 Hi, most of you know me. I'm David Thorburn, director of the communications forum. Let me begin by saying we're missing, as you may have noticed, two speakers. Those two speakers are casualties in different ways of the ending of the writer strike. And we'll have some things to say about the writer strike shortly. I regret the loss of Barbara Hall and Howard Gordon, both of whom have distinguished careers in television. And would have had, I think, many interesting things to say. But I must admit that I'm not distraught over this fact, because the man to my right, John Romano, an old friend and a comrade of mine, is among the most articulate Hollywood folks I know. And as you'll see from what I'll say in a few moments, there is a partial explanation for that. By articulate, I mean capable of talking to audiences in the way very good teachers do. John Romano has been a writer and producer on more than a dozen television shows, including some that he created himself among the titles that John has worked on, among the shows John has worked on either as a writer or sometimes as a writer-producer, sometimes actually as the showrunner, the supervising producer who's responsible for the whole activity of the program, among the shows that he's been associated with are Hill Street Blues. Let me look at my list, because it's actually such an impressive one, a little-known show called Beverly Hills Bunts, which was a spin-off of Hill Street Blues, a show called Sweet Justice, which John created. He worked on Knott's Landing. He wrote the pilot episode of 24. He's written episodes of Monk. He was the showrunner, executive producer over a number of seasons for American Dreams. He was the executive producer and a writer on Third Watch. He's worked on Providence, among two shows, not long-lasting shows, but shows that deserve a place in the Hall of Fame of shows that lasted only a short time, but were intellectually and artistically very distinguished. There are two shows he created, one with the actor David Caruso, called Michael Hayes, and another show, a show very dear to my heart because it was sort of set in a college campus. I kept hoping he'd create a Professor Thorburn on the show, but he never did, a show called Class of 96. So he has had a very creative and productive career as a television writer and producer. But in recent years, he's moved more and more toward into the movies. And his screenwriting credits are impressive in an even more remarkable way, I think, in some degree. His credits include The Third Miracle, The Cone Brother's film Intolerable Cruelty, a forthcoming film starring Richard Geer called Nights in Rodanthe. All these things would make John Romano a remarkable and interesting man in any environment. But I think that there's a side of his career that is even more interesting, especially an interesting profile for a television writer. John has a PhD from Yale, where he studied English under many very distinguished professors. After earning his PhD at Yale, he took a job in the English department at Columbia University and was a beloved and much admired young teacher at Columbia. And while he was at Columbia, he wrote a wonderful book, an academic book. And I think he must be the only creator of a television program who's published a book with the Columbia University Press about Charles Dickens. And it's a wonderful book. It's called Dickens and Reality. It's a very thoughtful, intelligent piece of sophisticated literary criticism. And it's one of the reasons that I treasure John as a writer and as a friend. It's really one of the few rewards you get for getting old as a teacher is that sometimes your students achieve so much and come back and they're guests on forums that you run. And it's a very, very exciting experience. I certainly feel that about John's visit today. I thought that, and the plan is to do, as we normally do with a forum, John and I will have a kind of conversation about some matters related to television and media for the first hour. And then we'll throw it open for questions and comments from the audience. We also have some clips that we hope to show. And John will comment on them. And I think this will give us, hopefully, a particularly immediate insight into the art and commerce of television. John, let's begin by talking a bit about the strike. Howard Gordon, the showrunner for 24, who was supposed to have joined John on the panel today, sent me an email the day after the writer strike was ended, was resolved expressing great apologies and saying that he was just overwhelmed with responsibilities now that the strike had ended. And he was sorry not to be able to do it. Barbara Hall did not back out immediately, although I began to get uneasy about it. But apparently, the pressure of work became so heavy on her that she became ill. And she had to back out much more recently because of illness. And I am sorry about that. My hope is both of them will be able to return to a forum at a later stage. But let's turn to the question of the strike, John, and begin with that and have you make some comments about that. There are many people who feel that the strike accomplished very little for the writers. And the first question I have for you was do you think that anything useful happened because of the strike? Second question, I've also read a good deal by people commenting on the strike saying that they thought that the strike signaled a change, perhaps a fundamental change in the economic structure of the TV industry. And I'm wondering if you could begin by commenting on those things. Well, I'll take a second one first. It was too soon to know. It kind of changed it to signals. I'm sure it signals change. We live in a time when the television industry is being hit by all sorts of changes. If we were talking with some of your students earlier about watching downloaded episodes of Lost and just people sending out. Some people catch up with 24 through little minutes that are sent over your cell phone. I mean, clearly there's change. And the way of catching up with a show or watching a show exclusively through DVDs you buy in a box or going on demand and deciding to catch up on a show you didn't see watching every episode of in-treatment from the beginning, these are all things that were not there 20 years ago. And in each case, there's a financial consequence. And in each case, as a writer, you say, well, so who makes money when my sister backs up to see the episodes of last season's favorite show? When somebody makes money, can I make sure they're passing that on to me? It's simply about money. But you have to understand that you wrote the darn thing and the idea that some, and you wrote it to be put on the air. And now someone has found another way of selling it out of the back of their truck. And they had no intention of giving you a piece of that. And I mean, I'm not the world's biggest union guy. I was not active in the strike. I participated in the strike. I did not break the strike. I carried, to my daughter's amusement, I actually carried a sign and walked in a picket line. But so you're not talking to Tom Hayden here. I'm not exactly the world's greatest union organizer. But there's a common sense fairness that you should participate in the profits of your work if other people are going to. And if not, not. And the studios, I will say, this is no point reopening these wounds. But the studios did seem to have a kind of little wet dream that they were actually going to profit from the internet retransmission of old television shows and not share the money with anybody. That really did seem to be in their little minds. And that's just common sense unfairness. And that's all, without getting very excited, because believe me, I don't have an enemy on these subjects. It seemed like 0% was probably the wrong number. And we can go from there. And then the number we ended up with was not very exciting, but it was better than 0. And the principal is on the table, and that was not there before. And so good for us, I guess, I hated being on strike. So it's why you're not getting, I'm not singing any Joe Hill songs or anything. So for those of you who have. A mixed verdict on the table. No, no. I think we got something valuable. It's now on the table. So it doesn't matter that it isn't a lot of money. The idea that the principal was accepting. Yes. You can't sell my stuff in any way, shape, or form. The comic book version, the novelization, the one minute on my cell phone, the video game. If I wrote it, you've got to give me something of the money you're making by getting it out there through those media. That's all. It's not a religious principle. It's just. All right. This may have also in part been a consequence of the strike. But I remember noticing in the, every Monday, the New York Times in its business section runs a page that I'm sure everyone in Hollywood looks at closely. It lists the movie grosses for the week. And it lists the top rated television shows. And one of the most interesting aspects of those tables was the fact that you had to go down to number six or seven before you came. In terms of the programs that had gotten the largest audiences, you had to get down to number six or seven before you came to a story show, a fiction show, a series. Whereas 15 years ago, every single show in the top 10 or 15 would have been, or almost every single show, unless there was a Super Bowl. Except for 60 minutes. Or 60 minutes. Well, even 60 minutes. But yes, you're right about that. 60 minutes was always a perfect show. But the number of fiction shows would be overwhelming on those lists. And that has declined. Now, part of it surely was the strike. And they had stopped putting some of the fiction shows on during the strike. But even if we allow for that, John, in the last five years or so, a much larger number of reality-based nonfiction programs have been getting audiences larger than the fiction shows. So one way into this sort of broader conversation I want to have with you has to do with, do you think that it's actually a, does it feel to people in Hollywood like a kind of permanent change that so much more of prime time is now devoted to things that are not stories, that are not fiction, not series, not movies? Or do they feel that stories will return? Well, the quantitative answer, trivially, is that you're right. There used to be most of the shows. Used to be story, script-oriented, character-based, fictional narratives. Most of the show's in the top 20. And now fewer than most. And but the reality is that if what you do for a living, if there are students in the audience or people in the audience who want to tell stories and they want to tell them in the format of television, there is and probably will be for the foreseeable future always an appetite for the next really terrific one. And any executive who is here, if you should have executives here, you should have people who dress better than myself and look at it things from the corporate side. Some of them are remarkable, creative individuals, men and women, believe it or not. And they would say, look, if someone walks to the door and tells me a story of tapes at the top of my head off about people that he or she made up, I'm gonna bet that it's gonna take off the same head and the large numbers of people. I bet there's money in that. That sounds great to me. Let's do it. There'll always be an appetite for that. Now, what's changed is that on the networks, on the five networks, and they're closely related cable stations like USA, FX. The notion of what makes