Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin

The Good Writer

By Julia Hanna

It’s been “a very kooky couple of weeks” for television writer Leonard Dick (MBA ’90). Season Three of the critically acclaimed CBS show The Good Wife premieres on Sunday, September 25, and when we catch up with him by phone at his home in Los Angeles, Dick, one of eight writers on the show, has had about seven days to turn in a 60-page script. “My wife will tell you that I’m an insufferable ogre when I’m on deadline,” he says. “But you have to feed the beast. Halting production can cost millions of dollars.”

As an MBA, Dick probably has a greater appreciation for what that means than most of his writer colleagues. “I’m definitely an anomaly at reunions,” he says, “but I’m here because of HBS and the alumni network—and I’m not just saying that to play to the home crowd. When I saw how many graduates were working in Hollywood, it began to seem like a possibility that a middle-class kid from Toronto could have a career out here.”

Dick performed in the Hasty Pudding theatricals as an undergraduate at Harvard and co-wrote the script for the HBS show Les Bizerables, a French revolution spoof about the emergence of the European Common Market in 1792. Before HBS, he worked as an M&A analyst at Morgan Stanley. In the summer between his first and second years, he worked as a summer intern at Cineplex Odeon in his native Toronto, and then upon graduation started as a senior business planner in Walt Disney Studios’ film distribution division in Burbank.

“A friend told me that people in Hollywood would think I was Einstein because I could work with spreadsheets,” he half jokes. “I’m one of the few writers who gets excited about reading the page 6 item in Variety about Warner Brothers signing a video output deal with an Italian distributor.” While working at Disney, Dick and his best friend from HBS, John MacDonald (MBA ’90), took a sitcom writing class at UCLA’s extension school.

“My girlfriend at the time—now my wife of 18 years—told me that I should be a writer,” he says. “So I proposed to her and quit my job.”

Dick says it was about two years before he got his first break, a syndicated sketch-comedy show called The Newz that was canceled after the discovery of financial shenanigans by one of the executive producers. From there it was on to a slew of shows, including another sketch comedy (MAD TV), then in 30-minute sitcoms (Sister, Sister and “shows you’ve never heard of because they were canceled.”). In 2002, he wrote a spec one-hour pilot that was produced by the WB (now the CW) but not picked up. “I curled into a fetal ball for 72 hours, but that pilot was my entrée into the one-hour world,” recalls Dick, who was then invited to write for Lost in its first two seasons, work that earned him a Writers Guild of America Award as well as an Emmy for best drama.

“You’re a nomad, a kind of creative Bedouin,” says Dick, who has also written for House. “There’s no job security. You’re your own business. You have to diversify and be flexible, especially in this economy.” During the 2007–2008 writers’ strike, Dick was the strike captain for the staff of House. “I may be the only member of my class to walk a picket line,” he speculates. Dick estimates that he’s had about 18 different employers over the course of his writing career.

For now, Dick says he loves working on The Good Wife, which stars Julianna Margulies as a lawyer building a new life and career after her husband, a State’s Attorney, is implicated in a corruption scandal. “The writing process is very iterative and collaborative,” he says. “We can spend most of the day in the writer’s room, working on different ideas. When we finish a storyline we let out a little puff of white smoke, like the Curia in Rome.”

The show received six Emmy nominations; Margulies took home the award for best actress in a drama. “When I first started as a TV writer, I just wanted someone to hire me. Last night I went to my fifth Emmys. The secret is that I would pay people to do this. I still pinch myself.”