Film and Television

TV Main Title of the Week

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I have a real sentimental attachment to this main title from SPENSER FOR HIRE. This is the show that began my television career. Bill Rabkin and I wrote a SPENSER spec script and — to our surprise and delight — they bought it, shot it, and hired us to write several more scripts. I can’t believe it’s been twenty years already…

Interview with Roy Huggins

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My six-hour Archive of American Television video interview with legendary writer/producer Roy Huggins is now up on Google Video. The interview was conducted back in 1998, not long before Roy’s death.

Roy created and produced such series as MAVERICK, 77 SUNSET STRIP, THE FUGITIVE and THE ROCKFORD FILES…and was Stephen J. Cannell’s mentor in the business.  He was a mentor of mine, too.

I put myself through college as a freelance journalist. I snagged an assignment from a magazine to do an article on the complete history of the TV series MAVERICK. So I tracked Roy down at Warner Brothers, where he’d just been fired as showrunner of the BLUE THUNDER TV series. His misfortune was my good luck — he had time on his hands.  He invited me down to the studio and, over the next several weeks, screened every single episode of MAVERICK for me, giving me a running commentary. And each day he’d take me to lunch and tell me stories about his days in TV. I was  in TV heaven. I couldn’t believe it. 

A few years later, I interviewed him again at length for Electronic Media magazine (now known as Television Age). He was the showrunner of HUNTER at the time, working for apprentice Steve Cannell. And not long after  that, I became a TV  writer and actually ended up as a story editor on HUNTER. The first thing I did was give Roy a call to share with him my pleasure (and astonishment) that I’d gone from being a "Roy Huggins fan" to writing on a show that he’d  produced. He was very happy for me and gave me some good advice about dealing with the various people he knew who were still working on the show. I told him I hoped we’d get a chance to work together some day. Sadly, that day never came.

But we stayed in touch and I was thrilled to have the chance to interview him for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Archive of American Television.

Inside The Writers Room

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Writer/producer Matt Witten talks with Deutsche Welle about the Media Exchange "Writers Room" seminars I’ve been doing with Action Concept in Germany. Matt sums it up pretty nicely:

American shows tend to be pretty fast-paced and vigorously structured,
and the way we structure the action and the conflict for our main
characters has been thought through in ways that are fresh for German
writers, they haven’t necessarily heard it described in these terms. So
it gives them a new way of looking at the writing they’re doing. They
were also intrigued by the fact that in America we have staff writers
who meet every day, and we have a head writer responsible for the
consistency of the show — "the show-runner." These concepts are new in
Germany, where there is no cohesion of writing staff. Instead, episodes
are written by freelancers who turn in maybe just two a year. Another
thing in American TV is that directors don’t have the power to change
the script without talking to the writer.