PLUME: It was a principle worth fighting for…
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah, it was. Over the years, that has been the one thing that’s lingered the most with me in the sense that most of the jobs I have walked away from, I’ve walked away from on principle. When I worked on an animated series called The Real Ghostbusters, the first season for the network and the syndicated season that I edited at the same time – 78 episodes simultaneously – they brought in, after the first successful year, consultants who wanted to change the show to make it more politically safe. They proposed, to my mind, some really offensive things. They wanted to make Janine a mommy character, instead of the strong female character she’d been in the movie and the series; they wanted to make Winston, the only black character in the show, just a driver, which I though was profoundly racist. They wanted to meddle even though, in the beginning, it was ABC’s number one rated show.
So I said, “If you do this, I’m walking. If you force these changes on me, I’m leaving, because they’re ethically wrong.” And they did, and I left. When I worked for Captain Power, after the first season, they said that the toy company was going to get more say over the content. I said, “That’s not correct – that’s not moral to have a toy company giving approval over stories. If you do it I’m leaving.” They did it, I left. I’ve always put money secondary to standing up for what I think is right as a writer. The moment you compromise that… The moment you let it go and say, “Well, it’s just the one.” Then there’s two, and then there’s going to be three. It’s something that I think my wife, at times, is driven to distraction by, and my friends can’t understand it sometimes, but I think that – at the end of the day as a writer – what you leave behind on the shelf, your stories, say, “This is how I saw the world and this is what it meant to me.” If you compromise that, then everything you leave behind is a lie.
PLUME: Given the way the industry is, do you believe that fighting that good fight is more detrimental or positive in the long run? How has that affected where your career has gone over the years?
STRACZYNKSKI: It’s both. On the one hand, you get a rep for being difficult. But on the other hand, ghe jerks of the world who hear that you’re a pain in the ass on moral points tend not to come to you – which on some level is good, because it saves me from having a lot of hassles. Those who understand what I’m about and what I fight for tend to come to me for jobs. Most jobs I’ve had have been multiple assignments, where if I worked for a producer in years past, they come back to me and say, “Would you do this again?” They know that I’m a pain in the ass, but I write good.
PLUME: The things you’re fighting for are quality and integrity issues…
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah. I was on Murder She Wrote for 2 years and left to do B5, and just this past year – after Crusade ended – they’ve been trying for 3-4 years to get a Murder She Wrote TV movie off the ground and nothing could get past the studio and the network. They were desperate to get something on the air, and one day they finally said, “Well, there’s always Joe.” I’m told there was this really long sigh, and they called me. They said, “We know you’re a pain in the ass, but you’re going to give us a good script.” I said, “I’m happy to do it.” I wrote the script – it got past the network, it got past the studio, it got produced, it got aired in May. And it did very well.
PLUME: So well that there’s talk of another one?
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah. They were not sure they wanted to do another one or not, but this one actually did very well – in fact, they aired it opposite the Friends season finale – so I figured, for sure – phhhttt! – that’s it. But it did extraordinarily well in spite of that, so there’s going to be another one… I’m not involved in that one, because they want to get another writer – now that I’ve broken the spell, if you will, they go to easier writers to work with.
PLUME: Going back to college… Your college years would have been, what, the mid-to-late 70s?
STRACZYNKSKI: I graduated high school in ’72 and I got out of college, finally, around ’78-’79. I got two bachelor’s degrees – one in clinical psychology and the second one in sociology, with minors in philosophy and writing. So it took me a little longer to get those done. I went to the Master’s program but didn’t get very entranced with that.
PLUME: What drew you to those particular majors? Was is to enhance your writing?
STRACZYNKSKI: I figured, at the time, that they could possibly be additional income providers – not understanding fully that one had to get a Ph.D. in psychology to make any living at it, unless you’re flipping burgers… Subtitle again: I’m an idiot. I did figure it would get me a chance to learn about people and applied techniques that would be useful as a writer, although what I did with that period of time and what I would recommend to all people who are aspiring writers who are in college is this: I took full advantage of all the facilities that were available to me. I tell students to do the same thing… Take an acting class, take a theater class, write for the college paper, write for the college magazine. Often, the theater department will take small plays, or the telecommunications and film department will do little 10-15 minute productions. Use the radio station. You can go to college and just see the classrooms and the bathrooms and the restaurants and the parking lots and that’s it – that can be your whole college experience. I say use the entire campus, because that’s where you’ll get the grist of what you need and the experience you need to be a writer later on. By the time I got out of college, I had a half-hour pilot produced, I had 9 plays produced, I had a radio drama, I had written a hundred articles or more for the college paper – so by the time I finally walked out of college, I was a honed and toned writer.
