Roger Director '73

Hollywood Squares | Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

by Todd Larson

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Yet Federici's insights, I realize, are not simply the setup for easy jokes at L.A.'s expense. If it's become commonplace to ridicule Hollywood's mass-market aesthetic, the bottom-line focus remains a serious concern to those who have dedicated their artistic talents to film and television's creative rather than financial possibilities. Federici's talk of elevating people rather than pandering to them is not just a personal goal; it's a direct reflection of the cultural gulf presumed to exist between disinterested highbrow "art" and commercially-motivated, lowbrow "pop culture." To work in Hollywood is, by definition, to sell out. And no one is more sensitive to this fact than those taking a piece of the action.

Certainly this is the case for Roger Director '73, whom I meet for lunch at a café near his Santa Monica home. (Again, my snazzy L.A. photographer is there. Again, she is sent home to await a sunny day.) Director, I find out, has been hawking his Hollywood wares since he arrived in 1983 and began writing for the acclaimed cop drama Hill Street Blues. (Yeah, a writer named "Director"....hah, hah.) "You feel all the shame you need just working in Hollywood," he sighs. "But to be a Haverford graduate and to actually have your name on a plate in a parking lot inside a studio gate....You feel like you should just shoot yourself." Of course the soft-spoken Director, who has also written for Moonlighting, Mad About You and HBO's Arliss, is kidding. I laugh out loud when he tells me about his 25th college reunion: "When I told Jack Coleman what I was doing, he went ashen and groaned. Not only was I wasting my life - he made it seem as if the Quakers should never have gotten off the ship."

"No one would call me a Hollywood type," he says. "I can be honest when I'm dealing with writers. I'm supportive and enthusiastic and try to help people do the best they can. I've survived by being as genuine as I can be."

Yet beneath the dry wit and self-deprecation - imagine a West Coast Woody Allen - Director seems a bit exasperated that he's presumed guilty merely by his association with an industry that he acknowledges is "defiled by committee-think and marketing considerations." If anything, his career is proof that a Haverford degree and a studio parking space need not be mutually exclusive. "There is nothing about Hollywood that's consonant with anything you're taught or encouraged to be at Haverford," he admits. "There you were encouraged to speak your conscience, to directly communicate with people. Here that's heretical babble." Nonetheless, Director has succeeded specifically by refusing to participate in show-business-as-usual. "No one would call me a Hollywood type," he says. "I can be honest when I'm dealing with writers. I'm supportive and enthusiastic and try to help people do the best they can. I've survived by being as genuine as I can be."

When it gets right down to it, Director, who began his career as a journalist in New York, is genuinely proud to have blazed a trail traversed by few of his fellow Fords. His time in television, he claims, has been an "immensely gratifying" experience. "It's very immediate," he enthuses. "Working with actors on a set is tremendously creative." More important, TV writing has afforded him the time to pursue something he considers "more worthwhile": a career as a novelist. Valard published his first book, A Place to Fall, in 1996, and a second novel, The Cracker-Jack, is in the works. Director offers up "non-commercial" when asked to describe his style. "It's not an airport rack kind of a book," he jokes.

As Director mentions his personal literary heroes, I'm reminded that many our century's most celebrated novelists - Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Nathaniel West, James Agee - sold their services to film studios when their "non-commercial" novels failed to pay the bills. Legend has it that Hollywood hackwork actually sucked the life out of Fitzgerald and West: they died within a day of each other, each an unsuccessful and unappreciated screenwriter. "Both West and Fitzgerald were writers of a conscience," Edmund Wilson would later write. "Their failures may certainly be laid partly to Hollywood with its already appalling record of talent depraved and wasted."

But that was a different era. If the lessons of postmodernism have taught us anything, it's a healthy skepticism regarding too strict a division between the artistic and the commercial. Roger Director might feel that his novels are more worthwhile, but who's to say you can't find art in an old episode of Moonlighting? (Just watch one and tell me I'm wrong.) Either way, Director has clearly succeeded without wasting his talent or checking his conscience at the studio door. "I've been incredibly lucky," he says. "I've been able to support myself as a writer, and not many people can say that."