CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 6/06/08

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The Andromeda Strain's Robert Schenkkan

By peter clines

An award-winning playwright and screenwriter dips his foot in the Hollywood pool again for a retelling of the story that taught us all to fear strange infections.

Actor, playwright, and screenwriter Robert Schenkkan (The Quiet American) may be best remembered by the public at large for a brief recurring role in the early days of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Less known is a 1992 Pulitzer Prize and Tony nomination for his stage play The Kentucky Cycle. Such credentials pushed him to the front of the pack when Ridley and Tony Scott were considering screenwriters for a miniseries version of Michael Crichton's groundbreaking novel The Andromeda Strain.

When a particle-sampling satellite crashes on the outskirts of the tiny town of Piedmont, Arizona, a deadly virus is unleashed on the town. Causing painful, almost instantaneous death in most, suicidal madness in others, and mutating by the hour, the deadly disease—dubbed Andromeda—could spread worldwide in days unless Dr. Jeremy Stone (Benjamin Bratt) and his team of researchers at Project Wildfire can discover the common link between Piedmont's only two survivors. As time runs out, the scientists quickly find themselves dealing with internal conflicts over the direction of their research, the threat of a military cover-up…and with Andromeda itself, which may be dangerous in ways they never could have considered.

With the outbreak safely contained, Schenkkan spent some time on the phone with CS Weekly to discuss adaptations and miniseries, how much the world has changed in four decades, and some of the amazing things you can pull off in 30 minutes.

You started out as a pretty solid working actor in the '80s and '90s, yes? What prompted you to move into screenwriting?
[laughs] We are going back a ways. First, before I wrote for film I wrote for the stage, and I wrote for the stage almost from the beginning of my career as an actor. I'm a huge cinephile. I love movies. My father was a major figure in public television, I grew up in the world of public television. So it was not too dramatic a leap to begin to write for film and television.

Did you take any classes, read any books, or just have someone offering you pointers?
No, I'm a horrible example of unskilled labor. I never took any screenwriting class or playwriting class—plenty of theater classes, though. Never read a book about screenwriting. I've learned by watching great movies, reading good scripts, and working with really talented people. I'd like to think I have a pretty instinctive gift for structure, and I've always been pretty handy with dialogue.

People have been trying to get The Andromeda Strain rebooted for almost a decade now. How did your path and its finally cross?
I have been on this from the beginning of this project. There may well have been previous incarnations that I'm unaware of, but the original project with Tom Thayer, David Zucker, Ridley Scott's company, formerly set up at Sci-Fi and moved over to A&E—that I've been a part of since the beginning. I guess we've been working on that for four or five years.

Now, I'm sure a lot of writers think, "Wow, a miniseries, all the time I could want for character development and twists and a complex plot…" Was it freeing to have all that space, or a bit intimidating to have to fill it all?
I never felt that as intimidating. It was certainly challenging. One does have more freedom in that one has more time. One is also more constrained, structurally, because a miniseries format traditionally has to be broken for commercial breaks. So you have to build the script with that in mind, which is a very technical challenge. There's nothing organic about nine commercial breaks or whatever it is. That's just the way the business is today and you deal with it.

Was this heavily developed? Did you have free reign, or did you have a checklist of set pieces (either new ones or from the original work)?
No, you know, nobody actually ever gave me a wish list like that, or a demand list. It was a very collaborative group. These are all very bright, creative people, and my feeling as a writer, in that circumstance, is you do yourself a disservice if you don't take advantage of all the smart minds in the room. So certainly people were encouraged to offer whatever thoughts they might have, some of which found their way into the draft and some of which didn't. It was a genuine collaborative process about which I feel, by and large, pretty good.

Did writing something this size change your basic approach to writing? Did you forgo note cards for a thorough outline or anything like that?
Well, because there are thriller elements to this, you absolutely had to outline. The plot is very, very complex. You have multiple plot strands to keep track of. In this case you've got the science strand, the political strand, and to keep all those balls in the air and make sure that you don't reveal your hand too early, and that the audience has just enough information just when they need it—that's a very demanding technical challenge, and it does require a continuous and extensive outlining to make sure I'm telling the story as well as I can, keeping in mind all these variables.

Is that normal for you, using an outline?
You know, I'm used to it. There are very few instances anymore where someone—by that I mean a studio or a network or a producer—doesn't expect to see a treatment to begin with. In this instance I relied very heavily on it and I felt it was truly necessary. It was more detailed, perhaps, than I am wont to do, but that was solely the demands of the material. I think the key thing is to respect what the material needs, not try to impose some arbitrary aesthetic on it.

