Fight For Your Writes
As head of the writing team on Xena: Warrior Princess, R.J. Stewart oversees the creation of all the scripts for the series. While finding out how it's all done, David Bailey narrowly avoids asking, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 06
Of course, we all know Xena: Warrior Princess is a show quite unlike any other. Even viewing it as part of a genre that contains such diverse shows as Star Trek and Buffy, there's still a lot that makes it stand out from the crowd.
R.J. Stewart, having worked on a number of US television shows, knows the differences better than most. “I think they are all positive differences. There is so much we can do on Xena: we can do melodrama, we can do soap opera, we can do comedy... Of course, at the core of it all is adventure and jeopardy. And the greatest thing is that we can do fantasy and mythology, which really liberates you. I think all the writers who work on Xena always say that it's the most fun show they've worked on, because we're so free to explore just about anything.”
That exploration happens during the writing staff meetings, when Executive Producer Rob Tapert joins the team to dream up the stories for the next crop of episodes. “Mostly, Rob and I bring the ideas,” Stewart says. “That isn’t to say that [another writer] might not occasionally come up with something, but I’d say that 90 per cent of the episodes are generated by Rob and I.” These meetings are an open forum for discussion, although Stewart admits, “Rob and I are definitely the dominant characters. But we’re really open to anybody who’s got good ideas.
“You hear these nightmare stories about other shows where writers never get to see the executive producer. Au contraire here: we think, ‘We’ve got the writers in the room, let’s see what they’ve got to say’. There are risks of course: bad ideas; some of the younger writers may get a little nervous about taking chances... But that’s the way I like to run the staff - to encourage everyone to contribute as much as possible.
“And, you know, it’s easier on me,” Slewart says. “There are times when I just fade away and let people take over, and I’ll listen carefully.”
Once the stories for the episodes are devised, the script-writing chores are doled out to the writers present. “The writer then has to go off and do the hard work,” Stewart explains. “You can give a bad writer the greatest idea in the world and it will suck, and you can give a terrific writer a pretty mediocre idea and they can make it into something special. Rob and I get to think up the ideas because we’re the big dudes, but it’s really the writers that make it work.”
It’s a given, surely, that once the first draft of a script is completed, Stewart - as chief writer - makes his comments and the script is duly re-written. As in so many other ways, Xenn’s production company Renaissance Pictures does things a little differently... “That’s something very unusual about Renaissance,” says Stewart. “We have a huge [preparation time on each episode], so we will send the first draft to production, and once it’s with production it’s out there. So we do a pretty major distribution of the first draft, which shocks the hell out of writers the first time. They say, ‘What, people are going to read this?’ But that’s the way we do it, because we want to give production as much time as possible for prep.
“I was kind of shocked when I first got here and realised that’s what Renaissance did,” Stewart reveals, “but now I’m totally addicted to that way of doing it. On any other show - even without being connected with Renaissance - I would try to do it that way. There is of course the danger that if the wrong people see it, they’ll panic because it might not be in good shape. So you've got to have some limit to who sees it.” Stewart goes on to explain that the studio execs at Universal and Studios USA only see the final shooting draft of the script - the one which echoes most closely what will be seen on screen.
It’s Stewart's job to decide just who gets to write these scripts in the first place, and the Xena staffers don’t write them all. Freelance screenwriters, who take no part in the meetings, write a number of episodes every season. “This season's been a little different, because we’ve had some musical chairs going on,” Stewart explains of season five. “On most seasons, I’d say the staff usually do about 14 episodes, and the other eight are by freelancers. Those other eight scripts, though, are always rewritten by the staff; I do most of the rewrites, but Steve Sears would certainly step in at a crucial time to do a rewrite if I was over-booked. Some of the rewrites are major, others are just little touch-ups.”
At this point, Stewart digresses to discuss a new rule for writers in the US which he’s not too keen on. “There’s a new Writers' Guild [essentially a trade union for writers] rule that we have to put our names on the scripts as the rewriters when we send them out. But I’m not too comfortable with it, actually. That way the staff writer gets a credit for a lot in the script when it’s sometimes not justified.
“I’ve always liked to remain anonymous,” Stewart asserts. “I know what my contribution is, and the people I work for and who pay me know what it is, but the whole world doesn’t have to know. But this is a new ruling; I guess they got stung on some arbitration or something.”
It is, of course, part of Stewart’s job to do such rewrites, and he feels slightly uneasy about claiming credit for work which really isn’t his own. “Every draft that I have any part in, I have to put my name on, even if it is just changing scene locations,” he clarifies. “In other words, a script that I do a complete rewrite on, altering everything, would have at the bottom, ‘Current Revisions by R. J. Stewart’. And a script that I just change a couple of pages on would have at the bottom, ‘Current Revisions by R. J. Stewart'. Of course, if you went back to the previous script, you could see what my contribution was and evaluate it that way, but nobody’s going to do that.
