TV Writer Leonard Dick: The Heeb Interview

By Pamela Chelin

“I found my home here," says House MD writer Len Dick, sitting at his desk in his office on the L.A. Fox lot where the TV series is shot. "I love it." It’s less than a week after the writers’ strike officially ended and the 12 House writers are back at work, figuring out how to make people sick. Dick, a 44-year-old Canadian writer, husband and father of three, has spent 17 years in Hollywood, but he wasn’t always able to show up to work wearing a brown sweatshirt and jeans like he is today. Dick started his illustrious career at Harvard Business School and worked on Wall Street before jumping coasts for Hollywood. After gigs on shows including Mad TV, Hack and Lost, he joined House in its third season, brought on by the show’s creator, David Shore. Though he spends long hours in his office, researching, writing and re-writing, Dick is excited to be back at work. After all, he may not be a doctor, but he gets to write for one on TV.

After years on various television shows, why is this show unique for you as a writer? This is a great group of people. It’s unbelievably supportive. I’ve worked on shows that have toxic writers’ rooms and bad personalities. On most shows you spend 90 percent of your day sitting in a conference room. David Shore [the show’s creator] comes from Law and Order, which doesn’t have a writers’ room, so 90 percent of my day is sitting in here and working on my own story. David Shore lets you tell the story you want to tell and he helps you shape it. The other thing is that you get to work with Hugh Laurie and the rest of the great cast—Robert Sean Leonard, Lisa Edelstein. I get to write words that Hugh Laurie says and I can’t help but feel, sitting at home on my couch on Tuesday night, "It’s Hugh Laurie! Saying what I wrote!"

Which character is your favorite to write for? House is the most fun because he’s invariably the one who will do the outrageous thing. The expression we use in the shop is, "What ‘s the big House move?" Does he immerse the patient in a vat full of piranhas? But it will never be arbitrary. It has to be organic. There’s a legitimate medical or character reason. And for House, two plus two can equal uranium. Instead of, "What would Jesus do?" it’s "What would House do?" That’s a better bumper sticker.

What is it like to work with Hugh Laurie? Hugh Laurie is unbelievable. We write him these enormous chunks of dialogue that are long and filled with medical jargon and he does it with an accent, while walking with a cane and popping Vicodin, but he sells it. He’s so convincing. Hugh will maintain his American accent during breaks so that he won’t lose it. One day, Emma Thompson came to the set to visit and he said hello in his British accent and it was jarring. You forget that he is British, that is how amazing this actor is. And his instincts are fantastic. He’ll offer suggestions and 101 percent of the time, they are great. He’s an absolute pleasure to work with and he’s a real gentleman. He’ll come up and say, “Thank you. This was such a great script. I loved it.”

What is the biggest challenge in writing House? I’d say that the hardest thing here is finding the medical story. Some of my colleagues joke, “What the fuck are we doing? We’re not doctors!” But we have four doctors who work on the show and one is a full-time writer. I don’t know enough about medicine, so I hit up all my doctor friends. One of my best fiends is a doctor and every conversation starts with the same four words: "Is it remotely possible?" Also, making the medicine visual, dramatic and compelling is hard. In reality, day-to-day medicine is boring. That’s the hardest part of the show.

How do you keep coming up with new diseases and ideas? We don’t have the big book of diseases, so you find stories wherever you can. I wrote a story based on a story I read in The New York Times about the Hatfields and the McCoys. It turns out that the McCoys had a genetic disease that predisposed them to fits of anger, so I read it and found one or two little things, just enough to hang our hat on. I bounced the idea off one of our doctors and that was all I needed. Some specialists don’t want to speak to us. One will say, "I don’t want to answer that because I’m concerned that you’re going to twist this and then I’ll have someone walk in my office and say, ‘I saw on House that you can do x, y, z treatment and cure this,’ when that’s not the case.”

There have been a lot of medical dramas in the past and there are currently shows like Nip/Tuck and Grey’s Anatomy. What makes House special? It’s a unique show because of Dr. House. On most shows, the fantasy was always, "I want to live with the Bradys" or "I want to go to school with the 90210 kids." Now it’s, "I want to be able to conduct myself like House and tell people what to do with minimal repercussions.” The great thing is that if he wasn’t brilliant, he’d just be an ass. But, he saves lives that nobody else can save so he has a license to do things that nobody else can. That is why the show is called House and not Princeton Plainsboro Hospital. I’d put him on the same spectrum as Tony Soprano. House is a very complex character with many layers and that’s what makes him interesting. We forget that he’s wrong a lot of the time and makes so many mistakes because we know he’ll come up with the answer ultimately.

What do you think of the hysteria surrounding House? Viewing parties, message boards, clothing… It’s the greatest compliment. I came here just wanting to work in Hollywood and I’m now on this show where people are debating and discussing stuff that I wrote. It’s pretty surreal. There’s nothing cooler than that.

What do you think?