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Generaal Geregistreerd op: 22-2-2005 Berichten: 775 Woonplaats: Gullegem

Stephen Cannell Interview
Interview by Dan Epstein, Mr. E

Stephen J. Cannell. The name echoes in my brain. A-Team, 21 Jump Street, Hunter. I never expected a super-mogul of the entertainment world to be such a nice guy. I half expected to smell cigar smoke through the phone and to be interrupted a dozen times. But he was perfectly cool even when we talked about Robert Blake, who he produced on Baretta.

Cannell has switched gears from doing television and has written his own series of detective books with his hero, Shane Scully. He writes a mean novel. Check out his site.

Dan Epstein: What does the title The Viking Funeral mean?

Stephen Cannell (SC): Well, it's about an underground group of cops who go bad. The group calls themselves the Vikings, who are complete rogues. My hero, LAPD Detective Shane Scully goes after them.

DE: What inspired the character Shane Scully? Was it people you had met working on your television shows?

SC: I got started on my first book, The Tin Collectors. That got me interested in internal affairs. I had been writing about them for years, but I had never spent much time discovering exactly what they did at internal affairs. I knew they investigated bad cops, but I had never been down there and talked to them. I put some time aside and sat in the back of the internal affairs division in Los Angeles. It's open hearings, so you can just sit in the back and watch the cops being put on trial. I started to meet the people who run internal affairs, the advocates who are the prosecutors for the department and the defense reps who are policemen that defend the cops. The more I got into it, I thought it would be fertile ground for a book, so I started to come up with Shane Scully. In the first novel, he is accused of crimes that he had nothing to do with and is run through internal affairs. I created him for that novel and a cast of other characters that were involved with him. He fell in love with the woman who prosecuted him in Tin Collectors, so she's in The Viking Funeral. I like the characters a lot. I was talking to a friend of mine who's in ASAC [Aviation Security Advisory Committee] for the U.S. customs service. He started to tell me about the parallel market, which is a market where Fortune 500 companies use their products to launder Columbian drug money. Its been going on for fifty years, they've laundered billions of dollars. The more I got into it, I figured it would be a great storyline and I could use the same characters again.

DE: Did specific real-life events help shape the story?

SC: Oh, yeah. I went online and found a bunch of stories. If you type in "black market peso cartel" you will find many stories of this nature.

DE: How did you find out about real life corruption?

SC: After I've done all my research and I've plotted the story, which is the fundamental hard work of writing a novel. Once I sit down and write it, it takes about three or four months.

DE: How much different was it than writing your TV shows?

SC: Well, TV scripts are sixty pages long and have much less writing on each page. It's a much shorter venue. A television script I can write in four days. It's nowhere near the size project a novel is.

DE: I believe Profit [1996 FOX television show that was canceled after five episodes], was the last television you worked on. Was it that show's cancellation that soured you on television?

SC: I didn't get totally soured on television. I did television for 25 years and I created or co-created over 40 TV shows. I just had done it for so long. Plus, I owned my own studio for 15 years, and it was the third-largest studio in Hollywood. We had 1500 to 2000 people working there; it was called the Cannell Studios. When I sold the studio in 1995, I knew that I didn't want to go work for someone else as a hired gun. I wanted to change venues, so I wrote my first novel, The Plan, and it was a national bestseller. I really love writing novels; it's a lot of fun. I'm doing a lot of motion picture work as well. Also I've been doing a lot of acting in the past five years.

DE: How did you get bit by the acting bug?

SC: I've been acting off and on for 15 years. I do it just for fun; I wouldn't call it a serious career. But I've been getting more and more work.

DE: At least you don't have to bus tables while auditioning.

SC: [laughs] Right. Mostly, I get hired by people who know me. I don't solicit acting work. But when it comes to me, I take it. I just got back from an acting job in Germany in a Steven Seagal movie. I was on the picture for a month. I've done guest star leads and I was a recurring role on Renegade [syndicated television show starring Lorenzo Lamas that Mr. Cannell wrote for as well] starring for five years. I generally don't do cameos because I can't learn anything as an actor doing cameos. I did one for my daughter, who's a director. They needed a celebrity. They were trying to get actors or rappers; it was for a VIP [syndicated television show starring Pamela Anderson]. Finally she called me and asked me to do it.

DE: It's been said that a college professor turned your life around. How?

