Stephen Cannell Interview
Jan. 29th, 2009 06:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ostarellaExcellent interview with Stephen J. Cannell - you can listen or watch it here
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200901/20090127_cannell.html
Tavis: Stephen J. Cannell is one of TV's most successful and prolific writers and producers. His outstanding resume includes seminal shows like "The A Team," the "Rockford Files," "21 Jump Street," "Wise Guy" and so many more. He's also, though, a successful novelist whose latest work is now a "New York Times" bestseller. The book is called "On the Grind." Before we get to the text, here now just a small sampling of the award-winning work for television by Stephen J. Cannell.
[Montage of Stephen J. Cannell shows]
Tavis: I have not seen that little clip of some of your best stuff, but I'm so glad it closed with the typewriter moment, because I was about to say, with all due respect to your work, my favorite part of your work -
Stephen J. Cannell: (Laughs) And I didn't even have to write that. (Laughter)
Tavis: I'm glad to have you here.
Cannell: Good to see you, man.
Tavis: No, it is so cool, because I know for people who may not know the name Stephen J. Cannell, whoever those persons are under a rock somewhere, we've seen enough of your stuff on TV - "Oh, you mean the guy at the typewriter that throws the paper."
Cannell: Yeah, the litterbug.
Tavis: Yeah. (Laughter) Talk to me about how something - speaking of bug, a bug that you are identified by, how important is something that seems so little to people knowing and recognizing and attaching that to your work, to your name?
Cannell: Well, it's interesting how it started, Tavis, because I had been starting to be called a mogul in the trade press and in some national press, and I thought a mogul was a guy in a green suit who tried to pick up actresses. And I thought, I don't want to be a mogul; I'm a writer. I get up every day and I write for five hours. And I said to this lady who was running my publicity department, "I want to get this off me."
And we were redesigning the corporate logo, and she said, "Well, let's do something with you at the typewriter." And now when I walk around in the streets today, people go, "Oh, you're the writer." So it actually managed to completely submarine that idea that I was a producer more than a writer.
Tavis: How important - obviously it was important - tell me why it was important and how important it was for you to be identified as a writer.
Cannell: Well, it's my passion, it's what I do. I used to say to people, and I still believe it, you can take almost anything except my wife and kids away from me, but you take my typewriter, which I still work on, by the way, an old Selectric, I'll chase you down the street. I don't want to lose that, because that's what I do every day for five hours. This morning, five hours I worked on it.
Tavis: Does the typewriter have - obviously it does, but what is the significance of you to this point in your career still working on a typewriter? Why does that matter to you?
Cannell: Well, I have learning differences, which you may know about - I have severe dyslexia. I flunked three grades before I got out of high school. And I spell everything phonetically, so the computer really doesn't work. When I hit spell check on my computer, it just smokes. (Laughter) So for me, I just gave up on spelling a long time ago and I'm just saying, you know what?
And I like the kind of tactile experience of the typewriter; I like hearing that ball hit the page, so I stayed on it. I'm fortunate in that I can sort of have things my own way, and I have people that input everything every day into a computer and so it quickly gets onto a computer, but I write on a typewriter.
Tavis: I was about to say, so for the people who work with you, whatever that team of people is, over the years they've worked with you well enough to know when you spell something out phonetically because of your dyslexia, they know how to interpret what that word is?
Cannell: Yeah. Sometimes I get a creative re-write where they make a guess at something I've written and it's actually better than what I wrote. But I don't tell them. (Laughter) I just accept it.
Tavis: There you go. What do you make of the fact that you have been able, have been blessed - that's my word, not yours; you may agree or disagree, but I think blessed - to have been able to fashion such a wonderful career unable to pass most of your high school English classes?
Cannell: Well, I think it's an example of - actually when I went to school, as you know, Tavis, there was no condition called dyslexia. Because I graduated from college in 1964, so it was - back then they didn't know what it was. So what I was getting all the time was that I wasn't applying myself. They'd listen to me talk and they'd go, "Well, there's nothing wrong with you. Just work a little harder, you'll do better."
But when you're working as hard as you possibly can, when you study five hours for a test, a quiz, and you flunk it, and some buddy of yours got an A and you say, "How long did you study?" and he says, "I didn't," then you begin to say, "You know what? I'm not very smart." That's the only thing I could take away from it.