Did you see this as a new adaptation of the book or a remake of the 1971 film?
A new adaptation of the novel. I did see the film as a child—probably as a teenager—and the only thing I truly remember from it is that wonderful scene where the scientists are investigating Piedmont and they cut the wrist of the dead man and his blood falls out like dust. I don't really remember anything else about the movie, and I quite deliberately did not go back and look at it. I didn't want to even accidentally borrow from it. The novel was published in 1969, so we're now almost 40 years later. The world has changed enormously in that time, and I thought it was important to bring all of that to bear on this work. I should say at the onset, I do a fair amount of adaptation, and my feeling about it is that you want to approach the original work with respect, and given the iconic nature of Michael Crichton's book, a certain humility. I think this book really did establish the science-techno-thriller genre. At the same time, you can't allow that to hobble your own imagination. I think what's important is that you respect the spirit of the work but permit yourself to do what you need to do to tell this story newly and for audiences who may have no prior knowledge of either the book or the movie.

You mentioned how long it's been since Crichton wrote the original—was there anything that just flat-out didn't work anymore? Either because audiences or the world has changed?
Well, for example, the world of 2008 looks very, very different than 1969. By that I mean the world of science, the military world, the government. The presence of women, of minorities, of homosexuals. The world looks different, and I think you have a responsibility to reflect the world you live in. Laurie Garrett, in her wonderful book The Coming Plague, talks about how we hit this time period in the '70s, from a scientific point of view, where we felt like we were really going to solve all the medical problems there were. It had been 40 years since the great influenza pandemic and we seemed to have that under control.

Well, wow, what a difference 40 years makes. Look at HIV/AIDS worldwide now, and the numbers of dead and infected. And not just HIV. There's this emergence of a whole host of new and extremely lethal plagues—Marburg, Ebola. We've seen the use of infectious material as a weapon of war—by Sadaam Hussein against the Kurds—and as a weapon of terror within our own country—the anthrax in the mail, which still to this day has never been solved. That's very different. Look at our government. We now have this huge organization called "Homeland Security" that didn't exist 10 years ago. Look how different everyday life is, just the absolute proliferation and extension of the internet into every aspect of our lives. The use of computers. I think what sums up that is our keen and new appreciation of how the micro affects the macro, how everything is connected and everything affects everything. We are beginning to see that you can't just arbitrarily change one little thing and not expect that to have huge ramifications down the line. Then you look at new advances in scientific equipment or theories, whether its pilotless drones in the military or the advances in molecular biology or nanotechnology or quantum physics. The world is a very, very different place. It's very exciting in many ways and also very terrifying. I thought this was an ideal opportunity to bring all that to bear. That's what we tried to do, hopefully in a way that feels legitimate.

In the original film and the original story, a lot of questions are never answered about the Andromeda virus. What made you decide to go back and fill in a lot of those gaps, and expand so much about the nature of it?
I just thought there was some really exciting possibilities there. Again, part of this is driven in the changes of epidemiology and our understanding of microbes and how they work and how epidemics function. I also felt that we had the opportunity here to explore some very, very interesting ideas, ideas that were rich with human possibility and dramatic conflict, and everyone was on board for that. We didn't want anything that felt dry or academic. We wanted something that had the kind of urgency and immediacy that, sadly, we all feel every day when we pick up the newspaper.

You also added in a lot more backstory to all of the characters before they're pulled in for the Wildfire project, yes?
Yes. In the novel it's fairly dry. You have Dr. Stone sitting in his laboratory and mulling over the individuals on his team. It's dry and we don't really learn much about them. I think given the time that we had, we had the opportunity to make these individuals really reflective of the new world around us and interesting in their own right. Not just auxiliaries to the plot, but really complicated, interesting people. Not everybody has the same agenda, not everybody has the same philosophy, not everybody practices the same way. What's wonderful about human beings is how in a crisis we do have the potential to all work together to solve a common threat. If there's anything that can save us in the end, I think it'll be that.

As it was, this version of The Andromeda Strain isn't that much longer than the original, is it? Your script is only about 40 minutes longer, yes?
Well, that's 40 minutes. Thirty-five minutes is a lifetime in television [laughs]. You can do Normandy in 30 minutes.

Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.

The Andromeda Strain (2008) courtesy Universal Home Entertainment

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