Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  I liked Greg Prange a lot, not only because he always welcomed me to his creek, but because I felt that he was doing a necessary and virtually impossible job bridging the gap between both coasts. Whenever I arrived I always went straight to his office for the update. With the weather channel constantly running silently in the background—Wilmington is a tropical-storm magnet and production is a slave to weather—Prange would fill me in on everything from how the prep with the director was going, to the general mood of the crew, to why the episode I was there to produce was absolutely unproducible. (Whether it meant borrowing money from the budgets of other episodes or slyly talking me into cutting entire scenes, he would, of course, always somehow find a way to make them producible.)

  My second stop after that was to the shoot. Even if it was very late and I was completely jet-lagged, I always made sure I did this. Sometimes this meant a quick walk over to the soundstage. But more often it meant hopping in my rented Taurus and driving out to a location. Along with the exterior work at Dawson’s and Jen’s houses out on the creek, we shot interiors and exteriors throughout Wilmington, especially in the downtown area. These were easy to find. You just looked for all the trucks and the teamsters that drive them, who would invariably be standing around smoking cigars and barbecuing chicken wings.

  When a TV crew works on location, they basically set up an entire mini-city in a matter of hours. Our location shoots included a large 30' x 30' tent where meals were eaten, as many as ten trucks for lighting, properties, costumes, cameras, and such, and five huge trailers, some for the actors, some that served as bathrooms, and one that was the Hair & Makeup trailer. After Prange’s office, this was where I always went next upon arrival in Wilmington, as I quickly learned that Hair & Makeup was where the true power of a TV series resided.

  Walking into the Hair & Makeup trailer on location at one in the morning was always a bracing experience. You would step out of the humid, chigger-filled darkness into a world of bright lights, happy music, and every kind of stage makeup imaginable. It feels like a high school musical crammed into a mobile home. Hairdressers skirt about actors, washing them, rinsing them, blow-drying them to perfection. Makeup artists, tool belts strapped around their waists laden with cosmetics, create faces. Ordinary pretty faces that would go virtually unnoticed at the grocery store are transformed into worldwide franchises. The whole thing, the whole place, is rather astounding.

  This was where I often found actors so I could greet them and get a sense of what they thought of the just-published script. Often they had it in their hands and had just started reading it, so they were politely positive but still developing an opinion. I did a great deal of this preliminary work with people who were lying back with their heads in sinks. But the most valuable work I did was talking to the Hair & Makeup artists once the actors left the trailer, because the Hair & Makeup artists knew everything.

  I had discovered that the people the actors trusted with applying their makeup and doing their hair were people they trusted with a lot, especially in the middle of North Carolina, especially on Dawson’s Creek. They were confidants. I learned that of all the people to befriend in television these were the most important; for not only did Julie the hairdresser know exactly how a particular actor really felt about a potentially sensitive story line, but a positive comment from her into an actress’s ear suddenly put the “Good Script” stamp on what I was down there to produce. It was my understanding that one of the caterers, the people who owned the company hired by Sony to feed the entire cast and crew, did not treat a hairdresser the way she wanted to be treated. We had a new caterer within days.

  My next task was always to track down James so that I could get his notes and do what the writers referred to as “the James Pass.” Now, on every other show I had worked on, and for that matter heard about, writers did not perform this service for particular actors. On some shows actors have zero input. They are expected to adhere to their contracts, show up on time, and say the damn lines exactly as they are written. On more shows, at least the ones I worked on, showrunners’ doors are open. Specifically, this means that if an actor has a problem with a story line, a scene, or a bit of dialogue, he or she can politely call the EP or request a quick meeting and express a concern. Most showrunners will make occasional adjustments, and some might even reconsider an entire story line. But on Dawson’s I would literally do an entire pass through the script, for James. Sometimes, especially in later seasons, he would love a script, and this was really minor stuff. But sometimes, especially in Season Three, I spent much of my first few days and nights in Wilmington writing.

  As extraordinary as this was, and as much as this tended to piss off the writing staff, you have to understand that this December trip to make episode #312 was my second trip to Wilmington. Just a few months earlier I watched this guy try to perform a speech to all the football players on his father’s team, which was nothing short of ridiculous, and he was well aware that he came off the same way. And when I say he, I don’t just mean the character.

  You see, for a writer to work on a troubled show, your career is not on the line. For one thing, everyone around town knows it’s a troubled show, and for another your agent is already working on getting you another. The most important thing for a writer’s career is not the show, not the credit, it is to work hard, contribute to the Room, write scripts that satisfy the showrunner—basically to get along. If you do these things you get good recommendations, your showrunner and your colleagues want to hire you again, and good buzz follows you, no matter how stupid the show.

  However, if you are an actor on a stupid show, it is your face saying those stupid words. You become forever associated with them. Actors’ businesses are the characters they are associated with, and if the characters on the TV show they are doing are not being cared for, they get tense. This is pretty much how I would characterize the overall mood of the actors when I started on Dawson’s Creek. Writers did not want to come to Wilmington, certainly not for any extended period of time.