And I think in a way, the residual benefit of all of that is that I don't put the need on myself to be brilliant. I had the idea that I would be brilliant beaten out of me in the third grade. I just sit down every morning, trying to have a good time. And the result of it is I don't block, I'm not one of those guys or girls that can't get to the keyboard.
I know people that are walking around sharpening pencils for half the day, and with me I just jump up and do it because I'm there to have a good time, not to be brilliant, because I don't even consider that as being part of the equation. And the result of it is sometimes I actually can write pretty well.
Tavis: I'm fascinated by that. I want to come back to that, because I've never heard anybody quite put it that way in all these conversations, but I like that. I wonder whether or not there is something for parents, specifically, to take from that, which is to not put an inordinate amount of pressure on the child to be brilliant, that it takes away from their creative juices starting to flow.
Cannell: Well, I think it absolutely has to. If I were to say to you, "Okay, Tavis, go home and be brilliant and write something that's brilliant," if you didn't lock, which most people do have a tendency to do because they go, "I'm not going to be brilliant, so I can't put a word on the page."
The other thing that - I think the most common byproduct of that is pretentiousness, not brilliance. So what you want to do is you want to - have you ever heard the acting expression that he or she has an open engine? It's an acting expression meaning they can access their feelings and their emotions and they come out really cleanly, and it's an open engine. Well, the same thing is true of writing - you have to have an open engine.
You have to be able to get deep into yourself and let these things come out, and they need to be a little bit kind of freeform. You can't say as you're writing it, oh, this has to be just a little better or a little tighter or a little brighter. You just have to let it happen. Then you do the brightening and tightening in your rewrite.
Tavis: What's the significance of you sitting every day for five hours? You've referenced that now a couple of times. Is there a process here? Is there a phobia if you don't sit for five hours? What's the five-hour thing every day?
Cannell: I just love doing it. I really love doing it. And I think more than anything else, that's responsible for my prolific nature of my career is that I get up every day and for five - and it is five hours. I get up at 3:30.
Tavis: A.M.?
Cannell: A.M.
Tavis: Right.
Cannell: I lift for an hour and then I go to work and I write. I'm done by 11:00. I'm done with my writing part of my day by 11:00, I'm producing some pictures, and I'm running some businesses. So I go then to that other part of my life. But every day for five hours at the top of the day I'm writing, and it's - and I've been doing that for 40 years.
Tavis: Does stuff always come to you, or do you find yourself sometimes every now and then sitting there and not getting a thought for the five-hour period, or at four hours and 45 minutes, something brilliant hits you?
Cannell: Well, I always know what I'm writing before I start. I outline everything. This book was totally outlined, there's a 70-page outline that I wrote before I ever sat down and wrote the first chapter. I know where I'm going. I know what I'm trying to accomplish. I did that with - now obviously, plotting days are different day from writing days. If I'm plotting or researching I'll allow myself a certain amount of time to do that and then I'll sit down and do my plot and then I allow myself two or three weeks to plot a book, if that's what I'm going to do. And that's five hours a day of sitting there and making beat sheets and plots and what's act one and what's the complication at the top of act two and how am I going to move the adversary and all that, and I'm doing all that work, get that done.
Then the writing is the picnic. That's the getting up and going, get to play with it. And if it's good structure, you know it's - I'm never going to be at a place where I can't finish
Tavis: I want to come to Shane Scully here in just a second, but do you have any idea after all these years where this stuff comes from? You do the outline, then you sit there, to your word, and the picnic begins. Where does this stuff come from? Do you have any idea where it comes from, or it just comes?
Cannell: Just comes.
Tavis: Yeah.
Cannell: I don't know, I'm nuts. I think maybe I should be committed. (Laughter) I'm all the characters - I'm the men, I'm the women, I'm the good guys, I'm the bad guys. My wife will walk by my office door and I'm giggling. I think she wants to throw a net over me. (Laughter) If it's a comedy I'm writing. It's just always been - that's my gift. It's very much like an - I'm also an actor, and it's very much like an acting improve where once you know who your guy or your girl is that you're being, and then you feel their feelings and the emotions come out and the dialogue comes out.
Tavis: What's Shane up to now?
