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TV producer Cannell honored by Writers Guild

Posted on: Wednesday, 1 February 2006, 17:26 CST

By Cynthia Littleton

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Nobody will get a heartier round of applause from the TV producers in the audience at the Writers Guild Awards Saturday than Stephen J. Cannell, when he accepts the union's highest award for television writing.

The man who once did a show titled "The Greatest American Hero" is an action hero to a generation of TV writer-producers. He is the "showrunner" made good, the writer who managed to go it alone in a big-time way for nearly 20 years without ever giving up his original craft.

A day before he turns 65, Cannell will receive the prestigious Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award during the WGA Awards, taking place at the Hollywood Palladium (and simultaneously in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria). Named after the Oscar-winning writer of "Network," "The Hospital" and "Marty," the award honors "writers who have advanced the literature of television throughout the years and made outstanding contributions to the profession of the television writer," according to the WGA. Previous recipients include Steven Bochco, Larry Gelbart, Rod Serling, Carl Reiner and David E. Kelley.

Cannell has never stopped writing -- in the decade since he shifted his focus to novels, he has published 11, with No. 12 coming soon -- and he has never sold out, at least not completely.

Although he parted with his production company for $30 million in 1995, Cannell still owns the negatives to 1,000 hours of television that earn a small fortune every year. And he still keeps to his old schedule of rising at 4:30 a.m. to lift weights before getting in a few hours of uninterrupted writing time.

"I marvel at what he was able to do. I so respect him," says "CSI" executive producer Carol Mendelsohn, who got her first staff writing job on the Cannell-produced 1980s detective drama "Hardcastle & McCormick." The Cannell building on Hollywood Boulevard was packed with hard-charging creative types who were long on talent and enthusiasm if often short on experience, Mendelsohn says.

"When I first got there, it was like getting into Harvard," she says. "It wasn't just, 'Come into my office and get some notes.' He gave of his time and of his experience. He taught us the rules of drama. The writers were always in and out of each other's rooms, we were in the editing room learning how it's done. We rooted for each other. You just don't get that kind of collaborative environment anymore."

For Cannell, the drive to succeed in business came from his father, Joseph, a self-made man who had a highly successful Pasadena furniture store and other small businesses. The desire to make it as a television writer came from deep within. It was an all-consuming passion that even overcame the dyslexia that went undetected until Cannell was well established as a writer and the condition was diagnosed in his eldest daughter.

"I wrote for five hours a night for five years before I broke into the business," Cannell says. "I would have put in five more years if that's what it would have taken."

He finally got some bites on spec scripts and then landed a job as a story editor on "Adam-12." With that show, he began a long association with Universal Television that yielded such hits as "The Rockford Files," co-created with his mentor Roy Huggins, "Baretta" and "Baa Baa Black Sheep."

By the end of the 1970s, Cannell decided to strike out on his own. The boss of Cannell Prods. had no choice but to keep writing for all of the shows that bore his imprint because he needed to keep his staffing costs down. After a few singles ("Tenspeed and Brownshoe") and doubles ("Greatest American Hero"), Cannell hit his first home run in 1983 with NBC's "The A-Team."

When you've created or co-created more than 40 TV series, it's hard not to have a few favorites. Among the shows that stand out in his memory are the ones that first put him on the map, NBC's Emmy-winning "Rockford Files" ("I didn't know my ass from second base back then, but Roy taught me everything"), "A-Team," CBS' "Wiseguy" and Fox's "Profit," which lasted only four episodes but has endured as a cult favorite.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

Source: REUTERS

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