After growing up in the middle of the Mojave Desert, NICEOLE LEVY escaped to the bright lights of Los Angeles. While studying acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, she realized her true love was writing stories. She completed the Master of Professional Writing program at USC, and is an alum of the CBS Writers Mentoring Program, NBC's Writers on the Verge, and the WGAW Showrunner Training Program. Niceole has written on IRONSIDE, ALLEGIANCE,THE MYSTERIES OF LAURA, SHADES OF BLUE, CLOAK & DAGGER, FATE: THE WINX SAGA, S.W.A.T, and THE RECRUIT. She also co-wrote a feature, THE BANKER, with former ALLEGIANCE showrunner and director George Nolfi, available on AppleTV+, and is now writing “Spark,” a film inspired by the life of Claudette Colvin. Niceole is currently a co-executive producer on an untitled Netflix series and has several TV and feature projects in development. “The Writers’ Room Survival Guide: Don't Screw up the Lunch Order and Other Keys to a Happy Writers' Room,” from Michael Wiese Productions, is to be released in October of this year.
Order Niceoloe's book here. Visit Niceole's website to follow her current and future writing adventures.
Dave Watson: Congratulations on The Writers' Room Survival Guide! How did this come about? It’s an engaging read to start to finish.
Niceole Levy: Thank you! It came about through one of my mentors , Carol Kirschner, who co-founded the Viacom CBS Writers’ program, and co-runs the Showrunners’ Training Program at the Writers Guild. We go back to the beginnings of my career. She was like, “Hey! Someone should write a book about this!” I said, “You’re right, someone should!” She said, “I meant you.” I said, “Oh, too busy, too busy, can’t, can’t, can’t.” Then I said, “Okay, let me try and write a Table of Contents. The initial Table of Contents had like thirteen headings, so I said, “Yes, I do have something to say.”
DW: Some people might think of The Writers’ Room as people sitting around a table trading ideas, and there are also various roles one can assume, such as casting. Does one have to earn roles such as this one with experience?
NL: It really is show-dependent. If you are on a show like S.W.A.T. or on a Shawn Ryan show, Shawn is a believer in training writers from the day they start. Even if you are a staff writer or a first-year writer, when you get to participate in the prep meetings, you get to see the casting videos, you send your submissions; it doesn’t mean you’ll win, but you get to say your vote. You get to go on scouts and produce your episode, and that is such an important thing to building future showrunners in our business, is getting all that experience.
With some shows, staff writers don’t get to participate all that much, and as you work your way up the food chain, they’ll start to be like, “Hey, can you watch those casting videos and tell me who you like? Can you handle these prep meetings?” And you start to get more involved in that whole thing.
I’m a firm believer in the Shawn Ryan method. It’s a lot when you’re a first-year writer, going to set is very intimidating, but that’s how you learn. It’s sad where a lot of shows are written before they are shot, so a lot of writers are coming up without that experience.
DW: It sounds dependent and also fluid. You could be in a writers’ room but you could also be very involved on the set, making decisions all the way up to the cameras rolling, is that right?
NL: Yeah, in a standard, like if you’re in a broadcast show, the train is moving constantly.
I say to newer writers, broadcast is your friend. You’re going to learn so much even working on a broadcast show for one season. A start-to-finish idea, if you’re on a show like S.W.A.T., say, you’re in the room, you pitch an idea for your episode, the Showrunner approves it, the room breaks the episode over the course of several days.
You write your story document, that gets approved by the showrunner, studio, network, you go write your script, you go through all the note processes on that.
In the meantime you’re in the room helping a writer with their episode while you’re going through this process, then it’s time for your episode to go into prep, like, a month maybe, after you wrote it maybe? If you’re lucky? (Laughs)
You start doing prep meetings talking about what kind of cars do we need in this scene, what kind of costumes, what kind of locations do we need, how many extras do we need, and the director might be the lead, but they will listen to your ideas. You might say, “Let’s not have blue cars in this scene,” because the showrunner hates it when we use blue cars,” stuff that you’ll know that they don’t know.
