One night, Ed stopped by as usual, only to find a stranger behind the counter.
“Where’s Lee?” he asked.
“They killed him this morning,” the woman said. “Shot in the face.” Ed was stunned. He went back to his patrol car and sat there. His first thought: “Where am I going to get cigarettes for 25 cents a pack?” Then he stopped. Lee was dead, and Ed found himself thinking about cheap cigarettes? He shook his head and looked down as he told me the story. It was the moment he knew he had to get out. “That job is a complete erosion of your humanity.”
Ed didn’t get out for another five years. But he began writing screenplays in his basement. “Not as a job,” he told me, “but as therapy.”
One day, a friend was picking up an NBC executive from the airport to speak at Northwestern University. Ed’s wife had slipped her one of Ed’s scripts and asked her to pass it on to the visiting exec. Within days, Ed got a call. Good stuff, he was told, sit tight. More agents and producers called asking for meetings—invoking some of the biggest names in Hollywood: Steven Bochco, John Wells, David Milch.
Three weeks shy of his tenth anniversary with the Chicago police department Ed Bernero pulled his money out of his home, cashed in his pension, and hauled his family across the country. Within a month, he had his first freelance gig—with super-producer Steven Bochco on the CBS police drama Brooklyn South. Following that, he worked with John Wells on the NBC hit show Third Watch. Ed ended up doing more than 130 episodes of New York cop dramas, many of them drawn from his own experience.
But Ed found Hollywood a strange place—riddled with back-lot intrigue, hypersensitive egos, and no shortage of pandering and posturing. Directors, producers, show runners, and studio execs maneuver for recognition and influence. Writers think every word is a gem. Actors take their craft, and themselves, very seriously. Just about everyone is insecure or desperate to get the big break and will say anything to ingratiate them with whoever is calling the shots. Ed once wrote a deliberately terrible script and took it to a crew meeting to see if anyone would call him on it. They didn’t. He realized that if he was going to get genuinely creative work out of his team and not just his own ideas thrown back at him, he needed to engage them differently. He couldn’t bark orders—he had to ask.
You can’t treat people like puppets on a string, Ed told me.
The creativity Ed wants to inspire requires collaboration. “I want everyone to be involved in the show,” he said. It starts in the writers’ room, where ideas collide in mid-thought and mid-air. The room is dominated by a big table that is bounded by whiteboards and littered with chips and pretzels and energy food. This is where Ed’s writers “break the story.” They jot down an idea, kick around plot points, story elements, twists and turns, and imagine how the whole thing unfolds.
Ed wants his writers to construct original, bold, surprising stories—to “color outside the lines.” But he knows that if he tells writers what he’s thinking about a scene or a character, they will be tempted to run with it, play it safe, and give him what they think he wants. So he uses questions to challenge the room.
What if the hero shows up late?
What if the bad guy missed his mark?
The questions are designed to get the writers and the rest of the crew peering around the corner, inventing surprising twists and turns in the story. Ed uses this technique to foster an atmosphere that’s edgy, highly charged, and fun. He wants brainstorming and energy. He also wants creative tension. Ed can be a pain in the ass, and he knows it. He will send scripts back to the team with corrections and complaints. He will say something’s terrible. He usually eats lunch alone in his office. It’s not because he’s shy. He wants to give his team their space. “I want them to bitch about me,” he told me. “I want them to care enough to be upset. I tell them all, at some point during the season you’re going to hate me. That’s okay. It’s like a family. You can storm out. You can be emotional.”
Ed barks questions, not orders, to challenge his writers.
How can you improve the character?
What happens next?
But he also uses questions to make people feel involved and invested. “Otherwise they will just sort of quietly wait for you to say something, and go and do it. It’s the same with the crew as it is in a writing room. I can change the whole direction of the story just by saying something.” Ed believes he brings out the most creative thinking from people when he asks.
He recalls shooting a scene when an actor playing a cop couldn’t nail the timing of a critical move. Squaring off in the street against a woman who is the prime suspect in a criminal investigation, the cop gets his first opportunity to question her. She is crouched and defensive. The cop studies her through his sunglasses, sending signals of authority and accusation. At the right moment, the cop pulls away his sunglasses to make eye contact. After several tries, Ed sees it isn’t working.
“Take five!” Ed calls out, approaching his cop-actor to discuss the scene. Ed does not tell him, “On the third line take your sunglasses off….” Instead he asks, “When do you think this character would want to show his eyes? That’s the moment the suspect sees into you.” Ed wants his actor to think about his eyes, not the glasses. “So when do you want that to happen?”
By turning a direction into a question, Ed handed the responsibility for the answer to his actor, asking him to picture the scene and solve the problem. It wasn’t just about his lines, it was about the chemistry between two characters that, in turn, shaped the story. The actor had to feel it intuitively. The next take, Ed recalled, was perfect.
“Actors are extremely emotional people and extremely sensitive,” Ed explained. “You can’t just go in and tell them. You have to find a way to ask and find out what they’re thinking and value.” Once you do that they help answer the question. Now they can close their eyes and imagine.
Ed could be talking about anyone in any place. If you’re trying to devise a new way of approaching a problem, if you’re hoping to get the creative juices flowing, your question can be an invitation.
How would you do this differently?
What’s your new idea?
These questions are invitations to contribute and create. They send a signal of respect. They offer a challenge that says, “you are a valued part of the expedition. Where to?”
Imagined Reality
Creativity questions have an almost magical capacity to transport people to a different time, place, or perspective. They help us get to that imagined reality. Like Ed Bernero, we can use these questions to craft a story that’s original and different.
A publisher friend of mine, Jay, convened an off-site retreat with his top editors. He began with an exercise. Crunch time had arrived and each magazine had to cut its budget by 50 percent. He asked:
What do you cut?
What do you do?
Were do you start?
The teams went to work, prioritizing and calculating, cutting staff and expenses and page counts, looking for savings in paper quality and marketing. They looked at circulation and administrative costs. Though this was just an exercise, everyone played along and took it seriously.
Then came the twist. In a surprise move, Jay gave his editors their money back. Every penny. But he told them to use the budget they’d cut just a few minutes earlier as their new baseline. They could invest the money they had “saved” in any way they wanted.