Steven DeKnight

A Three Part DTS-exclusive interview and feature with departing Smallville producer and writers, Steven DeKnight.

Love or Hate the storylines in Smallville Season Six, one thing can be said about the driving force behind this season... Steven DeKnight represented a bridge between the fans of Smallville and "The Powers That Be" (writers) of Smallville.

Mr. Deknight will be departing from Smallville at the end of this season, but he has left his mark on Smallville in so many ways.

In an exclusive interview with Mr. DeKnight, reporter Sana Saleh got to know a little more about where the man came from, how he has reached out to the fans, about working on Smallville and what his vision would have been for season seven of Smallville.

Part One

A Circuitous Route: “It was like something out of a movie.”

Interview by Sana Saleh

A Circuitous Route

The irony of Steven DeKnight penning the untapped adolescent trials of comic history’s most enduring characters on Smallville is that his own trajectory is doubtless a hidden reservoir of inspiration. Unlike Clark Kent however, he had only one power; growing up in small working class South Jersey town with nary a theatre in sight kindled a vivid imagination for the life-long television enthusiast and departing co-executive producer and writer. DeKnight knew well the meaning of struggle toward one’s true-if “circuitous”-calling in an inauspicious and culturally barren locale.

“It was one of those circuitous routes. Millville, New Jersey is about as far away from Tinsel Town as you can get,” DeKnight said, threading laughter through memory, upbeat attitude belying the desolate depictions of the town.

“I grew up in a miniature version of Tom Cruise’s home town in All the Right Moves. It was a factory town and it was just bleak.”

As DeKnight recounted the uphill climb toward lionized Hollywood hills, it was increasingly apparent how his own background lent itself to writing a Clark Kent, Lex Luthor, and Lois Lane finding their way out of a small town that was too limited for their potential.

“I’d always loved movies, television...growing up I had to ride my bike 30 minutes to the next town over to see a movie, which in the summer was brutal,” he said.

He calls himself the “poster boy for why movies and television are not what’s wrong with society.” His earliest childhood memories are dotted with regular trips with his parents to drive-ins. “I grew up on all that stuff and just loved it, loved it.”

“Ever since I could remember when I was a tiny, tiny little kid, they would take me to the drive in-and this was back in the early to mid seventies, where, the stuff I saw were R-Rated Kung-fu movies, monster movies-stuff you probably wouldn’t take a kid to [see]....were extremely violent disturbing..and I’m the most nonviolent person ever. It’s entertainment, even as a kid I got that.”

The fervor for pop culture his parents instilled in him manifested itself first in thespian ambitions. Initially self-conscious, playing the king in his fourth grade play showed him an avenue to both channel his interests and overcome his timidity.

“I don’t think my brain was formed enough to realize it was acting,” he joked. “But I liked the performing aspect and I was also horribly shy as a little kid and that was a place that I can really let myself go.”

He had in fact originally intended on embarking on a long term acting career. He seized on his first opportunity to leave Millville and headed for California.

“When I graduated from high school I went to UC Santa Cruz, which was basically...I got a brochure, I opened it up, and it was rolling grassy hills and the ocean and it couldn’t be further from where I grew up. I saw this brochure and I thought, ‘Yeah. I’m in.’”

He occupied the bulk of his undergraduate experience acting, usually in plays, before deciding that he needed to adjust how he would realize his Hollywood dreams-through his love of the story behind the acting.

“It was a great time to be at Santa Cruz. They didn’t have a graduate program yet so the undergraduates got to do everything,” he said. “Then after about 3 and a half years into the whole [acting] thing I realized I was in this in-between place in acting where I wasn’t tall enough or good looking enough to land those kind of roles, and I wasn’t Dustin Hoffman-good enough, to land the other kind of roles. I fell into a very beige area.”

So he started writing the plays instead of acting in them. He was then accepted into UCLA’s graduate playwrighting program, which drew him into the Hollywood area. From there he latched on to screen writing. “I realized, one, I was no Shakespeare and, two, didn’t want to starve to death so I stuck it out for an extra year and went through the screen writing program.” The program provided the first of several sobering lessons about Hollywood. DeKnight learned the creative disparities between the approach of a playwright and that of a screenwriter. “The screenwriters were coming at it all from a Hollywood blockbuster point of view.”

“It was more geared toward what’s going to sell the script, not geared towards character,” he explained. “Which is part of the problem with Hollywood these days. Coming from the playwrighting background to me was all about character and finding the right stories.”