Then you finish prep after about a week, then they go into shooting for seven to ten days, and you can also be on hand to give notes after watching dailies for the edit if that’s the kind of show you’re on.
So on average, from the day you pitch your episode to when you give notes on cuts, if you’re on that kind of show, so I would say on average, it might be a month to six weeks, but it’s maybe, generously, a two-month process. It might not air for a couple of more weeks because of the way they pull network shows off the air, God help us.
DW: There are many rules to navigating the Writers' Room. What were the biggest surprises for you?
NL: You know, I made a point of talking to other writers who very generously, anonymously, donated their ideas and stories, so no names shared for the guilty and the innocent, it’s my name, my name is the name attributed to everything. It was interesting to me how much work we’ve all done to try to make the Writers’ Room more inclusive.
I work with The Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity as well, so we’re doing all this work on all these different fronts to make things better, and seeing how many people are still running into treatment that is less than we would like in the writers’ room, and so knowing that there's more work to be done, knowing that we have to, hold that gauntlet up, that maybe was a little disheartening, but people were willing to share their insights on how they handled those situations, like when an upper-level writer treated them poorly as a staff writer.
Hopefully that means that if someone runs into these situations, they can remember, “That writer said this in Niceole’s book,” and they can forge ahead and not get overwhelmed in that situation.
DW: That implies a thick skin while staying open to ideas simultaneously.
NL: My favorite showruners have had bad days, are not happy with the work that’s been done and I say, “Guys, what have you been doing all day?” You say, “We’re in trouble.” The next day he or she comes back and they’re in a better mood.
All showrunners can have a bad day, and that’s very different than bad showrunners who are toxic and create a toxic work environment and make people uncomfortable.
A big part of being in the room is learning everybody’s personality. I compare it to a large, often dysfunctional family dynamic. Everybody’s personality gets room in that space.
Someone doesn’t talk much, and you may need to help them talk more or they don’t talk much and you should know that person doesn’t like to talk so maybe you can engage them and be like, “Oh Dave, didn’t you have that idea the other day or whatever?” Or the person who jumps on other peoples’ ideas. You know who that person is because you’re paying attention in the room, so then to say, “Can I finish real quick?” and then finish your pitch. It’s all a negotiation of personality in a lot of ways, and hopefully you have a solid showrunner who sets the tone from day one. If you have a toxic or chaotic room, you have to find some allies in the space if you can and make the best of a situation
DW: It’s almost like we’re getting down to manners and social navigation, social navigational tools and awareness.
NL: It’s a lot of that. Some people laughed when I talked about where to choose your seat in a room, but it’s true, it’s an important thing to think about. If you’re the kind of person who fidgets, don’t sit next to the showrunner because they’re going to get distracted and be annoyed with you. Sit on the other side of the room and fidget. We all have our things, our quirks. If you need to go to the bathroom every hour, sit close to the door so you can just slip out.
DW: Know thyself.
NL: Know thyself is a really important thing, and also just give yourself grace. None of us knew how to do this the day we got there. We all have to learn, we all make mistakes, and all hopefully have people who help us out and say, “Hey, maybe don’t say that thing to the boss in the morning, it rubs him the wrong way?” And that’s how you learn, then you pass that on and teach someone else.
DW: So you’re being observational, soaking things and personalities up around you. It almost sounds transcendental, meditative.
NL: It’s a lot. It’s really important, and I hope what people take away when they read the book is you can’t do all of it at once in the beginning.
One piece of advice I got early on from a writer is if you can say one thing that feels like it was of value in the morning and one thing in the afternoon, you have won the day when you’re a first-time writer in the room. You have won. You have to pay attention to who’s pitching and whose’s pitches land all the time and that’s the person you want to emulate. Who rubs the Showrunner the wrong way? Why do you think that is? Don’t repeat that behavior. You’re learning about the people in the room while you’re pitching, working, and your muscles are going to get stronger every day that you’re there, and you’ll be able to do things super-super fast. I’m a super-fast problem-solver when it comes to board problems and people say, “How do you do that so fast? I say, “Y’all, when you break a mystery every single week that your heroes have to solve, it has to feel fresh and new from what we did last week, you get real good at problem-solving,” which I wasn’t good at in my first year (laughs).
