Behind the Scenes with Thomas Schlamme

By Darrell L. Hope
Photos by Robert Hale

After taking home the 1998 Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy Series DGA Award for his pilot of ABC's thought-provoking Sports Night, director Thomas Schlamme not only repeated that accomplishment in 1999, but was also nominated for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Dramatic Series for his pilot episode of NBC's one-hour drama The West Wing.

Although Sports Night is ostensibly about the production of a sports news show and West Wing is about the goings on at the White House, one can see similarities between the shows. Both blur the lines between traditional comedy and drama, and both explore the behind-the-walls workings of worlds in the public eye. It is a viewpoint that Schlamme finds close to his heart.

Having such hands on responsibility over two shows so widely critically acclaimed keeps Schlamme, who also co-executive produces both series, extremely busy. But it's a pressure he gladly endures for as Schlamme himself laughs, "Today's flavor will be tomorrow's leftovers."

What were you doing back in 1978 when you joined the DGA?

I was directing commercials and starting to pursue movies and television. I did a music video with Bette Midler and after we finished she asked me to film her next concert. So I did that for HBO and they began to hire me to do concerts and comedy specials.

Is that where you developed your eye for comedy?

I was always interested in comedy, but I got put into this category of "comedy director," which was never my intent. 

That's why it was so nice to be nominated this year in both the comedy and drama categories. I never wake up in the morning and know it's a comedy day or a drama day. In my life, I can be laughing hysterically and something will happen and I'll be hit with a great pathos that has nothing to do with what I was laughing about. The reverse is also true, I can be at a funeral and something can happen that's just uncontrollably funny. 

My father has a wonderful sense of humor, and yet is a man who fled Nazi Germany and been widowed three times. It was the third time I'd been with him to the same Jewish funeral home in Houston, Texas, and while he was going through the same stoic spiel he'd always done, I grabbed a business card and drew eight squares on it and hole punched three of them and gave it to him. Throughout the day, I would see him show the card to someone who shared his sense of humor and they would just start laughing and then go back into the tragedy of the day. 

That balance is so important to me. It's always been in my work and it's satisfying that I'm now in a position where I don't have to be one or the other. When I was doing straight comedies, I always felt they were worried I was going to make it too dramatic. And I would do dramas and they'd be worried I was going to make it too funny. But when I was directing ER, The Practice and Chicago Hope, I found that some of the best comedy I was ever getting to work on was on those shows. 

Viewers were demanding their dramas have a lighter element so that they could accept the darkness, and it was the same, in reverse, with the half-hour comedies. That doesn't mean that there's still not a place for really traditionally funny half-hour television and very somber and dark hour television, but they don't have to exist solely.

That's the best of this time right now. My work reflects the way I see the world.

Some of that was evident on HBO's The Larry Sanders Show, which you helped develop.

I had been brought in on the second to the last season of It's Garry Shandling's Show. I hadn't done half-hour television at that point, but I loved the show and understood what Garry was trying to do. When they were setting up Larry Sanders, they called me in and we worked on how we could make this work: behind the scenes, with video and the real show. I designed the sets so that we could be shooting in the vérité style, but it would still be well-crafted because it wasn't improv. It was designed with the idea we could shoot through doorways and shoot with more than one camera that would give it a flow that felt completely real. 

A month before we started shooting I got an offer to go do a movie and had to step away from Sanders. I never got to feel the satisfaction of being a part of it, but it did set in motion the kinds of things I was interested in visually. 

I'm not a documentary filmmaker, but I like trying to incorporate that look, that sense of urgency and the feeling of being a fly on the wall in another world. That's the perception that I'm interested in. It's the perception of Sports Night, it's the perception of West Wing and it was in Larry Sanders. Even when I did the pilot of Spin City, it was a very traditional half-hour but I said, "We can do a little bit more with this. We can make it so that the comedy doesn't all have to work in this ‘your turn-my turn' kind of way." So in the pilot, there were long Stedicam shots that people might have forgotten, but it was not often done in half-hour television.

How much of your Sanders work did you bring into Sports Night?

