Television Work


The oldest rookie writer in Hollywood.

That's what the Christian Science Monitor called me when I started on JAG in 1999. For the record, I was 51, ancient by Hollywood standards where a female TV writer in her 30's pretended to be a teenager to get a job on a youth-oriented show.

Heading west, I had this antiquated notion that a writer who's worked numerous jobs, lived different places, read lots of books might have more to say than a kid fresh out of Harvard. What did I know?

I had a brief fling with Hollywood in the mid-1990's when NBC made a TV movie from TO SPEAK FOR THE DEAD, my first Jake Lassiter book. I served as "creative consultant," which meant I was paid to give notes to the screenwriter who was then paid to ignore them. Here's an actual telephone conversation between the naive novelist in Miami and the savvy screenwriter in Hollywood:

NOVELIST
You didn't use any of my notes.

SCREENWRITER
And you don't understand the process.

NOVELIST
There's a process?

SCREENWRITER
See, you owned a car. You sold us the car. Now, you want to drive the car. But I'm gonna drive it. You can wave as it goes by. That's the process.

So, I'd been warned. But still, I started dabbling in Hollywood long-distance. I wrote an action-adventure feature for Stephen J. Cannell's company. Think DIE HARD in a missile silo. If you missed it in the theaters, there's a reason: it was never shot. ABC hired me to write a pilot about a teenage computer hacker. (What do I know about computer hackers? About as much as I know about quantum mechanics). Five similar pilots were commissioned by the networks that season; none got on the air. I wrote a World War II mini-series for CBS, which also remains unproduced.

I also free-lanced two episodes of JAG, the CBS military drama. Those were produced and aired. Listening to actors read my lines just a few weeks

- - sometimes, a few days - - after they were written, I was bitten by the Hollywood bug. When Don Bellisario, the creator of JAG, offered me a staff position, I packed my bags and left Miami for the Hollywood Hills. Goodbye mosquitoes; hello coyotes. Over the next few years, I wrote more than 20 JAG episodes.

With Bellisario, I also co-created a short-lived CBS drama, FIRST MONDAY. Based very loosely on my Supreme Court thriller 9 SCORPIONS, the show gave me the opportunity to work with James Garner, Joe Mantegna, and Charles Durning, three terrific actors with about a thousand years of experience. But FIRST MONDAY fizzled, especially with younger viewers. Gee, if only we'd cast Jessica Simpson as a law clerk, maybe we'd still be on the air. (It didn't help that a show with "Monday" in the title debuted on a Tuesday and was moved to Friday.)

So my relatively brief experience in Hollywood has had its peaks and valleys...and deep canyons. Still, I have learned valuable lessons from television writing. These days, I try to trim the fat from my fiction. I write leaner prose and construct tighter plots. But one thing hasn't changed in my approach to Hollywood. I still don't understand "the process."