CITAZIONE
Swang Song - May 10, 2011
I was 28 when I first walked into Don Bellisario’s office to pitch a story for NCIS, a show I’d never seen until a week earlier. In my defense, they weren’t even done with the first season yet, so as far as being late to the party there were plenty who would come later than me. I had figured I could basically take a CSI kind of story and set it in a Navy world, figured that would work, until I read the first line of the pitch packet Don sent me that read, “NCIS is not CSI in the Navy.” One story, that’s what I had, if you don’t count the one about a koala being smuggled out of Australia onboard a submarine, and I was advised not to count that one. Halfway through my pitch, Don’s eyes drifted closed and he started to lean deeper into the couch. I couldn’t tell if he was visualizing what I was saying or just falling asleep. I picked up the pace, hit the final twist as hard as I could and his eyes popped open, he shot upright and said, “Didn’t see that coming.” I took that as a good thing coming from a guy who’d made hundreds of these things. “I wanna see what happens next,” he said, “Go write it.” I believe my response was something along the lines of, “Go write what?” I’d never been in an environment where so much responsibility was heaped on an individual writer, in most of my jobs prior there’d been a great deal of collaboration from concept to breaking down the story to the final draft. The tv term used to describe me would be “Baby Writer.” “Write what you just said,” he told me, “And watch some of the good episodes, the ones I wrote. These characters all have specific voices.” I left.
I delivered a script about a week later and I got back two notes delivered secondhand from Don: 1) Tony likes movies. 2) Let’s see if we can get a fourth act out of the kid. That was it. Armed with that, I rewrote. I came back in after a second draft and Don had it tucked away on a shelf behind his desk when he offered me a job on staff. But I had already taken a job on a new soon-to-be-short-lived tv show. To which Don said, “When that gets canceled, cause they all do except mine, come back and I’ll give you a job.” While I was scratching away on that show, I ran into the Art Department Coordinator for NCIS who lived on my block at the time. She said they’d just gotten a script with my name on it, which was news to me. One of the writers, John C Kelley, liked my draft, pulled it down off the shelf, re-wrote it to fit in Season Two and they shot it. And aired it. And 14 million people watched it. It was a surreal experience for me.
For the next two years, either Don or John would check up on me about every six months to see if I was unemployed and in an NCIS frame of mind. In that time, I ran my streak of failed first year tv show staff jobs to three, I wrote a pilot that didn’t get made, a mini-series that died an ignominious death, and I spent months wandering the earth scribbling in a notepad. Over the same period, NCIS went through dramatic changes of its own, making headlines for the shocking Season 2 finale “Twilight” and hitting what I consider its first high-water mark for the run of episodes from “SWAK” through “Kill Ari.” It continued to amass viewers at a steady clip, cracking the top ten on a regular basis until I just couldn’t ignore it anymore.
In the middle of Season 4 I joined the writing staff on an 8 episode contract, hoping not to be fired at the end of it. I’ve worked on 110 episodes since then, making contributions to many, less than nothing to others, but I think 21 of those scripts had my name on them. We hit number 1 for the first time with an episode that contained a line I wish I’d written, “Are you telling me there’s a killer robot Humvee loose on the streets of Washington D.C.?” and I was hooked. I fell in love with the show, with the insanity of being a part of it, with its ability to constantly surprise me, its nature to re-invent itself, to gather new fans, new faces, new layers, new depths. And just when you think you know exactly what NCIS is – the show develops different flavors.
When Shane Brennan took the reins in Season 5, I remember sitting across from him in his office and asking, “Who’s gonna write the episodes that Don and John used to write?” He squinted at me with this crooked smile of his that I would eventually discover meant something along the lines of, “Maybe you.” So I took a deep breath and started pitching, “How ‘bout somebody gets killed with Mercury injected into their brain? What if a girl shows up who was a childhood friend of Gibbs’ daughter? What about a PTSD Marine on a rampage who turns out to be a steroid junkie? Oh, I’ve always wanted to rip off the first episode of the GI Joe cartoon where they’re hired to test the security of a government installation. Ooh, a woman stabs Ducky at a crime scene because she thinks he’s a torturer like Olivier in Marathon Man. Or something like that Law and Order episode “White Rabbit” where they re-visit old times. Maybe flashbacks involving first cases or… maybe we go to one of their hometowns. Does Gibbs have a father?” I was in there rambling for about half an hour, I just found the notepad while I was cleaning my office. It also contains the words “Human Sacrifice!” with a great big circle around ‘em. Never did get to that one.
Over 4 and a half seasons I have dug as deeply as I could into this world. I’ve created characters who have been hated and loved and I’ve taken satisfaction in both. I’ve indulged in conception and murder. I’ve laid out storylines that have filled me with pride and I’ve watched them come out in a manner I never could have expected. I’ve lost myself so much in the fictional realm of NCIS that at times I’ve forgotten where it began and the office ended. My dream, since I first started noticing that tv shows have writers, has always been to create someplace like that. And I’ve learned that if I’m ever going to make that happen, if I’m going to make something of my own, it’s going to require my full attention. So it’s time for me to say goodbye.
To everyone at CBS and Paramount – thank you for being so good to me.
To Mark, Mark, Charles, Susan, everyone in the office and my favorite crew – thank you for making my madness real.
To Mark, Michael, Pauley, David, Cote, Sean, Rocky, Brian, Joe, Muse and all the phenomenal actors I’ve written for – thank you for letting me mess with your heads.
To Shane, Gary, George, Frank, Steve, Reed, Nicole, Chris and every writer I’ve been on staff with – I don’t have the words, but I know you do.
And to the fans, the millions of you around the globe with your own experiences of NCIS - this has been my little piece of the puzzle, my small contribution as a custodian of its history. Hope you enjoyed “Swan Song.”
Jesse Stern
Co-Executive Producer
Questo è anche stato il canto del cigno di Jesse Stern...
e poi anche l'abbraccio di gruppo davvero bello.. mi sono emozionata
NO.
