Screenwriter Paul Haggis may be most famous now for writing back-to-back best picture Oscar winners, Million Dollar Baby and Crash, but he once feared he'd be best known for the Chuck Norris cheesefest Walker, Texas Ranger.
After spending eight days rewriting the pilot episode as a favour to a colleague, he saw the television series run for 10 years with his name attached to it as creator. "Never do a favour for anyone. It will come back to haunt you," he joked during his "In Conversation With ..." session at the Banff World Television Festival.
"That's why I ended up deciding to quit television and do independent films," Haggis told the crowd. "I woke up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. I'd just pictured my tombstone, and it said 'Paul Haggis: Creator, Walker, Texas Ranger.' I had to do something to right that."
This January, Haggis is returning to television for another shot at redemption with the crime drama The Black Donnellys, to air Thursdays on NBC. He co-created the series with Crash collaborator Bobby Moresco, and directed the pilot episode.
Haggis calls it an homage to a "story that haunted me in my youth." The real-life Black Donnellys were a family from Lucan, Ontario – 40 miles from Haggis's hometown of London – murdered by their neighbours in 1880. His show The Black Donnellys follows the story of four brothers involved in organized crime in New York.
"I wanted to do something contemporary about that tragedy, and talk about intolerance, about criminals, about the way people look at criminals. To make you empathize with and really love these people, and see how they deal with the larger community," said Haggis. "In the (real) Black Donnellys' case, the larger community slaughtered them, so it didn't work out overly well."
"I'm basically telling a tragedy, but it's a tragedy that will be played out over four or five years. Hopefully a funny tragedy," he added, pointing out that even in his sombre films like Million Dollar Baby, people forget there was humour in his writing before the tragic twist.
NBC picked up The Black Donnellys a decade after Haggis and Moresco wrote it, only after The Sopranos and later shows proved audiences were ready for complex anti-heroes. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was after the series creator acquired two Oscars and a heap of other accolades and publicity. It was written immediately after the quick failure of his critically acclaimed show EZ Streets, which he said is similar in tone and subject matter. "I think it'll fail brilliantly," he joked about his new project, bemoaning his TV track record for critically acclaimed failures.
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1 - Joan Hunt
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