Let’s get one thing straight right now: The episode “Jitters” (episode 1-8), which aired around this time last year, was probably one of the most well-received episodes of the first season. It was admittedly the episode that most said hooked them onto the WB network show. The episode was written by the husband and wife team of Jeff Gottesfeld and Cherie Bennett.
Before their experience on the “Smallville” writing team, Bennett and Gottesfeld’s only previous forays into television were story consultations on the daytime soap operas “Port Charles” and “Another World.“ But the team is no stranger to young-adult audiences. Their most recognizable work is the critically acclaimed “Anne Frank and Me,” which was published in 2001 and won several awards. They also wrote the young-adult novels for “Dawson’s Creek,” under the pseudonym C.J. Anders, and more than a handful of other titles in mass-market fiction and plays. In addition, Bennett writes a nationally syndicated teen advice column called “Hey, Cherie!” with Copley News Service.
Although Gottesfeld and Bennett no longer write for the onscreen “Smallville,” they haven’t completely severed their ties to the show. They continue to tell the stories of the residents of Clark Kent’s hometown through the young-adult novels published by Little, Brown. “See No Evil,” which was released earlier in 2002, was the second book in the series; “Flight” was released in early December, and another, “Speed,” is planned for release in 2003.
As busy as Bennett and Gottesfeld are (next week they are off to Florida for the first reading of Bennett‘s new three-character play), they squeezed in a half-hour to log a telephone interview from their Southern California home.
Sullivan Lane: I loved “Flight.” I think I liked it better than “See No Evil.”
Cherie Bennett: Great! I kinda think I did too.
Jeff Gottesfeld: Me, too. I like the one that’s coming later on even more -- “Speed.” It’s a very, very cool book. It’s actually about something. Essentially, it’s Multicultural Week in Smallville, you’ve got a guy who wants to turn back the clock of the town to what it was --
Cherie: Before it was multicultural. So it touches on prejudice, racism and progress, and the changes in small-town America. It was really, really fun for us to do.
Sully: And when will that be out?
Jeff: I want to say March [2003].
Sully: Where did you come up with the idea for [the meteor mutant in “Flight“]?
Jeff: There’s a great story behind it. Both “See No Evil” and “Flight” came out of ideas that were developed in the writers’ room in “Smallville,” while we were on staff …
Cherie: … that we kicked around for shows, and for one reason or another it was decided not to use them for the television show. And for example, with “Flight,” it would have been really tough to do for television. And if you tried to do it, I could only imagine how hokey it would be.
Jeff: Actually, the story of “See No Evil” was quite well-developed in the room. That came fairly close to being the sign of an episode. The “Flight” one, everyone thought it was a cool idea, and impossible to execute on television.
Cherie: It originally came from the Greek myth …
Jeff: Icarus and Daedalus. … I think it was our friend Greg Walker who concocted this notion in the first place, [just to give] credit where credit is due.
Sully: Clark’s spaceship as the artichoke. Did you get that [nickname] from KryptonSite?
Cherie: Did they say that on KryptonSite?
Sully: We’ve been referring to it as the Giant Artichoke because it looks like one.
Cherie: It does, doesn’t it!
Sully: And then they changed what it looks like, so now it’s the Lawn Dart, or Darth Vader’s helmet. [Laughter.]
Jeff: No one was wild about how it looked. So in between … they’re very careful about the looks of things … when it came time for the spaceship to take on greater importance onscreen, it got a facelift!
Cherie: Rather than having the artichoke flying.
Jeff: I understand it took three tons of Botox.
[Laughter.]
Sully: Which character do you enjoy writing the most?
Cherie: For me, that would be Chloe. I want the “Chloe Show”! I love Chloe, and I think personally I have a girl sensibility, and I write a lot for girls. I know she really speaks to girls, because she’s a real girl. She’s spunky, and funny, and smart, and assertive, and she looks like a real girl. And she has this hopeless crush on this super -- wink, wink -- [guy].
Jeff: For me, I can’t point to a particular character, except to say that the freedom of being able to write 30,000 words to tell a story is an unbelievable amount of freedom, compared to a 53-page script. You really have a lot of room.
Cherie: You get to be in their heads much more: you could have exposition, stream of consciousness. You don’t have the limitations of set or budget, so in those senses it’s really freeing. And in a script, at least last season, how it was done was … all of the scripts were developed in a room by all the writers and then a writer or a writing team were sent off to write a script based on a very detailed outline that was approved by everybody -- the networks, the studios, the head writers, and then you only had about a week or eight days to write it. So you don’t get very long to write a script.
