Here's the only mention of SR writing a play that I could find.... it's a really good article; I almost remember reading this years ago......
==============================
C.O - Commanding OfficerIn the conventional television world, police procedurals don't showcase shady cops, and writers aren't inked to multimillion-dollar contracts. Then again, no one has accused Shawn Ryan '88 of being conventional.By Dick Anderson
Middlebury.eduThere's a moment at the end of each episode of The Shield—the cops-behaving-really-badly drama entering its third season on FX—that seems blissfully out of place after an hour in the company of L.A.'s foulest. It's an image of a fresh-faced young man—OK, he's a preppy—standing in a field dotted with cows. That's the title card for MiddKidd, the production company of series creator Shawn Ryan '88.
"I wanted something to remind me when I watch these shows of where I came from and where I started," he says, sitting in his office on the Prospect Studios lot in Los Angeles. "I like the person I was then, and this town—this industry—has a way of destroying you with success. And I desperately didn't want that to happen to me. I know this sounds deeper than it is, but the card that I throw out at the end of each show reminds me of that kid at Middlebury. I'm the same person who studied economics and theater; there's nothing overtly special about me."
There are those who think otherwise, including the executives at News Corporation, who last June put together a $6 million package—"the most lucrative writer deal in the history of basic cable," according to Variety—to keep Ryan on board as Commanding Officer (that's what the title on his door says) of The Shield for the next two seasons. In the rare moment that things slow down enough for reflection, Ryan—dressed not unlike a college student in his T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers—marvels at his role as a Hollywood player.
"They give you the keys to the car far too early in this town," Ryan says between a review of music cues for episode three and a lunch with his writing staff of six. Although he's technically The Shield's show-runner, Ryan views himself as a writer first. "Everything I do on the show is about protecting the writing, and people call that producing," he says. "I'm still learning. I have surrounded myself with really talented and experienced people who do know a lot. If I was smart about anything when I took this job, I was smart knowing how little I knew about how to make a TV show."
Even with a cable-friendly, 13-episode season—nine fewer than most network shows—the schedule can be murder. Over the course of a single day in early November, Ryan had tasks to perform on seven of the season's first eight episodes: "We were breaking the story for our eighth episode, but during the course of that day, I was watching a mix review of episode one. I was picking music for episode two. I was in the editing room for episode three. We were shooting episode four, and I had to run to the set to see a scene. We were putting out blue pages for episode five. I was talking with the writers about episode six. Episode seven was the only one I didn't have anything to do with that day. There's no business school equivalent for this. You're thrown into it, and it's sink—or swim."
Ryan likens the show to his oldest daughter, who turned four in November. "My girl is different than when she was two, but she's the same child. And that's the way I feel about the show. We're true to what the show is, yet the show oftentimes surprises us. You have to trust the good ideas and they come. You let the story and the characters lead you."
From its debut in March 2002, The Shield became an instant hit—"by FX standards," Ryan modestly notes. "It's the right show in the right spot, and in that spot it's considered a hit." (In its second season, the series was the year's highest-rated ad-supported cable series among adults 18 to 49, the coveted advertising demographic, drawing an average of 2.21 million viewers.) On network television, where critically acclaimed fare such as Boomtown and Line of Fire have struggled to find an audience, Ryan's not sure The Shield would be successful. "It's a challenging, in-your-face show, and it isn't easy to digest. It doesn't give you some sort of happy conclusion at the end of every week." Although sales figures are hard to come by, it's also a hit on DVD (the second season was released January 6). "I'm sure we sell a lot more DVDs than According to Jim would."
Growing up among the cornfields of Rockford, Illinois, Ryan decided that he wanted to be surrounded by mountains when it came to choosing a college, and he and his mother set out to see his top five choices; Middlebury was his last stop. "My mother and I came for our visit sometime in November," he says, "and they had their first big snow of the year the night before we got there. And so I found Middlebury under completely idyllic conditions. My mother remembers me turning to her within the first minute or two on campus and saying, 'This is where I'm going'—which is pretty shallow considering I hadn't met anyone or talked to any of the professors."
A self-described sports freak in high school, Ryan played two years of JV soccer, warming the varsity bench as a sophomore. ("I don't remember how we finished, but we beat UVM that year and that was sweet.") He majored in economics, he explains, "because I had always been strong in math, and economics sounded like a cool thing to study that would utilize my math skills." But when he started looking at a concentration to go with his major, he gravitated toward theater. His interest in writing emerged with a little help from his professors: "They sought me out and encouraged me to pursue a path because they saw a talent in me that I didn't see in myself."
As a freshman, Ryan took an introductory theater class taught by Doug Anderson. "The final project was to write a five-minute scene and to co-opt a few of the other students in your class to act it out," he says. "I wrote this thing that I thought was funny and that my friends would think was funny but that I assumed no one [else] would. It was like a five-minute inside joke." As it turned out, Anderson liked the scene and encouraged Ryan to take his screenwriting class the following fall, where he wrote his first play.
He took additional theater courses with Doug Sprigg, and film and video classes with Ted Perry, but it was husband-and-wife professors Richard Romagnoli and Cheryl Faraone who energized the theater department—and Ryan—with their arrival on campus his junior year. "They came in and encouraged a lot of student productions," says Ryan, who found himself acting in plays in the College's small black-box theater and developing a real passion for writing.
