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Before he became Carnivale's supervising producer, veteran TV writer William Schmidt
was already a fan.
HBO: What's does a supervising producer do on a television show?
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: Well essentially we're writers who are allowed to produce our own episodes. That means not only do we write the script, but we're involved in casting and editing the final product. It allows us to shape our episodes a little bit in our image.
HBO: How did you get involved with Carnivale?
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: I had gone in to Carolyn Strauss at HBO with a series pitch. HBO ended up not buying it. But Carolyn called me up about three weeks later to interview for show runner. And so they sent me over the pilot script and the bible. And from the first page, the script just blew me away. There were five days between getting the script and going into the meeting, and I must have spent, oh man, sixteen hours a day reading it, rereading it. You know, feeling what I think the series should be.
So, I went in there extraordinarily prepared. I think I had eight, single-spaced pages of
single-spaced notes.
HBO: [CHUCKLE]
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: And I didn't get the show runner job, but I got the supervising producer job. And I'll tell you, I've been doing this twenty-one years, and I've won awards and done a lot of nice things. But this is definitely the best material I've ever, ever got to work with.
HBO: What do you like so much about it?
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: Well the theme of good versus evil, which was also the theme of my series, Prey. But the different variations of it really interest me. I think that good and evil were sort of not talked about for a few years before 9-11. You know, it was sort of like, "Nah, we're too hip to be talking about good and evil."
HBO: Hmm.
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: But suddenly with 9-11, everyone started looking around, saying "Yes, there is good and evil." Which I've always believed. Beyond that, just the imagination and talent evident in the pilot script. The characters and the richness of the dialogue--all of it was something I'd never seen before. And man I wanted that job more than anything.
HBO: When you're a writer and you have ownership of an idea, is it hard to turn it over to other writers?
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: Well you know, that's a really good question. I would say that when I've been on mediocre shows in the past, my ego did say, "Gosh, I don't want to be rewritten by this
person, cause I don't think they're a better writer than myself."
But, because I think Dan Knauf is a genius, it's the first show where he takes over, and I can't wait to see what he does with it. I don't think I can ever remember that in my career. I've always been, from the day that I was an arrogant little young pup, a little resentful of anybody rewriting me.
HBO: Not anymore?
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: Knauf does it better. He's so well grounded in drama. On my first episode, Episode four, he took a good day to rewrite me. And then on my second episode, episode nine, he took two hours. And that was a very proud day.
Dan has such a nice way of including you and making you feel like you're part of his show. It's probably evident from this conversation that we've become very close friends over the last fifteen months. But I think a friendship like that always starts with respect.
HBO: Dan obviously has a very firm grip on where the show is going. Does he just give you the guidelines that you need and let you rip a little bit?
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: That's exactly it. He has the mileposts: So-and-so's gonna be here at the end of season two. So and so's gonna be there at the end of season three. But within those guideposts--he has a few for each season--there's a great amount of work to do.
HBO: Have there been any big disagreements about where the show is going?
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: By big do you mean just atomic or hydrogen explosions....
HBO: [CHUCKLE]
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: We had some massive, massive debates in the room. When you're dealing with senior staff people like Dawn and Nicole who are the Co-EP's, Ron Moore, a veteran, Toni
Graphia a wonderful writer, it never gets personal. And man, when you have people who've had their own series, and have been in this business as long as all of us have, you're gonna have strong opinions.
HBO: Right.
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: We all got together yesterday for the first time since we shut down in July. And it was a very, very warm feeling, because it was like, "Hey, look what we did." You know, it was very difficult show, and no one had ever done anything like it before, so, you're kind of writing blind sometimes. But for all the long hours and the disagreements and the
breakthroughs and the pitfalls, we have something that we're all very proud of.
HBO: What were the aspects of it that were hard?
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: I think it was going from themes and thoughts to scenes and plot-lines. It was a lot harder in the first six episodes than it was for the back six. It's sort of like popcorn. We build up a lot in the first six episodes and then everything starts popping. There're no slow moments cause you have to watch every scene.
Just before the season started, I just happened to see all twelve episodes back to back over two days. I was really impressed; it picks up pace just like you'd expect a novel to. By the end it's like, holy mackerel, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. You know, scene, scene, scene, scene, scene. Oh my god, that happens; oh my god, that happens.
