CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 10/17/08

Following a Clear Vision:
Eli Stone's Marc Guggenheim

By peter clines

As Eli Stone heads into its second year, one of the creators of the quirky law show talks about the process of getting a modern-day prophet to the masses.

Writer-producers Greg Berlanti (Brothers & Sisters) and Marc Guggenheim (The Practice) were both well established in television when a few ideas combined to form their latest brainchild, Eli Stone. Following the hit show Lost when it premiered in February, Eli built up a loyal fan base with its quirky characters, offbeat humor, and upbeat message of faith.

On the show, Eli (Johnny Lee Miller) is a promising, fast-tracked legal shark who's engaged to the boss's daughter (Natasha Henstridge) at WPK, San Francisco's most powerful law firm. Then he starts having vivid hallucinations about dragons, earthquakes, and elaborate song-and-dance numbers featuring pop star George Michael—hallucinations that guide him to morally just cases over the big-client ones he's used to. Even more disturbing, Eli discovers these visions may be the side-effect of a potentially fatal aneurism nestled deep in his brain. Now he's struggling to save his relationships and his career from his unexplainable behavior, and also trying to decide if he's just suffering from severe brain damage…or if he's a modern-day prophet.

Amidst a hectic morning of unexpected (and unwanted) surprises, Guggenheim found some time to speak with CS Weekly about comic book heroes, British pop stars, and the different ways we see God on television.

Eli Stone premiered during the Writers Guild strike. Considering how tough it is for a new show to stick around, do you think being on then helped you?
No, actually. I'm far enough on the other side of it that I can say it did not help. The conventional wisdom going into the strike was any new show that premieres during the strike will have an advantage because people will be desperate to watch television and they'll watch whatever's new. I think the ratings could bear me out on the theory that actually the exact opposite occurred. People were like "Oh, nothing new's on—I'm just not going to watch TV." Shows like us, shows like Terminator, that premiered during the strike, I think we didn't have access to as big an audience as we would've liked.

What was the original inspiration you and Greg Berlanti had that eventually became Eli Stone?
It started off with a few different ideas Greg had been playing around with in his head. He was playing around with doing something about a modern-day prophet, he and I were talking about doing a law show, and he was also playing around with this guy who sees visions. All three of those elements coalesced and became Eli. The more we talked about it, the more excited I got about it. The script itself was written on spec, and it just came into the world fully fleshed out.

Whenever Greg and I were running into trouble breaking the pilot, we would always try to return to this notion of Eli as superhero. Superman and Spider-Man were the two archetypes we would discuss the most. Those are both heroes [whose] personal lives have to take a back seat to their super-heroing, and that's very much the cross that Eli has to bear. This is something we're playing around with a lot in the second season. He has to make a lot of sacrifices in his personal life in order to fulfill his calling as a prophet. Similarly, Spider-Man is always getting yelled at by his boss, making his aunt worry, back when he was married it was always causing strife in his marriage. So, this notion of greater responsibility versus personal needs is something at the core of what Eli is going through.

One thing that screenwriting books and gurus stress again and again is not to use specific music or songs in your scripts. You guys base entire episodes around specific songs. How do you manage that?
Every time we do this, it's a high-wire act. We pick the song first, and in almost every case the plot really hinges on the exact title of that song or the exact lyrics. We did Creedence Clearwater Revival, we did a couple of George Michael songs, we did Nina Simone, a whole host of different artists. It's a tricky thing, and like most things, it's a combination of skill and luck. On the skill side, I've got a great music supervisor in Joe Guthrie. The other thing that really helps us, we always send them copies of the episodes and the script their song will be used in. I think the quality of the show and the respectfulness with which we approach the material helps us a great deal. You talk about CCR or the Beatles, and they're very concerned with how their music is portrayed and what it's portrayed in connection with. It's a combination. I've got great music people, I've got a little luck on my side, and I've got a quality show. It is a high-wire act, but it's one that's so far, so good. I'm always knocking on wood.

Did you ever end up with a false start? Where you worked everything around one song and couldn't get it?
Yeah, with the pilot actually. We wrote the pilot for George Michael and "Faith." We wrote it thinking, "Well, we're never going to get George Michael, but we'll write it with him in it and then we'll just swap him out later." We talked to a couple of his agents who said he wouldn't be interested in it and they weren't going to take it to him. It was kind of what we'd expected, so then we went through the process of trying to replace him and discovered it was a lot harder than we thought, given the way the episode is structured. Then, luckily, we made contact with another one of his agents, and he said, "Actually, I think he would love this." That was the closest we came to a near disaster, because we had put all our chips on the George Michael possibility, and for a long time it looked like it wasn't going to happen.

