April 16, 2025 • 55 mins
For my generation of older TV watchers, there was a time—at least before DVRs totally upended weekly viewing habits—that Friday nights were frequently reserved to watch the iconic police drama, Blue Bloods. While the show recently completed its 14-year run, its executive producer and show runner, Kevin Wade, (thankfully for us) has not retired. He recently debuted with an extraordinarily accomplished crime thriller, Johnny Careless. In today’s 45 Forward episode, Kevin will take us through his storied tenure with Blue Bloods, as well as his eclectic career as a playwright, actor, screenwriter and producer that shaped his vision for the show. He’ll talk about how he shaped the show’s development, worked with a multigeneration of stars, managed demanding shooting schedules, budgets and surprising challenges. Kevin will also describe how he unexpectedly transitioned as a novelist, how he found his footing as a different kind of writer, and how he developed a new world of characters for Johnny Careless. As you’ll discover, no matter what the genre, Kevin Wade really knows how to tell a story.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Welcome to forty five Forward with host, journalist and speaker
Ron row Out. Ron's mission is to make your second
half of life even better than your first. Most of
us are just approaching our half life when we reach
the mid forties, with many productive years ahead. Ron is
here to help prepare us for this kind of longevity
(00:35):
by providing vital strategies to shift the traditional waiting for
retirement model to a continuous, evolving journey of compelling life chapters.
So now please welcome the host of forty five Forward,
Ron row Out.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Hello, everyone, welcome to forty five Forward on Bold Brave TV.
This is your host, Ron Roell. Now, if you're from
my generation of older TV watchers, there was a time
at least before DVRs and streaming services totally upended the
weekly viewing habits we all had that Friday nights for
me were frequently reserved to watch no not Friday night Football,
(01:31):
but the police hit show Blue bloods Now. While the
show recently completed his fourteen year run, its executive producer
and showrunner Kevin Wade, thankfully for us, has not retired.
He started another chapter in his writing career with a
recent debut of a terrific crime thiller Johnny Careless. So
in today's show, Kevin will take us through his time
(01:53):
with Blue Bloods, as well as his wide ranging career
before that as playwright, actor, screenwriter, TV producer that shape
division for the show. And of course he'll talk about
how he made his transition as a novelist and developed
a world, a new world of characters for Johnny Carroless.
So now let's meet our guest, Kevin Wade. Kevin, Welcome
(02:14):
to the show.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Ron, Thanks for having me. Nice to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
It's a pleasure to have you. So, as I mentioned
in the introduction, this is a I found it a
very compelling new novel. It's a fast read. I had
to you know, I did read it, and I saved
it for reading before bed, and I had to sort
of stop myself, like, Okay, don't save some for tomorrow.
(02:41):
I know you want to keep reading it, but wait
for tomorrow. So we'll talk about how I developed the novel.
But first let's talk a bit about the Blue Blood's
And you know you've had a fourteen year run. I
guess you started in the second season as the show runner, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
I came on to it. I had known Tom Selleck.
I'd worked with Tom on a movie called Mister Baseball
in Japan in the mid nineties, and Leonard Goldberg, who
created Blue Bloods, ran twentieth Century Fox when they made
a movie called Working Girl that I had written. So
i'd worked with them both literally back in the last
(03:21):
century and starting up Blue Bloods. And a friend of
mine said, you know, they're both here. They'd love you
to come in and talk to them. Have you seen
the show? Blah blah blah. I went in, I talked
to them. I had some ideas, and they were freely
admitting that they didn't really know what to do with
Tom Seleck's character, the commissioner, and I gave them my
(03:46):
little elevator pitch, and I think I started the next
day and I wrote two or three of the episodes
in the first season, including the first season finale, And
after that kind of jumping in, Leonard asked me to
start what they call show running the second season. Then
(04:07):
I ended up doing it for thirteen years.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Wow. Yeah, So what does that mean? Kevin is a
showrunners also executive producer. So what's the difference.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
It's a great question and almost unanswerable it's a made
up term. There is no Writer's Guild of America contract
that says showrunner. You have never watched a TV show
and seen the credits crawl at the end where it
says show runner, And so I always says executive producer.
It's a placement. It really. It means essentially two things.
(04:38):
You are the head writer, and you are the ambassador
between the writing staff and the scripting portion of a
show and the actors and their needs, and then everything
kind of flows from there. So for me, it was
chief cook and bottle washer, backseat driver, casting, final say, editing,
(05:02):
final say. A lot of things that I could do
just mediocre, but paid attention and had great people around me.
So I did a lot of stuff that was interesting
and a lot of fun on it.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Yeah, now you hadn't done a police show before, you know,
But so how did you learn a little bit about
this world?
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Two ways. I'd been reading detective police fiction, action spy,
but mostly detective stories. I'd read, you know, since I
was a kid, since my dad he was a big
fan of a guy named Joseph Wombau who wrote a
novel The Onion Field The New Centurions. He was an
ex LAPD guy with an enormous gift for writing and
(05:47):
almost a David Mammett ear for dialogue, and so I
started with that. I got turned on at Raymond Chandler
and John D. McDonald and I won't to go through
the list, but I've been reading this stuff since I
was a kid, and when I sat down to write
my first Blue Blood script, it occurred to me, what
you just said. You had no idea what you were doing.
(06:09):
You've done this before. But by page two or three,
I was like, oh, yeah, I've read a million of these.
I know how supposed to move. I know that the
dialogue should have a lot of muscle in it and
mustard on it, and so I just kind of, you know,
didn't worry about it and started doing it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yeah, So I've you know, before Blue Bloods, I had
watched you know a number of shows. I liked NYPD
Blue and you know, so and I I was actually
in college. I was a student of David Milch. Soon
I knew him a bit.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
That's right, I forgot. We've talked about that, yes.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but your show was different for me,
and it seemed I'm trying to think of the right word,
and maybe you'll know what the right but my word
is like more fulsome you know, there are a lot
of you know, shows where you know, focuses on sort
of mail orient it's on these detectives. It's sort of
their dysfunctionality, and they're dedicated, they're sort of you know,
(07:13):
you know, I kind of classic and so forth. But
your characters seem to you know, and maybe this is
part of your broader background as a playwright and an actor,
and you know you've worked on shows that featured women characters.
Did you think about that when you were creating these characters.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
We had two marching orders, really, one of them from
Leonard Goldberg, and Leonard sold the show to CBS by referencing,
and I believe brought it into his meeting with Leslie
moon Bess a reproduction of Norman rock Wells. I forget
what the painting is called, but it's that Thanksgiving. It's
(07:53):
that everyone's around the table and there's a beautifully done turkey.
And he said, I want to do a show that's
that has the drive of a police procedural but has
it it's a family, so it has the element of
a family drama as well as a police drama. They've
got a police two police commissioners, one former, a detective,
(08:18):
a rookie when we started, a rookie beat cop, and
an assistant district attorney with the Manhattan DA's office. So
it was really that was the Those were the marching orders.
And I was very aware from the start of the
time slot frankly on Friday night at ten pm. Traditionally
(08:40):
it had been a good launching pad for cop shows
and for medical shows. I thought, if we lean into
the family stuff, maybe we get a bigger audience than
just the guys watching. Maybe they are watch maybe they
watch with their daughter, you know. So we were aware
of that of trying to it's a it's listen, it's
(09:01):
a death slot Friday night at ten o'clock until we
got on right, it just was. So we did that,
and towards the end of the first year I was
working on it, I was driving work one day and
I remember the show from when I'm going to say
I was a kid and maybe you were a littler
kid called Bonanza. Bonanza was on Sunday nights, I believe,
(09:24):
on NBC, and it was when you boil it down.
It was about a widowed father and his three sons
keeping the peace in the area where they lived. In
that case, it was the Ponderosa Ranch in Colorado. In
this case, it was a bunch of Catholics in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
But it was kind of the same thing. And I
(09:45):
called up one of the assistants and said, look on
the internet, there's going to be a synopsis of all
those years of Bonanza episodes. We can steal them. The
statutations is up, so somebody reads. It wasn't that much
I could use, but it was fun to go. This
thing has a father and a grandfather. You know, it's
(10:06):
part of television history of mashing together two things to
make a third thing.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we were Our family was a big
watcher bands, and my parents loved it. They had four
sons instead of three. But it resonates, you know, but
it's not so easy to pull off sometimes, you know,
it's to do a kind of show like that without
turning into the Waltons, you know, it takes some finesse.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
You know. It really helped that we were surrounded by
and real life and YPD. We lived and shot on
the streets of New York. We had a guy named
James NUSSFORO Jimmy Nusfuero, who was a decorated x NYPD
detective who was our tech advisor, and he one phoned
it in. He was there every day on set or
(10:53):
in the writer's office, keeping it real, show us exactly
how this could or could not happen, and we obeyed him,
and it became kind of a point of pride for
when you would meet a cop, or a cop would
come up and see you work a couple blue bloods,
we always wonder how you get that stuff right? And
(11:13):
I give them Jimmy, but it was a great I
always imagine if you worked on the medical show, the
highest compliment you could get was a doctor coming up
saying that's exactly how I'd do a triple bypass, you know.
So we tried to pay attention to.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
That right right. The other I aspect I liked about
it is that your women characters seem also, you know,
more interesting and develop. You know, a lot of shows,
you know, they seem to me that you know, yes,
there's been a lot of cultural change in the police
force about bringing women, but a lot of characters you know,
do seem a little forced and jammed in there and
(11:49):
you know, I don't know for diversity purposes, but whatever,
but if you know, but yours seemed to fit in better.
And I was wondering whether obviously a lot of people
working with you, but did your and experiences working on
projects like Cash Me a Mafia and Working Girl, they
you know, sort of informed that you could really develop
(12:10):
women characters better.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Better. I'll leave I'll take the compliment and leave up
up to the audience. I did. I was struck when
when I wrote Working Girl, it occurred to me, just
write the women characters the way you would write them
if they were men. Don't make excuses for or don't
(12:35):
soften things because you think you're writing a female character.
