Entertainment Summit West - Los Angeles

Entertainment Summit West - Neal Baer Transcript

Neal Baer M.D., Executive Producer Law & Order SVU

NEAL BAER: I want to tell you a brief little story about, um, writing about HIV for television. When I was on ER, I started in 1994, about the only drug we had was AZT. We decided to do a show that became a long-running arc on the program with the actress Gloria Reuben playing a woman who was HIV-positive who was treated with the drugs available then. And, as the show progressed, over the years, began using the triple cocktail. It always amazes me, when I look back at the very early shows, how things have changed in the last 11 years. There was a kid who came in on an episode who had pneumocystis pneumonia and all we could do was treat him with AZT. Fortunately, things have progressed. So, when we did the episode that launched this long-term HIV story, we wanted to tell it differently. HIV was then presented on television as a death knell, that you would die. And, back then, you often did die.

But we wanted to show someone who was functioning and working as a health care provider and who as an integral part of the health care community at County General in Chicago. We then were able to get into all of the issues about whether someone who is HIV-positive should be a health care worker. Whether they should be treating someone. I think it was very valuable storyline. As we did the storyline, we got into a discussion about how she contracted HIV. And we had a character, played by Michael Beach, who played her husband, Al Boulet. And we had big discussions in about 1995, '96, about how this happened. And, of course, there were only a few ways. Transfusion -- but we said that blood was being pretty well screened by them so that really wasn't an option. IV drug use, possible but we had never really shown that as his character. Of course he could be a surreptitious IV drug user. Contracting it sexually from men or from women, which is still, as you all know, in the United States, not a very common route of transmission. So we ultimately said that he got it from sleeping with lots and lots and lots of women. We chickened out.

We got a lot of interesting letters back then from African-American woman saying, why don't you tell the truth? Why don't you say how Al Boulet got HIV? And, you know, in retrospect, we really chickened out. We should have said that it was because he had sex with men. So cut to this year, or this past year on, on SUV,. I was running on a track on La Cienega and Olympic about a year ago, thinking about that story. And I saw a bus go by and the city bus had a sign on it that said, don't be on the ‘down low’, you know, protect your wife and children. And it had an African-American man and it had a kid and a woman. And I thought, this was really interesting. And I brought this up to my class, at USC, I said, who are, who are we targeting this message to? What kind of message are we targeting? And they got it. It was interesting. This was put on buses because buses travel in communities where people, um, maybe don't have access or as much access to automobiles.

So it was obviously targeted to the African-American community. I thought it was interesting that it was targeted to them but not so much to the rest of the community. And it only really started to be talked about with Governor McGreevey in New Jersey, who was living on the downlow as well. So, we decided to do an episode of SVU last year, which is nominated for a Shine Award by the Media Project that deals with human sexuality issues.

We got Michael Beach to come back. I called him and I said will you do the show the way we really should have done ER? And he said, sure. And we did an episode about an attorney who is on the ‘downlow’ who exposes his wife to HIV and she contracts it. It was really, a very tough, hard-hitting episode that also delved into cultural issues in the African-American community and we were able to do that through Ice-T's character.

The reason I bring this up is that when we write these shows and we're trying to send out a message. On my shows, both ER and SVU, I do try to send out a message. First, I try to tell a really good story. I try not to think about entertaining versus educating. When I do that, then it's a problem. These are two opposites that lead us to bad programming. So I don't think about trying to entertain the audience and I don't think about educating them. I try to tell a gripping story. And these are certainly gripping stories that the audience can relate to.. And, at least, knock on wood, it still bears out by ratings, at least, that we reach a very large mass audience. So I wanted to tell a story that the audience can relate to, a man who's on the ‘downlow’ who doesn't want to tell his wife and all of the repercussions that that entails.

That's the, the, the number one factor for us, when we're writing, both for ER and, and for SVU, is when we choose a story, be it about HIV or about fetal alcohol syndrome. I asked my class, on Monday, what is the most common cause of mental retardation in the United States? And I was amazed that two of them knew that it was fetal alcohol syndrome. When we do that kind of show, we really try to focus on the facts. We go to experts always because we find that people who watch shows that deal with medical issues, particularly medical shows like ER, and even SVU, that they believe what they see. That's what The Kaiser Family Foundation found when they did a pretest and posttest about two episodes of ER, one about emergency contraception and one about Human Papilloma Virus. It was profound how much an audience learns with just a few minutes of information and that they retain. I think it was about 70 percent of the audience knew.

After the show aired, they did a post-test of, of viewers. They did a pre-test and post-test. The first time it was ever done in television. Usually, it's retrospective. Close to 50 percent knew that HPV caused cervical cancer. Translate that to 40 million viewers. Certainly knowledge is a prerequisite to changing behavior. And that really stunned us. I think John Wells, who runs ER and West Wing and Third Watch, and Dick Wolf who is the overseer of all of our shows, were really impressed by this research and why, at least, with those producers, and hopefully through many organizations in town, and other producers, as well, see that it is important to be accurate. Just throwing around information in vague ways really does have an affect on the audience. That's why I bring up the point about education versus entertainment. Many producers hide behind the notion that we're just entertaining. So, because we're just entertaining, that means that it's lightweight that it doesn't really matter. The show is to take your mind off of things and therefore excuses any responsibility for portraying these issues accurately and responsibly. Others feel like if we have to educate them, they'll turn off the dial because we'll be giving them all these facts and figures. And that's why, as I said earlier, I don't think in those terms. I think great story and that way I'll be able to integrate information naturally, as it comes through our characters. It's always about our characters. So I'm going to show you, actually, a clip right now, that does that, about Shaken Baby Syndrome

