Film School (37 page)

“That's just wrong,” I say as we're out of earshot. Tom nods. “I wonder if the guy calls someone to service his wife,” he mutters.

The next morning, I'm up early. I tell Tom I'm going to work on my television pitch. Tom's fine with that. The day is dawning sunny and bright. We stay at Carl and Irene's that day and have the place to ourselves because they're out of town. I get my legal pad and sit in the shade and write down ideas. Tom finds a reclining chair in a backyard patio and strips off his shirt, exposing a mass of blindingly white flesh. At noon, he cracks a beer.

Throughout the day, I write in the shade and run my ideas past Tom, who sits a few feet away in the blazing Southern California sunshine. He serves as my muse. He stays in the sun the whole time and sips his beers. He nods when he likes an idea, grunts when he doesn't. I sip water and work on my pitch. My pancreas flare-up means no beer, no coffee, nothing spicy. As the day goes on, Tom nods more than he grunts. He likes the pitch.

By 6
P.M.
that day, I've got my pitch done. Tom is beet-red from the sun. He's happy. I'm happy.

That night, I read over my pitch. It seems pretty good. I start performing it, memorizing it, getting ready for the upcoming class. Tom grills some steaks and listens.

When Callaway's pitch class comes on Thursday, I walk in and . . . he's not there. There's another instructor, a sub. Callaway is busy with CSI: NY, we're told. The substitute is a polite blond-haired man in his fifties wearing khakis and new white K-Swiss tennis shoes. I have no idea who he is. I suspect he's one of the many adjunct instructors USC has at its disposal.

Caraballo is glad to see me back. I assure him I'm feeling fine. When it's time to pitch, I walk in with this pitch memorized:

Two weeks ago, I went to the doctor because it felt like I had a baseball stuck under my ribs. A baseball made of jagged crystals.

He told me I appeared to have a case of pancreatitis. My pancreas was inflamed. He said he didn't know why, that they would need to do more tests.

I was not happy. I knew there are really only two organs in your body that are hard to replace: one is your brain; the other is your pancreas.

I knew that because a few years ago I worked as a transplant coordinator at the University of Chicago Hospitals. I was the guy who carried the Igloo cooler with a human liver inside. My job was to oversee all aspects of the transplantation harvest. I was essentially a producer of a traveling road show that flew all over the country to take out human organs in the middle of the night. I gathered the surgical team; I got us to a little hospital in Arkansas, or Brooklyn; and I actually helped to take the livers out—which was the scariest part because I was an English major turned reporter turned transplant coordinator and didn't know jack about surgery. True story—one Christmas Eve, the University of Chicago was doing an experimental surgery where they were taking out a portion of someone's liver and giving it to that person's deathly sick infant. This was very risky stuff at the time. Very cutting edge. But because they were so short on surgical residents at the time—it was Christmas, and we were doing another transplant operation at the same time—the lead surgeon pulled me out of a hallway and I scrubbed in and helped him dissect this little tiny section of liver that was going to be going into the infant. My experiences at that hospital have helped shape what I think is a great one-hour hospital drama.

The working title is: FOR EVERY BEATING HEART . . .

Every episode of this show is a stand-alone drama. In every episode, we follow a heart as it goes from donor to recipient. From someone who was once alive to someone who is about to die, and gets new life. This drama focuses on one main character: Nic Barnes, a new surgeon-in-training whose job is to follow the donor heart on every step of its journey.

This drama takes place right now, at a major American research hospital, where the politics are intense, the city around them is crumbling, the weather is always unpredictable, and any other place in America is a few hours away by jet.

M
AJOR
C
HARACTERS
:

Nic Barnes, thirty-one years old. The son of a car salesman and a school secretary. He's a surgical fellow: he's gone through medical school and a long residency and now he's almost through with his training. Nic is a guy without airs. He's got the easy social skills of a salesman, a guy who likes to hang out at run-down bowling alleys and the corner basketball court. But he's whip smart—the kind of guy who knows every single
JEOPARDY!
question in the snap of a finger. He has a problem with authority figures, however, not a good thing when he deals with his attending physicians, some of the biggest egos in medicine. Nic is single. Good-looking. Never found the right girl. Deep down, he's a poet who finds the time to keep a journal. He's also got a secret that tortures him: when he was seventeen, he lost control of his car and slammed into another car,
killing a family of three. To this day, he doesn't drive. Not a problem during his medical school and residency in NYC. A big problem in Chicago.

