You can read the Part 1 here
Part 2
Before the evening began, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, who was just recently appointed as the second Artistic Director for Brava, talked to us about the theater and Brava’s mission and then introduced Ilene Chaiken to the audience.
Ilene began by saying that first she will talk to us about her life and career, and how she finally got to do The L Word and tell our stories, and after her talk we would have a chance to ask her questions. I read a lot of Ilene’s interviews over the last few years, especially regarding the creation and realization of The L Word but listening Ilene speaking about it had quite a different feel to it. She talked to us for almost 30 minutes so I will give you just some highlights of Ilene’s talk. It’s not verbatim but I tried to make it as close to what she said as possible
Ilene’s Talk
- Making movies and telling stories has always been for Ilene a combination of a really great way to spend more time with fabulous women.
- In her senior year at the film school she made a thesis film that was pretty much autobiographical and it was before she realized that she was gay. The movie was made from the point of view of a woman but she wasn’t telling gay stories, she was pushing out the issues of sexuality and how women fit into the culture. The movie was sort of a version of “Sex, lies and videotapes”, and it was controversial and shocking. Ilene’s thesis advisor looked at the film and said, “You’re gonna go to Hollywood”, which wasn’t a compliment.
- Ilene did go to Hollywood and she wanted to write and direct movies. Her first job in Hollywood was at a theatrical agency called TAA. One of her jobs was taking her boss’s Ferrari to the gas station and gassing it up.
- She began working in Hollywood before the sexual harassment laws and before sex changed for everyone with the advent of AIDS.
- After a few years Ilene got a job with a few Hollywood producers who wanted to make a movie and Ilene wrote a treatment for a movie about a bunch of girlfriends who were about to graduate from high school and looking forward to go into the world, explore their sexuality and become adults. It was a personal story for Ilene in a lot of ways. One of the producers liked the treatment and he took it…he actually took took it. He took it to some guy at Warner Brothers and they made a movie out of it about a 40-year old man having an affair with an 18-year old girl. In the background there were a few girlfriends and some nod to a relationship between women but the movie itself was different. It was called “Satisfaction” with Liam Neeson, Justine Bateman as the main character and Julia Roberts as one of the friends.
- After that Ilene worked as an executive, developing movies and then she went to work for a production company where she met Aaron Spelling. She ended up working for him for five years developing television shows.
- While working for Aaron Spelling she learned a lot about television and worked as a development executive on a Pilot for the show that featured the first ever lesbian character on the network television. At that time Ilene was already out and she was completely out in her work. The show was called “Heartbeat” (1988) and it was about a group of women gynecologists in Los Angeles. All women doctors were straight but there was one lesbian played by Gail Strickland who told Ilene that she didn’t know how to play gay and she asked if she could come over to hang out at Ilene’s house and learn how to be gay. The show wasn’t picked up.
- After that Ilene went to work for Quincy Jones’s production company at Warner Brothers for three years. Most famous show that she worked on with Quincy Jones was “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” It was very successful and represented different stories told on television but it wasn’t something that would help Ilene to tell her stories.
- Ilene got fed up with everything and tired of not being able to tell her stories and really get her work out there. Finally, after ten years of working in the movie business and not being able to do what she wanted to do, Ilene locked herself in a cabin and wrote a script. It was angry and really fun action movie. It was homage to “Seven Samurai” but it was all-girls action movie. It was very cool, at least for Ilene. She took the script to an agent she’s been working with and said, “I’m a writer now, here’s my script.”
- Ilene got another writing job and worked on a script for a more conventional movie but after that she got a really cool job adopting a comic book. It was a perfect job because she always wanted to do an action movie, showing girls’ power. She was hired to write a script based on a comic book called “Barb Wire.” The comic was great and she wrote a more subversive script than the comic itself. Ilene’s script was a blown-out action movie with great characters and she thought it would be the coolest movie ever made. She turned in the script and it was pretty much re-written and even though Ilene got the credit as a writer, it wasn’t exactly what she wrote. “Barb Wire” was made in 1996 with Pamela Anderson as a main character. Ilene actually shown us the opening credits for the show and it looked like a soft porn movie.
