An Interview with ‘Perry Mason’ Writer and Showrunner Michael Begler

Michael Begler has been working as a screenwriter for many years, on everything from The Jeff Foxworthy Show and The Tony Danza Show to the Cinemax show The Knick, working with director Steven Soderbergh. He took time out of his busy schedule to speak to Script Magazine about his work writing, producing, and showrunning the second season of HBO’s reimagined Perry Mason, featuring Matthew Rhys in the title role.

The second season challenges the legendary criminal lawyer in new ways as he peels back layers of the worst parts of Los Angeles during the Great Depression. The show is a sharp examination of the largesse of wealth and the unfairness of “justice” in the United States, with top-notch production values and gorgeous cinematography.

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: How do you go about cracking a mystery over the course of a season?

MICHAEL BEGLER: This was the first time that I was doing this that we've never written a courtroom drama, we never ran a mystery, so we had to learn as we go, but the most important thing--and because the show is also established with a great first season--we had to let the characters lead us on the journey, everything had to come out of character. Any move that Perry makes, any move that Della makes, we wanted to make sure that it wasn't just because we needed to advance the plot, it was that we really felt like the decisions that they're making are from deep inside them. 

That said, because it's a historical drama, we have the benefit of doing all this research, which is the best part of it, you just do these deep dives. We have great, amazing experts on the show, but I also loved Newspapers.com, going back and reading the ‘30s papers and all that stuff. We would gather all of this information and from that, germs of the ideas come. Brooks McCutcheon was slightly based on Ned Doheny, and learning about the oil industry and these different sides of Los Angeles. And knowing that this is the worst year of the Depression, by taking those pieces, we start from a place of a simple question: “What if our guys are guilty?”

What does that do for our character? I think that was a really interesting place for us to start and to then take that, adding on all the texture of the historic background, and then with all that, ask how does Perry Mason navigate that? And then that leads us into the breaking of the season.

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: I want to ask about the historic element. It's a lot easier to write historic elements than it is to shoot them, logistically.

MICHAEL BEGLER: Yes.

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: How does access to various locations or work from your production designers influence the writing? Do you decide you’re going to set something over here and I'm going to write a whole bunch of scenes because I know we have access to this? How do those considerations affect your writing…?

MICHAEL BEGLER: It's a mixture. When you're just in the script writing mode, and even in the beginnings of prep, you have the luxury of writing whatever you want, essentially. Within reason--we're not gonna all of a sudden go build a rocket--but also there's a lot of give and take. We know what we can spend and where we can shoot where we have access to, there were certainly elements that we started out with, I can say in particular, we had a whole idea that some of the plotting was gonna take place at a dance marathon, but that became logistically too big, a lot of extras, where are you gonna get the space, blah, blah, blah, and so we had to pivot. There's a lot of that going on in production, we're pivoting saying like, “OK, this is not gonna work for us. How do we move it to here and how does that affect the story and how do we work that into the story?”

The great thing though, about a show in Los Angeles in 1930 is there's an abundance of locations. It's incredible. And personally, I'm very happy to say that I live in Pasadena and we shot in Pasadena a whole bunch of times, which was nice for me. But also, Keith Cunningham, the production designed, was just so on top of it, and he was able to just make these incredible sets. There's only a few times where I think we had to adjust it due to budget or just time to shoot it.

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: Perry Mason's been a household name for almost 100 years. It's the third most successful book series that's ever been published, which for being out of print for so long, it's sort of hard to fathom that, and the TV show and all the TV movies came after that. This feels like a very different take on it. How do you take the spirit of all of what came before, but also challenge it with something new like this?

MICHAEL BEGLER: Coming on the second season, there's a responsibility to honor so much and, like you just said, this is a giant train, it's not only three or four decades of Erle Stanley Gardner books, and the legend of that, but then what most people know is the Raymond Burr television show, that's what most people reference, and you have to honor that. But then we have to honor what Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones came up with this new take on it. And you're never gonna please everybody. I mean, look, there's gonna be fans of the books, who’re gonna say, “This isn't the Perry Mason I know.” You’ll have fans of the Raymond Burr show, say that, or fans of season one who say, “Oh, they changed it too much.”

You have to just find that balance of making something that honors that, but at the same time, I feel has to be contemporary for the audience to digest that there's a way that these books were written. They were written at the time, so that's important for that time, the television show was a very specific time, and so I feel like we're not trying to reinvent Perry Mason, but we're trying to evolve him and the show...

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: What is it about his character that interest to you as a writer, taking that evolution in mind? What is it... What is it that makes him tick, that gets you excited to write his character?

MICHAEL BEGLER: I think that right off the bat, what I really like about, again, what Rolin and Ron created, was this very damaged guy, and in terms of the trauma that percolates inside him, I think that is just very, very interesting. What we explored in this season was this idea of imposter syndrome, because he's never really found his footing, even though we’re a dozen years since World War I, and he's still struggling with that. When somebody is saying to him, “Oh no, you're good, at this,” he doesn't believe it because he's still holding on to all this pain, and I think that that was interesting, but at the same time, this is a man who lives in the grays who doesn't just see things black and white, who doesn't just see things like there's a simple answer and there's a simple justice for everything. That goes back to what he experienced in the war and what he felt he needed to do. That to me is such a complicated person, and that's what makes it fun to write.

