American Gothic -- Magazine Excerpts

Excerpt from Xpose magazine:

GOTHIC AMERICAN
AMERICAN GOTHIC delves into the darker side of the Deep South. Judy Sloane talks to its creator, Shaun Cassidy.

Two decades ago, when Shaun Cassidy was starring in the television series THE HARDY BOYS at Universal Studios, he dreamed of the day he would have his own office on the lot where he could produce and write a myriad of projects. Quite an aspiration for a 19-year-old who had just become the teenybopper flavor of the year.

"I spent more time up in the producer's office than on the set of my own show," he recalls. "I was much more interested in hearing conversations between the writers and the networks. I was trying to write scripts for THE
HARDY BOYS, but they wouldn't take me
seriously."

Sitting in his spacious modestly decorated suite, it's more than obvious Universal is taking him very seriously now. But his adolescent
vision-for-the-future took longer than even he
imagined, although his celebrity status, he admits, did assist him in opening doors. But it wasn't
until 1989 that Cassidy got his foot firmly in the door at Universal when he pitched them the concept for a series called OVER MY DEAD BODY.

"They gave me an hour script commitment because they didn't know what to do with me!" he laughs. "And I think to get rid of me they said, 'We'll just give him an hour episode commitment and he'll write something, and we'll have our staff rewrite it and we'll be done with him.' But they actually ended up liking the script a lot, and it gave me all kinds of new openings."

Cassidy went on to write a couple of television movies, one of which, STRAYS, was in the horror genre, pitting cats against man in the way
Hitchcock did with his feathered predators in THE BIRDS. This screenplay led to the most off-beat program to be seen on American television since TWIN PEAKS. Universal coupled Cassidy with Sam Raimi, the director of THE EVIL DEAD, to conjure up a dark and foreboding horror for CBS.

"I'd always been fascinated by southern Gothic literature like Tennessee Williams and Faulkner, and the idea of there being bodies buried in this pristine, beautiful, facade which the south is so good at protecting. I thought why not do the underbelly of a small town and use it as a forum in
which to explore good and evil."

The evil is personified by the character of Sherriff Lucas Buck, played with intense depravity by Gary Cole of MIDNIGHT CALLER fame. Although written as an ensemble piece, the character of Lucas Buck garnered the kind
of attention that JR Ewing did when DALLAS premiered. It's a roll most actors would give their eye-teeth for, but Cassidy insists that he didn't
write it with himself in mind.

"I actually never even thought about it, only because I didn't want to act anything because I was writing. But you do play all the parts when
you're writing them, and they're all different aspects of personality."

As a producer on the show, Cassidy was privvy to all aspects of the creative process, including the casting of his characters. For Lucas Buck, "the antagonist" around which the story flows, there seemed to be only one actor who filled the part.

"Gary Cole is a great man and a terrific actor," say Cassidy." He had the perfect balance between charm and malevolence which is needed in the character. He's a very masculine actor, sort of a guy's guy and yet different than anybody's idea of a Southern sheriff."

As the pilot began filming in Wilmington, North Carolina, Cassidy faced a new, and amusing, dilemma. In his many years of acting on television he would find himself constantly wanting to compose new dialogue for himself. Now he had actors confronting him with the same plight.

"It's God's little joke on me, isn't it?" he laughs. "The complete revenge for anything I may have done to other writers. I used to rewrite my
dialogue quite a lot, to the writers chagrine. I've had actor's call me and say, 'What about this line?' Most of the time they are pretty respectful, and
obviously, being an actor, I write for actors. One of my problems as an actor was that I would get scenes that people in a room with a typewriter had
written, and they had no sense of what the actor's objective would be, or what they were doing when they were saying these lines. They wrote all the
flowery dialogue, but there's no life going on. And people don't do that. There's stuff going on while there's a nightmare happening in your house.
There's a life beyond that, so I would approach scenes as a writer as I had as an actor, which helped the actors, and the actor's appreciated it."

