MARC AND ELAINE ZICREE: TOGETHER IN HOLLYWOOD

Marc and Elaine Zicree have been collaborating in the entertainment industry in Hollywood for over twenty years. Between them they have over a hundred writing and producing credits, including television shows such as ‘Sliders’, ‘Babylon 5’, ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Real Story’, ‘The Smurfs’, ‘The Lazarus Man’,  and ‘Space Precinct’. They have also written numerous screenplays and teleplays and have appeared on radio and television shows, including ‘The Today Show’ and ‘Entertainment Tonight’. In addition Marc authored the best selling book ‘The Twilight Zone Companion’, which received an American Book Award nomination. Most recently they were nominated for a Humaitas award. AUSUS Magazine spoke to Marc and Elaine about how they came to be writing and producing partners, what they’re up to now, and looking back at one hundred and fifty!

Q: How did you meet each other?

 M: Huh! That’s a story in itself. Okay. I was nineteen years old, almost twenty. I’d just sold my first short story via the Clarion writer’s workshop, which is the most famous science fiction workshop in the country. This fellow I knew, who was very impressed with that, invited me over to his place to meet his fiance. Elaine. And they had this New Years party which was the weirdest party I ever went to because all of Elaine’s friends were funny and laughing and telling jokes and all of his friends seemed like they were in crisis. Like something out of an Ingmar Bergman movie. In major depression. I liked Elaine very much immediately but I realized she didn’t know about this guy’s history of violence against women.

E: His initial approach to women was very, very gentle. He’d come on very softly. He was a therapist. It was the opposite to what he really was.

M: Yes. And although he was very short he had these biceps that were about as big around as my head. He told me once that he knew some day he would kill someone and I believed it. I thought that someone should warn her about this but, because I was the only person he was still in contact with from his past, there was no one else but me, twenty year old me, to do so. So I got up the courage and invited Elaine over to my place and told her everything I knew and she believed me.

E: By then I did have some suspicions and had actually suggested we should go into therapy if we were going to go on. There was a lot of tension at the time. One day we had an argument in his truck and I started to take off the engagement ring and he grabbed my hand and he bit it. I managed to calm him down but when it was safe I immediately packed my things and moved out. And that was the end of the relationship.

M: The postscript to that, which is rather fascinating, is that after this my mother had asked him to help her move and so I ended up alone with him in his truck. It was sometime after the break up and he knew that I was the one who tipped Elaine because I was the only on who could have done so. And he said to me ‘…don’t worry. I’m only violent with women!’

E: Soon after that we moved in together and were married. We’ve been married about twenty six years and together for twenty eight. 

Q: Marc, weren’t you studying at the time?

M: I was going to UCLA. I got my degree in painting, sculpture and graphic arts. I’d had gallery shows and my work had appeared in various national magazines but by then I knew I wanted to be a writer. I was very disenchanted with the art world, with the politics of it.

E: It’s all about reputation. You buy for the reputation. You don’t buy for the art.

M: It just didn’t appeal to me. That whole gallery scene. At eighteen though, I’d written a short story which I later sold and a radio play which aired on KPFK here in Los Angeles. Specifically, I knew I wanted to write for television and Elaine was very, very supportive. I decided the way to learn how to make good television would be to study in detail a show that was great, that I loved. ‘The Twilight Zone was a show I’d grown up watching, so I thought the best thing to do was to first read about it. But I found there was almost nothing written about the show and so I realized that I had to write the book that I wanted to read. I managed to convince Rod Serling’s widow to let me do it although I’d never even published an article and she’d already turned down successful journalists who had wanted to do a similar thing. I interviewed thirty people who had worked on the show before I even went to her so I knew my subject very well. She could talk to them and see that I was okay. From the month I started till the month the book was published was five years. It’s now been in print for over twenty years and has sold around half a million copies.

Q: Elaine, what did you do before entering this field?

E: I was in social work. I ran a federal program for seniors. My background is pure leftist. My parents were reds, so I leaned in that direction. I’ve had every job you can imagine. I ran the federal program for five years. I’ve worked with mental disability and I’ve worked in convalescent hospitals but in this case it was simply seniors with physical disabilities. The focus of the program was independent living. We took care of many different aspects of a person’s life. Before this I’d been an actress and a producer off Broadway. I’d also been very active in the civil rights movement. I’d been counseling draft dodgers from the Vietnam era. I went from the McCarthy period to the integration protests to the Vietnam marches and then I left the country for eighteen months. 

Q: Where did you go?