a story and characters thrilling is more aggressive, less literary, less about the language, higher concept, crazier, faster. And if you have an idea which really has to do with the transactions between human beings, if you're sort of more on the Jane Austen end of things than on the JJ Abrams end of things, you're probably gonna go, and this happens to me every week. Tell everyone who JJ Abrams is. I think it's they tell him who Jane Austen is, but she obviously knows. They all know who JJ Abrams is. She has more movies out than he does. You know, he's a guy. They're better movies, too. A creator of Lost and Alias, those kinds of television shows as opposed to Jane Austen. If you're closer to the character narrative storytelling end of things, if your imagination is giving you really, to your mind, interesting, sexy, attractive moves within the recognizable normal human psyche with the ordinary number of heads and arms and taking place on this planet and roughly linear time, if that's where your imagination takes you, you'll probably take your idea to HBO or Showtime and you're less likely to think that you're restricted to the five networks. If it has a big star in it attached, if you've decided to tell this idea to your friend, David Caruso, and he wants to do the show with you, you probably go to CBS. And if it has six incredibly good-looking young people, that's the nature of idea, who just can't leave each other's little bodies alone, you probably take it to ABC. So there are, you know, you have a direction, a sense of sort of directionality, but they'll still be a place, there are fewer places and you have to pick your shots more carefully, but there's still a place for narrative storytelling. And yes, you've done the numbers correctly. There are more so-called reality shows and more other types and kinds of things, competitions and shows filtering and runways. Clearly, there were many factors that changed the nature of broadcast network. You know what, come out of what you're saying, maybe I heard, I missed the real interest of your question. The real interest of your question is why strike now given you already have a problem fiction TV writer, which is that all these other shows are types and kinds of shows. Well, yes, I mean, that's true. And a lot of people said, we have enough troubles. With the rise of it, with fewer people watching ordinary dramatic television to suddenly make the, the evidence is getting, is losing enough of its flavor for the studios and networks. Why make it even harder by cutting into their imagined profits from new media? And that's true, that's a good case to make, sitting around the fire or walking in the picket line, but there remains for many of us a kind of, again, what I just call common sense, fairness, that, you know, well, as long as they're making some of them, and I wrote some of them, I want some of the money, some of the profit, that's all. Let's shift to a related subject. There were many, money, as I started to say, there were many factors helped to explain how network programming, especially fiction programming, has changed since you entered the business in 1980. And one could make an argument that the period from the mid-70s sometime through the mid-80s was a very, very remarkable time in television history. Maybe it's most creative time from the standpoint of fiction programming. But one, and there are obviously part of the explanation for what happened there has to do with competition from cable and the proliferation of channels and so forth. But one thing that many people have said, and I wonder what your reaction is, I know you have some interesting things to say about this, is that the events of 9-11 had a profound impact on the content of television, on the kinds of stories that were being told on television. And I wondered if you would comment on that a bit and talk to us about how you felt, how you feel the events of 9-11 affected programming, and attitudes toward programming, attitudes toward stories and characters. Well, we were just having a very good discussion about the show Lost, and that it reflects a kind of post-9-11 paranoia, a kind of, well, I shouldn't call it paranoia, there's genuine fears at stake in here, but a sense that we are an island threatened by a strange alien creatures, I mean, there's xenophobia in this, and that we only have each other to depend on and who knows whether we can depend on each other. I mean, there's certainly, 9-11 did its fair share to feed a lot of impulses, not all of which are admirable. Some are just xenophobia and so forth, but it also did a sense that I thought was palpable. Let me be a little random in my answer. Take, for example, the current Cone Brothers movie, A No Country for Old Men, and the evil Javier Bardem character. Our friend Leo Brody made a very good point about this character, aside from the fact that he's sort of in the movie of indeterminate foreign origin, and he is an implacable evil with a kind of psychology-less, non-humanistic interior, so that the evil seems to be sort of presentational surface evil with nothing behind it, which is, I think the technical term is fucking scary on the screen, and it resonates with something in the audience which may not have been there before 9-11, so that we're, the interest, I find it a valuable creatively. It's useful, as Robert Frost said about the poor, they're useful in my work. I find the idea that there's such a thing as good and evil is actually of help to a storyteller so that everything isn't always about how are you feeling today, and so I'm feeling today, and the answer to all problems, when I was writing Part of Your Father, I used to say this is a world in which the answer to almost everything is a hug, and the world is actually much more interesting than that. 9-11 represents that part of our human experience, which is not answerable by a hug, it doesn't mean it's answerable by the Patriot Act, but it's non-answerable by a hug, so that makes stories almost as interesting as the real world, which remains still the winner in any contest for what's the most entertaining and unbelievable. You're offering a kind of positive, you're saying that there's an aesthetically positive. Well, no, I thought you were going to say, gee, all the television programs became fascist shows about how you should torture people. Well, don't forget I worked on the pilot for 24, I mean, I think that, which is a fact. Which we're gonna show, which we're going to show you in a second. Well, but the point is, the interest, the human interest of a show like that is, look, what you want to do, you had David Melcher, who has a great deal to teach, and one of the things that David taught when I was a kid on Hell Street Blues, I think 150 years ago, was that, just, his instructions were, as you went into your cubicle to write, just jam your character up, make things as hard for him or her as possible. When you're done making him that possible, you're done, hand it in, we'll shoot it. That's the job, that's the task. Well, if you want to look at a positive side to 9-11, I mean, lightning is surely gonna strike if you make too much of this, but the truth is that it's a very, it presents, it certainly makes thinking about international relations more difficult. And the dilemma of Kiefer in 24, and I think that if Howard were here, had been able to come, we would have had a good time talking about the subsequent history of the show because he's been involved in recent years. I was only there at the beginning. The dilemma that you're serving him, the genuinely interesting dilemma, and if you don't think this is interesting, you're simply mistaken, not about the quality of the show, but about the nature of the dilemma, is that there's such a thing as evil out there to fight. I'm not saying it gets characterized with political accuracy in any given manifestation of paranoia that comes out of Hollywood or out of the Atlantic for that matter, but I'm saying that suddenly it says you can't answer it by sitting down in act four and touching knees and being very sensitive and clear, a kind of writing I love doing, by the way. But this is aggressively, is aggressively the case that Kiefer must be a human being, must cope with his daughter, his family, his own limitations, his own point we always made, the fact that he is within himself not in control, out of control, as a person, and yet it is his task to do something about something which, a threat which is really out there. Now if you premise that there's no threat really out there, that the only threat you can think of as the Republicans winning in November, is a part of me that might agree with you, but we're both wrong. There's a good deal more to be concerned about. And the idea of both taking that on and remaining in touch with your humanity for which read father, husband, person, kid who used to play with marbles is now torturing or being tortured. I mean the truth is those narrative human dilemmas which can't be comfortably solved which are not the simple knockoffs of any particular political position. When the human being transcends his politics, you've got something interesting to talk about. Have they served it well? I feel more comfortable saying that they haven't if Howard were here to defend it, but there's no question that the dilemma is an authentic one awaiting our next president. I certainly agree about that. My own response to the question in a way has to do not so much with any individual show, but with the proliferation of law and order kinds of programs. In other words, it seems to me that one explanation about the impact of 9-11 is just to say that the country was terrified into a situation in which, or at least Hollywood felt the country was terrified into a situation in which it needed to have programs that reassured it that all of its law enforcement agencies were hooked up to the best technology possible and were geniuses at last minute torture. Well the interesting thing about the proliferation of technology centered, I mean the side of 24 that simply bores me, I don't watch very often, the side of 24 that simply bores me is it's techno-spice stuff. But if you look at shows like CSI, if you can bear it, the thing about that kind of writing is that, yes, it has a naive faith that somehow you will invent the right widget. I mean I'm here at MIT, it's a lively question. But the interest, but the taste for and the acknowledgement of complexity, there was no widget that will, you will still have to make decisions about deploying. And those decisions you will always make a little bit blind. You will always see us through a glass darkly. That is the, that's the deal. So by all means, let's work on better ones. So bad technology forensic centered shows are the ones that pretend that the cool toy solves the problem. Good ones show the limitations and the fact that nothing will ever replace. The TSL, you said there is no method except to be very intelligent. And nothing ever relieves you. No methodology will ever relieve you of those human dilemmas. Nor will any right feeling. Nor will any way of, no ideology, no way, this is me talking and perhaps I'm mistaken, but no correct way of looking at the world is gonna spare you how complex problems are. When stories say that, they're doing a good job. I have respect for a show you don't like very much, which is Dick Wolf's Law and Order. And I think in its early days, I haven't seen all the incarnations and I don't like to see the ones with like a colon and something after Law and Order. I don't