DW: What you just said is timeless in a way, because I grew up watching the Hardy Boys, the Bionic Man, the Bionic Woman, and Nancy Drew,let us not forget our female protagonists, and they have to break a case every week. Have some things not changed then?
NL: It all depends on the space you’re in, such as a broadcast format. Look at Bosch, which is incredibly good, but it’s about police officers. Every week there have to be things going on with the cases, clues popping up, interrogations happening, so that part of it never goes away unless you never work in that space.
One of the things that people run into in this business is criticism. People who think, “If you’ve done broadcast and never done streaming,” and think, “Oh, you’re not cool.” My message is, those of us who have done broadcast can write anything you put in front of us. Murder done every week that is solved by the same people that has to feel different (laughs), you get real good at being creative.
In terms of cop shows, medical shows, lawyer shows, telling a story from A to B to C to D, it is what it is. I’ve learned it from people who did it two decades before me. So I think it’s a mainstay in what we do.
DW: Another mainstay seems to be mentoring and collaboration appear to be key aspects of this environment. Through it all, what qualities would you say writers need to succeed in these and related capacities? There are probably different shades of methods, mentoring and problem-solving and being a mentee in these capacities.
NL: One of the biggest rules to remember is that TV is a team sport. Nobody does it alone.
Even if you’re David E. Kelley and you wrote the whole show, it takes 150 people to make the show real. So, just remembering that someone else’s idea doesn’t mean your idea is bad; maybe they’re inspired by your idea and say “Oh, that’s a great idea!” Then someone says A, someone says B, and suddenly, “Act out! What if we add this element?” And that’s the way the process works. “And that’s how we’re going to act it out, and it’s perfect and that's exactly how we’re going to end with the teaser of the episode.” So that sense of teamwork and collaboration is what TV’s about, and if you’re not up for it, go write features. That’s very much what this gig is.
Don’t be afraid to admit you don’t know something. One of the ways I’ve seen writers stumble is when there’s a very good offer on the table and they don’t accept it.
I learned from very good upper level people to be the person who says, “Hey, if anybody has questions? If you’re unclear on stuff, feel free to come to me and I’ll go get the answer, so the lower levels have someone to go to who isn’t the Showrunner.” Not everyone is willing to come and say I have a question, and usually that means they turn in a weaker first draft, they turn in something the Showrunner doesn’t like when I could have told them; they write a twenty-page outline when they were only supposed to write a twelve-page one, things the upper-level writers could have helped them with, because all of us want the Showrunner to be happy with the outline. If you’re in a toxic environment, maybe you don’t have anyone on the show to ask that question, but that’s why it’s really important to have your tribe of writers you can call and say, “Guys, this fifteen-page outline needs to be twelve and I don’t know what to cut.”
Maybe they can’t do the cutting for you because they’re not on your show, but they can say, look…Here’s what I do: I go through every line and I cut every widow and reread every paragraph and say, do I need this detail? What can I cut?
DW: In our larger culture admitting you don’t know something can be a sign of weakness, but it sounds like you keep the mission in mind. One of the seven highly effective habits from a few decades ago is to keep the end in mind, and keep the Showrunner happy, and don’t be afraid to admit, ”I’m not sure how to go about this.”
NL: Absolutely, because look, the very best Showrunners will say to you, “Hey guys, I’m not sure if this episode works. Let’s try this again.” They were so sure they wanted to go down this road and can’t admit defeat, they’ll come back and say, “I led us down the wrong road. I think we need to re-break this,” We’ll say, “Okay, that’s our job, let’s re-break this,” because the goal is to make the best show, not for someone to be right.
DW: Great note to end on. What's next for you? Aside from the Netflix series you’re co-executive producing.
NL: Right, we’re finishing up the room on that. I’m writing a feature, my second feature, it’s called Spark, inspired by the real-life story of Caludette Colvin, a 15 year-old girl who refused to give up her seat on a bus nine months before Rosa Parks. This movie is why you don’t know her better.