Jeff: That’s fairly typical for hour-long television, and occasionally it’s even shorter.
Cherie: And the people we were working with were extremely experienced and very good at it, and trained as well. But as novelists it was pleasurable to be able to take the time and the word space.
Jeff: You can have a conversation which can go into some depth; it’s not limited to being two minutes or three minutes long.
Cherie: And that was another freedom we had [getting to involve the secondary characters], and it was something that we learned, being fairly new to television. You have X number of people who are on X kind of contract, which means to fulfill those kinds of contracts, you need to do X, Y and Z scene every week, which means there are characters you don’t get to give a lot of time to.
Jeff: There is a lot of room for imagination [in writing the novels], and there is a lot of room for character development, which you don’t get an opportunity to do onscreen. The sword-fighting scene in “See No Evil” of Clark and Lex, when Lex is doing his self-putdowns, that was just a gift, to be able to write something like that. You get to say a lot, and you need some room to get into it.
Sully: Were you Superman fans before writing for “Smallville“?
Cherie: I wasn’t, really. I wasn’t much of a comic book fan, but I have an older brother who is Mr. Comic Book and Mr. Science Fiction, and the great irony was when we got the job on “Smallville,” I said, “Steve, I’m getting paid to write that which you know so much better than I do.” But I certainly came to learn a lot. And also, “Smallville” is really grounded in real emotions and real stories of teenagers.
Jeff: I wasn’t a comics guy when I was younger, although I clearly read Superman comics when I was a kid.
Cherie: [The characters] are archetypes, and we did our homework. Once we knew we had the job, we spent many hours and days doing our homework so that when we went to work on the show we knew what we were writing about.
Jeff: The trickiest thing about writing these books is that we’re writing, in many cases, well before some things are going to air on television. And during the process of a season, some things in the writers’ room that you anticipate are going to happen in episode 10, but when you finally get to [episode 10], those things don’t happen and you’ve gone in a different direction, usually for some good reasons. [For example], a character gets really popular.
Cherie: We [also] wrote the “Dawson’s Creek” novels, and the job is the same when you’re writing novels of things that are on TV, which is you know approximately when the books is going to come out, and your job is to loosely make sure, even though you’re telling a stand-alone story, that nothing in that story contradicts any truth that’s going on, on television during that time. For example if you’re going to do a television tie-in and they kill the character off in October, [while] you’re writing the book six months before that and you didn’t know it. So they tell us usually in general what’s going in the show and if any big things are going to happen. And we get tapes of the show ahead of time.
Jeff: And we read scripts too, but in some ways that’s still not enough time. We’re writing many months ahead of publication. That’s just the book-publishing cycle. I mean, “Flight” just came out; and we were writing “Flight” during the early summer, if I’m not mistaken.
Cherie: It is about six months for paperback fiction. And sometimes you have to try to go in and catch something right before it gets printed. They’ll decide one day, “What are we going to do with Whitney? Are we going to send him to the Army? Are we going to kill him off? Are we going to have him lost in the jungle?” And a decision is made, you write accordingly, and then they decide to do something else completely, which makes your story look ridiculous.
Jeff: That doesn’t happen with us though!
Cherie: We almost got caught with Whitney.
Jeff: You get several shots at the material. You send in your manuscript and it’ll come back with editorial comments, and then you can make some changes on that. And then, page proofs come back from the publisher, and you can make changes on that. So, we really have a few months.
Sully: So after you’ve finished your completed draft, how many times are you able to get it back and make corrections?
Jeff: With this sort of pop-television fiction, I think we get two more shots at it.
Cherie: In the case of this series, the editor at Little, Brown, and then also at DC Comics, by the way who are the best people in the world to work for.… They give us notes, and then we get to do a polish, then page proofs where it’s actually typeset, and we get to see if there’s anything wrong.
Jeff: We may even get another shot at it. We get a copy-edited manuscript back, too. Depending on the time length.
Sully: It seems like a pretty extensive process.
Jeff: Compared to hardcover fiction writing, this is nothing!
Cherie: [With hardcover fiction], it’s many, many, many passes.
Sully: So talking more about the writing process, what’s the process that you two [go through] as a team? What are your strengths and weaknesses? How do you work together?
