| The Hollywood Issue | Spring 2009 |
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Script Doctors Allan Hamilton ’82 Neurosurgeon Derek Shepherd runs his hand through his perfectly coiffed hair as he worriedly reviews an MRI scan. His patient, a young pregnant The plot is likely familiar to fans of ABC’s medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, which follows the lives of physicians at a fictional Seattle hospital. While Shepherd gets his matinee-idol looks from actor Patrick Dempsey, his experiences come courtesy of Allan Hamilton ’82. The real-life neurosurgeon is, he laughs, “consulting for Dr. McDreamy.” For Hamilton, though, television was never part of the plan. He was already chief of neurosurgery at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center and executive director of the Arizona Simulation Technology and Education Center at that school’s College of Medicine when Hollywood came calling. “They wanted to use 3-D neurosimulation and virtual reality techniques in an episode of Grey’s,” he explains. The writers contacted Hamilton—an expert in these techniques—several times with technology-related questions before he was eventually asked to consult for all neurosurgical issues on the show. As a consultant, Hamilton reviews scripts and helps fit neurological diseases to suggested storylines while keeping the details as accurate as possible. He knows both patients and physicians watch the show closely: patients ask whether a treatment shown on an episode is suitable for their condition, while his peers at a recent talk about stem-cell research wanted to know “what’s happening with Izzie,” one of the show’s more melodramatic characters. Hamilton credits his time at HMS with his taste for drama. “At Harvard and its teaching hospitals, I was surrounded by larger-than-life characters, such as Gerald Austen [’55] and Judah Folkman [’57],” he says. “They were so impressive, in the heroic mold. Doctors aren’t gods, but if they come close, it’s at Harvard.” His involvement isn’t limited to technical aspects. In preparing for the difficult storyline in which Shepherd loses a patient, Dempsey contacted Hamilton to ask how a real doctor might react in the situation. Hamilton is no stranger to those emotions; the plot is often based on his own experiences. The case in question is rooted in that of a patient who died on his operating table. “Losing a patient is one of the loneliest feelings in the world,” he says. “I was impressed Patrick wanted to convey that realistically.” For all his attempts at accuracy, Hamilton still finds parts of the process surreal. On a recent visit to the set, for example, he chatted with James Pickens, Jr., who plays the chief of surgery. “I found myself saying, ‘we’re both chiefs, I love your work,’ ” Hamilton says. “I had to remind myself that he’s an actor.” Likewise, he marvels at the set itself: the hospital’s main staircase leads nowhere, the cabinets are empty. “When I saw for the first time what happens there,” he says, “I was wide-eyed, just like any other fan.” Neal Baer ’96 The script had lain dormant for a quarter century before it landed on the desk of Neal Baer ’96. Yet the story—written by Michael Crichton ’69 The show, of course, was ER. Baer became the first medical student to be a staff writer on a television program, completing his internship in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles during production hiatuses. “That gave me hundreds of experiences, which became things that happened to Noah Wyle’s character,” says Baer. “Being puked on, peed on, ordering too many or not enough labs—it was all grist for the mill.” By the end of his stint with ER, Baer had finished his medical training and become one of the show’s executive producers. He now holds the same title at another NBC drama, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Baer entered show business before medical school. He already had several degrees, including two master’s degrees from Harvard, and had spent a year at the American Film Institute as a directing fellow. He dabbled in the craft for a few years, writing an episode of China Beach and an after-school special about sexually transmitted diseases. “I realized I was writing stories that were medically oriented,” says Baer, whose father and brothers are surgeons. “I was interested in medical school and thought I should try it.” Baer loved medical school. The fact that the HMS curriculum at the time, the New Pathway, was embedded in storytelling was a happy coincidence. “We learned how to elicit patients’ stories and uncover the nuances of their narratives,” he explains. That technique became a principal feature of the way Baer approached screenwriting, too. “When you’re writing a story with characters,” he says, “it’s helpful to have training that emphasizes narrative and ethical elements, because TV and movies are about conflict.” The approach has succeeded on ER and on SVU, where Baer has written about such topics as transgendered children and skeptics who deny the link between HIV and AIDS. Baer’s passion for storytelling is central to another recent project. He is the co-creator of The House Is Small but the Welcome Is Big, an initiative that explores the impact of HIV/AIDS through the eyes of women and children in South Africa and Mozambique by giving them cameras to document their lives in photographs. While his schedule prevents him from seeing patients, Baer continues to give their narratives a voice. “I’m very fortunate,” he says, “to have television and film to help me tell those stories.” Robert Huizenga ’78 For most HMS students, the fourth-year play is a time to generate a few laughs. For Robert Huizenga ’78, though, this tradition sparked a lasting That advice proved sage for Huizenga, who penned the 1995 exposé You’re Okay, It’s Just a Bruise about his experience as team internist for the Los Angeles Raiders. Huizenga resigned from that position in 1990, disillusioned by drug use and the pressure on athletes to play while hurt. “Thirty-three former players allowed me to share the medical