October 9, 2001

One fine summer day when my spec screenplays were floundering on the West Coast and my great unfinished novel was still too unfinished for the East, I suddenly realized I was flat broke. My checking account balance was under a hundred bucks, I had ten thousand dollars in overdue bills and not a writing job in site. Now I haven’t had a regular paycheck since a bad brush with a low draft number at the end of the Vietnam War, so I’ve been broke before, but somehow, someway, a gig always comes along. The basic tenet of being a writer is faith.

This time, my salvation came — as it often does — in the form of a phone call from an old friend. Paul Kurta, a film producer who’d once cast me in a movie with Sissy Spacek, thought I might be the just the guy to write for a new Showtime series he was producing. Created by feature writer Scott Rosenberg, Going to California is described as "Route 66 for the MTV generation" – two young guys on the road in an old muscle car, a new town and a new adventure awaiting them each week. I read Scott’s pilot script and was immediately hooked.

Despite being warned it was a long shot that I’d actually get the gig, a week later I was sitting in the Santa Monica office of the show’s Executive Producer and showrunner, Jeff Melvoin. In the course of twenty minutes, I laid out my ideas for two different stories I’d devised. I’ve been in my share of Hollywood pitch meetings and my success-to-failure ratio is pretty high, so it wasn’t hard to know I was going down the tubes. My ideas were too detailed for a one-hour episode, and the stories too expensive to shoot on the show’s budget. What Jeff wanted was a solid concept that would bring the episode’s cost down, not up.

Since producers often like you more than they do your ideas, the most important rule for a writer in a pitch meeting is to always have one more idea in your hip pocket. If that idea happens to be based on a classic story, all the better. My fallback was for Space and Ungalow, the show’s main characters, to run out of gas in South Texas. Pushing their car to a deserted station named Gordo’s, they’d find a note from the owner which said ‘Gone for gas, back tomorrow." The name of the episode… "Waiting for Gordo." One of the beauties of television is that it doesn’t take years to see your work make it to the screen. Today, just one day before we start shooting my Gordo script, I still feel blessed to be working for a show whose producers actually like the idea of a Latino version of Beckett.

Another great advantage of the tube is that the speed of production makes it more of a collaborative medium than film. In features, multiple writers are the norm, and a movie may be made of your original script without a single word of your genius being said by any actor. In television, chances are if you turn in something good, much of it will be shot. As he does with every episode of his show, Scott Rosenberg did a polish on my script, a process I of course dreaded. But my worries were unfounded, as Scott managed to retain just about everything I felt was essential and still found natural openings to make the rest better. The script has laughs; it has heart, it even has a little action.

This morning I got my first look at the newly finished set for Gordo’s gas station in the hills west of Austin, and it was so much more fully realized than what I’d imagined that I immediately knew my words were in good hands. I’ve worked with feature directors who never knew through the entire production what the next shot was going to be. But this morning, the director of my episode, John Asher, walked the crew through a technical scout of all our locations, reciting his shot list from memory for every sequence in the entire one-hour film. Like most writers with a little experience under their belts, I’d tried to keep the number of camera angles and specific shot directions to the minimum. Write your scenes with what it takes to tell the story, then let the director do his job. This morning John was telling the same story I’d written, but he was doing it with the added visual flair of a guy who knows lenses, dolly shots and how to cut together a special effects explosion so that the viewer’s hair is blown back by the force.

John Asher is also an actor who appears in the show as a reoccurring character named Insect Bob. That means he knows a good actor when he sees one. Scott and John had hoped to cast Cheech Marin in one of the episode’s two Latino guest roles, but Cheech was unavailable, so today everyone was up against the wall to make some casting decisions fast. Invited to watch audition tapes this afternoon, I learned more about auditioning in an hour than I have in years of my own occasional readings for parts.

The audition tape I did for The Sopranos last year was the best I’ve ever sent out. Following the straight take at the beginning of the tape in which I let the writing speak for itself, I added two more-energetic versions of the same scene. But two weeks later when I was blocking that scene on the set, Sopranos director Allen Coulter told me the first take was the one that had gotten me the job. One reason The Sopranos seems so real is because that’s the nature of the stories the entire cast and crew are telling — in collaboration. They believe in those stories, and so does their audience.

Watching tapes today for the parts I’d written, I learned that no matter how much an actor throws himself into a role, he’s either got the character down or he doesn’t. "What this tells us," Scott Rosenberg said after we watched one particularly painful tape, "Is you can’t shine shit."

John Asher had an equally instructive line. "You’ll know who’s right the moment you see him," Sure enough, the next guy on screen practically lit up the room. Tomorrow morning that actor will be on a plane to Austin and "Waiting for Gordo" will already be shooting its first scenes with the two principle cast members, Sam Trammell and Brad Henke.

At this point, my work is done. Now it’s up to everyone else to tell my story. But unlike on most feature film sets, I’m welcome to hang out and watch my words and dreams come to life. I know that many of the people reading this story don’t subscribe to Showtime, so let me tell you flat, you’re missing something good. Going to California has the balls to seek out promising writers with regional voices, and has the cast and crew to deliver on that promise. But don’t take my word for it, check it out. Without you, we’re nothing.