Post by Sirenna on Oct 9, 2004 18:04:13 GMT -5
Producing Excellence (An Interview with Dick Wolf)
Produced by (The Official Magazine of the Producers Guild of America) Fall 2000
"When it went on the air, the sales department hated it. It was the highest advertising pullout show in the history of NBC. At the early focus groups, people were saying, 'Who are these people? Why should we watch them?'"
You might think the producer would wince at the memory. But the suits and the advertisers and the focus groups were flatly wrong: the show was Law & Order, and Dick Wolf smiles as he tells the story.
Like his shows - Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Arrest & Trial - Dick Wolf conveys an intelligence leavened with wit and clarity. Whether one agrees with his views or not, they are stated clearly and directly. Wolf exudes a passion for good television and for people who know how to craft it. He does not, however, lay any claim to gentility: "As soon as you become complacent, your show gets canceled."
Wolf rejects television that plays to the lowest common denominator. "We don't spoon-feed the audience," he says. Trusting your viewers' intelligence turns out to be a plausible approach: Law & Order has won a record nine consecutive Emmy nominations for Best Drama Series (including a win in 1997), and Wolf can lay claim to an army of loyal viewers and a host of awards that includes the Anti-Defamation League's Distinguished Entertainment Industry Award, The Governor's Award from the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the Award of Excellence from the Banff Television Festival, 1997 Achievement Award from the Caucus for Producers, Writers and Directors, and the Leadership and Inspiration Award from the Entertainment Industries Council.
Speaking with Produced by's Ken Ross in Los Angeles, Wolf's arrival and departure were precisely on schedule and his attention to the conversation was undivided.
Let's start with the roots of your creative style. You've said that Arthur Conan Doyle was the first writer who captivated you.
I discovered him when was I was 10.
That's young to be reading Arthur Conan Doyle.
I was an only child growing up in New York and reading was my escape. It was a place I went to very happily. I loved Sherlock Holmes. The books that probably had the biggest effect on me were Hound of the Baskervilles and also Mutiny on the Bounty. The first thing I ever wrote was a serial in my school paper, when I was 12, about a character who was basically an American Sherlock Holmes. It ran for two years, and when I graduated from the eighth grade, I ended it with "To Be Continued." It was the most massive cheat I've ever come up with in my writing. People said, "Wait a minute, he's leaving." [laughs] I didn't have a great ending.
Why did Doyle captivate you?
I think the rigid storytelling, the construction of the facts. I read all the Sherlock Holmes books and realized that they're really not character-driven stories. You're given information about Sherlock Holmes, but the information is procedural: he smoked a pipe, used cocaine, played the violin, had a brother. You could write everything you knew about Sherlock Holmes on one sheet of paper. The story was the thing. In a strange way, Mutiny on the Bounty was similar. Captain Bly was a great antagonist and Fletcher Christian was a great protagonist, but there are not pages of description about them. The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.
So flash forward. You spent some time in advertising.
Seven years.
You're drawn to complex stories, and you come to a very concise medium.
Advertising is the art of the tiny. You have to tell a complete a story and deliver a complete message in a very encapsulated form. It disciplines you to cut away extraneous information.
But your shows challenge people in a way that advertising doesn't.
Because I don't think you can really make television based on what you think audiences want. You can only make stories that you like, because you have to watch it so many times. It has to be edited and scored and everything else, and if you don't like what you're watching it can be a very painful process. I get bored with establishing shots of people getting out of cars and walking into buildings, getting into elevators and then 45 seconds later they have a line. I'd rather be giving information. On Law & Order and SVU you only get the information once. We don't spoon-feed the audience. We don't tell them what they are going to see, then show it to them and then tell them what they saw.
I asked (Executive Vice President, Programming, Studios USA Television) Charlie Engel what frustrates you most about television. He said it's when shows get dumbed-down for what is perceived to be the lowest common denominator.
There's been something of a "told you so" aspect to our experience with Law & Order. Virtually nobody except Brandon Tartikoff and Kerry McCluggage thought the show was going to work. When the first six episodes came in, people at NBC said "No, no, no, no, no. You can't do this and you can't do that." Luckily, there were these two 500-lb gorillas standing there saying, "Let it alone!" When it went on, the sales department hated it. It was the highest advertising pullout show in the history of NBC … but Brandon left it on the air because he thought it was a good show. If it came on now, I don't think it would go past six episodes because there's none of that comfort zone. At the early focus groups on Law & Order people were saying, "Who are those people? Why should we watch them? Were those detectives in the guest cast? How come they disappeared in the back half of the show?" People didn't get it at all. It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.
People who work with you describe you as "direct." Not rude, but definitely blunt. That doesn't quite fit the stereotype of a producer as either bombastic and rude or smooth and political.
I think most people don't react well to being screamed at. It's counterproductive. One rule everybody has learned at our company is, you're allowed to scream up but you can't scream down. Scream at me, scream at (Wolf Films President) Peter Jankowski. If you're an editor, scream at (Wolf Films Vice President and Head of Post) Arthur Forney. But don't scream at your assistant. I try to just communicate what I want done as clearly and simply as possible. To quote General Patton, "I don't like paying for the same real estate twice." If it's not done, you say, "This is not what we agreed on." I was raised not to be rude, but I also try to get the best work out of people.
