Making “˜Gossip Girl’ leap from its pages
By Elizabeth Packer
Oct. 2, 2007 9:37 p.m.
If you swapped the palm trees and beaches of “The O.C.” for the sidewalks and skyscrapers of New York City, the result would be “Gossip Girl,” the CW’s new show based on the series of popular novels by Cecily von Ziegesar that chronicles the life of the Upper East Side’s prep-school elite.
Created by Josh Schwartz, the man who brought us “The O.C.,” “Gossip Girl” follows a group of trust-fund teens as they navigate life in the city, depicting their glamorous party life and their not-so-glamorous relationship drama.
While Manhattan might seem far removed from sunny UCLA, Felicia D. Henderson, a writer for the show and the show’s co-executive producer, has a deep connection to Los Angeles, and in fact that is what makes her job the most difficult.
For Henderson, born and raised in the L.A. area, she finds she needs to research not the latest vernacular, but New York City itself when she writes for the show. “The biggest challenge for me is what is New York, because I am West Coast,” she said. “That’s where my research comes in.”
Not only is Henderson a UCLA alumna, but she was recently named the Zakin-Hunter professor of screenwriting, the only endowed chair in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television’s screenwriting program.
While Henderson has spent much of her career behind the scenes of a number of high-profile television shows, her new position in the classroom is very much a homecoming of sorts. Henderson received her bachelor’s degree and master of fine arts degree at UCLA and is currently pursuing her doctorate here. In addition to her upcoming teaching position, she has endowed several scholarships on campus.
Coming from a working-class background, education allowed Henderson to climb the ladder of success, so giving back is an important part of her life.
“Education is everything to someone like me. It is the way that you change your life. … If you’re not born privileged, education is the thing that allows you to go beyond your circumstance,” Henderson said.
Henderson already sponsors two scholarships ““ the Four Sisters Scholarship for students in the theater, film and television school and a more general, undergraduate student scholarship through the UCLA Black Alumni Association ““ and she is currently working to establish a third, the Felicia D. Henderson Screenwriting Award. “It’s the most embarrassing one, because the dean of the school wanted to call it this,” she said.
Henderson, who went through the theater school’s screenwriting master of fine arts program, is creating this scholarship because she wants to specifically support the program that was “so instrumental in (her) journey as a professional.”
That journey began when Henderson enrolled in a management training program at NBC, where she first had access to several television scripts.
Though Henderson had always loved to write, she had never considered it as a career possibility until her exposure to TV scripts at NBC. “I was fascinated by the form, by the comedies and dramas and how they were structured differently,” she said.
Her interest piqued and so she began her career almost 20 years ago as a professional writer, during which time she worked on hits such as “Family Matters,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” “Moesha” and now “Gossip Girl.”
Since the premise for “Gossip Girl” comes from a series of books, Henderson is able to use the novels as reference material to aid her writing.
Fans of the books will notice that the show deviates from the original story in a number of ways, as the show’s creators, Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, made adjustments to facilitate the characters’ transition from page to screen.
As Henderson explained, “Everything that works in a book wouldn’t necessarily work in a series. You want to be as true as you can but you always end up taking creative and dramatic license.”
“If you want viewers to come back week after week, you have to give them something to root for, so adjustments were made, particularly in the main character, Serena van der Woodsen, to make them television characters.
In the books, for example, Serena is an unapologetic party girl. In the television series, she is trying to change, be a better person.”
The hour-long episodes air Wednesdays at 8 p.m., and tonight, viewers will be treated to the first episode Henderson wrote in its entirety.
The dialogue and conversation of the show is full of pop-culture references and current slang ““ it is a cast of mainly teenagers, after all ““ but Henderson has no problem keeping her writing fresh and appealing to the show’s target demographic. “I’m a person who loves pop culture, unapologetically, and I have teen nieces and nephews, so my life, both personally and professionally, is always surrounded with what is hot, what is new,” she said.
Henderson, while continuing to write for “Gossip Girl,” will begin teaching at UCLA this winter as the Zakin-Hunter professor of screenwriting, the first person from a television background to hold the title. “I feel honored. … Normally that position has been given to a feature film writer, so I’m very excited about TV getting its time in the sun,” she said.