Story-however substantive or shallow-would have to wait. Upon graduation, DeKnight would spend the next six years looking for his big break. He resorted to teaching English as a Second Language at a Japanese school and bided his time. Nevertheless, he refused to entertain the possibility of changing tracks.

“And honestly, I couldn’t do anything else,” he said. “Writing was the one thing that I was actually good at. And I definitely felt, coming from a small town in South Jersey, I had no connections, I didn’t know anybody-you can’t get an agent unless you have a job; you can’t get a job unless you have an agent. You just got to keep chipping at it and sooner or later something will happen.”

Something did eventually happen-MTV’s Undressed. While he was thrilled to finally land a writing gig-especially since he was initially hired for only two weeks-his enthusiasm quickly waned.

“It was the creative equivalent of a sweat factory,” DeKnight said.

All the more reason he values his later experiences on creative powerhouses Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and eventually coming on board to write and produce the everlasting Superman legend on Smallville.

Reaching Out

Fans reaped the benefit of DeKnight’s ability to relate to their passion for their source material. DeKnight’s own entertainment media fanaticism, coupled with the perceptible influence of his former boss and prolific producer, Joss Whedon, motivated his desire to reach out to enthused fans of his television shows. DeKnight started a blog on MySpace on a whim as a means facilitate direct interaction with online Smallville fans. He had previously kept in touch with online Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans.

Producers and writings logging on to or quietly lurking around fan sites has been something of a trend in the last few years, and the new CW network is built around making promotional materials accessible to online fans, but DeKnight says Whedon was doing this well before it was in vogue.

“I’m heavily influenced by my years of working with Joss Whedon, who was really doing this stuff before it got popular. I used to talk to the fans all the time when I was on Buffy, when I moved over to Angel I didn’t have enough time, was much busier on that show. His fiancé planted the seed when he came on board Smallville.

“I was on Smallville for a couple of years and literally my fiancé signed up for MySpace, which I’d never heard of, and she convinced me to join, saying ‘sign up, meet some new friends’ and I protested ‘I don’t have time to see the friends I have now!’”

DeKnight said he enjoyed making himself accessible to fans-despite the liberal amounts of inter-fan bickering and the occasional attacks on his writing or the show that can be found on the blog. [ ]Producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar “had no idea what [he] was up to.” He says he maintains utmost leniency toward all feedback and discussion-from the good, the bad, to the inane responses the blog draws.

“I was on for a couple of weeks and literally I had like two friends and one of them was “Tom”, who you get automatically. So I said I’ll reach out to the old Buffy and Angel fans and open it up to the smallville fans...so I did and the response was great and I met a lot of great people online and yeah, sometimes get completely out of line, but from the start I told everyone that unless they’re using extremely foul language I’m not going to delete your comment.”

He adds, “You can complain all you want, all I ask is that you try to be quasi-nice to each other. Or at least be funny when you’re attacking somebody. There’s no policing on my blog.”

DeKnight uses the fan responses on his blog as to gauge efficacy of certain, usually his newer, approaches, but does take into consideration that online participation is self-selecting and limited.

“It’s kind of a double-edge sword because number one, it’s a litmus test, to see how they’re reacting to what you’re doing but also, considering the five million or so people that watch the show it’s still a very, very small percentage of people that get online,” he said.

He and the rest of the writing crew keep in mind that specific niche and subsets of people get online in the first place. “It’s people that are super-passionate and they have their own very clear, very specific ideas, and it doesn’t necessarily represent the majority of ideas or even the [on screen] vision.”

The extent of his bosses’ opinions on the blog was amusement, and later, a warning.

“Early on when I was doing this I actually got yelled at by Al and Miles,” he admits. He had made a veiled reference to a spoiler that had long been leaked all over the internet fan communities on his blog. The main concern is not leaking of the story spoilers itself so much as inadvertently undermining the promotional mechanisms behind the show.

“Often times the studio and network want to make an official release and you don’t want to get in the way of the publicity machine,” says DeKnight. “I was told in no uncertain terms ‘Don’t give away any spoilers, even if it’s on the internet.’ I confirm or deny nothing. I totally understand...you have to be careful what you put out there.”

Aside from that, DeKnight himself does not know if or how Gough and Millar use the blog. “Honestly they kind of chuckle at it. How they use it is a mystery to me. Hopefully someone else will talk to the fans next year.”

Click on the link :

http://www.devotedfansnetwork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=38000&page=1&pp=&conly=0