  I also met with the other actors and received their notes, which, though never as comprehensive, could sometimes be considerable. One way or another, they were all addressed. Whether or not this improved the quality of episodes is a matter for debate, and it was certainly debated around the story table. But it made the actors feel like they were being tended to, which they were, and I believe it kept them doing the show.

  Once I was finished in Hair & Makeup and on set, I headed for the Inn at St. Thomas, the “quaint” inn the writers stayed at because downtown Wilmington didn’t have a Hyatt. It wasn’t too bad, I suppose. I always stayed in the same room, the Santa Fe suite, named for the Southwestern theme to which the furnishings adhered. It was comfortable, a good place to write and watch the occasional hurricane swing through, though I could have done without the skull of some sort of horned animal that hung on the wall in the living room.

  On the #312 trip, I headed back to the offices at Screen Gems the next day for the meetings that always preceded production. At 11:00, there was casting. Most of the major casting was done out of L.A. So this meant sitting with Lisa or Craig Fincannon, the easygoing local casting directors, for two hours and watching scores and scores of people who drove hundreds and hundreds of miles from Florida and Georgia and Virginia so that they could read five lines in the hopes of being cast in a day-player role. It was generally mind-numbing and heart-wrenching, but when someone walked in who had what you were looking for and then some, it could be thrilling.

  At 1:15, there was the tone meeting. Prange, the director, and I would sit in Prange’s office and have a speakerphone meeting with Paul and, occasionally, the showrunner, back in L.A. The idea was to go through the script page by page so that Paul could essentially explain to the director his vision, or the story room’s vision, for each scene. If there was ever any doubt that TV is not a director’s medium, as it is in film, that can be laid to rest right here. At 2:30, there was a tech scout. At this t
ime I piled into a Suburban with department heads so that everyone could see the locations where we would be shooting and prepare accordingly. At many of these locations, I often found myself on my cell phone with Los Angeles, assuring somebody that the director did in fact understand everything he was being told in the tone meeting and that the locations we were scouting could indeed by made to look semi-nice by stringing up a bunch of “twinkle lights.” At 5:30 there was a production meeting. This was when we went over the entire script again, page by page, with heads from the entire production team, from properties to lighting to transportation. At 7:00, over something inevitably chickenlike that was brought from the catering truck, I then sat down with the director, got his notes, and went over the script again, page by page. By this point, I knew the episode so well I could have performed all the parts without a script. And the day wasn’t even close to being over, because in L.A., it was three hours earlier.

  At 9:00 EST, I took a call from Paul, who relayed the network’s notes. Since the WB was in the loop on this episode, they were fairly minor. But on some episodes, entire story lines would have to be reworked. While I was on the phone, Paul faxed the network’s Standards and Practices comments to me as well. Jet-lagged from the time difference, lacking sleep, swamped with actors’ notes, the director’s notes, the production notes, the network’s notes, the nervousness of my nonwriting executive producer, comments from Standards and Practices, the network’s censors, this all seemed nothing short of surreal.

  On most television shows, each episode is more often than not a negotiation of some sort with Standards and Practices. On Dawson’s, we had caught on that the best way to get what we wanted approved was to leave material in drafts of scripts that we knew very well would never fly, simply to strengthen our negotiating position. The memos from the network censors were remarkable. The number of potentially objectionable words, phrases, and situations are tabulated, and many are required to be removed from the scripts. They sounded like this:

  “Please reduce the number of ‘crap’s by half in this script and consider spreading the remaining ones over the next few episodes.”

  “Please replace the disparaging term ‘stanky ho-bag’ with ‘prostitute.’”

  “Does the axe murderer have to use an axe? Please strongly consider less violent means for him to accomplish his task. If axe is used, unless it is a paid product placement sponsorship, ‘Axe Company of America’ is cleared with legal.”

  “Make sure that in Act Three when the characters ‘have passionate sex on the kitchen floor’ that they remain fully clothed throughout. Likewise, make sure that when the character takes a shower afterward he is not naked from the waist down. Can we do both of these scenes offscreen and simply reference them in subsequent scenes?”

  “If characters drink excessively they must get sick. Please make sure such sickness is dramatized tastefully.”

  “You may have ‘ass’ but not ‘ass-hole.’ ‘A-hole’ will be accepted if you remove all of the ‘crap’s and ‘butt-breath.’”

  “‘Screw you’ is an improvement from ‘Go fuck yourself,’ but it is still deemed inappropriate.”

  “If you remove two ‘damn’s and a ‘hell’ you may have the keg party.”

  Many writers even make up words and phrases that the censors allow but are ultimately more objectionable than the more commonly known references they are replacing. On Dawson’s, these new terms quickly joined the American lexicon of popular slang.

