INTERVIEWS

Sam Shaw’s Manhattan

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By Brock Swinson.

Sam Shaw

Sam Shaw

Making the transition from a prose writer and journalist, Sam Shaw has shifted into becoming an expert in suburban deception, metaphorical slang, and the relevant period piece. As somewhat of a combination of Dr. Strangelove and Mad Men, Sam Shaw’s Manhattan is masterfully written, both in structure and character.

The WGN show lives as a drama, based on the lives of the world’s smartest scientists as they calculated the possibilities of the first atomic bomb, on blackboards in the desert. Set in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the show is mainly fictional but based in great detail on real events and individuals in 1940s America.

What led you into screenwriting?

It was a long and circuitous road. For most of my life, I thought I was going to be a prose writer. I wrote fiction all throughout adolescence and high school. Then I went to graduate school and got an MSA in fiction writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and I was totally convinced that I was going to be doing that for the next sixty years of my life — completely surrounded by books, writing prose sentences.

Along the way, I joined a friend of mine, Dustin Thomason, who was also a fiction writer, where he co-wrote this astronomically successful first novel, called The Rule of Four. He somehow migrated out to LA, started working in television and got a show on the air on ABC. It was a short-lived talk show called The Evidence (2006). Dusty called me up and invited me to do some work on the show. At that point in my life I didn’t even own a TV. I had been a movie and TV fanatic as a kid, but I had moved to books for so long that I needed to take a crash course in television to get reacquainted with the hour drama, which had changed so much since the last time I had been a regular viewer.

I loved working on it. Fundamentally I loved the collaboration that came from writing television. It reminded me of being in grad school, which was amazing because it was such a social experience. Essentially, you’re surrounded on a deserted island with a bunch of friends who share the same interests. We’d stay up until 4 am in bars or doublewides drinking canned macro-brews, arguing about similes. But, then you begin to discover that the life of a fiction writer is a really solitary one, so you miss the pleasures of a creative enterprise that wasn’t so totally isolating.

Producer Thomas Schlamme, Sam Shaw and Richard Schiff as Occam in Manhattan. Photo Credit: Greg Peters/WGN America

Producer Thomas Schlamme, Sam Shaw and Richard Schiff as Occam in Manhattan.
Photo Credit: Greg Peters/WGN America

Manhattan is such a high-tension show with multiple moving parts. Where did that initial idea come from and what kind of research is involved writing historical fiction?

It started as a very different animal than the show it became. About six or seven years ago, I had this idea for what I thought was going to become a feature. I wanted to write about the war on terror and the burdens of secrecy for those involved in matters of national security. My dad was a criminal defense lawyer and he when he retired about fifteen years ago, he took on some pro bono clients to keep his mind active. He had some clients that were detainees at Guantanamo Bay and I was always fascinated that he represented these guys because there was so much that he couldn’t tell me about his work. I was always fascinated by the costs of secrecy, both at the national level and at home. Imagine sitting across from your family at the dining room table and you can’t share this experience that you’re having.

Along the way, as I was researching matters of national security and this massive amount of secrecy over the last sixty years, it became clear that the story of the birth of the atomic bomb was the great origin story of 21st century. It was not only the development of the ability to wipeout the human race, but it was also the moment we became a country of secrets, and we’re still living in that country seventy years later. That was the genesis, or idea of the project.

In terms of the research, there is an incredible historical record associated with the Manhattan Project. You could spend a lifetime just reading old histories, memoirs and books of records. I actually did some work as a journalist earlier in my career and I always loved the aspect of being a journalist, so when writing fiction in a dramatic, historical fashion allowed for me to explore worlds I had not known about, I began to immerse myself in the details. Over a course of five years, I read everything I could about the Manhattan Project and talked to all the historians and scientists that I could. It was a crash course in a matter that I knew nothing about as I’m not a physicist or historian.

What are some of the cinematic influences for Manhattan?

Well, my partner-in-crime Tommy Schlamme (Sports Night, So I Married An Axe Murderer), the Executive Producer and Director of our show, who is best known for directing The West Wing, he and I shared this feeling for the direction and the look of the show. We didn’t want it to feel like a typical World War II story. Some of our greatest films and TV shows are set in the 1940s and I’m an extraordinary fan of shows like Band of Brothers but that’s not what we were setting to make.

