Lost in Ideas

Montage Art, books, diverse creations 66 Open Book 68 Hearing History 68 Off the Shelf 71 The Elephant in the Cutting Room Lost in Ideas Cuse with a young Norman Bates (Freddie Television’s Carlton Cuse on what animates his work Highmore) on the set of Bates Motel, and stills by lydialyle gibson from the show, which reimagines Psycho hen an idea keeps him the more intuitive and dissected online every up at night—nudges him the less intellectual the week. The producer and awake to lie there, eyes process is of choosing an writer is now knee-deep W wide and mind working— idea, whether it’s mine or in two other series: The that’s when television writer and produc- one that’s pitched to me,” Strain, based on vampire er Carlton Cuse ’81 knows it’s good. An Cuse says. “If I feel it, and novels by horror director epidemic of vampirism in New York City if I find myself continually thinking about it Guillermo del Toro; and Bates Motel, Cuse’s that, chillingly, sends the infected chasing for days or weeks, then I know.” revival, with co-writer and co-producer after those they love; a reimagining of Al- Cuse is perhaps best known as a co- Kerry Ehrin, of the Psycho story. “What fred Hitchcock’s Psycho as an eerie, tragic showrunner and co-writer for the hit TV really interested me there was the idea of almost-romance between a mother and son; series Lost, which debuted in 2004 and Norma Bates”—the murderer’s mother— a plane crash on a seemingly deserted is- took the shipwrecked survivors of Oceanic “a really iconic character in American land whose secret powers slowly, menac- Flight 815 on a circuitous six-season odys- cinema that we knew virtually nothing ingly come into view: “The more I do this, sey that millions watched obsessively and about,” Cuse says. (She appears in the 64 January - February 2016 Photographs courtesy of Carlton Cuse Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE Vampires on the attack in The Strain; Cuse on the set of his new show Colony; and a still from Colony, which stars Lost actor Josh Holloway totalitarian societies, between appar- ent normalcy that the tragedy and the anxiety it belies. “In certain ways we know is com- things function well” in the show’s imag- ing doesn’t befall ined L.A., Cuse explains. There’s no street them.” crime; a bus ride across the city takes 12 More recently, minutes. “But there are enormous costs Cuse has been stay- and consequences to living under this ing up nights with imposed colonialism. And that’s what the his latest project, show explores.” Colony. He describes Growing up, Cuse’s afterschool hours SA NETWORKSA the show as a “fam- were filled with reruns ofHighway Patrol, U ily drama crossed Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Rifleman, Green Acres, with an espionage I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Lim- thriller, with a sci- its. But it was The Chronicles of Narnia, PAUL DRINKWATER/ PAUL ence-fiction over- which his fifth-grade teacher read aloud original movie, plus two 1980s sequels and lay.” The story is set in a Los Angeles oc- to the class, that hooked him on narrative a later prequel, only as a ghostly voice or cupied by a mysterious invading force. A and made him want to write. Enthralled corpse; Hitchcock famously kept an empty 300-foot metallic wall surrounds the city; and impatient with her chapter-a-day chair marked “Mrs. Bates” on the set of the a proxy government is in power. Cuse says pace, he convinced his mother to buy the 1960 film.) “You’d think that Norma Bates he and co-creator Ryan Condal wanted books so he could read them all at once. was this horrible shrew who berates her to explore a modern-day version of a He entered Harvard as a pre-med stu- kid into becoming crazy,” he adds, “but scenario like Vichy Paris: “The idea that dent—a family ambition more than his what if that wasn’t the case at all? What if you have Parisians going about their lives own—but had begun to drift toward other she loved her child to death, and there was and drinking espressos in sidewalk cafés subjects by his junior year, when the mak- just some flaw? So really it’s a story about while Nazi stormtroopers are marching ers of Airplane came to campus. Cuse was two people who love each other, and as an down the street.” Colony reflects that same recruited to help set up a screening in the audience we’re sort of hoping against hope split, often felt in occupied countries or Science Center. “They were recording a laugh track,” he says, “and