by Steve Boman
In my pitch in Callaway’s class, I explain the corollaries. Most of the students nod politely. They don’t know what a waterski show is. Without a visual aide, it’s hard to explain what I mean when I say human pyramids—a boat tows nine skiers. Five keep their skis on, four kick off theirs and clamber onto the shoulders of the five skiers to build a human pyramid. In my pitch, I can look sideways and see some of the students’ eyes start to glaze over. It’s hard to explain without seeing it, and as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.”
My final CRAZYHOUSE pitch goes well enough. I’ve got the entire pitch memorized, and for my ramp I use the latest ratings for DANCING WITH THE STARS, and segue into Luhrmann’s film, then use it to launch into my film, which I call “the next great waterski comedy.”
Callaway laughs at the line. He’s one of the few to laugh. He’s old enough to get the joke. There never has been a great waterski comedy, of course, unless you count the corny 1973 Disney flop SUPERDAD, which features a brief scene with Bob Crane on water skis. I go through my characters and detail how the lead character saves the resort and wins the big end-of-summer waterski competition using a handful of quirky residents from the local halfway house … and redeems himself along the way.
I’m satisfied. I’m looking forward to pitching CRAZYHOUSE to the industry panel in two months.
There’s still two months, however, and I’ve got to come up with a television show to pitch for the rest of the class.
M
y documentary class has become a pitch class in its own right. The final exam for this class will be pitching a documentary project to a faculty panel. This pitch will be mostly a video, with a short verbal section. In the first few weeks, I sifted through other ideas presented in class. Rene and Manny are also in the class. Rene’s documentary pitch will be about a type of upper-class traditional Mexican wedding that involves horses, guns, and lots of liquor. Manny is going to pitch a story about creating underwater reefs by sinking old ships. They’re both good ideas, but very difficult to do as a film student based in Los Angeles. I want to do something very L.A.-centric, something with some visual pop, and something no more than a few miles from USC. After tossing out some serious ideas (a day in the life of an overworked medical resident, obese kids, a doc about Drew Casper), I settle on having fun. I tell the instructor I want to do a documentary about Los Angeles’ drag-racing culture. L.A. was the birthplace of the National Hot Rod Association and the home of early drag racing. Now there’s only a handful of drag-racing tracks left, but the city is still a hotbed of racing—it takes place illegally, on the street.
I like my idea, but the size is daunting. I’m busy with Casper’s class, cinematography, Callaway’s class, screenwriting … and finding more than a day or two per week for this project is impossible. So I fall back to an idea I’d done before. I’ll pitch a documentary about the same twisty road and the same daredevil motorcyclists I chronicled in 507. That was an eight-minute documentary. Now I’ve got to pitch a project that, if made, would be twenty-six minutes. I’ve got to shoot new footage.
Spring break is coming. A few nights before I plan to fly home, I invite my nephew Mikey to dinner to make sure he eats something. He’s nineteen and seems to live on ramen and water on his sailboat. We eat at a Sizzler steakhouse across the street from campus. Our steaks are tough as a saddle, but Mikey downs a huge piece of meat and several side dishes. He never seems to fill up.
The next morning my gut aches. It’s centered on my right side. I blame the steak, but by the next day my stomach is not getting any better. It feels like I’ve got a burning lump under my right rib cage. I’m feeling pretty crappy all around, too. I call Mikey and ask him how he feels. He’s great. That afternoon I’m in the USC locker room. I’m gonna try to work out, even though I’ve now got what feels like a baseball covered with glass shards under my ribs. I’m hunched over on a bench when an older guy getting dressed down the aisle asks me if I’m okay. I say I am, but I don’t look all that good in the mirror.
