Post by Naj on Sept 22, 2004 12:26:02 GMT -5
Chill Factor
Cold Case creator Meredith Stiehm speaks through her drama. By Malcolm Knox.
It is 1990 and a man is murdered, stabbed 14 times. His naked body is dumped in the back of his van in Philadelphia’s red-light district. Thirteen years later, a demented woman shows up in a cemetery babbling about the death. Her story is brought to the attention of detective Lilly Rush, who decides to investigate.
As he digs the case file out of the archive, Rush’s sceptical colleague says, “I guess cold cases aren’t less important than new ones.”
“They’re more important,” Rush contradicts him. “They’ve been waiting longer.”
This set-up comes from episode three of Cold Case, “The Church-Going People”. It is one of the episodes written by Meredith Stiehm, the series’ creator.
Television marketing-speak will tell you that this police drama, the top-rating new series in America last year, is brought to you by Jerry (Top Gun, CSI, Without a Trace, Pearl Harbor etc) Bruckheimer. In fact, the uber-producer Bruckheimer is little more than a brand name.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Cold Case is brought to you by a young female TV writer who has succeeded, like her police heroine, in an often brutal male-dominated industry.
Stiehm’s conception of the series matured and gained weight over time, much like the cold cases themselves. About five years ago she became intrigued by the murder of Martha Moxley, a young woman who was beaten and stabbed with a golf club in Connecticut.
Moxley had died in 1975, and the case went unsolved for a quarter of a century until a member of the Kennedy clan, Michael Skakel, was arrested, tried and eventually convicted for murdering Moxley.
“I was intrigued by how a 25-year-old case could suddenly come alive again,” says Stiehm. “The idea of a 42-year-old man serving time for something he had done as a 17-year-old seemed to have more drama in it than the average murder conviction.”
The Skakel-Moxley murder inspired the pilot Stiehm wrote for the series that would become Cold Case. Sounds simple. You have an idea, you write a script, and before you know it you have the most-watched new series in America.
Stiehm, 35 this year, had been working her way through the TV-writing pipeline for a long time. After graduating from university in 1990 as an English and playwriting major, she submitted a freelance script for Northern Exposure in 1995. She was hired to polish it up, and it earned her a first writer’s credit and led to a job writing episodes for Beverly Hills 90210 in 1995 and 1996. There she worked with Jonathan Littman, who would go on to join Bruckheimer’s company and later be an essential link-man in Stiehm’s career.
From 1996 to 2000 Stiehm wrote for NYPD Blue under series creator David Milch.
“That was my real training ground,” says Stiehm. “David was very much concerned with writing character and story, rather than pure structure.”
Milch also showed her that in American series television, the writer is God. In film, directors and producers hold sway and the writer is something they wipe off their shoes; in television, the writer is the team leader, and it is writers who take the next career step to casting shows, choosing cinematographers and art directors, and supervising post-production.
Stiehm took this step in 2000, when, after a brief spell at The District, she became a producer-writer at ER. It was an unsatisfying experience — “I missed writing, and I didn’t think the medical genre was for me” — but it led Stiehm towards refining her idea of what she really wanted.
“I realised I was best at writing detectives and mystery stories. And at the time there was a real void of female detectives as lead characters. There were plenty of female detectives around, but they were partners or sidekicks to male leads.”
This was a reflection of Stiehm’s off-camera experience in male-dominated TV shows. As a young woman on the NYPD writing team, she stood out.
“I guess that’s how I see Lilly Rush. In fact my dad, when he saw Cold Case, he said to me, ‘You are Lilly Rush.’”
Inspired by the Skakel trial in 2002, Stiehm went to Philadelphia and met police working on cold cases. Cold cases are seen as the Siberia of the profession, but Stiehm found elite investigators drawn by the challenge of cracking the toughest crimes — the unsolved ones.
She pitched the idea to Littman, her old colleague from 90210 who was now with Bruckheimer. Then came a short presentation to Warner Brothers, where Stiehm had worked on ER. Warner Brothers asked her to develop her idea into a pilot.
“I was really proud of the pilot after we made it. Even if it hadn’t been picked up and turned into a series, I would still have thought it was a good piece of work. Beyond that, with the ratings and everything, it’s all a bit of a mystery to me and out of my control.”
Lisa Zwerling, a writer on ER who has known Stiehm since they wrote plays together at high school, says she can “hear Meredith speaking through [Lilly] Rush”.
“She refuses to give up and won’t be discouraged,” says Zwerling. “That’s so much a model for Meredith ... The show being told from a strong woman’s perspective is definitely a Meredith thing.”
Each Cold Case episode starts at some point in the past, when the crime is committed. “The furthest back is 1939, and the most recent is two years ago,” says Stiehm.
“A lot are in the 1980s and 1990s. It makes the show expensive to produce, but you get a lot of atmosphere through the music and fashions of the time.”
The action then bounces between Rush’s present-day investigation and the flashbacks.
A key to the show’s success, Stiehm believes, was the casting of Kathryn Morris as Rush. Morris had the self-possession and fragile-on-the-outside, rock-hard-on-theinside complexity Stiehm wanted.
“I’ve become more and more interested in women who work in men’s worlds, and how they navigate them,” Stiehm says.
“The expectation is that they downplay their femininity, and you see how Lilly Rush, with her messy hair and rumpled clothes is being kind of strategic, saying to her colleagues, ‘Treat me as a cop, not a female cop.’ But at the same time she’s not aggressive or hard as nails. It’s a more contemporary take on how a woman can succeed.”