She is a delightful human being, I’ve gotten to spend time with her, as feisty as ever at eighty-three. Saniyya Sidney is going to play her. Anthony Mackie is directing, so we’re really excited about that, and some other TV-development stuff in the works.
DW: Saniyya Sidney, what else has she been in?
NL: She was in King Richard. She plays Venus.
DW: Her career rise seems very steep, sharing the screen with Oscar-winner Will Smith.
NL: And she’s delightful, she’s so lovely.
DW: Finally, what's your favorite cinematic moment?
NL: It’s interesting, I really had to think about it. Growing up, there are two TV ones. I’ve never forgotten the feeling of watching the end of the Hill Street Blues pilot. Hill Street Blues literally changed how television was made. I will still argue that with anyone. It was amazing and it stayed amazing. There had never been anything like that on television.
DW: You felt something.
NL: I was just awestruck. It was funny, it was brutal, it was every emotion I felt watching a TV show. And it ends with two officers get shot and Frank FurBrillo has to come out and deal with it and I said, “That’s it? That’s how it ends? We don’t know if they’re alive and dead?” That’s when I fell in love with TV in a different way, I would say.
Without question the movie that changed my life in a very real way was Iron Man because it made being a dork cool. It made it okay to be a nerd who loved comic books in a way Batman had not. I loved Batman and Wonder Woman, my first comic book loves, but that movie in some way changed the game a little bit, and then Marvel, the MCUs started to happen, then Agents of Shield happened.
I thought, I could write Marvel for TV? Really? I could do that? I mean, I got to write Marvel on television, and it all started with Iron Man coming out.
DW: It was fourteen years ago. People in TV owe Hill Street Blues a lot, and I think a lot of filmmakers saw Iron Man and I don’t know how much they incorporated aspects of that, but they cast Robert Downey Jr. who had often played nerds up until that point, and it was an interesting turn for him as well.
NL: I remember telling people, “They’re making Iron Man and they cast Robert Downey Jr.?” And so many people I knew who had never picked up a comic book became engaged in conversations about comic books. It just made it okay in such an interesting way.
DW: Was there a scene that stuck out to you? Like the ending when he declares himself?
NL: I think it’s the scene where his friend sacrifices himself and it’s the realization of, “Oh this is the cost of everything.” To me, that always defined his performance of that character, that moment, right up until Endgame, though the I will say Black Widow is my favorite. Nattie is my favorite!
Clip: Hill Street Blues
Iron Man
Founder and editor of Movies Matter, Dave Watson is a writer and educator in Madison, WI.
Order Niceoloe's book here. Visit Niceole's website to follow her current and future writing adventures.
Dave Watson: Congratulations on The Writers' Room Survival Guide! How did this come about? It’s an engaging read to start to finish.
Niceole Levy: Thank you! It came about through one of my mentors , Carol Kirschner, who co-founded the Viacom CBS Writers’ program, and co-runs the Showrunners’ Training Program at the Writers Guild. We go back to the beginnings of my career. She was like, “Hey! Someone should write a book about this!” I said, “You’re right, someone should!” She said, “I meant you.” I said, “Oh, too busy, too busy, can’t, can’t, can’t.” Then I said, “Okay, let me try and write a Table of Contents. The initial Table of Contents had like thirteen headings, so I said, “Yes, I do have something to say.”
DW: Some people might think of The Writers’ Room as people sitting around a table trading ideas, and there are also various roles one can assume, such as casting. Does one have to earn roles such as this one with experience?
NL: It really is show-dependent. If you are on a show like S.W.A.T. or on a Shawn Ryan show, Shawn is a believer in training writers from the day they start. Even if you are a staff writer or a first-year writer, when you get to participate in the prep meetings, you get to see the casting videos, you send your submissions; it doesn’t mean you’ll win, but you get to say your vote. You get to go on scouts and produce your episode, and that is such an important thing to building future showrunners in our business, is getting all that experience.
With some shows, staff writers don’t get to participate all that much, and as you work your way up the food chain, they’ll start to be like, “Hey, can you watch those casting videos and tell me who you like? Can you handle these prep meetings?” And you start to get more involved in that whole thing.