Write dialogue as you would for a guy, and see
what it looks like coming out of, you know, on
a woman. And it seemed to it seemed to be
a good rule of thumb, because rarely have I gotten
complaints from actresses saying she's so mamby pamby, or she
(12:57):
said that I try to give them just as much
muscle and and risk as I would a guy.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Right, yeah, yeah. And the other thing that struck me
two is, you know, there was a you know what,
I just called myself as a writer, sort of a
writerly quality to the dialogue. And again it seemed like
you were you know, yeah, you were a playwright as well,
and you were an actor, and I think so your
(13:24):
your command of dialogue I thought was pretty exceptional and
it came across authentically.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
It's and you put the two together. It's both stage
plays and teleplays. Television dramas are largely dependent on the
muscle and the mustard in the dialogue because most television,
most television, when you get to the crucial part of
(13:53):
the scene, it's shot and or it's it's edited to
be pretty much the way you and I are talking
right now in a medium closer on the stage, you
don't you can't show the car chase, nor would you try.
You're not even gonna write the car chase. You're going
to write right before the car chase, or write the aftermath,
(14:13):
and it's going to be two or three people going,
we got to do this, or boy did we screw
that up? And so that has to have the urgency
of the off stage action, but keep the audience pulled
in and excited.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Yeah right, well that went fast. But we have to
take a short break now, Kevin, but folks will be
right back very soon. Talking much more with Kevin Wade,
the former executive producer and showrunner of the hit police
drama Blue Bloods, who recently completed the fourteen year run
and as debuted as a novelist with a crime thrill
(14:48):
thriller Johnny Carroless. So folks don't go anywhere. We have
much more with Kevin Wade.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
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Speaker 2 (16:57):
Welcome back, folks. This is Ron Roell talking today with
Kevin Wade, the former executive producer of Blue Bloods and
now a novelist with a terrific crime thriller, Johnny Careless.
Before the break, we were talking to Kevin about his
writing career and just I was asking about his approach
to dialogue and writing and his you know, basically authentic
(17:18):
approach to his dialogue. And I was just recalling, you know,
as we were talking, my own very brief career as
a so called filmmaker in graduate school. And I made
a fourteen minute documentary black and White, so that'll tell
you a little bit about when. But I remember this
(17:39):
one very sobering moment with my professor, who was a
documentary filmmaker, and I was describing the scene that I
was talking about, and he said, what's going on in
the scene? And I just described it to him and
he just sort of gave me this blank look. He said, well,
I don't see it in your head, but you know
(18:03):
it's not there. It's got to be there, you know,
so I think that you know it's from a writer,
you know, to you know, being on screen, you've got
to really show it in a different way, you know,
and you can do flashbacks and things like that, but
it's you really need to have a command for what,
you know, still a visual form. People are looking at it,
and you've got to have it there right in front
(18:25):
of them.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
You have to, I mean, they'd be dramatic right without
boring your audience, but you have to have two or
more people in a room and they have opposite needs.
One has something that the other wants and that a
person will not give it to them, and it all
kind of grows from there. And as much as you
can come into that scene as late as possible without
(18:50):
the audience being in the dark, and leave before it's resolved.
Because you're telling a story, you're not telling a scene
that has a beginning, middle, and end and that parts over.
So the building blocks are relatively simple if you and
if you're writing a play or a movie, they have
their own pragmatic needs. In television, in Blue Bloods, we
(19:14):
were telling three or four stories an episode, so you
have to be very aware of pacing and interlocking these
three or four stories, which sometimes meant that each story
only got four or five or six scenes often, so
you were very aware of just it had to be
incredibly economical without being without short thrifting the audience.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Right, yeah, yeah, Now talking about short thrifting your life,
it's hard when you're doing it. You know, a season
like this, the schedule must be incredibly demanding. I mean,
for me, just doing a weekly podcast is a lot.
I'm like, I can't imagine you know, doing it. So
(19:58):
tell me a little bit about that life.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
What was that. It's a big piece of machinery. On
the given day, you've got about two hundred and forty
in crew, including the actors. On the other given day,
you've got those two forty plus anywhere from fifty to
three hundred extras will hopeful them have to be dressed, fed,
made up, transported and sheltered. So you're doing it on
(20:24):
your stages. It's a little bit of an easier day.
But for the showrunner, you've got at any given time,
you've got five scripts in some stage of development, two
or three or four episodes in some stage of either
pre production or post production, which is scoring it, editing,
it sound, mixing it, et cetera, et cetera. I won't
(20:46):
get into all the weeds. But for my job, started
early on Monday morning and the week ended. Usually I
would clock it by the second NFL football game on
Sunday off at about four point thirty on Sunday, and
had Sunday Day. But otherwise I was either writing or
I was doing all the other things that I do. Wow,
(21:10):
So it's a long week, and it's a lot, you know.
And when you go out on location, you're moving, it's
a small army. You're in tractor trailers, you're taking over
blocks and blocks just for parking to be on location.
You've got church basements or whatever to do hair makeup,
and you've got another church basement to feed people. So
it's a lot of logistics.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Right right, And how long is it was a season?
You know, when did it start? When did it finish?
Speaker 3 (21:37):
For the writers, it started in It started in June
and ended the following May, April or May, depending on
where you were in the rotation. For the For the showrunner,
it started in around Memorial Day and did the following
the beginning of the end of May. The following year,
(21:58):
there was about two weeks off, yeah, which for most
people that most people worked like that, but they were
long weeks. The showrunner always has something going on. There's
always something hanging out there that needs to be dealt with.
Speaker 6 (22:12):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Wow, And then you've got an unintended break with the
writer's strike, right.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Or I guess pandemic and then the writers strike.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, sort of coincidentally, given the woman
I had on last week's show was a registered nurse
who actually worked on the pandemic and she worked on
some of the sets. Think that she mentioned that, right, Yeah,
Dane Curly, so she was she was, I guess a
compliance officer, you know.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
Yeah, we had. We called them COVID cops. They were difficult.
They had a difficult job. We could not stand. They
were nice people, but their reason for being there was
to make sure that your mask was over your nose.
And when we started, we not only a mask, but
we had like welders arcing plexiglass. And you're trying to
(23:05):
communicate intimately with an actor or from writer to actor
or actor to actor, that's very difficult.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
It was very, very difficult process that first year of
under COVID protocols. Yeah, and to your point, a couple
of years later, we had the writers and actors strike
that went on way longer I think anyone intended or expected.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, but it was during that time. As the saying goes,
never never waste a good crisis, and you use that
time to to basically do what you had been thinking
about for quite a while, which was to write a novel.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Yeah. Yeah, i'd been. I was so I had I
was so used to writing on network TV deadlines that
after a couple of months of strike vacation, I found
I was like, there's four or five hours a day
where I was saying, like, shouldn't I be doing something?
There's something I'm usually doing, And I thought, I just
(24:09):
try and write a novel, you know, just try keep
it simple. I set it around where you and I live.
I had enough cop lore and NYPD stuff in my head,
and I lived in the north shore of Long Island
for twenty two years by that, so I knew. I
knew all the names and addresses and kind of the
(24:31):
dynamics of it.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Yeah. Yeah, it was fun for me to read it
in that sense, because you know, obviously you change some
of the things around, but there was enough references. I'm like,
I've been there. It was it was nice, but it
also again you know, it made it authentic for me,
you know, and it showed like, as you know, write
(24:54):
what you know, and that's what you know and what
you didn't know you talk the police consultants about.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, and when the third thing is whatever, neither of
them knew me or them. I just made them up,
you know. So you have that license too, that's right.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Who's going to check? We's going to challenge me on that? Yeah,
And it's fiction.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
So silly, it's right in the couver. It says a novel,
that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Yeah. So you mentioned before you love detective novels. Were
there anyone in particular that you were thinking about. I mean, like,
I know you've read Raymond Chandler, Michael Connolly, guys.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Michael Connolly is great. Robert B. Parker, who wrote the
Spencer series. Oh yeah, Jesse Stone series was terrific. The
biggest influence, sounds so writerly. The guy I admired the
series I admired the most was Travis McGee by John D. McDonald.
I believe there were twenty one of them, and they
(26:02):
didn't they weren't procedurals. They were just wonderful, the beautifully
written plots about a guy who's kind of a bounty
hunter salvage expert, lives in a house boat in Fort Lauderdale.
But every few pages in every one of those books,
it stops and the author takes over and explains why
(26:25):
it's such a tragedy that Florida is paving over the
everglades or high rises or a lot. He just would
go on through the creation of his character, and to me,
it was so much more involving because it took the
real life of everything that he was writing about, and
his hero was thinking about those things as he was
(26:46):
solving the crime or trying to find the killer or
trying to evade danger. And it felt to me like
I felt like I knew the character and the way
he thought, and I certainly felt like I knew the
way the author wanted to use this platform to sort
of go like, if you were sitting next to me
at dinner, here's what I'd be talking about. It was
(27:06):
very inviting, and I always loved them and I've reread
all of them, and so that was the That was
the key to me, is to make Jeep Mlane, the
hero of this book, somebody who you felt like you
sat next to on an airplane or or or next
to it at dinner, like you felt like, you.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Know, yeah, yeah, yeah, I liked them. You know, I
did find myself, you know, and I'm tell people how
he got his nickname Jeep. They can read the book
and find out. But I did find myself saying like, wow,
there are a lots Jeep, some Loe Island. Yes, never
(27:46):
saw Similars and so forth. But so what was the
what did you find was was different about the process?
Speaker 3 (27:54):
You know?
Speaker 2 (27:54):
I mean I liked you know, the I agree with you.
The pacing. I thought it was important. You know. I've
just seen too many acts, movies and books where it's
just like you're just it's just one race at for another.