Cherie: I would say Jeff’s strength is probably plotting and ideas, and my strength is probably character and dialogue. What we do, and we learned to do this in the writers’ room and now apply it just to all our writing, to card beats on index cards and put them up on the bulletin board, so that we can move them around. We break down the whole piece that way. And then we trade off chapters and edit each other’s chapter.
Jeff: And then sometimes within chapters, there’ll be an action sequence, which I’ll write inside of Cherie’s chapter. And there will be a big emotional Clark/Lana conversation, which Cherie will write within mine. [Sometimes] I’ll write one, I’ll give it to Cherie. She doesn’t mark it up. She’ll put it up on her computer and rewrite it. And I’ll do the same to hers. … And then by the time we write, swap and rewrite, it’s utterly seamless. We don’t even remember who wrote what.
Cherie: I’ll say, “Oh, I love what you wrote here,” and he’ll say, “No, wait, I think you wrote that!” [Laughter.]
Sully: You two seem a lot like when Craig and I wrote together. [Psst: Check out “Lois & Clark: The Unaired Fifth Season” for some of Sully/Kat and Craig’s collaborative work from 1997. Shameless plug. Ha.]
Cherie: It is truly a blessing. So if you write that well with him, stick with it because so many people often ask us about that, they say, “How can you be married to each other, have a personal relationship and a professional relationship?” … For us it works really great. When you can find someone that you can do that with, it’s an amazing blessing.
Sully: You make the writing seamless.
Jeff: We better be able to make it seamless! If Al [Gough] and Miles [Millar] can do that with their scripts, we should be able to do it with our novels.
Sully: What do you like best about writing the “Smallville” characters?
Cherie: I have really come to love those characters, and … to have the opportunity to write for Superman as a teenager, I mean, who wouldn’t want to have the chance to do that? And the mythos of Clark and Lex, I think that’s one of the things that fascinates both of us the most, [since] the beginning. That you know what becomes of these two people, and you know that they are going to wrestle with ultimate good and ultimate evil, and here you have both of them, possibly on the cusp of becoming something else, and how they influence each other. And those themes are so big, having a chance to work with those archetypal characters and those kinds of themes [are] really exciting.
Jeff: For me I think it’s just different from other stuff we’ve written. We’ve tended to write fairly grounded fiction in the past, without a guy who can turn an M-16 into a pretzel. And it’s kind of fun to be able to write for a guy who can turn an M-16 into a pretzel!
Sully: Which characters were you most like as high school kids?
Cherie: Chloe! Chloe, of course! She’s a writer, and she’s funny. I look at Lana, and I think they have, to the credit of the show and the actress, come quite far with [her]. In the writers’ room, there were only two women, and a lot of guys -- we’re talking a lot of testosterone in that room. And [Kristin Kreuk] came in early on and met all of us. And she is loveliest, sweetest, most down-to-earth person. And she is stunningly beautiful, and then she left the writers’ room. Doris [Egan], the other female writer, and I are watching male eyes just slumping all over the room. [The male writers] had a hard time conceiving her as something other than someone you’d put on a pedestal because her beauty got in the way. But I think that the actress really wanted to develop her character, as did everybody else, and everybody, to their credit, got beyond that. And she really had a chance to show some dimension.
Sully: What about you, Jeff? Who were you most like in high school?
Jeff: I was like Jeremy Creek in high school. In his electric phase! [Laughter.] I was like Jonathan Kent. It’s hilarious. He’s jeans, T-shirt, flannel shirt. Most of the time with boots on.
Sully: In high school?
Jeff: Kinda right now, too!
Sully: And here’s the obligatory question for every Superman interview ever: If you could have any superpower, what would it be?
Cherie: To fly.
Jeff: Gosh, it would be so tempting to be a dork and say “super-breath.” Um, how about super-speed?
Cherie: What do most people say to that?
Sully: A lot of people say fly, and a lot of them say invisibility.
Cherie: The first thing that popped into my mind was invisibility, but having written it, and having written “Flight,” and I have never had a dream of being invisible, but I’ve had flying dreams since I was a little girl.
Sully: This question is for the relationship fans: Who do guys root for, Clark and Lana, or Clark and Chloe?
