Post by Naj on Jan 5, 2004 22:36:35 GMT -5
Dec. 31, 2003, 5:08PM
'Cold Case' writer is intrigued with character, a female cop in a man's world
By ELLEN GRAY
Copyright 2003 Knight Ridder Newspapers
MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. -- Throw her in a lineup and Meredith Stiehm probably wouldn't be picked as a cop-show writer.
Cold Case writer Meredith Stiehm thoroughly researched the world of cops to make sure her fictional homicide detective Lilly Rush, played by Kathryn Morris, above, was realistic.
For one thing, she's not a guy.
For another, the 1990 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania speaks awfully softly for someone who spent four seasons on the writing staff of ABC's NYPD Blue, and who, as the creator and executive producer of CBS' new police drama, Cold Case, is now working with action film-meister Jerry Bruckheimer (The Rock, Armageddon).
And then there's the whole self-effacing thing.
Stiehm, 35, who's been lured from her office to a seating area outside the Cold Case soundstage at Manhattan Beach's Raleigh Studios for an interview, isn't crazy about the idea that this story is about her, preferring to talk about Lilly Rush, the fictional homicide detective at the heart of Cold Case, who's played by Kathryn Morris.
So if you ask Stiehm about her years at NYPD Blue, where for most of the time she was the show's only woman writer, she'll cheerfully acknowledge its reputation as "high-testosterone boys' club, very male environment" before adding, "And I think that's partly why Lilly Rush is interesting to me, because she's in this completely male environment, navigating those waters."
Stiehm "is very soft-spoken," acknowledges Jonathan Littman, the president of Jerry Bruckheimer Television, which has put its considerable muscle behind Cold Case this season. (Bruckheimer also produces CBS' CSI, CSI: Miami, Without a Trace and The Amazing Race.)
"She's very soft-spoken, she's very mild-mannered and yet she channels this whole other life and this whole world, and I think a lot of it is that she just sucks it up like a sponge," he said. "She's very good with research. She spends a lot of time absorbing the worlds" she writes about, Littman said.
It's something she learned working on Blue, she said. Growing up in Santa Monica, Calif., she felt better prepared to work on Beverly Hills, 90210, her first series, than for a gritty New York-based cop show.
Though it was a script she wrote for Blue while on staff at 90210 that got her foot in the door at the ABC drama, Stiehm said she knew "nothing" about police work when she joined the show.
"I had to go learn," she said. "I went to New York and I met detectives. I had to study. But doing this show, I felt I did know a lot because I'd spent four years" writing about detectives, she said.
Which didn't stop her from doing more research in Philadelphia.
In July 2002, Stiehm flew to Philadelphia to meet with police Lt. Mark Deegan and detectives Tim Bass and Richie Bova.
Bass and Bova "do special investigations, which in Philadelphia that's actually what they call their group of homicide detectives that work cold cases. And they just let me talk to them and see where they worked and told me how they work cold cases. And Tim and Richie then took me out to the Badlands and drove me around to parts of Philadelphia I'd never been to before, even though I lived there for four years," she said. (Bova has since transferred out of the unit.)
"It gave me a really quick education."
She returned in October for more research, and Bass advised her on the script for the pilot and was on the set when it was filmed, she said.
"They were really generous with their time and their stories," she said. A retired Los Angeles police officer now acts as the on-set advisor, "but he's in contact with Tim a lot because I want it to be very Philadelphia," Stiehm said. "It's set there, so I want it to be accurate, from the language to the procedures. I want Philadelphia to be one of our characters in the show -- it's not just set anywhere."
Stiehm also arranged for her star to get her own taste of the city. Morris, who lived in Philadelphia for a couple of years in the early '90s while attending Temple University, spent a couple of days this summer riding along with detectives.
The experience appears to have left the actress a bit star-struck herself: "The men who work in homicide, they're really quite extraordinary. They really care. They're really men who've made it a career instead of a job," Morris said.
And yes, they're men -- at least those who work Philadelphia's cold cases are, Stiehm acknowledged.
Lilly Rush, then, is "an imagined character more than one based on anyone else," she said.
"I'm very interested in women in all-male worlds. In Philadelphia, especially, homicide is the elite -- you sort of have to work your way up to homicide. So the people that are there are the best," she said, and what goes along with that is "lots of men, lots of ego, lots of testosterone."
She describes her own foray into the largely male world of NYPD Blue as "interesting."
"I don't have brothers, and I know how men were with each other, and I became so familiar to them, I think," that they let down their guard with her. "To their credit, they did find room for me. They didn't have a reputation for being very female-friendly, but I was there for four years, and they were open to me succeeding," she said.
Blue also contributed to what Littman praised as Stiehm's "very sparse writing style."
She credits "Blue's" famously frank co-creator David Milch for that.
"I remember once this writer was telling a really long, tortured story. And five minutes in, he said, `And this is where it gets interesting,' and David interrupted and said, `Start where it's interesting.' And that kind of resonates in my mind all the time."
Most important, working on Blue gave her a taste for police dramas she couldn't shake, so that even after following up Blue with a two-season stint on NBC's ER, she knew she wanted to develop her own cop show.
"Medical dramas are not a good match for me," she said. "I'm really squeamish about hospitals and the drama of medical shows -- there's no villain, it's just sort of bad luck if people get cancer or get in an accident," she said.
"In homicide shows or detective shows, there's a culprit and justice to be served, so I really missed writing about detectives."
www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/ae/tv/2330037
~Naj
