Ron Moore Blog/November 13, 2005

==Transcript==
I first met Michael Piller in July of 1989. I sat in the outer office of his suite in the Hart Building on the Paramount lot with a white pad on my lap filled with my illegible scrawl which contained the seeds of the half-dozen stories I planned to sell to “Star Trek: The Next Generation” that very day and which would no doubt launch my career that very afternoon even though my spec script, “The Bonding,” had yet to be actually, technically, purchased, much less produced. I sat there and waited nervously for what would be my very first official Hollywood pitch session, having little idea of exactly what I was supposed to do or say and even less notion of what might follow after. Eventually, the door opened, and I was ushered into Michael’s office, where a tall man wearing an LA Dodgers’ ballcap, sneakers and a loose-fitting button-down shirt, stood up behind his desk and greeted me with a broad smile as he shook my hand.
The rest of the Next Generation writing staff was there as well – Ira Behr, Hans Beimler, Richard Manning, Melinda Snodgrass, and Richard Danus – and the mood in the room was light. They were all laughing and cutting up as I came in and this would register with me later when the laughs would be revealed more as the gallows humor of an embattled writing staff than the joyful merriment I took it for at the time. Michael said a few complimentary things about my spec script -- which was why I, a complete novice, was in the room at all -- then sat back, put his feet on his desk and told me to go for it. I began to pitch out the first idea, and got about two sentences in when Michael said, “I have to stop you. We’re already doing that idea. Next?”
I pitched the next one, got a little further in this time before: “Let me stop you there. We’ve gone down this path and we’re not interested in this direction. Next?”
Suddenly feeling like perhaps I wasn’t going to be anointed The Next Big Thing that very day after all, and worried that maybe a half-dozen stories weren’t going to be enough for this session, I plowed on through the rest of my scrawled notes. I did manage to get through a couple of them all the way, and listened while the other writers chewed them around a bit before Michael ultimately rejected them. At the end, Michael gave me a big smile, shook my hand again and ushered me out with the exhortation to “Go think up six more ideas.”
The whole thing probably lasted less than a half-hour, but it was a seminal moment. For that was the day I was treated like a professional writer for the first time, and it was Michael Piller who made it happen.
He certainly didn’t have to. I was nobody. Just someone trying to be a writer in a city where the busboys are working on screenplays and the valets are setting up pitches. The only thing I had done, the only noteworthy effort I’d made, was to write exactly one script that Michael liked. But that was everything to him. He was a writer. He respected the craft, respected the profession, and respected anyone who could sit down and rearrange twenty-six letters on a blank piece of paper and create something special. Michael didn’t care that I had no experience, he didn’t care that I looked like I could barely drive, and he certainly didn’t care that no one else had ever seen fit to validate my abilities by actually buying something from me. What he did care about was that he thought I could write, and if he thought you could write, you got treated like a writer – sometimes brutally so. Once I was on staff and got to sit on the couch cutting up with the other writers, I had a ringside seat to the suffering of untold numbers of novices and professionals who came in through the door to pitch to Michael, and it wasn’t always pretty.
After Michael had hired me on staff, he’d decided that perhaps there was something to be said for buying scripts from people with no prior experience – called “amateurs” I’m told – and so he opened the floodgates to the masses of fans who fervently wished to fulfill their lifelong dream of selling a script to “Star Trek.” Michael insisted that anyone who filled out a proper Paramount release form be given the courtesy of having it read and considered, and so a team of full-time Readers were hired to do nothing but read Trek specs day in and day out, to the tune of 3,000 scripts per year. A synopsis and commentary was generated on each submission, called “coverage” in the business (and by “the business” I, of course, mean “the industry”) and each piece of coverage had to be read by a member of the writing staff before it was either rejected outright (the majority), purchased (a tiny, tiny fraction) or still rejected but with the proviso that the writer was good enough to invite in to pitch the show (less than a majority, but still a relatively common occurrence).