It was a direct lineage, to the point where I also brought cinematographer Peter Smokler in. I needed someone who understood that we were going to be looking in 360 degrees but I didn't want it to feel like a documentary. But it was the material in both cases that made the style work. Both were brilliant pilots, but Spin City wasn't the show that was ready to break out visually as much as was Sports Night. I had been working on this style for a while and when I read Aaron Sorkin's pilot script I didn't see any other way of doing it. 

When I started watching Hill Street Blues, I thought, "This looks and feels different than television was when I was growing up." It was in my face both from a writing point of view and visually. It was a huge influence on me. For me, Sports Night was an opportunity to break out half-hour television. The camera can tell this story and enhance what's already written. I understand that for a long period of time, just the fact that they could record it was good enough. For me, that's not good enough. The camera has an unlimited vocabulary, why not exploit the hell out of it?

How much time do you have for rehearsals?

When I was doing Mad About You, I loved the first three days of doing a half-hour TV show, where I was just rehearsing a play. We put it together, block it and find the funniest things. Then they'd wheel the cameras in and I'd think, "Oh shit. This is not the way I'd shoot this scene if I really could shoot this scene." The dynamics of the medium were such that I was not able to do that. So when I did Sports Night it was the ideal. I've brought in hour directors to do Sports Night and they've loved it. You get three days to rehearse and there's almost no prep. By Monday afternoon at the latest, we pretty much have the script we're going to shoot, so we had three days to rehearse, which we've now reduced to two because we found that we could put the show together and then have three days to shoot it. By the end of the second day the whole show is blocked out. We don't get up to performance level because we're not doing run-throughs for the network or trying to figure out which jokes work and which jokes don't. We're incredibly liberated in that process, so it's real rehearsal time.

Do you shoot in front of a live audience?

Not after the first few shows, but we never wanted to. That was the big debate between ABC and us. I never felt it needed a live audience because the actors were playing to each other. 

We shoot with multiple cameras, but it's not a traditional multi-camera show. It's sort of the way Larry Sanders was done, but we've even stepped that up to a degree. The coverage is part of the visual nature of the show that I designed. It's a sporting event. There's an urgency that feels the electricity and excitement and allows it to feel kinetic. We still shoot the scene many times from different angles, but if we could steal a camera and get another angle, we'd get another angle. The lighting scheme is such that we can do that. As we progressed, we'd shoot the cameras all in one direction, then shoot the cameras all in another direction, giving Peter Smokler more leeway with his lighting.

West Wing is on an eight-day schedule and, unfortunately, we don't have rehearsal time. We do a table read of the whole script, and then we'll start doing it. When we did the pilot, we rehearsed the whole thing. If we could figure out a way to do West Wing in seven days, that would be my dream. We would steal a day of rehearsal and take the scenes that you know the actors are going to have questions about and try to understand it better. Directors who had never worked with these people before, would now have a chance to work with the actors and the script before the clock starts to tick.

I did it on Chicago Hope on the first year with an episode called "Quarantine" where seven characters were quarantined in the OR. I went to David Kelley and said, "Let me shut down for two days and rehearse with the DP, the script supervisor and all the actors. Then we'll shoot it in six days." It was the 11th episode and all the actors were saying, "This is unbelievable! We haven't really rehearsed since the pilot where we could stop and talk about scene and didn't feel like we were holding up the whole company." And it worked. It's visually interesting, even though 80 percent of it takes place in the OR. 

Being able to rehearse was like marrying the half-hour world to the hour world. I feel like I've been successful at bringing some of the sensibilities of hour television to half-hour, now I'd like to bring some of the sensibilities of half-hour television to hour television.

How do you decide how many episodes go to visiting directors vs. how many you'll direct yourself?

This year I directed five West Wings and only did the first and last episodes of Sports Night. Executive producing both of these shows is a 16-hour a day job, so where does directing get slotted? I'll probably direct fewer episodes next year so I can focus on executive producing and making sure the shows maintain the quality we want.

It hurts. I like being the executive producer, but I'm happiest and most fulfilled when I'm directing. But to have a life and a wife and three kids and try to executive produce and direct two shows is just too much so something had to go.

Do directors come to observe the making of the shows?

