Bob DeLaurentis: Executive Producer Extraordinaire

No, he's not related to movie icon Dino DeLaurentiis...notice the extra "i" in Dino's last name. In fact, the Executive Producer of "The O.C." has had to deal with that question so many times during his lengthy career as a writer/producer that he went so far as to name his company, One Eye Productions. That humor, as well as his vast television experience and easy-going personality, gives you a clear indication of why the creators of "The O.C." consider DeLaurentis to be a main cog in the show's successful wheel of fortune.

So how did you get your start in this crazy industry?

BD: I broke in to the industry in a sort of classically simple way. I was tending bar on the East Coast and I wrote a first screenplay, and I sent it to a producer in Hollywood who optioned it and brought me out here to write another one.

So I wrote a handful of screenplays, made a movie, and was really intent on becoming a writer/producer which is a difficult proposition in the feature film business, so I decided to segue into the television business in the late '80s, where I could become a writer/producer, and that's kind of it in a nutshell.

What would you consider your first big breaks in television?

BD: I created a couple of short-lived series with Dick Wolf [later the creator of the "Law & Order" franchise], I worked on "St. Elsewhere" and "Tattinger's" with creator Bruce Paltrow, and I worked on a bunch of development deals and produced "The Big Easy" for the USA network. I also started and ran the first three years of "Providence" and then went into another development deal with NBC, and that's when I got the call to meet a young fellow named Josh Schwartz.

It's been said by the other creators of "The O.C." that they were being forced by the network to bring in an experienced Executive Producer to run the show, mainly due to the relative inexperience of the creators in running a network series. And Stephanie Savage told us that they were resistent to that and it wasn't until they met you that they gave up the fight. What do you think you brought to the project that eased their concerns?

BD: I think the comfort level between us was a shared aesthetic sensibility. When you sit around with a group of people-whether they're young, old or in-between-you can find that you all like the same movies and like the same music and have kind of the same tastes, regardless of age. It's one of those things that transcends age and whenever you get a shared sensibility you get a terrific comfort level and a real chance to do good work together.

It's like whenever you hear people in the entertainment field parting ways over "creative differences," it usually comes from sensibility differences. I mean people don't really break-up over whether they can come to an agreement on how a movie should end. They disagree over a fundamental approach. If it works, it's because of that. And if it doesn't work, it's because that isn't there. You either share some fundamental assumptions about life or you don't really have much to say to that person because they basically think differently than you do. And I think-in the case of Stephanie, Josh and I-it was just a fortunate example of people who really did click. We all like the same books, we all like the same movies, and we all listen to a lot of the same music, despite our pretty significant age disparity.

It's all about chemistry. It's like in the NBA, if you put three major stars on the same team it usually doesn't work. It's about putting people together who combine different skills and most importantly play the same way. And that's the same in our business, and it's always been what makes a creative organism work.

What would you say is your key role in this phenomenon that we call "The O.C."?

BD: I spend a lot of time with the writers and the macro-elements of the show; the large story arcs, how many new characters are we gonna bring in, how many episodes are they gonna be in, and what kind of storylines are we going to have. A lot of my creative energy is spent in that area and then the rest of my energy is spent being a kind of "link" between the creative side of the show and the production side of the show.

My office is located right smack in the middle of the hallway. To the left of my office, you're in the production side of the show-with the line producers, locations, accounting-and to the right you find the writer's room and Josh. You could say that my office location serves as a metaphor for what I do.

I am responsible for the money and what we spend it on, how we're spending it and where we're spending it, because every creative thing you do has a price tag on it. So somebody here has to make a decision on what to give up and what to save, creatively speaking, and I'm the one who basically handles that.

You mentioned that a lot of your time is spent in the writer's room. Take us inside that room for a moment and describe that process...

BD: What we basically do is we all sit in a room with our very small group of writers-never more than about four people in this room. And we basically put all the storylines up on a board and move them around; creating them, deconstructing them, until we get an outline for a specific episode. Once that rough outline is up on the board, it is the job of that episode's writer to go off and put it on paper in outline form and begin to write.

Then the network and studio take a look at it, we get it approved, and then that specific writer goes out and writes that episode, then we give notes and then at some point in the process, usually near the end, Josh takes a final pass at it. And of course Josh does a lot of the writing himself, writing a lot of the episodes.

Josh said in an interview that you have become a mentor to him, and that you're the one who tells him to take some personal time to avoid burning himself out. Would you say that's another part of your role, to watch out for the personnel as well as the show?

BD: I think there are a lot of factors that contribute to the long-range success of a show and you need to be aware of those factors. Writers get burnt out very often in hour-drama television. Everybody starts getting sick around January and the reason they do is they're burnt out.

