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Sunday March 18, 2007

Our woman in Hollywood

Stories by ELIZABETH TAI

starmag-feedback@thestar.com.my

She started with church plays, graduated to a column in, ahem, this newspaper and now ... she’s writing scripts in the world’s TV capital, Los Angeles!

OLDER readers of The Star’s Youth2 pages will probably be familiar with Adele Lim, writer of the Life! column. Lim started writing it in 1994, when she was just 17, stopping only after five years, when she left Malaysia to further her studies in the United States in 1999. Life! was very popular, and even had a co-author, Erik Neeson, at one time.

Like me, loyal readers of the column would probably be curious about what Lim has been up to all these years. What I surprise I got when I e-mailed her recently: “I’m currently working as a writer for One Tree Hill,” she answered, seemingly casually.

My reaction wasn’t casual at all: teen drama One Tree Hill is in its fourth season in the United States and is a big hit!

(The third season ended recently on 8TV in Malaysia. The show revolves around two basketball-playing half brothers, Lucas and Nathan Scott, played by Chad Michael Murray and James Lafferty, respectively.)

When Lim left Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, with a degree in TV/Film in 1996, she wondered whether she should start her career in Kuala Lumpur or Los Angeles. However, the South-East Asian economic crisis happened round about then, which meant TV work became scarce in Malaysia.

So she moved with her boyfriend (who eventually became her husband) to Los Angeles and tried to get into the TV industry – along with the million others who haunt the TV capital of the world looking for entry into the glamorous world.

However, with no money, no contacts and a pile of student loans hanging over her head, life wasn’t very glamorous for Lim.

She had a series of temporary jobs, some of which were quite colourful: she worked for the Dole/Kemp US presidential campaign, processed loans in a company that sold coin laundries and got paid to be in a live studio audience!

“We ate at discount burger places and lived in a rundown apartment complex where the police had to be called in every other week,” she recalled. “One day, I walked out of our apartment to find blood smeared on the floor of the hallway. It was gruesome, but when you’re young you think it’s all a big adventure!”

Our Adele’s all grown up and living the glamorous life in Hollywood!
Lim’s big break came when she answered an advertisement in a trade magazine asking for assistants for TV scriptwriting staff.

“My resume was non-existent, so it was a miracle that I was hired. I later learned that the man who hired me might have had a thing for Asian girls – he had this weird obsession with Asian exotic dancers and (Thai-Chinese violinist) Vanessa Mae – but he never behaved inappropriately around me so I didn’t care.

“In this business, you take whatever you can get,” she said frankly.

After getting the assistant’s job, a writer for whom Lim worked read one of her “test” scripts – “I wrote a raunchy Sex and the City script,” – and introduced her to his manager. This led to her first TV scriptwriting job: as staff writer for the sci-fi series John Doe.

It may sound like Lim got that first job quickly, but it actually took four long years for her to land it.

“Television writing is insanely competitive. There are tens of thousands of writers trying to break into the industry,” she said.

After getting the job, Lim was relieved, not to mention ecstatic, since she had had many moments of self-doubt when she thought she was on the wrong track.

“There were definitely bad moments, when I thought I should be, I don’t know, working in a bank or something and just writing in my spare time,” she admitted.

It’s a long, frustrating process to become a successful television scriptwriter, and there are no clear paths to that career either, Lim warned. And in the rocky, volatile world of Hollywood television, one must also be prepared for any eventuality, such as when John Doe was cancelled.

“John Doe was cancelled after a full season (22 episodes), but that was all right, most new shows don’t even get that far,” she said pragmatically.

Despite the cancellation, it was a positive experience, especially for a first-time staff writer, Lim said. She had the opportunity to write a script, she got story credit for one or two other scripts, and she produced some episodes, which involved flying up to Vancouver, Canada, where the show was shooting, and being on the set every day.

After the cancellation, Lim “adopted a puppy”, worked on other writing samples and went job hunting like any other writer. Thankfully, the executive producer and writer who hired her for John Doe was hired to work on the popular “life in a casino” series, Las Vegas, and Lim was taken along.

“That’s fairly common: people you work with on one show will hire you when they move on to other shows – providing you’re not a total bipolar nightmare,” she said.

Yes, indeed. The TV writing business is a volatile one and there is no job security.

“It’s incredibly stressful,” said Lim. “It’s not for the faint of heart.”

However, Lim appreciates this life because she gets to work in a field where people are passionate about what they do.

And after eight to nine years in the business (four years as a staff writer, a few years before that as a writer’s assistant and script coordinator for shows such as Xena: Warrior Princess, Jack of All Trades, and State of Grace), she is still “shocked and grateful” that she is being paid to write.

“One day you’re writing about two gangsters in a Chinese restaurant and the next day an entire crew goes to work casting gangsters and hanging roast ducks from a set they’ve built from scratch. It’s pretty magical,” she said. It’s can also be amazing and scary, she said.

“Las Vegas was a macho, testosterone-driven environment and I had to learn to deal with the raunchy, male sense of storytelling. A lot of our episodes involved booze, drugs and strippers,” she said.

She also found it challenging – and intimidating! – to work with high-profile actors such as James Caan (who plays casino mogul Ed Deline in Las Vegas).

“Other times, it was total fun, like the time (action star) Jean-Claude Van Damme was a guest star on an episode I wrote, and I got to hang out with him and his kids,” she said.

She describes the set of One Tree Hill as sweeter and more heartfelt. “The focus is not on flashy stand-alone stories, but on character arcs, which I actually prefer,” she said.

(Among the episodes that she has written: One Tree Hill’s fourth-season episode All These Things I’ve Done and Las Vegas’ Year of the Tiger, Die Fast, Die Furious and Games People Play.)

This is certainly a dream job for a girl who once wrote school and church plays, and, yes, was columnist for a national newspaper.

“For the longest time I thought I’d wind up writing unsuccessful novels in a remote hut. Living in squalor. Surrounded by dogs,” she said.

Now, she has greater ambitions: she hopes to keep writing for television for as long as she can and one day create and run her own show.

Though she doesn’t mind hanging on to the dream of writing unsuccessful novels in a hut!

“Also, a reservation at the (world renowned Californian) French Laundry restaurant would be nice. If there’s one thing I love more than writing, it’s good chow,” she said.

Related Story:
A day in the life

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