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ROAD
TO ROSWELL
From theWB.com:
Once a struggling
playwright, Roswell creator Jason Katims began his television
career writing for the highly influential drama, My So-Called Life.
In the first entry of this two-part series, Katims talks with The WB about
writing, his background and what the hell baseball has to do with
anything.
How did you get your
start in writing?
I grew up in New York,
and when I graduated college I decided I wanted to be a playwright, and I
just started writing plays and joining playwriting groups and trying to
get productions. I didn't really have a lot of success when I first
started doing it. I mean I had enough success, and enough people
responded to my writing to keep me going, but it was quite a long time
before I wound up earning a living doing it. And even though during
that period I would have killed for a job, I'm grateful now for that time
because I feel like that time helped me develop a voice. And there's
something freeing about the fact that nobody cares what you write and what
you're writing about. There's something freeing about that because
it allows you to really write in a very pure way. You're not
servicing anybody, you're not writing for a producer or a TV studio or a
network or an actor or anything like that, and you're just writing.
What did you write
mostly back then?
I would write one-act
plays, a couple of full-length plays. I tried writing a couple of
spec features, but predominately I wrote plays. I got my break in
television through a play I had written. Ed Zwick, who was producer
of My So-Called Life and many other things and a director, had read
one of my plays and called me and said, "Do you want to write for
television?" And I got on a plane, and that was it, and I've
been in L.A. ever since.
Having also written
for film, do you find there to be more immediate satisfaction in
television?
As hard as it is to do
what we do when we write for television, it's really addictive. If
you write a play - unless you are an enormously successful playwright -
you go and you write the play, and then you try to get a reading, and then
you have another reading and then a stage reading and then a workshop, and
then you re-write, you re-write, and by the time you get a production of
the play it's years later. Same thing with a feature. There's
something about writing something that you know two weeks from now they're
going to be shooting it. There's a reward to that that you can't
deny. It's great training for writers. I learn more with every
script that we produce and every script that we write. It's like the
quote by Ted Williams about hitting : somebody asked him to teach him to
hit, and he said if you want to learn how to hit, you have to hit 10,000
balls, and that's how to become a hitter, and I think it's similar with
writing. If you want to be a writer you gotta write - not only
write, but you have to sort of have the experience of seeing that stuff
played, and it kind of becomes so blatantly obvious when you see a scene
being acted... whether it's working whether it's not working, and you
learn from that.
What advice would you
give to a writer who wants to break into television?
My advice would be to
not worry so much about what form you're writing. Do something where
you feel who you are can most clearly come out and emerge, whether that's
in a play or a short film or a short story or a spec feature... or maybe
it is a spec TV script, but I think the advice is you have to really care
about what it is that you're doing and invest yourself in it because I
think that's how your work will separate itself from other work that's out
there. As a producer, when you're reading something where there's
obviously passion behind it and there's obviously an individual voice...
that's what producers look for.
How has the teen genre
developed since My So-Called Life?
When we were doing My
So-Called Life, the teen genre was dead. It was totally
dead. The network didn't care about a teen show. They didn't
care about that audience. They weren't looking to service that
audience, so on My So-Called Life, we enjoyed this kind of
wonderful anonymity. Nobody paid attention to us. But after
the show was off the air it just wouldn't die, and it continues to this
day. You flip through the stations in the middle of the night and
there it is. We only did 17 episodes of the show, but there's
something about it that sort of remained in the consciousness and the
imagination of people, and I think that it foreshadowed a lot of these
shows that came since. I thought it was a pretty amazing show in
terms of how deeply it tapped into adolescence, and so in doing Roswell,
I try - not to do My So-Called Life again cause you could never do
that - but it is definitely on my mind a lot as I write.
On to Part
2.
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