Even experienced half-hour directors who do Sports Night have to come in to observe because it is done like no other show. You can't stage things just for the laughs and you can't stage things for a 250-seat theatre proscenium. Theatre directors who would traditionally do well in half-hour television wouldn't necessarily do well here. You need the cameras to tell the story and yet you have to move and shoot huge page counts of drama and comedy in three days. It's like a filmmaker's medium. Half-hour directors have to remember to keep the characters moving and one-hour directors can't get too overwhelmed by the extra cameras, so observing seems to help.

On West Wing, directors don't have to come in and observe. They have an eight-day prep period during which they'll come in and learn the mannerisms of the actors and the tone of the show. Last year we hired some feature directors as well as traditional hour directors. On those shows we've been very lucky with having wonderful directors.

What do you look for in your DGA teams on these shows?

I look for incredible talent, but you have to be a collaborator. If they don't go together, you're not going to fit in this group. We have amazing teams who take pride in our shows, and therefore they work very hard. It's important to me to know that they do feel that way, because if they don't they're not going to be happy here. There's a life outside of this life and if you're going to spend this many hours here, it should be a faux family that makes you feel better about sacrificing your real family to be here.

Schlamme  sets up a West Wing scene with cameraman Don Thorin, actor Rob Lowe and editor Bill Johnson.

What do you think it was about your West Wing pilot that caught the attention of your fellow members?

Although it was great to win the Emmy last year for Sports Night, nothing compared with winning the DGA Award. For me the DGA Awards have been so generous in the last two years. I try to downplay awards, but that morning when my assistant called me and said, "Howard Storm called to say you're not nominated for one show, but for two." I felt like I was 10 and had just made the majors. I was so overjoyed that this, a group of directors, had recognized and voted for my work. 

I think any director will recognize that a pilot is different from any episode. It's like making a movie because you're starting with just the script — in this case, a brilliant one. I think there were better episodes of West Wing this year, but for awards consideration, I would still put up the pilot because we really did start with nothing and I'm very proud of what we ended up with.

How involved have you been with the DGA?

Not as involved as I should be, to be honest. I mean, I vote and I care about who's on the council. But I'm beginning to understand now, what a great Guild this is and how much it has protected me over the years and how much more I need to give back. Lately it's been just a scheduling thing, but earlier I was busy pursuing my career and didn't fully understand how the Guild could help me. 

What enlightened you?

Being an executive producer and realizing how well the directors are protected and how much more they need to be protected. I'm on the other side of the fence now. For example, when we do reshoots, even if I was unhappy with a director, that director needs to be able to come back and do the reshoots. I can't do it even if I wanted to because the Guild protects those directors as well as their need to be protected in the editing room. It just opened my eyes to a lot of things that I'm really concerned about, like creative rights and other things that I had not used the Guild for.

Was there ever a time where you needed that protection?

When I did So I Married an Axe Murderer, that was not a very good experience for me. If I'd known more, the Guild could have been a greater ally. Now I know I'm not being a crybaby if I go to the Guild and say, "I need some help here; I feel like I'm being taken advantage of." When the relationship between the studio and myself got strained, or when the star came into the editing room, I should have notified the Guild. Instead, I remained silent and thought I was being a good team player. That's where I can help other Guild members who don't use the Guild out of that same thought process. It's not because they're worried that the studio's going to be mad at them, but they think, "Well, I can handle this." The Guild is there to protect you and give you a heads-up on what people can and can't do. I didn't use them and there was a point where I just wanted to walk off the film. I called my lawyer and he said, "We should call the Guild and find out what your rights are." That was something I hadn't even thought about doing.

Is where you are now where you envisioned yourself back when you joined the Guild in 1978?

In 1978 I thought I was going to be the next Robert Altman and make really interesting films, but I couldn't be happier than where I am. However, if you come back in ten years, I don't think I'll have four TV shows. I have no earthly idea where I'll be. Maybe I'll have a little office supply store somewhere in Virginia. But this is where I am now, and I feel like I'm still growing and, like any good filmmaker, the vocabulary is so big that you're always learning. 

The best thing about growing older is, after spending so much time like a horse running with blinders on, those blinders start to come down and you get a better picture of what's around you. So it's not the 1978 guy going, "I'm going to win an Academy Award and be a big motion picture director," as much as "I'm going to do work that incredibly satisfies me," which is exactly what I'm doing now. I hope that's what I'm able to do in the next 20 years.

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