Liberal Arts as the “Secret Sauce”

When Joel Fields ’85 visited Pitzer as a high schooler, who was his tour guide?

John Landgraf '84. 

“What neither of us could have imagined, so many years ago when John gave me my campus tour, was that decades later we’d wind up finding such joy and meaning working together,” he said.

A writer and executive producer whose work on FX’s critically acclaimed series “The Americans” earned him an Emmy (and two Writers Guild of America awards), Fields has had ample chances to witness his former classmate (and campus tour guide) in action at FX. Fields doesn’t think a liberal arts background hinders anyone from embarking on an entertainment executive career (or any other) just because they don’t have a business or law degree. Quite the opposite, in fact. (OK, Fields might be a little biased since his own professional success stems from the same liberal arts tradition as Landgraf’s: Fields majored in philosophy at Pitzer).

“John’s liberal arts degree and anthropology major have been part of the secret sauce of his success,” Fields said. “As someone trained in classic liberal arts, he maintains an intellectual humility and always reflects before he reacts, which has made him a great manager.”

In fact, Landgraf’s background, Fields continued, has enabled him to fully appreciate the creative challenges that a storyteller like Fields faces.

“As someone steeped in anthropology, he understands human motivation and story dynamics in a way that makes him one of the entertainment industry’s greatest-ever dramaturges,” he said.

Fields offers an example. He recalls a critical episode of “The Americans” in which the character of Paige, Philip and Elizabeth’s daughter, is coping with what she’s discovered about her parents. Various executives kept sending notes to Fields and his co-showrunner, Joe Weisberg, expressing dissatisfaction with Paige and her parents’ story in the episode. They were both baffled—they felt everything was right there in the story, but with every rewrite and re-edit the notes kept coming. Finally, Fields and Weisberg called Landgraf to see what he thought.

“John said, and it was like the simplest thing in the world, ‘I get what you’re saying about the characters intellectually, but I don’t think the audience is feeling it emotionally,’” Fields recalled. That conversation helped him and Weisberg realize what was missing—a short scene that communicated the situation’s forceful emotional tension with a minimum of dialogue.

The notes stopped coming.

“John didn’t write the scene for us. He didn’t even tell us we were missing a scene,” Fields said. “But what he did do was constructively articulate what we ourselves were trying to achieve—and that helped us find our own way to tell the best version of our story.”

From Philosophy to FX

Watch Joel Fields ’85 discuss what led to his career in the entertainment industry: