Producer and Carnegie Mellon alumnus John Wells was invited to discuss storytelling with President Farnam Jahanian.
Before John Wells made a name for himself in film and television, he was a production design student at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama in the days before Purnell Center for the Arts existed. When describing the work culture of School of Drama Production Design life, Wells described it as “kind of its own fraternity” situated in CFA, where he spent most days working from sunrise until 11 p.m.
Now, as John Wells returns to Carnegie Mellon’s campus, he is recognized not only for his contributions to the entertainment industry, but also his role in facilitating the success of current students at Carnegie Mellon. The Purnell Center for the Arts houses the John Wells Studio Theater as well as the John Wells Directing Fellowship, a three-year MFA program that allows students to study tuition-free. This past Wednesday, The Tartan spoke with Wells to ask him questions about his career and contributions to the Carnegie Mellon community.
At the start of Wells’ junior year he was called into the assistant head of the department’s office after faculty found out that he hadn’t paid his tuition in full.
He had hoped that he would “breeze by” and be able to continue taking classes until someone had noticed, but unfortunately, the registrar had noticed. Later, Wells was called back into the office and informed that a former head of department had paid his tuition in full and he would be able to stay at Carnegie Mellon. Wells said, “I’ve always felt that that kept me there. And so I’ve already felt that … once I had some success … I should return that favor.” When Wells asked how he could repay him, he was simply told to “help someone else out in the future.”
Wells recalled, “We had a lot of people who came and spoke at the school when I was here, which I found really useful for some perspective.” Now, Wells gets to be one of the visiting artists who get to teach professionalism and industry standards. “That was very much, and is very much, a part of the Carnegie Mellon tradition — that people come out of here as professionals and know how to behave professionally, and that was all really important. So if I can import a little bit of that again…”
While visiting, John Wells was invited to participate in the President’s Lecture Series event titled “The Value of Narrative Storytelling in Polarized Times.” The event was attended by students in the directing program as well as MFA students in the John Wells directing program who got to sit in the first row and hear Wells speak on balancing responsibilities of delivering humanity to audiences through storytelling.
In the rise of streaming, there has been an increase not only in what media is available but also in the number of audience viewers who are streaming television. “Everybody’s home watching during COVID, and watching a lot. So there was actually a market for it because everybody’s watching, like, an extraordinary amount of stuff.”
After this growth moment with streaming, however, the market for streaming has shrunk: “Netflix is Walmart, and the business has changed dramatically, where we’re back to significant amounts of financial pressure … there will still be, you know, Apple … but Apple can afford to spend that kind of money on shows and spend the kind of money doing ‘Severance’ that nobody else can.” Because of this, “we’re actually getting back to being more fiscally responsible, which leads us back to … character instead of spectacle.”
John Wells is currently the executive producer of Max series “The Pitt,” which follows medical workers through the shift of a single day and all the chaos that accompanies this. “The Pitt” is a medical drama that in grounded in the notion of “character instead of spectacle.”
Wells spoke about the process of developing “The Pitt” and the dedication of medical workers that inspired the team, including the impact of COVID on the lives of medical workers. With COVID, “It’s like you kind of want to forget. It’s like you’re in a car accident. You don’t want to think about it.” Doctors speaking to Wells noted that “this has been devastating to the medical community, and if you can, help people understand that we can’t forget.”
“They went through this … tremendous sense of loss, and that was really the impetus to go back into medicine. We’d all written a lot of medical shows. I read three of them, and directed a bunch of them. So that was the impetus to go back into it.”
John Wells closed out his visit to Carnegie Mellon with a special screening of the finale episode of “The Pitt” before its official release later that evening on April 10.