like stuff. But the original Law and Order with like Sam Waterston and those incredible people around them, they were great shows and the reason is, A, you didn't know whether they, we, the team we're rooting for, cops and then prosecutors, would win or not. And B, you didn't know whether they should win or not. And C, they didn't know whether they should win or not. And he always kept those three things in play. And if like me, you find yourself watching the same ones late at night over and over again, it's because the ending is not an ending because they had true respect for the fact that, yeah, this is a lawyer doing a great job really well. This is a cop doing a great job really well. Guess what? I don't know whether it should go this way and I don't know how it's going to go. And that kind of respect for the stubborn way, which, This is a writer's argument about the complexity, about the moral complexity of the show. Yeah, yeah, and I think it just, again, bluntly speaking, it makes for better stories, it makes for more fun. But it's also truer about the world from my experience. One way we can concretize some of John's writerly passion is by looking at particular passage. And we are gonna now show you a clip. Can we do this? Can we make a transition to it? What are you gonna show? Tell me what you're gonna show. We're gonna do the 24 first. Oh, the first few minutes? We've kind of covered that point. Well, let's show the clip and you can say very little about it, but I want people to see it quickly. I'd move on. Can you find it fast? What is the next clip? The next is Hill Street, you wanna do the- No, no, I can't do this. Because I thought if we ran out of time, we would just- Well, no, I mean, I think 24, 7, I'm gonna say the same. And I wanna do this is to concretize some of what you've been saying. Sure. I mean, no, it's one thing to think in sort of abstract terms. Okay, let's see. One of the things about Romano is that he actually has the job of writing a scene in his head whenever he's talking. And I think it will be helpful for you to see it. Is this it? Can we freeze it for a second? Sure. John, do you wanna give a context for this? Did you start with the house? There's no context. This is the first five minutes of the first show. Of the very first- So the audience saw it without context. They saw some kind of- This is the very first episode of 24. Yeah, so they had no context. So why should they get the context? Which John wrote, which John wrote, go ahead. Right, I rewrote, I rewrote. They had a good idea for a show and it was gonna take place in 24 hours every week. And I mean, yeah, I'm sorry. It was gonna be an hour every week for 24 episodes. And that would be your season. But it would be real time hour. As you know, they didn't stay with that. Eventually became, you know, every show was 24. I mean, it was just too arduous to do real time for seven years. But they had that idea, that they had the idea of Jack and this sort of supra intelligence agency. And the idea that the first season would be about a planned assassination, alas, of a black candidate for the U.S. president. All right, so here's Romano's revision of the first, his revised version. Well, it's the version he shot, more or less. His rewrite, you know. Is she still giving you the cold shoulder? If by she you're referring to your mother, I'd appreciate it if you called her by her name. Mom, I don't know, she's just busy. She's busy a lot. It's a school night for you, so time for bed. Let me guess, just now she was all sweet in some light, right? Then she said something nasty about me. Yeah, and I just busted her on me. I know you're taking this so personal, it's just that mother-teenage daughter thing. You can't play us off each other in a minute. She's insulting you, she's insulting me, too. You just said that you appreciate that. They appreciate it. It's no exceptions. She can forget about getting a driver's license. You know, you need a phone call. The only thing I'd say about that in relation to what I said, that's only just another milch would call an exfoliation. Idea would be that every line from, I think you should call her by her real name, mom, which obviously isn't her name, to I became the enemy, right? To they're manipulating you, Jack, to all of those have palpable kind of spy military reality, right? It's as if one is saying that the distinction between domestic life and political life has been really has evaporated, and you can't. I mean, it was also deliberately bland, ordinary scene, which has happened in my house, any number of nights through my daughter's teenage years. I mean, it was deliberately underwritten and, except we didn't play chess, as I recall, it was deliberately something that might happen in any home. But it was haunted by the political realities which are his job, he's a spy, so when you say to him you're being manipulated or you're lying, or when he says, I got a good idea, let's tell her we can't play, she can't play both of us off each other. You don't hear anything you can't hear in many of our kitchens, but you're also hearing something you might well hear in the back rooms at National Security Agency. There's a kind of sense in which those lies. So that's the kind of thing that I have in mind. Both those worlds are coming. Now, it turns out she's not just gone. I mean, she wouldn't be the first teenage girl to jump out the window to leave, but very few were being abducted by international spies. But you see the point, really, that I'm making. These are essentially human, the political dilemmas are essentially human dilemmas. The human dilemmas have a political dimension, and that's where we is. John, were you implying what I feel is the case, is that as 24 went on, it became less and less interested in that human dimension? Yeah, I think there was no, I don't think the development of. I don't really want to say too much about the show. I mean, there's certainly been a, it's, like a lot of us, our politics have damaged its social, its manners, its sense of civility and decency. I mean, there's a lot to say about the show. The torture stuff was, again, without Howard here, I don't want to come and say it. We're going to skip to the third example. But I mean, does anyone have a reaction? Am I throwing off your format? No, no, no, that's fine. Because I mean, let me, I'm the boss here. OK, I know, I know. So look, what I mean, I just showed him a piece. But what I want to do now is I want to show you another clip to give you, so show you in a way another side of John, another side of television. One of the most interesting things about American television in the 80s and 90s, in part because of competition from so many new sources and the proliferation of channels, was that in an odd way, broadcast television, the television that we associate with the major networks, it came in its own way very experimental. And there were a whole series of programs that appeared in the 80s and 90s, some of which lasted only a few episodes. They often had more episodes in the can than they actually showed because the networks were so impatient, not allowing them to generate an audience. If they got very low ratings, they would knock them off the air very quickly. And one such program is, for me, it's sort of the embodiment of this whole group of programs. There must be at least a dozen such shows, series television programs that took liberties with various generic expectations. And here is a particularly dramatic example of such a program. In its introduction, it uses a scene in a police station, a roll call, and it's a very explicit allusion to the way in which Hill Street Blues almost always began. Almost always the very first scene in Hill Street Blues was a scene at roll call where the sergeant at arms would be giving assignments to various people. And the scene you're about to see, it's from, I think, the first episode of this program, from a recent episode, from one of the very few that were broadcast. It was only on 11, 11 episodes. Right, this is from maybe the second or third week. But it doesn't matter, I mean, because it's the very beginning of the show. But you'll get a sense of what's going on there. And you'll see why I haven't mentioned the title, even though you probably were able to read it on the screen. Think I'll look at this too. Item 7, November 29, 3 PM, Conflict Resolution Seminar in this room attendance mandatory. You got a conflict with that? Yeah, I do. It's resolved. You're going. Item 8, Officer Quinn returns to active duty roster tomorrow. So, Yeager, you'll ride with Cerudo. Oh, look, give me a break. Yeager's got yak breath. I can't ride with him. So we're a gas mask. Item last on the teletype, we still got the Franklin Avenue flasher. Struck at two outdoor weddings and a school picnic so far this month. Male cock, 6-3, look for tattoos and unusual places. OK, that's it. And hey, hey. Sorry you couldn't get the whole song, would come up to you. Oh, yeah. I'm sure it does. And in fact, I mean, the show is called Cop Rock. And it was a police musical, really a cop opera, really. And every, and John can describe it more fully than I because he worked on the show. But every episode had a number of original songs in it. Five. Five in every episode. One of the things that went wrong was that Stephen Bosko declared, decreed, that we would have five songs in every show. This meant that if three of them were OK and two of them were less than OK, we were still going to have five songs in every show. Now, a bad scene, you can get a sandwich. I mean, a bad song, you just flipped it. You know, I mean, a bad song is this. I don't remember, John, were you here before when I showed? I've shown this once before at the forum. And it got much more of a reaction than you folks. You don't know that maybe it may have been a very strong reaction. Just unexpressed. Maybe so. But the show was a catastrophe from every. In fact, John was embarrassed. When I first mentioned it in public, John was embarrassed as if it were a. It has a huge following. It has a following. People are, Trio recently made a documentary about the making of Cop Rock. But it's a slightly bemused, it has a huge camp following, I can tell you, in the sense of camp. But it also, a lot of people liked it as much as you did. What do you think went wrong, John? Well, I think, well, listen, I think that you'll learn something. Here's the three rules of history. You don't march on Moscow. You don't find a land war in Asia. And you don't make cops sing on television. Those are, that's I think what we learned making Cop Rock. I'll tell you something interesting about what really went wrong. It, the first episode, had songs by Randy Newman. And they were great songs. And then we had Amanda, who wrote The Rose, Amanda, I want to say Amanda Crow, that we have some very good song writers, Donnie Markowitz, they were good song writers. But they weren't, they were being asked to write five, come up with five songs, original songs a week. I mean, you know, Lerner and Lowe didn't do five. It just not the way musicians work. So it was defeated by that premise. But it was defeated, I think, even if you did have John Lennon and Elton John writing your music or something, you could not have done the show in that company. Because that group of men and women who did Hill Street and then they did, eventually they did NYPD Blue. And you know, that crew. Music requires a kind of non-ironic, among other things, requires a non-ironic soul. I mean, you have to be able to look into the eyes of