Cannell: Well, in this one it's called "On the Grind," and it's about a corrupt city and police department right in our inner city here in Los Angeles. A fictitious department that I created called Haven Park PD in the municipal city of Haven Park. Corrupt mayor. All 36 members of that police department have all been thrown off of other departments for crimes ranging from beating up people in I rooms to bad shootings, and the only place where they can get employed is at Haven Park.
So it's really a rotten barrel full of cops, and they're shaking down the mostly Hispanic population of this town that is undocumented and has nowhere to turn for help. Shane Scully infiltrates this department and it's a pretty exciting ride for him because he has nowhere to turn. He's back in the front seat of a patrol car; he's a homicide detective at LAPD.
But now he's in a blue suit with a shoulder rover on his shoulder and being trained by maybe the worst police officer in America, a guy named Alonzo Bell.
Tavis: You've done, to be sure, a lot of stuff. We saw the clip at the top of the show of a sampling of some of the stuff you've done. But I get the sense that there's an affinity that you have to crime - well, not to crime yourself; as a criminal.
Cannell: Check your wallet, Tavis. (Laughter)
Tavis: Let me check my wallet here, yeah. Not an affinity to crime, but you like crime stories, though.
Cannell: Yeah, I do, I really do. Here's what I like about police stories and private detective stories, all the shows that I've done, is that you can go anywhere in society and tell your story, so you can access things that are going on in this mostly Hispanic town of Haven Park, which is a fictitious town but the research was real.
Or you can go to the Bellaire country club and do a crime there. You can deal in the oil industry; you can go to the outskirts, the orange groves of L.A. and what's going on there. So it's like anywhere you want to go in our society, you can tell a police story. And so I love it for that reason, and there are lots of times when I find myself into areas where I never would have thought I would have been able to go in another kind of novel that I can go in a police story.
Tavis: I love this guy. I've been watching his work, like you, for years, and I did not know the back story. My grandmother used to say all the time that people see your glory; they don't know your story. So I saw his glory, but the back story, flunking English classes in high school, to this day still spelling words phonetically, but what a star Stephen J. Cannell is.
His new book is called "On the Grind," the latest in the Shane Scully novel series. Stephen J. Cannell, glad to have you on the program.
Cannell: Hey, Tavis, thanks for (unintelligible).
Tavis: Nice to have you here, man, thank you.
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200901/20090127_cannell.html
Tavis: Stephen J. Cannell is one of TV's most successful and prolific writers and producers. His outstanding resume includes seminal shows like "The A Team," the "Rockford Files," "21 Jump Street," "Wise Guy" and so many more. He's also, though, a successful novelist whose latest work is now a "New York Times" bestseller. The book is called "On the Grind." Before we get to the text, here now just a small sampling of the award-winning work for television by Stephen J. Cannell.
[Montage of Stephen J. Cannell shows]
Tavis: I have not seen that little clip of some of your best stuff, but I'm so glad it closed with the typewriter moment, because I was about to say, with all due respect to your work, my favorite part of your work -
Stephen J. Cannell: (Laughs) And I didn't even have to write that. (Laughter)
Tavis: I'm glad to have you here.
Cannell: Good to see you, man.
Tavis: No, it is so cool, because I know for people who may not know the name Stephen J. Cannell, whoever those persons are under a rock somewhere, we've seen enough of your stuff on TV - "Oh, you mean the guy at the typewriter that throws the paper."
Cannell: Yeah, the litterbug.
Tavis: Yeah. (Laughter) Talk to me about how something - speaking of bug, a bug that you are identified by, how important is something that seems so little to people knowing and recognizing and attaching that to your work, to your name?
Cannell: Well, it's interesting how it started, Tavis, because I had been starting to be called a mogul in the trade press and in some national press, and I thought a mogul was a guy in a green suit who tried to pick up actresses. And I thought, I don't want to be a mogul; I'm a writer. I get up every day and I write for five hours. And I said to this lady who was running my publicity department, "I want to get this off me."
And we were redesigning the corporate logo, and she said, "Well, let's do something with you at the typewriter." And now when I walk around in the streets today, people go, "Oh, you're the writer." So it actually managed to completely submarine that idea that I was a producer more than a writer.
Tavis: How important - obviously it was important - tell me why it was important and how important it was for you to be identified as a writer.