SC: Because of my dyslexia, I had always had kind of hard time in school. In my sophomore year at University of Oregon, Ralph Salisbury was my first creative writing teacher and he was so enthusiastic about his student that it made me enthusiastic. He really said that I had the talent to become a professional writer and he convinced me that if I wanted to, I could do it. That was the first teacher I ever had that looked past my misspellings and bad handwriting and looked at what I was actually writing. He said it was pretty good.

DE: So, has your dyslexia held you back at all?

SC: I don't think it has, but it certainly wasn't easy in school. I flunked three grades before I got out of high school. But now, I think it's a blessing. I don't think I would have my writing career if I weren't dyslexic, because dyslexics use abstract thought as their greatest weapon. We're very good at thinking from on the right side of our heads. That's something I've been doing my entire life from when I was kid looking out windows and daydreaming, that's all my abstract thought coming into play, it became a strength instead of a weakness.

DE: How did you first get your job on Adam 12 [1968-1975 television series on NBC]?

SC: I had been trying to sell producers around Hollywood lots of scripts. On Adam-12 it was the last show of the season and the network threw out the script they were going to shoot because they didn't like it. The producer was having basically a bake-off, hiring five or six writers and shotgunning the assignments, trying to find a script that worked. He had a very short time to do it in; like a week. He remembered me as a kind of an afterthought. He called me on Friday and told me if I wanted the assignment I would have to get it in on Monday morning. He said, "I know it isn't much time." But I said I didn't mind, I got the job and I was the only writer of the six that delivered. They liked it so muchm plus the fact I had written it in two days, they asked me to be the head writer on the show. So the next year I was doing it.

DE: Is there any kind of secret to writing popular television?

SC: I don't know that there's a secret. It's like I could whisper it to you and you'd have it. You have to have an instinct for dialogue, for good storytelling. Some people are better at it than others. Some people are doing it that I think are mediocre that are working all the time, and others are brilliant. It's like anything: Some people just have a gift. If you ever read a David Chase [creator of The Sopranos] script or a Steven Bocho [creator of NYPD Blue] script you'd see the difference between that and someone else.

DE: Your movie Director's Cut was done on digital video. Are you embracing that medium?

SC: Well, I'm sure interested in it, and we made that one picture, and I think it looks really great.

DE: Was there a reason you made the film on such a low budget?

SC: I just wanted to test out the equipment, see how quickly you can shoot on it, what it looked like, how big a crew you needed, things like that. I knew it was a new format and I thought there might be a way to use that format and get a lot of quality for less money. So I wrote and produced this movie.

DE: I was watching The E! True Hollywood Story of Mr. T and someone at NBC said they saw him in Rocky 3 and knew he was a star. What did you think?

SC: It was Brandon Tartikoff who said that. He was head of programming for NBC back then. He's quite an amazing guy, so when Brandon and I were talking about casting The A-Team, he said that I should go see this guy. He was actually doing an episode of Silver Spoons. So I went over to the soundstage at Universal and met with him. The guy is just amazing and we are still friends.

DE: Is he going to be involved with The A-Team feature film you are producing?

SC: We'll, we're in second draft on the script and I would love for Mr. T to be involved - not playing B.A. Baracus, but I would certainly love to come in there.

DE: He could be like Charlie in Charlie's Angels.

SC: Yeah, right.

DE: Who came up with you throwing the paper out of your typewriter that turned into your logo that was at the end of many of your shows?

SC: At the time that that was designed I was starting to be referred to as a TV mogul, and I never wanted to be a mogul. I wanted to be known as a writer. I wrote every day then, and I write every day now for five hours a day. I had a woman working for me in my public relations department and I told her I that I hated being called a mogul. She said that they were redesigning your logo, and asked what they should do. Since I wanted to be known as a writer, she came up with the idea of the typewriter.

DE: You've been nominated for 15 Emmy awards and you won one for The Rockford Files [television series on NBC starring James Garner]. How important are awards to you?

SC: Awards and nominations are fun, but you can't take that stuff very seriously. Mostly the awards are given to you by blue ribbon committees of people that are out of work. The stuff that's rewarded tends to be a certain kind of programming. It's like reviews: You get good and bad reviews and I think it's a mistake to believe either one. I know people who believe their good reviews and get really upset by the bad ones. I figure that there's only one person you're doing this for, and that's you. You've got to please yourself and if you do that, that's what counts. That's the only healthy way to look at it.
DE: You were the first television producer to cast Kevin Spacey [as the maniacal Mel Profitt on Wiseguy]. How did that come about?