"I saw in Shawn a somewhat taciturn student who wrote very funny plays about ordinary guys acting beyond their capacities and suffering obviously unintended, but very hysterical consequences," says Romagnoli, who served as an adviser for Ryan's senior work, a play titled The Gamesman, about a young hipster, his dorky roommate, and their girlfriends. The production was invited to the American College Theatre Festival, and Ryan won a couple of national honors. One of them, the Columbia Pictures Comedy Playwright Award, catapulted him out of Burlington, where he was writing ads for a radio station, into the writers room of the NBC sitcom My Two Dads. There, he spent two weeks learning the ropes, which led to his first story credit and gave him enough money "to live for a year before I had to find real work again."For the next four years, Ryan paid his dues, turning out spec script after spec script while working odd jobs. "I initially thought I should be pursuing sitcoms. What I found was that I could write funny scripts but I wasn't the world's greatest joke writer"—a liability for landing a job as a staff writer on a sitcom. While Ryan struggled with his punch lines by day, he spent his nights watching dramas—Northern Exposure, L.A. Law, NYPD Blue, and the like. He discerned a shift in the storytelling landscape, where an increasing number of shows were mixing drama and comedy. He eventually concluded, "If you could tell good stories but also find some humor in them, there was work available." So he doubled his spec-script output and started pursuing sitcom and drama writing.
With the support of his manager, Ryan was getting a lot of meetings—"I was the guy whose work people liked but never liked enough to give me a job." Eventually he landed some paying jobs—a pilot for the MTM production company, a couple of freelance scripts—but his first steady job was on Nash Bridges, the hour-long CBS drama (which he got on the basis of a spec script for HBO's The Larry Sanders Show). He spent three years on the Don Johnson vehicle, followed by a year on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off Angel. Then he sold the pilot for The Shield, and Angel producers Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt released him from his contract to make the show.
The roots of The Shield (originally known as The Barn) dated back to Nash Bridges. "Once a year we'd go up to San Francisco to do police ride-alongs, and I found those visits fascinating and dark and interesting, and I found that I could use very little of it for Nash Bridges, which was a far lighter, more cartoonish joyride kind of show. So I found myself assembling these stories and human attitude and sarcastic perspective toward things that I saw these cops exhibit but wasn't right for that show."
When Ryan was hired to write a sitcom pilot by Fox Television Studios, he kept pitching them comedy ideas, but nothing flew. After months of frustration and chasing the industry concept du jour—a kung fu show for the WB, a college sitcom for Fox—Ryan was asked what he would really like to write. "I wanted to try to do a cop show," he says, "like HBO would do a cop show"—where the characters could talk naturally with no restrictions on profanity, where the action could be rougher, and where "you didn't have to have a hero who always did the right thing," he says.
As work progressed on the characters—a few detectives, the captain, and a pair of uniformed cops—Ryan felt something was still missing. Around the time he was struggling with the script, the Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department was buried waist-deep in scandal, with charges of drug dealing, witness intimidation, illegal shootings, planting of evidence, frame-ups, and perjury, for starters. As Ryan read further, he learned that the department had discharged special units to the gang-infested areas, "and had started ruling them, by the sound of it, with an iron fist," he says. "They seemed to be doing the wrong things, but getting the right results."
As he was outlining the story, Ryan often sat in his infant daughter's room, with his Notebook computer in his lap, having just gotten her to sleep. As a first-time father, he recalls, "I had these disaster fantasies of all the things in the world that could hurt her. And I started thinking to myself, What kind of cops do I want walking the streets protecting my little girl? What would I be willing to put up with from the law officers whose salaries I helped pay if it were to make her safer?" The more he thought about it, the more inconclusive he became. "And I thought that could make for good drama if I wasn't sure myself which side I wanted to be on." So he added the strike-team element to the show, which led to the creation of the show's breakout character, Vic Mackey.
From the outset, Ryan, co-executive producer Scott Brazil, and director Clark Johnson agreed not to lock themselves into types when casting the series. For instance, actress CCH Pounder wanted to audition for the part of a police detective that was originally written as a man. She won the part, and Charles Wyms became Claudette. Likewise, detective Vic Mackey wasn't written "as a bald, bulldog kind of guy," Ryan says. "I was envisioning a more traditional Hollywood, young Harrison Ford sort of lead." But then Michael Chiklis (star of TV's The Commish and the mercifully short-lived Daddio) read for the part, "and he was too good in the audition for us to go in any other direction. It wasn't what we expected, but once we saw Michael we realized, Wow, that really works." Any similarities between Chiklis and Ryan—both are heavyset, bald, thirtysomething males—are purely coincidental: "I still view myself as a fit 19-year-old with hair," Ryan says, laughing. In September 2002, when Chiklis copped a Best Actor Emmy for his performance, The Shield was firmly planted on the TV landscape—a position cemented four months later when Chiklis and The Shield took home Golden Globes in the drama categories. While the accolades are much appreciated, they don't make Ryan's work any less harrowing. As a show-runner, he says, "You never feel comfortable. Each step in the process can let you down: The script might not be as good as it needs to be. The guest actor you get might not be as good in performance as he was in the audition. All of a sudden you can't get the rights to a song that you were counting on using for the show. You expect the house of cards to fall at any moment, and when it finally works you feel so unbelievably lucky"—and then it's on to the next episode.
For most of the year, Ryan's life revolves around the show and his family, leaving little time for anything else. As part of his new contract on The Shield, Ryan has a series development deal for 20th Century Fox TV. "I think it will allow me to develop whatever it is that I want to develop, which is how I'm going to approach it," says Ryan, who plans to wrap up production on season three before starting any new projects. "The greatest thing about being hooked up with Fox is that they sell to everybody. There are a lot of buyers out there now, so it would be great to have a show on network. I've worked on network shows, but they've never been my shows."
A hit show, job security, a loving family—to borrow a phrase from E!, it's good to be Shawn Ryan. "I can't really fathom what it all means," says Ryan, who is scheduled to return to campus as a speaker on April 14. "It sort of reminds me of the classic line from Broadcast News, when William Hurt asks, 'What do you do when your life exceeds your dreams?' and Albert Brooks replies, 'Keep it to yourself.'"