- Ilene was now a screenwriter and she loved to write commercial movies and she liked to make mainstream entertainment but she always tried to find stories that featured her themes and her people.
- It was a number of years before she had another movie made. She wrote a movie about a young woman with multiple personality disorder who struggled to remain her true self. Ilene wrote it but it didn’t work out and just recently she found out that someone dug it out and made a movie out of it with Halle Berry and it titled “Frankie and Alice”; it’s coming out later this year.
- Finally, Ilene met folks at Showtime and they were working with a very interesting project. They tried to figure out how to make a movie about the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and about events that occurred in 1990 when a museum director in Cincinnati went on trial for showing Mapplethorpe’s work in his museum. The theme was very interesting to Ilene and she read everything about the real events. The movie was called “Dirty Pictures” (2000).
- Showtime executives were really supportive of Ilene’s work and then she wrote an article for LA Magazine based on her urge to tell her stories. At that time Ilene and her then partner had twin girls and they were two years old. She looked around and saw that a lot of her gay and lesbian friends in West Hollywood were having babies and she wanted to talk about it. She wanted to write something about the lives of gay and lesbians in Los Angeles and LA Magazine liked her story and published it. Ilene decided that maybe she could try to make it into a movie and took her article to Showtime. She pitched it to a few people in production that she worked with before and they said, “No way, the guy down the hall in the corner office will never go for this.”
- So Ilene went to work on another movie and then “Dirty Pictures” got nominated for the Golden Globe. And something happened then. Showtime got the rights to a British TV series “Queer as Folk” and they put it on air and it was the most successful show that Showtime ever did before. And just before the Golden Globe Awards Ilene said that they doing this queer boys show and not just long ago she pitched a lesbian show but it was rejected. During the Golden Globe the same guy from the corner office came up to Ilene and whispered in her ear, “I think we’re going to try your lesbian show.” And that night “Dirty Pictures” actually won the Golden Globe.
- This was a truly great moment in history, especially for Ilene because she was finally able to tell her stories the way she always wanted it. Showtime was very supportive and there was never a moment when they said that she had to change something, or tone it down, or not to tell some stories because they were too controversial.
- Ilene ended her talk on a slightly bittersweet note. She said that it was their mutual decision to end The L Word after six beautiful seasons and she felt that they would go out on a high note. Ilene already pitched her spin-off to Showtime (during that event on March 20, Showtime hadn’t made their decision yet but we already have news that “The Farm”, as the spin-off was called, was not picked up by Showtime). Ilene always thought that they will have The L Word on the air for five-six years and by the time it will end there will be many shows, waiting to be made and taking off where TLW left off. And Ilene said that she doesn’t know what happened because we find ourselves once again not represented on the television. She was really disappointed that with the ending of The L Word there’s nothing out there right now representing gay and lesbian characters.
Q&A with Ilene
After the talk, Raelle Myrick-Hodges was heading a short Q&A session with Ilene. They warned us right away that we can ask any questions as long as it’s not, “Who killed Jenny?” Again, here’re some highlights from that part of the evening.
- At first they talked about gay characters being marginalized, or Ilene being marginalized as an artist because she’s gay. Ilene said that even in the earlier years of her career she felt pretty integrated but sometimes people used it against her. She told a story when she hired a woman to direct one of her movies and she got a call from a very powerful person who said that Ilene hired that director because she was gay. In reality, the director was straight and married but they wouldn’t believe her. And she added that we get marginalized not because we are gay women but because we are women. It’s still a largely misogynist culture. And in her career she felt more oppressed because she was a woman and not a gay woman.
- They talked about how Ilene separates her life and her art and Ilene said that she often put a lot of her personal life stories into her writing.
- Ilene said that she tried to write a show that would not only speak to gay women but to straight women and men, to anyone who wanted to come and partake of our stories. The thing that made The L Word a great success was that women loved it, not just lesbians but women. The loved the show and supported it throughout the years.
