Meet Tom Kapinos, Creator, Writer and Executive Producer of the series Californication and Lucifer via Zoom!
Kapinos moved from New York to California in the mid-1990s, working in Los Angeles for Creative Artists Agency as a staff story analyst. In 1999, Fox 2000 purchased his first sold screenplay, The Virgin Mary, with actress Jennifer Aniston attached to play the title role. The film was never made, but after reading The Virgin Mary the producers of Dawson's Creek hired Kapinos first as a writer and eventually executive producer on Dawson's Creek.
Kapinos moved on to his own series, Californication, a dramedy on which he was executive producer and chief writer. That rare entity that finds success almost immediately upon arriving in Hollywood, Tom Kapinos was a fledgling scribe when he dropped out of the New York University graduate program in dramatic writing, headed to the West Coast and almost immediately landed a behind-the-scenes role on the 1998 WB teen drama Dawson's Creek.
Starting out as a creative consultant and fledgling writer for the show in 1999, Kapinos went on to become an executive producer. Admittedly a tough experience, in later interviews he referred to it as, "like going to a TV grad school and learning how to run a television show." When Dawson's Creek ended its run in 2003, Kapinos spent the ensuing years working on a script based on his experiences as someone with goals of becoming a screenwriter with artistic vision and instead finding success down a pop culture path that didn't reflect his creative sensibilities. What started out as a long-form film idea that stalled at 60 pages wound up becoming the pilot for the 2007 Showtime dramedy Californication. But rather than have the main character pen scripts, Kapinos had David Duchovny's Hank Moody be a New York novelist whose book was turned into a lightweight romantic comedy. Unlike the happily married father of three that Kapinos is, Duchovny's Moody became a philandering, boozy reprobate whose outspokenness and sexual escapades made him a much-loved anti-hero.
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