In the late Summer of 2000 I was happily vacationing in Colorado, comfy in a little cabin in the Rockies. Well, okay, so I wasn't really vacationing and I wasn't all that comfortable. But I'd intended to be.
My wife, Gwen, and I had gone up to Salida, Colorado to combine relaxation with parenting. Our teenage daughter, Amber, had the female lead in an independent film of the "family movie" persuasion, and one thing had led to another so that I was now "producing" it--which meant I was protecting Amber by making sure everyone showed up to do their jobs and therefore help the first-time director do his. Not as easy as it sounds when you're dealing with volunteers and pros taking deferred payments.
One morning as my daughter was leaving for the set the phone rang. It was Gerry Conway calling from the Santa Clarita Valley just north of L.A. Santa Clarita was the home of a brand new film studio complex. Soundstages, offices, dubbing stages, you-name-it. And Gerry was showrunner of a series on USA cable called The Huntress. He was also a showrunner in a crunch. "I need a quick script," he said.
"How quick?"
"I need the First Draft in two weeks. We'll start shooting it in three."
Being a man of integrity and honor, a stand-up professional deeply concerned about doing my absolute best on any and all jobs I took, I asked the Big Question: "What's it pay?"
"About five hundred dollars less than Guild minimum for network, even though it's cable," Gerry said.
"How can that be?" I said, knowing that first-run cable minimum was about ten grand under that for broadcast networks.
"Each show gets run twice the first week, so you get paid for the first rerun immediately," Gerry said. "And that's about ninety-five hundred dollars."
Being a man of integrity and honor, a stand-up professional deeply concerned about doing my absolute best, I broke into a grin. I was getting zero dollars for producing the film here. Taking in twenty-seven thousand dollars for two or three weeks work at the same time sounded just fine.
There was just one little hitch. I didn't know the show. Nothing about it at all. And I certainly didn't have any ideas for it.
"Not a problem," Gerry said. "I'll send you some scripts and some tapes. And we've already got a network-approved concept. It's the line producer's idea. He's got a directing commitment. That's why we start shooting the episode in three weeks."
Within forty-eight hours of the three weeks I had in which to do this entire job I'd read five teleplays and fast-forwarded through three videotapes of a series about a contemporary mother-daughter team of bounty hunters. The series was based on a non-fiction book by the widow of the a man whose own non-fiction book had been one of the inspirations for an earlier series, The Fall Guy, that I had produced and written almost twenty years before, so I felt comfortable with the material.
I was also comfortable with the fact that The Huntress had a lot of yada-yada dialog in it--banter that would stretch a script to over sixty pages without anyone complaining. This meant I could write fairly loosely. Loosely meant easily. Easily meant quickly, which would help me make the two-week deadline for the First Draft.
I felt more comfortable after I talked to the line producer-director and heard his ideas. He had the logline and about one-fourth of the scenes he wanted to see all figured out. Here's the logline:
"RICKY [the bail bondsman for whom the mother and daughter work] is thrilled to get a classic Cadillac as payment from a client--but not so thrilled when the client skips and the Caddy is stolen. Suddenly it seems that everyone and his mother wants the car--and it's up to DOTTIE and BRANDI [our heroines] to be the ones who succeed."
And here's what came after:
The Outline
First Draft
Second Draft