I’m a firm believer in the Shawn Ryan method. It’s a lot when you’re a first-year writer, going to set is very intimidating, but that’s how you learn. It’s sad where a lot of shows are written before they are shot, so a lot of writers are coming up without that experience.
DW: It sounds dependent and also fluid. You could be in a writers’ room but you could also be very involved on the set, making decisions all the way up to the cameras rolling, is that right?
NL: Yeah, in a standard, like if you’re in a broadcast show, the train is moving constantly.
I say to newer writers, broadcast is your friend. You’re going to learn so much even working on a broadcast show for one season. A start-to-finish idea, if you’re on a show like S.W.A.T., say, you’re in the room, you pitch an idea for your episode, the Showrunner approves it, the room breaks the episode over the course of several days.
You write your story document, that gets approved by the showrunner, studio, network, you go write your script, you go through all the note processes on that.
In the meantime you’re in the room helping a writer with their episode while you’re going through this process, then it’s time for your episode to go into prep, like, a month maybe, after you wrote it maybe? If you’re lucky? (Laughs)
You start doing prep meetings talking about what kind of cars do we need in this scene, what kind of costumes, what kind of locations do we need, how many extras do we need, and the director might be the lead, but they will listen to your ideas. You might say, “Let’s not have blue cars in this scene,” because the showrunner hates it when we use blue cars,” stuff that you’ll know that they don’t know.
Then you finish prep after about a week, then they go into shooting for seven to ten days, and you can also be on hand to give notes after watching dailies for the edit if that’s the kind of show you’re on.
So on average, from the day you pitch your episode to when you give notes on cuts, if you’re on that kind of show, so I would say on average, it might be a month to six weeks, but it’s maybe, generously, a two-month process. It might not air for a couple of more weeks because of the way they pull network shows off the air, God help us.
DW: There are many rules to navigating the Writers' Room. What were the biggest surprises for you?
NL: You know, I made a point of talking to other writers who very generously, anonymously, donated their ideas and stories, so no names shared for the guilty and the innocent, it’s my name, my name is the name attributed to everything. It was interesting to me how much work we’ve all done to try to make the Writers’ Room more inclusive.
I work with The Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity as well, so we’re doing all this work on all these different fronts to make things better, and seeing how many people are still running into treatment that is less than we would like in the writers’ room, and so knowing that there's more work to be done, knowing that we have to, hold that gauntlet up, that maybe was a little disheartening, but people were willing to share their insights on how they handled those situations, like when an upper-level writer treated them poorly as a staff writer.
Hopefully that means that if someone runs into these situations, they can remember, “That writer said this in Niceole’s book,” and they can forge ahead and not get overwhelmed in that situation.
DW: That implies a thick skin while staying open to ideas simultaneously.
NL: My favorite showruners have had bad days, are not happy with the work that’s been done and I say, “Guys, what have you been doing all day?” You say, “We’re in trouble.” The next day he or she comes back and they’re in a better mood.
All showrunners can have a bad day, and that’s very different than bad showrunners who are toxic and create a toxic work environment and make people uncomfortable.
A big part of being in the room is learning everybody’s personality. I compare it to a large, often dysfunctional family dynamic. Everybody’s personality gets room in that space.
Someone doesn’t talk much, and you may need to help them talk more or they don’t talk much and you should know that person doesn’t like to talk so maybe you can engage them and be like, “Oh Dave, didn’t you have that idea the other day or whatever?” Or the person who jumps on other peoples’ ideas. You know who that person is because you’re paying attention in the room, so then to say, “Can I finish real quick?” and then finish your pitch. It’s all a negotiation of personality in a lot of ways, and hopefully you have a solid showrunner who sets the tone from day one. If you have a toxic or chaotic room, you have to find some allies in the space if you can and make the best of a situation
DW: It’s almost like we’re getting down to manners and social navigation, social navigational tools and awareness.