“I thought the mystery of it was better,” he says, “and that it was better for the freelancer too. Now, the freelancer comes in and does the best job he can, then I just do a little polish on it and my name’s on the script. But I'm sure it’s done for good legal reasons. If I totally rewrite a freelancer’s script, I will never [try to take any of] their credit. I feel real strongly that it’s my job to hire the right people. If I hire the wrong people, then I have to rewrite them and so be it - I'm paid well to do that. I don’t want to take their credit away from them.”
As far as hiring freelancers goes, does the buck stop at Stewart? “Mostly,” he says, “although I’m very open to input and suggestions. I don’t have a lot of time to read, so executives at Renaissance will send me writers who they like. I’d say that I get a lot of suggestions from other people about who to hire, but it’s pretty much up to me. Let me put it this way: under no circumstances will there ever be a writer hired on this show who I don't want to hire.”
Many US television shows use freelance writers, and it’s normal for these shows to have what is known as a writers’ bible. This document outlines what the show is about, what characters are in it, and what kind of stories they tell. Once again, Renaissance does things a little differently. “I don’t like writers' bibles,” Stewart states.
“You know, we’re all so influenced by our early jobs,” he continues. “I was on Remington Steele and [producer] Michael Gleeson would not show us the writers’ bible. He said there was a writers’ bible but he would never show it to us. Finally, at the end of the first season, he showed it to us and I realised why we’d never seen it before - because virtually everything that was in it he had written when the show first started, and it had evolved right away. It would be a constant struggle to update it.”
But that's not all. “There’s another thing that’s changed in the last few years,” Stewart says, “and that’s the internet. If a writer wants to review what we’ve done, there are probably hundreds of sites where you can go and read a synopsis of different stories, and I think there are something like seven books that break down the seasons. So if it’s about catching up with what we’ve done, there's so much information out there that [to create a writers’ bible] would be, to me, just book-keeping.
“So the only use of a bible would be to establish rules and guidelines, and like I said earlier, we kind of thrive on being as free as possible here. It’s not in my nature to do a bible.”
With many television shows of this ilk, it's usual to be led on a mystery tour. You might know that your characters are facing a threat, but you won’t know what - or who - that threat is. This ‘whodunnit’ angle has served many shows very well, but in Xena you invariably find out who the villain is very early in the episode. “Well, Xena always knows,” Stewart specifies. “It’s hard to do a closed mystery with someone as smart as Xena.”
Stewart proceeds with a deft 'compare and contrast’ discourse: “In The Rockford Files, the character of Rockford is in the dark for most of the show, as is Magnum (of Magnum P.l. fame), as is any detective. Even in Murder, She Wrote, [Angela Lansbury's character] is in the dark for most of the show. But when you’re dealing with a superhero, they really aren’t in the dark, ever. If you look at Superman or Batman, the adventure is frequently presented in the first frame of the comic book. So it’s a matter of stopping the evil, and making that as interesting as you can as you go along.
“So there are all kinds of neat story twists that can make it more complex,” Stewart says. “Of course, Xena’s particular character flaws can make it more rich and complex, but when you're dealing with a great, great hero, you don't want to see her interviewing people.
“That is one of the reasons we have the pinch [where Xena blocks the air supply of a bad guy in order to extract information from him]. We can skip all those investigation scenes: she just puts the pinch on somebody and says, ‘Tell me what it is!’”
That could be seen as making the writer's job more difficult. Usually, a writer can construct his story with the mystery in mind: he knows the architect and the architecture of the deviousness, but withholds it from both the hero (and sometimes the audience) until its revelation can be used to best effect. Wouldn’t that be easier? “That is the temptation,” Stewart agrees, “but we just can’t do it. We can’t have the audience ahead of Xena. We can’t have the bad guys ahead of Xena. I think with Xena, we’re even more careful because the show was a pioneer in many ways.
“She was, I’d say, the first female superhero that had a broad following,” Stewart continues. “There were certainly others - Charlie's Angels, Wonder Woman - but with this one, we have such a large following over so many different levels - not only kids, but grown-ups too. And we needed to combine Xena’s dark past with a very believable superhero, and so we really did not want her in any way to seem vulnerable or less than other superheroes. We were aware this was new territory we were stepping into.”
Part of that new territory is the very particular modern feel of Xena. Two things which, at first, seem deceptively similar have been said about this aspect of the show: Xena: Warrior Princess is a modern take on the ancient world; and Xena: Warrior Princess is the ancient world’s take on modern themes. Which would Stewart say is more true? He thinks for a moment, then replies, “Well, if this is truly a multiple choice, and I flunk the test if I don’t pick one, I would go with the first. I think both of them have some truth. There’s a part of the mythos that we love to get into here, which is that we're working off the Xena Scrolls and this is the true history. And if it sounds simply like a writers’ device, it’s actually more than that.”
