Words on Screen: A Talk with Dawn Prestwich & Nicole Yorkin
As writers, we all have stories to tell. Words on paper that bring characters and plots to life. The craft of turning imagination into scenes, feelings into actions, and dialogue into a plot driver is one that we spend years developing and growing. Writing for television provides the opportunity to show on screen rather than tell, produce a physical setting that the audience can see instantly, and integrate music that stimulates emotions. The words become actions on screen. Actions that must do a story justice in the eyes of its audience.
Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin are a TV writing team with over 35 years of partnership and experience in the business. Their journey together includes writing for award-winning shows on network, cable, and streaming television. If you haven’t watched The Killing, HBO’s Carnivale, Netflix’s Hit & Run, and Z – The Beginning of Everything, then consider clearing a weekend and grabbing some snacks. The incredible duo has dipped into nearly every genre – from Irish mobsters to interdimensional space wars. After spending the day with Dawn and Nicole, the Hollywood writers didn’t seem Hollywood at all. Instead, they provided mentorship, encouragement, and craft points based on years of choices and experiences.
Crossing Genres
Theresa: You have touched nearly every genre; how do you choose what you want to work on?
Dawn: If it’s too scary, we decide to do it! Do what scares you!
Theresa: So, out of all the genres, which one do you think is your favorite to write about, or to write on?
Dawn: We like anything where there’s a female, a main character, the hero. Often, you know, against all odds.
Nicole: I think we like thrillers a lot.
Dawn: Yeah, we do.
Nicole: Sort of suspense thrillers; a fast and specific engine that keeps the plot going. It’s harder when you don’t have that engine driving your plot. But good things still come out of it. Like Z.
Dawn: Yeah, that was character-driven. Our plot in that was all coming out of character, which is really challenging in and of itself. You know, we always love whatever it is we’re working on now.
Nicole: Yeah.
Dawn: That’s just the way we are. We – we fall in love with the thing we’re working on.
Theresa: Which one do you think is the hardest/scariest?
Dawn: One we’ve never written before that has a very specific world, like writing Irish mobsters and politicians in Providence, Rhode Island. That was really hard.
Nicole: Also, we worked on a show that never made it to the air called Guantanamo. That was a world we didn’t know anything about. We had several people on staff who were very knowledgeable. One had written a book about the famous terrorist [Mohammed al Qahtani, Sept 11th attacks]. And that was hard because when we were hired, we were hired a little bit later than the rest of the staff. We knew nothing about it. We were like…Oh my god, what is this? What is this world? What are the rules of this world?
Dawn: We had to get up to speed on what was happening in Guantanamo. You know, there’s this whole prison and justice system down there that nobody knows about that is, to this day, ongoing.
Nicole: That was a hard one.
Dawn: Yeah, that was really hard.
Prison Town was challenging. We had to really immerse ourselves. We had to go to a prison. We found one prison in Indiana that would let us, it was a medium-security prison that would let us come into the prison.
Nicole: And talk to the warden and talk to some guards.
Dawn: Yeah. We got a tour and then we walked around town and we talked to people in the town to get a sense of it because it was about the town and the prison. And that show never got made, but that script has gotten us many other jobs.
Nicole: It was good for something.
Dawn: Yeah, it did its job.
Coping with Cancelled
Theresa: So, on the note of shows not making it, if something gets canceled and you have material left, do you reuse it? Or do you kind of store it away and just say that that died with the show?
Dawn: We don’t necessarily reuse something if it’s been cancelled. But if it never got made, like if we wrote a pilot and got paid to write a pilot or something, then sometimes we’ll cannibalize it, you know? Or try to sell it in a different mode, you know? Dress it up.
Nicole: It’s sort of heartbreaking in many cases. We’ve been on many shows that have been canceled. Some that haven’t. And it’s always heartbreaking, again, because you have such high hopes, like your child, your baby’s going to Harvard, and suddenly, nope. It looks like they’re not going anywhere, not making it in. It was heartbreaking when our last show, Hit & Run, was cancelled.