Perhaps the most infamous scene to emerge from the series so far has the predominently evil Sheriff incongruously whistling THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW theme.

"I was writing a scene where a deputy walks into the sheriff's office and some little, seemingly irrelevant, dialogue is supposed to take place,
and I just flashed on THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW. I said, 'We're in North Carolina, we've got the deputy coming in to talk with the sheriff.'"

It seemed a natural-but Cassidy explains his reasoning, "One of the problems I have with a lot of Horror type movies is that the characters in
the movie have no relation to the audience's experience of pop culture. Only everyone in the audience knows that you don't open that door, but for some reason the characters in the movie haven't seen THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, haven't seen POLTERGEIST and they act as though they come from a different universe.

"I wanted to have our lead character have the same awareness about the world he was in as the audience. Because the minute he starts humming THE ANDY GRIFFITH theme it deflates the cynicism of the people watching, because they're going to go, 'Oh, there's THE ANDY GRIFFITH theme', well, he's seen that show too! And because he's whistling this theme, which is part of our collective pop consciousness that is supposed to be completely unthreatening, and THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW in its way was probably as extreme a version of Americana as AMERICAN GOTHIC is in its way, there are dark parallels."

With the unique emphasis on doing an adult series in which the struggle for good and evil is predominent, there were occasions when certain
material was viewed negatively by the censors.

"We had a line in the pilot, 'Rack your balls,' which almost didn't get passed by the studio in the script," admits Cassidy. "Selena [a school
teacher by day and Lucas's seductress by night] goes up to the deputy, and he's lying on the pool table, and she says 'Rack your balls?' It was a
seemingly innocuous question, and they didn't want it to be put in the script. And I said, 'That's her humor, she's Mae West.' Most of what Mae
West said you couldn't get past the censors."

Despite the fact that the program was greeted with critical acclaim, it didn't muster the high ratings the network hoped for, and before the
season was over the show was unceremoniously yanked from the schedule.

"I was disappointed by that," admits Cassidy. "In looking at CBS's schedule now, and looking at their agenda in terms of what kind of network
they want to be, there really is no place for AMERICAN GOTHIC."

But even though the show is done, it's not out. "There's talk of doing a series of movies, there's talk of a feature. It will have a life in some way, because there's a huge fan base for it.
The internet is a big support system for the show."

And for everyone who was left hanging when the program suddenly disappeared from their television screen, Cassidy promises that the final
twelve episodes will be airing this summer.

"Unfortunately, CBS picked from the tree along the way and ran them out-of-order, so I'm afraid that the episodes that have yet to air will be
somewhat confusing."

In his twenty-plus years of acting, both on television and the stage, singing, producing, and writing, Cassidy seemingly has no trouble singling
out which aspect has given him the most gratification.

"With writing there is this incredible satisfaction. You have an idea and then the first day of shooting where you actually show up after spending six months or a year, whatever the time frame is from idea to production, and see all these people have a job because you had this idea. It's really an amazing thing. It's like this domino effect of how you actually effect people's lives. As an actor you sometimes wonder, 'What am I doing this for?' Maybe you're doing it to enlighten other people, or to gain enlightenment for yourself. As a writer you're doing that too, and it's not that people come to your movie or watch your television show that hopefully benefit by what you've done, it's literally the workers, all the production people who are employed, and that's really neat."

There's many a slip between the final draft of a shooting script and the final version that is screened for the public, and most often they don't
even resemble each other. But, in the case of AMERICAN GOTHIC, the original idea that emerged from Cassidy's brain is what was broadcast to the TV audience.

"Certainly in the pilot," acknowledges Cassidy. "It's an amazing experience and one that I will never take for granted, to see something
realized that you dreamed about. Most of the time it doesn't work out that way. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad, but it's definitely not what you had
visualized. The pilot is really what I had hoped it would be and in some cases more."

And with a TV pilot for Ice T in the works for NBC, and a two-hour movie for Fox that will be shot in Ireland, Cassidy hopes to employ many more workers and see his visions once again reach the screen intact.