The process of the atomic bomb is so much more unusual and harder to fathom for those who simply have a casual familiarity with the subject. It’s a true-life science fiction story. What happens when you take the greatest collection of geniuses ever assembled and you stick them in this make-shift POW camp where there is a city that has been built overnight in the middle of the desert on top of a dead volcano and task them with building the most deadly weapon humankind has ever built? It’s a weapon that will either end the war forever or destroy human life forever. It’s such a far-fetched premise and it felt really important to capture that strangeness.

It’s also a story, fundamentally, about paranoia and secrets. The experience of living in a city that’s purpose is secret. The vast majority of people who lived at Los Alamos in World War II had no idea of the purpose of this town that they lived in. There were physicists but they brought their families. When you have kids, you need schools and teachers, grocery stores, and contractors, but none of those people were privy on what the town actually was, which suggests a climate of paranoia.

I’ve always been a huge fan of the American literature of the suburbs: John Updike and John Cheever, to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), and even the recent Desperate Housewives (2004) where there are dark secrets behind white picket fences. This, in a way, is the mother of all of those stories as it’s the first modern, planned community. Los Alamos came the prototype for Levittown and the suburban boom of the 1950s. So, in this scenario, we’ve got the suburbs and their white picket fences held the greatest secrets of all time—a secret that would forever change our relationship and mortality with the world. That seems both exciting and a great method for storytelling. This show is somewhat of a true-life Twilight Show (1959) episode, and part of that fabric is in the writing and directing.

Janel Moloney as Donna Moss, Bradley Whitford as Josh Lyman and Rob Lowe as Sam Seaborn in The West Wing

Janel Moloney as Donna Moss, Bradley Whitford as Josh Lyman and Rob Lowe as Sam Seaborn in The West Wing

Within all of that research and collaboration, when it’s you alone in the room, what are your writing rituals?

For one thing, I remain a huge researcher. While writing the first draft of the show, I spent years researching the show. My office looks like an episode of Hoarders, with an overflowing collection of books and papers. Sometimes that research can be a way of procrastinating when fighting the blank page but I really have to think my way into whatever I’m about to write. So there is a lot of reading, pacing, and walking. I take a lot of baths and showers and then when I have the loaded gun of a deadline to my head, I dive in and write a first draft as quickly as I can.

I always envy writers who talk about the process of writing as if it’s this mystical person-to-person phone call from some muse who delivers dialogue. That’s certainly not the case for me. It’s always a long, painstaking decent. I mean there’s an idea that writers possess some kind of special genius but even the best writers want to kill themselves when they read their first draft.

In addition to filling the blank page, what’s the most difficult step in the writing process for you?

The interesting thing about writing TV is that you’re not working in a vacuum. You’re working with other writers. I have an unusual staff of writers that I’ve put together, meaning that all of the writers on our show were prose fiction writers, and they now write for TV. Many are old friends and colleagues from Iowa.

It’s a very mysterious process writing within a group of people to find consensus. It’s an aristocratic process where you put a bunch of smart people together in a room, who have different points of view and different life experiences and you debate until you find an idea that’s hopefully better than any one individual idea. It is tricky though, because at some point, someone needs to be an arbiter and legislate a point of view as to how to move forward. In a way, this can be the most challenging part. Essentially, it’s a choose-your-own-adventure where everyone is aware that there are fifty ways of telling the story and we need to commit to one.

Producer Jerry Kupfer, Sam Shaw and Producer Dustin Thomason on the set of Manhattan.

Producer Jerry Kupfer, Sam Shaw and Producer Dustin Thomason on the set of Manhattan.

In your opinion, what makes a good story?

Honestly, I think it’s a good character. We have some intricately constructed plots in our show — especially as the seasons progress — but character is the most important. I was actually a jazz musician for several years and I had the folly to think I was going to become a professional jazz guitar player, which is probably the only field where you are less likely to pay your rent other than that of a writer. But I have a musical approach when it comes to the writing of our show and how we construct the season’s storytelling. There are parts where we need to change the tempo as a scene develops over time. We are very careful and thoughtful as the approach those plots, but ultimately, none of them mean anything if they are not built to service a character that the audience can identify with.

