L.A. Show's Creator Likes Living in Monterey
By Charlie McCollum
Mercury News, 11/02/02

Graham Yost may live in Monterey, but his heart and soul are still in Los Angeles, particularly the L.A. of Raymond Chandler and Roman Polanski's ``Chinatown.''

``God, I just love Chandler,'' says Yost, the executive producer and creator of the new television series ``Boomtown.''

``Chandler was so important to me when I was a teenager. I fell in love with Los Angeles through Chandler and through `Chinatown.' ''

That enthusiasm oozes into Yost's show, which may be set in modern times but has the feeling of an L.A. of a bygone day. Critics, who have generally heaped praise on the cop drama, have justifiably compared its storytelling to that of film director Akira Kurosawa in his classic ``Rashomon.'' But the show really has as much in common with ``Chinatown,'' ``L.A. Confidential'' and any of the films based on Chandler's novels -- film noir on the fringes of a glitzy town.

In fact, one of the reasons film director Jon Avnet (``Uprising,'' ``Fried Green Tomatoes'') agreed to work on ``Boomtown'' with Yost is the writer's unique view of L.A. ``It's idiosyncratic, it's quirky and it's not as iconic as the L.A. I've come to live in and see and have seen on film,'' says Avnet.

So why does a writer who can wax so poetic about L.A. live in the relatively unexciting city of Monterey?

It was all a matter of family and lifestyle. Seven years ago, Yost and his wife, Connie, decided that a place like Monterey was a far better one in which to bring up their two young children.

The move was for ``my sanity too,'' says Yost. ``It helps to get away from this business.''

But in many ways, Yost is a true child of ``this business.''

Born and raised in Toronto, Yost is the son of Elwy Yost, who for years was host of ``Saturday Night at the Movies'' on Canadian television. His father was such a film fan that he once kept Graham home from school to watch ``Citizen Kane,'' telling his son's teacher that watching the Orson Welles film was as much a learning experience as a day in the classroom.

``The only thing was he didn't get the reaction from it that he wanted,'' recalls Yost with a laugh. ``He was spoiling for a fight. He wanted them to say, `Well, a movie isn't a reason to be late for school.' But they already knew what kind of a character he was and how much he loved movies. So, they basically said, `Yeah, ``Citizen Kane.'' That's worth being late for school.' ''

Immediately after college, Yost moved to New York to become a writer and spent five years there before moving to L.A. He first hooked onto the writing staff of Nickelodeon's kid comedy, ``Hey, Dude!'', before putting in time on sitcoms including ``Herman's Head'' and ``Full House.''

It was during his time on ``Full House'' that he got his big break. Although he had done mostly comedy, Yost says, he ``was always, on the side, writing action scripts and drama scripts. And then I hit upon `Speed' in 1991 and that pretty much changed everything.''

The 1994 success of ``Speed'' -- the pulse-pounding, high-adrenaline thriller that pitted a young cop against a madman bomber -- led Yost to work on a string of adventure films including ``Broken Arrow'' and ``Hard Rain.'' It also led to a stint as a writer-director on ``From Earth to the Moon,'' the Tom Hanks-produced HBO mini-series on the Apollo space program.

When Hanks started work on ``Band of Brothers,'' another miniseries for HBO, one of the writers he brought in for the World War II drama was Yost. And it was during that time that Yost stumbled upon a germ of a storytelling idea.

``With `Band of Brothers,' I was researching one particular battle in Holland. Each vet I talked to had a different account of the battle. And that was because, as they said, `all you know is the 12 feet around you in battle,' '' says Yost.

``So their whole perspective on the battle was those 12 feet. I thought it would be interesting to patch those stories together as a series of stories rather trying to make one big story. It didn't work for the episode, but I was really struck by how that might be a cool way to show reality.''

What evolved from that notion was ``Boomtown,'' where every crime is seen from the individual perspectives of its recurring characters -- a couple of veteran detectives, two beat cops, an ambitious district attorney, a paramedic, a newspaper reporter -- as well as victims, criminals and bystanders.

``In the writers' room when we talk about the show, what we think of is not that we're seeing some person's point of view,'' says Yost. ``It's more that each person has their own life. They've got what happened to them before and what's happened to them after. It's as if we've got seven movies running at once. . . .

``Everyone is the hero of their own lives, their own movie. And what we do in any episode is show selected clips from each person's movie. It's as if you're doing seven different shows . . . and we're just putting them together in one.''

Yost claims to have never seen Kurosawa's ``Rashomon,'' which offers four very different versions of the same murder-rape. But he thinks ``Boomtown'' is closer in form to Lawrence Durrell's lush romantic novel, ``The Alexandria Quartet,'' which views the same circumstances and the same environment through different eyes and motives.

Using that kind of storytelling, Yost has created a rich, challenging kind of cop drama that is loaded with moral ambiguity and actually asks the viewer to pay attention. In one very good episode that played off the Sarah Jane Olson-Symbionese Liberation Army case, what actually happened at the scene of the crime isn't revealed until the last few moments of the hourlong show.

``We don't present an objective truth,'' says Yost. ``The viewer has to put it together as to what really happened. The more characters' lives you get into, the more you understand about a given situation.''

Yost adds that not every episode is precisely the same in its format or approach.

``Not every character is going to have their point of view every week, but every character will be in the show,'' he says. ``And some stories will be more heavily weighted toward one person's story; one person's point of view will sort of be guiding. We will find out more of why they have that point of view, what's going on in their lives or in the solving of this case that is driving them.''

(In tonight's episode, almost half the show is solely from the point of view of one of the detectives, ``Fearless'' Bobby Smith played by Mykelti Williamson. It has far more to do with the death of one of Smith's Army bodies from the Gulf War -- and certain promises that were made -- than it does about the crime.)

At this point, Yost plans to write about a third of ``Boomtown's'' 22 episodes while serving as script editor and executive producer on the rest. That means a lot of time away from his Monterey home, although he points out that ``if I'm writing an episode, I might as well be writing at home as in L.A.''

It also looks like it could go on for a while. ``Boomtown'' is finishing second in its time period behind ABC's ``The Practice,'' pulling in around 10 million viewers weekly. That's not great, but it was good enough that NBC recently announced that the show had been given a full season to find an audience.

And Yost firmly believes that despite the complex format of the show, viewers will accept the challenges of ``Boomtown.''

``I honestly feel this: If we're asking too much of the audience, then we're not delivering enough,'' he says. ``Hopefully, we're delivering enough so that's worth the price of having to pay attention.''

Boomtown
*** 1/2
Airing: 10 tonight, Chs. 8, 11
Creator: Graham Yost
Cast: Donnie Wahlberg, Mykelti Williamson, Neal McDonough,
Jason Gedrick, Gary Basaraba, Nina Garbiras, Lana Parrilla

Originally appeared at: Bay Area.com