Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images.
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.
When all of your decisions are based on economics, you end up with a sameness of vision. You're not taking the risks, you're not exploiting the passions of your creators. You're manufacturing product for a huge vending machine.
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.
Casting is sort of like looking at paintings. You don't know what you'll like, but you recognize it when you see it.
If bad taste were a felony, every writer I know would've done prison time.
The entertainment world, television, movies, social media, YouTube stuff, we're so bombarded with so much imagery and such a great sense of inhumanity, and there is a coarseness, a coarsening of interaction.
The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people's emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time is really the stuff that interests me.
Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.
The thing that has always interested me in the kinds of shows that I do have more to do with the consequences of behavior than the behavior itself. Pulling a trigger and shooting somebody, or dismembering somebody.
I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment.
When it is perceived that a show has gone awry, the pressure is staggering, and as a writer caught in that storm, it feels like you are being attacked by jackals.
Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.
One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.
Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.
Imagery is like music.
You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.