NL: It’s a lot of that. Some people laughed when I talked about where to choose your seat in a room, but it’s true, it’s an important thing to think about. If you’re the kind of person who fidgets, don’t sit next to the showrunner because they’re going to get distracted and be annoyed with you. Sit on the other side of the room and fidget. We all have our things, our quirks. If you need to go to the bathroom every hour, sit close to the door so you can just slip out.
DW: Know thyself.
NL: Know thyself is a really important thing, and also just give yourself grace. None of us knew how to do this the day we got there. We all have to learn, we all make mistakes, and all hopefully have people who help us out and say, “Hey, maybe don’t say that thing to the boss in the morning, it rubs him the wrong way?” And that’s how you learn, then you pass that on and teach someone else.
DW: So you’re being observational, soaking things and personalities up around you. It almost sounds transcendental, meditative.
NL: It’s a lot. It’s really important, and I hope what people take away when they read the book is you can’t do all of it at once in the beginning.
One piece of advice I got early on from a writer is if you can say one thing that feels like it was of value in the morning and one thing in the afternoon, you have won the day when you’re a first-time writer in the room. You have won. You have to pay attention to who’s pitching and whose’s pitches land all the time and that’s the person you want to emulate. Who rubs the Showrunner the wrong way? Why do you think that is? Don’t repeat that behavior. You’re learning about the people in the room while you’re pitching, working, and your muscles are going to get stronger every day that you’re there, and you’ll be able to do things super-super fast. I’m a super-fast problem-solver when it comes to board problems and people say, “How do you do that so fast? I say, “Y’all, when you break a mystery every single week that your heroes have to solve, it has to feel fresh and new from what we did last week, you get real good at problem-solving,” which I wasn’t good at in my first year (laughs).
DW: What you just said is timeless in a way, because I grew up watching the Hardy Boys, the Bionic Man, the Bionic Woman, and Nancy Drew,let us not forget our female protagonists, and they have to break a case every week. Have some things not changed then?
NL: It all depends on the space you’re in, such as a broadcast format. Look at Bosch, which is incredibly good, but it’s about police officers. Every week there have to be things going on with the cases, clues popping up, interrogations happening, so that part of it never goes away unless you never work in that space.
One of the things that people run into in this business is criticism. People who think, “If you’ve done broadcast and never done streaming,” and think, “Oh, you’re not cool.” My message is, those of us who have done broadcast can write anything you put in front of us. Murder done every week that is solved by the same people that has to feel different (laughs), you get real good at being creative.
In terms of cop shows, medical shows, lawyer shows, telling a story from A to B to C to D, it is what it is. I’ve learned it from people who did it two decades before me. So I think it’s a mainstay in what we do.
DW: Another mainstay seems to be mentoring and collaboration appear to be key aspects of this environment. Through it all, what qualities would you say writers need to succeed in these and related capacities? There are probably different shades of methods, mentoring and problem-solving and being a mentee in these capacities.
NL: One of the biggest rules to remember is that TV is a team sport. Nobody does it alone.
Even if you’re David E. Kelley and you wrote the whole show, it takes 150 people to make the show real. So, just remembering that someone else’s idea doesn’t mean your idea is bad; maybe they’re inspired by your idea and say “Oh, that’s a great idea!” Then someone says A, someone says B, and suddenly, “Act out! What if we add this element?” And that’s the way the process works. “And that’s how we’re going to act it out, and it’s perfect and that's exactly how we’re going to end with the teaser of the episode.” So that sense of teamwork and collaboration is what TV’s about, and if you’re not up for it, go write features. That’s very much what this gig is.
Don’t be afraid to admit you don’t know something. One of the ways I’ve seen writers stumble is when there’s a very good offer on the table and they don’t accept it.
I learned from very good upper level people to be the person who says, “Hey, if anybody has questions? If you’re unclear on stuff, feel free to come to me and I’ll go get the answer, so the lower levels have someone to go to who isn’t the Showrunner.” Not everyone is willing to come and say I have a question, and usually that means they turn in a weaker first draft, they turn in something the Showrunner doesn’t like when I could have told them; they write a twenty-page outline when they were only supposed to write a twelve-page one, things the upper-level writers could have helped them with, because all of us want the Showrunner to be happy with the outline. If you’re in a toxic environment, maybe you don’t have anyone on the show to ask that question, but that’s why it’s really important to have your tribe of writers you can call and say, “Guys, this fifteen-page outline needs to be twelve and I don’t know what to cut.”