- The questions chosen from the audience were mostly general questions about movie business or asking advice for young writers. Ilene’s advice was - writing, writing, and writing. Learn all you can about the business and your craft, and keep writing. Ilene herself has certain rituals when she’s writing. She usually gets up very early in the morning and she either works out or write, usually she does both. She writes all day long and most of her writing is done at her computer and not on the paper. She doesn’t write like some writers who go for a walk and come up with ideas then. She writes, takes breaks and then comes back to write more.
- Ilene said that she doesn’t watch many TV shows. There were just a few that got her attention but as soon as she began working on The L Word, she just didn’t have time to watch pretty much anything. Her favorite show was “Six Feet Under.”
- One question was kind of funny. Someone asked if Ilene had ever excluded a storyline from The L Word because it was “too gay”. Ilene was really surprised and asked, “On The L Word? It’s a gay show, there were no stories that can be too gay.” She did mention that she worked on other projects when some people questioned a storyline that appeared too gay but never on The L Word.
- Ilene also said that another reason she wanted to do a lesbian ensemble drama because on the television there were gay characters but it was always the gay best friend or the gay character here or there, and even if there was a show about a single lead gay character, this character was living in a largely straight world. She wanted to have several gay lead characters, represented in a multitude.
- One question was about any similarities between the “Lez Girls” movie storyline and a real-life relationship with Showtime upper management. Ilene replied that as she said before, the Showtime was always unbelievably supportive and never tried to shut her down, make her less gay but that storyline was very real about Hollywood, especially in the movie making business.
- Ilene did say again that Jenny’s storyline was a response to fans’ demands to kill Jenny but it wasn’t only because the fans demanded it. She also said that in the Pilot, Jenny’s character was written based on Ilene and her personal life when she was younger. However, the actresses changed the characters as they brought themselves into their characters; therefore, Jenny changed a lot over each season. Bette was also another character that represented Ilene in her adult reincarnation-- someone driven by work and her passion -- but Bette’s character also evolved because of the way Jennifer Beals portrayed her. Ilene said that she loved Jenny because she thinks that Jenny made the world more interesting place to live.
- Marina was written off the show because Karina Lombard went to work on another show, “4400”.
- One question was asked about Dana. Ilene basically said that when they met in the beginning of season three for their writer’s meeting, a lot of them went through some loss with family members and friends. They wanted to tell a story about a loss and they hadn’t decided right away what character they would kill. All they knew that it had to be a beloved character. Ilene said that she loved Dana and she loves Erin Daniels who had fit very well with the group, but they decided that the most powerful way to tell this story was telling about a character who was healthy, who took care of her body, and it would be shocking. But Ilene had no idea what the reaction of the fans would be and that the grief would be so profound. Ilene said that they believed it was an important story to tell, but if she had a foresight about the fans’ reaction, she would not have killed Dana off.
- The obligatory sex scenes question was asked again, and Ilene replied that all sex/love scenes were choreographed. Each actor works with sex scenes in a different way. There were some who wanted each scene being choreographed to the number, telling them when to move this hand or when to move there, or when they have to orgasm. Some worked better when they were told just the general direction where the scene would go. Always, when they did the sex scenes, the actors had a large say on how the scene was done. They all had different boundaries and Ilene respected those boundaries. The only thing Ilene told them was, “I want you to tell the story, and I want you to believe in it, and we will make it work in a way that makes you comfortable.”
- They had an incredible crew and the directors were predominantly women and it’s really unique in Hollywood. Women were dominating in this project. Rose Lam, who is actually straight, hired as many lesbians as possible to work for the show. It was a very pleasant environment to work in and all the straight people who worked on the show were always comfortable, even with some sensitive material. Ilene said that there was never a division between straight women or gay women who worked on the show behind the scene because, in her opinion, everyone wanted to be gay.
- They skipped most of the written questions about individual characters and then gave the audience the chance to ask more questions. One question was about how to keep going and make more stories about gay and lesbian community. Ilene said that one important thing is for the community to get engage in the storytelling and tell the networks what they like. Ilene added that the president of Showtime called her all the time and told her about the crazy L Word fans that kept sending him letters and emails. When Showtime was deciding to pick the L Word for another season, they started a “black bra campaign” and he got tons of black bras sent to his office. When the community gets together, there’s no way to stop them.
