The W Files

Profiling Screenwriters at Work

The Magic Finger: Jeff Rosen
By Philip Moscovitch

Talk to Jeff Rosen and you wonder if he ought to be doing standup. The one-liners just keep coming. He was once paid in sporting equipment for a TV writing gig. He dropped out of high school and went to New York to be the next Bob Dylan, but "that didn't work out because I wasn't short enough." For his days on Theodore Tugboat (he was executive story editor and wrote 100 episodes), "I got paid in merchandise."

Good laughs, except he insists the bit about the sporting equipment is true. Rosen was 23 and writing for the CBC teen show Time of Your Life. The producer "was a failed tennis pro, and he had all these tennis rackets. And that's how I got paid."

Born in Montreal, Rosen earned his first film credit on Crazy Moon, Kiefer Sutherland's debut. He eventually moved to Halifax to become part of the Buddhist community there, but the city "wasn't exactly a hotbed of television production." One of his first gigs in town was the CTV show Wonder Why, "in which part of the job was wearing a lizard outfit on camera. It was cheap and badly made and off-gassed terribly, creating splitting headaches. The ensuing result was a delirium in which I got married and had two children."

Now that the delirium has subsided, Rosen finds himself as executive producer and creator of Poko, CBC-TV's flagship preschool program.

The stop-motion animated show features Poko, a young boy, along with his dog, Minus, and his stuffed monkey, Mr. Murphy (who also gets his own flash animated storybook segment). With his finger, Poko can draw objects in the air that become real. Minus can erase them with his nose. The show is narrated by Cory Bowles, better known for the slightly more profane role of Cory on Trailer Park Boys.

Rosen and Cheryl Wagner wrote all the scripts for the first season. He says he admires Wagner's ability to connect with kids on their own level. "She has not forgotten what it's like to be three," he says, adding, "My wife would say the same about me–but in a different context."

While developing Poko, Rosen was determined to find a format that worked best for the kind of show he envisioned–a show that paired physical comedy with a positive message about coping with emotions that can feel overwhelming.

"Stop-motion was the medium we chose for this production. One of the most expensive and time-consuming mediums, for which there was no industry here that existed to do it. So it's crazy," Rosen says. "I find stop-motion to be a magical medium. It feels magically real to both adults and children. Characters in stop-motion have this ability to convey emotion and physical humour and to create an immediate connection with the audience…The money was there to do this medium, so we built a studio here and brought in people from across Canada, and started an industry."

In stop-motion, animators will typically work an hour to produce somewhere between five and 10 seconds of movement. It's time-consuming, expensive work. And it has a definite influence on the way the show is written.

Rosen says, "You have to plan out every nuance of the action before you get to the animators on the floor. A lot of writers have the experience where their script is alive right on the floor. Right when they're shooting, on the set, they're able to make changes. But stop motion really needs to be planned out very carefully… Even when I was doing Tugboat, it was a little bit more fluid, because they were moving models: maybe we'll go left instead of right. It wasn't quite as militarily planned out."

Rosen says that Michael Donovan, his fellow executive producer, always saw Poko as a quiet show. A bit of an oasis in a non-stop, frenetic media environment. Some of that might also be indirectly attributed to Rosen's long-standing Buddhist practice.

He hesitates a bit when asked the question, then says, "The influence I take from my contemplative tradition is to foster an understanding that sometimes doing nothing is a positive act. Sometimes Poko will sit quietly when he's overwhelmed by an emotion, and just breathe. Coming from a contemplative tradition, I think it's important to understand why we do the things we do, so we don't just act out of fear, hatred and aggression."

Though Rosen strongly believes the show can help kids learn about emotional intelligence, he also feels a deep-seated ambivalence about the world in which he has worked for over 20 years. "The one thing I loathe about my job is that I'm not sure that television is the greatest thing that children should be watching. I have a real ambivalence about that. On the other hand, I know they are. And if they are, maybe I'll try and do something meaningful that gets children thinking and somewhat active and engaged."

In case he's starting to sound too earnest, Rosen jokes about himself as a "hardened, cynical children's writer," then adds, "I want to have a good laugh as much as anybody. I don't want to teach anything, I just want to teach possibilities. There's nothing more horrible than a false smile or a forced message."