Naked Women, A Lot Of Corpses, And a Love Story

A handful of men are brawling in a creek at the bottom of a wooded North Carolina ravine. It’s cold; everyone’s wet. At one point they stop fighting and one of the men spots the guy who’s responsible for their predicament. It’s David Schickler, wearing the new Timberline boots that he bought for himself in celebration of this event, standing relatively dry and warm among the crowd of 70 or so production people shooting this first scene for a new Cinemax television series, Banshee. The miserable actor looks at Schickler, the Rochester writer who’s the show’s co-creator, and asks: "Does it get worse than this?"

It may, if co-producer Alan Ball (True Blood and American Beauty) and Schickler have a hit on their hands, notes Jeff Spevak. Banshee makes its debut at 10 p.m. Friday, and at least a half-dozen people will die in that first hour. The body count will continue to rise. Ten episodes have been filmed. Schickler and his co-writer, Jonathan Tropper, have been commissioned to write another two. And yes, lots of people are also having sex in the fictional town of Banshee, Pa. "I don’t know what my mother will say when she sees this," Schickler confesses.


SCENE ONE. Naked women, a lot of corpses, and a love story

Schickler pulls out his phone and flashes a photo sent to him by Tropper. It’s a shot from New York City’s Times Square, where a huge poster for Banshee glowers from the side of a building. 'Small town. Big secrets,' the advertisement reads, and Schickler points out the less-obvious details. "There’s a guy lying in a pool of blood, and in the background an Amish guy digging a grave." Schickler explains how the story of an ex-con who steals the identity of a murdered sheriff in Pennsylvania’s Amish country suddenly appears in Times Square. "When you come up with a TV show pitch, you’re selling a world," he says. "What they call in Hollywood 'renewability.' They want to see this is a five-year-long idea. 'Convince me, as the money guy, that you can keep doing this for five years.' They want to know that there’s that much depth to the main character’s troubles."

The money guys want The Sopranos and NYPD Blue, shows driven to hell and maybe back by tortured characters. "Will this man be damned or absolved?" as Schickler puts it. Banshee’s damned man is Lucas Hood, played by the relatively unknown New Zealander Antony Starr. "And we think he’s going to be a star," Schickler adds. "Lucas Hood is our Tony Soprano; he’s our Andy Sipowicz." Alan Ball agreed. He has Grammy, Oscar and Golden Globe statues on his mantle for writing films like American Beauty and as co-producer of the HBO hits Six Feet Under and True Blood. When he signed on as a co-producer, Banshee had a real heavyweight on the team. Despite the violence and action, Schickler insists he and Tropper have also written a love story. "It’s not gratuitous," he says. "There are naked women and a lot of corpses. But there are deep relationships. The main character is trying to get back the woman he loves. In the end, the relationships between the characters are what keep you with the story. We both love a good fistfight, in stories. But there’s a romantic arc at heart in our literary novels."

SCENE TWO. A killer with a tender stomach

It might be easier for Schickler to create these kinds of characters if he himself is driving to hell and back. We shall see, perhaps this fall, when his memoir is scheduled to be published. He reveals little for now, merely describing The Dark Path as "how I spent my youth, in the early ’70s, on a path to being a Catholic priest, and where my love for women, writing and the world challenged that path." Long story short, Schickler is not a priest. He didn’t even get close.

He was 30 years old when he moved into the basement of his parents’ home in Gates — the kind of hothouse environment in which fragile writers bloom like heirloom tomatoes — spending the next three years creating what would prove to be his breakthrough novel, the New York Times 2001 bestseller Kissing in Manhattan. The monk-like existence suits Schickler, who seems to like to simplify mundane decisions, like fashion and menus. His closet appears to be nothing more than unadorned shirts in varying shades of graduate-student drab. One place where he can frequently be found writing is a Bruegger’s where the employees know him by name, and where Schickler generally orders the same thing: chicken spaetzel soup. He has a tender stomach, this literary architect of death explains, and doesn’t like to challenge it...

Running the literary circuit with writers like James Frey, whose A Million Little Pieces, a scary memoir of drug addiction, was one of the acclaimed books of 2003, he met Jonathan Tropper, a novelist with a taste for literary wisecracks and dysfunctional relationships. "We had a lot in common," Schickler says of Tropper. "He was close to his family. Close to his religion, me Catholic, him Jewish. As writers we favored a darker, sexier, more-adventurous brand of books and screen stories." About three years ago, the pair started developing their idea for Banshee.

The basic job description for writers hasn’t changed for centuries, but the setting does. William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler and F. Scott Fitzgerald led a long line of established writers to Hollywood in the 1930s to create screenplays. A similar migration is occurring now, only toward this different medium: the dense, extended cable television series, as established by such shows as The Sopranos, Mad Men and The Wire. The bright literary lights Michael Chabon, Salman Rushdie and Gary Shteyngart have been toiling on their own shows. But supreme literary content does not guarantee success in the now-superheated terrain of cable drama. Jonathan Franzen, a novelist so celebrated that he warranted his own Newsweek cover, was adapting his bestseller The Corrections for HBO. It died on the storyboard table.

But Banshee lives. It got a B+ review this week from Entertainment Weekly. "Ultra-violent, over-the-top, and wickedly fun," it writes; and you really can't ask for more than that.