So yeah, I try to be aware of things like that and try to space things out in the scheduling to better enable people to get through a very long year. It's a very tough climb and particularly when you get into the winter months, which is on the downside of your schedule. We finish up at the end of April, so come February everybody's draggin' a little, because there's only so many storylines running through your head and scripts you can concoct before you start getting a little bleary-eyed.

What about time-off between seasons? Is there much time off, or is that off-season spent preparing and planning for the next season?

BD: It kind of depends on your position on the show. There was a hiatus period of about three months after Season One, and I think Josh and I had about ten days to two weeks off. And the writers got a good chunk of time off, but we pretty much spent that period talking about Season Two. We arc'd out the first six episodes and talked about the big brushstrokes of the coming season and got some production things settled, so there's plenty of work to do during that time. During the transition time between a first and second season, there's really just not a whole lot of time off.

You've had some successes with various shows over the years, but "success" for a series is truly out of the hands of those on the show, as it comes down to viewer acceptance. Did you honestly feel that this show would have the impact it had during its first season?

BD: No, and I don't think anyone honestly knows things like that. I think you make a judgement on getting involved with a show, based on a couple of things. I think you make a judgement based on an affinity for the material, which is also a way of saying an affinity for the people involved. You can have an affinity for the people and not for the material, and vice versa, and in the case of this particular show I thought that both of those things lined up.

When I met Stephanie and Josh on that first day, I honestly felt an immediate connection with them. I had already read the pilot, so I had already made a literary judgement in that I thought it was a very smartly written script and I responded to the smartness of the writing and I knew the genre pretty well, and I felt that it was a different version of a relationship-driven drama, so I really responded to the material. And then I came in and had the meeting, and really responded to them as people. So at that point it was a no-brainer.

But in answer to your specific question, does all of that necessarily add up to success? No. I can tell you that the series "Tattinger's" [ran from October 1988 to January 1989] was a terrific pilot. The show was in New York, I loved the actors-Stephen Collins and Blythe Danner-I loved the world of the show and for some reason, it just didn't work. And everybody was predicting that it was gonna be a hit, but that's just the nature of the business.

You put it out there and you have no idea about the rest, so while you always hope that you've picked a show that can be successful, I think that's just a bad way to enter into an enterprise. You have to go with your gut on the material and the people, and it's such hard work that if you don't enjoy the people you're working with you're just going to be miserable and life's too short for that.

One of the strongest elements of "The O.C." is that you have the fascinating storylines to play off with the adult characters, and most shows don't have such an effective and successful cross-generational interest...

BD: I've read a lot of articles about the show that point to the fact that we took an equal amount of interest and care in carving out those adult stories, and we do. From week to week, you might see subtle shifts in the balance of attention paid to the adult stories versus the kid stories, and that's a conscious attempt to keep both sides interesting.

You've had a lot of experience in television over the past 15 years, so what would you say has been the evolution of serial TV since the late '80s when you started?

BD: I would say that it's been a subtle evolution. I think you could even make a slightly radical case that nothing has really changed. There are a lot of days when I could say that there's nothing that I'm doing here that's any different than what I was doing or able to do on "Providence." And I think "Providence" is a good show to counterpoint, because on the face of it, it seems almost generationally different-it was more of a thirtysomething character driven vehicle than a teen show with parents-but the fundamental things apply in this genre.

When I see shows in this genre that don't work, it's usually because they don't have some of those fundamental things. They're simple, but they are very hard to achieve; like being able to move from comedy to romance to drama with some facility. And the shows that don't tend to succeed are those that get stuck in one of those tones; being able to move from funny to sad is what makes these types of shows work. It's a matter of capturing life.

ven in terms of what you're able to do and say today, I think it's relatively conservative now. I would even say that there were some times in the '90s when you could get away with a whole lot more than you can get away with now. We're in a new conservative era in a lot of ways.

There's been quite a bit of media coverage of a new show called "Athens," which involves all of the "The O.C." hierarchy. And it's interesting to note that some critics are calling it an East Coast version of "The O.C." since, only a year ago, critics were trying to compare "The O.C." to older shows. And now you're the show that new shows are being compared to. It's very ironic and funny at the same time...

BD: I feel very lucky that that's happened with "The O.C." because it only happens when something has become something of a cultural phenomenon. That's just the nature of the world we live in and that things can get spread around very, very fast nowadays. But you also need to be aware that you can easily be on the other side of that, and a new show can come out next year and suddenly it's the new phenomenon. We're all happy and feel fortunate that people are now using "The O.C." as the barometer for all of these kinds of shows.

But, to be honest, I don't think "Athens" is anything like "The O.C." although it will share a sensibility because of the creators, but it's a very different world. The thing is, when you look back on all the shows that were anchored around places-shows like "Dallas" and "Providence"-you tend to mythologize them. It's a way to color a place with more of a world view and sort of make a statement about it, in the search for its essence.