Immersion as Research
Theresa: When you are working on shows like Chicago Hope or Ally McBeal that have specialties (medical & legal), how do you approach the research to come up with real storylines?
Nicole: So, we approach research in different ways. For Z, we had a professor friend from UCLA come in and speak to the writers about the culture of the times. We were going to be featuring New York in the 20s, so she talked about the Harlem Renaissance and some other things with us. Yeah. We also had a few other people come in and talk too. We had the author of the book come in. [The show] was based on this book called Z. We had her come and talk to the class. What else did we do in terms of Z?
Dawn: Well, we read everything we could find about Scott and Zelda.
Nicole: Oh, we spoke to a Scott Fitzgerald scholar.
Dawn: Yes. We read Zelda’s novel. Which not many people read. Save Me the Waltz. We read a lot of biographies of Zelda and Scott. We read a lot of Scott’s writing that clearly was inspired by Zelda. So we – we began to formulate sort of our own point of view on just how much he was influenced by Zelda and how much he appropriated from Zelda ultimately.
Nicole: If you’re on a medical show, you have doctors that you can talk to. And in that case, Dawn was married to a doctor at the time.
Dawn: And my dad was a doctor.
Nicole: We used him; we used them a lot. On The Killing, we went to the morgue. We went and visited the L. A. County Morgue.
Theresa: Oh my goodness, how was that?
Dawn: It was kind of shocking. It was shocking.
Nicole: As you’re walking around, you’re seeing a stack of bodies, like, stacked up in, like, pallets. Sort of like in a big refrigerator, a walk-in refrigerator. And then you’d walk by separate rooms where autopsies were going on. And you saw some – like a guy who had just blown his brains out. Yeah, you saw that. And…that’s, that’s a look. It was very, um, sobering.
Nicole: We went and spoke to a group of parents of children who had died to get some insight into what, what that, that is like since one of the first season’s stories would be about.
Yep. Parents dealing with a girl’s death. We spoke to a cop. We spoke to, we watched some documentaries about the death penalty and so on. We really did quite a lot of research.
Yeah, we sort of had a homicide detective, uh, as a buddy who, you know, would give us sort of all the inside scoop on how it’s done, you know, what people would say and what they would think and that was interesting.
What’s Next?
Nicole: We are working on a show based on this book which is called Bad City [a Pulitzer Prize winner]. Which is about the former Dean of the USC Keck Medical School, who became involved with and obsessed by a 20-year-old young woman who also was a sex worker. This Dean is a famed ophthalmologist and was obsessed with this 20-year-old. They started doing meth together, did heroin together, and he’s still doing eye surgery. He’s still heading up the medical school. He became a drug addict, showed a real lack of judgment. And the point of the book is that both the city of Los Angeles, well I guess the city of Pasadena and USC were complicit.
Dawn: The journalist who wrote it [Bad City] is an L. A. Times journalist named Paul Pringle [the journalist responsible for uncovering the story]. As far as he’s concerned, they were very complicit.
Nicole: The Dean brought in something like $700 million worth of grants to USC. They would poach people from UC San Diego, bring the person with their entire lab to USC, along with their grants. And so, I think what he [Paul Pringle] is positing in the book is that USC would look the other way because this guy was a huge rainmaker for them.
Dawn: He was too big to fail; too big for them to kick out, basically.
Nicole: But, of course, eventually the president of the university ended up having to resign because there were a lot of scandals.
Theresa: And then you have mentioned something like The Killing that is in the works.
Dawn: Yeah. We don’t know if we’re going to do it yet.
Nicole: We’ve gone out for this which means that there’s somebody that owns this book that reminds us a little bit of The Killing and so we have met with them on it.
Dawn: And we are all on the same page about how we would do it. Well, we are hoping that we’re all on the same page and that’ll be the next project that we work on.
Dawn & Nicole (in unison): You never know. (They both laugh.)
Nicole: You never have control.
Final Comments?
Dawn: Remember that TV spec scripts first begin as words on paper. You have to convince the reader this show is worth working on, and your prose is just as responsible for that as your characters and plot. If you can get your reader hooked in by beautiful exposition around dialogue, that is what makes a great TV writer.
