The Lynn Marie Latham and Bernard Lechowick Interview
August 26, 2004
Lynn Marie Latham and Bernard Lechowick are one of the premiere power couples in
television. In a career that has spanned
more than 25 years, the married dynamic duo of writing has penned more than 200
hours of primetime programming, been nominated for Emmy Awards and their shows
have been up for People’s Choice Awards eight years in a row. They shot to fame with “Knots Landing” in
the mid-1980s and the rest has been TV history.
“My
father was a Western writer, he published seven novels and over a thousand
short stories. His name was John H. Latham. My cousin, Aaron Latham, wrote ‘Urban Cowboy.’ In a way I was following the family business,” Latham reminisced.
“As an Irish American Catholic, I was fascinated with wordplay and the distinction of phrases, as most in the Irish culture usually are. I was raised with a respect and love for the language,” Lechowick said.
Latham
grew up in Conroe, Texas, near Houston, and Lechowick in Mentor, Ohio, near
Cleveland. Their backgrounds would
later serve as the basis for their crowning achievement, the ABC cult favorite,
“Homefront.”
The
couple said they both became interested in writing at a young age. While Latham had obvious familial
influences, Lechowick stumbled upon his career almost by accident.
“I
wrote a monologue in high school for someone and someone laughed,” Lechowick
said. “That’s a very bad thing because then you think you’re good at this and
you get hooked. I won a minor writing
award from Atlantic Monthly and I was on my way.”
Lechowick
was graduated from the University of Notre Dame and Latham from the University
of Texas at Austin. For his graduate studies,
Lechowick chose Texas to complete a master’s degree in Radio, Television and
Film and it is there that he met Latham.
“I
began teaching at the school and after I went into directing. I did public television directing, lots of
drama, lots of comedy and a cooking show,” Lechowick said.
Lechowick’s
most notable turn on PBS was the Spanish and English series, “Que Pasa?”
“It
was the first bilingual sitcom, three generations of Cubans living under one
roof. The older generation spoke no
English, the parents spoke more English, but preferred Spanish and the kids
knew mostly English. It’s still running
in Miami and a lot of people still mention it to me, all these years later.”
After
graduating from Texas, Latham went to New York for a year and worked at the
magazines Advertising Age and Business Insurance. She and Lechowick moved to Hollywood in hopes of pursuing a
career writing for entertainment.
“Originally
I was a comedy writer,” Latham said. “I
wanted to do half-hour sitcoms. Well
this was a time that the comedies were disappearing and hour-long dramas were
coming in. And I wanted to work so I
told my agent, ‘If you can get us a job, we will keep it because we’re very
hard workers.’”
By
this time Latham had started writing with Lechowick. They began their writing partnership in 1979 and their marriage
in 1981. In 1984, they landed jobs as
story editors, or staff writers, on the NBC nighttime soap, “Berrenger’s.”
“We
were actually the third choice of the producers on ‘Berrenger’s,’” Lechowick
said. “So we were fortunate to get that.”
“We did quite well on that but it didn’t last very long,” Latham said. “‘Berrenger’s’ was shot on the MGM lot by Lorimar and when it went down it was exciting because we got job offers from ‘Dallas,’ ‘Knots Landing’ and ‘Falcon Crest.’ We had not focused on soap writing; that was not what we were looking at, we just wanted to write. But at that time those were the big shows.”
Latham
and Lechowick studied the offers and decided to go with “Knots Landing.”
“We
liked it the best,” Latham said. “It
was the most realistic and you were dealing with people who were middle income
people, not the super wealthy, and it just appealed to us.”
“‘Berrenger’s’
wrapped in December and we did a script for an episode of season six of ‘Knots’
as freelancers (‘A Man of Good Will’),” Lechowick said.
The
couple began working fulltime on “Knots” at the commencement of the seventh
season and Latham and Lechowick both have vivid memories of their significant
early experiences on the show.
