PASADENA, Calif. _ When writer Noah Hawley was charged with reimagining the Coen brothers' hit movie "Fargo" for television, everyone held their breath. After all, the Coen brothers' point of view is quirky, to say the least.
But four years later, FX's anthology version of "Fargo" has piled up 32 awards. And Hawley is not only writing but running another show for FX, "Legion," which arrives for its second season on April 3.
No one is more surprised than Hawley, who spent 10 months on unemployment and eight years working in what he calls "day jobs."
"I started out as a musician, so writing music and songs at a certain point I thought, 'If you're going to write popular music, then your target audience is 14 or 15 years old.' And I wanted to tell more adult stories. But you gotta pay the bills as well. So I was fortunate enough to have a job out of college that was very meaningful."
That job was with the Legal Aid Society in New York in family court. "I was a paralegal with the lawyers who represented the children in abuse and neglect cases, also juvenile delinquent cases, and I was there for four years," he says.
"And you're working with a lot of really tireless people who are arguably a Band-Aid society. But there's a sense of nobility to that. And I was lucky to be able to contribute to that," he says.
Finally Hawley left New York for San Francisco, where he joined a writing group that supported and encouraged fellow members. "There wasn't a similar job that I could get (in San Francisco), so I started doing some law firm work to pay the bills and ultimately I sold a novel, and then stopped having a day job. And now I had to earn it because that money runs out pretty fast."
That novel was "A Conspiracy of Tall Men," but what followed wasn't exactly writer's bliss. "There was a period in my 30s where I was going through a divorce, had published my first novel and had a deal for a second novel. But they didn't like the book that I delivered. And my parents were both going through illnesses that would ultimately take them away. It was a tough period there where it felt I was going to have to find some grace to get through it all," he says as he shakes his head.
"Then this moment where you're looking at the small numbers in your bank account trying to figure out, 'Well I'm going to have to go back to work unless I figure out something.' So the Hollywood work came at a moment where it really felt like life-saving."
The "Hollywood work" was the sale of his first screenplay, "Lies and Alibis," which starred Steve Coogan and earned Hawley a passport to Hollywood.
"I ended up selling a pitch, and Paramount hired me to adapt my book, because now I seemed to be a screenwriter. And then 'Lies and Alibis' sold _ all within a six-month period. So I went from being a struggling novelist to having three projects very quickly. It changed my life, really," says Hawley.
Today he finds himself in charge of "Legion," and swatting offers faster than Roger Federer. "On some level I'd been able to ... create my own future," he says. "As a writer, you can always write something that changes your life. That next thing could do it. So the power of it was I was on my heels from life, but instead of giving up, I leaned into it and ultimately it paid off."
Married and the father of two children, 10 and 5, he says the grace he found during that down period rose from a sense of moral imperative.
"I feel like I'm a humanist," he says, "in the great tradition of Kurt Vonnegut. I really feel like I may not be a firm believer in an organized religion, but I am a believer in that we should all strive for a moral and ethical grace and treat each other with respect and try to make the world a better place. I try to balance my work around my life to be a good husband and father and to take care of people and make people feel like the work they do matters. Because it does matter to me. I don't ascribe to the 'tortured artist' persona. I think that's a crock. We can all do our best work and go home to our kids."
PROSECUTOR UNCOVERS NEW EVIDENCE
Marcia Clark, who prosecuted the O.J. Simpson case, is starring in a new show on A&E premiering Thursday. Called "Marcia Clark Investigates the First 48," the series will re-examine famous cases, and the information that was gleaned by the investigators. The murder of Caylee Anthony is one of those cases, and Clark says she uncovered information the prosecutors did not have when Caylee's mother, Casey Anthony, was acquitted.
After the case ended, the defense attorney, Jose Baez, wrote a book about it, says Clark. "And in it he said that his investigator found that one of the browsers on the family desktop computer in the house _ I think it was in the living room _ was used to search for foolproof suffocation. And that was done shortly before Caylee, the baby, died," she says.
"So then the question became who did that search? According to Jose Baez's book, the search was done at 1:51 p.m., at which time George Anthony, Casey's father, would have been in the house. He didn't go to work until something like quarter to 3 or 2:30. He would have been home.
"So Jose Baez theorized that George Anthony had done the search for foolproof suffocation, and that he did it because he was feeling suicidal.
"Come to find out, we reinvestigate ... We have a few experts look at this and determine that, in fact, the program that the defense attorneys' expert used was incorrect as to the time-stamp and that it wasn't 1:51 when the search was done. It was 2:51, at which point we know _ based on cellphone pings _ that George Anthony was at work. He was not at home, and that the only person who was at home when foolproof suffocation was searched for was Casey Anthony," she says.
"We also find out the following: 31 days that Caylee, the baby, was missing, the police get called to the scene by Casey's mother. They go and they talk to Casey. Casey says, 'I think she was kidnapped by Zenaida Gonzalez,' 'Zanny the Nanny' as they referred to in the media ... So they say, 'OK. Where would Zanny have taken the baby?' And she names three places. And they take her around to each of the places and rule each one out.
"One's a retirement home. One's a model home no one lives in. One's an apartment complex. No one's ever heard of anybody there. Clearly not true. They interrogate her at her place of work, by the way, where she didn't work, where she lied about working. Then they bring her home. They bring her home, and they leave her home by herself to figure out what to do next. And we determined that during that time she was home alone for a few hours, the police came back and picked her up. But for the few hours she was home alone, someone erased the search history that contained the search for foolproof suffocation. I'm guessing the prosecution would have loved to have had this information. That's what we uncovered."
MID-LIFE CRISIS BRINGS LAUGHS TO ABC
What if you suffered a mid-life crisis and decided to quit your job and launch a new business? Crazy? Well, that's the theme of ABC's new series, "Alex, Inc.," premiering Wednesday. The show stars Zach Braff as the guy who stretches for the brass ring.
As he explains, "This is inspired by a very true story about a man named Alex Blumberg who left 'This American Life' because he had this idea that no one had quite yet mastered how to monetize a podcast, which does come mostly from selling short ads within the podcast and having sponsorship much like television. But often these days they're woven in in creative ways to the podcast.
So that was his idea, and he said to himself, 'I can't believe no one's done that yet. Someone should really do that.' And then he said to himself, 'Maybe I should do that.' And so he said, 'But I know nothing about starting a business. That would be crazy.' And he said, 'I have an idea. My very first podcast will be this meta story. I'll tell the story of a guy with a family, who has no idea how to start a business trying to start a business.'"
VERSATILE ACTRESS MASKS SHYNESS
Benedict Cumberbatch and Kelly Macdonald are co-starring in "The Child in Time" Sunday on PBS's "Masterpiece." It's a weird story about a couple who tries to stay together after suffering a shattering tragedy. Mixed in is a sort of spy-story and some fantasy _ not everyone's cuppa, as they say in England. Macdonald, who keeps showing up in a wide variety of shows, reports that she's really shy at heart.
"I think a lot of actors are shy," she says. "I remember that Paul Newman was incredibly shy. It makes sense because when you're acting it's someone else's words, it's like a different character. So I don't think the two are necessarily incompatible being, shy and being an actress."
