Creating Legends
A producer for the first four seasons of the show and writer of season six’s To Helicon and Back and Many Happy Returns, Liz Friedman’s expert knowledge of Xena is unquestionable. Joe Nazzaro catches up with the now freelance writer for our special finale issue to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the series’ development and conclusion.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 21
It wasn’t an easy decision to make. After spending half a decade working her way up the ladder to become a producer on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, Liz Friedman made a surprising career choice, putting production aside in order to become a full time scriptwriter.
“It’s a little like when people go to the top of a building and leap off,” explains Friedman, who with writing partner Vanessa Place, recently handed in the script for Many Happy Returns, her second for Xena’s sixth season. “At a certain point, I made a decision that it’s what I wanted to do, and talked to Rob Tapert about it, and he gave us an opportunity to join the staff of Hercules for the last season.
“At one point I thought, ‘I love producing, but what I really love most about it is working with writers and working the stories. Maybe eventually I should stop hiding and put my own butt on the line instead of constantly critiquing other people’s work!’ So that’s what I did.”
As Friedman explains, there just wasn’t enough time in the day to both write and produce. “One of them would have suffered,” she admits, “and that’s not really fair to anyone. So in a way it’s a conflict of interests. Producing is absolutely a full time job, and so is writing. And the more I’ve gotten into writing, the more I think it doesn’t go that well with many other things. Some of it is down to personality; I’m not a great multi tasker. I like to concentrate on one thing at a time.”
Unfortunately, half a decade’s worth of producing experience doesn’t count for much in the highly competitive freelance writing market. “At this point, my writing partner and I have actually been working pretty much non-stop since April 1999, so we’ve had a really good run of it. But people outside Hercules and Xena don’t take the shows that seriously. Once you get into network stuff, it’s a different ball game. But we’ve got an agent and there’s a lot of hustling involved.”
Luckily, however, Friedman and Place have been involved in a number of projects other than Xena and Hercules in recent years. “We did an episode of Deadline, and an episode of a Fox Family show called The Fearing Mind,” she says. “We just finished up Many Happy Returns; we did a Tarzan episode for Disney, and we’ve had a couple of pilots. So we’ve stayed pretty busy.”
Going back to her roots with the Renaissance family, Friedman became involved with the company long before the first Hercules TV Movies began shooting in New Zealand. “I actually started as [executive producer] Sam Raimi’s assistant,” she reveals. “That was my first job there, and then I worked with [former producer] David Eick as a development assistant. I was in all the story meetings and whatnot, working with David and Rob, but it wasn’t until the second season of Hercules and the first season of Xena that I got directly involved. David had to go off to deal with [Renaissance’s US-based science fiction/horror series] American Gothic, so I took over on Hercules and Xena.”
According to Friedman, one of the most difficult things about the show was finding writers who could capture the voice of Hercules and the other characters given that the show combined contemporary language and expressions with mythical legend. “The toughest thing was getting people that could write it,” she recalls. “Head writer John Schulian came up with a particular dead-ahead, Butch and Sundance, masculine plain-spokenness to Hercules that also had a certain amount of lightness in it. John said the model for the tone of Hercules, at least in the characters’ voices, was Butch and Sundance. And that’s still the trick with Xena - trying to figure out how to do that and getting people to figure out what you want to do.”
When the decision was made to create a spin-off series based on Xena, who had featured in a first season three-episode arc of Hercules, Friedman was delighted. “It was double duty, but it was also more money, and I’m no fool!” she laughs. “Everything about doing Xena was cool! I was doing Wonder Woman! It was so funny, because New Zealand actors in general are the most down to earth people, but I was on set when we were filming As Darkness Falls and Lucy and I had been sitting on apple crates next to each other. She was making me tell her who I’d met who was famous, and was all excited that I’d met Sean Cassidy!
“And suddenly,” Friedman continues, “I went from being an assistant to somebody who had some form of responsibility over two shows. One of the shows couldn’t have been more of a pipe dream for me, and the star was somebody who I thought was a great fun person to be around, so it didn’t get any cooler than that.”
Although the Xena of season one was very different from the series that’s about to end, it still managed to get off to a strong start. “The writing staff on the show was much more solid from the beginning,” says Friedman, comparing it to Hercules’ beginnings. “If you look at that first episode of Xena, Gabrielle is so different than she is now, and I think the richness of the relationship and the interwovenness of those characters now is a huge dynamic of the show. Having written pilots myself, I know that there’s so much stuff you have to cover and set up. These characters have just met, but if you compare the scenes between Xena and Gabrielle in that pilot to the campfire scene in Callisto, there’s quite a difference there.”