side of their participation in professional sports,” he says. The book brought national recognition to Huizenga, who had previously been a medical correspondent for the news program BreakAway; a script consultant for such television shows as Trapper John, MD; and even an actor playing a neurosurgeon on the soap opera Rituals. Huizenga’s book eventually caught the attention of director Oliver Stone, who partly based his 1999 film, Any Given Sunday, on it. A few years later, Huizenga’s experience with the Raiders opened another door. A producer friend contacted him with an idea for a television show about people undergoing major physical transformations without plastic surgery. And so The Biggest Loser, a show that follows obese people as they compete to win money by losing weight, was born. Although Huizenga is a natural on camera, his greatest contributions to the show have occurred behind the scenes. During his stint with the Raiders, one of his jobs had been to help linemen keep weight on, a feat that proved challenging with the team’s intense two-a-day workouts. Huizenga suspected his time with the Raiders might offer useful lessons for The Biggest Loser: The intense exercise that had prevented his players from keeping pounds on might help obese contestants keep them off. “That observation,” he says, “led to what has become a salient feature of the show.” Frustrated that the show was being viewed as unrealistic, he set out to prove that extraordinary weight loss could also be achieved at home, without cameras and monetary incentives. He formed a study group of rejected potential contestants, put them on a rigorous exercise regimen, and tracked their progress. Six months later, members of the group had lost an average of 65 pounds, results similar to those achieved on the show. Huizenga has several new projects in the works, including a reality program based on grand rounds. Yet showbiz, he says, “is just something fun I do on nights and weekends.” He has a private practice in Beverly Hills and is an associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Despite his schedule, Huizenga still preserves one tradition he began at HMS: writing. “My goal is never just to be on TV,” he says. “It’s to put emotions in print. And the rest comes from that.” Joe Brewster ’78 “I want to make it clear that what I do is not ‘Hollywood,’ ” says Joe Brewster ’78. “It’s at the other end of the spectrum.” An independent Based in Brooklyn, he operates in two vastly different worlds: as founder of the Rada Film Group, with his wife, Michèle Stephenson, and as an attending psychiatrist at Harlem Hospital and an assistant clinical professor at Columbia University. Such dichotomy is familiar territory for Brewster, who grew up as a self-described geek in South Central Los Angeles. “To be obsessed with science and letters wasn’t necessarily appreciated in that community then,” he explains. “So I hid that part of myself.” After completing a residency at McLean Hospital, he decided to pursue another obsession and began taking film classes at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Today, he juggles his work as a psychiatrist with running the Rada Film Group and raising two boys with Stephenson, a human rights attorney. The theme of duality is an undercurrent in many of their films, including An American Promise, which recently received a spot in Robert De Niro’s Tribeca All Access development program. That documentary, still being filmed, chronicles a dozen years in the lives of two African American boys attending an elite Manhattan prep school. “We’re looking at the ways they acclimate,” Brewster says, “and we’re exploring why, in general, African American boys don’t do well in such an environment.” The filmmakers’ elder son, one of the boys featured in An American Promise, also appears in their 2008 documentary, Slaying Goliath, which follows the parents of boys on a Harlem basketball team as they travel with their children to Florida for a national championship game. The film, Brewster says, isn’t the typical sports movie. “It’s really more of a tragedy. We look at the families and their expectations for what basketball will do for them—and watch them self-destruct when those goals aren’t met.” Brewster has also produced several award-winning dramas, such as The Keeper, a story of a prison guard who helps a Haitian immigrant falsely accused of rape. The 1996 film, which Brewster also wrote and directed, drew on his experiences counseling inmates at the Brooklyn House of Detention. The similarities to his own life don’t end there: Like Brewster, the lead character in his 2003 film, The Killing Zone, is a psychiatrist, whose son is played by Brewster’s elder son. Brewster’s work as a psychiatrist informs his filmmaking in other ways. “Making a film involves many people working together,” he explains. “Being a psychiatrist helps me with that because it makes me a good listener.” As with his approach to filmmaking, when it comes to finding an audience for his work, Brewster thinks outside the box. “Ticket sales are important,” he says. “But the Web is a really powerful way to get our message to people.” He and Stephenson draw on their new media skills to create documentaries and Internet-friendly shorts that nonprofit clients can use on their own websites to drum up interest and aid in fundraising. It’s a way of working that reflects their activist roots. “We’re showing that film is not a luxury,” he says. “It’s something for everyone.” Erroll Bailey ’84 By day, Erroll Bailey ’84 helps heal the delicate bones and muscles of his patients’ feet and ankles. After hours, the orthopedic surgeon trades his Bailey’s foray into film began almost by chance. “I’d never thought about being a writer,” he admits. “But I felt I had a good story to tell.” That story, the tale of a homeless man with supernatural powers who serves as a guardian angel to a troubled African American teenager, became a manuscript. On a cruise ship in the Caribbean, Bailey struck up a conversation with a fellow passenger, who turned out to be a book editor