someone you love and say, I'm yours. You can't do that as a writer, as an artist. You shouldn't be writing musicals. They really, they can't all be wisecracks like this one. When it works, that's fine. You know, you should have a few of those in every, you know, great musical. But you also have to be able to be direct and ironic. And the strength of that very gifted group of people who did such great television, like a lot of the work of that generation, the one directly preceding my own TV generation, is marked by a sense that all great art is a little bit, you know, all the curses of high modernism. It's always ironic. All emotions are a little bit bullshit. Sentimentality walks with the devil. You know, all the things that made the literature of the 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s great. I mean, their favorite writer is J.D. Salinger. I mean, the world in which their sensibility was formed is a deeply ironic, a tearing of the veil of ordinary bourgeois society. There's a kind of a contempt at its heart for the kinds of emotion that I think make for better songs. I'm just speaking as, you know, you don't really kind of want to write a lot of songs which say, I love you, but I got to go now, the boys are waiting, which is sort of the tone of the world of Stephen Bocco, David Nelsch. This is an aesthetic judgment, John. My question is sort of no longer, why didn't the show work with audiences? Why didn't people watch? Because they want, I love you. They want feeling. They want true people who are entitled to feel something. They don't always want to be smirking at the, you know, you just can't live on a diet of wisecracks. I remember I talked to you on the telephone when you were working on this show. And I remember, because I was excited about something I was watching on television, I said, well, and you kept telling me, don't tell me your ideas, because I'm working on this character now. And remember, we actually had an argument because it was as if John didn't want to be distracted. From his sense that the materials he was working with had a kind of original excitement for him that he didn't want corrupted by sort of academic discourse. And the truth is, I remember genuine intellectual excitement in you, especially about the central plot. I mean, this show actually was a very advanced show and a lot of them- Well, it had a great- I mean, one of the things is that the, one of the protagonists is a cop who ends up going to jail. Yeah, but you know, but that, again, you know, it's sort of the dirty cop who had to do what he had to do and put them on the wrong side of the authorities. I mean, there's a kind of, it seems to me the informing cultural precepts of that show, and perhaps of Hill Street Blues in its way, which is a greater show, seemed to me long in the tooth in a way that as an artist, you always have to be conscious of. It seemed to belong to the side of post-war writing and art that sort of felt the more cynical you were, the smarter you probably were, that all great art is fundamentally ironic. And that is, you can see that we were talking about a very successful example of a movie, which I admire and I work with Coen Brothers, but the movie, No Country for Old Men, you know, embodies that. You can see how smart I am because you see how depressed and cynical and fundamentally essentially dissenting I am. And now, I think that movie really is really worth seeing, really good. You know, we did a movie called Intolago Cruelty. That's an interesting, I don't know if any of you saw Intolago Cruelty. You like the movie? How many saw Intolago Cruelty, okay. And good, I'm glad you like it. They made a change in the direction that I'm talking about. Well, I think the problem with Intolago Cruelty, perhaps for those who are not as excited about it, was that everybody in it is kind of a bad guy. She's as much a thief and liar and she's a marriage pirate. She goes from marriage to marriage, she's stuffing her pockets as she divorces you and she takes on the world's most talented divorce lawyer and gets him to fall in love with her on the grounds that she's Catherine Zeta Jones. And looks great. That's the device of the movie that actually, the Cone Brothers are such skillful movie makers. They told the makeup people we want her to look like gold and they said, oh yeah, she'll look great. They said, no, no, gold is in AU gold. We want her to look like gold. That is, we want the makeup to actually have a gold tint because she's about money and that's how we're gonna shoot her suited her hair and eyes, but that's what they did. I mean, they're incredibly meticulous filmmakers and brilliant, I'm not saying anything about that. But in my version, she was an ordinary housewife whose husband left her, took her to the cleaners and she decided to get even by getting this divorce lawyer, George Clooney, to fall in love with her and she succeeds and takes his money. In their version, she too has a kind of marauding career and so it was too bad guys against each other. It became therefore about a thousand times funnier and more entertaining than my version and maybe it left a little less, maybe it had a little less impact potentially on your feelings than my version. We will never know. I loved working with them and I think it's proud of the movie but you'll see my credit is for story because they went a whole other way with the making of the movie and it was a similar thing and they're fairly young and forward-looking filmmakers and the same might be said of the other Oscar movie this year, There Will Be Blood, that it has a really nasty heart. The sort of ironic, sort of modernist, ironic perspective that we were talking about certainly makes, the argument makes great sense to me, John and I certainly see how it's manifested especially in the movies, commonly, frequently. I guess, and I understand how elements like this can get into television but it seems in fact that such a sort of modernist and ironic perspective would not survive on television for very long because there's always that sort of claim of sentiment, there's always that claim of reassurance that at least broadcast television until very recently. I think Scrubs is a terrific show and it wears its feelings very lightly but they're there, it has tremendous affection toward its characters. It's really fun, it's really entertaining. Yeah, but you'd have to think hard before calling it sentimental. One thinks of Scrubs as a very late show. Whereas Grey's Anatomy is very happy, I mean Grey's Anatomy is both sentimental and I think has no particular weight and no, but it's certainly attractive and gets its audience a good time so I don't think you, and I think it could be a lot better, so I don't think you'd necessarily achieve great art by going the other way and in their turn, David and Bocco and have created really some of, I think NYPD Blue is the best you can, I wasn't anywhere near that show. I think it's the best you can do. I think that for me that was the great show because they really did care about Sip of Wits. Right. And I think that therefore they were invested beyond the law and order of it. I mean, I created a show called Sweet Justice with Cicely Tyson, it was on for a year and one of the reasons I created the show was I went to the Oscars, the Emmys and I remember seeing the clips for Best Show and one was NYPD Blue in which Bunce takes an accused man, a perp, which means in our system, a man accused of being a criminal, which means in our system, by the way, that he's innocent in case you haven't noticed, or you're John Ashcroft. He takes an accused man and slams him into the wall and he says, I'm gonna get a migraine tonight because I can't smash your forehead in right now because of the Bill of Rights or something like that. And then the next clip was for Picket Fences and it was Ray Walton or somebody I think being a judge and David Kelly, who's a lawyer, had written this series and the judge is saying, in the clip they showed was saying, isn't it a shame the way we have to let so many criminals go free because of technicalities? And I thought, here's a judge talking about technicalities. Well, what the heck else do you do as a judge but worry about whether the laws, technical rules have been followed exactly what, and I thought both of these shows are being promoted and have huge audiences and I've enjoyed episodes of both. As I said, NYPD Blue, I thought, a spectacular show, but both of them took as a premise, you see, that what the audience wanted was that we should be slamming the accused no matter what. So I created a show about defense attorneys. Well, no one has really been able to make a successful show about defense attorneys. I mean, Boston Legal is as good as you get, gets and Boston Legal writes those, I mean, no one has ever, let me leave it at that, no one's ever been able to make a show about defense attorneys and I would confront a botch going they had no sympathy in the last 25 years. I mean, there have been shows in the long history of television. Well, maybe, I mean, I am talking about the last 25 years. No, in fact, I mean, it's an interesting fact that the medium has in some sense become more important. But I believe in the market to this extent, if people, if there were a tremendous yearning in the audience to see someone defend criminals and for that to be your hero, we would have had more than the few examples that we have of shows that even pretend to do that. So, I mean, I think the audience is at, the audience isn't a very law and order mood. No doubt your point is well taken, 9-11 reinforces that and these shows have catered to it with their own anxiety and cynicism about the social fabric and I wouldn't say the right wing. By the way, as everyone knows, everybody who writes in Hollywood is more or less a liberal Democrat. If you can count the exceptions on one hand, you can print that if you want it. I'm gonna, this is the last question I'll ask and then we'll open it up to questions from the audience. So prepare your questions. But John, on the basis of something you've just said, I was gonna ask you to say a little bit about what you and I have sometimes called and I've actually seen referred to in print as the Yale and Harvard mafia of guys who write for television. I think the point is that- When you went off to work on television, there was already a group of former Yale graduates who were working in television. That was how you got, that was your contact. Yeah, I looked up- Talk a little bit about it, yeah. Talk a little bit about it. I think the only, aside from the sort of bouleau of it, the only thing that's important about it is the following. That TV is made by dropout English majors from good universities and not necessarily Harvard and Yale only and that it, it's, there is a, when I got into it in the late 80s, early 90s, there was a literary inheritance which was always present. I mean, you know, it can be, it can be overwhelming sometimes. I mean, remember, you know, walking down the hallway at MTM, the old studio that produced St. Elsewhere and Ramican Steel and Hill Street Blues and all and they'd say, let's do Stephen Crane's The Blue Hotel only we'll use our characters and everyone knew what he was talking about more or less. I mean, you know, that was very surprising. I think that ship has sailed. I think now you have a generation of really good, really smart, really talented young filmmakers who for reasons of their own actually prefer TV to movies but their origins that the pictures in their head derive