And I think I think people enjoy the pacing and
kind of it's not relaxing, but it gives you a
sense of, you know, of well again, fulsomeness. You know,
(28:15):
there's a story here, and it's not just about catching
a killer.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
Right. The daunting aspects for me were really twofold. One
was just the sheer amount of words, candidly I'd never
tried to write one single page of prose before, so
sitting down and looking at a novel is supposed to
be around a minimum of seventy thousand words. I think
(28:41):
a screenplay and at teleplay is somewhere around seven thousand
and eight thousand, So it was a lot of words.
The second thing was it was just me. Everything else
I've done in my since I was twenty five, whether
it's a play or a movie or a television show,
you had a whole bunch of people you worked with.
(29:01):
It's a very collaborative business. You need a director, actors,
You need location managers and wardrobe specialists and hair and
makeup and all of it. If you write a book,
you're all of those things. So it took me a
little while to go, don't you've sat with them in
production meetings, you've known them, you've worked with them for
forty odd years. Imitate them. What is it that they
(29:24):
do that you need to do in this? So once
I got comfortable with that, it started to come a
little easier. The third thing is actors, I'd always written.
Everything I'd ever written didn't exist as something I wrote
for you to read. It existed as something for a
crew and a cast of actors to take and put
(29:46):
on film. So everything I wrote I didn't have sexy, charismatic, compelling, funny,
mysterious actors and actresses. I just had black words on
a white page. So that I'm getting used to. That
was a lot to learn.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, people like all your writers like, yeah,
it's solitary, you know.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
Yeah it is. It was funny going back into because
fourteen years of Blue Bloods, I was around one hundred
people every day closely, you know, interacting with that, you know,
at least half the crew, and all of a sudden
you're alone in a room making stuff up. It's very different.
It's different to get back to.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
That, right, So, did you have to develop a routine
that didn't get up in the morning or did you
do in the afternoon? Did how did you.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Always said the same routine, which is just sit your
ass down, do your pages. Hopefully they're done by three
or four. And it's a job. I mean, I was it.
I've always thought and anybody who ever asked or when
I've talked to kids, don't go walking on the beach
waiting for inspiration. Don't tell your novel over a barstool
(30:59):
or your screenplay at a dinner party, sit down and
write it and finish it, and so that's been I
learned that a long long time ago. That's the only
way stuff gets done and you get paid right.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
There, you go, yeah, yeah, you know. So it is different.
But I did find in reading that again, there were
certain things that are reminded me of of your cinematic experience.
I guess one of your reviewers talked about your cinematic prose,
and I think that that's that's true extent. I mean,
the use of flashbacks and ways to you know, fill
(31:35):
in and go back and forth. I think, you know,
also creates a little you know, you see it on
the film now too, you know, because the scene goes
through and then seft goes five years earlier, you know,
and you can fill in the background. Did you find
yourself thinking about those techniques.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
I thought, yes, I don't. I'm not a big fan
of flashbacks in movies or TV, at least in the
modern era. I was a rookie novelist and I didn't
have enough plot to tell it all in present day
linear fashion. But I also felt like, if you're going
(32:09):
to care about this mystery, you're going to have to
care about one or more of the characters. So I
felt the license to bring you back to when they
formed these friendships, or they first trusted after each other,
or any number of scenes that are in Johnny Careless
that serve the purpose of investing in those characters and
(32:30):
what happens to them. You know, one of them is dead,
one of them is divorced from the dead one, and
one of them was a good buddy of the dead
one for most of his adult life. So I wanted
to I thought that readers should know how that all
that happened and maybe relate to some of it.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Yeah, yeah, I think. But I thought it was effective
because you you need to fill in that, and it's
hard to do it in straight chronological prose because also
it's not really how the mind works a lot of times.
So you're in the present and then you're in the past,
and you bring up the past again.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
So I think people do it beautifully. They're just way
better writers than I am. So I made my own
little trick and it was really that felt like a
good thing. And there's a wonderful if any of the
any of you out there are thinking of writing a
novel there's a wonderful guide from Elmore Leonard, who was
(33:21):
a wonderful crime novelist and Johns for many years, and
it's on one page. It's Elmore Leonard's ten rules for writing,
and the last one is try to leave out the
parts that the reader tends to skip over. There's some
other gems in there, but that was the one that
(33:43):
was the most useful to me was you don't need
to know what kind of pattern is on the couch
or what kind of you know, fork is next to
the asparagus. And that was really helpful in trying to
keep it quote unquote cinematic, just like like I'll give
you the essential information and then I'm going to move
the camera right right.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Yeah, Okay, wells, folks, Again, I'm sorry we have to
take another short, broke short break. When we come back, though,
we'll be talking much more en last segment with Kevin Wade,
the former executive producer, showrunner of Blue Bloods and now
a novelist with the crime thriller Johnny Carless, So folks
(34:24):
will be back sorely. Don't go anywhere, No Doctor.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
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(34:48):
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(35:31):
and coach John M. Hawkins reveals strategies to help gain perspective,
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Speaker 3 (35:41):
John M.
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Hawkins new book, Coached to Greatness Unlock your Full Potential
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(36:05):
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(36:27):
in radio.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
Welcome back, folks, this is Ron Roel on Bowl Brave
TV forty five Forward of the host and we're talking
with Kevin Wade, formerly with Blue Bloods and now a
novelist with a crime filler Tony Careless. Before we continue, folks,
and I wan't to let you know tell your friends
and colleagues if they missed this live show, don't worry.
(36:50):
They can find replays on my playlist and Bowl Brave
TV it's YouTube channel, or just click on my forty
five forward playlist and you can to find it on
Spotify and Apple Podcasts and most major streaming platforms. So
before the break, we were talking about Kevin's novel and
about you know, just some of the process of writing it,
(37:15):
writing flashbacks, some of the differences, but there's regular cinematic experiences.
So I want to talk a little about the themes that,
you know, the underlying themes, which which I really enjoyed too,
which was really getting into the culture of the north
shore of Rhode Island, which for me, I do think,
(37:35):
you know, as you point in sort of a microcosm.
It's it's our area, but it's it's a microcosm about
you know, often about class and what you call social
tribes and the intersection of them. So talk about that
a little bit. You know you thought about that theme, Well.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
I think it's if you have your eyes and ears
open and you live around here, were a certain areas
outside of Washington, d c. Or Gross Pointe, Michigan, or
Beverly Hills, California, are a million other places we could name,
and just in America, there's usually a shape to society
(38:12):
that has has and have nots in some way that
is a service class and a ruling class or whatever
it is. When I was a kid in high school
they had us read The Great Gatsby, and I was
one of the few that was a sign that I thought,
this is good and easy to read. And I've read
(38:33):
it every two or three years ever since. I've probably
read it twenty times or so. So when I moved here,
it is East Egg and West Egg. The North or
the Gold Coast is what Fitzgerald was writing about. It
was one hundred years ago, I think two or three
days ago that The Great Gatsby was published, and when
(38:55):
I moved here it stuck with it. It was very obvious,
very quickly that a lot of those dynamics were still
at play every single day, slightly changed mostly by music,
fashion and the automobiles, the roots of them were still around.
And so when it came time to think about a book,
I thought, I don't want you just have a dead
(39:17):
guy and find out how he got dead. And so
just kind of went out and thought, well, it'd be
fun to examine this as if I were writing a
novel novel, not just a thriller cop novel.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah, yeah, I like you. I remember reading The Great
Gatsby in eleventh grade in high school part of American
myth you know, and read a little your canon of
catching the rye and you know, and gats people one
of them. But it did, it did, I don't know.
It just really affected me. And as a matter of fact,
(39:52):
between my junior and senior year, I actually went out.
I was the editor of my high school paper, and
I said, I want to write about this. So we
actually went out to West Egg looking for Gatsby's mansion.
And of course it was probably a compositive several places,
but we actually found a place that fit through the description,
(40:14):
and we we you know, trepidation, walked up to the
front door, knocked on it and said, we're not don't
worry where, We're not here. We're just looking for Gatsby's
house and this, you know, and and they said, yeah,
this is one of them that we think. Well, so
they took us inside and they took us around, like okay,
(40:35):
well this is interesting, you know. But it did have
that kind of pull, and I think it was part
of it is like you're you're finding you know, wow,
this is something that I read about is actually here.
So there there's that pull to it. But but also
there was about I don't know if it's you know,
(40:55):
when when you talk about the different class differences, but
also the psychological differences of longing and yearning for the
past and trying to you know, deal with that and
trying to salvage it or trying to make sense of it.
And you know, I think that that's so it has
a c it's but it's not just nostalgia. It's a
(41:15):
it's a different kind of longing, you know.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
Yeah. I mean fitz Sheld got all those dynamic he
got sex and money, and the city versus the country,
he got sort of everything, and he did it in
like one hundred and seventy five pages. You know, it's
a it's a very slim novel today and they would
say that's that's a novella, f Scott, you know, but
(41:41):
it's it's an astonishing achievement that is fresh one hundred
years later.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did, I did, you know, I
did find myself thinking about it, and yeah, then i'd
suw like you like, wow, this is the one hundredth
anniversary of Gatsby being published, you know, and as often happens,
like people didn't think much of it when it came out,
you know, and here we are, you know, one hundred
(42:09):
years later.
Speaker 3 (42:10):
Yeah, it's the one. Yeah, yes it is. Yeah, my friend.