Okay. That's a three-minute clip. The audience got a lot of information. I showed this to my class as well. I said, just watch this clip. And they were able to list, you know, the causes of Shaken Baby Syndrome. What Shaken Baby Syndrome is, how it occurs, and what it looks like. So just in three minutes, you can do so much for an audience. And yet it is a story and, I hope, a compelling one about a social issue that's touched many, many people. And it's a way of bringing the audience to the issue because the very last scene, which I didn't put on but I'll tell you about, is Chris Meloni's character, later, after the mother has confessed to doing it. And he is confessing, in a sense, to his superiors, saying that, once he slapped his daughter because she spilled grape juice on the rug. And then a voice in his head told him to stop, don't do it again. Unfortunately, no voice in this mother's head told her to stop. So that the point was, how do you engage the audience? How do you use the story as a template for their own lives as well, because most parents have thought about it? They've been so upset that the notion has crossed their mind to somehow stop their child from doing what they don't want that baby to do.

And because people can relate to that, the relatability factor is so critical in doing, commendable and entertaining and compelling stories Good commercials tell good stories. Good TV shows tell good stories. Good movies tell good stories. And you got to find that story and you got to find how it relates to people's lives and you can accomplish a great deal changing at least knowledge or, or helping people gain knowledge about health issues. Thanks. (applause)

DR. ALLAN ROSENFIELD: Having gone through medical school and been exposed to the medical profession, do you do any teaching in medical schools or schools of public health? Teaching people, sort of, how to make use of their professional skills in ways that you now...

NEAL BAER: Yes. I taught when I was a resident, when I was at Childrens Hospital. But I do a lot of talks. I'm doing one at Stanford soon and one at Harvard, on doctors as storytellers. And very briefly, what my pitch is in teaching doctors is that there are two kinds of storytelling. That's my mission, storytelling. Now there are two kinds of storytelling. There's private storytelling and public storytelling. Private storytelling is the kind of communication that doctors do with each other. When we're talking about a patient, we do a presentation. We're taught, as medical students, how to present, so that you can convey the information to the other doctors and residents and nurses around you and they can ask questions. It should be a dramatic presentation. It should give just the specifics. And it should leave, uh, the listener with the ability to target in on questions that he or she may have to help you get to the diagnosis. So I call that private storytelling. That's the kind of communication, privately, health care workers have with each other to work and help a patient get to a diagnosis and then treat a patient.

Public storytelling is doctors taking their private stories and making them public. For instance, if you're an emergency physician and you've seen children shot with guns, then you need to take those private stories and make them public. And, if you're fortunate like me, you can do it on TV. But there are many resources and avenues, be it grassroots, lobbying, talking to legislatures, talking to kids, talking to other medical students, talking to schools. I think that that's a way for doctors to take their own storytelling skills, their own stories, and make them public. That's another way I try to focus on storytelling and get doctors to think about their jobs as not only treating patients but treating the community. Doctors have a public health commitment to the community.

DR. ALLAN ROSENFIELD: Do the media and the companies with which you work welcome your medical background in your attempts to bring these kinds of issues into the stories without thinking education versus entertainment?

BAER: There was an interesting article by Harold Varmus in the New York Times about a show that's on now called Medical Investigation, which he criticized because, number one, it takes place at the N.I.H., which does no medical investigating. It's the CDC that does that So, the networks have very different standards. They hold ER and SVU, they tell me, to a different standard because they know doctors are on that show, they're making it real

I was glad that Harold Varmus wrote that article. It doesn't matter if it's ER, SVU, or Medical Investigation. The audience sees it. We try to make it look real. Why do we go to such efforts to make it look like the N.I.H. or an emergency department or a squadron? We want people to believe, to suspend their belief, that they're watching TV and that it's real. And if we're going to go to that effort, then we make sure that we're being accurate. And we're trying to get that across.

I think, what's interesting is that ER and LA Law changed television. LA Law had David Kelley. He was a lawyer. It was really the first legal show that was written by a lawyer. ER was the first medical show that was written by two doctors. Marcus Welby had the AMA, signing off on it. St. Elsewhere had some consultants who had put some medical information in. You could see how on SVU, a doctor will understand everything that Tamara Tunie's character said. But maybe the audience won't understand what (sounds like) retinal shearing is. But they get it. They know what it's about. And it feels real. So I, I think that ER and LA Law raised the bar and, and the audience expects realism and accuracy. And most medical shows do use real doctors now, and certainly, all the legal shows have lawyers who are writing them. But I think that we have to push the networks to be responsible about their medical shows and any show that has a medical storyline in it.

And, certainly, Sonny can talk about this to a great extent with the organizations he works with, that there are many in Los Angeles, the CDC amongst them, who to try to get writers to pay attention to this because, like it or not, the audience gets its medical information from television and from the Internet and they're going to believe what they see. I think it's incumbent on us to be as accurate as possible.

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