A Friendly Chat: Stephen J. Cannell, Novelist, Co-Creator of '21 Jump Street' And 'The A-Team'

Stephen J. Cannell is the creator of 40 television shows, including 21 Jump Street, The Rockford Files, The A-Team, and The Commish. He has written 450 TV episodes and produced some 1500. His production company is heading up work on feature films of 21 Jump Street and The Rockford Files. Also: he is also a popular mystery writer and has written 14 novels. We spoke at about noon on a Tuesday while he was in the car headed to lunch with a writer in Santa Monica. He had already spent five hours at his desk working on a novel.

THE AWL: I'm overwhelmed. How did you do all this?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: I'll tell you how I did it. One is, you don't make television my yourself. It's a collaborative art form—if it's an art form at all; a craft?—and it really comes down to how good the people are that you accumulate around you. And I expect that a lot of my success is from the fact that I had really good actors working with me, I had really good directors working with me, I had great writers that were on my staff that helped me keep those shows fresh and alive. And I'm a fairly diligent writer. I think if you write for five hours everyday, Saturday and Sunday included, for 40 years, you'd be surprised by how much you can write!

THE AWL: Oh my God. Five hours! Do you get up early and do this?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: This morning I was up by 4 but usually I am up by 3:30 and I lift weights for about 40 minutes and then I start.

THE AWL: Do you have one project that you work on at a time or do you have several things going?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: I do one at a time. Even when I had multiple shows on the air, I used to keep an average of six hours of TV on at all times because I was running a studio and that was what was required to basically pay my overhead, and it was a private studio, but even then, I'd be writing for all the different shows, so I'd write an episode of 21 Jump Street, and I'd write an episode of Wise Guy, and then I'd write an episode of Hunter and then I'd write an episode of The Commish, and then I'd go back to 21 Jump Street. Sometimes the executive producers would come to me and say, 'Can you give us one to three days, we could sure use the help.' I never had a lazy susan with six scripts going.

THE AWL: How did you get into writing books? Is it two completely different kinds of writing?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: The similarity is, obviously, there is the immense amount of discipline I have for writing, which is very useful in writing a novel. I'll write a chapter a day. Like Hemingway, I bang out 10 pages a day. I'm like Hemingway in that work ethic! I don't compare myself to Hemingway. I plot my book in three act play structures just the way I plotted my hours of television…The one difference is that when you're writing a screenplay everything has to come out of a character's mouth–every plot, every idea, every emotion has to be delivered verbally so that the audience can be aware of it. In a book you have this tool called omniscient author where you can go into the head of your character and deal with the plot directly. Sometimes I'll be writing a script and be setting up a very sensitive emotional scene that I want to deliver on and I'm beginning to realize that to write it, I realize I cannot have these two characters say the things to one and another that I had planned them to say, because it would be rude or it would be inappropriate, and my gut tells me when I become that character and start to see that character say the lines on the paper that I would never say that and I have to adjust the scene to make it realistic and believable. In a novel you would never have that problem.

THE AWL: What were you working on this morning?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: I'm writing a novel. I'm way ahead on my novels because I love to write, so I've finished the one that will be out in January, called The Pallbearers, and the one I'm writing now is another Shane Scully book and it won't be out until a year from January and it is called The Prostitute's Ball. It's almost done. And I have a movie script I'm going to write, and I have some acting I'm going to do, so my life is laid out a couple months in advance.

THE AWL: The acting, is that just for fun?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: Yeah, pretty much just for fun. I've been doing it for 25 years, and I've gotten to the point where I'm actually not too bad at it. There was a time when I started when I do a part and I would think, 'Oh my God, I was just wonderful,' and I would see it and I stunk up the movie. I ended up being on Renegade for five seasons as a recurring role, I must have been in about 25 or 30 episodes, and I learned to act while I as doing that show. So now when I get jobs I actually can deliver.

THE AWL: Your scenes on Castle are the critics' favorites.

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: They've actually talked to me about coming back.

THE AWL: So 21 Jump Street and The A Team are going to be movies.