I'll tell you one quick funny story. My friend Doug
produced the latest movie of the Great Gatsby, which was
with Leo DiCaprio, and they shot it all in Australia
because they got some money to do it. But there
were some young American you know, young American college age
(42:31):
production assistance on it. And one of them came up
to Doug one day and said, what made you want
to do a movie of the Great Gatsby? And Doug said, well,
Fitzgerald and I were roommates in college. And the guy said, wow,
that must be so cool that you're doing his book,
and it was that thing of like he was. It
(42:53):
was as someone who would say, twenty one thinks all
old guys are the same age. They're just really idea
to him, Fitzgial could have gone to college in the
sixties or seventies instead of the nineteen fifteen or whatever
it was.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
He was at Princeton, right right, yeah, yeah, So any
surprises that you know that came out of your experience,
but either either with blue Buds or with your break
into novels.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
No surprise novel I putting a book out is by
far the most retail experience I've ever been involved in,
even when I was when I was twenty five, I
wrote my first play. It debuted in a ninety nine
seat off off Broadway theater. All of that was taken
care of, partly because there's actors in it, and perhaps
(43:53):
the theater has a building or a company that's known.
A novel is a complete startup if you're a new
book writer, if you're an unknown novelist with his first book.
So the retail aspect of it, I mean, I think
if I were to call up McMillan Publishing tomorrow and
say send me two hundred copies, I'm going to load
(44:15):
up the trunk of the car and go door to door,
they would go, that's a great idea, that's fantastic, because
it really is very, very retail. So I certainly understand now,
at the later end of the game, why so many
(44:35):
of our great writers, especially even tending towards literary, but
even some thriller writers have jobs as college professors or
classes or take on editing assignments because it's very hard
to make. There's an old saying about the theater that
certainly goes for this. You can't make a living, but
you can make a killing. But make a living part
(44:58):
I think is probably very hard in novel writing.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Yeah, yeah, I think we had a previous conversation about
this in terms of advice for people going into the field,
and I think you said, don't do.
Speaker 3 (45:10):
It is always that, But yeah, I think no, No,
I would never discourage anyone from doing that. The important
thing to remember and I and hopefully it's the thing
that lifts you up and frees you up. Every story
has been told. We just talked about the Great Gatsby
(45:31):
vis a vis what I was thinking of when I
wrote Johnny Careless. Not that they are comparable in any way,
but every story has been told. Every story you could
possibly think of has been done dozens of not hundreds
or thousands of times. The only thing that makes it
different and why you should do it is because it
would be in your voice. No one's ever written that
(45:53):
story in that voice. And that's it. When I talked
to film schools and college kids and all sorts of
stuff over all the years, that's the that's the key
to it. The story won't be new, it'll feel new
to you, but I'll give you ten examples off the
top of my head. Why it's like The Wizard of
(46:13):
Oz or the Dirty Dozen or on the Waterfront. The
important thing is that you're the writer this time, so
it will be new. And I think anybody sits down
to write a story has to remember that every day
and every page.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Yeah, well, you're right, I think there are There are
just a certain number of stories. But but they're they're
interesting updating of them, you know, and and relevance to it.
So you know, so I did you know when you're
talking about you know, Tony Careless, I mean just the
element of you know, it was interested. So you picked
(46:47):
that name, you know, ply his nickname. But I think
that tells something about the time we're living in and
about how that connects with you know, the class differences
in Fitzgerald's time. But but that persists today. I mean,
I think there is you know, that's it's an interesting
and bigous word. And so did you think a lot
(47:08):
about that about you know that your choice of it.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
I just tried to come up with a cool title,
I really did, and then I kind of reverse engineered it.
But I mean, when Fitzgerald wrote about Tom, Tom and Daisy,
but especially Tom Buchanany wrote about how he just left
a mess in his wake and didn't there and someone
would pick up after him, you know. And I've watched
(47:34):
people around here is I'm sure you have, or friends
of our kids or whatever, and that's how they get
to go through life, especially in their younger years. It'll
be taken care of.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Right, yeah, and even in the later years some people
like that there they're careless in many dimensions of the work,
you know, and that's something we need to deal with
as a society, you know, what to deal with that
kind of carelessness Karen versus careless, you know.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
So I think that's sit down. You write a police
novel about it.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah, Karma, Yeah, yeah, So this is another chapter. So
now you're going to write it. You're going to keep going, right, I'm.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
Going to keep going. I last last summer, after Blue
Bloods was over, I took another two months where I went,
it's nice to be free, and then about sixty days
in went, aren't I supposed to be doing something for
four or five hours a day? So I started a
second like it's not a sequel, but the same main character,
(48:36):
Jeepe Mulaine, a local police chief, in his late thirties,
and it's called Pirate Jenny. I sent the first six
or seven chapters on to McMillan to see if they
had any interest. They bought it off, the first six
or seven chapters. So I'll finish it in a month
or two since then, So, yeah, it's a lot longer
than writing the first one. The first one idea what
(48:59):
I was doing. The second one, I have just the
slightest idea what I'm doing. So then you have all
the self doubt that you're not doing it right.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
Where would we be without self doubt?
Speaker 3 (49:12):
That's exactly right if she keeps going.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
And what about no interest in taking another dive at.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
No, you know, even if I did, I'm I'll be
honest with you. I mean not to leave this room.
But I turned seventy one last month. And Hollywood is
a notoriously agist business for very good reason, because it's
it's absolutely true. So the idea of going with my
(49:44):
hat in hand to movie studios or television studios and
saying I've got something that the young people are just
going to eat up is a pool's errand. And so
I had a very nice run and a place at
the table for a long time between movies and television.
I'm just not going to monkey with it.
Speaker 2 (50:04):
Yeah yeah, yeah, hopefully though, I you know, you see
little pieces of you know, older folks, you know, in
TV and theater. I think that I think that people
are catching up a little bit to the reality of demographics.
Speaker 3 (50:21):
Mostly actors, no I'm talking about I mean, then there
are some wonderful directors who still work who are older
than I am considerably, but listen, famously, the roles dwindled
out for actresses once they hit thirty five. You know,
the old jukes. You're the ingenue, and then then you're
the mother of the ingenue, and then you're the judge
(50:44):
in the divorce court in the movie. For writers, you know,
once in television certainly, but in film, everybody runs the
business is in their twenties and thirties, so you're coming.
There's just a barrier to entry. That's there's a barrier
at entry when you're young, because you're trying to get
(51:05):
into a door that everybody wants to get in. There's
a barrier at entry when you're older because the people
run in the shops you're their parents' age, right, just
the way it goes. It always has been. You know,
there's a long way of me saying I'm very grateful
to have a second novel to write.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
Good good, I'm more grateful that you are doing it,
so I appreciate that. Yeah, So let's see anything that
I haven't asked you that you want to mention in
terms of final thoughts about.
Speaker 3 (51:38):
Not really, this has been. It's been wonderful to talk
to you. I don't you know I've I've been extremely lucky.
But if there's any lesson in the way I've been.
I was a playwright in my twenties. I wrote movies
in my thirties and forties. The movie phone stopped ringing
when I was about fifty. I started trying to write
(51:59):
televis and then was blessed with a long, long run
at Blue Blood's. The only through line is trying to
write stuff in my voice, trying to write stuff that
I thought people would like to see, and to sit
your butt down in front of some sort of keyboard
or writing pad and do it almost every day and
(52:22):
most of all finish stuff right. So it's not very mysterious.
It's mysterious as to who likes what and how something
becomes popular, which is out of your sphere, you.
Speaker 2 (52:35):
Know, absolutely, yeah, yeah, well, I'm glad you've done it.
I think it's been a really nice series of chapters.
And that's sort of the way I do my show.
I think about it that way. And you know, I
think that people, you know, one of my models is,
you know, plan but don't predict. You know, you don't
(52:55):
know what's gonna happen, but to keep out of it.
And I think it's you know, that's my of you know,
for people who want to be writers as and you
know what, there's one rule, right, and keep writing and finish.
I think that's important. Yes, yeah, and you can go
back and revise it. You know, a lot of what
I realized that how much of my work was actually
(53:17):
to say, well, just get it down and then go back.
And it's it's in the revision process of the gestation
process that things get you know, worked out, and you
see things you didn't see before. But at any rate,
so listen, Kevin, this has been fun. I really appreciate
your being in the show. Thanks for a terrific conversation.
I hope you gave some thoughts for people who are
(53:38):
thinking about this and basically I want them to to know,
so basically they can find your books at bookstores and Amazon.
This absolutely there, It is there.
Speaker 3 (53:51):
It is Johnny Carroless from McMillan, available in hardcover kindle
and a very well done audiobook I available wherever first
novels are sold.
Speaker 2 (54:04):
Terrific, terrific. Okay. And if people want to get in
touch with you, they do it through McMillan or through.
Speaker 3 (54:11):
Through McMillan or I believe it's called at It's at
Kevin Wade on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (54:17):
Okay, very good at Kevin Wade and instagam great. Okay. So, folks,
thanks again for spending this hour with me and helping
me learn and grow and appreciate stories about how we
can make our second half of life even better than
the first. Be sure of join me next Wednesday, seven
(54:38):
pm Eastern time. I want to be talking with Brian Zimmerman,
who's the owner of a gardening design consulting business, who
will talk about his mindful approach to sustainable gardening and
health and stimulation and social benefits, particularly as we get older.
So folks, until then, keep moving forward. Forty five forward.
Speaker 1 (55:04):
This has been forty five forward with host Ron Roell.
Tune in each week as Ron tackles the many aspects
of health, finance, family and friends, housing, work, and personal pursuits,
all as part of an integrated plan and to take
charge of your unretiring life during these uncertain times. Wednesdays,
(55:28):
seven pm Eastern on the Bold Brave TV Network, powered
by B two Studios
Welcome to forty five Forward with host, journalist and speaker
Ron row Out. Ron's mission is to make your second
half of life even better than your first. Most of
us are just approaching our half life when we reach
the mid forties, with many productive years ahead. Ron is
here to help prepare us for this kind of longevity
(00:35):
by providing vital strategies to shift the traditional waiting for
retirement model to a continuous, evolving journey of compelling life chapters.
So now please welcome the host of forty five Forward,
Ron row Out.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Hello, everyone, welcome to forty five Forward on Bold Brave TV.