from movies, from television, from graphic media, different kinds, they're not originally, they're certainly not playwrights and nobody goes to the theater and they're, I mean, I'm talking about the kinds of numbers, the masses that you need to produce a popular culture and what's become of reading is, well, familiar story, I should think, I mean, so their sensibilities are not founded on texts, are not founded on language. It already comes in visualized form. That being said, boy are they talented, boy are they cool, boy, you know, there's a lot of interesting stuff being done but there is for me that will always seem to me to be some, it's a little harder for me to get at some of the interesting wrinkles of this humanoid crowd if you don't have access to language and if words aren't centrally in play in your drama and that doesn't mean that all television has to look like in treatment which is a camera that goes back and forth between two talking people, terrific show. But it does mean that basically, you know, take away the word and there's just not much you can say about these bipeds that will really claim me as an artist, inspire me. But the truth is that these, a lot of these young filmmakers are not, they're not devoid of language, it's just like the language already comes in visual form. It's already moving, they're already moving pictures. I suspect there are limits to what that direction is gonna be able to say or achieve. But remember that Henry V begins with Shakespeare saying, oh for a stage of, what is a ring of fire, oh. The first thing he calls for is get me out of this little box where all I can do is talk. He's asking for cranes, you know, shots that like the one in Atonement that goes all around like through four cities and ends up in his nose. I mean, there are limits to what you can do with just words and artists and writers have always felt it and gestured toward it and so the new generation has it. And you wanna welcome that but I think that as the word, so I mean your answer to your question about the Yale Mafia or Harvard Mafia, what you're saying is that there's a surprise, the generation that made the great television of the 80s and 90s was looking back with surprisingly well educated and every now and then the New York Times would run a piece saying, look it, there's a person there who writes for television who actually knows how to read and write and went to college once. It would always be shocking to people. I think that's, you know, people know that you come out of Brown and MIT and so forth having watched and absorbed a lot of internet webisodes and television, maybe even more than novels by Balzac and yet you're gonna be creative and you're gonna tell interesting stories but I think there is some, there may be some leakage in what we can accomplish when we're no longer a logo centric. I mean is that just an olfogie? Maybe, but I think one would certainly, I think one could certainly say that recent television is less verbal than it used to be, less psychological, more oriented toward action in ways that confirm what you're saying. Well, it's also image mad. I mean, that's really, because I mean, Deadwood is a very verbal show. There are speeches in Deadwood that must go three pages and yet you don't necessarily, I would not call a character send it. I would call, it's very interested in image making and kind of myth making. It's basically a very logoreic graphic novel. It's not actually novelistic. It's not literary or dramatic the way we're talking about. What's a really positive example? Juno, Juno seems to me in the great literary tradition. That's depressing to hear. No, no, I think Juno is. I think Juno comes right out of Jane Austen or something without blinking. I mean, Juno seemed to me a great, it's not as good as Lars and the Real Girl, but it's close. I would say Lars and the Real Girl is the best script I've read in the last seven or eight years and tell you the truth, I didn't see the movie, I just read the script. She was a TV writer on Six Feet Under, terribly literary show with real characters and a total and a completely absurd premise that you would have, if you were a betting person, you would have been well advised to bet against the success of a show set in a funeral parlor. And yet, look at the pleasure it gave and look at how much it ended up saying about human beings and life. But of course, it was a cable show, though. Yes, well, the last thing we say is, it would never have been on the network. But they said before, when you have something that's fundamentally people-centered and you have to use language a lot, you go to HBO, for instance, and that would be an example of why. But it's no surprise that a writer on Six Feet Under ends up writing wonderful script like Lars and the Real Girl. It's less surprising the fact that a stripper ends up writing, you know. But those are marvelous writers. That's a very exciting generation of women writers. We got some interesting shows ahead. It's as good as A Squid and the Well is Bad. It's your turn. We have a clip in reserve, which I could show, but I'm holding it in case the discourse requires the reason we should go to questions is that the media comes at you and now you get to come back a little bit. It would be helpful to identify yourselves when you come to the microphone since this is being recorded for posterity. Hi there, I'm Tom Valovic and I'm a media theorist enjoying this. So I have a question in reference to television content over the last 10, 20, 30 years. And my question is given the rich spectrum of human drama that's available, I've always tended to think of cops and robbers as kind of a least common denominator approach to that content. So my question, I guess, is the obsession with cops and robbers and crime drama is that a feature or function associated with the television industry or their obsession with it, the audience's obsession with it or some combination between the two? Well, I think it's probably hardwired into the human being, this obsession with cops and robbers. If by that you mean dramas that essentially turn to the question of whether you're raking the law or not. Antigone is centrally about that. You'd be raking the law burying your brother there. That's okay, I guess I'm a criminal. Well, I'm a cop, says Creon, and we got a show to do. So that's the first cop show in my imagination. When I was a student of literature and David Thorburn. Maybe we should have Jennifer Antigone for these people. David Thorburn was, oh, now you're not going to for young Professor David Thorburn was giving a lecture and he said, we were all students of, I mean, the fashionable topics were theory, the fashionable topics were Rousseau, we were like poetry of Wallace Stevens. That was that moment was the 70s in literary theory. And David gave a lecture, Professor Thorburn gave a lecture that said, a cop is a really interesting person, now he's speaking to an audience who didn't think so. Cops, the other word for cop was pig. And we were sure that they weren't very interesting, at least not the ones that we had passed on the way to school that morning. And he said, no, a cop stands at a windy juncture of, you know my little rewriting here. Windy corner where straight society and the element that threatens it and poor people and people who prey on poor people. It stands at the juncture of social forces, economic forces, social forces. It stands in a sort of Hobbesian cutting edge, that person. And he has to live a life. He has to come home to his family. He has to be a person. He said, it's interesting that our novelists, our fiction writers at the time that was conjured, the name Donald Barthelme or something, are not interested in a figure like that. But if you go back a hundred years, Balzac writes about cops, Dickens writes Inspector Bucket, Dostoevsky creates Stavrogin in crime and punishment. In other words, the great foundational works of narrative fiction found cops very interesting and saw their odd social place they occupy as perfect for a kind of narrative exploration of the social contract, of our deepest issues. While our novelists are now piviling off in the direction of Donald Barthelme or excuse me, Sylvia Plath. That thing was so alarming and reactionary and interesting that many of us became cop show writers. Not in direct causation, but it occurred to me very often and I knew it was true at least to Dickens. So what I'm saying is that the real question is not why so many people watch Cops and Robbers is what else is there to really write about? Not other than Cops and Robbers, but the fundamental question of right and wrong in society, how we can stand living with each other? How can we get the good of living with each other? And what medium more, it's like life and, when you're writing a medical show, unless you're stealing money, what you're doing is you're supposed to be writing about life and death so that if instead you're just stealing hugs in the hallway like on Grey's Anatomy, I think you're letting down our trust. But for medical shows, read life and death. For Cops and Robbers, read Hobbs Leviathan. For any of these genres, there's a reason we keep, that's what's hitting, that's the pressure of thought that's hitting them at an angle if you're any good at it and if the show is any good. So I don't think they need much defending. Most of them are terrible. Most Cops shows are terrible. In spite of everything I can, every illusion I can draw. One further thing from an academic or historical perspective to say about these genre forms is that they're partly because they're so stable. The genre begins, the beginning of television continues as one of its dominant genre, not its only genre, but one of its dominant story forms. It makes the Cops show an incredibly interesting window on American social history because you can see over the course of the history of television, the movement from Dragnet in the 1950s to various shows in the 60s, culminating at the end of the 60s in a series of Cops shows that show much greater sympathy. The culture was bifurcated. It was the time of the Vietnam War and generational conflict. And the Cops shows reflected that. And the Cops shows of the late 60s and early 70s through Hill Street Blues in 1980, which begins in 1980, are shows that show a much greater sympathy for the criminals and a much greater sympathy for the victims of crime have a much more complex attitude towards- Well, complex rather than sympathy for the criminal. Yes, the social pathology of crime becomes a subject. And then I think what you can actually see as the country itself becomes more conservative and in the Reagan years, you can see Cops shows constricting again, going back to being much simpler kinds of morality plays in which the Cops- Well, back to my original point, though. The threats that, you know, there's such a thing as being a reactionary. The threats that cause reaction also have to be taken seriously. If you're a good writer, you wanna walk in line between acknowledging what people are afraid of that drive reaction. And noting their reactionary quality. But when you're doing CSI and you're only interested in how with one strand of hair we can find you even if you're in New Zealand, then you're imagining that there are simple solutions to complex problems and the heck with you. So, next question. Oh, sorry. I just finished a huge paper on the CSI effect. But another thing that I noticed when I was writing this is the theme that late night TV seems to really be about things that are dangerous