Produced by (The Official Magazine of the Producers Guild of America) Fall 2000
"When it went on the air, the sales department hated it. It was the highest advertising pullout show in the history of NBC. At the early focus groups, people were saying, 'Who are these people? Why should we watch them?'"
You might think the producer would wince at the memory. But the suits and the advertisers and the focus groups were flatly wrong: the show was Law & Order, and Dick Wolf smiles as he tells the story.
Like his shows - Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Arrest & Trial - Dick Wolf conveys an intelligence leavened with wit and clarity. Whether one agrees with his views or not, they are stated clearly and directly. Wolf exudes a passion for good television and for people who know how to craft it. He does not, however, lay any claim to gentility: "As soon as you become complacent, your show gets canceled."
Wolf rejects television that plays to the lowest common denominator. "We don't spoon-feed the audience," he says. Trusting your viewers' intelligence turns out to be a plausible approach: Law & Order has won a record nine consecutive Emmy nominations for Best Drama Series (including a win in 1997), and Wolf can lay claim to an army of loyal viewers and a host of awards that includes the Anti-Defamation League's Distinguished Entertainment Industry Award, The Governor's Award from the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the Award of Excellence from the Banff Television Festival, 1997 Achievement Award from the Caucus for Producers, Writers and Directors, and the Leadership and Inspiration Award from the Entertainment Industries Council.
Speaking with Produced by's Ken Ross in Los Angeles, Wolf's arrival and departure were precisely on schedule and his attention to the conversation was undivided.
Let's start with the roots of your creative style. You've said that Arthur Conan Doyle was the first writer who captivated you.
I discovered him when was I was 10.
That's young to be reading Arthur Conan Doyle.
I was an only child growing up in New York and reading was my escape. It was a place I went to very happily. I loved Sherlock Holmes. The books that probably had the biggest effect on me were Hound of the Baskervilles and also Mutiny on the Bounty. The first thing I ever wrote was a serial in my school paper, when I was 12, about a character who was basically an American Sherlock Holmes. It ran for two years, and when I graduated from the eighth grade, I ended it with "To Be Continued." It was the most massive cheat I've ever come up with in my writing. People said, "Wait a minute, he's leaving." [laughs] I didn't have a great ending.
Why did Doyle captivate you?
I think the rigid storytelling, the construction of the facts. I read all the Sherlock Holmes books and realized that they're really not character-driven stories. You're given information about Sherlock Holmes, but the information is procedural: he smoked a pipe, used cocaine, played the violin, had a brother. You could write everything you knew about Sherlock Holmes on one sheet of paper. The story was the thing. In a strange way, Mutiny on the Bounty was similar. Captain Bly was a great antagonist and Fletcher Christian was a great protagonist, but there are not pages of description about them. The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.
So flash forward. You spent some time in advertising.
Seven years.
You're drawn to complex stories, and you come to a very concise medium.
Advertising is the art of the tiny. You have to tell a complete a story and deliver a complete message in a very encapsulated form. It disciplines you to cut away extraneous information.
But your shows challenge people in a way that advertising doesn't.
Because I don't think you can really make television based on what you think audiences want. You can only make stories that you like, because you have to watch it so many times. It has to be edited and scored and everything else, and if you don't like what you're watching it can be a very painful process. I get bored with establishing shots of people getting out of cars and walking into buildings, getting into elevators and then 45 seconds later they have a line. I'd rather be giving information. On Law & Order and SVU you only get the information once. We don't spoon-feed the audience. We don't tell them what they are going to see, then show it to them and then tell them what they saw.
I asked (Executive Vice President, Programming, Studios USA Television) Charlie Engel what frustrates you most about television. He said it's when shows get dumbed-down for what is perceived to be the lowest common denominator.
There's been something of a "told you so" aspect to our experience with Law & Order. Virtually nobody except Brandon Tartikoff and Kerry McCluggage thought the show was going to work. When the first six episodes came in, people at NBC said "No, no, no, no, no. You can't do this and you can't do that." Luckily, there were these two 500-lb gorillas standing there saying, "Let it alone!" When it went on, the sales department hated it. It was the highest advertising pullout show in the history of NBC … but Brandon left it on the air because he thought it was a good show. If it came on now, I don't think it would go past six episodes because there's none of that comfort zone. At the early focus groups on Law & Order people were saying, "Who are those people? Why should we watch them? Were those detectives in the guest cast? How come they disappeared in the back half of the show?" People didn't get it at all. It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.
People who work with you describe you as "direct." Not rude, but definitely blunt. That doesn't quite fit the stereotype of a producer as either bombastic and rude or smooth and political.
I think most people don't react well to being screamed at. It's counterproductive. One rule everybody has learned at our company is, you're allowed to scream up but you can't scream down. Scream at me, scream at (Wolf Films President) Peter Jankowski. If you're an editor, scream at (Wolf Films Vice President and Head of Post) Arthur Forney. But don't scream at your assistant. I try to just communicate what I want done as clearly and simply as possible. To quote General Patton, "I don't like paying for the same real estate twice." If it's not done, you say, "This is not what we agreed on." I was raised not to be rude, but I also try to get the best work out of people.