This is your host, Ron Roell. Now, if you're from
my generation of older TV watchers, there was a time
at least before DVRs and streaming services totally upended the
weekly viewing habits we all had that Friday nights for
me were frequently reserved to watch no not Friday night Football,
(01:31):
but the police hit show Blue bloods Now. While the
show recently completed his fourteen year run, its executive producer
and showrunner Kevin Wade, thankfully for us, has not retired.
He started another chapter in his writing career with a
recent debut of a terrific crime thiller Johnny Careless. So
in today's show, Kevin will take us through his time
(01:53):
with Blue Bloods, as well as his wide ranging career
before that as playwright, actor, screenwriter, TV producer that shape
division for the show. And of course he'll talk about
how he made his transition as a novelist and developed
a world, a new world of characters for Johnny Carroless.
So now let's meet our guest, Kevin Wade. Kevin, Welcome
(02:14):
to the show.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Ron, Thanks for having me. Nice to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
It's a pleasure to have you. So, as I mentioned
in the introduction, this is a I found it a
very compelling new novel. It's a fast read. I had
to you know, I did read it, and I saved
it for reading before bed, and I had to sort
of stop myself, like, Okay, don't save some for tomorrow.
(02:41):
I know you want to keep reading it, but wait
for tomorrow. So we'll talk about how I developed the novel.
But first let's talk a bit about the Blue Blood's
And you know you've had a fourteen year run. I
guess you started in the second season as the show runner, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
I came on to it. I had known Tom Selleck.
I'd worked with Tom on a movie called Mister Baseball
in Japan in the mid nineties, and Leonard Goldberg, who
created Blue Bloods, ran twentieth Century Fox when they made
a movie called Working Girl that I had written. So
i'd worked with them both literally back in the last
(03:21):
century and starting up Blue Bloods. And a friend of
mine said, you know, they're both here. They'd love you
to come in and talk to them. Have you seen
the show? Blah blah blah. I went in, I talked
to them. I had some ideas, and they were freely
admitting that they didn't really know what to do with
Tom Seleck's character, the commissioner, and I gave them my
(03:46):
little elevator pitch, and I think I started the next
day and I wrote two or three of the episodes
in the first season, including the first season finale, And
after that kind of jumping in, Leonard asked me to
start what they call show running the second season. Then
(04:07):
I ended up doing it for thirteen years.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Wow. Yeah, So what does that mean? Kevin is a
showrunners also executive producer. So what's the difference.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
It's a great question and almost unanswerable it's a made
up term. There is no Writer's Guild of America contract
that says showrunner. You have never watched a TV show
and seen the credits crawl at the end where it
says show runner, And so I always says executive producer.
It's a placement. It really. It means essentially two things.
(04:38):
You are the head writer, and you are the ambassador
between the writing staff and the scripting portion of a
show and the actors and their needs, and then everything
kind of flows from there. So for me, it was
chief cook and bottle washer, backseat driver, casting, final say, editing,
(05:02):
final say. A lot of things that I could do
just mediocre, but paid attention and had great people around me.
So I did a lot of stuff that was interesting
and a lot of fun on it.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Yeah, now you hadn't done a police show before, you know,
But so how did you learn a little bit about
this world?
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Two ways. I'd been reading detective police fiction, action spy,
but mostly detective stories. I'd read, you know, since I
was a kid, since my dad he was a big
fan of a guy named Joseph Wombau who wrote a
novel The Onion Field The New Centurions. He was an
ex LAPD guy with an enormous gift for writing and
(05:47):
almost a David Mammett ear for dialogue, and so I
started with that. I got turned on at Raymond Chandler
and John D. McDonald and I won't to go through
the list, but I've been reading this stuff since I
was a kid, and when I sat down to write
my first Blue Blood script, it occurred to me, what
you just said. You had no idea what you were doing.
(06:09):
You've done this before. But by page two or three,
I was like, oh, yeah, I've read a million of these.
I know how supposed to move. I know that the
dialogue should have a lot of muscle in it and
mustard on it, and so I just kind of, you know,
didn't worry about it and started doing it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yeah, So I've you know, before Blue Bloods, I had
watched you know a number of shows. I liked NYPD
Blue and you know, so and I I was actually
in college. I was a student of David Milch. Soon
I knew him a bit.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
That's right, I forgot. We've talked about that, yes.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but your show was different for me,
and it seemed I'm trying to think of the right word,
and maybe you'll know what the right but my word
is like more fulsome you know, there are a lot
of you know, shows where you know, focuses on sort
of mail orient it's on these detectives. It's sort of
their dysfunctionality, and they're dedicated, they're sort of you know,
(07:13):
you know, I kind of classic and so forth. But
your characters seem to you know, and maybe this is
part of your broader background as a playwright and an actor,
and you know you've worked on shows that featured women characters.
Did you think about that when you were creating these characters.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
We had two marching orders, really, one of them from
Leonard Goldberg, and Leonard sold the show to CBS by referencing,
and I believe brought it into his meeting with Leslie
moon Bess a reproduction of Norman rock Wells. I forget
what the painting is called, but it's that Thanksgiving. It's
(07:53):
that everyone's around the table and there's a beautifully done turkey.
And he said, I want to do a show that's
that has the drive of a police procedural but has
it it's a family, so it has the element of
a family drama as well as a police drama. They've
got a police two police commissioners, one former, a detective,
(08:18):
a rookie when we started, a rookie beat cop, and
an assistant district attorney with the Manhattan DA's office. So
it was really that was the Those were the marching orders.
And I was very aware from the start of the
time slot frankly on Friday night at ten pm. Traditionally
(08:40):
it had been a good launching pad for cop shows
and for medical shows. I thought, if we lean into
the family stuff, maybe we get a bigger audience than
just the guys watching. Maybe they are watch maybe they
watch with their daughter, you know. So we were aware
of that of trying to it's a it's listen, it's
(09:01):
a death slot Friday night at ten o'clock until we
got on right, it just was. So we did that,
and towards the end of the first year I was
working on it, I was driving work one day and
I remember the show from when I'm going to say
I was a kid and maybe you were a littler
kid called Bonanza. Bonanza was on Sunday nights, I believe,
(09:24):
on NBC, and it was when you boil it down.
It was about a widowed father and his three sons
keeping the peace in the area where they lived. In
that case, it was the Ponderosa Ranch in Colorado. In
this case, it was a bunch of Catholics in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
But it was kind of the same thing. And I
(09:45):
called up one of the assistants and said, look on
the internet, there's going to be a synopsis of all
those years of Bonanza episodes. We can steal them. The
statutations is up, so somebody reads. It wasn't that much
I could use, but it was fun to go. This
thing has a father and a grandfather. You know, it's
(10:06):
part of television history of mashing together two things to
make a third thing.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we were Our family was a big
watcher bands, and my parents loved it. They had four
sons instead of three. But it resonates, you know, but
it's not so easy to pull off sometimes, you know,
it's to do a kind of show like that without
turning into the Waltons, you know, it takes some finesse.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
You know. It really helped that we were surrounded by
and real life and YPD. We lived and shot on
the streets of New York. We had a guy named
James NUSSFORO Jimmy Nusfuero, who was a decorated x NYPD
detective who was our tech advisor, and he one phoned
it in. He was there every day on set or
(10:53):
in the writer's office, keeping it real, show us exactly
how this could or could not happen, and we obeyed him,
and it became kind of a point of pride for
when you would meet a cop, or a cop would
come up and see you work a couple blue bloods,
we always wonder how you get that stuff right? And
(11:13):
I give them Jimmy, but it was a great I
always imagine if you worked on the medical show, the
highest compliment you could get was a doctor coming up
saying that's exactly how I'd do a triple bypass, you know.
So we tried to pay attention to.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
That right right. The other I aspect I liked about
it is that your women characters seem also, you know,
more interesting and develop. You know, a lot of shows,
you know, they seem to me that you know, yes,
there's been a lot of cultural change in the police
force about bringing women, but a lot of characters you know,
do seem a little forced and jammed in there and
(11:49):
you know, I don't know for diversity purposes, but whatever,
but if you know, but yours seemed to fit in better.
And I was wondering whether obviously a lot of people
working with you, but did your and experiences working on
projects like Cash Me a Mafia and Working Girl, they
you know, sort of informed that you could really develop
(12:10):
women characters better.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Better. I'll leave I'll take the compliment and leave up
up to the audience. I did. I was struck when
when I wrote Working Girl, it occurred to me, just
write the women characters the way you would write them
if they were men. Don't make excuses for or don't
(12:35):
soften things because you think you're writing a female character.
Write dialogue as you would for a guy, and see
what it looks like coming out of, you know, on
a woman. And it seemed to it seemed to be
a good rule of thumb, because rarely have I gotten
complaints from actresses saying she's so mamby pamby, or she
(12:57):
said that I try to give them just as much
muscle and and risk as I would a guy.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Right, yeah, yeah. And the other thing that struck me
two is, you know, there was a you know what,
I just called myself as a writer, sort of a
writerly quality to the dialogue. And again it seemed like
you were you know, yeah, you were a playwright as well,
and you were an actor, and I think so your
(13:24):
your command of dialogue I thought was pretty exceptional and
it came across authentically.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
It's and you put the two together. It's both stage
plays and teleplays. Television dramas are largely dependent on the
muscle and the mustard in the dialogue because most television,
most television, when you get to the crucial part of
(13:53):
the scene, it's shot and or it's it's edited to
be pretty much the way you and I are talking
right now in a medium closer on the stage, you
don't you can't show the car chase, nor would you try.