and fearful, almost like fairy tales. When you say late night TV. Well, I've never seen it, yeah, so. There's a lot of shows on, you know, after 11, 12, one, two, three, that tend to be about medical mysteries or, you know, this could happen to you type of things or America's most wanted true crime, you know, predatory type behaviors. And I'm thinking, you know, this is the last thing you want to see before you sleep, but yet maybe you could explain that. Why they're on so late? Yeah, why that theme is so prevalent in late night TV. I think there's just a voyeurism and a pornography to it. That's just unbelievable. And the thing about it that I would say to whoever makes those shows, you know, it's not the same group. They're not really writer driven. They're, you know, they're documentary filmmakers and they're sort of slumming most of them. I know what you mean, like the, even HBO had one, the Taxi Stories. Was that, you ever see that one? Yeah. Taxi Diaries. Taxi Diaries. See that, isn't it? The thing about it is that they'll always be, you know, they'll always be, you know, the walls of Pompeii, they'll always be an appetite for that kind of, and I think it's preying on people's late night fears and under the guise of telling the truth and getting at reality. They're just titillating our most worst sort of 4 a.m. sleepless anxieties. They're not saying anything about those things. They're just saying, you know what they're kind of saying? They're kind of saying, ooh, that's what they're saying. That's all they have to say. Look at this. And all those fake, those cop shows which are just the camera following arrests and domestic break-ins and, you know, they're just giving people a kind of vicarious thrill. And my warning to anyone who's putting their money behind such shows is that the internet's doing it way better and that we can't, there's no way we can compete. You know, we used to say about violence. I mean, we used to pride ourselves in Hill Street and how bad we did the action sequences because we just didn't care about them and we weren't very good at them and how do you write them anyway. And the thing that kept us honest was that movies just did them so much better. How can you compete with the explosiveness of a diehard to name a really exciting example? You can't compete with that on TV, so don't even try. And I would say to that kind of TV, I think your ins and things about what's creating it is a corrector. And they're not very soothing. Is that you cannot keep up with what the internet is about to provide, is now providing. So I think therefore they're doomed. That's a case where the technological wars mean TV will lose. Because no matter what, how permissive the FCC gets, they're never gonna permit some of the stuff you could find if you type in the right sick little combination of words on your search engine. God help us. Hi, thank you. Thank you. Hi there, my name is Steven Ren and I work in the advertising industry. I'd like to, you touched on royalties briefly earlier. I'd like to kind of bring us back to that. I think about royalties, and I also think about libraries a little bit. And I wonder, and the libraries are just sort of starting to understand the role the internet plays in their ability to sort of bring the library from a physical building out into the home. I know the Boston Public Library is working through many initiatives to sort of decentralize the library and decentralize their collection. And I also look at BitTorrent, for example, and the recent statistics I've been reading are 80% of the traffic on BitTorrent are actually television programs. So I sort of look at this spontaneous library of television programming, which is sort of, there's an enormous demand and appetite, and obviously it's illegal, I think, by any standards that the writers would certainly look at. And I remember as a child, I'd go to the library and we'd get videotapes and we'd go home and we'd watch them and we'd bring them back. And do you think that down the road, the royalty issue will sort of inhibit the library's ability to deliver digital content? How do you see that playing out sort of down the road? I mean, obviously writers need to make money and it's not just writers, obviously, that have a financial interest, but even today we can go and take out books and such from the library. And I'd just like to get your comments and what you think about that. I hope you're not too disappointed. I don't have strong or interesting views on this. I mean, I know that there's an unpredictable, a lot of unpredictable aspects to the media, the explosion, the types and kinds of archiving and library availabilities. And I don't think anyone can predict right now what's the best arrangement. Look, let me make the opposite case from the one I made before because as I say, I don't have religious views on this. I like the studios and networks wanting to be in the dramatic television business and the business of making movies that are about human beings instead of transformers. I like studios and networks to think there's money to be made there and I don't want to to use the jargon disincentivize an executive who's considering a project by taking away the little pennies he thinks he might make by selling it in some media that I can't even conceive of or pronounce. So I think there's, I'm in no huge hurry to figure out contractually how even if they invent a way of watching my show on your fingernail or something, I will get money pennies out of it. I don't need to spend any time doing that. But everybody in this room knows that the internet is a place to watch TV episodes or you'll soon know, your kids will tell you. And so that one, we know that there must be advertising dollars is what it comes to, getting spent on those internet rebroadcasts. So how about cutting that very big pie or if it's a little pie, cutting that very little pie. And that's all, that's as far as I can go. I can't, and by the way, it's true. Authors don't get royalties when I take your book out of the library and no one's screaming that this is a moral nefarious. So, I don't know. Mr. Ramona, my name is David Sheets and I'm an undergraduate here at MIT and I'm wondering about two, I guess, related, in my mind, relatively recent things that have occurred. It's related to the TV show Dexter on Showtime, which is a cop and robber show, as you mentioned. And it's regarding the layout of the show, how the show is no longer metered and fed to the audience episodically weekly. Like you mentioned, you can view it on DVD. In fact, many people that I talk to only view their shows on the internet or on DVD. How do you think that's going to change the writing of these shows? Particularly shows that are very traditional forms like cops and robbers, where you now have these very intricate, multi-hour video story lines like in the show Dexter, that you have to keep the entire show in your mind simultaneously to understand. Well, I think that, I mean, I think it's very exciting. I think that narrative has, well, two things. One, I still think the most adventurous thing about Dexter, which is a good show, is that it's from the point of view of a serial killer. Once you've decided to crush that Rubicon, I think, here already in strange territory, and it's very good. They do a good job. It makes sense to me, the show. It makes moral sense to me. It makes sense to me. Macbeth has a star as a killer and indeed a serial killer. But as for what you're saying about the fact that they're breaking it up and webbing it out and all that, and how does it affect the writing of it, I think that we're trying to keep up and trying to figure it out. I'm not on the show, obviously, but I'm sure they're trying to figure out how to, are there a three minute version? Are there three minute scenes which will get people to watch the whole hour? Are there, here's one thing that's very tempting, which is there's a great scene to be had, let's say, with the mother of the victim. But there's really no room in the hour for that scene. We want the hour to move, move, move, move, move. So if you go onto our website and click on her little head, you'll see the scene that she plays out with the investigator, what's her name? And we didn't have room for it in the show. And then from that, it's a short step to let's shoot some scenes, which are not gonna be in the hour that are now gonna be available online. So if you really, if you can't get enough of a loss like these three guys, you can go online and see what's her name when she goes back to her tent or something. You can follow rivulets off the main and we're writing them and providing them. And the nice thing is they don't have to be any given length, they don't have to be, I mean, there's a, that's very tempting to a writer. I mean, we like to write, give us anything. And the one minutes of 24, those are cut from the body. But it's very easy to shoot a few more. And the first place that appeared, I remember they gave the couple that did the deluxe pack of the godfather and he included scenes of the family, which were not in any version, including his cut. It's not like the director's cut. It's stuff that he had left on the cutting room floor. Well, now you're gonna start making those scenes and writing those scenes. And sometimes they'll include clues for the ongoing story of the series as a whole. So you're inviting the audience to play with you. Fun, fun, fun. My reaction is that it's fun. I mean, a further sort of theoretical implication is that it continues a process that the literary scholars have been talking about for almost half a century now, which is what they call the destabilization of the text. Where, what is the text? Is it the hour that's broadcasted? Is it the director's cut that's reduced? Or is it the DVD? There are so many venues in which these stories can now be experienced that it's fundamentally altering the landscape of this form of narrative. And I think that it's a profound question. I think John's answer about how this is tempting tells us how writers are going to begin to exploit these new possibilities. But there's one caveat that I think is crucial, which is that we live in an era where platforms go obsolete five minutes after they're introduced. And that is the problem. In other words, if there were some stability, if we could be sure that a particular delivery system would last more than five years, we might have some confidence that very rich forms of narrative would develop. But because we're not sure about this, some of these experiments are going, that's right, some of these experiments are going to be disappointed because the platform they are conceived for won't be viable. But in general, we're clearly in an immensely destabilized moment in the history of audio-visual storytelling and what John's just said about it is just a hint of what I think we'll follow. Hi, my name's Whitney. I'm a first year CMS graduate student. I'm really interested in the fact that you have a background in Dickens and you've talked a lot about the relationship between literature and television writing and sentimentality. Of course, Dickens being a great sentimental writer. I'm also interested in the relationship between, of course, Dickens is also a great writer of serial texts and wrote in process. He would write serials as one at a time on a monthly basis. And I'm curious if you see any relationships between that and television writing. It's something that I've seen some Victorian scholars hint at but they haven't really fleshed out a relationship that