“Valene
(Joan Van Ark) got her babies in the
last episode of the sixth season,” Latham said. “I remember it because I had to
watch the dailies when they were shooting something about a day player
screaming and holding a baby. I was so
upset because the screams were going in this kid’s ear and the child was really
crying and it was very difficult to watch.
I remember going, ‘Why didn’t the director do this differently?’”
“The
first big episode I remember working on was when Ted Shackelford blew up Empire Valley,” Lechowick said. “It was the
first time we used intercut dialogue.
Meaning, Gary Ewing (Shackelford) was trapped and Greg Sumner (William Devane) was trying to track
him. So the dialogue would go with Greg Sumner saying, ‘They’re heading east,’
and Gary would then say, ‘I’m about 20 yards from the east entrance.’ That style got us by what could have been a
boring scene but the producers allowed it and a lot of the audience liked it.”
When
Latham and Lechowick were hired, they were not brought on as a team, but as two
separate writers, and Latham said that was also a key factor in choosing
“Knots” over the other soap offers.
“We
had worked together as a team on ‘Berrenger’s,’ but I very much wanted my own
career, because we had a child. With
teams, people can look at you and ask, ‘Who’s the real writer?’ So at that point we each became individual
writers. We were each hired onto the
show separately, with separate contracts, separate titles, separate
credits. From that point on, Bernard
and I did not write scripts together, we wrote our own scripts. What we have written together is 14 pilots,
but our episodic work has been individual.”
The
process of writing “Knots” was similar to other continuing series, Latham said.
Before the season began, the writing staff would spend two months composing a
“bible,” similar to a novella, ranging from 100-150 pages that covered
everything that would happen that year on the show. From there, the writing
staff would take that prose document and break it down into outlines for each
episode. Week by week, one writer would
take the composed outlines and write an individual script.
“We
had a week of seven working days,” Latham said. “We started on a Monday and
would finish on the following Wednesday.
But we never worked on a hard and fast schedule. Sometimes the episodes were easy to
complete, sometimes they were very difficult.
The outlines are the hard part; the scripts are easy, that’s fun, that’s
dialogue, that’s a breeze. In one-hour
drama, it goes in four acts. And we
used to say there was the unnatural fourth act. That goes back to Aristotle, when drama falls into three
acts. But what you find in soap operas
is that there are three acts of a complete story and the fourth will often be
the first act of your next show.”
Latham
said that they balanced the rigors of working on “Knots” with raising two
children, Rick, now 22, who is on an academic fellowship in several Asian
countries and Vincent, now 18, an incoming freshman at Bard College in New
York. The key was to leave work at the
office and always have one of them around for the kids on weekends.
“If
one of us had to write on the weekend, one of us would entertain the child and say,
‘Hey, we’re going to Disneyland, we’re going to the park.’ We never wanted them
to suffer because of our career. So the
kids would think, ‘I’m having a wonderful Mommy Sunday or a wonderful Daddy
Sunday.’ We would get home at 6 or 6:30
and lived a very civilized, normal life for our kids. We played board games and cards and never discussed work.”
As
for the stories on “Knots,” both Latham and Lechowick brought their individual
sensibilities to the plotting, and themes from their childhood often arose. Lechowick said his “Midwestern American
Catholicism” from his childhood fueled his storytelling at times, especially in
terms of certain “social issues” plots.
“I
grew up in a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” Lechowick said. “We were very
devout Catholics who attended Mass faithfully, observed every holy day of
obligation, prayed the novena, everything.
This theology of social justice stayed with me into adulthood and I
think had an effect at times on the show.”
The
theme of social justice pervaded their favorite plots. Both Latham and Lechowick said they most
enjoyed creating the storyline featuring Jason Lochner (Thomas Wilson Brown) as an abused teen helped by Mack McKenzie (Kevin Dobson).
“During
that story Mack McKenzie came to the realization that he himself had come out
of an abusive environment, but he had not faced that fact,” Latham said. “That is frequently what happens with adults
who have to come to terms with that later in life. We interviewed children who had gone through it, at the Clarion
Center here in L.A.”