Dr. Schwartz, the head of the transplant program. Exceedingly arrogant, never wrong, and a man who always wants to be number one, no matter what the cost.

Dr. Whiteside III, second in command. Boston Brahmin, all the right schools, a guy who still wears tweed jackets with leather patches and likes to boast about his stunning assortment of bottled sherry. He has a great curse: his father, Dr. Whiteside II, won a Nobel Prize in medicine in the 1960s.

Dr. Susanna Hanson, a final-year surgical resident, one year younger than Nic. Introverted, tough, a real looker. Fantastic rapport with patients, especially children. Already twice divorced. Her second marriage lasted forty-seven days before she filed for divorce.

Wendy Kim, another surgical resident. Cute, a joker, everyone's best friend. Always upbeat, a complete straight arrow. Or so it seems.

Avio Torres, the hospital's other fellow, which makes him an equal with Nic in the hierarchy of the hospital. But . . . Avio is older, late thirties, a cardiac surgeon who is returning to the university for another year of training so he can do transplants. Avio is a heartthrob: GQ looks, a politician's charm, a backstabber par excellence.

Fat Eddy, the candy bar–eating, slobby transplant coordinator. Seems to know nothing, but he always gets the transplant team to the right place at the right time. The kind of guy who can come up with a dogsled team in an hour, even while eating a leftover pizza.

B
ASIC
S
ETUP
:

Every episode features a through-line of a single transplantation. In that way, it's similar to the LAW & ORDER or CSI or other police and legal procedurals. It also allows for a multitiered story line like SIX FEET UNDER. In each FOR EVERY BEATING HEART episode, there are the stories of the donor and the recipient and the stories of the transplant team. They will overlap and interweave during each episode. And although the medical team will have a changing dynamic through the season, this is not a soap opera. Viewers watching episode five will not need to know what happened in episode four to understand the action. Each episode will stand fully alone.

This format allows a tremendous amount of flexibility in storytelling. For example, although each episode features a harvest operation and a recipient operation, it is entirely possible to spend nearly the entire hour on just the harvest. Same goes with a recipient operation. There will be episodes in which there is no harvest operation because something goes amiss. There will be episodes in which the recipient operation goes afoul. Sometimes the good will die. Sometimes the simple will not work. This is a show built on unpredictability—a tremendous amount of unpredictability—which gives it a huge measure of its drama.

The show also allows viewers to explore the ethics and controversies and dilemmas and miracles of transplant surgery. Think for a moment: the great police and legal procedurals all wrestle with big societal questions. What does GREY'S ANATOMY wrestle with? Who to sleep with? What melancholy ballad to play under the script? This show, FOR EVERY BEATING HEART, will be the next one that people talk about, think about, blog about.

T
HE
P
ILOT
:

Nic Barnes has just arrived in Chicago. The movers haven't arrived yet, and he's just arrived at his apartment. It's a Sunday. He's slated to start his fellowship at the Chicago University Hospital on Monday. He tells his girlfriend—she still lives in New York City—that he'll have an easy first couple of days. Paperwork. Orientation. His doorbell rings. It's Fat Eddy, the transplant coordinator, who somehow found where Nic lives and tells Nic
that they're going to Louisiana for a harvest, right now. Nic can't say no, so they're off. Nic, Fat Eddy, the easy-on-the-eyes Susanna Hanson, and a very young medical student named Tyler. They fly in a chartered Lear to a tiny airstrip in the Bayou and take a run-down cab to the local hospital. It's 2
A.M.
They arrive to find everyone at the hospital angry and upset. The donor, it turns out, was the staff psychiatrist, who was killed by one of her patients. The patient threw a Molotov cocktail into her office, burning her to death and damaging the hospital. We have seen these scenes interlaced with the scenes of Nic in Chicago. Now, the two stories collide. There's another complication: the psychiatrist's family is split on whether to donate her organs. She's Creole, and some family members don't think it's right. The dispute spills into the operating room as Nic and Susanna are removing the woman's heart. Nic is forced to calm the angry family. When Nic and the others are finally ready to leave, they're stranded temporarily at the hospital because there is no ambulance—and no cab—to take them to the airport. A member of the woman's family, the leader of the anti-transplantation group, volunteers to take them. A family funeral procession slowly winds its way through the lowlands of the Bayou, taking the Chicago transplant team to its waiting plane. As the team enters the plane, the tearful family stands outside, hugging and crying.

