fishnet stockings and army boots. It was bizarre. The hooker in the Risky Business story (played by Brittany Daniel) somehow ended up in future story lines doing all sorts of weird, unexplained things, like breaking into Jen’s grandmother’s house. We had a bunch of drag queens show up as the entertainment for a formal homecoming party. I wrote an episode, #304, where film geek Dawson gives a rousing speech to the entire school football team, of which his father is now suddenly the coach and just out-of-the-closet Jack suddenly the star player. In the original teaser of that episode—which I wrote days after my daughter, Sophie, was born on July 4th—I wrote a scene where the audience learns that one of the male characters is circumcised and one is not. While I was instructed not to use the terms “anteater” and “fireman’s hat,” the original draft was as follows:

  Riffling through a closet, the guys come across Dawson’s Baby Book. A PHOTOGRAPH falls out.

  Pacey: Oh, look at this artifact, Dawson’s first baby picture in his birthday suit.

  Pacey picks it up and the guys stare at it. Pacey looks not only surprised, but a little startled.

  Pacey: Wow.

  Dawson: What?

  Pacey: I’ve known you since birth, man, but I’ve never known this about you.

  Dawson: Hey, it’s not like I was given a choice in whether or not it was done.

  Pacey: We never are. We never are.

  Fortunately, Greg Berlanti, who was made squeamish by the idea of the scene from the moment I brought it up, had the good sense to suggest in strong terms that it be removed. I followed his suggestion.

  As you can see, we were floundering, to say the least. And it was right about this time that Greg pitched the Kiss. Frankly, it was very exciting. We knew we were on to something. Both Tammy and Alex immediately responded. Bonnie and Hadley made a lot of noise about it. There was a great deal of jumping up and down from seats, grabbing colored markers, and writing stuff on the boards. Paul was in heaven.

  The fact is, at that moment, Greg had invented Dawson’s Creek, the TV series. And we would soon learn that kissing Katie Holmes was the franchise. However, before we were able to put the idea into action and realize just what we had, the bottom kind of fell out on the show. This started when Tammy turned in her first draft.

  The first script of the season did end up loosely and referentially following Risky Business. It featured Dawson on a powerboat about to have sex with a stripper named Eve (Brittany Daniel), and Joey (Katie Holmes) taking her shirt off à la Hyperion Bay. The response to T
ammy’s script was not one that she liked, and within a day or two of turning it in she was off the show. Whether she was fired or quit seemed to be a matter of opinion, just as it was with Joe Dougherty. And just like Joe, of course, she still collected her pay. None of this was relevant for long though, as she quickly developed Strong Medicine for Sony.

  At this point, Alex took over entirely and the series really began to spin out of control. In a winding plot that we had written ourselves into, somehow Eve is revealed to be Jen’s half-sister. Once we premiered, the fans were not only confused, they were getting angry. And the actors were nothing short of enraged with what we were sending to Wilmington. With no studio to back them, with no network presence on location, they called our offices constantly. I’d walk by Alex’s office and see the poor guy in there, squeezing that sheep castrator, trying to assert authority even though he effectively had none. He just wanted to make a quick buck and develop his own ideas, not deal with this shit.

  After the first few episodes aired, freelancers were brought in to write scripts. One of the freelancers was a young woman named Heidi Ferrer. Heidi worked for about a week with the writing staff and developed a story that featured Michelle Williams. We had felt that her character, Jen, was being underutilized that season, and we wanted to give her more screen time. After we helped Heidi create a story that we all liked, she went into a conference room to pitch it over the speakerphone to the studio and network. I was with her when she did this, and as far as I can remember only John Litvack responded to her story.

  Heidi’s pitch did not go very well. Presumably fed up with how the show was being managed, John had a great deal of notes for Heidi. He repeatedly interrupted her while she pitched to the triangular Polycom speakerphone. “What’s the story! What’s the story!” he yelled. He did not want to hear a story that featured Michelle Williams. But that’s what Heidi had, so that’s what she pitched, with growing anxiety, increasing her tempo and volume until, finally, John Litvack simply cut her off: “I don’t care about that chipmunk-cheeked cunt!”