E: It was a question of economics. I found myself getting a little crazy so I found out I could get a discount flight to Israel. I was there for a year and then I spent six months on the island of …, in the village of…. A little fishing and farming village. And then I arrived back at LAX with twenty five cents in my pocket. I was a lot more open when I came back. My expression had become gentler. Before that I was always down on myself because I hadn’t saved the world yet. When I came back I started focusing on writing and that was the shift. I remember getting in my 1954 Chevy and driving around the country so I could write about my experiences. The funny thing was, that even before all of this stuff, I had sort of an odd Hollywood connection because I’d gone to Cal State Northridge and two of the students I was with did quite well here. One wound up writing for ‘Star Trek’ and the other, Robert England, played Freddie Kruger in the ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ movies.

M: I happened to be on a TV interview once with Robert and he said to me ‘…everything I know about acting I learned from Elaine’. So I went home and said to her ‘…Freddie Kruger is your fault!’ 

Q: Do you write together as a team?

M: It varies. Originally that wasn’t our intention but what happened was that back when I was twenty three I was writing for television. A friend of mine asked me to write animation so I wrote for shows like ‘Smurfs’ and ‘He Men: Masters of the Universe’. I became the god of animation. But that was just a way to get an income base and break into live action and writing movies for TV, adult stuff. So I would write the scripts and initially I would say to Elaine ‘…okay. Read this and give me your comments’. I wasn’t very good at taking criticism at first but eventually it became easier. Elaine’s notes were great, but there were times when I didn’t know how to do what she had suggested, so she would write a version of the scene and I would rewrite it. So slowly but surely we started collaborating more and more. Eventually we ended up a writing team. And while I was winding up on staff and story editing different TV shows and moving up to producer, Elaine was writing screenplays and theatrical plays. The first time we officially shared writing credit was on ‘The Lazarus Man’, a western, starring Robert Ulrich. By the time I finished being a producer on ‘Sliders’ we’d officially become a writing team.

E: Now we pursue collaborative projects as writer producers. Primarily in TV. We also wanted to retain a certain standard. TV is not like film where if it’s not right you have time to just sit back and make it right. There’s immense pressure in TV because of these incredible deadlines. So it was also for that reason that we decided to join up. So that we could keep the focus and keep it honest. It’s also fun because we write well together. The scripts are better, they’re deeper. And with my background as head of a federal program, I’m very good administratively and Marc isn’t as strong in that area. 

Q: Elaine, how did you come to work with Tom Fontana?

E: I had this idea for a show and we went after Tom, who had created a show called ‘OZ’, and was also running a show called ‘Homicide’. We got him as our partner and then we executive produced and wrote what’s called ‘Pilot Presentation’, which is a shorter version of a TV pilot. It’s about twenty minutes long and we shot it in five days. Cast and crew of eighty five. Thirty five millimeter.

M: People ask me how I learned to be an executive producer and I said ‘…well I look at what Elaine’s doing and then imitate it’. She’s terrific at gathering a team and then getting them to work as a unit.

E: The hours were pretty extreme. We’d walk in the door at dawn and the phone would start ringing. Ultimately the pilot didn’t go to series but things seem to have a new life periodically. We bring them back. 

Q: Tell me about ‘Magic Time’ Marc.

M: ‘Magic Time’ was actually a project that we have brought back. It started as a TV pilot, then became a series of books and now I’m taking it back to TV and pitching it as a mini series. We still love the concept and it may ultimately have a new life. It’s a very challenging project. A lot of TV series that became hits actually started at different networks. For example, ‘The Sopranos’ was originally developed by one of the major networks, Fox. They then shelved it and HBO bought it. This constantly happens. I’ve done a number of pilots for ABC, NBC, Showtime. You just keep putting it out there and hope that it eventually clicks. But TV is such an incredibly powerful medium that I can go anywhere in the world and my work is there and that’s very gratifying, very exciting. 

Q: Have you traveled with your work?

E: We did a pilot for NBC that was shot in Thailand. So Marc and I went there for the shoot. We went once with the producer then came back later with the whole team. It didn’t go well. If you see the final product it looks like it was shot in Culver City. The director captured none of the exoticism, none of the magic. He butchered the script. It was a pilot that we did for NBC. It was horrible but the odd thing was that it sat on the shelf for a couple of seasons then ABC bought it and aired it.

M: But that’s why we want to be producers. Because we want to control the end product. We don’t view the script as the end product. We view the show as the end product and you don’t want it to get screwed up so you just take responsibility and gain power. And that’s very much our journey. 

Q: What are you working on right now?

E: Right now we’re collaborating in pitching series to the networks. I also just finished a screen play which I’ll be producing. Marc will probably come aboard on that.

  M: I’ll also be directing a feature. It’s four horror stories with a wrap around. Two of them are scripts by us and I’m going to direct those two. It’s the dance of collaboration. It’s very free flowing in that way. We’re one hundred per cent supportive of each other and are totally committed to getting our stuff made. We’re completely passionate about what we do. We’re not just phoning it in.