PLUME: Out of the 8 years in college, what is the strongest experience that has stuck with you?
STRACZYNKSKI: Actually, it was 6 years in college. It was probably just the open-mindedness. Back when I was in college, it was more of a well-rounded education, I suppose, and it instilled a need for learning in me – that need to learn new things and experiment and try things that people don’t necessarily try. It’s propelled me to keep doing that, which is why – to this day in my work – I try to experiment with form and style and turn things upside-down on their heads and try different things.
PLUME: So, after 2 bachelor’s degrees, where did you go after college?
STRACZYNKSKI: I stayed in San Diego for a while, working at various newspapers and magazines – San Diego Magazine, The San Diego Reader, and a bunch of others. I did some work for Alien Worlds – a radio drama series at that time, based in Los Angeles. Finally, I got a contract to write my first book – a nonfiction book on scriptwriting. I figured this could be the key to getting to Los Angeles, which is where I knew I wanted to go. Synchronicity being what it is, the woman I was involved with, who later became my wife – Kathryn Drennan – got a job offer at Carl Sagan productions. I met her at San Diego State in the Telecommunications and Film Department. She was offered a job to come work for Carl Sagan, who was then doing a thing called Cosmos. So we said, “Let’s move up together.” We did that -we moved up to LA on April Fool’s Day, 1981. For the first year or two, she primarily worked for Sagan and I worked on my book and tried to make the transition to a much larger pond. Back in San Diego, I was a good-sized fish in a very small pond. In LA, I was a microscopic fish in a very large pond. It took quite a few years to finally overcome that and to find a place as a writer here in this town.
PLUME: It’s also a pond that has a strong current moving against you…
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah. I’d never worked in television much, and it was something I’d wanted to do. I ended up working, finally, for the LA Herald Examiner, the Los Angeles Times here in LA, and the LA Reader. I ended up working with Time, Inc. for a magazine called TV-Cable Week. After which, when it folded, I went to People Magazine and – without going into details on it – there was, again, an ethical crisis that came up. I realized what People Magazine was, and I said, “I just can’t do this any more.” I quit journalism. I didn’t have anything else lined up, but I said, “I can’t do this anymore. I gotta go straight.” I ended up in television. I’m not sure if that’s going straight or not, but for the time it was.
PLUME: At least television understands that it is fiction…
STRACZYNKSKI: Yeah. Definitely.
PLUME: Was it easy at that time to make the transition into television? What was the market like at that time?
STRACZYNKSKI: It was very tough, and for about 6 months it was an absolute struggle to try and crack what I wanted to do. What happened finally was that I happened to like cartoons – I’m a big cartoon nut, like the Warner Bros cartoons – and there was a show called He-Man which I liked to watch… because I’m a goofy kind of guy and I like cartoons. I thought, “Well, someone writes these. I see writing credits go by.” So I thought, “What the hell,” and I wrote a sample He-Man episode and sent it off cold to the studio. No agent, no prior contact… Nothing. If you know anything at all about the business, things don’t happen that way. To my astonishment, I got a call from one of the producers on the show saying, “This is a great script. Can you come in for a meeting?” I came in and sold that script. I sold, I think, 3 others – one right after the other. Then they said, “Look, we’re out of budget this year to buy freelance scripts.” I thought, “Oh, well, there’s goes that.” But they said, “Would you want to come on staff?” I, of course – having finally learned how not to be an idiot – said yes. That was my first regular gig earning more money than I’d ever seen before. That was in 1984-85. After that, I was on the staff of shows non-stop for the next 15 years without a break.
PLUME: What are the difficulties of being a staff writer, and how much compromise is expected of you?
STRACZYNKSKI: To various extents. To me, there were small acts of rebellion. Working on cartoons initially, because they were sponsored by toy companies, I would try not to blatant in the use of a character just because it was going to be a toy. I would try and tell good stories, first and foremost, and not worry about that aspect of it. There’re a number of He-Man sites out there -which is somewhat unnerving – and when I look at the episodes that they say are the top ten, a lot of them tend to be mine, because they’re good stories and not toy commercials.
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