Is ‘Californication’ Creator Tom Kapinos The Real Hank Moody?

By Todd Gold
Fancast.com

Dawson’s Creek and David Duchovny are the unlikely ingredients Tom Kapinos mixed together when he created ‘Californication’. How do both figure into Showtime’s acclaimed series about tormented Hollywood novelist Hank Moody? Is the man behind this depraved and debauched slice of creative life in the glitzy epicenter of pop culture’s wasteland a real life Hank? To compliment Fancast’s special presentation of entire first season and the second season premiere episode, which you can watch here starting with the pilot for free, we caught up with Kapinos and asked him to reveal his inner Hank - and more.
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Q: How did the show come about?
ANS: My first and only previous job in television was on Dawson’s Creek. I worked there for four years. I started as sort of a lowly staff writer and then within two years I was running the show. When I was done with it, all anybody wanted from me was to write another teen drama andI just didn’t really want to do that. I sat down and I wrote ‘Californication’ as a screenplay. But I thought it was terrible.

Q: So?
ANS: I put it on my desk, and I just didn’t…

Q: What didn’t you like about it?
ANS: I couldn’t figure out how to end it. And it just sat there for like a year or so and then my wife read it and she said, “You know, you’re right, it doesn’t quite work, but the first 60 pages are really, really good, some of the best stuff you’ve ever written. So being a lazy writer, I thought okay, well that’s 60 good pages, let me turn that into like a spec pilot and try to use it as a writing sample. And that’s what I did. And it sort of made the rounds around town and it got a lot of attention because of the writing and then Showtime read it and said, we’d like to make this. tThat’s really how it happened. I never thought that it would ever see the light of day, because I just designed it as a writing sample to get people thinking of me in a different way.

[Watch the season 2 premiere here.]

Q: So you came out to L.A. from where?
ANS: New York.

Q: At what age did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
ANS: It was relatively late. I was already in college. Before then, I wanted to be a musician. I was always playing in rock bands, but I was more into being a rock star than I was actually being a musician. I hated the idea that you had to rely on four or five other people to make your way in the world. So the second dream was movies. I thought, okay I’ll direct something. Then I realized I’m not any good on a set. I realized the only thing I could probably do is just write. I took a screenwriting class at my undergraduate college and I did pretty well and I thought, you know, I’ll give this a try. I got accepted to NYU for the graduate program in dramatic writing, but while there I realized I was wasting a lot of my parent’s money and I should just give LA a try. I moved out to LA when I was like 25 and bounced around for a couple of years reading scripts for CAA and then finally I wrote one of my own, sold it, and that’s what actually got me onto ‘Dawson’s Creek.’

Q: What were your influences?
ANS: Movies – and it went in waves. The first wave for me in terms of movies was like the Spielberg stuff: Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET. The second wave was when I was in high school, and it was all the John Hughes stuff. That made a big impression on me. And then I clearly remember the summer of 1989 being a big year for movies for me, because I think that was the year ‘Sex, Lies and Videotape’ came out and ‘Do the Right Thing.’ That’s when I started to realize like oh, you know, regular people can actually do this.

Q: What about TV?
ANS: My parents were pretty strict about television and I didn’t get to watch a ton.

Q: How’d you get the idea for Californication?
ANS: It was two things. I wanted to find a way to write about my experiences sort of coming out to LA from New York with these grand ambitions of being a screenwriter and doing good work, then ultimately what happened to me was I sort of got swallowed up into television. I worked on a show that had a lot of fans and it was certainly a pop culture phenomenon, but it didn’t really reflect my sensibility. So a lot of Californication was about that.

Q: And you transposed yourself into a novelist.
ANS: Well, yeah. It’s about a novelist who comes out from New York, and his great work is turned into a crappy romantic comedy. But then at the same time, as a huge fan of filmmakers like Hal Ashby and Robert Towne, I was like where is the Shampoo of today? Where is The Last Detail? Where is that Warren Beatty character? Where is that Jack Nicholson guy? And gradually I started to get a glimpse of the character who is almost like some kind of romantic anti-hero. I didn’t really see that guy anywhere else and thought he might be interesting to write about.

Q: How much of Hank is there in you?
ANS: I would say 98% in terms of the way he sees the world. I don’t have a filter. I will say what’s on my mind. Obviously not to the extent that Hank does. But I mean, I love writing a character who says what’s on his mind and believes whatever comes out of his mouth is the truth. So that’s all me. And the sexual stuff is, well, obviously wish fulfillment. In real life, I’m married and I have three kids. I couldn’t be more boring in that way. But I mean, you know, the way he sees the world, the way he talks, you know, that comes pretty much from me.