  And at the end of this day, Friday, December 3, my most important task was only just beginning: the rewrite. Somewhere around eleven P.M. or so, I drove back to the Santa Fe suite at the Inn at St. Thomas. While in the car, I took a cell-phone meeting with my new boss, new showrunner Greg Berlanti, and made sure that we were on the same page about everything that needed to be done. Then, to the sounds of drunk UNC-Wilmington students and even drunker folks from every small town in North Carolina within a hundred-mile radius, all partying in the street outside the inn, I stayed up all night and wrote. Sometimes other writers would help with the rewrite too, and I think with this script, which was initially written by the whole staff, some may have.

  Late on Sunday, I brought a disk of the rewrite to the Screen Gems production offices where the script, now called the “Full Blue,” was printed, published, and sent out to cast and crew all over town. It is called a Full Blue because the pages of this version are blue. The previous version was white. And now whenever a rewrite is done, even for a few lines in a scene, the pages are printed on a different color in the following order: white (original), blue, pink, green, yellow, orange, buff, tan, goldenrod, lavender, white (again, and so on). These colored pages are then inserted into the blue script (unless you’ve done another entire page-one rewrite, in which case you’ve got a “Full Pink”). You know when your script is fairly monochromatic, you’ve had a good week. You know when you’ve got a rainbow in your hands, it’s been a bear.

  Monday morning, December 6, call time was at seven A.M. and the first shot was at eight. I arrived on set sometime before the first shot, and for the next five days, about twelve hours a day, unless I was back at the inn rewriting or working in the production offices or talking to L.A. on my cell, I sat in a chair next to the director, headphones on, listening to the performances, and produced.

  This was my life throughout Season Four and Season Five as well. During my three years on the show, I received written-by credit on nine episodes, story on one, and entirely rewrote or contributed writing to a lot more. I made ten trips to North Carolina. Initially my trips would be a week or two while I produced an episode I wrote, but later they lasted a month or longer as I helped oversee additional episodes. I found that producing television required almost every experience I had in my life, from what I learned about story in playwriting school to what I learned about management in advertising. With the exception of some nearly page-one revisions, I loved almost every minute of it. For me, writing and producing TV was the culmination of everything I had wanted to do with my life since I started writing those plays back in high school.

  When I wasn’t producing on location, I was either at work in the writer’s room or at home writing a script. Someone asked me a rather New Age-y question about TV writing: Is there a work/life balance? By 2001, Season Five, when I became a coexecutive producer, when my wife gave birth to our second daughter, it was clear to me that there was a work/life balance to TV writing, as long as everything in your life is about work. This was a problem.

  FOURTEEN

  The New Reality

  “People cannot stand too much reality.”

  —CARL JUNG

  Episode #312 was a turning point for Dawson’s Creek. Called “Weekend in the Country,” much of the episode was about the characters working together to help open Joey’s bed and breakfast, so much of the episode was filmed in a small cottage on the creek. Just as writing the episode brought the writers together, filming it brought the cast and crew together. From what I saw, things were different in L.A. and North Carolina after that show. Some of this I’m sure was due to Greg’s leadership and some of it due to the show having a direction. As much as I loved writing all the characters, I especially loved writing Grams. I found that she didn’t sound like anyone else, except perhaps my wife’s Baptist grandmother in Toccoa, Georgia. Lines like “Love is the hardest of woods,” from episode #312, could only be pulled off by Broadway-trained actress Mary Beth Peil, who played the character. Over the coming seasons, Gina and Tom wrote episodes that became famous among fans of the series, like “The Longest Day” and “Downtown Crossing.” In the spring of 2001, Greg effectively left the show to create and run Everwood, and Tom took over.

  On May 1, 2001, my wife and I had our second daughter, who we named Charlotte. This was partially because when my wife was pregnant, I would often talk to her on the phone during layovers in the Charlotte airport on the way to or from Wilmington.

  On May 5, we signed the paperwork to p
urchase a gorgeous new house. I’d learned a few things over the last two years in Valencia. First, while I originally thought that my neighbors had boring and regular lives, I later realized that nothing was further from the truth. In fact, I began to wonder if those who defined themselves almost entirely by their work were not only the ones who were truly boring, but were also missing out on things, larger things, beyond their diminutive scope.

  Among other reasons, this made me want to stay in the suburbs. However, we had discovered two flaws in the house in which we were living. The first was that it was on a major cut-through street, which became instantly relevant when our oldest started walking. And the other was that we had unknowingly purchased a home on “the Christmas Street.” You know how every city has that one street? Everyone goes overboard during the holidays, the local news always covers it, and people always drive by to look at the lights. That was our street. Only our street was legendary. We had tour buses filled with elderly people from all over the San Fernando Valley. We had traffic jams that were so bad I couldn’t pull out of the driveway. The massive lit-up Nativity scenes and electric blinking reindeer and flashing dancing Santas were so bright that we had to put black-out curtains in our daughter’s bedroom. And while I respect all religious traditions, this was not one of mine. There were a few monolithic menorahs on lawns, and one house had a six-foot dreidel, but as I wrote on ever-present deadline, I couldn’t quite find the same holiday spirit. So while we loved Valencia, we decided to look for another street.