Kevin Williamson single-handedly revived the teen-slasher genre with his screenplays for Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. This month he's providing the skeleton for The Faculty. And he's busy with next year's fright fare Killing Mrs. Tingle - all the while keeping his hit TV show Dawson's Creek afloat. With all this success you'd think his fear of failure would have let up. But his anxieties started early and he's not about to give them up now.
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Two years ago, nobody had ever heard of Kevin Williamson. Today he's as inescapable as any of the serial slashers he created for the big screen. That's because he single-handedly resurrected the teen-horror genre with his scripts for blockbuster scare-fests Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and then unleashed a gaggle of gorgeous young things into popular culture with his hit semi-autobiographical coming-of-age TV show Dawson's Creek. Just now his profile is even higher because the sci-fi special effects flick he cowrote, The Faculty, which stars Salma Hayek, Elijah Wood and Josh Hartnett, is hitting screens across the country, and his hotly anticipated directorial debut, Killing Mrs. Tingle, is already in the can. That Williamson was a barely working actor up to his neck in bills just a few years ago makes all these feats even more surprising. And now that he's got a $20 million writing, producing and directing deal with Miramax's Dimension Films, he's primed to be in the spotlight for years to come.
Under the circumstances, I'm expecting Williamson to wear at least a self-satisfied grin when I meet him, if not lapse into egomania. But when we shake hands, I realize my expectations are way off. He's anything but smug; in fact, he strikes me as downright spooked--in a self-mocking way, of course. Despite being friendly, unassuming and engagingly yackety as he shows off every nook and cranny of his groovy offices and introduces me to his young staff (nasty, dumb or unattractive candidates need not apply), he radiates a palpable anxiety.
"It's a very good time to be Kevin Williamson," he admits gingerly, glancing across his buzzing work space. But before I can agree with him, he continues, "In two years, though, it may not be a really good time to be Kevin Williamson. You know, 'Here today, gone tomorrow.' That could be the case for me. I'm always thinking, 'When's it all going to come crumbling down? When's the big flop going to happen? I mean, the whole teenage horror thing was over five minutes ago, right? Fear drives me more than anything. Fear of what won't happen if I don't deliver."
Williamson discharges this soliloquy so seriously, but at the same time with such a deadpan, manic delivery, that I can't help bursting out in laughter. At this, he looks relieved and cracks up, too. Then he looks me dead in the eye and confesses, "I'm scared to death of coming off really stupid in front of you. Am I doing OK? I'm just such a boring interview. You'll find I'm not very intelligent. It's OK that other magazines I don't like write shitty stuff about me, but I read Movieline religiously every month and I would prefer to come off sounding like I sort of know what I'm doing." I assure him he sounds like everyone who knows what's up in the business: smart, self-aware, hopeful, frantic, toasted around the edges. At this, he relaxes.
"I'm the first one to walk into a room and dispel all my neuroses," he continues. "Look, everyone's insane. So it's not like you're going to find me different from anyone else. I had a totally dysfunctional upbringing. It's led to years and years of the therapy I still badly need."
Williamson, now 33, was raised on the North Carolina coastline in a fishing village that boasts one stoplight, one gas station and two restaurants. While he was growing up, his father, whom he describes as having an absurdist, edgy sense of humor, was a struggling shrimp and scallop fisherman. His mother was a housewife with a gift for storytelling. "We were proudly poor white trash," boasts Williamson, grinning.
At age 12, Williamson was a self-described "very sensitive kid." He was busy either reading (he successfully convinced the local librarian to subscribe to Variety) or checking out the latest blockbuster at the neighborhood theater--his favorites were Jaws and, no surprise, Halloween, which he watched six times straight. He even made such homegrown, sub-Spielberg-ian flicks as White as a Ghost, in which one of his neighbors did double duty as both a psycho-killer and his victim. By high school, he was emoting in the drama club and devouring how-to screenwriting books. It looked as if Williamson was on a straight path toward Hollywood. But the blossoming filmmaker was pushed back by what would turn out to be one of the greatest blows to his confidence ever. The hit was delivered by his high school English teacher, whom he refers to as "Mrs. Tingle." It all happened when he was reading one of his short stories in front of his English class. Before he'd gotten halfway through, "Mrs. Tingle" interrupted him to harangue him about his atrocious grammar. She then proceeded to predict that he'd never amount to anything as a writer, and ordered him to go sit down because he had a voice that shouldn't be heard.