The fundamental mission of our show is to take subject matter that can feel really distant to a contemporary audience and make it relevant. It was a more innocent America, so when constructing characters, they need to feel contemporary, fresh, recognizable and human so we can show a world that is very different in the world where we now live. You can construct a rock-solid three-act structure, but if there isn’t a heartbeat in the center of it, then your viewers aren’t going to be engaged.

It seems like you’ve had a variety of career paths, but ultimately shifted in the right directions. As upcoming writers are working to enter the field — prose, television, or otherwise — what advice would you give them?

As a writer, you collect bits of wisdom and pass them on to others like a custodian of fortune cookies. There are two pieces of advice I would give and neither of which are my own. The first is from E. L. Doctorow and I learned while writing prose, but it states, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” This, to me, really applies to anything whether you’re writing a scene, an act, an episode, or an entire season. You’ll loose your mind trying to focus on the whole, the entire time, but if you make the ascent line-by-line, or scene-by-scene, you can make the whole trip that way.

The second quote is honestly the best piece of advice I’ve ever heard. I’m certainly not the originator and I can no longer remember where I first read it, but the most important development as a writer is when you stop thinking of writing as a high art and start thinking about it as work. It took me a long time to do that, especially beginning as a prose writer. I began because I loved prose stylists like Lorrie Moore so I had all of these highfaluting ideas about myself as an artist. In reality, the writers I know that have made a lifetime of writing have set aside those ideas and focus on the work at hand. They write every day.

Anything else you would like to tell our readers about the upcoming season or any additional projects you are currently working on?

Absolutely, our second season is about to premiere on WGN America and we’re incredibly excited about it. Our show deals with physics and physicists, which sounds dry, but is actually a thriller in it’s own way. In the first season, the show took a diverse cast of characters and tossed them into this desert world to build a weapon where both the war and the weapon were abstractions. They were writing algebraic problems on blackboards while the war fought on over seas.

In this new season of storytelling, we wanted every character to be confronted by this job that they were doing, which has moved on to more of a science project, where they are building a weapon of mass destruction. There is a moment for each character where they cease to become a scientist—or spouse of scientist—and start to become a combatant in one way or another. So we wanted to make the violence and reality of the war more present and dramatic for the characters, even though the real battles are occurring thousands of miles away on another continent.

Olivia Williams as Liza Winter, John Benjamin Hickey as Frank Winter, and Alexia Fast as Callie Winter.

Olivia Williams as Liza Winter, John Benjamin Hickey as Frank Winter, and Alexia Fast as Callie Winter.

Without giving too much away, there is title card in the first few minutes of the pilot that reads “766 Days Before Hiroshima.” With that in mind, what kind of timeline is realistic for the show as a series?

Right. So when I sold the show to WGN America, I sat down with the GM of the network, Matt Cherniss, and described seven seasons of the Manhattan story and what it would look like over it’s entire life cycle. For anyone working on a creative project, the scenes and story can change and evolve while writing, and they should. In television, when you’re building sets and actors are taking on characters, the story starts to shape itself.

For this story, the trick-up-the-sleeve is that is begins by setting itself up as a story about World War II, but it’s really a show about what we became after World War II. America opened this atomic Pandora’s box and entered the cold war while simultaneously becoming a superpower. This created an entire different appearance for Americans around the world, both for good and for ill. So when the bombs drop in Japan, that is the end of the first act of this story. The second and third acts occur when this tiny little town goes from being the best-kept secret in the world to the most famous city on the planet.

I hope people are watching and we certainly enjoy telling the story. In truth, the best is yet to come.

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Brock Swinson

Contributing Writer

Freelance writer and author Brock Swinson hosts the podcast and YouTube series, Creative Principles, which features audio interviews from screenwriters, actors, and directors. Swinson has curated the combined advice from 200+ interviews for his debut non-fiction book 'Ink by the Barrel' which provides advice for those seeking a career as a prolific writer.

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