- There was a question “What happened to OurChart” and Ilene was telling about how they really believed in that project, but because of the business structure and some other reasons I don’t remember, it wasn’t valuable as a business. Ilene and some other people who were on OC are working really hard to put together another version of OurChart.
- Another question about The L Word the movie was asked, as well. Ilene pretty much said the same thing as she always said – that the cast and she really want to do it, but it’s not up to her, so it’s hard to say right now what will happen. I suggested sending more black bras to the CBS or whatever company is in charge of it. Ilene’s reply: “It won’t hurt.”
- Another thing Ilene said that there’s a difference between writers and screenwriters. As a screenwriter, you write not to see your words on page but to see it performed by actors. She was always so excited to see what actors would make out of your work, and sometimes they would make it better with their acting. In television, writers are supreme, and in the movies, writers are garbage. In television, the writers are often in charge of everything, even more than directors.
- On any television show, there’s a group of writers. On the L Word, Ilene had a relatively small group of writers. She was a head writer who chose writers, and they all worked together as a group, talking about their ideas in collaborative way. At certain points, Ilene would give everyone certain scripts or stories to write or contribute to a storytelling, but as the head writer, she had the final say.
VIP reception
During the VIP reception we all had a chance to approach Ilene and talk to her. I found her by herself for a moment and asked if she always had a big picture in her mind about where the storylines would go when she pitched the Pilot to the Showtime executives. Ilene replied that when she pitched the Pilot, she basically pitched the characters, but each season they would decide where their stories would go.
Then I asked if it was true that she never intended to get Bette and Tina back together after their break up in season 1. Ilene said that she didn’t intend not to get them back together, but there was a possibility that TiBette would end up in different relationships. Then I asked, “Why did you finally decide to reunite them? Was it because of the fans?” And Ilene said, “It was such a good story to tell and bringing them back together was part of it.”
Overall, I liked event. It was entertaining and informative and just another little connection to the show that I missed so much already.
Before the evening began, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, who was just recently appointed as the second Artistic Director for Brava, talked to us about the theater and Brava’s mission and then introduced Ilene Chaiken to the audience.
Ilene began by saying that first she will talk to us about her life and career, and how she finally got to do The L Word and tell our stories, and after her talk we would have a chance to ask her questions. I read a lot of Ilene’s interviews over the last few years, especially regarding the creation and realization of The L Word but listening Ilene speaking about it had quite a different feel to it. She talked to us for almost 30 minutes so I will give you just some highlights of Ilene’s talk. It’s not verbatim but I tried to make it as close to what she said as possible
Ilene’s Talk
- Making movies and telling stories has always been for Ilene a combination of a really great way to spend more time with fabulous women.
- In her senior year at the film school she made a thesis film that was pretty much autobiographical and it was before she realized that she was gay. The movie was made from the point of view of a woman but she wasn’t telling gay stories, she was pushing out the issues of sexuality and how women fit into the culture. The movie was sort of a version of “Sex, lies and videotapes”, and it was controversial and shocking. Ilene’s thesis advisor looked at the film and said, “You’re gonna go to Hollywood”, which wasn’t a compliment.
- Ilene did go to Hollywood and she wanted to write and direct movies. Her first job in Hollywood was at a theatrical agency called TAA. One of her jobs was taking her boss’s Ferrari to the gas station and gassing it up.
- She began working in Hollywood before the sexual harassment laws and before sex changed for everyone with the advent of AIDS.
- After a few years Ilene got a job with a few Hollywood producers who wanted to make a movie and Ilene wrote a treatment for a movie about a bunch of girlfriends who were about to graduate from high school and looking forward to go into the world, explore their sexuality and become adults. It was a personal story for Ilene in a lot of ways. One of the producers liked the treatment and he took it…he actually took took it. He took it to some guy at Warner Brothers and they made a movie out of it about a 40-year old man having an affair with an 18-year old girl. In the background there were a few girlfriends and some nod to a relationship between women but the movie itself was different. It was called “Satisfaction” with Liam Neeson, Justine Bateman as the main character and Julia Roberts as one of the friends.
