Story by Ed Berthiaume / Communications
Lee Shallat Chemel ’65 has been doing a fair bit of soul searching.
Since graduating from Lawrence
University 54 years ago, Chemel has forged an impressive career as a director,
first in theater and then in television — a 10-year stint as a conservatory
director at South Coast Repertory in Orange County, California, eventually led
to a more than three-decade run working behind the scenes on some of the most
iconic shows in TV history.
Now she returns to Lawrence as the 2019 Commencement speaker on Sunday, June 9, ready to impart insight and wisdom drawn from a professional career that she says has everything to do with the liberal arts education she received at Milwaukee-Downer College and then Lawrence.
“It’s forced me to investigate my
entire life,” she said with a laugh. “It’s been a fascinating experience.”
She’ll be joined at the Lawrence Commencement ceremony by her husband, David, and her daughter, Lizzy. Her son, Tucker, won’t be able to make it.
Details on 2019 Commencement, related events
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Without stealing from her
Commencement speech —no spoiler alerts here — we chatted with Chemel, an
English major as an undergraduate, about her journey, her deep affection for
Lawrence and why she has a special fondness for Michael J. Fox, Lauren Graham
and Jason Bateman.
On how Milwaukee-Downer and Lawrence — she was part of the first Downer class to merge with Lawrence, spending her first three years in Milwaukee and her senior year in Appleton — lit a fire in her for the arts and planted the seed that a career in the arts might be possible:
“My path to
theater happened because of Lawrence. And that’s kind of significant. I never
thought I would ever enter the arts of any kind as a way to live. Being a woman
who was brought up in the ’40s and then the ’50s, I didn’t even foresee that
possibility for myself.
“I grew up in
very modest circumstances, five people in a one-bedroom apartment when I was
young. I didn’t have big dreams of anything except going to college. That was a
big deal to me. I loved my teachers, so I thought I really want to teach.
I never had the dream of doing anything in the arts. It didn’t seem like
it would be practical enough. It just never occurred to me that that would be
something I would do.”
On seeing her first theater production at Lawrence, a staging of Macbeth directed by David Mayer III:
“I was just
blown away by it. I had done some theater. I wasn’t one of those kids who did
musicals and stuff in high school, but at Downer I had done theater. And I was
just blown away by this production.”
On her early mentors in theater at Lawrence, Mayer and Ted Cloak:
“When I got to
Lawrence, I decided I would take an acting class from Ted Cloak, who was
probably one of the best acting teachers I have ever had, even including the
three years I spent with Duncan Ross (in a professional acting program in
Seattle) and all these other fabulous people. But Ted Cloak was a wonderful
acting teacher, and he loved theater and understood it, and the productions
they did, they were just phenomenal.
“I really
believe that because of David Mayer and Ted Cloak, I found that theater was
more than I thought it was. I really loved it although I still didn’t buy
the idea of it as a career at that point. But I became much closer to that
idea. Lawrence opened my eyes completely to the richness of the arts,
particularly the theater and the film arts. It was remarkable what an influence
it had on me.”
On making the transition from Milwaukee-Downer to Lawrence:
“I was only at
Lawrence for one year. But it was a year that was packed with amazing things
for me. Downer was a very good school in that the professors there were kind of
radical. … They were sharp people. They radicalized me politically. Got me
involved in the Civil Rights movement. Linus Pauling came to talk with us,
Upton Sinclair. It was amazingly rich for a tiny, tiny school. But Lawrence
took that and just broadened it – everything became broadened and deepened.”
On ditching her teaching career for theater after she and then-husband Phil Shallat moved to Seattle so he could study theater in graduate school:
“I was teaching high school there. … He said, there’s a new thing they’re doing (at the University of Washington School of Drama), a professional acting training program. I said, wow, that is so cool. Meanwhile, I had applied to teach at a terrific private school there. … But Phil suggested I also audition for that M.F.A. program. And I did, just on a lark. And on the same week, I got an acceptance into the (acting) program and an offer for my total dream teaching job. I held those two envelopes up and went back and forth and said, oh, heck, I’m going to do the acting thing. It was a whim almost.”
On her forays into acting after earning a master’s in fine arts from Washington’s Professional Actor Training Program:
“I acted in
Seattle, but I knew somewhere in my head that acting, I just didn’t have a
tremendous passion for it. I liked it. I loved doing it. But it wasn’t complete
for me. I wasn’t secure with it or something.”
On her introduction to directing:
“I moved away
from Seattle and down to San Francisco and then I got a job at South
Coast Repertory in 1975, and they didn’t hire me for acting but they hired me
to teach in the conservatory. And that led me to teaching at the colleges
around there, so I was kind of cobbling together a bunch of teaching jobs but
then what happened is Orange Coast College said we don’t have the money for you
to teach next quarter but do you want to direct a play? So, I
directed The Rivals, an 18th Century English
play that I really liked. And I fell in love with directing right then and
there.”
On embracing and thriving as a theater director, earning five L.A. Drama Critics Awards along the way:
“It all happened
through my education in a way. If I hadn’t had the background of this liberal
arts education I wouldn’t have been able to make a living doing the teaching
part while I searched for what finally struck home for me — the directing.”
On turning to TV directing in the mid-1980s:
“That was
another leap. That was like a crazy leap where I was now a resident director at
South Coast Repertory. … I’d done some good directing, a lot of directing, to
the point where in L.A., I had a little bit of a name. There weren’t a lot of
women directing in theater then.