“Never
once (in that story) did you see hitting or abuse,” Lechowick said. “But you
knew it was there. This became more of
Mack McKenzie’s story, because it brought him around to an insight. I remember a scene with Mack and Larry Riley
(Frank Williams) that went something
like, ‘You can’t smack your boss, you can’t hit the President, but somehow you
can do that to a child.’ There was a
big burly guard on the lot who said he had seen that episode and told Kevin Dobson
that after watching that, ‘I don’t hit my daughter anymore.’”
Another
favorite of Lechowick’s was the storyline involving Olivia’s (Tonya Crowe) cocaine addiction and the
impact it had on her mother, Abby (Donna
Mills).
“Donna
Mills played either a vixen or villain up to that point. So she has a daughter who uses drugs, let’s
humanize her. It’s more interesting to
see a villain in a situation like this; now she’s presented with a problem she
can’t get out of in the usual way.”
But
it wasn’t all heavy drama that Latham and Lechowick were interested in. Latham
said her favorite “fun story” was the May-December romance between Greg Sumner
and Paige Matheson (Nicollette Sheridan).
“Bernard
and I saw there was a chemistry we thought we should use,” Latham said. “We love audience testing, so many writers
say they don’t like it, but we love it.
Bill Devane didn’t want to do the story, Nicollette didn’t want to do
the story, David Jacobs didn’t want
to do the story -- everybody pretty much didn’t want to do the story. So we went to a focus group and said what
happens if these two characters fall in love because there’s such an extreme
age difference and everyone in the room said they hated it. So when you have so much response from a
group, positive or negative, you know you’re onto something good because you’ve
engaged the audience.
“The
focus group hated it because they said he’d be a dirty old man. Bernard and I looked at each other and said
we know exactly how to write this: we made her fall in love with him and he
refuses to have anything to do with her because of the age difference. So it is her heart that has gone out to him
and we play it that way. She is in love
with him and he will not return her affections.
“Sure
enough, we started writing it that way, laying it in very slowly. Next time we tested the show, the entire
focus group said, ‘How can he be so awful to her, she adores him … he needs to
return this.’ And it worked like
gangbusters. That one I loved doing and
it was very successful.”
One
of the tasks of plotting an ensemble show like “Knots Landing” was to add to
the large cast periodically. By the end
of their tenure in 1991, there were 20 characters appearing regularly on the
show, a sharp increase from when they arrived in 1985. Latham and Lechowick said they enjoyed
presiding over the arrivals of Paige, Claudia (Kathleen Noone), Frank, Pat Williams (Lynne Moody) and Anne (Michelle
Phillips). But Latham cites Sam Behrens as her favorite addition to
the show.
“Danny Waleska, he was my favorite. He was a marvelous villain by the time we got rid of him after two years. After he had trapped Gary and beat him up with a baseball bat – it was just marvelous!” Latham said, laughing.
Not
everything worked in their eyes, however.
The venture to Mexico by Paige, Michael (Patrick Petersen) and Johnny Rourke (Peter Reckell) did not go as originally planned and Latham and
Lechowick were a bit embarrassed by its development.
“At
the end of one season, CBS was toying with the idea of doing summer
programming,” Latham said. “CBS was
going to spin off the younger characters and we were going to take them to
Mexico. So we had the cliffhanger with
them and then the network decided not
to do it.”
“The idea of summer programming was
being talked about in the 1980s, but it was still a new concept,” Lechowick
said. “CBS balked because they didn’t
think that enough people would watch in the summer. For 50 years they taught the audience not to show up and they
only showed reruns. But as shows like
‘Coronation Street’ and ‘Eastenders’ in Britain showed, year-round programming
can work. One of the great dilemmas
used to be that no one watched TV on Saturday nights, but CBS changed that with
‘All in the Family,’ ‘The Jeffersons,’ ‘Maude’ and ‘The Bob Newhart Show.’ So the
summer show could have been done if they wanted to, and of course you’re seeing
it done now.”
Instead,
in 1988, Latham and Lechowick, now promoted to producers, had to solve the plot
problem of the youth trio in Mexico without a show.