SC: I had written a character in Wiseguy [1987-1990 television on ABC starring Ken Wahl], a central heavy for a six-episode story arc. I had hired another actor and he was two days away from his wardrobe fitting in Vancouver, where we were shooting. I got a call from his father and his dad said that he wasn't going to make it because the dad just checked him into a rehab clinic. I was stuck without an actor and we were four days from shooting.

I was in Los Angeles, so I got out the list of actors who we had read and talked about before we hired the actor in rehab. Nobody looked good on that list and my casting director said, "There was a guy that was in town from Chicago, that everyone says is great. He's a stage actor, but there's no film on him." He was still in town. The casting director later told me that he's on a plane back to Chicago, should I turn him around at the airport and send him back? I asked if he was worth it. The casting director said that he didn't know but people say he's good. So turn him around, I said. When Kevin got to Chicago, his agent told him to get back on the plane and go back for an audition. When he got to my office he was really trashed and he walked in kind of angry, saying, "I'm not just going to do this. I don't just do anything." I was thinking "Gee, you don't even have any film credits. Why are you giving me this heat?"

Kevin said, "I've got to read this script." I had written the first two hours of this thing so I handed it to him. He went away to read it and he came back two hours later saying, "This is pretty cool." He read a scene for me, and he was just great, so I booked him right there.

DE: When I told a friend of mine that I was going to be speaking with you he attacked me with Wiseguy questions. So how did Wiseguy come about?

SC: The idea for Wiseguy came from an episode of television of a show I wrote called Stone [1980 television series on ABC starring Dennis Weaver]. In this episode, I had written about a cop who went undercover. He so liked the experience of being a criminal, he decided to kill the three cops in the LAPD who knew he was an undercover cop and keep his life as a criminal. I did the episode and after I got through, I thought that there was something very cool about a guy who has been completely destroyed by going undercover, that his moral compass has completely been swayed. I got to thinking about writing about an undercover agent who is seduced by the very thing he is trying to arrest.

So I started pitching the idea to networks, and I would say that I needed to do it in six-hour arcs. This guy just can't infiltrate an underworld family and then in 47 minutes and 53 seconds, bust the heavy. It's going to take the first episode just for him to infiltrate, then another episode to start pulling away the people that surround the heavy, and then the last episode the bad guy gets busted. The networks hated it, every time I pitched it, they asked if I had anything else. But I loved it, so every time I went in to a new executive who hadn't heard it before, I'd pitch it again. I finally ran into the right guy, Ken Lamasters, who was the new head executive at NBC. He thought it was the coolest idea he had ever heard and bought it right there.

DE: I wanted to talk a little about Robert Blake who you worked with on Baretta [television series on ABC from 1975-1978]. Have you spoken to him since the incident? [In May 2001 Blake's wife was shot to death in his car after they had dinner together. The case is still unsolved].

SC: Nope, he's been more or less in seclusion.

DE: Do you think the kind of violence that happened is within him?

SC: I suppose it's in anybody. It's probably in you or me if the right circumstances came up. But I don't think that's any reason that we should suggest that he killed her. I think we should leave it to the police. So far, they seem to not have arrested anybody. I don't know what the end story will be. More and more it looks like there will no resolution, so far be it from me to try and indict this guy with some kind of breezy analysis whether or not he could do it. He certainly was an emotional, very high-energy and tightly-wrapped guy, but I never saw him hit anybody, and I was around him for five years. I saw him misbehave as a person but I never saw him turn to violence. Certainly I have no first hand information that would lead me to believe that he would be a killer.

DE: What are your favorite projects that you've worked on?

SC: Television, or...

DE: Well your books must be like your children.

SC: My TV shows are my kids, too, even the ones that didn't work very well. They were great to do. I loved doing The Rockford Files and Baretta. Baa Baa Black Sheep was cool because I was thirty years old and I had a whole squadron of planes I could fly everyday. I loved doing Wiseguy; The Greatest American Hero was a great show. There were so many. Renegade and Silk Stalkings were a lot of fun. I really enjoyed them. They were all different in my mind and they all offered different opportunities as a writer.

DE: Were there any that you disliked?

SC: Yeah, there were three or four I didn't do right and they didn't work.

DE: What were they?

SC: I don't want to say because there were actors and other people involved and I don't want them to say to me, "Hey you didn't like my show?"

DE: Thank you so much. It was really cool talking to you.

SC: Nice talking to you, too.