they wanted an ‘intelligent audience.’” He had never met anyone who made C hapter & Verse movies, and here suddenly were writers Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words and directors. “It was like a bell went off,” he says. He asked Tom Parry ’74, a Harvard Thomas Gutheil seeks the full text of “Childhood is a lost, enchanted land, grad who’d recently gone to Hollywood a poem with a final couplet that runs, as and we spend the rest of our lives trying (and who brought the Airplane filmmakers best he recollects: “His claims to be bru- to find it again.” to Cambridge), how to get there himself. tally frank were just endless, / Until, to be The words to “My Little Papaya Tree,” “And he said, ‘Make a movie.’ ” So Cuse, a brutally frank, he was friendless.” heard sung on the radio to the tune of member of the varsity crew, made Power “The 12 Days of Christmas” Ten, a documentary on rowing. “It’s this es- More queries from the archives: oteric sport, and people outside it don’t re- “Life is all right but for a bad 15 minutes Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter ally understand why anyone would get up at the end” (perhaps from Edward Gibbon) and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware at three in the morning to train and work “Not at the table, Amanda” (c. 1920s) Street, Cambridge 02138 or via e-mail to like crazy for what amounts to, like, five “Beginning in October effectively again” [email protected]. six-minute races in the spring.” To fund the film, he sneaked into the boathouse at Harvard Magazine 65 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE night, copied the names off old team pho- Richard Henry Dana Jr. A.B. 1837, tos, and sent letters to everyone whose ad- OPEN BOOK LL.B. ’39, LL.D. ’66, survives in modern dresses he could find. memory as the author of Two Years Before Movie in hand, he went to Hollywood the Mast. But his literary legacy alone sells and got a job, first with one producer and Beyond him short, Jeffrey L. Amestoy argues in then another—buying organic food for the Slavish Shore (Harvard, $35), the first full boss’s Akita, getting the car windows tint- biography in more than half a century. ed, and reading hundreds and hundreds of Brahminism Indeed, the voyage he undertook scripts. “That was like film school for me.” and recorded fired Dana At night and on weekends, he was writing: (see Vita, March-April 1998, page 48) with hatred not only of the scripts, stories, ideas. “I got to where I maltreatment of sailors, but also of slavery and other injus- could write anytime, anywhere,” he tices—causes he addressed as a lawyer. Amestoy, M.P.A. ’82, says. “Procrastination and perfec- a former chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, is the tionism are two sides of the same ideal extra-literary biographer. From the introduction to his coin, and they inhibit you from account of Dana’s “odyssey”: getting to your subconscious, which is where you want to ac- On an August day in 1834 a slight, counsel of the cess your ideas. And the pres- nearsighted boy boarded a ship he had sailor and the sures of television are wonder- never seen before, joined a crew to slave,” wrote ful for shedding those censors whom his aristocratic family would have Charles Francis that stand between you and the never spoken, and sailed where few Adams Jr. [A.B. work you want to do.” Americans had ever been. The ship might 1856, LL.D. ’95], Despite an occasional screen- have vanished with the forgotten lives of “courageous, skillful writing detour into feature films its sailors. Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s clas- but still the advocate like 2015’s disaster flickSan Andreas, sic, Two Years Before the Mast, immortal- of the poor and unpopu- “My heart is in television,” he says. Cuse ized the harrowing voyage from Boston lar.…In the mind of wealthy describes the form’s narrative challenge as around Cape Horn to the remote coast and respectable Boston almost anyone almost architectural: the rigor is in building of California. But when Dana witnessed was to be preferred to him.” a strong structural framework, and “the fun the sadistic flogging of his shipmates, it Dana first broke with convention when part” is filling in the details. “And I love that prompted more than one of the most he left Harvard to ship as a common it’s really a collaborative medium, in this compelling scenes in American litera- seaman.

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