CS Weekly Archive > Happenings > 06/09/06

Putting Life Into the Words:
David Milch at the WGA's Storyteller Series

By ari eisner

Television writing wunderkind David Milch addresses the WGA as part of their "Storyteller Series." What he has to offer has as much to do with living life as it does with the process of putting pen to paper.

Speaking to a full house of writers at the WGA theater, executive producer/teacher/show creator/racehorse owner David Milch's demeanor is casual, intelligent, and, above all else, candid. The multiple award-winner doesn't sugar coat or censor himself when it comes to discussing his writing, his work methods or his personal life. As a writer and an orator, no topic is off-limits for him.

Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945, his father a surgeon and mother the head of Board of Education, from an early age, Milch showed a penchant for the cerebral. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Yale (where he was a fraternity brother with George W. Bush), and won the Tinker Prize for highest achievement in English. After a nine-year teaching stint at Yale, he co-authored a number of college textbooks on literature. Then he turned to television writing. He won an Emmy, a Writers Guild Award, and a Humanitas Prize for "Trial By Fury," the first script he wrote for Hill Street Blues. Milch has since gone on to write, produce, co-create, and create a number of television series, including NYPD: Blue and Deadwood.

Milch speaks analytically when it comes to discussing his methods. "Everything you think about writing when you're not writing is ego based." He finds it easier to get into his characters and storylines when he's in the actual process of writing. As a person, he's too involved in the equation when he's not writing but still thinking about his work. It's more efficient for him to be in an office, in front of a screen, in the process of writing, where he can then become something of a stenographer, transcribing his characters' dialogue as it flows from their mouths. He's trained himself to keep to a strict regimen of writing several hours a day, everyday, without exception. His process is such that his brain is able to shift gears automatically between the world he writes in and the one he lives in. He's groomed himself to follow a judgmental line of thought when it comes to this matter: "What I think about when I'm not writing is wrong."

For his influences, Milch doesn't resort to the typical great TV writers of the past. Instead, he looks to William James and the James-Lange Theory of Emotions. "Thought is the result of behavior," Milch says. "You can't act your way to right action, you have to act your way to right thinking." This is how Milch surrenders himself to his world of writing. "The future reinterprets the meaning of the past." Milch uses this viewpoint when it comes to playing with character dynamics. In all his work, it's always the emotions and the attitudes of the players that drive the scenes, not the procedure or violence they're caught up in.

Although notorious for not meeting deadlines, Milch quotes Tao philosophy: "When the Tao is lost, men begin to speak of good and evil." In this paradigm, the Tao is the story. He relies on the forgiveness of the network once he turns the work in. When they're happy with the end result, they tend not to be as strict in terms of finishing dates.

In 1995, Milch created Murder One, a series that chronicled the prosecution of a single murder case over the course of an entire season. At the time, the networks were reluctant to support serialized shows (the logic being it's easier to syndicate stand-alone episodes), but eventually, long after that show's cancellation, things changed. Serialized dramas like 24, Lost, and Desperate Housewives have recently become smash hits. With a single show the networks ultimately failed to get behind, Milch proved to be ahead of his time.

As expected, Milch considers character to be the cornerstone of dramatic writing. To him, they are literally everything. Deadwood, for example, was originally set in ancient Rome at the time of Nero, but the theme of a lawless society is what ultimately intrigued the show creator. That, and how the people of that world would react to one another. "I've never written a character I didn't want to spend time with," he says. He feels that almost all behavior has to do with the way a character deals with his or her past in the present moment. He doesn't use flashbacks to shade and develop his characters, but rather relies on their actions in specific moments to define them. Deadwood's incipient salon boss Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), for example, can only talk about his past when in the midst of receiving oral sex. This, Milch claims, is the catalyst that allows this character to access such a horrific and impressionable time in his life.

Milch writes his characters to live in the moment, responding to each other not for the greatest theatrical effect, but for purposes of individualism and pragmatism. His characters aren't designed to appear dramatic, but rather, alive. If a viewer can watch a scene he's written and appreciate it for its emotional realism as opposed to an orchestrated dramatic scenario, Milch feels he's properly done his job.

For a man who has done so much work on shows with seasonal arcs (tracking characters and storylines as they change in a pseudo-serialized format), Milch doesn't do a whole lot of planning when it comes to outlining his shows' seasons. "I tried that on Deadwood. I knew what was going to happen at the end of the season. We never got there." For his method, when it comes to actually constructing the events of a show at the start of a season, simply put, "I start on scene one."

To call Milch a complicated man is an exercise in understatement. He speaks openly of his three-decade struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction. Such tendencies gave the writer clarity and inspiration to create NYPD: Blue's Detective Andy Sipowicz, the gruff, boozing, love-to-hate-him detective who became one of television's most infamous cops. Milch's battles with depression and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder further drive his creative impulse. He reveals that in college, "I wrote the same 12 pages of a novel every day for a year." He further recalls the indelible words of a doctor who was treating him for depression: "I've never had a patient on so many anti-depressants, and I've also never had a patient so dramatically under-medicated." In disagreements with a former boss, Milch had been known to urinate on his superior's typewriter. "He wasn't always there when I did it," the writer confesses.

When asked what advice, other than "just write," he gives to writers, David Milch references Henry James. "Be one of those on whom nothing is lost." For a man who has spent so much time with the bottle, the needle, the bookie, the psychiatrist, and, ultimately, the darkest corners of the human mind, it's apparent that advice isn't just given…it's self-applied.

Ari Eisner is an award-winning writer/director who has written for the television show Still Standing and the print magazine Creative Screenwriting. He is co-creator of the trailer parodies Must Love Jaws and 10 Things I Hate About Commandments, which was featured on CNN (mature language in both).

Deadwood courtesy HBO
Murder One courtesy 20th Century Fox Television

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