You're not even gonna write the car chase. You're going
to write right before the car chase, or write the aftermath,
(14:13):
and it's going to be two or three people going,
we got to do this, or boy did we screw
that up? And so that has to have the urgency
of the off stage action, but keep the audience pulled
in and excited.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Yeah right, well that went fast. But we have to
take a short break now, Kevin, but folks will be
right back very soon. Talking much more with Kevin Wade,
the former executive producer and showrunner of the hit police
drama Blue Bloods, who recently completed the fourteen year run
and as debuted as a novelist with a crime thrill
(14:48):
thriller Johnny Carroless. So folks don't go anywhere. We have
much more with Kevin Wade.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
Mike Zurich are three time California state champion in Greco
Roman wrestling at one hundred and fourteen pounds. Mike blind
SI's birth was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a
six time national placer, including two seconds, two thirds, and
two fourths. He also won the Veteran's Folk Style Wrestling
(15:15):
twice at one hundred and fifty two pounds. In all
these tournaments, he was the only blind competitor. Nancy Zurich
a creative spirit whose talents have taken her to the
stage and into galleries and exhibitions in several states. Her father,
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and helped her fine tune. Her natural abilities influenced her
(15:38):
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a fruitful career doing what she loves. Listen Saturday mornings
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heartwarming stories and interesting talk on the BBM Global Network.
Speaker 5 (15:55):
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Has caregiving become exhausting and emotionally draining? Are you an
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(16:17):
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(16:38):
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Speaker 2 (16:57):
Welcome back, folks. This is Ron Roell talking today with
Kevin Wade, the former executive producer of Blue Bloods and
now a novelist with a terrific crime thriller, Johnny Careless.
Before the break, we were talking to Kevin about his
writing career and just I was asking about his approach
to dialogue and writing and his you know, basically authentic
(17:18):
approach to his dialogue. And I was just recalling, you know,
as we were talking, my own very brief career as
a so called filmmaker in graduate school. And I made
a fourteen minute documentary black and White, so that'll tell
you a little bit about when. But I remember this
(17:39):
one very sobering moment with my professor, who was a
documentary filmmaker, and I was describing the scene that I
was talking about, and he said, what's going on in
the scene? And I just described it to him and
he just sort of gave me this blank look. He said, well,
I don't see it in your head, but you know
(18:03):
it's not there. It's got to be there, you know,
so I think that you know it's from a writer,
you know, to you know, being on screen, you've got
to really show it in a different way, you know,
and you can do flashbacks and things like that, but
it's you really need to have a command for what,
you know, still a visual form. People are looking at it,
and you've got to have it there right in front
(18:25):
of them.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
You have to, I mean, they'd be dramatic right without
boring your audience, but you have to have two or
more people in a room and they have opposite needs.
One has something that the other wants and that a
person will not give it to them, and it all
kind of grows from there. And as much as you
can come into that scene as late as possible without
(18:50):
the audience being in the dark, and leave before it's resolved.
Because you're telling a story, you're not telling a scene
that has a beginning, middle, and end and that parts over.
So the building blocks are relatively simple if you and
if you're writing a play or a movie, they have
their own pragmatic needs. In television, in Blue Bloods, we
(19:14):
were telling three or four stories an episode, so you
have to be very aware of pacing and interlocking these
three or four stories, which sometimes meant that each story
only got four or five or six scenes often, so
you were very aware of just it had to be
incredibly economical without being without short thrifting the audience.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Right, yeah, yeah, Now talking about short thrifting your life,
it's hard when you're doing it. You know, a season
like this, the schedule must be incredibly demanding. I mean,
for me, just doing a weekly podcast is a lot.
I'm like, I can't imagine you know, doing it. So
(19:58):
tell me a little bit about that life.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
What was that. It's a big piece of machinery. On
the given day, you've got about two hundred and forty
in crew, including the actors. On the other given day,
you've got those two forty plus anywhere from fifty to
three hundred extras will hopeful them have to be dressed, fed,
made up, transported and sheltered. So you're doing it on
(20:24):
your stages. It's a little bit of an easier day.
But for the showrunner, you've got at any given time,
you've got five scripts in some stage of development, two
or three or four episodes in some stage of either
pre production or post production, which is scoring it, editing,
it sound, mixing it, et cetera, et cetera. I won't
(20:46):
get into all the weeds. But for my job, started
early on Monday morning and the week ended. Usually I
would clock it by the second NFL football game on
Sunday off at about four point thirty on Sunday, and
had Sunday Day. But otherwise I was either writing or
I was doing all the other things that I do. Wow,
(21:10):
So it's a long week, and it's a lot, you know.
And when you go out on location, you're moving, it's
a small army. You're in tractor trailers, you're taking over
blocks and blocks just for parking to be on location.
You've got church basements or whatever to do hair makeup,
and you've got another church basement to feed people. So
it's a lot of logistics.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Right right, And how long is it was a season?
You know, when did it start? When did it finish?
Speaker 3 (21:37):
For the writers, it started in It started in June
and ended the following May, April or May, depending on
where you were in the rotation. For the For the showrunner,
it started in around Memorial Day and did the following
the beginning of the end of May. The following year,
(21:58):
there was about two weeks off, yeah, which for most
people that most people worked like that, but they were
long weeks. The showrunner always has something going on. There's
always something hanging out there that needs to be dealt with.
Speaker 6 (22:12):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Wow, And then you've got an unintended break with the
writer's strike, right.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Or I guess pandemic and then the writers strike.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, sort of coincidentally, given the woman
I had on last week's show was a registered nurse
who actually worked on the pandemic and she worked on
some of the sets. Think that she mentioned that, right, Yeah,
Dane Curly, so she was she was, I guess a
compliance officer, you know.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
Yeah, we had. We called them COVID cops. They were difficult.
They had a difficult job. We could not stand. They
were nice people, but their reason for being there was
to make sure that your mask was over your nose.
And when we started, we not only a mask, but
we had like welders arcing plexiglass. And you're trying to
(23:05):
communicate intimately with an actor or from writer to actor
or actor to actor, that's very difficult.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
It was very, very difficult process that first year of
under COVID protocols. Yeah, and to your point, a couple
of years later, we had the writers and actors strike
that went on way longer I think anyone intended or expected.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, but it was during that time. As the saying goes,
never never waste a good crisis, and you use that
time to to basically do what you had been thinking
about for quite a while, which was to write a novel.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Yeah. Yeah, i'd been. I was so I had I
was so used to writing on network TV deadlines that
after a couple of months of strike vacation, I found
I was like, there's four or five hours a day
where I was saying, like, shouldn't I be doing something?
There's something I'm usually doing, And I thought, I just
(24:09):
try and write a novel, you know, just try keep
it simple. I set it around where you and I live.
I had enough cop lore and NYPD stuff in my head,
and I lived in the north shore of Long Island
for twenty two years by that, so I knew. I
knew all the names and addresses and kind of the
(24:31):
dynamics of it.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Yeah. Yeah, it was fun for me to read it
in that sense, because you know, obviously you change some
of the things around, but there was enough references. I'm like,
I've been there. It was it was nice, but it
also again you know, it made it authentic for me,
you know, and it showed like, as you know, write
(24:54):
what you know, and that's what you know and what
you didn't know you talk the police consultants about.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, and when the third thing is whatever, neither of
them knew me or them. I just made them up,
you know. So you have that license too, that's right.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Who's going to check? We's going to challenge me on that? Yeah,
And it's fiction.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
So silly, it's right in the couver. It says a novel,
that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Yeah. So you mentioned before you love detective novels. Were
there anyone in particular that you were thinking about. I mean, like,
I know you've read Raymond Chandler, Michael Connolly, guys.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Michael Connolly is great. Robert B. Parker, who wrote the
Spencer series. Oh yeah, Jesse Stone series was terrific. The
biggest influence, sounds so writerly. The guy I admired the
series I admired the most was Travis McGee by John D. McDonald.
I believe there were twenty one of them, and they
(26:02):
didn't they weren't procedurals. They were just wonderful, the beautifully
written plots about a guy who's kind of a bounty
hunter salvage expert, lives in a house boat in Fort Lauderdale.
But every few pages in every one of those books,
it stops and the author takes over and explains why
(26:25):
it's such a tragedy that Florida is paving over the
everglades or high rises or a lot. He just would
go on through the creation of his character, and to me,
it was so much more involving because it took the
real life of everything that he was writing about, and
his hero was thinking about those things as he was
(26:46):
solving the crime or trying to find the killer or
trying to evade danger. And it felt to me like
I felt like I knew the character and the way
he thought, and I certainly felt like I knew the
way the author wanted to use this platform to sort
of go like, if you were sitting next to me
at dinner, here's what I'd be talking about. It was
(27:06):
very inviting, and I always loved them and I've reread
all of them, and so that was the That was
the key to me, is to make Jeep Mlane, the
hero of this book, somebody who you felt like you
sat next to on an airplane or or or next
to it at dinner, like you felt like, you.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Know, yeah, yeah, yeah, I liked them. You know, I
did find myself, you know, and I'm tell people how
he got his nickname Jeep. They can read the book
and find out. But I did find myself saying like, wow,
there are a lots Jeep, some Loe Island. Yes, never
(27:46):
saw Similars and so forth. But so what was the
what did you find was was different about the process?
Speaker 3 (27:54):
You know?
Speaker 2 (27:54):
I mean I liked you know, the I agree with you.
The pacing. I thought it was important. You know. I've
just seen too many acts, movies and books where it's
just like you're just it's just one race at for another.
And I think I think people enjoy the pacing and
kind of it's not relaxing, but it gives you a
sense of, you know, of well again, fulsomeness. You know,
(28:15):
there's a story here, and it's not just about catching
a killer.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
Right. The daunting aspects for me were really twofold. One
was just the sheer amount of words, candidly I'd never
tried to write one single page of prose before, so
sitting down and looking at a novel is supposed to
be around a minimum of seventy thousand words. I think
(28:41):
a screenplay and at teleplay is somewhere around seven thousand
and eight thousand, So it was a lot of words.
The second thing was it was just me. Everything else
I've done in my since I was twenty five, whether
it's a play or a movie or a television show,
you had a whole bunch of people you worked with.