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: I'm producing both of them; I am not writing them. The A Team is in casting right now, Joe Carnahan is directing it, Ridley Scott is co-producing with me, and Tony Scott is the executive producer. So that's going to be a good movie. We're in negations right now with Liam Neeson to be Hannibal. 21 Jump Street, we're in the second draft on that, I think it's a very funny script, being done by Jonah Hill and a guy named Michael Bacall, who is a really good writer. And we're doing Greatest American Hero through my own studio right now, but it may end up going out, and we have attached a big name director to that.

THE AWL: How do you keep everything straight?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: I had times when I was doing six shows simultaneously, and all of those shows were 24 episodes a season, so that's over 100 episodes a year that I was producing…. There were so many episodes floating around at one time at the shop that you got very good at compartmentalizing your thinking. And that's basically all I'm doing now.

THE AWL: When you're writing a book, or when you would write TV shows, do you figure out everything that is going to happen before you even start?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: Yes. Totally. I talk to writers all the time who don't do that, they get a concept and have this idea that the characters will lead them through the story, and I can almost tell you when a writer is doing that. The stories tend to wander and do a lot of U-turns and stuff that could be dropped and didn't get dropped because the writer liked it, but it wasn't flowing in the same direction as the story. Plus a lot of writers that do that end up going a couple of acts into it and throwing it away because it wasn't working. I never had enough time to be able to indulge myself like that. I'd rather spend two or three days on a TV show plotting it completely. If it's a novel, it's about 2 weeks after I've done all my research, I sit down and for two weeks all I do is plot. And then I write about a 60 or 70 page narrative, and that's not for my publisher, it's totally for me, it's so I know that the architecture of the story I'm about to start writing is clean, so I don't get two-thirds in and go, this isn't working, I don't know where I'm going, it's all messed up, I don't want to be there. The hardest work of writing a book or a screenplay is plotting it, and I think that's why so many writers choose not to do it. Because you sit there and you scratch your head and think, what am I going to do next? What's the complication at the top of act two, how do I make the story more devastating than it appeared at the beginning, what are my adversaries doing, what's their move, how do I keep them in motion instead of standing still, waiting to be caught.

THE AWL: Did you learn this by doing it?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: Yes I'm pretty self taught. I had a great writing instructor at the University of Oregon, he's still up there, his name is Ralph Salisbury. He's retired now, he's a professor emeritus, and he taught me a lot, a lot, a lot about writing, about character creation. But I lived in L.A. and I wanted to write for television and motion pictures and I started to write some spec scripts—and I began to realize I didn't know what I was doing. I realized there's a thing called a complication at the top of act two which is really, really important. If you don't have it, you're dead. It's a piece of the backstory that remains hidden and then rears up at the top of act two and changes everything. When you know that a complication is a piece of the backstory that remains hidden, well, then it's pretty easy. I've got to lace some thing in here in act one that we don't talk about. These guys keep trying to break into her car, and all the sudden we find out she's in the witness protection program and that was something that was hidden from the audience all through the thing, and that's why the boyfriend hero keeps getting beat up.

THE AWL: Do you think you'll start a new TV show ever again?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: Well I'm doing a pilot right now with Janeane Garofalo. We'll see what happens. It's for USA. I did so much television, I kind of felt that I'd been there a long time, and unless I'm doing something that I think is really fresh or different, then I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to do Hunter sideways, or Rockford sideways. If I'm going to do it, I want to do something that's never been done before.

THE AWL: Do you watch TV yourself?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: I do. My daughter is directing Monk, so I've gotten very close to that show, I think it's very funny. I'm watching Burn Notice, I like that, I like House, I like Raising the Bar, from my friend Steven Bochco. There's a lot of good stuff.

THE AWL: So if you get up every morning at 3:30, what time do you go to bed?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: 8 or 8:30. My wife will tell you I'm not a very fun person. But she's been with me for 44 years.

Previously: Damian Mason: Farmer, Corporate Comedian, Bill Clinton Impersonator

Logan Sachon lives in Portland, Oregon. Ways she makes money: tending flowers, making bouquets. Ways she does not make money: writing, optioning things. She is working on changing the latter.