When Winnie Holzman was asked to create a television show from the perspective of a teenage girl, she was flummoxed. Raising an eight-year-old while writing for the groundbreaking series Thirtysomething, Holzman felt very far from the turbulence of adolescence. To research My So-Called Life, she spent time at a local high school and wrote a fictional diary in the mercurial voice of Angela Chase. The cult show, cancelled after just one season in the mid-1990s, launched the careers of Claire Danes and Jared Leto and remains one of the great pop culture portraits of teen experience – suffused with romanticism and longing, yet cringingly realistic. “No show on TV has ever come close to capturing as truly the lovely pain of teendom as well,” Joss Whedon has said.
Two decades later, having written several other television dramas and the hit Broadway musical Wicked, Holzman once again finds herself working as the showrunner on a series about a gang of emotionally volatile characters. This time it’s not teenagers, though; the characters in Roadies are nominally adults but live suspended in the prolonged adolescence that is rock ’n’ roll.
Created by Cameron Crowe, Roadies is the product of the film-maker’s lifelong love affair with rock, which started when he became a correspondent for Rolling Stone while still a teenager. For her part, Holzman is actually more of a fan of musical theatre than rock concerts. “This is Cameron’s life and his world … but I understand what it means to really care about something and to be enraptured with music,” she says fervently. Stage musicals and rock concerts are both a kind of pilgrimage, “a group experience that is transporting. That’s what we are writing about to some extent.” At a more basic level, Holzman recognizes the intense emotional connections between touring crew members: “It’s all about relationships. It’s a kind of family.”
Roadies opens with tour manager Bill Hanson (Luke Wilson) mid-sex act with a tattooed younger woman. The age difference does not go unremarked. “I love how you’re not some young dude – you’re like one of those old lions at the zoo,” the nymphette coos, cutting Bill’s aging roadie ego down to size. He and production manager Shelli (Carla Gugino) are the de facto parents of this traveling circus; they have to keep everyone happy, from guitar techs to money men to nannies terrorized by band members’ feral children.
Confessing that she was particularly intrigued by the show’s female characters, Holzman says of Shelli, “From the beginning I saw her as someone with something to prove because she is a woman in a man’s world. She has to work extra hard to prove she belongs and be extra right about everything” – a point that might equally apply to women showrunners on television soundstages.
The basic characters were already in place when Crowe and executive producer JJ Abrams (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Lost) approached Holzman about a collaboration on Roadies. That’s a lot of high-powered auteurs for one show but Holzman’s role, she suggests, “is all about being a facilitator and a help to Cameron. It isn’t about me coming in and trying to see how much I can make it more like me.”
Holzman is a Crowe fan going back to Fast Times at Ridgemont High – in its own day, a breakthrough in representing teenage life as striking as My So Called Life. She even took a small acting part as a divorcee in the movie Jerry Maguire just so that she could meet Crowe. “What was so striking was the nakedness of his voice. The cut-through-everything-else quality of his voice.” But Holzman never imagined she’d get a chance to work with him. “He not only hadn’t done a TV series before but, being an auteur, he hadn’t really worked in that collaborative way before that I knew of.”
Once Roadies finishes shooting, Holzman plans to focus on finishing a play. Surprisingly for the creator of such an influential TV series as My So-Called Life, she has no show of her own currently under development. Despite her genius for creating beautifully realistic televisual voices, Holzman wasn’t able to sell a post-MSCL project about a female toy company executive. Critic Alan Sepinwall mentions in his book The Revolution Was Televised that HBO execs were torn between greenlighting two different shows in the mid-90s: either a drama about a mob boss by David Chase or Holzman’s female executive series. As we know, HBO pulled the trigger on The Sopranos, leaving Sepinwall to imagine an alternative history in which HBO chooses Holzman’s show and becomes a haven for female programming.
Holzman describes the never-made series as one of her favorite pieces of writing, but seems surprised by the idea that it was ever in contention with The Sopranos for an HBO slot. “That’s hilarious!” she says, breaking into velvety giggles. “My understanding was that absolutely no one was interested. I never had a discussion with HBO, or with any other network or studio about that project. It was majorly disappointing.”
She pauses and adds, “You can’t argue against picking up The Sopranos, of course! Still, I would have liked to have had a conversation.”