might exist between the popularity of both narratives. Actually, that's a very good question. I mean, it's a question I like a lot feeling as I do about Dickens and it's a very good question about the form of television because I think that's where it was predicted in some way was the weekly, not only monthly but weekly serialization in some of the Victorian novels not just Dickens, he's the one we remember. And not only that, but they would go home, they'd appear, you'd buy a copy, bring it home and read it to the family in the living room just where we have the TV now. And not only that, but it came with commercials. Our advertiser friend would be happy. I mean, if you look at a serial weekly it had ads around the side for powders and whatever they sold and so it came with commercials. And also Dickens watched the sales of his story and if things were not going well with the sales of a given book, like we might watch Nielsen's he might just introduce a new character, he might change the direction of his story and he watched them like a hog and Martin Chauze went, the people started for the first time not to read his new book in the same numbers he was used to and he noticed that a lot of best sellers were about voyages to America. And so he suddenly sent his characters off to America and sales picked up and he brought them home and finished the original narrative which is just what a good Hollywood producer might do. This is really working on some other show. We should have a, I don't know, gay cop or whatever. So there's a kind of an appetite for the audience which drives the artistic imagination in the same way as well as these really exact parallels that you're pointing to such as weekly civilization but the profoundest link is the one you began with the sentimentality and so forth. This is really a middle class writer writing to the heart of the middle class when that wasn't a bad word and the emotions of family and the drama as you saw in that clip of very ordinary human lives, everybody who's got a teenage daughter or is one gets it and that was fodder for his imagination and the Victorian imagination and it still plays like mad, you know? So that, yeah, the Dickens, it was a very appropriate background. I would have been a different TV writer if I'd come out of Flaubert or something, you know? I like the question and the intimacy. You know, your question about late night is there's a very private relation between reader and text alone in bed at 2 a.m. That's not the relation at eight o'clock or nine o'clock TV show. When you're watching with your kids, you're always told to watch with your children. When you're eating in front of the TV so the communal meal becomes, but the relationship between you and the TV set at 3 a.m., you're probably watching alone. And these days you might even be watching with it on your lap in the world of laptops and I think it draws closer to that other, the solitary relation of the reader and the 90th century novel had already moved away from that to a kind of more public engagement. But that's one thing that's going on with late night, isn't it? Reminds me of listening as a kid to radio shows and by putting the radio under my pillow and listening to a voice late at night. Now TV is there, whereas TV stations in those days had signed off with the American flag at around 1030, as I recall. My name is Wesley Foster. I'm a computer engineer and has anyone realized that the function of video is to make hardware more marketable? Is what? The function of video is to make hardware more marketable? No, I didn't tell me about that. Well, Microsoft sells most of its units directly to the actual factory and just charges them a licensing fee. In other words, if they get sued by a legal body that wants to extort money out of them, they just simply get rid of the retail version and they sit there and say, okay, now you can buy it from the Japanese and you can pay somebody to take it off. And it's your problem, not mine. And up until Linux or the EEPC, you couldn't really market a PC without a Windows operating system on it. So the function, the model for the engineering community and computer engineering is that without the actual Windows operating system, the PC is unmarketable as a mass produced device. So the object of our industry is to reduce the cost of memory to the point where we can first market audio, which we've done with Napster and so on, and then lower it further by marketing video. So the logical aspiration for our industry is to take video, put it onto a notebook PC at the factory and use the program on the PC to make the PC marketable because the profit level is so much higher than the actual hardware because you have to write a piece of software once and then you can market it millions of times. That comparing the actual product alone sold on a CD or a DVD is unprofitable. You might as well just shove it on the actual PC at the factory. Has anybody in the industry realized that? Yeah, I mean, it's the kind, well, let's say yes, I don't even know, I hardly know what you're talking about, but the truth is that, no, I don't mean it satirically, what I mean is I do not know how close such a development would be or how it would look, but I can say yes to this extent. It sounds like very bad news. I can say yes to this extent. We are terrified about the kind of thing you're talking about. Are we correct to be terrified? In your opinion, sounds like we should be. It means your market's gonna get wider, not more narrow. If I would be worried, if I was worried about it, I would be the executive who was worried at NBC, because if I was the head of the union during the union negotiations, I would have gone to the Chinese and say, can you make a player so I can circumvent NBC and have all of my union members produce content for your device instead of an actual television set? Well, if I understand you correctly though, I should be terrified too, because if people are gonna buy a PC that already has all my movies, 22 episodes of my favorite show or whatever, once and forever they bought that. They'll never get through what they have on their hard drive, I imagine, in their lifetime, right? Then they never have to go to the store and buy the DVD of any of those things and I'll never see any profit, royalty participation or residuals because they bought it. If I understand you, it's why I confess my ignorance upfront, but if I understand you, it's already in there. It's already in the PC that I buy. So why would that person ever have to go to a store or a theater to see anything that you or I might write? And up happening is you end up with well-written shows that have a very large market internationally available and I think if you talk to the cast of Star Trek, I think they're probably pretty pre-leased with their reaction. That's pretty good. You know what I pictured when you told me about it? Again, without having quite the ability to understand, there's that collection of Janice Films, which is 250 CDs you can buy, which are all the great foreign films that were marketed here in the 60s and 70s and it's very heavy and very expensive, more expensive than my wife intends to spend on me at Christmas and I imagine that what you're saying you could buy someday that'll just be on somebody's hard drive as a little attractive little perk of buying the thing and those films would be available the way it's very hard to find them or buy them now. So it's good for the consumer and good for, yeah, and maybe even, I mean, yeah, the shelf life is good. We'll see, it's so not what we do, it's so far beyond imagination we know just enough to be afraid and that's what I'm trying to convey. It's hard to take this as a serious business model because since the computer is a system that can communicate with anyone, it makes more sense to think of it as a device that would allow people to buy many stories from many different sources. But he's sort of saying you'll never have to. But, I mean, if the idea is that you can buy every audio-visual story in the history of the universe on a single CD, that's a different matter. But I assume that even if that were true, it would be put up someplace on the net and you could go and download what you wanted, right? It makes much more sense than that. Every individual in the universe should own every story ever written in the universe. In other words, it's hard for me to see why one would ignore the PC's communication power. It's power to reach out. I'm gonna be telling people that you about this. But it's very interesting. Very interesting. Just so you know, you have your cell phone sitting in front of you. Right. If you look at the cost of that and reply to the standard business model, that device is gonna cost you $4,000 over a four-year period. That is more expensive than every PC that most of us will own. And unfortunately, there's nothing in it that is even significant enough to go on your resume. It is a device that's going to be used for marketing something. The aim for our computer industry is to market video. We're gonna be looking for video to market. Our compact flash cards are about to hit 32 gigs in the market. There's 64 gigs on the way. The SSD drive is available, although hideously overpriced. Our hard drive costs are dropping. And you're saying that the implication is that bandwidth won't catch up enough so that the amount of downloading you could do wouldn't be enough to match what you could get. The object of the industry is to lower the cost of memory. Got a guess. A lot of it is done by simply wasting a lot of it. Well, I have to come up with new stuff that you don't have on there yet. The Microsoft product is specifically designed not to use it very well and occasionally screw up. We build IBM mainframes. An IBM mainframe tests and use everything in it exactly and will give you error reports on what's broken in it. Eventually, we'll get to that in a cell phone, but first we gotta get the cost of memory down. To do that, we need you to produce video. So we're gonna need good writing. We're gonna need video production. Don't think of TV as your only market. Oh yeah, that is the good news. And you have to understand, when I graduated from college in 1999, I was allowed 12 megs on a Unix server. That was it. That's the space of three MP3s. The cards nowadays are 2,000 times that size. I can walk in, put my credit card down, and walk out with it. My professors never dreamed that would be possible. Hi, I'm Anna, a first year student at CMS. At what? CMS, comparative media studies. I just wanted to know how you've dealt with product placement and how you've seen it evolved. I had a intense experience with it because the last show where I was just a consultant, I'm sort of mostly more in movies than in TV now. It comes up in movies, but it would never reach down to the level of the mere writer. But in TV, we had in American Dreams, we had a very aggressive executive producer who was keeping the show on the air by going directly to Ford and General Mills. And we'd be pouring that cereal, we'd be driving those cars, and you'd write it right into the text, and somehow you'd find a way of saying the product name. And I found it really boring to have to do that. But you know what, people do say product name sometimes, so I guess it's not beyond the capacity of a writer to work it in there. You don't want, you got enough to think about without worrying about having to reference the Captain Crunch, but it's present, it's there. Is it more prevalent now, John? Well yeah, sure, everything that