When I fly back to Minneapolis for spring break, I’m a bit better. But I’m holding my side, and it hurts to breathe deeply. I keep waiting for whatever it is to go away, but it doesn’t. At the end of the break, I finally call Dr. Flaata. He gets me in immediately. When I see him, he pushes his fingers under my rib cage. I flinch badly. It hurts. He suspects I may have a gallstone. “If you do, we’ll have it out in no time and you’ll be fine,” he says. But some of my symptoms are unusual for gallstone. He orders up a CAT scan and a bunch of lab tests. He says I might have to have a camera-equipped tube shoved down my throat to investigate, and I shudder. The test results won’t be ready until the next day, the day I’m supposed to be back at USC, so I delay my flight.
I ask him what the heck is going on with my body. I’d been impervious for decades, and now this, too? “Sometimes stuff just happens, Steve. It’s the way medicine goes. I wouldn’t read too much into it,” he says. Of course, I have read too much into it. I’ve read lots and lots on the web, and by the time I’m heading to my CAT scan on Monday morning, I’m convinced they’re going to find liver cancer. Or pancreatic cancer. Just like I did when I had my stroke, I wonder what underlying issue is causing this weird breakdown.
Worrying makes the symptoms worse, and by the time I’m lying on the CAT scan table, I’m freaked out. I know the lab technicians aren’t supposed to make diagnoses, but I can’t help myself. “So, how does it look?” I ask. “That’s up to the doctor to discuss with you,” the tech says.
I drive home, waiting for the phone to ring. A radiologist is supposed to read my CAT scan and report back. All afternoon, I pounce on the phone every time it rings. Will I need surgery? Do I have pancreatic cancer? What the hell is going on? I’m amazed how many phone calls our house receives in an afternoon—almost all of them telemarketers. Everyone who calls is surprised I’m answering within a tenth of a second of the first ring.
Finally at 4:30 P.M., I can’t take it anymore. I call Dr. Flaata’s office. Thirty minutes later, right at five, his nurse calls me. She apologizes, says the CAT scan wasn’t read by a radiologist until late in the day. And she says everything looks normal. No gallstone. No anything.
I ask her, “So, they look for, you know, things like cancer, right?” She chuckles at my naiveté. “Yes, of course. They don’t see anything abnormal in your entire abdominal cavity.” I sit down and breathe a huge sigh of relief. This medical roller coaster is too much for me.
Later that evening, Dr. Flaata calls me on his cell. He says some of my lab results were elevated. It appears I have a mild case of pancreatitis. “Caused by what?” I ask. “Hard to say,” he says. The bottom line is that I need to eat mild food, stay away from fats, and, he adds, go back to grad school. He’s a big supporter of my journey.
That night, I’m eating noodles and saltines for dinner. It helps a bit, and I schedule my return flight to Los Angeles for late that week. By the time I get back, I’ve missed a week of most of my classes.
Besides catching up with missed class work, my coming weekend has three items on my to-do list: tweak my CRAZYHOUSE script yet again, shoot video footage for my documentary class, come up with a television show for Callaway’s pitch class. During break, I’d thought a lot about what I’d do for the TV project. I settled on doing a drama based on my experiences as a transplant coordinator. Just as I’m getting settled into my routine again, I get a call from my pal Tom. He’d like to visit, on very short notice. As in right now. The Minnesota winter has gotten to him and he wants to visit Southern California.
I groan a bit. I love seeing friends, but my schedule is so booked, I’m always working, and now I’m behind because of missing some classes yet again. I don’t have much time to be a tour guide. I tell Tom he’s welcome to come, but he’ll have to accept the fact that I’ll be busy much of the time. He books his flight.
I pick Tom up at LAX. He’s white as a ghost. He’s got
that Minnesota winter tan. I tell him my schedule, and he shrugs. He’s cool by it. He just wants to be in the warmth for a few days.
The weekend is all good. On Saturday, I recruit Mikey to hold a microphone boom, and the three of us drive up the Angeles Crest and interview motorcyclists for my doc class. At the top of the mountain, there’s deep snow lining the side of the road, so we engage in a long snowball-throwing contest that lasts until our arms are shot. On Sunday afternoon, Tom and I play tourists. He wants to see Beverly Hills, so we park just off Beverly Hills Drive and go for a long walk through the heart of zip code 90210. It’s a cool, foggy afternoon.