- After that Ilene worked as an executive, developing movies and then she went to work for a production company where she met Aaron Spelling. She ended up working for him for five years developing television shows.
- While working for Aaron Spelling she learned a lot about television and worked as a development executive on a Pilot for the show that featured the first ever lesbian character on the network television. At that time Ilene was already out and she was completely out in her work. The show was called “Heartbeat” (1988) and it was about a group of women gynecologists in Los Angeles. All women doctors were straight but there was one lesbian played by Gail Strickland who told Ilene that she didn’t know how to play gay and she asked if she could come over to hang out at Ilene’s house and learn how to be gay. The show wasn’t picked up.
- After that Ilene went to work for Quincy Jones’s production company at Warner Brothers for three years. Most famous show that she worked on with Quincy Jones was “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” It was very successful and represented different stories told on television but it wasn’t something that would help Ilene to tell her stories.
- Ilene got fed up with everything and tired of not being able to tell her stories and really get her work out there. Finally, after ten years of working in the movie business and not being able to do what she wanted to do, Ilene locked herself in a cabin and wrote a script. It was angry and really fun action movie. It was homage to “Seven Samurai” but it was all-girls action movie. It was very cool, at least for Ilene. She took the script to an agent she’s been working with and said, “I’m a writer now, here’s my script.”
- Ilene got another writing job and worked on a script for a more conventional movie but after that she got a really cool job adopting a comic book. It was a perfect job because she always wanted to do an action movie, showing girls’ power. She was hired to write a script based on a comic book called “Barb Wire.” The comic was great and she wrote a more subversive script than the comic itself. Ilene’s script was a blown-out action movie with great characters and she thought it would be the coolest movie ever made. She turned in the script and it was pretty much re-written and even though Ilene got the credit as a writer, it wasn’t exactly what she wrote. “Barb Wire” was made in 1996 with Pamela Anderson as a main character. Ilene actually shown us the opening credits for the show and it looked like a soft porn movie.
- Ilene was now a screenwriter and she loved to write commercial movies and she liked to make mainstream entertainment but she always tried to find stories that featured her themes and her people.
- It was a number of years before she had another movie made. She wrote a movie about a young woman with multiple personality disorder who struggled to remain her true self. Ilene wrote it but it didn’t work out and just recently she found out that someone dug it out and made a movie out of it with Halle Berry and it titled “Frankie and Alice”; it’s coming out later this year.
- Finally, Ilene met folks at Showtime and they were working with a very interesting project. They tried to figure out how to make a movie about the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and about events that occurred in 1990 when a museum director in Cincinnati went on trial for showing Mapplethorpe’s work in his museum. The theme was very interesting to Ilene and she read everything about the real events. The movie was called “Dirty Pictures” (2000).
- Showtime executives were really supportive of Ilene’s work and then she wrote an article for LA Magazine based on her urge to tell her stories. At that time Ilene and her then partner had twin girls and they were two years old. She looked around and saw that a lot of her gay and lesbian friends in West Hollywood were having babies and she wanted to talk about it. She wanted to write something about the lives of gay and lesbians in Los Angeles and LA Magazine liked her story and published it. Ilene decided that maybe she could try to make it into a movie and took her article to Showtime. She pitched it to a few people in production that she worked with before and they said, “No way, the guy down the hall in the corner office will never go for this.”
- So Ilene went to work on another movie and then “Dirty Pictures” got nominated for the Golden Globe. And something happened then. Showtime got the rights to a British TV series “Queer as Folk” and they put it on air and it was the most successful show that Showtime ever did before. And just before the Golden Globe Awards Ilene said that they doing this queer boys show and not just long ago she pitched a lesbian show but it was rejected. During the Golden Globe the same guy from the corner office came up to Ilene and whispered in her ear, “I think we’re going to try your lesbian show.” And that night “Dirty Pictures” actually won the Golden Globe.
