CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 4/11/08

TV Writer Reveals Shocking Secrets!:
Dirt's Matthew Carnahan

By jason davis

As FX's Dirt wraps up its second season, step behind the scenes with creator Matthew Carnahan as he recalls the show's radical evolution from pilot to series, and the new look for year two.

Dirt creator Matthew Carnahan dishes the gossip on how his FX series about cutthroat tabloid editor Lucy Spiller (Courteney Cox) and her schizophrenic paparazzo pal Don Konkey (Ian Hart) evolved from an apocalyptic pilot script told from the latter's perspective to a ripped-from-the-headlines, celebrity-scandal-of-the-week ensemble series.

Why did you start writing?
I started as a poet, actually, studying with Nelson Bentley and Tess Gallagher at the University of Washington. I gravitated toward writing plays, moved to New York, ran a theater company there and wrote, produced, and directed a lot of plays. I'm really drawn to the way people speak, specifically dialogue—that patois of contemporary speech.

How did you segue from the stage to the screen?
I was happily plugging along as a playwright in New York and I got a fellowship called the Chesterfield Film Writer's Fellowship. It was the first year of that and it was through Amblin Entertainment and Steven Spielberg. So, I came [to Los Angeles]. The arrangement is that you write screenplays and they have an option on them. If they don't exercise the option, then the material reverts to you. One of the scripts I wrote there ended up being Black Circle Boys, which I directed a couple years later. It went to Sundance, so that got me rolling.

How did you get involved in the creation of Dirt?
A woman who works for [Courteney Cox and David Arquette], Thea Mann, had an idea to do something about paparazzi. That's what they had when I came in. I was wanting to do something about cultural apocalypse or the cultural endgame that we're all splashing around in right now. I also wanted to do something about schizophrenia, because I thought that went with that world. So, I brought in those elements and created the character of Don Konkey, the schizophrenic paparazzo. Courteney's character did not exist at that time. It was really a re-telling of the Faust story with an actor and the paparazzo character. [Interviewer's note: This bargain between up-and-coming action star Holt McLaren (Josh Stewart) and editor Lucy Spiller formed much of the spine for season one's ongoing storyline, but would be minimized along with the show's serialized format in year two.]

In developing the pilot, the paparazzi aspect became one wing of the story and you created DirtNow Magazine and editor Lucy Spiller to fill out the show's world. How did that develop?
That really developed by a certain amount of arm-twisting on the part of the network. I was never all that interested in that part of it. I think the network, as networks do, wanted to create a franchisable show that generates its own story from week to week. They weren't looking for a part for Courteney. The part was not created for her. She signed up after we had a script. She decided she wanted to try it. It really was at the insistence—or the strong urging—of the network. My original pilot, which I still think is a better show, was really about Holt and Don.

How has your experience with FX differed from when you created Trinity for NBC in 1998?
I was an independent filmmaker who had never made a TV show when I made Trinity. I was the creator of the show, but I was not the executive producer and did not run the show. John Wells ran it. It was a different experience creatively, because there was a showrunner that was not me. I learned a huge amount watching John. He's brilliant. He started as a stage manager in theater. The stage managing is still there, but there's also the writer, and he's become this total mogul. It's pretty interesting to watch him do his thing.

[Dirt] was really different because I was now in the position of being the guy running the show, along with Joel Fields. It was a very different experience, and it was for cable —for a very edgy, interesting network. I would say the shape of television itself has changed a lot. Even since I made Trinity a few years back, it's really changed. It's more interesting, more competitive, fewer people fighting for tinier slices of very thinly sliced pie. All in all, I prefer working in cable, even with the financial challenges.

Despite the fact that they redirected your concept for the show, would you say FX gives the creator more freedom than NBC or other broadcast networks?
That's a good question. FX, as a network, is incredibly controlling. And yet, what they're pushing for is to push you to do the most challenging, authentic work that you can do. You're being pushed in a different direction than you're used to being pushed, but you're still being pushed, prodded, strong-armed, cajoled, and coaxed. I would say that, as television goes, it's toward a fairly noble end—which is to make really cool work.

Before his schizophrenia was pharmaceutically controlled, Don Konkey lent season one a really unique point of view. Was that perspective the reason for making the character schizophrenic?
Yeah. I was incredibly drawn to that world and had spent a lot of time going on rounds with a brilliant psychiatrist I know who, at that time, was completing some of his final doctoral work. I would tag along with him to the V.A. hospital and to UCLA. Even in a fairly whimsical show like Dirt, I was interested in portraying some of the realities and aspects of schizophrenia that don't get touched on in most media. I was obsessed with that character—maybe to a fault—but that's where my creative desire about the show really lay. I wanted to explore that character. I wanted to explore his interactions with the characters in the show. I wanted to make him complex and able to be politically incorrect and have fun with him and really kind of peel back a couple layers and see what's there. And we, of course, have the greatest actor you could ever have.

Did you find that your interest in Don gave you a handle on the characterization of Lucy, since she could be his window into reality?
Yeah. I think it ultimately did, although it wasn't originally my goal. It gave her a humanizing touchstone, for sure. He's the one person she couldn't be cold, manipulative, and bitchy with. Although, she did arguably manipulate him a good deal of the time.

Season two has been more episodic, eschewing the ongoing story arcs of year one. Was that a re-tooling note from FX?
Yes, that was not my choice. That was the choice of the network. The only choice I would have had was to walk away. I didn't feel like losing my show and the jobs of 130 people, so I stuck with it. I think we ended up making some lighter fare, but more fun.

What criticism did FX have of the season one ongoing arc?
They felt it was too dark. They wanted essentially to circle the wagons and have any ongoing story to be contained within the lives of people who work at the magazine…to take more of the playfully bitchy approach to the Hollywood characters. In the testing they did, people were not sympathetic to the actor characters we saw on a regular basis.

For the season two "ripped-from-the-headlines" style of story, how did you break an episode? Did you take something like the David Hasselhoff drunk-on-the-floor video and build a story around that?
The one thing I will say about working on Dirt is that the writer's room is as good as I can ever imagine a writer's room being. It worked very organically. In other words, you would start in a very broad, macrocosmic way, talking about what happens to our characters this season. We really begin with these big character journeys through the whole season, and then the individual writers of the episodes might say, "I really want to do something about Paris Hilton," or, "I want to do something about Ellen DeGeneres and the dog saga." That's just plot. It's hard to break, but it's all moveable and you can find different ways of moving it around and finding which thing it fits thematically.

One of the fun things that we did is rather than take the Paris Hilton story and go straight down the middle: I took, for the first episode, Britney [Spears] and Lindsay [Lohan] and did a mash-up. Basically, we'd do DJ-style mash-ups of ripped-from-the-headline stories. It's much more fun to say, "That's Hasselhoff and Alec Baldwin." It's also less filled with schadenfreude and cruelty and more like we're all just having fun.

What did viewers miss when season two was truncated by the writer's strike?
The thing that really is too bad—what the audience missed—was the way that Don's story would have unfolded in season two. He was approaching some sort of normalcy, but we had a great way of turning the whole thing on its head.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

Matthew Carnahan, Dirt courtesy FX Network

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