The impact? "My 'Mrs. Tingle' experience paralyzed me," admits Williamson. "I didn't write another word for 10 years. At that age, you don't get why people are being so evil. Only in the aftermath do you look back and go, 'They had their own demons. They were just fucked-up people like the rest of us.'"
Following graduation, Williamson applied to the Chapel Hill journalism program, but was rejected. Was "Mrs. Tingle" right? On the rebound, he decided to study acting at East Carolina University, after which he moved to New York to pursue TV, movie and theater roles. He envisioned for himself an acting career "a little like Bill Pullman's offbeat stuff before he got famous--only with better comic timing." By the early '90s, he'd moved to L.A. but his resume consisted of little more than bits on Another World, roles in what he calls "terrible Roger Corman movies I don't want to name or people will go out to Blockbuster and rent them," and, his high point, a gig as William Kennedy Smith to Jim Carrey's Ted Kennedy on an In Living Color sketch. Why does he think his acting career never took off? "I look horrible on camera," he admits.
It was at this point that he began to turn the crippling trauma of the "Mrs. Tingle" experience to his advantage. Flat broke, he borrowed cash from a friend to take a UCLA screen-writing course, for which he wrote a script about getting revenge on the bitchy confidence crusher. Killing Mrs. Tingle sold in short order to Inter-scope. There was a setback when he got canned from the project (was "Mrs. Tingle" right again?) and was replaced by other writers, including budding South Park idiot savant Trey Parker, but he didn't give up. He dove into a second script, Scary Movie, which he completed in three days while holed up in a friend's house in Palm Springs. Miramax picked it up for $500,000 plus box-office points, and Wes Craven directed it virtually word for word. It was released as Scream. After the hip, self-aware, ironic film became a blockbuster, Williamson vaulted to the top of every Hollywood power-broker's automatic redial list.
Considering the difficulties Williamson had getting where he is today, it's no wonder he harbors insecurities about his accomplishments being, well, a fluke. "Sounds like you've contracted that fairly typical Hollywood syndrome that, any minute now, someone's going to tap you on the shoulder and say--"
"Time's up, we've found you out!'" Williamson interjects, chuckling. "I always feel like a fraud. There's always that 'Mrs. Tingle' thing lurking in me."
Whether Williamson thought he could write or not, Hollywood had faith in him. And why not? There were people who could recite Scream line for line and considered it a masterpiece. And Williamson turned out to have plenty of other juicy, crowd-pleasing ideas in his head. Within months of Scream's success, he penned another slasher film, I Know What You Did Last Summer, which he adapted from Lois Duncan's novel. Although the location was different (it was set in a coastal village, not a high school), the director was not Wes Craven (it was Jim Gillespie, who had only directed TV shows) and the cast was largely made up of TV personalities new to the big screen (Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Johnny Galecki), it became a huge hit. Was it Williamson's intention to capitalize on the slasher genre? "Part of why I took the job is that there was a lull in getting paid by Miramax for Scream," he says. "I thought, 'I'm never going to work again.' When somebody wanted to throw cash at me, I took it."
At the same time he was exorcising his slasher fantasies, Williamson was cooking up an idea for a TV show about sexed-up teens in a small coastal town. He pitched the concept to the Warner Bros. TV network and got a 13-episode commitment. Dawson's Creek went into production with stars-in-the-making Katie Holmes, James Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams and Joshua Jackson, and with Williamson serving as executive producer and chief writer. But just then Miramax wanted him to cough up a script for Scream 2. "That movie nearly killed me," he says. "I was in the middle of doing Dawson's Creek in North Carolina and the Miramax henchmen flew down there to follow me around and force me to write Scream 2. They actually sat me down in a room and made me write an outline, which I'd then fax back and forth to them and Bob [Weinstein]. Bob would call me up screaming. That movie should have sucked for the way we made it. [Director] Wes [Craven] did a phenomenal job--a better job than he did with the first. But, oh, God, it was a nightmare."