Tom thinks it’s interesting … and then we walk past a stately home and see an AAA wrecker truck parked in a driveway. Next to the wrecker is a new black Mercedes with a flat tire. The driver of the wrecker is in the process of changing the tire, while the owner of the car (a healthy guy our age) watches, along with his two young kids. Tom and I silently walk by, taking in this Beverly Hills moment. We both can’t believe it. Who would call a wrecker just to change a tire in his own perfectly flat driveway on a Sunday afternoon? It’s not raining or snowing. We’re both small-town Midwestern boys at heart. Changing a tire, especially in front of your kids, is an honored rite of manhood, something to be excited about, like Ralphie’s Old Man in A CHRISTMAS STORY. What is this rich guy teaching his kids?
“That’s just wrong,” I say as we’re out of earshot. Tom nods. “I wonder if the guy calls someone to service his wife,” he mutters.
The next morning, I’m up early. I tell Tom I’m going to work on my television pitch. Tom’s fine with that. The day is dawning sunny and bright. We stay at Carl and Irene’s that day and have the place to ourselves because they’re out of town. I get my legal pad and sit in the shade and write down ideas. Tom finds a reclining chair in a backyard patio and strips off his shirt, exposing a mass of blindingly white flesh. At noon, he cracks a beer.
Throughout the day, I write in the shade and run my ideas past Tom, who sits a few feet away in the blazing Southern California sunshine. He serves as my muse. He stays in the sun the whole time and sips his beers. He nods when he likes an idea, grunts when he doesn’t. I sip water and work on my pitch. My pancreas flare-up means no beer, no coffee, nothing spicy. As the day goes on, Tom nods more than he grunts. He likes the pitch.
By 6 P.M. that day, I’ve got my pitch done. Tom is beet-red from the sun. He’s happy. I’m happy.
That night, I read over my pitch. It seems pretty good. I start performing it, memorizing it, getting ready for the upcoming class. Tom grills some steaks and listens.
When Callaway’s pitch class comes on Thursday, I walk in and … he’s not there. There’s another instructor, a sub. Callaway is busy with CSI: NY, we’re told. The substitute is a polite blond-haired man in his fifties wearing khakis and new white K-Swiss tennis shoes. I have no idea who he is. I suspect he’s one of the many adjunct instructors USC has at its disposal.
Caraballo is glad to see me back. I assure him I’m feeling fine. When it’s time to pitch, I walk in with this pitch memorized:
Two weeks ago, I went to the doctor because it felt like I had a baseball stuck under my ribs. A baseball made of jagged crystals.
He told me I appeared to have a case of pancreatitis. My pancreas was inflamed. He said he didn’t know why, that they would need to do more tests.
I was not happy. I knew there are really only two organs in your body that are hard to replace: one is your brain; the other is your pancreas.
I knew that because a few years ago I worked as a transplant coordinator at the University of Chicago Hospitals. I was the guy who carried the Igloo cooler with a human liver inside. My job was to oversee all aspects of the transplantation harvest. I was essentially a producer of a traveling road show that flew all over the country to take out human organs in the middle of the night. I gathered the surgical team; I got us to a little hospital in Arkansas, or Brooklyn; and I actually helped to take the livers out—which was the scariest part because I was an English major turned reporter turned transplant coordinator and didn’t know jack about surgery. True story—one Christmas Eve, the University of Chicago was doing an experimental surgery where they were taking out a portion of someone’s liver and giving it to that person’s deathly sick infant. This was very risky stuff at the time. Very cutting edge. But because they were so short on surgical residents at the time—it was Christmas, and we were doing another transplant operation at the same time—the lead surgeon pulled me out of a hallway and I scrubbed in and helped him dissect this little tiny section of liver that was going to be going into the infant. My experiences at that hospital have helped shape what I think is a great one-hour hospital drama.
