Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld Take "Flight"
by Sullivan Lane

Let’s get one thing straight right now: The episode “Jitters” (episode 1-8), which aired around this time last year, was probably one of the most well-received episodes of the first season. It was admittedly the episode that most said hooked them onto the WB network show. The episode was written by the husband and wife team of Jeff Gottesfeld and Cherie Bennett.

Before their experience on the “Smallville” writing team, Bennett and Gottesfeld’s only previous forays into television were story consultations on the daytime soap operas “Port Charles” and “Another World.“ But the team is no stranger to young-adult audiences. Their most recognizable work is the critically acclaimed “Anne Frank and Me,” which was published in 2001 and won several awards. They also wrote the young-adult novels for “Dawson’s Creek,” under the pseudonym C.J. Anders, and more than a handful of other titles in mass-market fiction and plays. In addition, Bennett writes a nationally syndicated teen advice column called “Hey, Cherie!” with Copley News Service.

Although Gottesfeld and Bennett no longer write for the onscreen “Smallville,” they haven’t completely severed their ties to the show. They continue to tell the stories of the residents of Clark Kent’s hometown through the young-adult novels published by Little, Brown. “See No Evil,” which was released earlier in 2002, was the second book in the series; “Flight” was released in early December, and another, “Speed,” is planned for release in 2003.

As busy as Bennett and Gottesfeld are (next week they are off to Florida for the first reading of Bennett‘s new three-character play), they squeezed in a half-hour to log a telephone interview from their Southern California home.

Sullivan Lane: I loved “Flight.” I think I liked it better than “See No Evil.”

Cherie Bennett: Great! I kinda think I did too.

Jeff Gottesfeld: Me, too. I like the one that’s coming later on even more -- “Speed.” It’s a very, very cool book. It’s actually about something. Essentially, it’s Multicultural Week in Smallville, you’ve got a guy who wants to turn back the clock of the town to what it was --

Cherie: Before it was multicultural. So it touches on prejudice, racism and progress, and the changes in small-town America. It was really, really fun for us to do.

Sully: And when will that be out?

Jeff: I want to say March [2003].

Sully: Where did you come up with the idea for [the meteor mutant in “Flight“]?

Jeff: There’s a great story behind it. Both “See No Evil” and “Flight” came out of ideas that were developed in the writers’ room in “Smallville,” while we were on staff …

Cherie: … that we kicked around for shows, and for one reason or another it was decided not to use them for the television show. And for example, with “Flight,” it would have been really tough to do for television. And if you tried to do it, I could only imagine how hokey it would be.

Jeff: Actually, the story of “See No Evil” was quite well-developed in the room. That came fairly close to being the sign of an episode. The “Flight” one, everyone thought it was a cool idea, and impossible to execute on television.

Cherie: It originally came from the Greek myth …

Jeff: Icarus and Daedalus. … I think it was our friend Greg Walker who concocted this notion in the first place, [just to give] credit where credit is due.

Sully: Clark’s spaceship as the artichoke. Did you get that [nickname] from KryptonSite?

Cherie: Did they say that on KryptonSite?

Sully: We’ve been referring to it as the Giant Artichoke because it looks like one.

Cherie: It does, doesn’t it!

Sully: And then they changed what it looks like, so now it’s the Lawn Dart, or Darth Vader’s helmet. [Laughter.]

Jeff: No one was wild about how it looked. So in between … they’re very careful about the looks of things … when it came time for the spaceship to take on greater importance onscreen, it got a facelift!

Cherie: Rather than having the artichoke flying.

Jeff: I understand it took three tons of Botox.

[Laughter.]

Sully: Which character do you enjoy writing the most?

Cherie: For me, that would be Chloe. I want the “Chloe Show”! I love Chloe, and I think personally I have a girl sensibility, and I write a lot for girls. I know she really speaks to girls, because she’s a real girl. She’s spunky, and funny, and smart, and assertive, and she looks like a real girl. And she has this hopeless crush on this super -- wink, wink -- [guy].

Jeff: For me, I can’t point to a particular character, except to say that the freedom of being able to write 30,000 words to tell a story is an unbelievable amount of freedom, compared to a 53-page script. You really have a lot of room.

Cherie: You get to be in their heads much more: you could have exposition, stream of consciousness. You don’t have the limitations of set or budget, so in those senses it’s really freeing. And in a script, at least last season, how it was done was … all of the scripts were developed in a room by all the writers and then a writer or a writing team were sent off to write a script based on a very detailed outline that was approved by everybody -- the networks, the studios, the head writers, and then you only had about a week or eight days to write it. So you don’t get very long to write a script.

Jeff: That’s fairly typical for hour-long television, and occasionally it’s even shorter.

Cherie: And the people we were working with were extremely experienced and very good at it, and trained as well. But as novelists it was pleasurable to be able to take the time and the word space.

Jeff: You can have a conversation which can go into some depth; it’s not limited to being two minutes or three minutes long.

Cherie: And that was another freedom we had [getting to involve the secondary characters], and it was something that we learned, being fairly new to television. You have X number of people who are on X kind of contract, which means to fulfill those kinds of contracts, you need to do X, Y and Z scene every week, which means there are characters you don’t get to give a lot of time to.

Jeff: There is a lot of room for imagination [in writing the novels], and there is a lot of room for character development, which you don’t get an opportunity to do onscreen. The sword-fighting scene in “See No Evil” of Clark and Lex, when Lex is doing his self-putdowns, that was just a gift, to be able to write something like that. You get to say a lot, and you need some room to get into it.

The interview's not over! Read more!!!

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