Cold Case creator Meredith Stiehm speaks through her drama. By Malcolm Knox.
It is 1990 and a man is murdered, stabbed 14 times. His naked body is dumped in the back of his van in Philadelphia’s red-light district. Thirteen years later, a demented woman shows up in a cemetery babbling about the death. Her story is brought to the attention of detective Lilly Rush, who decides to investigate.
As he digs the case file out of the archive, Rush’s sceptical colleague says, “I guess cold cases aren’t less important than new ones.”
“They’re more important,” Rush contradicts him. “They’ve been waiting longer.”
This set-up comes from episode three of Cold Case, “The Church-Going People”. It is one of the episodes written by Meredith Stiehm, the series’ creator.
Television marketing-speak will tell you that this police drama, the top-rating new series in America last year, is brought to you by Jerry (Top Gun, CSI, Without a Trace, Pearl Harbor etc) Bruckheimer. In fact, the uber-producer Bruckheimer is little more than a brand name.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Cold Case is brought to you by a young female TV writer who has succeeded, like her police heroine, in an often brutal male-dominated industry.
Stiehm’s conception of the series matured and gained weight over time, much like the cold cases themselves. About five years ago she became intrigued by the murder of Martha Moxley, a young woman who was beaten and stabbed with a golf club in Connecticut.
Moxley had died in 1975, and the case went unsolved for a quarter of a century until a member of the Kennedy clan, Michael Skakel, was arrested, tried and eventually convicted for murdering Moxley.
“I was intrigued by how a 25-year-old case could suddenly come alive again,” says Stiehm. “The idea of a 42-year-old man serving time for something he had done as a 17-year-old seemed to have more drama in it than the average murder conviction.”
The Skakel-Moxley murder inspired the pilot Stiehm wrote for the series that would become Cold Case. Sounds simple. You have an idea, you write a script, and before you know it you have the most-watched new series in America.
Stiehm, 35 this year, had been working her way through the TV-writing pipeline for a long time. After graduating from university in 1990 as an English and playwriting major, she submitted a freelance script for Northern Exposure in 1995. She was hired to polish it up, and it earned her a first writer’s credit and led to a job writing episodes for Beverly Hills 90210 in 1995 and 1996. There she worked with Jonathan Littman, who would go on to join Bruckheimer’s company and later be an essential link-man in Stiehm’s career.
From 1996 to 2000 Stiehm wrote for NYPD Blue under series creator David Milch.
“That was my real training ground,” says Stiehm. “David was very much concerned with writing character and story, rather than pure structure.”
Milch also showed her that in American series television, the writer is God. In film, directors and producers hold sway and the writer is something they wipe off their shoes; in television, the writer is the team leader, and it is writers who take the next career step to casting shows, choosing cinematographers and art directors, and supervising post-production.
Stiehm took this step in 2000, when, after a brief spell at The District, she became a producer-writer at ER. It was an unsatisfying experience — “I missed writing, and I didn’t think the medical genre was for me” — but it led Stiehm towards refining her idea of what she really wanted.
“I realised I was best at writing detectives and mystery stories. And at the time there was a real void of female detectives as lead characters. There were plenty of female detectives around, but they were partners or sidekicks to male leads.”
This was a reflection of Stiehm’s off-camera experience in male-dominated TV shows. As a young woman on the NYPD writing team, she stood out.
“I guess that’s how I see Lilly Rush. In fact my dad, when he saw Cold Case, he said to me, ‘You are Lilly Rush.’”
Inspired by the Skakel trial in 2002, Stiehm went to Philadelphia and met police working on cold cases. Cold cases are seen as the Siberia of the profession, but Stiehm found elite investigators drawn by the challenge of cracking the toughest crimes — the unsolved ones.
She pitched the idea to Littman, her old colleague from 90210 who was now with Bruckheimer. Then came a short presentation to Warner Brothers, where Stiehm had worked on ER. Warner Brothers asked her to develop her idea into a pilot.
“I was really proud of the pilot after we made it. Even if it hadn’t been picked up and turned into a series, I would still have thought it was a good piece of work. Beyond that, with the ratings and everything, it’s all a bit of a mystery to me and out of my control.”
Lisa Zwerling, a writer on ER who has known Stiehm since they wrote plays together at high school, says she can “hear Meredith speaking through [Lilly] Rush”.
“She refuses to give up and won’t be discouraged,” says Zwerling. “That’s so much a model for Meredith ... The show being told from a strong woman’s perspective is definitely a Meredith thing.”
Each Cold Case episode starts at some point in the past, when the crime is committed. “The furthest back is 1939, and the most recent is two years ago,” says Stiehm.
“A lot are in the 1980s and 1990s. It makes the show expensive to produce, but you get a lot of atmosphere through the music and fashions of the time.”
The action then bounces between Rush’s present-day investigation and the flashbacks.
A key to the show’s success, Stiehm believes, was the casting of Kathryn Morris as Rush. Morris had the self-possession and fragile-on-the-outside, rock-hard-on-theinside complexity Stiehm wanted.
“I’ve become more and more interested in women who work in men’s worlds, and how they navigate them,” Stiehm says.
“The expectation is that they downplay their femininity, and you see how Lilly Rush, with her messy hair and rumpled clothes is being kind of strategic, saying to her colleagues, ‘Treat me as a cop, not a female cop.’ But at the same time she’s not aggressive or hard as nails. It’s a more contemporary take on how a woman can succeed.”