Stewart explains that it’s simply a matter of viewpoint. “When we're sitting in a room and we’re inventing an episode of Xena,” he says, “we’re thinking as if this was the real history of
Xena and Gabrielle as discovered on the Xena Scrolls. So we do, of course, have modern sensibilities brought into it, but that’s because we're modern people, and we also have to appeal to a modern audience. But we don’t really consciously say, ‘OK, let's do the modern twist on the Oedipus story or the Sisyphus story’. We act as if this is the way it really happened. That’s the fun of doing the show. Even with the crazy stuff we do with Julius Caesar and all that, we behave as if this is how it really happened.”
Part of the modern tone is Xena’s dialogue. Out goes the usual sword-and-sorcery ‘Good morrow, sir, well met’, and in comes Valley babe Aphrodite and the used car salesman-esque Salmoneus. How easy is it to judge whether the modernity of the dialogue is not getting in the way of the episode’s believability? “There are different theories to that,” Stewart ponders. “When I came on here, I was hired on the basis of writing the pilot and we would mutually agree whether it worked, and if it didn’t work I didn't want to be stuck in the position where people weren’t happy with me. So when I was writing it, the voices started coming to me - Hercules had been somewhat of a model before - and it was kind of an easy fit for me writing contemporary action-adventure dialogue into this world. And so whenever I’m evaluating whether we’re going too far in the modernisation, I go back to that mode I was at right at the beginning - pretty much thinking of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid-type dialogue between our characters.
“We are also capable of doing grandiose, pseudo-Shakespearean stuff,” Stewart says. “We have the characters give these wonderful (or sometimes maybe not so wonderful!) monologues about their pain and their suffering, or what they’ve lost. I think we can do that because of the ancient feel of the show, that kind of raw emotion presented in words. You can’t do that on ER or NYPD Blue, but you can do it on Xena, because I think we have that sort of epic, ancient feel to it.
“There are times, though, that we overdo the modern stuff,” Slewart admits. “Sometimes it slips by and I’ll actually see it on the air, and I’ll say, 'Why’d I leave that in? That’s too much of an anachronism.’ But not too often.”
From time to time, it has been necessary to create episodes of Xena that don’t star Xena herself. From the time Lucy Lawless injured herself in a horse-riding accident during season two, right up to the latest episodes which had to factor in Lawless’ pregnancy, there have been ‘Xena-lite’ episodes where the title character has featured little, or not at all. While these do present difficulties for the writers, Stewart sees the problems as wider than that. “If you're talking about an episode that doesn’t have a lot of Lucy in it, then that's an episode that doesn’t have our star in it,” he states. “I worship Renee O’Connor [Gabrielle], but I do also notice any episode that Lucy Lawless isn’t in. Lucy Lawless is the star of the show and it is always difficult to make a good Xena episode without her in it. It’s kind of a no-brainer to say that!”
Stewart says an example of the importance of the star factor can be found in a recent issue of a major US television listings magazine. “TV Guide had the 50 greatest characters in television history, and Xena was one of them [number 46]. I remember sitting around with people and we were talking about those other shows; if any of those other shows had to be supported by a sidekick, it would have been very difficult. With sitcoms, there's that ensemble feel, so if your big star, or your favourite character, isn’t there, then somebody else can fill in. But for almost all the action-adventure type of things, you can’t [have the star missing for an episode]. Even partnerships, like Emma Peel and Mr Steed [of The Avengers] — if you did an episode with Just one of them, it would be a crashing bore. You need both of them.
"I think we need Gabrielle too,” Stewart asserts. “But certainly an episode with only Xena - we’ve done a couple of those - works pretty well, because Lucy is the star of the show. But it’s always better to have both of them.”
And I don’t think anyone would argue with that.
SIDEBAR: Team Xena
Xena: Warrior Princess has always had a core team of writers working on staff but, with the departure of Steven Sears at the beginning of season five, some changes had to be made. R.J. Stewart explains who's on the team today...
“Myself, Chris Manheim, and George Strayton and Tom O’Neil. Well, George and Tom are effectively one writer. It’s always been three, but this team is a little less experienced than in years past. Chris Manheim was always the number three key person, Steve Sears was the number two person and I was the number one person.
“Now I’m number one. Chris is number two, and George and Tom are number three. There’s no way in the world George and Tom have the experience Chris did [when she joined], but Chris probably does have the experience [that Steve had], so I think she’s ready to step up. George and Tom are doing a nice job, but they’re definitely cubby writers. We've never had cubby writers, so it’s not so much the headcount, it's the experience level.
“So we’re a little short this season, but we're getting through. It’s challenging this year, and we’re in the process of talking about how we're going to do it next year.”