(29:01):
It's a very collaborative business. You need a director, actors,
You need location managers and wardrobe specialists and hair and
makeup and all of it. If you write a book,
you're all of those things. So it took me a
little while to go, don't you've sat with them in
production meetings, you've known them, you've worked with them for
forty odd years. Imitate them. What is it that they
(29:24):
do that you need to do in this? So once
I got comfortable with that, it started to come a
little easier. The third thing is actors, I'd always written.
Everything I'd ever written didn't exist as something I wrote
for you to read. It existed as something for a
crew and a cast of actors to take and put
(29:46):
on film. So everything I wrote I didn't have sexy, charismatic, compelling, funny,
mysterious actors and actresses. I just had black words on
a white page. So that I'm getting used to. That
was a lot to learn.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, people like all your writers like, yeah,
it's solitary, you know.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
Yeah it is. It was funny going back into because
fourteen years of Blue Bloods, I was around one hundred
people every day closely, you know, interacting with that, you know,
at least half the crew, and all of a sudden
you're alone in a room making stuff up. It's very different.
It's different to get back to.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
That, right, So, did you have to develop a routine
that didn't get up in the morning or did you
do in the afternoon? Did how did you.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Always said the same routine, which is just sit your
ass down, do your pages. Hopefully they're done by three
or four. And it's a job. I mean, I was it.
I've always thought and anybody who ever asked or when
I've talked to kids, don't go walking on the beach
waiting for inspiration. Don't tell your novel over a barstool
(30:59):
or your screenplay at a dinner party, sit down and
write it and finish it, and so that's been I
learned that a long long time ago. That's the only
way stuff gets done and you get paid right.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
There, you go, yeah, yeah, you know. So it is different.
But I did find in reading that again, there were
certain things that are reminded me of of your cinematic experience.
I guess one of your reviewers talked about your cinematic prose,
and I think that that's that's true extent. I mean,
the use of flashbacks and ways to you know, fill
(31:35):
in and go back and forth. I think, you know,
also creates a little you know, you see it on
the film now too, you know, because the scene goes
through and then seft goes five years earlier, you know,
and you can fill in the background. Did you find
yourself thinking about those techniques.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
I thought, yes, I don't. I'm not a big fan
of flashbacks in movies or TV, at least in the
modern era. I was a rookie novelist and I didn't
have enough plot to tell it all in present day
linear fashion. But I also felt like, if you're going
(32:09):
to care about this mystery, you're going to have to
care about one or more of the characters. So I
felt the license to bring you back to when they
formed these friendships, or they first trusted after each other,
or any number of scenes that are in Johnny Careless
that serve the purpose of investing in those characters and
(32:30):
what happens to them. You know, one of them is dead,
one of them is divorced from the dead one, and
one of them was a good buddy of the dead
one for most of his adult life. So I wanted
to I thought that readers should know how that all
that happened and maybe relate to some of it.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Yeah, yeah, I think. But I thought it was effective
because you you need to fill in that, and it's
hard to do it in straight chronological prose because also
it's not really how the mind works a lot of times.
So you're in the present and then you're in the past,
and you bring up the past again.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
So I think people do it beautifully. They're just way
better writers than I am. So I made my own
little trick and it was really that felt like a
good thing. And there's a wonderful if any of the
any of you out there are thinking of writing a
novel there's a wonderful guide from Elmore Leonard, who was
(33:21):
a wonderful crime novelist and Johns for many years, and
it's on one page. It's Elmore Leonard's ten rules for writing,
and the last one is try to leave out the
parts that the reader tends to skip over. There's some
other gems in there, but that was the one that
(33:43):
was the most useful to me was you don't need
to know what kind of pattern is on the couch
or what kind of you know, fork is next to
the asparagus. And that was really helpful in trying to
keep it quote unquote cinematic, just like like I'll give
you the essential information and then I'm going to move
the camera right right.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Yeah, Okay, wells, folks, Again, I'm sorry we have to
take another short, broke short break. When we come back, though,
we'll be talking much more en last segment with Kevin Wade,
the former executive producer, showrunner of Blue Bloods and now
a novelist with the crime thriller Johnny Carless, So folks
(34:24):
will be back sorely. Don't go anywhere, No Doctor.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
RC will share extraordinary resources and services that promote educational
success as well as making a difference in the lives
of all social workers as well as the lives of children,
adolescents and teens of today. She will have open discussions
addressing many of the issues that we face about our
youth and how being employed in the uniquely skilled profession
(34:48):
of social work for over eighteen years has taught invaluable
lessons through her personal experiences. She will also provide real
life facts, examples and personal stories that will con that
why serving as a child advocate is extremely beneficial when
addressing the needs of the whole child. Listen Live to
Dare to Soar Saturdays ten am Eastern on the BBM
(35:11):
Global Network and tune in radio as Doctor RC will
provide thought provoking information that will empower, encourage and strengthen students,
families and communities across our nation. You can also visit
her at soarwith Katie dot Com. Author, radio show host
(35:31):
and coach John M. Hawkins reveals strategies to help gain perspective,
build confidence, find clarity, achieve goals.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
John M.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
Hawkins new book, Coached to Greatness Unlock your Full Potential
with Limitless Growth, published by I Universe, Hawkins reveals strategies
to help readers accomplish more. He believes the book can
coach them to greatness. Hawkins says that the best athletes
get to the top of their board with the help
of coaches, mentors, and others. He shares guidance that helps
(36:05):
readers reflect on what motivates them. We discover and assess
their core values, philosophies and competencies, find settings that allow
them to be the most productive, and track their progress
towards accomplishing goals. Listen to John Hawkins My Strategy Saturdays
one pm Eastern on the BBM Global Network and tune
(36:27):
in radio.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
Welcome back, folks, this is Ron Roel on Bowl Brave
TV forty five Forward of the host and we're talking
with Kevin Wade, formerly with Blue Bloods and now a
novelist with a crime filler Tony Careless. Before we continue, folks,
and I wan't to let you know tell your friends
and colleagues if they missed this live show, don't worry.
(36:50):
They can find replays on my playlist and Bowl Brave
TV it's YouTube channel, or just click on my forty
five forward playlist and you can to find it on
Spotify and Apple Podcasts and most major streaming platforms. So
before the break, we were talking about Kevin's novel and
about you know, just some of the process of writing it,
(37:15):
writing flashbacks, some of the differences, but there's regular cinematic experiences.
So I want to talk a little about the themes that,
you know, the underlying themes, which which I really enjoyed too,
which was really getting into the culture of the north
shore of Rhode Island, which for me, I do think,
(37:35):
you know, as you point in sort of a microcosm.
It's it's our area, but it's it's a microcosm about
you know, often about class and what you call social
tribes and the intersection of them. So talk about that
a little bit. You know you thought about that theme, Well.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
I think it's if you have your eyes and ears
open and you live around here, were a certain areas
outside of Washington, d c. Or Gross Pointe, Michigan, or
Beverly Hills, California, are a million other places we could name,
and just in America, there's usually a shape to society
(38:12):
that has has and have nots in some way that
is a service class and a ruling class or whatever
it is. When I was a kid in high school
they had us read The Great Gatsby, and I was
one of the few that was a sign that I thought,
this is good and easy to read. And I've read
(38:33):
it every two or three years ever since. I've probably
read it twenty times or so. So when I moved here,
it is East Egg and West Egg. The North or
the Gold Coast is what Fitzgerald was writing about. It
was one hundred years ago, I think two or three
days ago that The Great Gatsby was published, and when
(38:55):
I moved here it stuck with it. It was very obvious,
very quickly that a lot of those dynamics were still
at play every single day, slightly changed mostly by music,
fashion and the automobiles, the roots of them were still around.
And so when it came time to think about a book,
I thought, I don't want you just have a dead
(39:17):
guy and find out how he got dead. And so
just kind of went out and thought, well, it'd be
fun to examine this as if I were writing a
novel novel, not just a thriller cop novel.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah, yeah, I like you. I remember reading The Great
Gatsby in eleventh grade in high school part of American
myth you know, and read a little your canon of
catching the rye and you know, and gats people one
of them. But it did, it did, I don't know.
It just really affected me. And as a matter of fact,
(39:52):
between my junior and senior year, I actually went out.
I was the editor of my high school paper, and
I said, I want to write about this. So we
actually went out to West Egg looking for Gatsby's mansion.
And of course it was probably a compositive several places,
but we actually found a place that fit through the description,
(40:14):
and we we you know, trepidation, walked up to the
front door, knocked on it and said, we're not don't
worry where, We're not here. We're just looking for Gatsby's
house and this, you know, and and they said, yeah,
this is one of them that we think. Well, so
they took us inside and they took us around, like okay,
(40:35):
well this is interesting, you know. But it did have
that kind of pull, and I think it was part
of it is like you're you're finding you know, wow,
this is something that I read about is actually here.
So there there's that pull to it. But but also
there was about I don't know if it's you know,
(40:55):
when when you talk about the different class differences, but
also the psychological differences of longing and yearning for the
past and trying to you know, deal with that and
trying to salvage it or trying to make sense of it.
And you know, I think that that's so it has
a c it's but it's not just nostalgia. It's a
(41:15):
it's a different kind of longing, you know.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
Yeah. I mean fitz Sheld got all those dynamic he
got sex and money, and the city versus the country,
he got sort of everything, and he did it in
like one hundred and seventy five pages. You know, it's
a it's a very slim novel today and they would
say that's that's a novella, f Scott, you know, but
(41:41):
it's it's an astonishing achievement that is fresh one hundred
years later.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did, I did, you know, I
did find myself thinking about it, and yeah, then i'd
suw like you like, wow, this is the one hundredth
anniversary of Gatsby being published, you know, and as often happens,
like people didn't think much of it when it came out,
you know, and here we are, you know, one hundred
(42:09):
years later.