- This was a truly great moment in history, especially for Ilene because she was finally able to tell her stories the way she always wanted it. Showtime was very supportive and there was never a moment when they said that she had to change something, or tone it down, or not to tell some stories because they were too controversial.
- Ilene ended her talk on a slightly bittersweet note. She said that it was their mutual decision to end The L Word after six beautiful seasons and she felt that they would go out on a high note. Ilene already pitched her spin-off to Showtime (during that event on March 20, Showtime hadn’t made their decision yet but we already have news that “The Farm”, as the spin-off was called, was not picked up by Showtime). Ilene always thought that they will have The L Word on the air for five-six years and by the time it will end there will be many shows, waiting to be made and taking off where TLW left off. And Ilene said that she doesn’t know what happened because we find ourselves once again not represented on the television. She was really disappointed that with the ending of The L Word there’s nothing out there right now representing gay and lesbian characters.
Q&A with Ilene
After the talk, Raelle Myrick-Hodges was heading a short Q&A session with Ilene. They warned us right away that we can ask any questions as long as it’s not, “Who killed Jenny?” Again, here’re some highlights from that part of the evening.
- At first they talked about gay characters being marginalized, or Ilene being marginalized as an artist because she’s gay. Ilene said that even in the earlier years of her career she felt pretty integrated but sometimes people used it against her. She told a story when she hired a woman to direct one of her movies and she got a call from a very powerful person who said that Ilene hired that director because she was gay. In reality, the director was straight and married but they wouldn’t believe her. And she added that we get marginalized not because we are gay women but because we are women. It’s still a largely misogynist culture. And in her career she felt more oppressed because she was a woman and not a gay woman.
- They talked about how Ilene separates her life and her art and Ilene said that she often put a lot of her personal life stories into her writing.
- Ilene said that she tried to write a show that would not only speak to gay women but to straight women and men, to anyone who wanted to come and partake of our stories. The thing that made The L Word a great success was that women loved it, not just lesbians but women. The loved the show and supported it throughout the years.
- The questions chosen from the audience were mostly general questions about movie business or asking advice for young writers. Ilene’s advice was - writing, writing, and writing. Learn all you can about the business and your craft, and keep writing. Ilene herself has certain rituals when she’s writing. She usually gets up very early in the morning and she either works out or write, usually she does both. She writes all day long and most of her writing is done at her computer and not on the paper. She doesn’t write like some writers who go for a walk and come up with ideas then. She writes, takes breaks and then comes back to write more.
- Ilene said that she doesn’t watch many TV shows. There were just a few that got her attention but as soon as she began working on The L Word, she just didn’t have time to watch pretty much anything. Her favorite show was “Six Feet Under.”
- One question was kind of funny. Someone asked if Ilene had ever excluded a storyline from The L Word because it was “too gay”. Ilene was really surprised and asked, “On The L Word? It’s a gay show, there were no stories that can be too gay.” She did mention that she worked on other projects when some people questioned a storyline that appeared too gay but never on The L Word.
- Ilene also said that another reason she wanted to do a lesbian ensemble drama because on the television there were gay characters but it was always the gay best friend or the gay character here or there, and even if there was a show about a single lead gay character, this character was living in a largely straight world. She wanted to have several gay lead characters, represented in a multitude.
- One question was about any similarities between the “Lez Girls” movie storyline and a real-life relationship with Showtime upper management. Ilene replied that as she said before, the Showtime was always unbelievably supportive and never tried to shut her down, make her less gay but that storyline was very real about Hollywood, especially in the movie making business.
- Ilene did say again that Jenny’s storyline was a response to fans’ demands to kill Jenny but it wasn’t only because the fans demanded it. She also said that in the Pilot, Jenny’s character was written based on Ilene and her personal life when she was younger. However, the actresses changed the characters as they brought themselves into their characters; therefore, Jenny changed a lot over each season. Bette was also another character that represented Ilene in her adult reincarnation-- someone driven by work and her passion -- but Bette’s character also evolved because of the way Jennifer Beals portrayed her. Ilene said that she loved Jenny because she thinks that Jenny made the world more interesting place to live.
- Marina was written off the show because Karina Lombard went to work on another show, “4400”.