“It
was like, what is going on?” Latham said.
“First they were down in Mexico for an archaeological dig, and didn’t we
have them locked in a truck, and they almost died? And then we had to get them out of the truck and life had to go
on in the cul de sac.”
Latham
and Lechowick said they miss the days before cable was preeminent on American
television, because networks no longer take any risks and are obsessed with
holding onto their share of shrinking viewers.
On “Knots,” CBS allowed them to do mostly anything they wanted.
“Networks
are afraid of offending anyone now,” Lechowick said. “You simply can’t tell certain stories for fear that a particular
group might not like it. On ‘Knots’ we
had six years of 30 episodes a year where we didn’t have that worry. We did musical comedy, as I saw it, to
mystery to drug abuse. David (Jacobs,
creator and executive producer) was very sympathetic to whatever we tried.”
“There
was a lot more freedom back then, honestly,” Latham added. “Now if you do
certain things you’d get calls from the network. We did that episode that was like ‘Mildred Pierce,’ (‘The Heat of
Passion’) it was real film noir, and we got no calls saying they didn’t like
the style or content, or anything.”
Lechowick
is quite proud when he notes that he wrote the 200th (“Noises
Everywhere, Part I”) and 300th (“The Last One Out”) episodes of the
series. He shows more excitement when
discussing the cast he got to work with.
“My
God, did we have a cast or did we have a cast?
Bill Devane, Ted Shackelford, Kevin Dobson, Michele Lee and Donna, my word, and Alec Baldwin and Julie
Harris. You know, Julie Harris
picked up the corner of her apron when she entered a room in one scene. It’s something so small that you watched and
realized what great acting is. Ted
could do comedy and Kevin could do comedy, and they were effective because they
were not punching it into the ground.
In a heavier story they knew how to handle humor.”
Two
cast members, though, have complained about the stewardship of Latham and
Lechowick in published interviews last year.
Joan Van Ark and John Pleshette
both were critical of the couple. Van
Ark was disappointed in the direction her character Valene went in, and
Pleshette called them “awful people” after allegedly clashing with them on the
set of the episode “Birds Do It, Bees Do It,” which Latham and Lechowick wrote
together and Pleshette directed.
“I
don’t remember the tensions and the disagreement,” Lechowick said. “Certainly we weren’t in a position where we
were treating him badly when he came to direct. John wasn’t one of our usual directors and after a while you see
the same people and you get into a rhythm with them. With John it would have been the opposite of giving him a hard
time; he was married to David Jacobs’ ex-wife so if anything, we were bending
over backwards to please him while he was there. So I’m not sure what he was bothered about.”
Van
Ark said her character was being turned into “the village idiot” on the show
and that she protested about particular plotlines to Latham and Lechowick, but
to no avail.
“Well,
the character had some mental problems,” Lechowick said carefully. “She thought
her ex was returning and she got tormented by Jill (Teri Austin) and she stir fried her kids’ hermit crabs. I wouldn’t say this made her an ‘idiot,’ but
it was something that happened in the progression of Valene. Did we try to make her look purposely bad?
No. Were we trying to have her leave
the show? No. Did she get all the screen time she wanted? No.”
Lechowick
added that Van Ark’s Valene often dominated the storylines and was given many
opportunities to shine.
“In
the season finale where it was just her and Jill, that was a 15-20 minute scene,
no cuts, it was different and it was radical.
That was one of her great moments.”
During
the infamous five-month Writer’s Guild Strike of 1988, Latham and Lechowick
were forbidden from working on “Knots,” though Latham said there was pressure
on them to do so. Instead, they decided
to flesh out a story Latham had been carrying since childhood called
“Homefront.”
“It was based on my best friend’s mother who was a Belgian war bride,” Latham said. “In my little town of 9,000 there were three war brides (from World War II). And I would listen to their stories, one was German, one was Belgian, one was Italian. When the strike happened we sat down and developed this story. When it was time to pitch pilots, in 1990, we took the idea to NBC and they passed and ABC bought it. That was a dream of mine. During the time we wrote and shot the pilot we were on ‘Knots’ and the next season we were on ‘Homefront.’”
