A legal drama was a cop show seen from a different point of view.
A lot of what you do as a producer is say no and impose your tastes on other people.
After that, I went to work as a story editor on Columbo.
Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.
But I did read sports themed books as a child.
But I remember as a kid growing up and my fantasy of what a writer is, is he goes into a room and writes a novel.
By the time Hill Street Blues came along in 1980, I had been at it almost 15 years, so I knew and had worked with a fairly wide range of actors.
Carnegie accepted me from the ten short stories I sent to them.
Casting is sort of like looking at paintings. You don't know what you'll like, but you recognize it when you see it.
Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images.
Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.
Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.
However, we do work very hard to find exceptional writers whose work reaches inspired levels.
I always have a particular way that I like to tell stories. David Milch has a particular way that he likes to tell stories.
I always knew I wanted to be a writer.
I am supervising scripts for work and reading 10 scripts a week plus.
I did it very reluctantly in 1973 when I realized that producing was the only way to maintain control over what I wrote for television.
I didn't have a natural instinct for telling other people what to do.
I don't think we consciously thought about how cops talk. Cops are people like everyone else.
I grew up in New York, on the upper West Side, in a pretty rough berg.
I had a job at Universal Studios waiting for me. I had a summer job there in 1965 and I was invited to return when school was over.
I have several ideas noodling in my head for a book in the future.
I hear what I write much more than I see it.
I read 1000's of scripts for work.
I spent a year at NYU and transferred to Carnegie Tech, in Pittsburgh, which is now Carnegie Mellon. I graduated in 1966.
I tell writers, actors and other young people that for every person who succeeds in our business 1,000 people don't.
I think television is also an integral part of our culture.
I think that reluctance to arbitrarily impose my will on people ultimately made me a better producer.
I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment.
I was a street rat and lived for sports.
I was enamored with the theater.
I was not a person lost in books.
I went to work at Universal Studios a couple of days after I arrived in Los Angeles and have never been out of a job since then for a day in my life.
I've gotten to create and write shows that have been seen by countless millions of people.
I've never cast a cinematographer for the aforementioned reason that I'm not a particularly visual person.
Imagery is like music.
In high school I was involved with music and was a singer. I hated it.
Keep writing, and eventually you'll get read. Don't get discouraged. It's hard to make it.
Maybe because of my theater background, I instinctively valued words more than images.
Michael and I had worked with and met a lot of cops in the context of other shows.
Michael and I wrote the script for the pilot of Hill Street Blues in about two weeks.
My Dad was a musician and I come from a musical family.
My teachers told me I could write, and relatively early on in my life, it was clear to me that's what I did best.
My work precludes time for reading on a regular basis and reading for pleasure.
Neither Michael nor I had any particular interest. We had both worked on cop shows over the years and didn't feel there was anything particularly interesting about bringing another one to the air.
One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.
Over the years, I've gotten better at painting visuals with words.
The criteria for anything is if I fall in love to go off on my own to do it.
Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.
We always have an idea of what we want to do. We don't always pull it off, but we have an idea.
Writing television screenplays requires an understanding of the way (motion picture) film accelerates the communication of words.
You have to create an environment that allows for input from a lot of sources. It may take a little longer, but you come out with a better result.
You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.
You read ten pages of a David Kelley script and you knew he was a gifted writer.
You read ten pages of a David Milch, even though he'd never written a TV script before, and you knew he was a writer.
Your knowledge and memory of any given episode was informed by your experience watching previous shows.
You can share a link to this page with your friend!