Speaker 3 (42:10):
Yeah, it's the one. Yeah, yes it is. Yeah, my friend.
I'll tell you one quick funny story. My friend Doug
produced the latest movie of the Great Gatsby, which was
with Leo DiCaprio, and they shot it all in Australia
because they got some money to do it. But there
were some young American you know, young American college age
(42:31):
production assistance on it. And one of them came up
to Doug one day and said, what made you want
to do a movie of the Great Gatsby? And Doug said, well,
Fitzgerald and I were roommates in college. And the guy said, wow,
that must be so cool that you're doing his book,
and it was that thing of like he was. It
(42:53):
was as someone who would say, twenty one thinks all
old guys are the same age. They're just really idea
to him, Fitzgial could have gone to college in the
sixties or seventies instead of the nineteen fifteen or whatever
it was.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
He was at Princeton, right right, yeah, yeah, So any
surprises that you know that came out of your experience,
but either either with blue Buds or with your break
into novels.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
No surprise novel I putting a book out is by
far the most retail experience I've ever been involved in,
even when I was when I was twenty five, I
wrote my first play. It debuted in a ninety nine
seat off off Broadway theater. All of that was taken
care of, partly because there's actors in it, and perhaps
(43:53):
the theater has a building or a company that's known.
A novel is a complete startup if you're a new
book writer, if you're an unknown novelist with his first book.
So the retail aspect of it, I mean, I think
if I were to call up McMillan Publishing tomorrow and
say send me two hundred copies, I'm going to load
(44:15):
up the trunk of the car and go door to door,
they would go, that's a great idea, that's fantastic, because
it really is very, very retail. So I certainly understand now,
at the later end of the game, why so many
(44:35):
of our great writers, especially even tending towards literary, but
even some thriller writers have jobs as college professors or
classes or take on editing assignments because it's very hard
to make. There's an old saying about the theater that
certainly goes for this. You can't make a living, but
you can make a killing. But make a living part
(44:58):
I think is probably very hard in novel writing.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Yeah, yeah, I think we had a previous conversation about
this in terms of advice for people going into the field,
and I think you said, don't do.
Speaker 3 (45:10):
It is always that, But yeah, I think no, No,
I would never discourage anyone from doing that. The important
thing to remember and I and hopefully it's the thing
that lifts you up and frees you up. Every story
has been told. We just talked about the Great Gatsby
(45:31):
vis a vis what I was thinking of when I
wrote Johnny Careless. Not that they are comparable in any way,
but every story has been told. Every story you could
possibly think of has been done dozens of not hundreds
or thousands of times. The only thing that makes it
different and why you should do it is because it
would be in your voice. No one's ever written that
(45:53):
story in that voice. And that's it. When I talked
to film schools and college kids and all sorts of
stuff over all the years, that's the that's the key
to it. The story won't be new, it'll feel new
to you, but I'll give you ten examples off the
top of my head. Why it's like The Wizard of
(46:13):
Oz or the Dirty Dozen or on the Waterfront. The
important thing is that you're the writer this time, so
it will be new. And I think anybody sits down
to write a story has to remember that every day
and every page.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Yeah, well, you're right, I think there are There are
just a certain number of stories. But but they're they're
interesting updating of them, you know, and and relevance to it.
So you know, so I did you know when you're
talking about you know, Tony Careless, I mean just the
element of you know, it was interested. So you picked
(46:47):
that name, you know, ply his nickname. But I think
that tells something about the time we're living in and
about how that connects with you know, the class differences
in Fitzgerald's time. But but that persists today. I mean,
I think there is you know, that's it's an interesting
and bigous word. And so did you think a lot
(47:08):
about that about you know that your choice of it.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
I just tried to come up with a cool title,
I really did, and then I kind of reverse engineered it.
But I mean, when Fitzgerald wrote about Tom, Tom and Daisy,
but especially Tom Buchanany wrote about how he just left
a mess in his wake and didn't there and someone
would pick up after him, you know. And I've watched
(47:34):
people around here is I'm sure you have, or friends
of our kids or whatever, and that's how they get
to go through life, especially in their younger years. It'll
be taken care of.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Right, yeah, and even in the later years some people
like that there they're careless in many dimensions of the work,
you know, and that's something we need to deal with
as a society, you know, what to deal with that
kind of carelessness Karen versus careless, you know.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
So I think that's sit down. You write a police
novel about it.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah, Karma, Yeah, yeah, So this is another chapter. So
now you're going to write it. You're going to keep going, right, I'm.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
Going to keep going. I last last summer, after Blue
Bloods was over, I took another two months where I went,
it's nice to be free, and then about sixty days
in went, aren't I supposed to be doing something for
four or five hours a day? So I started a
second like it's not a sequel, but the same main character,
(48:36):
Jeepe Mulaine, a local police chief, in his late thirties,
and it's called Pirate Jenny. I sent the first six
or seven chapters on to McMillan to see if they
had any interest. They bought it off, the first six
or seven chapters. So I'll finish it in a month
or two since then, So, yeah, it's a lot longer
than writing the first one. The first one idea what
(48:59):
I was doing. The second one, I have just the
slightest idea what I'm doing. So then you have all
the self doubt that you're not doing it right.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
Where would we be without self doubt?
Speaker 3 (49:12):
That's exactly right if she keeps going.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
And what about no interest in taking another dive at.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
No, you know, even if I did, I'm I'll be
honest with you. I mean not to leave this room.
But I turned seventy one last month. And Hollywood is
a notoriously agist business for very good reason, because it's
it's absolutely true. So the idea of going with my
(49:44):
hat in hand to movie studios or television studios and
saying I've got something that the young people are just
going to eat up is a pool's errand. And so
I had a very nice run and a place at
the table for a long time between movies and television.
I'm just not going to monkey with it.
Speaker 2 (50:04):
Yeah yeah, yeah, hopefully though, I you know, you see
little pieces of you know, older folks, you know, in
TV and theater. I think that I think that people
are catching up a little bit to the reality of demographics.
Speaker 3 (50:21):
Mostly actors, no I'm talking about I mean, then there
are some wonderful directors who still work who are older
than I am considerably, but listen, famously, the roles dwindled
out for actresses once they hit thirty five. You know,
the old jukes. You're the ingenue, and then then you're
the mother of the ingenue, and then you're the judge
(50:44):
in the divorce court in the movie. For writers, you know,
once in television certainly, but in film, everybody runs the
business is in their twenties and thirties, so you're coming.
There's just a barrier to entry. That's there's a barrier
at entry when you're young, because you're trying to get
(51:05):
into a door that everybody wants to get in. There's
a barrier at entry when you're older because the people
run in the shops you're their parents' age, right, just
the way it goes. It always has been. You know,
there's a long way of me saying I'm very grateful
to have a second novel to write.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
Good good, I'm more grateful that you are doing it,
so I appreciate that. Yeah, So let's see anything that
I haven't asked you that you want to mention in
terms of final thoughts about.
Speaker 3 (51:38):
Not really, this has been. It's been wonderful to talk
to you. I don't you know I've I've been extremely lucky.
But if there's any lesson in the way I've been.
I was a playwright in my twenties. I wrote movies
in my thirties and forties. The movie phone stopped ringing
when I was about fifty. I started trying to write
(51:59):
televis and then was blessed with a long, long run
at Blue Blood's. The only through line is trying to
write stuff in my voice, trying to write stuff that
I thought people would like to see, and to sit
your butt down in front of some sort of keyboard
or writing pad and do it almost every day and
(52:22):
most of all finish stuff right. So it's not very mysterious.
It's mysterious as to who likes what and how something
becomes popular, which is out of your sphere, you.
Speaker 2 (52:35):
Know, absolutely, yeah, yeah, well, I'm glad you've done it.
I think it's been a really nice series of chapters.
And that's sort of the way I do my show.
I think about it that way. And you know, I
think that people, you know, one of my models is,
you know, plan but don't predict. You know, you don't
(52:55):
know what's gonna happen, but to keep out of it.
And I think it's you know, that's my of you know,
for people who want to be writers as and you
know what, there's one rule, right, and keep writing and finish.
I think that's important. Yes, yeah, and you can go
back and revise it. You know, a lot of what
I realized that how much of my work was actually
(53:17):
to say, well, just get it down and then go back.
And it's it's in the revision process of the gestation
process that things get you know, worked out, and you
see things you didn't see before. But at any rate,
so listen, Kevin, this has been fun. I really appreciate
your being in the show. Thanks for a terrific conversation.
I hope you gave some thoughts for people who are
(53:38):
thinking about this and basically I want them to to know,
so basically they can find your books at bookstores and Amazon.
This absolutely there, It is there.
Speaker 3 (53:51):
It is Johnny Carroless from McMillan, available in hardcover kindle
and a very well done audiobook I available wherever first
novels are sold.
Speaker 2 (54:04):
Terrific, terrific. Okay. And if people want to get in
touch with you, they do it through McMillan or through.
Speaker 3 (54:11):
Through McMillan or I believe it's called at It's at
Kevin Wade on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (54:17):
Okay, very good at Kevin Wade and instagam great. Okay. So, folks,
thanks again for spending this hour with me and helping
me learn and grow and appreciate stories about how we
can make our second half of life even better than
the first. Be sure of join me next Wednesday, seven
(54:38):
pm Eastern time. I want to be talking with Brian Zimmerman,
who's the owner of a gardening design consulting business, who
will talk about his mindful approach to sustainable gardening and
health and stimulation and social benefits, particularly as we get older.
So folks, until then, keep moving forward. Forty five forward.
Speaker 1 (55:04):
This has been forty five forward with host Ron Roell.
Tune in each week as Ron tackles the many aspects
of health, finance, family and friends, housing, work, and personal pursuits,
all as part of an integrated plan and to take
charge of your unretiring life during these uncertain times. Wednesdays,
(55:28):
seven pm Eastern on the Bold Brave TV Network, powered
by B two Studios
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