SoJ Web Report | Nov. 15, 2010
By Matt Roush, BA/Cert ’81 |
| Photo by Michael Yarish/Fox |
| Ryan Murphy, right, directs actor Matthew Morrison during a taping of Glee, Murphy's hit show. “Everything about my writing career and my future came from those four years at IU,” he said. |
“My friend (Mike Hyer, BA’87,) and I ran for the top jobs at the Daily Student, and every time we would run, we lost,” says Murphy, ‘88, sounding a bit like one of the endearing underdog misfits from Glee, his career-defining musical-comedy hit on the Fox network. “I think if I had won, I would have probably stayed in journalism, because I had a real passion for it at the time. But that regular defeat, I was like, ‘Oh well, they don’t like me. Maybe I’m not any good at this.’ I remember being so crushed by those losses.”
So Murphy set his sights elsewhere, and his rejection at the IDS turned out to be the catalyst that led him to his Hollywood career.
“I think about that all the time, because I think that every failure leads you to where you’re supposed to be,” he says.
Failure was never really in the cards for Murphy, 44. He left IU in 1988 just shy of graduation to jump-start a career in feature and celebrity journalism for The Miami Herald, Entertainment Weekly and others. He moved to Los Angeles and began to work after hours on a script (still unproduced) that he sold to Steven Spielberg, launching a new career in the business he once covered. Before Glee, which earned 19 Emmy nominations for its sensational first season, Murphy created the stylized high-school comedy Popular for the WB in 1999 and the controversial psychosexual plastic-surgery drama Nip/Tuck for FX in 2003.
Murphy reflected on his IU years earlier this summer, taking time from a hectic promotional and work schedule: gearing up for Glee’s second season while opening his second feature film, Eat Pray Love, which he co-wrote and directed. He had just finished a press conference at the Beverly Hilton hotel in front of the Television Critics Association, which a few days earlier bestowed Glee with Program of the Year and Outstanding New Program awards.
Murphy says he was “very humbled” to receive these accolades from former peers. In his acceptance speech, he described Glee as being “about the world we live in, but more than that, it really is about the world that I would like to live in. Glee is about making the choice to see the world around us with a deep and abiding optimism, and the fact that I’m standing here accepting this honor from you right now is proof that truly anything is possible.”
The award ceremony was a far cry from Murphy’s days as an openly gay high-school student whose show-biz fantasies were at the time just that. He knew he wanted to be a director and writer, but he didn’t know how. Since he had been the editor of his high school newspaper in Indianapolis, and all his friends were going to IU, he decided to go too.
“I went to the paper (the Daily Student), which I loved,” he says. “I had so many great opportunities there.”
As arts editor, movie reviewer and celebrity profiler at the IDS, “I got to write crazy fun stories,” he says. “Liberace came into town one time, but I did a big profile that was on the front page about his costumer. I always had this show-biz pop-culture interest.”
In a twist worthy of a Glee episode, Murphy also joined the Singing Hoosiers, where he directed some skits as well as performed.
“I was never really comfortable being a performer,” he says. “I was too self-conscious. I didn’t think I was good enough. But I really enjoyed writing. And I thought maybe I could still put those things together.”
Toward the end of his IDS career, he began writing celebrity profiles. His IDS experience led to internships at the Washington Post and Miami Herald.
He credits IU and the IDS with “helping mold me. … I feel I found my own path and I merged my interests, so by the time I finished college and I started being a journalist, I still had the dream of being a writer in Hollywood.”
One of his former Daily Student colleagues on the arts desk remembers Murphy as “singularly smart, creative, funny and gifted” as well as “the best-dressed and best-coiffed college student anyone knew.” Kathleen McKenna, now a freelance correspondent for The Boston Globe, says, “Not only was he a brilliant and fast writer, he was a skilled and encouraging editor who set the bar very high. … I recall many fun and enlightening hours beside him at our gigantic computers, while he went through stories I’d written line-by-line, word-by-word, and helped me make them better.”
McKenna says Murphy was fun to hang out with, too.
“He was genuinely interested in human nature, which made him a terrific listener,” she says. “He was a delightful gossip and knew virtually everything about pop culture. He was searingly honest and would cut you to the quick if you were feeling sorry for yourself or slacking off.”
Murphy says the greatest experience he ever had as a writer occurred his freshman year at the IDS. He was writing an arts piece, and editor Dail Willis, MA’86, was editing it on her computer.