Cannell: Well, it's my passion, it's what I do. I used to say to people, and I still believe it, you can take almost anything except my wife and kids away from me, but you take my typewriter, which I still work on, by the way, an old Selectric, I'll chase you down the street. I don't want to lose that, because that's what I do every day for five hours. This morning, five hours I worked on it.
Tavis: Does the typewriter have - obviously it does, but what is the significance of you to this point in your career still working on a typewriter? Why does that matter to you?
Cannell: Well, I have learning differences, which you may know about - I have severe dyslexia. I flunked three grades before I got out of high school. And I spell everything phonetically, so the computer really doesn't work. When I hit spell check on my computer, it just smokes. (Laughter) So for me, I just gave up on spelling a long time ago and I'm just saying, you know what?
And I like the kind of tactile experience of the typewriter; I like hearing that ball hit the page, so I stayed on it. I'm fortunate in that I can sort of have things my own way, and I have people that input everything every day into a computer and so it quickly gets onto a computer, but I write on a typewriter.
Tavis: I was about to say, so for the people who work with you, whatever that team of people is, over the years they've worked with you well enough to know when you spell something out phonetically because of your dyslexia, they know how to interpret what that word is?
Cannell: Yeah. Sometimes I get a creative re-write where they make a guess at something I've written and it's actually better than what I wrote. But I don't tell them. (Laughter) I just accept it.
Tavis: There you go. What do you make of the fact that you have been able, have been blessed - that's my word, not yours; you may agree or disagree, but I think blessed - to have been able to fashion such a wonderful career unable to pass most of your high school English classes?
Cannell: Well, I think it's an example of - actually when I went to school, as you know, Tavis, there was no condition called dyslexia. Because I graduated from college in 1964, so it was - back then they didn't know what it was. So what I was getting all the time was that I wasn't applying myself. They'd listen to me talk and they'd go, "Well, there's nothing wrong with you. Just work a little harder, you'll do better."
But when you're working as hard as you possibly can, when you study five hours for a test, a quiz, and you flunk it, and some buddy of yours got an A and you say, "How long did you study?" and he says, "I didn't," then you begin to say, "You know what? I'm not very smart." That's the only thing I could take away from it.
And I think in a way, the residual benefit of all of that is that I don't put the need on myself to be brilliant. I had the idea that I would be brilliant beaten out of me in the third grade. I just sit down every morning, trying to have a good time. And the result of it is I don't block, I'm not one of those guys or girls that can't get to the keyboard.
I know people that are walking around sharpening pencils for half the day, and with me I just jump up and do it because I'm there to have a good time, not to be brilliant, because I don't even consider that as being part of the equation. And the result of it is sometimes I actually can write pretty well.
Tavis: I'm fascinated by that. I want to come back to that, because I've never heard anybody quite put it that way in all these conversations, but I like that. I wonder whether or not there is something for parents, specifically, to take from that, which is to not put an inordinate amount of pressure on the child to be brilliant, that it takes away from their creative juices starting to flow.
Cannell: Well, I think it absolutely has to. If I were to say to you, "Okay, Tavis, go home and be brilliant and write something that's brilliant," if you didn't lock, which most people do have a tendency to do because they go, "I'm not going to be brilliant, so I can't put a word on the page."
The other thing that - I think the most common byproduct of that is pretentiousness, not brilliance. So what you want to do is you want to - have you ever heard the acting expression that he or she has an open engine? It's an acting expression meaning they can access their feelings and their emotions and they come out really cleanly, and it's an open engine. Well, the same thing is true of writing - you have to have an open engine.
You have to be able to get deep into yourself and let these things come out, and they need to be a little bit kind of freeform. You can't say as you're writing it, oh, this has to be just a little better or a little tighter or a little brighter. You just have to let it happen. Then you do the brightening and tightening in your rewrite.
Tavis: What's the significance of you sitting every day for five hours? You've referenced that now a couple of times. Is there a process here? Is there a phobia if you don't sit for five hours? What's the five-hour thing every day?
Cannell: I just love doing it. I really love doing it. And I think more than anything else, that's responsible for my prolific nature of my career is that I get up every day and for five - and it is five hours. I get up at 3:30.
Tavis: A.M.?
Cannell: A.M.
Tavis: Right.
Cannell: I lift for an hour and then I go to work and I write. I'm done by 11:00. I'm done with my writing part of my day by 11:00, I'm producing some pictures, and I'm running some businesses. So I go then to that other part of my life. But every day for five hours at the top of the day I'm writing, and it's - and I've been doing that for 40 years.
Tavis: Does stuff always come to you, or do you find yourself sometimes every now and then sitting there and not getting a thought for the five-hour period, or at four hours and 45 minutes, something brilliant hits you?
Cannell: Well, I always know what I'm writing before I start. I outline everything. This book was totally outlined, there's a 70-page outline that I wrote before I ever sat down and wrote the first chapter. I know where I'm going. I know what I'm trying to accomplish. I did that with - now obviously, plotting days are different day from writing days. If I'm plotting or researching I'll allow myself a certain amount of time to do that and then I'll sit down and do my plot and then I allow myself two or three weeks to plot a book, if that's what I'm going to do. And that's five hours a day of sitting there and making beat sheets and plots and what's act one and what's the complication at the top of act two and how am I going to move the adversary and all that, and I'm doing all that work, get that done.
Then the writing is the picnic. That's the getting up and going, get to play with it. And if it's good structure, you know it's - I'm never going to be at a place where I can't finish
Tavis: I want to come to Shane Scully here in just a second, but do you have any idea after all these years where this stuff comes from? You do the outline, then you sit there, to your word, and the picnic begins. Where does this stuff come from? Do you have any idea where it comes from, or it just comes?
Cannell: Just comes.
Tavis: Yeah.
Cannell: I don't know, I'm nuts. I think maybe I should be committed. (Laughter) I'm all the characters - I'm the men, I'm the women, I'm the good guys, I'm the bad guys. My wife will walk by my office door and I'm giggling. I think she wants to throw a net over me. (Laughter) If it's a comedy I'm writing. It's just always been - that's my gift. It's very much like an - I'm also an actor, and it's very much like an acting improve where once you know who your guy or your girl is that you're being, and then you feel their feelings and the emotions come out and the dialogue comes out.
Tavis: What's Shane up to now?
Cannell: Well, in this one it's called "On the Grind," and it's about a corrupt city and police department right in our inner city here in Los Angeles. A fictitious department that I created called Haven Park PD in the municipal city of Haven Park. Corrupt mayor. All 36 members of that police department have all been thrown off of other departments for crimes ranging from beating up people in I rooms to bad shootings, and the only place where they can get employed is at Haven Park.
So it's really a rotten barrel full of cops, and they're shaking down the mostly Hispanic population of this town that is undocumented and has nowhere to turn for help. Shane Scully infiltrates this department and it's a pretty exciting ride for him because he has nowhere to turn. He's back in the front seat of a patrol car; he's a homicide detective at LAPD.
But now he's in a blue suit with a shoulder rover on his shoulder and being trained by maybe the worst police officer in America, a guy named Alonzo Bell.
Tavis: You've done, to be sure, a lot of stuff. We saw the clip at the top of the show of a sampling of some of the stuff you've done. But I get the sense that there's an affinity that you have to crime - well, not to crime yourself; as a criminal.
Cannell: Check your wallet, Tavis. (Laughter)
Tavis: Let me check my wallet here, yeah. Not an affinity to crime, but you like crime stories, though.
Cannell: Yeah, I do, I really do. Here's what I like about police stories and private detective stories, all the shows that I've done, is that you can go anywhere in society and tell your story, so you can access things that are going on in this mostly Hispanic town of Haven Park, which is a fictitious town but the research was real.
Or you can go to the Bellaire country club and do a crime there. You can deal in the oil industry; you can go to the outskirts, the orange groves of L.A. and what's going on there. So it's like anywhere you want to go in our society, you can tell a police story. And so I love it for that reason, and there are lots of times when I find myself into areas where I never would have thought I would have been able to go in another kind of novel that I can go in a police story.
Tavis: I love this guy. I've been watching his work, like you, for years, and I did not know the back story. My grandmother used to say all the time that people see your glory; they don't know your story. So I saw his glory, but the back story, flunking English classes in high school, to this day still spelling words phonetically, but what a star Stephen J. Cannell is.
His new book is called "On the Grind," the latest in the Shane Scully novel series. Stephen J. Cannell, glad to have you on the program.
Cannell: Hey, Tavis, thanks for (unintelligible).
Tavis: Nice to have you here, man, thank you.