Q: And when your wife read this spec script, how much shot?
ANS: Nothing. Because she knows me, you know. She gets my humor, you know, that’s why I think she – the way she responded to it. She’s like, you know, this is one of the first things you’ve read in that, so you that it will probably strike a chord. Because I think when people, you know, reach deep down and write something personal that only they could write, that’s what ultimately works for you. The world, I think sort of picks up on that.

Q: Yeah. What kind of comments do you get from people about this show, and about Hank?
ANS: It’s funny. People either love it or they loathe it, and that to me is the best reaction. Being from New York, I grew up listening to Howard Stern and I feel like there’s a similar reaction where you either loved him or you hated him. But the people who hated him almost couldn’t turn off the radio. So I feel like Hank and the show in general has a similar affect on people. People either are enthusiastic or they hate it; either way, though, they can’t quite stop talking about it.

Q: What’s your favorite all time Howard interview?
ANS: Oh wow. That’s a good one. The first thing that popped into my head are some of those times he spoke with Duchovny, when he was still on the X-Files. Yeah, there were a lot of Duchovny interviews that were quite entertaining, because he would always get into it with him about Tea.

Q: Which show do you think – and you may be biased – which show do you think projects a truer version of Hollywood, yours or Entourage?
ANS: I don’t know if either does. I know that Entourage – there is no reality to Entourage. That’s as much a fairy tale as anything else. And it feels to me – I like the show but it feels to me very sugar coated. It seems like there’s an accurate depiction of the restaurant of the week, all the hot spots and all that, but it doesn’t feel that real to me. I don’t know if ‘Californication’ does either. I feel like my show uses Los Angeles as a character. I don’t know if it is as much about Hollywood.

Q: Do you have any favorite scenes or favorite episodes that stand out from the first season?
ANS: One of my favorites from the first season was actually the one where Hank’s father passed away. I broke structure a little bit and sort of did, you know, flashbacks and flash forwards and that was a lot of fun to do. I think it also showed people that the series wasn’t just about the sexual hijinks of the week. There was some deeper stuff going on. So that was a lot of fun. But conversely I love the Devil’s Threesome episode, which is the one with the big female ejaculation set piece. It is certainly a lot of fun to get away with that on television. And then, of course, I love the pilot because it’s the first thing and actually I was really pleased with how the finale came out.

Q: I thought the opening scene of the pilot I thought was one of the best, most surprising pieces I had seen on TV in a long time. Clever, dark, smart, surprising. Was that in the original screenplay?
ANS: Yeah, that was – what is funny, was the time at which I wrote the screenplay, I didn’t really – I didn’t really sit down and outline it. It was kind of literally like, okay, I want to write something and I’m just going to go with this character, and literally the first scene that popped into my head was that scene. That was the first thing I wrote after “Fade In.” So that’s always been there and it’s probably if you looked at the first draft of the screenplay it’s almost word for word.

Q: So you knew this guy from page one.
ANS: Yeah. I think that kind of – that scene very much kind of sets the tone for who he is, so it’s almost like I needed to write that scene to explain to myself who he was.

Q: What did you like about the finale?
ANS: You know, what I loved about the finale is that it’s all of the things that I love about the show wrapped up into one. It’s very funny, but it’s also emotional. And I feel like the ending is genuinely both kind of moving and surprising. You don’t really have an opportunity to do that much on TV. I don’t see people being genuinely surprised by things, so I just felt like it came together in a nice way and by having done 12 episodes everything was a lot deeper than it was at the pilot stage.

Q: OK, you got us to a great point in the finale. What do we expect? What should we be looking for in the new season’s opener?
ANS: Well, the finale was all about, OK, I’m going to give these guys a happy ending, and it was always my plan in season two to kind of explore what that actually means, because so many movies end with the guy getting the girl and they drive off into the sunset and lived happily ever after. And season two to me was about, OK, here’s the chance to explore the morning after when you’ve gotten the girl and now you have to figure out how to live the rest of your life. And so really the first four episodes are about kind of seeing if that relationship can actually work in the real world. It’s also about Hank’s desire to kind of get off the island. The island in this case being, you know, LA and wanting to get back to New York, where he thinks that’s the site of his greatest happiness. And it’s really about the forces that conspire to keep him in LA. He gets a job writing the biography of this very iconic record producer, who is sort of like a cross between Phil Specter and Rick Rubin, and you know, this guy is going to function as the devil on Hank’s shoulder, kind of leading him back towards temptation.

Q: Speaking of temptation, how is David doing?
ANS: Good, good. I was in touch with him a little bit last month, but I think he’s sort of gone underground for a while now. I think he’s on the road to a happier and healthier him.

Q: In some darkly ironic way, it was good PR for the show.
ANS: Yeah, in a way, it’s very strange. Nobody wanted something like this to happen. But I don’t know that it’s a negative thing for the show.