As a producer on both Hercules and Xena, Friedman found herself with two very different television children to deal with simultaneously. “I honestly didn’t find that it was difficult to treat them the same, because for me, to some extent, work is work. I’m pretty passionate about anything that I know is my responsibility to deliver, so while I may have had an instant thing with Xena, it was never, ‘Oh, it’s so much more important to me than Hercules,’ because my job was not to have Xena be more important to me. I think it’s very hard sometimes for your two kids to believe that you love them both equally.”
Still, it would be impossible for the former producer not to admit a fleeting attachment to a well-known Warrior Princess. “When we started on Hercules, at least with the movies, I was an assistant, so I wasn’t really in a position to make creative decisions,” she admits. “But certainly, from the beginning on Xena, I was much more in a position of responsibility and some degree of control. I admit, I have a bias; I like to see girls kicking ass! Hercules was a great show, and I think that Kevin [Sorbo] was terrific, but Xena was a phenomenon.”
No discussion about Xena: Warrior Princess would be complete without mentioning a certain subtext, which added a whole different level to the series. Friedman takes some personal responsibility for the development of the subtext. “When we did the main titles of Xena there is a shot of her kissing Draco, and it was shot from behind so that he had a pony tail,” she recalls. “Someone at the studio said, ‘People are going to think she’s kissing a woman!’, and I basically said, ‘Listen, lesbians are invisible. Trust me, I know this!’ How many times have I gone to the grocery store with my girlfriend and people say, ‘Are you two sisters?’ I’m white and my girlfriend is not, but they’re so desperate to explain that closeness. So I thought, ‘No one is ever going to think that Xena is gay, or that that’s a shot of her kissing a woman, or her and Gabrielle!’
“And then, I can’t remember exactly when it was, but it started being on the Internet and I was totally flabbergasted! In Altared States we had a joke where you hear moaning and groaning, and Xena and Gabrielle are in the lake, but then it turns out that they’re fishing! And it basically went from there.
“The only thing that was important to me when I was involved with the show was to not jump in with both feet and make a statement about it. I think pre-Will and Grace and Ellen, that was sort of the way television tended to deal with gay relationships. You’d make the joke or you’d play the real intimacy between two women, and then say, ‘But they’re straight, okay? Don’t worry, because they’ve got boyfriends.’ Or they’d then talk about their boyfriends. To me it was much more subversive, and also something that we could actually achieve just by not having them ever say one way or the other.”
Friedman first turned her attention to writing during the fourth season of Xena, when she collaborated with former writer/producer Chris Manheim on the story for A Family Affair. “That was one where I came up with the idea and worked out a rough preliminary story, and then Chris and I sat down and hashed out the beat sheet together. She went away and did a pass, and then I gave her some comments and it went back and forth.
“At the time, I was still a full time executive at Renaissance and a producer on at least two shows - I think Young Hercules was going on then too - so I simply didn’t have the five hours a day to sit down and generate a beat sheet. I also wasn’t ready, but I now realise that with everything else I had to do, it’s no wonder I finally had to do all or nothing.”
Friedman teamed up with Vanessa Place to become a full-time writer on the abbreviated finale season of Hercules. The pair’s first Xena script was for the earlier season six instalment To Helicon and Back, a very dark episode in which the Amazons are hunted down by a vengeful god. “We wanted to do something with the feel of a World War II movie,” Friedman recalls, “but it was actually an idea of Rob Tapert’s in a general conceptual way and then we shaped it from there.
“Rob brought up the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan and asked how we could do that. He said, ‘I want to do something where Xena leads a raid up a beach and they kind of get stuck there,’ and then he had another idea for a really sympathetic bad guy, so we put those two together. Hopefully, when all is said and done, it’s a good solid kick-ass combat piece that also lets us get in the midst of this battle.”
To Helicon and Back should have been the duo’s final contribution to Xena, but when Melissa Good’s script for Xena’s planned third musical unexpectedly fell through, Friedman and Place were asked to step in at the last minute. “Many Happy Returns had a shockingly fast turnaround,” Friedman admits. “Nonetheless, I think the script came out well.
“The episode was based on several notions,” she explains. “Rob had the idea of a girl who was so devout that she wanted to be sacrificed. At first, we were thinking of it as a serious, dramatic story, and then it became more of a road story. And everyone involved, including us, was interested in doing a comedy. I really enjoyed doing the running joke of Xena and Gabrielle playing practical jokes on each other. Also, there’s a scene revealing a particular neurosis of Gabby’s which makes me chuckle!”
It’s interesting to note, now that Xena is coming to a close, that Friedman was not only involved with both Herc and Xena from the beginning, but also right at the end. “With Hercules, it was a case of making the decision as to how to end it, which felt pretty important because I’d been so involved in the show. Also, because it was our first real job as writers, it was a big deal.
