“I felt it might
be my last chance,” he says now. “If it had failed,
I wouldn’t have known what to do next.”
At first the script went nowhere. Networks
passed on it. But as it circulated, Hollywood buzz began to
call it the best pilot script in years—a comment echoed
by critics when the show debuted last fall. The intrigues
and angst of five suburban women and their assorted men immediately
became one of television’s most-watched series and,
in the words of the American Film Institute, “the water-cooler
show of 2004” (that is, the show most likely to be discussed
wherever people gather).
Cherry’s success is the culmination
to date of a career that began, with twists and turns, as
a theater major at CSUF. He planned to act, especially in
musical theater, and chose Fullerton because it was both close
to home and allowed him to continue performing with The Young
Americans, a Brea-based song-and-dance group. He didn’t
learn of the university’s excellent reputation for musical
theater training until he had enrolled. But he calls Dean
Hess, professor of theatre and dance, emeritus “my favorite
theater person. He taught me to conduct myself as a professional.“
Although The Young Americans performed
in glamour spots like Las Vegas and Cannes, something about
his planned career didn’t sit well with Cherry. “The
day I got my Equity card, I realized I didn’t want to
become an actor,” he recalls.
Buoyed by the laughter of friends who
applauded his routines at parties and urged him to write for
television, he and his then-writing partner, Jamie Wooten
(also a former Fullerton student), set off for Los Angeles
to do just that. Living on $15,000 he’d won on “The
$100,000 Pyramid” and his salary as a personal assistant
to Dixie Carter of “Designing Women,” he wrote
spec scripts with Wooten at night. During the writers’
strike of 1988 they found an agent, got into a writers’
workshop at Warner Bros., and were invited to join the staff
of “The Golden Girls.” The process took them about
15 months.
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