Maybe they can’t do the cutting for you because they’re not on your show, but they can say, look…Here’s what I do: I go through every line and I cut every widow and reread every paragraph and say, do I need this detail? What can I cut?
DW: In our larger culture admitting you don’t know something can be a sign of weakness, but it sounds like you keep the mission in mind. One of the seven highly effective habits from a few decades ago is to keep the end in mind, and keep the Showrunner happy, and don’t be afraid to admit, ”I’m not sure how to go about this.”
NL: Absolutely, because look, the very best Showrunners will say to you, “Hey guys, I’m not sure if this episode works. Let’s try this again.” They were so sure they wanted to go down this road and can’t admit defeat, they’ll come back and say, “I led us down the wrong road. I think we need to re-break this,” We’ll say, “Okay, that’s our job, let’s re-break this,” because the goal is to make the best show, not for someone to be right.
DW: Great note to end on. What's next for you? Aside from the Netflix series you’re co-executive producing.
NL: Right, we’re finishing up the room on that. I’m writing a feature, my second feature, it’s called Spark, inspired by the real-life story of Caludette Colvin, a 15 year-old girl who refused to give up her seat on a bus nine months before Rosa Parks. This movie is why you don’t know her better.
She is a delightful human being, I’ve gotten to spend time with her, as feisty as ever at eighty-three. Saniyya Sidney is going to play her. Anthony Mackie is directing, so we’re really excited about that, and some other TV-development stuff in the works.
DW: Saniyya Sidney, what else has she been in?
NL: She was in King Richard. She plays Venus.
DW: Her career rise seems very steep, sharing the screen with Oscar-winner Will Smith.
NL: And she’s delightful, she’s so lovely.
DW: Finally, what's your favorite cinematic moment?
NL: It’s interesting, I really had to think about it. Growing up, there are two TV ones. I’ve never forgotten the feeling of watching the end of the Hill Street Blues pilot. Hill Street Blues literally changed how television was made. I will still argue that with anyone. It was amazing and it stayed amazing. There had never been anything like that on television.
DW: You felt something.
NL: I was just awestruck. It was funny, it was brutal, it was every emotion I felt watching a TV show. And it ends with two officers get shot and Frank FurBrillo has to come out and deal with it and I said, “That’s it? That’s how it ends? We don’t know if they’re alive and dead?” That’s when I fell in love with TV in a different way, I would say.
Without question the movie that changed my life in a very real way was Iron Man because it made being a dork cool. It made it okay to be a nerd who loved comic books in a way Batman had not. I loved Batman and Wonder Woman, my first comic book loves, but that movie in some way changed the game a little bit, and then Marvel, the MCUs started to happen, then Agents of Shield happened.
I thought, I could write Marvel for TV? Really? I could do that? I mean, I got to write Marvel on television, and it all started with Iron Man coming out.
DW: It was fourteen years ago. People in TV owe Hill Street Blues a lot, and I think a lot of filmmakers saw Iron Man and I don’t know how much they incorporated aspects of that, but they cast Robert Downey Jr. who had often played nerds up until that point, and it was an interesting turn for him as well.
NL: I remember telling people, “They’re making Iron Man and they cast Robert Downey Jr.?” And so many people I knew who had never picked up a comic book became engaged in conversations about comic books. It just made it okay in such an interesting way.
DW: Was there a scene that stuck out to you? Like the ending when he declares himself?
NL: I think it’s the scene where his friend sacrifices himself and it’s the realization of, “Oh this is the cost of everything.” To me, that always defined his performance of that character, that moment, right up until Endgame, though the I will say Black Widow is my favorite. Nattie is my favorite!
Clip: Hill Street Blues
Iron Man
Founder and editor of Movies Matter, Dave Watson is a writer and educator in Madison, WI.