Q: What is your feature about Elaine?

E: It’s a mystery about a little girl and a laborer who’s on the run from the law coming together and creating a new family. It’s set in New York in 1931. In those days, just before Roosevelt, union busting was automatic. People would shoot up the houses of the union leaders and they would be arrested on trumped up charges. In this piece the laborer’s wife has been shot and killed. He is working on a street widening project and is in search of his mentor who had brought him into the union and had now become a gangster.  In those days what was happening was that they shot hundreds of people. They just mowed them down with machine guns. They became what was called ‘individual revolutionists’. However they only exploited the corrupt police and the power structure. They would never touch the average joe. But they were selling their souls. Eventually the laborer finds his mentor and discovers he’s in worse shape than he is. So all he wants to do is get out of New York before the march for jobs start because he is terrified there’ll be violence and he’s not sure he can contain his own anger. During his journey he meets this little girl. She is in search of her rich grandfather who has mysteriously disappeared. It’s about how these two people forge a connection. He helps the girl and learns that the only way he can survive is to fight for something, not just be against everything. He heals in the process. It’s a sad story but it’s also very life affirming. I also have another feature I’ve just finished. This one is similar. It’s set in Arkansas. It’s about a fallen away Jehovah’s witness who is on the run from a retired gangster. He stole his dog. He was the dog walker for the mob!

  Q: Where do you find your sources for all these stories?

M: We draw from different sources. For instance, two of the inspirations for Elaine’s features were that years ago we drove twelve thousand miles around the US and just interviewed people. We met a retired gangster in Hot Springs, Arkansaw, and spent a day talking to him about his life. And the secondary influence was that we take our dog to a park near here. One day we met this dog walker who was walking this huge Neopolitan Mastif called Caesar who was incredibly shy. This huge dog who was afraid of his own shadow, much like our main character.

Q: Who do you pitch these stories to?

M: We just pitched it to you!

E: The first script I pitched to studios. The second piece I’m going to try and produce myself. To get it to funders and create a team. We have so much access to people now because of all our years in the business that it’s almost easier to put together a low budget indie feature than to go the studio route. Now it’s about raising the money and getting the distribution and getting a name for the lead so it can be picked up for American distribution.

Q: You run a networking group called ‘The Round Table’. How did you start this?

M: I had this idea for a piece called ‘Magic Time’. A story where all the machines in the world stop running and magic comes back. I wanted to do it as a TV show. I took a UCLA extension writing class to give me deadlines to write the spec script for the first draft of a two hour pilot. I always take classes to give me deadlines. It’s worked well in the past. So I wrote the first draft in eight days. This was during a two and a half month period when I wrote nine scripts for six different TV shows and they all got made. We then spent several months completing the script. The next thing was that I wanted to establish a structure to become a show runner and put together a team and sell the show. So I enrolled in a class called Flash Forward, which is essentially a program to help you accelerate your career. As part of this program you are assigned a team of six to meet every week and support each other. After the program ended my team decided to continue meeting. Eventually, however, the group fell away. I decided I wanted to keep it going but I didn’t want it to be just a writer’s group because, first of all, I didn’t want to read everyone else’s scripts. And secondly, I’ve seen those things disintegrate from in fighting. So I thought ‘…I’m going to have a table where I’m going to invite writers, directors, composers, editors and so on. Everyone who could work together to make stuff happen’. It took a little while to get started but it’s flourished. It’s a great supportive atmosphere. We now have about four hundred people in the group. My favorite story is that one day someone came to a meeting and said ‘…I’m shooting a short film. I need a free Boa Constrictor’. Two hands went up!

Q: Now you also run classes?

E: Yes. What happened was that some people wanted us to mentor them more hands on. So we decided to start a class where we mentored ten people at a time. Writers, directors, producers, actors. We’ve also just made a DVD about how to have a career in Hollywood. A lot of people in this business feel very hamstrung because they think there are all these rules they should follow but what we’ve done is to teach them to step outside the box. We give them tools to advance their career. Of course we have to make sure they have talent and if they don’t we recommend they take classes in their given field.

M: Or have them put to sleep! (laughs) 

Q: You mentioned that your combined age is 106. What do you want to have achieved by the time that figure reaches 150? 

E: Well, the reason I became a writer was because I came from a rather shattered childhood. I had a sense of being totally isolated. Of feeling irrelevant and completely different. What connected me was books, particularly Russian novels. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. And what was important about that was that they were talking about things that no one that I knew would talk about. They felt what I felt, saw what I saw and thought what I thought. These are books that have moved through time and therefore there was a world of connection that I could not perceive, but existed. And by that I was relevant and could feel like I belonged. And so what I would like to have done is to create a body of work that creates that connection. To achieve my dream and help as many people as I can.