Now, George Michael leads nicely into…God. The idea of someone talking to God comes with a lot of luggage. Go too humorous and you annoy people. Go too serious and you annoy people. What do you use as a yardstick for what works?
That's a really good question. The yardstick that we use is that show should never be about religion, which I think is a bit of a lightning rod for controversy. That word, for whatever reason, stirs a lot of pots. What Greg and I really wanted to do was a show that dealt with spirituality, which I think is a much bigger tent. I always like to say the show is every bit as much for atheists as it is for the most faithful. I believe even atheists are spiritual. If you ask yourself, "What's the point of all this? Is there a God?" even if you answer the question no, the fact that you're thinking about is a spiritual inquiry. It's not like we have a yardstick and we go, "That's too religious. That's not religious enough." We just traffic in the areas of spirituality, and as long as we do that, I think we're striking the right balance.

Having visions and talking to God brings to mind Joan of Arcadia and the short-lived Wonderfalls. Were you a fan of either show?
Yeah, we liked both shows. The difference for us, particularly with Joan of Arcadia, that's very much a religious show versus a spiritual show. The God in Joan is far more anthropomorphized and very Judeo-Christian, and that's all well and good. I don't mean that as a criticism, merely an observation and a means of drawing a distinction between the God on Joan and the God on Eli. Very rarely do we use the word "God" on the show, and usually when we do, it's done with a little bit of a wink, when people are doubting Eli. When Eli speaks about it, he talks about things that are divine, he talks about a higher calling and a higher power.

What's the basic process for an Eli Stone script?
The hardest thing about Eli as a show is every episode you feel like you're reinventing the wheel. It's not a formulaic show; it's not a show that has a set pattern. So every episode you're starting from square one, and as a result I think the process of writing every episode is a little different.

We usually spend two days in the writers' room. One thing we start off with is, okay, where is Eli at this week? What's he reacting to from the previous week? Where's he going? What's the lesson he has to learn this week? From that, we start talking about the stuff that's in the news and in our heads. As we talk about those cases, it's always with an eye towards how they relate back to what Eli is going through. Now, that itself is informed by a couple of weeks' worth of discussion we have at the beginning of every season where we say, "Here's a laundry list of the things we'd like to see happen to Eli. Here's a list of the things we'd like to see happen to Nate." We go through that with all the characters, and we have that list in the back of our heads as we're talking. Everything is grist for the mill, and all that comes into play those first few days. At the conclusion, we've made a decision as far as what the A story is, the B story, sometimes there's a C story. Then it's a matter of breaking out each storyline. We do that separately. We figure out the A story all by itself, the B story, and then we do what we call "smooshing." We integrate all the storylines and flesh it out and go through the process of, "Here's the five different ways into this scene. Here's the five legal arguments Eli can make in this scene." Out of that refinement process comes an outline, which gets shared with the network and the studio. And then we send the writers off to write a script.

I know a lot of people wonder about courtroom shows, like medical shows—do you have legal advisors in your writing room, or do you and your writers have a lot of esoteric legal knowledge of your own?
A little bit of both. I'm an attorney, and we have two attorneys on the writing staff. We also have a legal advisor who comes in every week and helps us solve whatever problems we're dealing with that particular week. Then there's things like the internet and talking to experts. I'm a very big believer that in a TV show your arguments should be acceptable. I always tell the writers, "Don't worry about the law. I'll worry about the law when I do my pass." This show is not Law & Order, where it's very much about the procedure. This show is about the emotion, the heart, and the characters. I never want the legal cart to drag that particular horse, so it's really just a matter of always coming up with the best story, and then I try to make sure it's coming from as realistic a place as we can manage.

Your first season was about Eli and the people around him growing to accept the nature of his visions. Considering the earthquake that proved Eli's accuracy, how much have you had to change your approach to the show for this upcoming season?
A lot. The thing is, the first season ended exactly where Greg and I had planned way back when we were trying to get the pilot picked up as a series. We always said the first season would end with Eli making the decision to have the aneurism taken out and ending with the surgery. Is Eli a prophet or is he a guy with an aneurism? We always knew that question would have to get an answer at some point. Neither Greg nor I are of the pool of "Let's drag this question out as long as we can." The second season, then, really becomes about Eli embracing his calling—and dealing with all the fallout from that decision.

Has second season been easier than the first so far?
I think the second season of any show is easier than the first season. It's hard to imagine something more difficult than the first season of a show. [chuckles]

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.


Eli Stone courtesy Touchstone/Disney Home Entertainment

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