Cherie: Clark and Chloe. However, I’m an experienced enough writer to know that it shouldn’t happen. That’s a lot of the strength of the show -- in the conflict -- so that triangle has to exist. But I was very excited to see this year that they’re playing that triangle. Much more so than they were last year, which frankly, I pushed for!
Jeff: I agree with Cherie! It’s a good triangle. And those triangles, they just work for young audiences. They work for medium-aged audiences, and they work for old audiences. Everybody loves a good, formidable triangle, whether it’s a guy and two girls, or a girl and two guys.
Cherie: And Chloe, in the lingo of daytime writing, is a “place card character,” meaning she is a girl that girls relate to. They feel like they’re her in a scene. She is a really important character. Also, [she] has some similarities to Lois Lane. We know what happens when [Clark] grows up, and we know he doesn’t end up with Lana. She becomes the fantasy girl you love when you’re young, and a lot of men … they could remember a fantasy girl in their youth that they felt that way about.
Jeff: I think that Cherie makes a really good point, in the sense that since we know it’s going to be Clark and Lois ultimately, looking at Clark and Chloe now is something of a window into Clark and Lois then. Even though it’s Clark and Lana. It’s interesting to the audience in that way.
Sully: What other projects are you working on?
Jeff: We’ve got some really cool stuff. We have a novel coming out by Random House in late 2003. It’s called “A Heart Divided” that we wrote together. It’s a [hardcover] romance between a girl from the North and a guy from the South set against a Confederate flag controversy in a national high school. It’s going to be a very controversial book, and we’re very happy with where it is.
Sully: Is it geared toward young adults?
Jeff: Yes, it’s for teens.
Cherie: I just finished a new play, and I’m excited about that because I haven’t had a chance to write a play in awhile, and I’ve had many producers at many theaters say, “Cherie, write something with a small cast where the main character isn’t 16!” I wrote a three-character play where all the characters are adults, and in fact we’re going to the first reading of it.
Jeff: We’re doing a teen series for Little, Brown, which will start up in the fall of 2003. And we’re working on another hardcover project for Putnam. We’ve got a full plate.
Sully: So does this mean you’re not going to go back into television?
Jeff: One never knows. We really enjoyed it. I hope that at some point in the not-distant future I can get in up to my elbows again.
Cherie: We certainly are open to going back on another show. [Aaron] Spelling has a series of ours going on right now that they’re trying to develop for the WB, so in the best of all possible worlds, that would be the series that would be based on our own books.
Jeff: The books are called “Teen Angels.” We wrote six in a series for Avon Books back in the mid-1990s. Now Aaron Spelling has an option [for it], so keep your fingers crossed!
Sully: What kind of advice would you give aspiring writers and novelists, and what was the best professional advice you ever got?
Cherie: The best way to become a writer, this sounds really pat, but to read everything. Read absolutely everything, to be a voracious reader. Simply start writing. I wrote from the time I was little, and the only way you can learn to do it is to do it. And the best advice I ever got was that when you want to do something, especially something in the arts like writing, that there are a thousand people who’ll tell you, “Oh that’s almost impossible. Nobody makes their living that way.” And they will discourage you. I always say to kids, I can absolutely guarantee that if you’re discouraged before you try, then you will fail. The only possible hope you have of success is if you try. And when you look back on your life, you will not regret the things you tried and failed at. You will regret the things you wanted to try and didn’t try.
Jeff: Best professional writing advice I ever got was probably not given as writing advice. But it was something that has stuck with me forever. It is something Miles Millar said in the writers’ room on maybe our first day there. It was a three-word question: “What’s on ‘Roswell’?” What that has to do with is keeping your story moving, compelling, exciting, so that there’s never any reason for either your viewer or your audience or reader to switch from what you’re doing. One of the scary things and wonderful things about television is that you’ve got a gazillion channels out there, and your story grinds to a stop for a commercial four times, maybe five times during the course of an hour. And you always have to worry, “What’s on ‘Roswell’?” So, in anything that we’re writing about, whether it is books, plays, TV scripts, film scripts -- you’ve got to … keep it compelling enough so that if someone dares think what’s on “Roswell” they’re not going to change the channel, or put down the book and pick up another one. Or turn off what you’re doing and start up on something else.
Cherie: I think you should be very brave to be an artist. Brave and fearless. Not necessarily an artist in television, because that’s much more of a collaborative process. But if you’re a novelist or playwright, you’ve got to look into the deepest part of yourself to really write well.
Source: kryptonsite.com |