- One question was asked about Dana. Ilene basically said that when they met in the beginning of season three for their writer’s meeting, a lot of them went through some loss with family members and friends. They wanted to tell a story about a loss and they hadn’t decided right away what character they would kill. All they knew that it had to be a beloved character. Ilene said that she loved Dana and she loves Erin Daniels who had fit very well with the group, but they decided that the most powerful way to tell this story was telling about a character who was healthy, who took care of her body, and it would be shocking. But Ilene had no idea what the reaction of the fans would be and that the grief would be so profound. Ilene said that they believed it was an important story to tell, but if she had a foresight about the fans’ reaction, she would not have killed Dana off.
- The obligatory sex scenes question was asked again, and Ilene replied that all sex/love scenes were choreographed. Each actor works with sex scenes in a different way. There were some who wanted each scene being choreographed to the number, telling them when to move this hand or when to move there, or when they have to orgasm. Some worked better when they were told just the general direction where the scene would go. Always, when they did the sex scenes, the actors had a large say on how the scene was done. They all had different boundaries and Ilene respected those boundaries. The only thing Ilene told them was, “I want you to tell the story, and I want you to believe in it, and we will make it work in a way that makes you comfortable.”
- They had an incredible crew and the directors were predominantly women and it’s really unique in Hollywood. Women were dominating in this project. Rose Lam, who is actually straight, hired as many lesbians as possible to work for the show. It was a very pleasant environment to work in and all the straight people who worked on the show were always comfortable, even with some sensitive material. Ilene said that there was never a division between straight women or gay women who worked on the show behind the scene because, in her opinion, everyone wanted to be gay.
- They skipped most of the written questions about individual characters and then gave the audience the chance to ask more questions. One question was about how to keep going and make more stories about gay and lesbian community. Ilene said that one important thing is for the community to get engage in the storytelling and tell the networks what they like. Ilene added that the president of Showtime called her all the time and told her about the crazy L Word fans that kept sending him letters and emails. When Showtime was deciding to pick the L Word for another season, they started a “black bra campaign” and he got tons of black bras sent to his office. When the community gets together, there’s no way to stop them.
- There was a question “What happened to OurChart” and Ilene was telling about how they really believed in that project, but because of the business structure and some other reasons I don’t remember, it wasn’t valuable as a business. Ilene and some other people who were on OC are working really hard to put together another version of OurChart.
- Another question about The L Word the movie was asked, as well. Ilene pretty much said the same thing as she always said – that the cast and she really want to do it, but it’s not up to her, so it’s hard to say right now what will happen. I suggested sending more black bras to the CBS or whatever company is in charge of it. Ilene’s reply: “It won’t hurt.”
- Another thing Ilene said that there’s a difference between writers and screenwriters. As a screenwriter, you write not to see your words on page but to see it performed by actors. She was always so excited to see what actors would make out of your work, and sometimes they would make it better with their acting. In television, writers are supreme, and in the movies, writers are garbage. In television, the writers are often in charge of everything, even more than directors.
- On any television show, there’s a group of writers. On the L Word, Ilene had a relatively small group of writers. She was a head writer who chose writers, and they all worked together as a group, talking about their ideas in collaborative way. At certain points, Ilene would give everyone certain scripts or stories to write or contribute to a storytelling, but as the head writer, she had the final say.
VIP reception
During the VIP reception we all had a chance to approach Ilene and talk to her. I found her by herself for a moment and asked if she always had a big picture in her mind about where the storylines would go when she pitched the Pilot to the Showtime executives. Ilene replied that when she pitched the Pilot, she basically pitched the characters, but each season they would decide where their stories would go.
Then I asked if it was true that she never intended to get Bette and Tina back together after their break up in season 1. Ilene said that she didn’t intend not to get them back together, but there was a possibility that TiBette would end up in different relationships. Then I asked, “Why did you finally decide to reunite them? Was it because of the fans?” And Ilene said, “It was such a good story to tell and bringing them back together was part of it.”
Overall, I liked event. It was entertaining and informative and just another little connection to the show that I missed so much already.
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