“We
were going to set it in Texas, like where Lynn grew up, but the show ‘Dallas’
had just been on the air and the network thought it would seem too similar so
instead we set it in Ohio. I grew up in
Ohio, outside Cleveland, so we set the show in the fictional town of River
Run,” Lechowick noted.
Latham,
Lechowick and Jacobs were executive producers of “Homefront” and they brought
much of the writing staff from “Knots” with them, including James Stanley and Dianne Messina, who would also eventually marry. Mimi
Kennedy, a writer on “Knots,” was cast in a starring role on the show. This followed her notable cameo appearance
on “Knots” as Linda Fairgate’s (Lar Park
Lincoln) mother. Ironically, Latham
and Lechowick were busy working on the pilot for “Homefront,” and didn’t even
preside over Kennedy’s episode, “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way,” in
1991.
“Homefront”
expanded upon Latham’s idea of World War II war brides by adding soldiers
returning from the war, “Rosie the Riveter” types losing their jobs to
returning servicemen, racial tensions and Kyle
Chandler as an up and coming baseball phenomenon. After being snubbed by award voters during their six years on
“Knots Landing,” Latham and Lechowick were nominated for Emmys and other major
awards in the two years “Homefront” was on the air.
“Homefront”
struck a chord with many viewers during its run, but was not highly rated
overall and was cancelled in 1993.
Latham said she still gets email from viewers and fan club members about
the show.
“I
think we did about 45 hours and imagine doing 45 hours of your dream
project. That’s like 20 feature films,
and so I considered it a gift. It would
have been nice for it to last longer, but I was thrilled that it was on. The actors were marvelous; some of them are
still my best friends. The crew was
magnificent.”
When
“Homefront” ended, so did “Knots Landing.”
Latham said she never watched the show after she left and considers that
a rule of thumb for any show she works on.
“Once
you’re off a show, if you watch it, the characters won’t be speaking the way
you think they should speak, or the story may not go the way you think it
should.”
Neither
she nor her husband was approached to work on the 1997 “Knots Landing” reunion
miniseries “Back to the Cul de Sac,” Latham said.
Very
much in demand after “Homefront,” Latham and Lechowick have worked steadily
ever since. The couple went on to
create and executive produce “Second Chances” and “Hotel Malibu” for CBS and
“Wild Card” for Lifetime. Latham wrote for “Savannah” (WB) and “Pacific
Palisades” (Fox), executive produced “The District” and “That’s Life,” both for
CBS, while Lechowick wrote for “Savannah,” created and executive produced “Live
Through This” for MTV, co-executive produced “Hyperion Bay” (WB) and executive
produced “Wolf Lake” (CBS)
Latham
returned to the world of soaps, this time Daytime, as the first head writer on
“Port Charles” in 1997 on ABC. She said
on “PC” she finally got to use the Aristotelian three-act dramatic
structure.
“I
truly enjoyed working there,” Latham said.
“I was able to bring Scott Hamner,
Earl Hamner’s son, who had worked on
‘Knots Landing,’ over to ‘Port Charles,’ and he’s always been one of my
favorites.”
Latham
said the key story that she worked on in her two-year stint on “PC” was the
“General Homicide” murder mystery that revolved around Dr. Kevin Collins (Jon Lindstrom). Latham left “Port Charles” in 1999 when her
father was dying.
The
couple has a new show in the works, Lechowick said, but he declined to release
specifics of the project. Both,
however, said they are very grateful to be in the position they are in in
Hollywood.
“I
feel incredibly fortunate to work in this field,” Latham said. “We wanted to work in the field we work in
and we did.”
“It’s
great working with Lynn,” Lechowick said.
“When you have to meet a deadline, it’s perfect to be working with
her. She came from the print world, I
came from the directing world, and it just has really turned out well.”
Art Swift is a student at the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. Check out www.ArthurSwift.com for additional
writings. Please visit www.knotslandingonline.com
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