That's why I don't think this could have been done on another network. Because, you have
to have people who are into the patience of a really intelligent television show. And, the
truth of it is that the American public can take more of this. [CHUCKLE] But the networks
don't give them the credit that HBO does.
HBO: Are there moments in the episodes that you've worked on that really stand out to you?
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: There are so many interesting moments in this season. The one thing that I love about the show is the carnival. I've never seen a carnival dramatized in quite this way, with the little moments. In episode nine, for example, the carnival's in such deep trouble financially, that they play what they call a fireball show, which means basically they want to take the chumps for everything they're worth, even if they have to pick pockets or cheat on games or, whatever. When you research these
things and then dramatize them, the magic moments are really, really cool.
HBO: Is there a character that you find yourself drawn to?
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: I can't say that there's one. I really love them all. As a TV writer-- and I've done something like thirteen shows--almost every script you write gets to the place where it's like, oh man, I just don't want to write that scene. It could be you're going away from writing something exciting to write a necessary family scene and you just feel like it's gonna be boring as sin, and you grit your teeth and do your best. Here there was never any of that. There was never some dull scene that I had to write. There's never a dull character that you just have to get through just to get to the good stuff.
I do have an affinity for Justin. But Sofie and Ben, they're all great.
HBO: It's the writer who's not the atheist who's drawn to Justin.
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: Yeah. [CHUCKLE] Exactly. Exactly. I find writing his stuff really, really exciting. Because one of the things we've been trying to do is that if Ben is the good avatar, then he has a lot of evil in him like the rest of us do. If he's the evil avatar, he has a lot of good in him, like the rest of us do. And we're trying to do that with all the characters. Justin is good and he's evil. So there's a question question of free choice and the exigencies of the times and how that turns you more evil or more good. You know--it brings out those little seeds in you that, that are obviously buried deep. But the choices you make dictate who you are.
HBO: You mentioned research; did you find yourself caught up in researching the Depression
and the wars and all that kind of thing?
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: Oh yeah. When I was a kid, my favorite show was The Waltons. I was a poor kid growing up in a crappy little town, so it was no wonder that that's a series I latched onto.
I was already kind of interested in the Depression times. And I'm a nut about reading
about the evils of Nazism and the all that. This is a show that you can do as much research on as you want. You could spend seven days a week, twenty four hours a day, and you're not gonna be done.
HBO: Right.
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: And that's fun for me. One of the things that we're very proud of is dialog that's true to the times. I did a lot of research into the slang of the 1930s. There's a line in episode four where Lila is basically saying that Ben would be easy to get to, and instead of saying that she says, "I knew he'd be a ripe suck." It's like, wow that was a time when people were more literate. And less homogenized. You had very colorful regional expressions.
HBO: It seems like a time when people aspired to cleverness.
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: Verbal cleverness. That's right. And that's not to put down our age, because we're very image-oriented, thanks to television. But yeah, the wordplay of an S.J. Pearlman is infinitely more interesting than Howard Stern's language, in my opinion.
HBO: So if you look back at all of the episodes, what is the theme of season one?
WILLIAM SCHMIDT: At the end of the day I think it is about alienation. You know, and about loneliness. Everybody in this environment, on both sides of the story, from California and in the dustbowl, they ultimately have to fall back on themselves to survive.
And how do you reach out to another human being? Ultimately it's easier sometimes to reach out to a tremendous outsider like the freaks, because they're all outsiders. I wasn't cognizant of it in the writing. But when I watched the episodes back to back to back, I felt like, oh wow, these are lonely people striving desperately to break through their, their inhibitions, to get through to one another.
And you know, the fact is that many of them don't succeed at it, and that some do, but on levels that aren't always dramatized. I mean it's not big hugs and stuff like that. It can be a very nuanced type of stuff between, say, Samson and Jonesy. You know, they don't tell each other their feelings-it's more like, "Hey, have a snort," and they pass the bottle. I love that. Again, it was not planned. I think it just came out of the trueness that we ended up getting to--of the time and the carnival itself. You know, there's a real bittersweet quality to it.
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Carnival Fact
Sideshow performer Stanley Berent, A.K.A. Sealo the Seal Boy, was afflicted with phocomelia, which caused his hands to grow directly from his shoulders.
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FATE Game
Try the strategy card game that puts a twist on Tarot!
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