and who asked to read his manuscript. Bailey’s novel, Mr. Dream Merchant, was published in 1998. The book’s inspirational message soon caught the attention of Hollywood producers. Bailey adapted his novel into a screenplay, but the special effects necessary to the plot made funding difficult. Still, the seed had been planted. “The experience was like Filmmaking 101 for me,” says Bailey. “I decided to take what I had learned and keep going.” He tried his hand at another screenplay, this one the tale of six childhood friends who reunite after the death of their Little League coach and mentor. The resulting film, The Last Adam, which was shot in just three weeks, won the Southeastern Media Award at the 2005 Atlanta Film Festival. To his surprise, Bailey has found his work in film parallels his time at HMS. “It was disconcerting to interact with people from an entirely different discipline—film—and to lead in a field I wasn’t trained in,” he admits. “It reminded me in many ways of my internship, always changing services, not having a handle on anything, yet having responsibility.” As he had on the wards, Bailey quieted his nerves and saw the process through. “Becoming a doctor gave me the confidence to trust myself,” he says. He now heads his own production company, Descending Dove Productions. Medical school gave Bailey—currently at work on the screenplay for a romantic comedy tentatively called House Calls—another push. As a student at HMS, he often played basketball with a Hollywood heavyweight: novelist Robin Cook, then a faculty member at the School. “My classmates and I used to ask him how he managed to practice medicine, teach, and be a bestselling author,” says Bailey. These days, the surgeon-turned-screenwriter is facing those same questions himself, with an answer that’s part mantra, part counsel to fellow physicians interested in the business: Just do it. David Foster ’95 On the hit television series House, MD, the curmudgeonly title character uses a range of diagnostic ploys to identify rare medical cases in his Such stories inform the fictional cases that Gregory House and his team explore, from that of a jazz musician who can’t breathe to that of a patient whose pain is triggered by a swallowed toothpick. “There’s a synergy between practicing medicine and writing,” says Foster, who notes that combing the medical literature for stories has an added benefit: keeping up with research. “Writing for House serves as a great kind of CME program,” he laughs. As the only physician on the show’s writing staff, Foster assists with the medical aspects of all scripts and has written eleven episodes himself. He credits his interest in writing with an elective medical literature course at HMS. The class—whose alumni include television producer Neal Baer ’96 and New Yorker scribe Atul Gawande ’94—was, he says, “incredibly good fun.” Yet Foster’s path from Harvard to House wasn’t a direct one. After his residency, he practiced at Boston’s Dimock Community Health Center, running a detox program and providing care to patients. Occasionally Baer, already established in the entertainment industry, sent a project his way, like consulting on the television show Gideon’s Crossing. Then came the opportunity to work on House. The show was not expected to be successful. After all, it had a little-known British actor playing a cynical American doctor with a Vicodin addiction and a knack for diagnosing rare disorders unknown to most of the viewing public. Yet the program overcame those odds to receive critical acclaim—and high ratings. Five years later, Foster is a full-time staff writer with fond memories of his time practicing in Boston. “I used to be a doctor who wrote a little,” he says. “Now I’m a writer who doctors a little.” Jessica Cerretani is assistant editor of the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin. Photo caption: Dr. McDreamy and his Grey’s Anatomy colleagues are just a few of the fictional physicians with connections to Harvard Medical School. Photos: ABC/Photofest (top); Kristen Spinning (Hamilton); Courtesy of Neal Baer; Courtesy of Robert Huizenga; Courtesy of the Rada Film Group (Brewster); ©Stan Kaady (Bailey); Joseph Viles/FOX (Foster) |
woman, is suffering from mini strokes; he must determine whether to perform a risky operation to save her life. When she dies during surgery, he is devastated.
while at HMS—still rang true. “Michael had captured what it’s like to be a medical student, a resident, an attending,” says Baer. “It was told from a doctor’s perspective, and I was really taken with it.” That script became a television pilot. At the request of the producer, a childhood friend, Baer flew to Los Angeles to help write episodes of the show. With his family in Boston, Baer intended to return in two months. Instead, he says, “I stayed seven years.”
interest in show business. “As silly as it was,” he says, “that experience was in many ways much more valuable to me than reading another textbook.” Huizenga, currently most visible as the physician who helps contestants shed pounds on NBC’s The Biggest Loser, helped write and costarred in his class’s production of Stoma, a spoof of Coma, a medical thriller by former HMS faculty member Robin Cook. Huizenga shot hoops with Cook, who advised students interested in the craft to write at least an hour a day.
filmmaker whose work centers on the themes of cultural, community, and individual struggle, Brewster is far removed from the glitz and glamour of Tinseltown—literally.
scalpel for a keyboard and a craft no less intricate—or rewarding. A partner at Atlanta’s Resurgens Orthopaedics, he moonlights as a screenwriter and film producer.
patients. Though vastly different from the character whose lines he helps pen, David Foster ’95 shares that same passion for discovery. “The ability to delve into a patient’s condition and use both logic and leaps of faith to make a diagnosis is why many of us went into medicine,” he says. “It’s a privilege to listen to patients—they tell fascinating stories.”
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