Nic is exhausted. The tough-as-iron Susanna tells him: get some sleep, 'cuz we're only halfway done, and the clock is ticking. They have four hours to put the new heart in.

When they arrive in Chicago, it's already after 7
A.M.
Traffic is a bitch, but with Fat Eddy driving—his vehicle is a former police cruiser—they run the shoulder and take shortcuts only to arrive at the hospital and find that the recipient who was supposed to get the heart failed his blood tests upon being admitted. The recipient is a drunk and arrived blotto. Second on the list of recipients is a famous cellist, but he's in liver failure. Third on the list is a felon, imprisoned in Joliet, who beat a murder rap only because no one would testify against him. The felon's lawyer successfully sued the prison system, arguing that his client deserved the same chance at a heart transplant as anyone else. Now the con gets his chance. And Nic gets to operate, under the watchful and very critical eyes of his two bosses. When they finish, successfully, it's not even noon. Nic feels like he's been gone a month. His boss pats him on the back, says nice work, and now get ready to do it all over again.

W
hen I get done, the nice man with white K-Swiss shoes looks mildly pleased. He advises me to drop any negative references to other shows. For all you know, he says, a producer from GREY'S ANATOMY is listening to the pitch. And what good would that do you? he asks. (It's also a bad idea to castigate a show created by Shonda Rhimes, a fairly recent USC film school student. And who am I to make value judgments? My wife Julie loves GREY'S ANATOMY.) He also doesn't like the name of my show. Too dull, he says. He makes a few other mild suggestions, but that's it.

Caraballo, meanwhile, has a great comedy pitch about a variety of Hispanic day laborers who meet every day outside a Home Depot in Florida. It's very funny, and with his Cubano accent, Caraballo makes the most of the Spanglish he sprinkles throughout the pitch.

At the end of the evening, I'm walking out of the class when the substitute instructor stops me in the hallway. “That was a really good pitch,” he says. “What's your name?”

I tell him, and we chat for a minute. I see the other students looking at me out of the corners of their eyes as they exit. I don't know who this instructor is, but he is very enthusiastic about my show idea. When we're done chatting, I catch up with a classmate outside the building on the sidewalk. “Who was that guy teaching tonight?” I ask. My classmate, a writing student, stares at me like I'm an idiot. “That's Jack Epps.”

I'm trying to remember where I heard the name before. Didn't Callaway mention it once? “Jack Epps,” the other student says with more emphasis. “He's the head of the writing program. Guy wrote TOP GUN and LEGAL EAGLES. And a lot more.”

I nod. Ahhhh.
That
Jack Epps.

T
he next week Callaway is back. I've tweaked my pitch. My ramp is about seeing ambulances and wondering who's inside. I drop any criticisms of other shows. I drop comparisons to SIX FEET UNDER and GREY'S ANATOMY and put it squarely in the camp of procedurals like LAW & ORDER. The new working title is HEART & SOUL. I throw in a line about using Hoagy Carmichael's popular composition of the same name as an opening song. I tighten my pilot.

I have a change from my first version. Nic Barnes is a much darker character. To calm the situation in the operating room, Nic, the lead character, tells the bereaved and reluctant family of the potential donor a touching story that his own brother died in a motorcycle crash. Nic explains that donating his brother's organs helped him through the grief of his death. His heart-wrenching tale convinces the family they should donate the brain-dead psychologist's organs. When Susanna, the other doctor, later tells Nic she's sorry for his loss, he tells her he never had a brother, that it was all just a story.