There's never gonna be just a straight-ahead way for Perry.

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: You’re running the show in addition to doing a lot of the writing, and so you're there writing at the beginning and then presumably working in the editing room, seeing how things change based on the realities of production... How does the writing change from script to the final edit, and then how does that inform your future writing as you move forward to learn from those lessons?

MICHAEL BEGLER: That's a good question. When you go through the entire process, it's such an incredible education in terms of storytelling, because what's on the page and what you feel you must get across, you start to realize, especially in the edit, what you need to get across, you know it's what is essential, and it's understanding what you need to let go. It's also understanding what you need to re-arrange in the story that's going to help tell the story better. 

Editing is script writing in a way, and it is because you're taking all the raw material and you are putting it together in other ways. We took episodes that we wrote, we shot, and then we cut to them and we said, “This is not working at all.” To be able to take that view, that thirty-thousand-foot view and to be humble enough to say, “Yes, it's not working, and we need to fix this. And we need to sort of look at the story through a different lens,” I think is very, very important.

It's not just the cutting, it's the music, it's the mix, it's all those things that really…you get what the full effect is. We all imagine on the page what it's gonna feel like, but until you're sitting in that final mix and all the elements are there that you really say, “This is what it wants to be.” 

I think that the second half of your question, it's almost difficult to know going forward how that will affect the writing. I think the best thing I could say is that it just opens you up to know that it's OK if it changes. And that's part of the entire process.

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: Do you have a particular example for season two where you had something on the page you were really daffy about and then it just didn't work and you had to get rid of it?

MICHAEL BEGLER: Oh yeah, yeah. I'll give you a very funny one. It's not gonna give anything away, but there is a scene we wrote for the finale between Perry and his son, which we've now established that there's a growing relationship between the two of them. It’s Perry being very straightforward and honest with that again, without giving anything away, and trying to say in his best possible way, “This is who I am.”

I was so into the research, and one of the things in LA at this time was what's called novelty architecture, so they had a coffee place that looked like a big coffee cup or a big tamal. So there was one called the Giant Cone, and it was a giant ice cream come on Wilshire Boulevard, upside down. Keith Cunnigham, our production designer, and I talked about it, we loved it. He built it. We shot it, and it looks so cool and so authentic, but then sitting there and seeing the scene, I'm going, “This isn't necessary, this isn't helping our story in the end…”

It was actually slowing down what we needed to do, the propulsion that we wanted in that final episode because we want the audience constantly leaning in and this...it felt like no matter where we placed it in the episode, it felt like a stall and it was just like, “Alright, we just gotta let the Cone go…”

I think it was a very sad day.

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: I read a really interesting piece from Richard Dreyer talking about the language the show and idioms the show uses…

MICHAEL BEGLER: The Washington Post piece?

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: Yeah, it was really terrific. I don't know if you've read his book on writing, but it’s also terrific. But I'm wondering how you balance those moments with keeping the subtext together and making sure that the dialogue isn’t too on the nose, or really just keeping the writing sharp and keeping all of that period-accurate stuff.

MICHAEL BEGLER: Like you said, it's a balancing act. You want those little nuggets, you want those little sayings that were period appropriate, but you never wanna overdo it, you never want it to feel too staged. 

When we did The Knick that was really important to us, we wanted it to have a more modern feel so that the audience can actually lose themselves in it more... We felt like if it's too much, if the characters were talking too much from the period, then it feels very staged and you definitely feel almost like there's a separation between you and what you're watching. 

With any good thing, whether it's film, book, TV, you wanna feel like you're really invested. It's so important to find that. I always want people to talk in a way that is easy to digest, and I think that, to me, the best example of that is The Wire, and I take a lot from that show and how they crafted those scripts. Even though it got into the intricacies of police work and stuff, you always felt that you were immersed in that. I know that he said in that article, one thing he said is, “you shred it, wheat.” Personally, that was one of those things that I found and I really liked. Every scene doesn't have to have that.

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: Where did you go for some of those? I know you mentioned Newspapers.com, which is a favorite resource of mine--It's shocking how relaxing it is reading really old newspapers and how fun it is--

MICHAEL BEGLER: Right?

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: So where did you go to for some of that nomenclature, 'cause that's not always the kind of writing you're gonna get in the newspaper?

MICHAEL BEGLER: Between the newspapers, the researchers that we had on the show out of USC, and we had three amazing ones that we really utilized this year. All three gave us some of those great little nuggets, also Green’s Dictionary of Slang. You like to look at that and see what's in there, and then to be quite honest, I also immersed myself in every possible Noir movie from 1935 to 1970, not only American but Japanese, Italian, and seeing just what could come out of that as well.

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: Are there any last bits of advice for any writers out there trying to do better work?

MICHAEL BEGLER: Yeah, honestly, two things come to mind.

One, don't ask for permission. Just do what you wanna do. And with that, just keep your head down and keep doing it.

Two, there's gonna be a lot of voices, a lot of dissent, a lot of opinions that come your way, and the first thing to do is trust your own instinct, trust your gut, and so that you can get that draft done.

Perry Mason S2 finale airs on April 24, 2023 on HBO.

You can find more from Bryan Young at http://www.swankmotron.com