“In terms of doing something close to the end of Xena, it was nice to have some part in terms of saying, ‘Okay, where are we going to leave all these people?’ Our episodes don’t really play a key role in that, we were still saying things like, ‘Well, do you want to set this up as you’re getting close to the end?’ So I liked having the chance to have some involvement in that. I’m really proud of Xena. It’s a huge part of what I’ve done in my professional life, so to have even a small part close to the end is an honour.”
Looking back at her time on both series, does the producer-turned-writer have any particular favourite episodes? “I love Callisto,” she responds immediately. “That may still be my favourite Xena episode ever! On Hercules I thought Faith was a really good episode, and I still have a bizarre personal fondness for Beanstalks and Bad Eggs because I looped the little monster that imprints on Autolycus. So that’s my voice, but that’s just ego indulgence!
“I really liked The End of the Beginning, with the idea of Hercules going back; that was my idea, and it came from, of all horrifying things, The Bionic Woman! I said to Rob, ‘Do you remember that great emotional dynamic on The Bionic Woman, where Jamie and Steve used to be engaged, but after her accident she couldn’t remember? He was always showing up at the bedside, and she was like, ‘Oh, have we met?’ and you play him blinking back the tears.’ I always thought that was so tragic, so it was basically my idea to rip off another cheesy television show!”
Friedman laughs at her own candour about these particular shows. “For every episode I like, I’m going to tell you that I was responsible for them. So it’s going to become clear how ego-driven this whole exercise is!
“I really liked the first Hercules episode featuring Xena, Warrior Princess,” she continues. “I thought that was terrific. And I loved the ballroom dancing episode, And Fancy Free.
One can’t help wondering if this trip down memory lane has brought back any desire in Friedman to produce, but the answer is a firm no. “I think it’s pretty much out of my system until I have my own show to produce,” she responds. “The way I feel is, having flung myself off this building. I don’t think I should try and stop halfway down!”
Ironically, now that Friedman is no longer a producer on Xena, she’s finally able to watch the show and enjoy it as a viewer. “I’ve watched it a lot more recently, and I think the episodes are really good,” she enthuses. “It’s fun being able to watch them and not having seen them five times before. It’s also fun to go back to the level of, ‘Oh, this is a good show!’ In my opinion, it’s a lot better than any of the other syndicated stuff around.”
Summing up her time on both Hercules and Xena, Liz Friedman considers her tenure a tremendous learning experience. “Other than teaching me pretty much everything I know about television, which is not a bad deal at all, I would say that as a producer and a writer the shows have given me an unbelievable education. Being involved in them and seeing what is going to work and what just doesn’t work at all, or what you think won’t play and plays tremendously, has been invaluable. You find out what it’s reasonable to expect; what you can hand to a reasonably good actor and they can make terrific versus what just isn’t giving anyone enough to work with; the ingredients that create a great hero; what you really care about at the heart of any story…
“All that stuff is totally crucial to working in this business as a storyteller, whether it’s from a writing standpoint or producing. I got that from working on Hercules and Xena. They’re excellent shows.”
SIDEBAR: Yes Virginia, There Is A Liz Friedman
One of the more bizarre footnotes in Friedman’s career will always be the Hercules episodes Yes, Virginia, There is a Hercules, and For Those of You Just Joining Us…, in which the cast play real-life members of the show’s production team.
According to Friedman, “As soon as they said Hudson Leick would be playing me, I said, ‘That’s fine!’ As I always say to everybody, you’d never know I photographed that well! I wasn’t wild that they got Hudson to have the fidgets, which I suppose I also have but don’t like to be reminded of!
“Truthfully, those episodes were entirely out of the panic of necessity,” Friedman admits. “The first one was because of Kevin’s stroke. We were in the middle of I can’t remember how many Hercules-free episodes; it’s too horrible to think about now! Every time we thought we were going to get him back, it didn’t work out that way. We kept having to come up with creative ways to not have Kevin in an episode, or to have him in in a way that you could film it in a day or two somewhere down the line. So Yes, Virginia, There is a Hercules came out of that panic.
“Actually, it was an idea that Rob had for Xena,” she recalls, “and I said, ‘Can we twist it and do a Hercules episode where we’re all working for Hercules?’ That’s where we started, and then Bob [Orci] and Alex [Kurtzman] came up with the twist of the earthquake and the panic, because they said, ‘It’s how we’re starting to feel every day now!’
“I remember when we were sitting down to talk about the show, and I said, ‘Look, my one concern is how do we do something like this and still say that there is a Hercules? I hate the idea that we’re going to say that this thing that we invest all our time in and the audience invests their time in is a fake.’
“So they came up with the great twist that Kevin Sorbo actually is Hercules, which is probably my favourite thing in that first episode.”