The working title is: FOR EVERY BEATING HEART …
Every episode of this show is a stand-alone drama. In every episode, we follow a heart as it goes from donor to recipient. From someone who was once alive to someone who is about to die, and gets new life. This drama focuses on one main character: Nic Barnes, a new surgeon-in-training whose job is to follow the donor heart on every step of its journey.
This drama takes place right now, at a major American research hospital, where the politics are intense, the city around them is crumbling, the weather is always unpredictable, and any other place in America is a few hours away by jet.
MAJOR CHARACTERS:
Nic Barnes, thirty-one years old. The son of a car salesman and a school secretary. He’s a surgical fellow: he’s gone through medical school and a long residency and now he’s almost through with his training. Nic is a guy without airs. He’s got the easy social skills of a salesman, a guy who likes to hang out at rundown bowling alleys and the corner basketball court. But he’s whip smart—the kind of guy who knows every single JEOPARDY! question in the snap of a finger. He has a problem with authority figures, however, not a good thing when he deals with his attending physicians, some of the biggest egos in medicine. Nic is single. Good-looking. Never found the right girl. Deep down, he’s a poet who finds the time to keep a journal. He’s also got a secret that tortures him: when he was seventeen, he lost control of his car and slammed into another car, killing a family of three. To this day, he doesn’t drive. Not a problem during his medical school and residency in NYC. A big problem in Chicago.
Dr. Schwartz, the head of the transplant program. Exceedingly arrogant, never wrong, and a man who always wants to be number one, no matter what the cost.
Dr. Whiteside III, second in command. Boston Brahmin, all the right schools, a guy who still wears tweed jackets with leather patches and likes to boast about his stunning assortment of bottled sherry. He has a great curse: his father, Dr. Whiteside II, won a Nobel Prize in medicine in the 1960s.
Dr. Susanna Hanson, a final-year surgical resident, one year younger than Nic. Introverted, tough, a real looker. Fantastic rapport with patients, especially children. Already twice divorced. Her second marriage lasted forty-seven days before she filed for divorce.
Wendy Kim, another surgical resident. Cute, a joker, everyone’s best friend. Always upbeat, a complete straight arrow. Or so it seems.
Avio Torres, the hospital’s other fellow, which makes him an equal with Nic in the hierarchy of the hospital. But … Avio is older, late thirties, a cardiac surgeon who is returning to the university for another year of training so he can do transplants. Avio is a heartthrob: GQ looks, a politician’s charm, a backstabber par excellence.
Fat Eddy, the candy bar–eating, slobby transplant coordinator. Seems to know nothing, but he always gets the transplant team to the right place at the right time. The kind of guy who can come up with a dogsled team in an hour, even while eating a leftover pizza.
BASIC SETUP:
Every episode features a through-line of a single transplantation. In that way, it’s similar to the LAW & ORDER or CSI or other police and legal procedurals. It also allows for a multitiered story line like SIX FEET UNDER. In each FOR EVERY BEATING HEART e
pisode, there are the stories of the donor and the recipient and the stories of the transplant team. They will overlap and interweave during each episode. And although the medical team will have a changing dynamic through the season, this is not a soap opera. Viewers watching episode five will not need to know what happened in episode four to understand the action. Each episode will stand fully alone.
This format allows a tremendous amount of flexibility in storytelling. For example, although each episode features a harvest operation and a recipient operation, it is entirely possible to spend nearly the entire hour on just the harvest. Same goes with a recipient operation. There will be episodes in which there is no harvest operation because something goes amiss. There will be episodes in which the recipient operation goes afoul. Sometimes the good will die. Sometimes the simple will not work. This is a show built on unpredictability—a tremendous amount of unpredictability—which gives it a huge measure of its drama.
The show also allows viewers to explore the ethics and controversies and dilemmas and miracles of transplant surgery. Think for a moment: the great police and legal procedurals all wrestle with big societal questions. What does GREY’S ANATOMY wrestle with? Who to sleep with? What melancholy ballad to play under the script? This show, FOR EVERY BEATING HEART, will be the next one that people talk about, think about, blog about.