“She had highlighted every adjective so that it would blink,” recalls Murphy, who admits to writing and speaking “baroquely.” “I looked at the screen, and it was like, ‘Wah-wah-wah’ blinking, and every other word was so purple and so flowery. And it really made an impact on me. Ever since, in my writing, I have tried to just streamline it and streamline it.”
He adds, “Everything about my writing career and my future came from those four years at IU.”
Journalism also gave Murphy an invaluable gift: He’s never once had writer’s block.
“When I worked for The Miami Herald and moved out to L.A., I had to write two to three stories a day, or I would not be paid,” he says. “You never had the privilege of saying, ‘Oh, I don’t feel it.’ I learned to just start. Just start writing. And I learned that writing is rewriting.”
Murphy remembers spending a lot of undergraduate time at the movies, going to screenings that burned their way into his psyche and helped shape his aesthetic. He sees the influences of his favorite directors — Bob Fosse, Mike Nichols and Hal Ashby — in his own work. Nip/Tuck, for instance, is reminiscent of Carnal Knowledge. And Glee is based on Murphy’s love for favorite Fosse movies All That Jazz and Cabaret.
He reels off other eclectic classics he saw for his first time at college: Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, Deep Throat. The wide-ranging curriculum on the Bloomington campus also appealed to the young Murphy.
“I took a course called Sexual Deviance that really led to Nip/Tuck in some weird way,” he says. “All the things I was allowed to dabble in infused my world view.”
Likewise, a class he enjoyed on the history of the Beatles would come back to haunt him years later, when Paul McCartney sent him a two-CD “mix tape” of songs to be considered for Glee.
“It really came full circle for me,” he says. “It’s a wonderful feeling.”
And it’s nothing he would have expected.
“I remember being 21 and standing in line to see the opening of Sleeping With the Enemy because I was such a fan of Julia Roberts,” he says. “And here I am doing this big Julia Roberts movie (Eat Pray Love). It amazes me every day.”
As successful as Glee has become, with its chart-topping music downloads and multiple CDs and a rare two-season renewal, and for all of its over-the-top entertainment value, at heart the show represents to Murphy the power of arts education. And because he values his own education so highly, he visits schools and talks to students.
On his birthday later this year, Murphy plans to go to the culturally and sexually diverse Harvey Milk High School in New York to accept an award “because I want them to know you can do it. Try. Anything is possible.”
“The only reason I’m a success is I never gave up,” he says. “I was not afraid to fail. So I like talking to kids about that. I like that they have somebody, especially gay kids, to say to keep going.”
Murphy’s next film project between seasons of Glee will be an adaptation of Larry Kramer’s 1985 stage polemic about AIDS, The Normal Heart.
“I came of age in the AIDS era so I remember what that was like,” he says. “I think so many people have forgotten, and I want to write about that period.”
Then he’d like to write something original, perhaps a romantic comedy.
His first two movies (Running With Scissors, Eat Pray Love) were based on successful memoirs, but don’t look for Murphy to join the tell-all club.
“I think I’ve worked everything out that I need to,” he says. “I think that my work is therapy.”
He considers Glee his most personal work to date, and it gets more personal as he writes it because he gets so much unexpected feedback from kids. During this summer’s sold-out Glee concert tour, he would sit in the audience and see firsthand the impact the show was having on fans young and old, gay and straight, including kids in wheelchairs who identify with Artie, the disabled teen who’s part of the New Directions ensemble.
“They saw themselves in it,” he says. “So now I feel even more impassioned to write about those issues.”
He also thinks of giving back by returning to Bloomington some day, the place where, he says, “my life began” and where “I learned every social skill I have.”
“I loved it there. Didn’t you? I have a big dream about going back and teaching a semester there. I don’t know what I would teach, but I think the campus is so beautiful. It has culture there: the music school, and big people would come into town. There were bars and restaurants with good food. Did you ever go to Bullwinkle’s [the local gay bar that closed in 2006]? Oh God, I lived for that place.”
And we’re suddenly back on a shared nostalgia trip. To an idyllic time when everything was new and anything was possible. Sounds like a great TV show. Glee: The College Years, perhaps?
Matt Roush, BA/Cert’81, is senior TV critic of TV Guide Magazine and a former managing editor of the Indiana Daily Student. He’s also an unabashed “gleek.”
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