Once they were in the room, they had passed Michael’s key test: they were a writer and deserved to be treated as such. Michael had no truck with dishonesty in any form. He was utterly incapable of hiding his likes or dislikes in a professional setting regardless of the impact his opinion may have on the neophyte from Cincinnati who had flown in on their own dime for the opportunity to sit in the very heart of science fiction’s Valhalla and offer their ideas for an episode.
“Nope. Sorry. Can’t do it. Next?”
Sometimes they got less than a full sentence out before Michael would strangle their children in their cribs and ask for a sibling. He showed no mercy. If the idea was wrong, if we were doing it already, or if we’d decided not to do it for one of the fifteen thousand reasons we didn’t do things on that show, Michael would stop the unfortunate scribe in their tracks and ask for the next one. It took a while to realize he wasn’t sadistic, he wasn’t dismissive, and he wasn’t caught up in some kind of a power trip. He was that rarest of Hollywood creatures, seldom sighted and less frequently directly encountered:
He was an Honest Man.
It worked against him, frankly. This is not the kind of business which rewards people who speak uncomfortable truths or remark on the potentate’s lack of clothing. Guile, deceit, the glad hand and the slippery sales job provide access to the corridors of power, not the honest observations of a man committed to making a good show or a good movie and unwilling to say the politic thing to ease someone’s ego. I remember when a non-writing producer on the show did his first-ever script for the series and turned it in to Michael, who was the undisputed head of the writing staff. A notes meeting on my own script had concluded, the meeting on the producer’s script was just getting underway and as I was leaving, I heard Michael start off the politically sensitive meeting by saying, “Well, I’m not impressed. This needs a lot of work…” I also remember doing a Lou Costello double-take as the door closed behind me. He didn’t just say that? But Michael did. He simply refused to countenance the idea that there was any higher compliment to a professional writer than to take his or her work seriously and critique it not as a first script or a nice try or good effort, but as a legitimate piece of work that deserved serious thought and consideration and your feelings on the matter were immaterial to the question of whether the first Act break was working or not.
He was not heartless. He knew how hard it was to make it as a professional writer and he had great empathy for anyone trying to break in. He not only opened the doors to spec scripts, but actually solicited writing interns from the Television Academy, hired others through the Writers’ Guild and actively reached out to students at his alma mater, UNC. Nothing gave him as much pleasure as giving a first break. He loved making the phone call telling someone they’d sold their first script or gotten their first pitch, or sometimes got their first job. And once they were in, once they were a professional, Michael treated them like one, considering it to be a sign, not of cruelty, but of the deepest respect.
For five years, I worked directly for Michael on “The Next Generation” and then more or less, indirectly for five years on “Deep Space Nine” and I cannot say with any honesty that it was easy. I was young and eager to show my stuff and Michael was the boss whose job was often to tell me that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did.
Every episode – every episode – on Trek went through a process known as “The Break,” wherein the entire writing staff was gathered in Michael’s office to “break” the episode on a white dry erase board in excruciating detail, before a word of the teleplay was ever written. Michael ran the breaks and he was the final arbiter of what went on the board (and hence, in the show) and what did not. With a roomful of writers, this means a continuous running argument about where the story should and should not go and it takes a particular kind of show-runner to successfully guide a break session without blood on the walls.
I can’t say that Michael was easy to break stories with, I can’t even say that I thought he was always right, but I can say that I’ve never seen anyone, before or since who was secure enough in his own skills and his own power to sit back and accept the level of argument and dissension that Michael Piller not only tolerated, but encouraged among his staff. We, the writers, sat in rooms with Michael and told him why, over and over again, we thought he was wrong, why we thought the show should go in a different direction or why one of our drafts represented one of the finer examples of late 20th century American screenwriting and why it should not, under any circumstances, be rewritten or changed in any way.
Or at least I did.
