Wednesday, January 12, 2000
Loveland grad bases TV series set on her old school
BY JOHN KIESEWETTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
PASADENA, Calif. — When Ann Donahue goes to work, she feels like she's back in old Loveland High School. And for good reason.
The set for her new NBC spring comedy series, M.Y.O.B., was modeled after her alma mater, now Loveland Middle School.
Parents Owen and Ann Donahue of Loveland photographed the school classrooms, hallways and office last summer for the M.Y.O.B. designers.
“We were getting down to the wire, and I couldn't quite express to the set designers what I wanted, so I asked Mom and Dad to go up and take pictures,” says Ms. Donahue, a 1973 Loveland graduate.
“They took about 70 snapshots of classrooms, the cafeteria and everything, and had them processed at a one-hour place and Fed-Ex'd them to me,” she says after an NBC press conference during the Television Critics Association's winter press tour here.
“The artists and designers have them up on their walls to make them to scale.”
M.Y.O.B. stars Katharine Towne (The Bachelor) as a 16-year-old street-smart runaway whose search for her birth mother takes her to her aunt (Lauren Graham from Caroline in the City), a northern California high school principal.
Ms. Donahue, the Emmy-winning writer from Picket Fences, is executive producer of the series with creator Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex, Single White Female).
That old high school spirit captured Ms. Donahue because she wanted a 1960s look for fictional Gossett High School in her first sitcom. She has spent the past decade writing one-hour dramas for Hollywood's best producers: David E. Kelley (Picket Fences), Steven Spielberg (High Incident), Steven Bochco (Murder One) and John Wells (China Beach).
“We didn't want to have an old school set in the 1940s, like an MGM movie. We wanted it to look like schools now,” she says.
So Gossett High will look like a cross between today's Loveland Middle School at 801 S. Lebanon Road, and the style of that building when Ms. Donahue was a student there 30 years ago.
The M.Y.O.B. school office has masonry brick walls and huge plate-glass windows, front and back, like the Hamilton County school. Down the hall is a 5-foot-high glass trophy case, identical to the one by the gym.
Hallways are lined with double-deck lockers, as photographed by her parents. The halls are painted a drab pea green, as they were in the 1970s, instead of the current cream color.
“Our building is very typical of schools thrown up for the early Baby Boomers,” says Jane Barre, Loveland Middle School principal. “Back then, just about every school was "industrial green' or "educational green.'”
Loveland Middle School's prime-time debut came about because NBC Studios asked Ms. Donahue to run M.Y.O.B. last year, after buying Mr. Roos' pilot. The writers had met 10 years ago on Aaron Spelling's Nightengales nursing drama, an embarrassingly short-lived NBC show not mentioned in their NBC bios. Technically, M.Y.O.B. is their first TV comedy.
“Don and I always joked that we wrote our first comedy 10 years ago. It wasn't intended to be funny, but it was,” Ms. Donahue says. “People greeted it either as an outrage or laughingstock. And I don't disagree at all.”
The transition from one-hour drama to a half-hour comedy has not been difficult, because M.Y.O.B. is shot on film without a studio audience like ABC's Sports Night.
“When people say comedy, they think of a sitcom with a studio audience and a laugh track. We don't do any of that. This is still film,” she says.
Although she has made her name writing some of TV's best dramas, Ms. Donahue says her childhood dream was to write for Lucille Ball's old The Lucy Show (1962-74).
“When I was 7 years old, and lived in Cleveland, I told my dad that I knew what I wanted to be. I wanted to write for Lucy,” she says.
NBC plans to premiere M.Y.O.B. in March or April — just a few months before the Lebanon Road structure is gutted for modernization. Had NBC waited until this summer to start production, Ms. Donahue would have had to rely on yearbook photos.
“We've already lost one corridor,” Mrs. Barre says. “If they had waited until June, this building would have been completely gutted. It would have been gone.”
As they say in show business: Timing is everything.
TV Critic John Kiesewetter is reporting from the winter press tour.
John Kiesewetter is Enquirer TV/radio critic. Write him at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati, 45202.
