Richard Hatem

Birthday:
November 2, 1966

Birthplace:
St. Joseph's Hospital, Burbank, California.  Directly across the street from the current ABC building where Miracles was born.

Occupation(s):
Writer. Was a waiter (only one letter difference) at Tony Roma's on Lake Avenue in Pasadena, CA for many years.  Also taught comedy traffic school for five years -- Honest.

Quotes:
"When you're going through hell -- keep going."
Winston Churchill

Favorite Food:
Anything Indian

Favorite Book:
Too many to name, but here's two from way back:
The Main by Trevanian and Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

Most influential
person in my life:
A small group of friends from high school and college, the smartest, funniest and most creative people I've ever known, who helped me believe I could do anything.

What is most important:
My kids, of course, and...  Maintaining the excitement and interest in the world that feeds my desire to create.

36 Questions with Richard Hatem (continued - page 3)
 

19.  Which character on "Miracles," if any, is most like you?

 I have Keel’s philosophy, Paul’s soul and Evelyn’s eyelashes.

20.  Is your use of the surname Keel in "Miracles" a reference back to The Mothman Prophecies book by John Keel?

Yes!  The "A" in John A. Keel (real-life writer of the paranormal and unexplained) stands for Alva.  And the character played by Alan Bates in The Mothman Prophecies is named Leek, which is Keel spelled backwards.  (The line between writer and serial killer is thin indeed…) 

Keel himself is proud to have been represented on screen, both large and small, twice in the past two years -- and both times by respected British actors.  Neither character is supposed to be John Keel himself, but both maintain some of his ideas and philosophies, though neither gets near his lunatic sense of humor.  I recommend all of John A. Keel’s books to anyone who believes the world is a stranger place than we can ever imagine, and sees the dark humor in that.

21.  Where did you get the inspiration to use hemography within the story, and to have the "God is nowhere/now here" central theme?

The "God Is Nowhere, God is Now Here" thing came from a class I took in the Spring of 2000.

A year before Miracles came along, I got an inspiration out of nowhere to take a class on the Bible.  I never went to church and had never read the Bible, and I felt this was a huge hole in my western humanities education.  So I signed up for a UCLA extension course taught by the brilliant Professor Charles L. Batten, Ph.D.  This guy deserves all the credit.  He was trying to illustrate a point about the difficulty in translating ancient stone tablets.  He explained that since stone tablets were so difficult to produce, that authors would not waste any space on them at all -- in fact, they didn’t even put spaces between words. 

Then Professor Batten walked to the chalkboard and wrote GODISNOWHERE.  "Alright -- what does that say?" he asked. 

Half the class saw one thing, the other half, another. Then he asked, "How are we to know what the author intended?  And how costly would a mistake be -- especially here?:

Now, what did I see on the chalkboard?  Let’s just say I’m no Paul Callan.

I forgot all about this little lesson.  Then, a year later, while outlining a much different version of the pilot, we needed Paul to see something -- something he could not explain.  In this early version, Paul was going to see these words spelled out on a wall by a cluster of living flies.  Much later, the hemography angle was substituted.

22.  Did you read any books about hemography?  Where did you get the background information on the subject?

I first found out about hemography in a wonderful book called (what else?) Miracles, by D. Scott Rogo, a parapsychologist who devoted an entire book to the investigation of miraculous phenomena.  The book includes photographs of actual hemography.  It’s a wonderful book and I recommend it to you all.

And here’s a tip I can’t resist: If you’re looking for out-of-print books, go to www.ADDall.com.  You will find every book you’ve ever seen or heard about.  Ever.

23.  Is "Miracles" based on a real person or events?

Miracles was not based on any real individual’s experiences.  But the Catholic Church does have people who investigate miracles.  They have for hundreds of years, and they still do.

24.  Who did you originally envision casting when writing the script?

I really had no specific actors in mind for any of the characters when I wrote the script.

25.  Was the scary creepy vision guy actually a high-ranking executive at ABC?

Next.

26.  What did each of the lead actors bring to their roles that surprised you and added dimension to the characters you’d created?

This may sound like a strange answer, but I was surprised with the level of humanity and realism that each of them brought to their characters.  You get so used to bad acting in TV and films (and my personal opinion is that most of it is pretty bad), that when people come off like human beings it’s a gift.  I feel each of our leads had this gift in spades.

27.  If Angus MacFadyen had not been available to accept the role of Alva Keel, who is the most likely actor to have played him?

Long before Angus’s name came up, we seriously considered trying to get Donald Sutherland.  He read the script, we met with him, but it was clear that his interest wasn’t there, so we moved on.  Once the network saw Angus -- and Skeet -- they knew we had our guys.

28.  What were the cast and crew like to work with?

Between Greenwalt, Skeet, Angus and myself there were a total of nine temper-tantrums, twelve screaming fits, five threats to quit the show, three stern lectures, two hundred hurt feelings, one phone hang-up in mid-sentence -- and ten thousand instances of sheer joy and gratitude.

29.  What is the significance of using children, teens or young adults (in the case of The Patient) to portray either evil or the possibility of it?

Well, first of all, I have two kids, so I know they’re evil.

I think kids on screen are like Rorschach images; we can easily project onto them a whole range of emotional qualities, both good and evil.  I think Allisyn Ashley Arm’s performance as Amelia Wye, the Little Girl in "Little Miss Lost" was both frightening and heartbreakingly sad.  And Jacob Smith, who played Tommy Ferguson, gave a performance every bit as real and nuanced as Haley Joel Osment in Sixth Sense. 

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June 1, 2003  © Copyright 2003-2004 MiraclesTV.com.  All Rights Reserved.