It was a gift, what Michael gave us. He did not stifle debate or dissent. He ran the show, but never once talked about “his vision” of the show. To Michael, the show was bigger than any of us, including him. He wanted the show to be the very best it could be and he pushed all of us to make the scripts better even when we thought they were already great. In that instance, we were (and certainly I was) wrong about him. Too often we thought that he was just throwing things out according to his own capricious taste, but in the end, looking back at the show with some perspective he was right in his instinct -- if not in his specific editorial direction, then at least in his gut level leadership instinct -- that the scripts could have been better. They could have. We should never have been satisfied and should’ve continued to push both ourselves and the show until the very last episode. Michael knew that. Knew that they were never really good enough, and that in the end all that matters is whether you can look back at the same piece of work years later and still say, yes that was good.
And most of all, he protected us from the dragon. There was a dragon out there, and nothing would’ve been easier in this world than to have offered up one or two of our bodies to appease the beast when it was displeased – and it was displeased often. But he never did. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand Hollywood politics in general or even the politics of our show in specific, it was simply that he wasn’t interested in it and also was cursed with something called a conscience.
He was a man who had difficulty communicating with people on occasion, and yet he was uncommonly generous of spirit. Michael had season tickets at Dodger Stadium and would ask the staff to go with him, without fail, every year – and it was not unknown for some of us to go with Michael to the ballgame two or three times in the same season. On those occasions, he would drive us to the game via a secret and mysterious route wending its way to Chavez Ravine and obsessively talk baseball with the most knowledgeable guest among us – usually Ira, whose love of Yankee pinstripes was the only conceivable rival for Michael’s affair with Dodger Blue. Then we’d sit in his seats along the third base line, watch the game, drink beer and eat Dodger Dogs. And while Michael and Ira kept score in their program books and reverently spoke of Campenella, Mantle, Kofax, and Maris, the rest of us would laugh and bitch endlessly about -- what else -- the show. Then back to the studio lot to pick up our cars around midnight and head home to catch some sleep and then troop back into Michael’s office the next morning and begin another round of arguing over the ramrod up Picard’s ass or all the reasons why the Federation was morally bankrupt.
They were good times.
Michael liked to laugh and he laughed easily and often. A wide grin would split his face and his eyes seemed to physically move out of his head in delight as he listen to us mock the show, the characters, the actors, the studio, and most of all, each other. He enjoyed the company of writers and particularly enjoyed the way the reliably adolescent nature of a predominantly male staff combined with the sheer brainpower and writing chops of the group Michael had assembled combined to produce wicked, smart and funny bouts of verbal combat. Among this group of friends and colleagues who loved one another like brothers, Michael was viewed as the distant father they battled against day in, day out. He had fun in those break sessions. He came alive in those rooms; enjoyed himself through the simple act of immersion in the creative process.
Michael enjoyed life. He suffered through ailments, large and small, all the years I knew him. He endured personal tragedy and suffered professional disappointments. But I never once thought of him as anything but optimistic about the future, about himself, about the fact that tomorrow is another day and another day is what really counts. He always had another project to develop, another idea to pitch, another venture to get involved with. He collected baseball cards, bought and traded wine, started businesses, dabbled in political causes, gave to charity, nurtured young writers -- and even as his life entered what would be its final year, he sold one more pilot and was no doubt thinking about at least three others.
The last time I saw him was in a story break on “The Dead Zone.” It had been at least five years since I’d broken a story with Michael, and while the show was interesting, and the staff was smart and engaging, I remember mostly being struck by a sense of nostalgia. He still ran a break the same way -- broke each and every scene of the entire show down into specific parts, he still had the WGA intern writing each Act in a different color and he still wore a LA Dodgers cap. I had a great time.
He’s gone now, Michael Piller. Tomorrow, I will gather in a place with other people who knew and loved him, along with some who only knew of him, and we will both mourn and celebrate him. His obituary has been written, and I can only add my personal opinion and belief that he was one of the most fundamentally honorable and decent men I have encountered in my life. And he had no malice.
I wish I could do him justice. I wish I knew how to better define and explain the man. But since he loved Shakespeare and since he personally advised me to crib from the Bard whenever possible, it seems only fitting to say to all the world, “This was a man!”
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