Perhaps with an enhanced appreciation for how his time should best be spent, Williamson wrote only the early drafts of this month's The Faculty, a horror sci-fi movie about aliens taking over a high school. He was originally going to direct the film, but ultimately decided against it, leaving the job to Robert Rodriguez (_Desperado_ and From Dusk Till Dawn). "I drifted off to do Mrs. Tingle instead," he explains. "I was always nervous about The Faculty because it's such a big special effects science-fiction movie, a genre I know nothing about. I was going for The Breakfast Club meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and I wrote two drafts, but I kept saying, 'I'm the wrong writer for this movie.' The studio eventually hired George Huang [writer/director of Swimming With Sharks] to work on it. He's a good friend and he would send me faxes of rewrites. I'd call him up and say, 'What the fuck is this? You're ruining the script.' He'd scream right back, 'Shut up.' It was a big party."
What does Williamson think of the finished product? "I haven't seen it so I don't know," he says. "I have a feeling it's going to be a roller-coaster ride. Robert really knows how to shoot this kind of movie. I don't think he's going to miss. But then again, when I work with people they become friends, so I can't be objective."
The upcoming Killing Mrs. Tingle is the project closest to Williamson's heart. When Miramax gained control of the project Williamson had been thrown off years before, it became the obvious choice for his directorial debut. The role of Mrs. Tingle, a hateful schoolteacher on whom dark, sweet vengeance is exacted by her fed-up students, was said to have interested Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Sigourney Weaver and Sally Field, for starters. "I screen-tested an Oscar-winning actress or two," Williamson concedes, "but I wanted Helen Mirren badly."
How did the predominantly young cast, which includes Dawson's Katie Holmes and big-screen newcomer Barry Watson, handle working with such a revered, seasoned British actress? "The kids were really nervous," he says, "particularly Katie, who'd had a bad experience with a certain Oscar-winning someone with whom she had screen-tested for the movie. But the first day we had a table reading, Helen just walked in like any other human being, having a lot of fun. I didn't buy it and said to people, 'Give her until day four and she's going to turn into a stark, raving actress.' Day four came and she was even nicer, joking it up, having fun."
And how did everyone deal with the other notable veteran in the cast, Molly Ringwald? Williamson himself is a self-confessed fan of the John Hughes movies in which she starred. "The day Molly was supposed to start working, Katie Holmes and I just stood outside the trailer too nervous and in awe of her to go in," he recalls. "But she was a very good sport and seemed to like commenting on herself, playing in a movie with Katie Holmes when Molly was the Katie Holmes of her moment.
"Overall, we had so much fun," Williamson continues. "We even called the set 'Camp Tingle.' I'd made a pact with myself: 'You may never get to direct again, so enjoy it.' And I did."
Now that he's made a movie about getting even with "Mrs. Tingle," does he feel he's laid to rest the trauma of having been so emotionally thrashed by her? "The real-life 'Mrs. Tingle' is dead," he says. "I tracked her over the years. She's gone. And though I know she may have had her own demons, the movie doesn't let her off the hook. She may have just been pure evil."
So, when are we going to get Scream 3? "The whole horror movie thing is over," Williamson asserts. "The best we can hope is that this present cycle will run its course. Let them all die out and, a year from now, let's hope the curiosity factor about seeing the third part of the Scream trilogy will let it make some money. It's a departure from the first two. Yes, it's a horror movie, yes, people will die, but there's a whole new angle, which I can't reveal because Bob Weinstein would have a fit."
Considering the time Williamson invests in his movie career, how involved does he continue to be in Dawson's Creek? "I write and write and write on it," he says, with a hand-wringing anxiety in his voice. "Yesterday, I watched episode one of the new season. Today, I have to read episode five and they're expecting my notes by this afternoon. Tomorrow I'll edit the director's cut of the second episode. I should look tonight at episode three. Then, this weekend or early next week, I have to fly back down to North Carolina to have serious discussions with a certain actor on the show."
Since Williamson's projects feature many of Hollywood's most beautiful kids, does he care to comment on the off camera goings-on he must be privy to? Williamson lets loose with a hearty, funky laugh and then, with tongue sort of in cheek, says, "Everything you hear is true. On Dawson's Creek, we have behind-the-scenes musical sleeping bags, intrigue, all of it. But I will definitely be hanged if I go any further. Let me put it this way: When we finished Killing Mrs. Tingle, we made a gag reel, basically a fake porno movie called Drilling Mrs. Tingle, in which the main question to everyone on the shoot was: 'Who were you having sex with on this movie?' On that project, though, nothing was going on! If we'd done the same thing on Dawson's Creek or Scream or Scream 2? There might even have been a crew guy involved here and there. But I'd better stop."
