An Unscripted Career

Last fall when Cynthia Saunders was writing the pilot script for “Profiler”--NBC’s new Saturday night dramatic series about a crime-solving female forensic psychologist--she immersed herself in a dark, fictional world inhabited by a serial killer.

Then she’d stop and drive her son to water polo practice. Or help her daughter with college applications.

But Saunders didn’t mind.

“Life is about interruptions,” she says.

“Doing this for as long as I have, you have to have some ability to just transition from one world to another pretty quickly. Just being a mother in general you learn to switch gears.”

Since selling her first script in 1988 to TV’s “thirtysomething,” she has achieved success as a screenwriter even as she chose to turn down television staff writing jobs that would have required uprooting her children and moving to Los Angeles.

Instead, she writes from her home in Laguna Beach. She’s been there when the kids got home from school. She’s car-pooled. She’s made sure homework got done. And she’s gotten to know her children’s friends. Saunders, a single mother since divorcing five years ago, has never wanted to do less.

Now, just as her teenage son and daughter are coming of age, so too is Saunders’ screenwriting career.

She is the creator and supervising producer of “Profiler,” an hourlong suspense series whose protagonist is a woman who has a “unique gift for understanding the criminal mind.”

Says Saunders: “I think men bring certain sensibilities to things, and women bring certain sensibilities to things. To me, there’s an inherent contrast, and therefore it’s dramatic to have a woman who’s dealing with violent crimes. I think as a woman she’ll bring a different spin to it.”

Saunders, a passionate reader since she was a child, had never tried writing anything more than a letter until she was 34. That was 10 years ago.

Now, she has not only beaten the competition at large--each year the networks hear hundreds of ideas for potential new series--but in creating a series she managed to bypass the normal rise through the ranks of episodic television.

Before landing the series, she had written only eight scripts--for such dramatic shows as “Equal Justice” and “Sisters”--in addition to working a year as a staff writer on “L.A. Law,” which accommodated her request to work from home in Laguna.

“When the network called to say my show had been picked up, they said, ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’ ” Saunders says.

John Landgraf, NBC’s vice president of prime-time series, says: “It’s very unusual for a writer like Cynthia, who doesn’t have an extensive background as a producer, to create a pilot and not only have it made but have it get picked up and go all the way as a series. It’s just a testament to the quality of her writing.”

September has turned out to be a big month for Saunders.

Three days after her series debuts Saturday on NBC, CBS will air “After Jimmy,” a TV movie written by Saunders about a family recovering from the death of their 18-year-old son. (Meredith Baxter, Bruce Davidson and Eva Marie Saint star).

And she’s rewriting a feature film screenplay for Castle Rock Entertainment--an epic romance about a white girl and a Comanche warrior based on a true story passed down in her family.

But “Profiler” has been taking up the most of her time.

In the series, Ally Walker stars as Sam Waters, whose crime-solving ability led her too close to a serial killer: He retaliated by killing her husband. Three years later, Waters’ former FBI agent mentor Bailey Malone (co-star Robert Davi) has coaxed her out of her self-imposed isolation with her 7-year-old daughter. During an investigation of murders in Atlanta, the serial killer who murdered her husband resurfaces. Waters then decides to join Bailey in forming a federal unit to fight violent crime. The pilot was filmed last March on location in Atlanta. Other episodes are being created on a sound stage in an industrial section of North Hollywood, where filming began in late July.

Because Saunders has no experience in series production, Ian Sander and Kim Moses were hired as executive producers of “Profiler” and Nancy Miller serves as co-executive producer and head writer.

Of the more than 80 pilot scripts purchased by NBC for the fall season, only 20 were produced; “Profiler” is one of seven to actually make it onto the network’s fall schedule. Each of the show’s six staff writers--including Saunders--will write two of the 12 episodes ordered by NBC.

After meeting with her fellow staff writers for three weeks in June to go over story ideas and character development, most of Saunders’ story meetings have been by phone. Three weeks ago she drove up to North Hollywood to finalize the story line for the first of her two scripts and stop in at the “Profiler” sound stage--a warren of sets depicting Sam Waters’ house and the crime task force’s high-tech command center.

While Saunders was there, the cast was waiting to film a scene. Behind them, dress extras--called “background”--wearing dark suits and name tags waited for their cue to give the crime-fighting operation an air of bustling activity.

Saunders has been on sets before. But this was different.

“It’s so exciting to literally see human beings say the words you write, to have all of this physically created from things you thought up in your head,” she whispers.

“When I stop to think about it, it’s like ‘Oh, my God!’ ”

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Saunders’ Laguna Beach home is a 1940s California ranch-style house on a hill above Coast Highway. She works in an office she had built above the garage. It’s an airy room with closets lined with shelves for scripts, a window seat with a view of the ocean a mile away and a comfortable sitting area next to a fireplace.

An early riser, Saunders is up between 5:30 and 6. After running with her yellow Lab, Dakota, on a nearby fire trail, she’s at her computer by 6:30 a.m. She works until 1 p.m., when she stops for lunch. That’s usually followed by an hourlong nap “just to go unconscious and get my brain cleared out. I usually can’t be creative and come up with new material more than six hours.”

After tending to “kid things” and “life stuff,” she returns to her computer around 4 o’clock and works “as long as my brain stays functional,” usually about 7.

“My schedule alters when I’m on deadline; then I basically work nonstop,” she says.

That’s what she was doing the first week of September when she was nearing completion of the first of her two “Profiler” scripts.

Not without the usual interruptions, though.

Her 18-year-old daughter, Margot Farley, left to begin her freshman year at USC and her 15-year-old son, Brian Farley, started his sophomore year at Laguna Beach High School.