“But I began to
wish sometimes in productions I directed that I could do a close up.
That sort of made me realize, maybe you really need to look at film. I applied
to the AFI, the American Film Institute; they had a program for helping women
get into film. But I didn’t get accepted. I continued to direct in
L.A., and my friend Joe Stern, who was a producer on Law and Order,
knew TV people as well as theater people. He said, Gary Goldberg has this
new show called Family Ties. He’s looking for a woman director
because there was some pressure at the time to start hiring women. You can see
how far that got after 35 years.
“He said he
wants someone who was good with actors, not just technical. I went in
and I met Gary Goldberg, and he liked me, and we were the same age, so
that was cool. He said, come in and observe. … So, after almost 10 years (at
South Coast), I just quit. I had no idea if this was going to take me
anywhere or whether I would succeed or not. I just moved up to L.A. and started
observing on Family Ties, and I remember I was observing that show
from August until, I think, October. … I started borrowing money from my
boyfriend, … and then finally on the schedule my name came up for a show in
February. So that’s how it all started.”
On how difficult the transition to TV proved to be:
“I think I did
six to eight episodes of Family Ties. But not all before I moved
on. That year I did one, then the next year I did two. Family Ties people
knew me before I stepped up and they were there to support me because I’d
been observing there and they were kind to someone just starting out. You go to
other shows and they don’t know that. They just know that you don’t know what
you’re doing yet. So those are tough times. Part of my speech is how tough it
was. You get a few episodes and you try to develop. … You try to get as many
gigs as you can and hopefully make a good impression so they’ll ask you back.
What I realized is it takes 10 years to be good at that. And we were
live-cutting shows. That was really, really hard.
“I had the
support of knowing that I was educated. And that sounds weird, but it was
actually quite significant to me that I knew things. I knew I could analyze a
script, I knew that I could understand things. I could communicate well, I
understood tone, I understood people. I was older than a lot of people who
start. So, I had lived some life, too. And these were the things that
buoyed me up during these very tough times.”
On highlights of a career that would include directing and/or producing work on Murphy Brown, Spin City, Northern Exposure, Arrested Development, Gilmore Girls, and The Middle, among others:
“Murphy Brown was certainly a big jump up for me. That’s when my
agent finally talked somebody into getting me onto what you’d call a real major
show. Working with such good writers. … And once I had Murphy
Brown under my belt, that got me an Emmy nomination, and, all of a
sudden, I was kind of accepted. I was brought into the club, I guess you could say.”
On her latest work, a nine-year run as director on The Middle:
“I got to be
full-time on that for nine years, and we all became a family. That was a
wonderful experience.”
On directing Michael J. Fox, first on Family Ties and later on Spin City, when, unbeknownst to most, he was beginning his battle with Parkinson’s disease:
“Michael J. Fox,
I love to talk about him. Initially, Family Ties was supposed
to be about two hippie parents who all of a sudden discovered that their kids
are conservative. It was that reversal thing. But here comes this guy playing
the conservative son who likes Nixon and stuff, and he was so funny and so
inventive, and what happens in comedy is that the writers want their jokes to
sail, so they start writing for that guy because he’s so good. All of a sudden,
the show flipped, because Michael was so damn funny it became more centered on
him. He became the star of the show.
“Michael is an
interesting guy. He plays the comedy so well and it was a delight to watch him
develop and sail, and you take good writers and then you take this great young
actor and you watch it as they just start feeding each other. That was quite a
wonderful thing to see. I loved watching that.
“Then I got to
work with him on Spin City for a whole year in New York. And
that’s when I learned that he had Parkinson’s. Nobody knew about it
except me and Gary Goldberg because they didn’t want to make it public yet. And
it was very challenging for Michael. But he was ever wonderful and I
admire him so much.”
On working with Lauren Graham on Gilmore Girls, first as a director, then as an executive producer:
“Lauren Graham and
I became friends during that last season on Gilmore Girls. It was
very challenging because Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of the show, went
away and that took the heart of the writing with it. Now she’s doing The
Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and she’s a brilliant writer. But here we
were with a whole year to do the final season of the show; the actors and
writers worked incredibly hard to keep the tone of the show consistent. That is
a very hard thing to do when for all previous years, Amy had written most of
the scripts. Bless those writers and Lauren, they did a phenomenal job.”
On her respect for Jason Bateman, who she directed on Arrested Development:
“I love Jason Bateman. I adore him. Jason and I did a few pilots together before Arrested Development. A lot of the network people thought he was going to be or should be the next Michael J. Fox. But he wasn’t, that wasn’t Jason’s humor.
“I think he went
through some real struggles, and then all of a sudden Mitch Hurwitz writes this
brilliant series called Arrested Development and it taps into
the real place where Jason can shine. I was so happy for him because it
validated him, and now he’s got a great, great career. And he’s the nicest guy
in the world and he was just very lovely to work with always.”
On whether last year’s series finale of The Middle means the end of her career:
“I don’t know. I
did the pilot for a spinoff from The Middle this fall, with
the Sue character. It didn’t get picked up. I wrote a note to my agents and
said, I’m not dead yet. But I don’t know. I feel maybe it’s time to give back
again and do some other things. I’m at a crossroads, but I’ll see what comes up
next season.”
On returning to Lawrence while not knowing what comes next:
“I’m like the
graduates in a way. What am I going to do now? I just want to be open to stuff.
I feel like I am in an interesting place in my life.”
Ed Berthiaume is director of public information at Lawrence University. Email: ed.c.berthiaume@lawrence.edu