Well, if he must. Since Williamson has been so instrumental in making stars out of Hollywood's Neves, Loves and Sarah Michelles, how would he handicap their chances for success? Let's start with Jennifer Love Hewitt, whose movie career took off with_ I Know What You Did Last Summer_. "The first thing that came to mind when I met her was Sally Field--great actress, bubbling charm. Almost too charming, so that you forget she's a very clever actress. Love can do whatever she wants because she's got the head for it, the management and a fabulous, cool mother."
Neve Campbell, heroine of both _Scream_s? "There's something very 'Old Hollywood' about her. Out of all these kids, she has a maturity about her so that she'll move with ease into adult roles."
I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2's Sarah Michelle Gellar? "A live wire who's very savvy about the business, who knows when to and when not to smile, and who's got the talent to back that up. And, like Love, she can nail it in one take."
James Van Der Beek, his Dawson's Creek alter ego? "After 20 seasons on Dawson's, after having a huge acting career, he'll be a director. I see it coming already."
The same show's Joshua Jackson? "He'll be a huge little deal in movies, then he'll come and go, then reemerge and be Tom Hanks. He's talented, smart. I love him."
Williamson saves his biggest raves for Dawson's Creek beauty Katie Holmes--whom he chose to star in Killing Mrs. Tingle despite pressure from the studio to hire someone more along the lines of, say, Alicia Silverstone--and with whom he has a dose relationship. "She's like my kid sister--we're so close, she went with me when I was house shopping." About her career, he says without hesitation, "There's an Oscar in Katie's future. She's going to become Michelle Pfeiffer. Like Pfeiffer or Jodie Foster, she's an incredible beauty the camera just eats up. But beyond that, she has amazing raw talent that's growing by leaps and bounds. A very smart, very practical girl from Ohio who watches the dock tick and thinks, 'I'd better learn how to act real quick.'"
So what's next for Williamson after Tingle? He'll produce and perhaps direct the romantic comedy Her Leading Man for Universal Pictures, which writer Greg Berlanti will pen. "It's a very self-referential deconstruction of the romantic comedy," says Williamson. "It's about a guy hired by Disney to write the first original live-action musical since Newsies and make it a romantic comedy. The guy is like, 'How, in our cynical times, can I revive two dead genres?'
"This project is a departure from anything I've done before," adds Williamson. "And not one character in it is under 30."
Williamson is also preparing another TV series, wasteLAnd, which is scheduled to debut in 1999 on ABC. Like Dawson's Creek, it's an edgy ensemble about everyday people, but it focuses on twentysomethings, not teens, and they live in L.A. Can he throw us a few details about the show? "Not really," he says flatly. "We're casting it now and we're going to shoot the pilot in November. That's all I can say."
With all the projects Williamson has done and is doing, surely there are material gains to be enjoyed? Indeed. He recently moved into a spacious vintage home in one of L.A.'s most venerable neighborhoods. "The best thing about all the work is it allows you to realize some dreams," says Williamson. "I had custom-built for my father the exact truck he loves in his favorite TV show, Walker, Texas Ranger, and, since my parents won't move here, I want to build them a great house so they can get out of the trailer they live in."
Then again, with writing, directing and consulting on movies, on top of writing, producing and developing for TV, does Williamson ever feel his plate is too full and that he may burn out? He nods and says, "I can only take so much before I flip out and just go off somewhere in a corner, collapse, cry, then come back all happy. Totally manic. I can't tell you how pressurized I feel all the time. I probably had the closest thing I've had to a breakdown two weeks ago. I called my mom, sobbing and said, 'I can't do this anymore.' Talking to her made me feel much better. She has this theory that Bob and Harvey Weinstein are going to kill me." He breaks up laughing. "But I'll kill them first. I love Harvey and Bob. I am so dysfunctional that I'm just attracted to people like them."
Still, I point out, there's no sense exaggerating one's insecurities. After all, he's not only dealt with his "Mrs. Tingle" fears, he's also in a position now to work on just about anything he wants. Williamson won't have it. He gives me a look and asks, "Even if it's over in two years, you'll still talk to me won't you? Maybe smoke a cigar with me and reminisce?"
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Stephen Rebello wrote about actresses getting ugly for the November 98 issue of Movieline.