involves ways of affording television shows is more prevalent now. In movies, it's really buried. In movies, it's still, thank goodness, I think in the realm of what things are on the shelf in the kitchen behind Harrison Ford's head, it's still a matter of things you see that you may not be paying attention to. I haven't heard anyone say that's a swell Chevrolet, you're driving there, Harrison. When you start hearing that, you know that it's reached movies too, but it's not something writers like to find themselves doing, and it is real. But you know what, corporate America's been very good to television and movies. John, every time I see an Apple computer on television, I wonder if Apple has paid for it. Well, I mean, but the truth is that there you're limited. I mean, I'm sitting here, I can see two Apple computers. I mean, so it's like, I don't smoke, I've never smoked, but I hated like heck being told that my characters can't smoke. There are certain people who are gonna smoke. Your job is, you're a night watchman in a bank in downtown Boston, you know, and you walk around a block all night. You have a fool not to smoke. I mean, you know, I mean, and the idea that, so I mean, I've never liked being told any of that stuff. It makes, I understand, people die of emphysema, it shouldn't sound this way, but you know, as a writer, you imagine things, you see things, you'd love to see them on the screen. Well, maybe what we'll do now is we have a few minutes left, about 15 minutes left. Maybe what I'll do is, there was a clip I was withholding. I think we'll show a clip and have John make a quick comment about it. What is it? This is a scene from Hill Street Blues. It's a scene trying to persuade buns to, the scene is between a snitch and a cop. Can we do third watching industry? Okay, wait, wait, it's too long. Honey gets money. Can you stop at a second land? Yeah. I guess you have to explain what we're looking at. Come in the light, John, so they can see you. This scene, which I don't know where David gets these scenes, but this scene was from the first episode of the last season of Hill Street. And it's about two scenes into this episode. What has happened is that a plane has crashed in the bad part of town. And as a small passenger, a small private plane, and as the cops have cleared it out, a snitch, an informant for the police, has grabbed a suitcase, which seemed to have fallen out of the debris of the plane and run like mad. And he goes to Dennis Frans, one of the great people you'll ever work with or know. And he's the informant for the detective bunts. And he's telling him that he may know something about where that suitcase is, which everyone is of course looking for in the city, the imaginary city where Hell Street Blues take place. So we've just seen the plane crash. We saw a hand grab the suitcase and somebody run and then we're in the bar with Detective Bunts, who's a cop, and his informant sit on the left. That's a curse. I can't tell you how many lives I've seen in a room. I'm trying to get business back on its feet again. Banks don't want to hear about it. Here comes the snitch. That's our niche, no, I'm not sure we do. Donnie, I think you better get out of here. What's the matter? I think he may be hot. Are you kidding me? I'll start you for 10. We get two points a week. Extra to every month you're outstanding. Right, okay. He knows how to get a hold of him. I get popped because of you. I'm gonna feed you a freakin' eye. Okay. Can you make it happen for me, Seth? Wait, where are we, Seth? I'm gonna see what I can do. Excuse me. Since when did you get to be captain on the store cruise, huh? Norm. I said you were up with what? Three weeks now? So this is how you gotta know. What's so big? It's so powerful, Norm. Or else I don't take the shot. Tell me about the suitcase. Did you see that suitcase? Yes. Did you see the way that kid was bent over when we did that thing? Do you know what was in it? Pound uncut. Streets for 20, 22, 5. It's not 10 pounds, Norm. Which 10 pounds, conservative, moves at a deuce in six figures and gets two-thick water, Norm. Did I say domestic water? Because it doesn't have to be domestic water, Norm. 20 pounds, Norm, gets enough 40 pounds. Not even six pounds, Norm, which is three quarters of a million dollars. It's intestine. We're dying off this stuff for high four figures. 7,500, 10 grand max. The kind of person you are. I wouldn't be surprised if you don't have that bank account somewhere, am I right? And that Bobby is out of the picture. And you, as a human being, are in life. I'm going to take my hand away from your lips now. Much to me. If you gave me some positive indication that you would consider what I am suggesting, then in the sense of what, I'm not. OK, Norm. Meaning? Coming, coming. What I was hoping you might do, John, is come in a sort of general way on the tone of the scene. I don't know, two guys, this is written by two guys who don't look terribly unlike these two guys 20 years ago. And we're just sitting in a French restaurant where we had lunch every day while doing Hell Street Blues. And just we were saying, maybe he says to him, maybe we keep the suitcase. And then it went from there to like, well, don't answer right away, but maybe we keep the suitcase. And then it went to, now, I'm going to ask you a question. And just started building. And we were on the floor by the time we were done, coming up with, I'm going to take my hands away now. And I didn't, you wouldn't respect. The line we thought was funny is you wouldn't respect me if I didn't at least ask. And we're making ourselves crazy with laughing. And then we go back and type it up. What do you want to know? Well, one thing I thought you might comment on is the relationship between the cop and his shrink, and his, and his, and his snitch. I've been thinking about in treatment, and his snitch. Because it's obviously, this is obviously a complex friendship, isn't it? Yeah. And you know, if any of you know anything about this kind of law enforcement, the relationship between informants and detectives is very steep, moral and psychological territory. You're clearly choosing someone who's up to his ears in crime or her. And you own a responsibility to protect them, but they also owe you a great deal for not doing what you can do, which is arrest them or something. So there's a kind of sense in which we both have each other at each other's mercy. But you are fundamentally a cop, and I am fundamentally a criminal. And we built over the years a relationship between these two, which was especially knotted and kind of mutually affectionate. They resemble each other, but they don't. And they live together. I mean, I'm sure that queer theory would have a ball with a sort of homoerotic overtones. They live together. They love each other. I remember I wrote the last episode of Hill Street Blues co-wrote, and there's a scene, which is the next to last episode, a next to last scene in the shell, where Bunce is being kicked off. That detective is being kicked off the force for losing his temper and hitting the police chief in the face and whatever. He's sitting alone with the fact that he's going to lose his profession as a cop. But it's always ever wanted to be. And Sid, who had this star moment here, his informant, comes to him and tries to comfort him. And Bunce says, I don't see myself being a cop again. And it's just such a pained moment. And Sid says to him, you're the best guy I ever knew, which is as close as people like this come to a. To sentimentality. To sentimentality. And Bunce says, thanks, I'm going to go for a walk now. And he leaves. And my boss at the time loved the scene and didn't change a word. But he stopped. The only thing he did was, as Bunce starts. You can identify the boss. Oh, David Milch. You have your right. And the only thing he did to the scene was right before Bunce leaves, after having Sid saying, you're the best guy I ever knew. He says, oh, and if you pass a convenience store, can you pick up one of those orange pops? And Bunce says, if I think of it, if they're open or something like that. And he leaves. It was the only change that he made. But it was brilliant change. And it taught me a lot. I was a new writer as my first show. Because it had a kind of a, not so much that it cut the treacle of the sentimentality of the moment. Because that was untouched. I mean, in a sense, you couldn't. But because it was an irrelevant detail, it was just a sort of thing that just happens in life and is just stuck to. The scenes we play in real life, no matter what the scene is, you're told your wife is leaving you or whatever the scene is, it never happens without a little orange pop in it, without something. The phone rings, and it's a solicitation from Hillary Clinton's campaign or something, right in the middle of the most dramatic moment of your life. That kind of thing in Flex, we don't get to play out the scenes of our life under a proscenium arch with perfect artistic timing. And that kind of knowledge in TV's shoddy little form is very good at conveying. But that tells you more about the relationship between these two guys. And it was a violent cop show. It wasn't great art by all standards. But you were able to explore human emotions and human relations. And I hope a little bit redeem the. And also, the tone of that show was especially complicated because it was full of comic, weird, strange, unexpected moments like this. But that's history. And I think we should look forward to what television might be in the future and what movies might be. And I see this young generation of filmmakers making movies that are really the smallest or about something. They have much more to do with John Sayles, and they do with David Melchman. They have much more to do with making movies in your backyard with unknown actors telling stories about what you really know. This is really exciting. They're fresh. They have a lot of heart. They're so far a little mild, they can go much further. And they drift off into a kind of easy comedy. You think of the Wilson brothers, really good kids, who gone from that kind of film describing like bottle rocket to very big broad Hollywood comedies that seem to be less interesting. So there's a danger that they'll sell out like so many before them. But in general, there's something about this generation of, as I was saying, Nancy Oliver and the filmmakers of some of these smaller comedies that I expect great storytelling, great narrative, great human truth. I don't know what their economic and technological future is, but you can't keep people from telling stories. When I see this, I see something that strikes me as really funny, very old fashioned, very, but paved the way for a kind of truth and honesty in storytelling. It's not a bad time for the big Hollywood movies, and it's a bad time for the big hits. I don't think there's a lot about Grey's Anatomy or something that would excite my artistic appetite if I were a young filmmaker. I wouldn't be rushing out to direct an episode of that. And then business is mostly that lipstick jungle. God help us, you know? I mean, there'll always be a lot of crap, but I think there's also little corners of both movies and less often television where you could see people coming along and saying something new. And so they don't come out of literature and theater and things the way we did. There's still stories to tell. I really do feel positive about what the new crop of filmmakers will do. Thank you very much. Audience, thank you, John. Thank you. Thank you.