Then there were the trips to the doctor--Brian had suffered a broken leg weeks earlier when he was hit by a car. Trying to be there for her son and working furiously to finish the script “was difficult, to say the least,” she says. “I apologized to him for being grumpy.”

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Born into a “big Southern family” that moved from Houston to the Birmingham, Ala., suburb of Mountain Brook when she was 5, Saunders is one of six sisters.

“We’re a close family,” she says, adding that each of her sisters, who are scattered across the country, will be hosting parties for the premiere of “Profiler” on Saturday.

Growing up in a community that boasted “open land, creeks and forests,” Saunders was the classic tomboy. “I rode horses from the time I was young, and I’d wander around the woods and build forts and catch polliwogs,” recalls Saunders, who today owns a thoroughbred jumper that she boards in San Juan Capistrano.

When she wasn’t tromping through the woods, she was reading.

“I loved spending time alone, and I still do,” she says. “I have a tremendous fantasy life. When I was a kid, I used to make up games and adventures.”

Saunders’ love of reading led her to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she majored in English and met her future husband, Chris Farley. Married after graduating in 1975, she and Farley moved to Charlottesville, Va., where he attended law school and she worked selling banquet space for a small restaurant.

At the time, Saunders considered either studying architecture or having children. Children won out.

Saunders and Farley and their young daughter moved to Laguna Niguel from Virginia in 1979 and to Laguna Beach in 1981, a few months after their son was born.

In 1986, when she was 34, Saunders found herself at a crossroads: Margot was in grade school and Brian in preschool.

“I said, ‘OK, now what? I have a little time; what do I want to do?’ So I sat down to write a novel,” she recalls. “I assumed that because I had been a voracious reader all my life that that meant I could write a book. I was in for a shock.”

She signed up for a novel-writing workshop at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. That’s where she met short-story writer Jo-Ann Mapson, now a novelist. Together, they joined Fictionaires, Orange County’s stellar private writing workshop whose members have included novelists T. Jefferson Parker, Elizabeth George, Maxine O’Callaghan and Donald Stanwood.

Saunders, who won the California State Short Story Contest for the only short story she ever wrote, was struggling over the structure of the novel she was trying to write.

Screenwriter Terry Black, a fellow Fictionaires member, suggested it might help if she put her novel in screenplay form.

“I said, ‘What’s a screenplay form?’ and he told me and I did,” says Saunders. “As soon as I started writing screenplays, I knew it was where I should be.”

It was while attempting to turn her novel into a screenplay that “thirtysomething” premiered.

Recalls Saunders: “I watched it and said, ‘Oh, God, that’s my life! I had two kids and a lawyer husband, and I’m a yuppie wife.’ And it had all that sort of dry humor about where we are” as a society.

She wrote a “thirtysomething” script in three weeks and sent it in. Within days, she received a call from “thirtysomething” producer Ed Zwick, who praised her script.

“So, do you think I can do this?” she asked.

“Absolutely you can do this,” Zwick told her. “You can have a career in scriptwriting if you want one.”

Her “thirtysomething” script didn’t fit in with the ongoing story line already designed for the season, but Saunders received an assignment to write an episode.

Since then, in addition to writing scripts for various TV dramas, she wrote an unproduced screenplay for Touchstone Pictures.

In 1994 she wrote an NBC pilot script for a romantic comedy that the network has set aside. In early 1995, she was called in by NBC to do a 48-hour “emergency rewrite” of a pilot script for a series that was about to go into production.

Both efforts impressed NBC brass. Last fall, the network offered Saunders a guaranteed pilot script commitment.

A dramatic show about someone who develops a psychological profile of a criminal based on information gathered from the crime scene “is the first idea I pitched to them,” she says. “They said, ‘Great! We love it.’ ”

The show’s star, Ally Walker, says the character “just kind of jumped off the page. You don’t get to play women too often that are intelligent and compassionate and feminine. Cynthia just nailed it.”

Says Landgraf of NBC: “This is a very tricky material to get into, a woman who is a profiler and tracks really heinous criminals, and yet I just knew, because of who Cynthia was, there would be nothing exploitative in the series. The main character is a lot like Cynthia: She’s a mother, she’s unbelievably intelligent and compassionate. That just adds a sort of level of reality, a level of humanity to the series.”

Creating a series has increased Saunders’ profile in Hollywood and generated interest among television producers who now want to work with her on future projects.

Meanwhile, life goes on at home. Saunders hadn’t planned on doing anything special to mark the debut of “Profiler” Saturday night, but her friends decided to throw a premiere party at her house.

While her first script eight years ago gave her a sense of personal validation separate from her role as a wife and mother, writing is now part of her identity.

“Back then I was a mother who had written a script that had succeeded,” she says. “All these years later, I’d say that I’m a mother and a writer.

“I’m both those things every day.”

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Cynthia Saunders

Background: Age 44. Lives in Laguna Beach. Divorced in 1991 after 16 years marriage, she has two children, ages 18 and 15.

Passions: Writing, horseback riding, gardening.

On the screenwriting process: “Sometimes it’s a struggle, as I think it is for every writer. But, for me, the writing itself is the very best part, even with the struggle. I prefer that to the production stuff and what other people might consider the glamorous part of the business. What I really love is the actual writing.”

On combining work and motherhood: “To a large degree, I’m lucky to have a job with some flexibility. . . . For me, it was a choice I was privileged to have. I could chose to work and try to have a schedule that worked around my kids, which is what I did. I must say, too, my children five years ago went through a divorce. My first priority has always been them, but once that happened, I had to become all the more vigilant with them to make sure they made that transition.”

On why she wrote a television series about a woman who investigates violent crimes: “I’m always bewildered and on some level fascinated, though that’s too positive a word, about why people do such heinous things. I don’t get it, and so I’m intrigued by it: What is it that makes somebody so disturbed that they’d do something like that?”