The man behind Veronica

Rob Thomas, creator of "Veronica Mars," talks about how he created his teen noir -- and its future.

By Heather Havrilesky

Read more: Arts & Entertainment, Heather Havrilesky, Arts & Entertainment Features

March 29, 2005 | Rob Thomas, the creator of "Veronica Mars," sat down with Salon recently and discussed casting a girl as the star of his teen noir, the pros and cons of writing for "Dawson's Creek," and whether Veronica will be back for season No. 2.

You mentioned at the Museum of Television and Radio's Paley Television Festival presentation that "Veronica Mars" actually started as a book. How did that happen?

I was under contract for a series of young adult novels for Simon & Schuster. I just started with a vague idea of taking the noir genre and sticking teenagers into it. It was one of the first projects I started thinking of visually rather than [in terms of] internalized protagonist dialogue. I started with this idea of sitting outside of a seedy motel with sort of neon-lit, black asphalt, wet, and hearing the voice of a sort of Sam Spade-ish character, and then cutting inside the car where the surveillance was going on, and realizing that you were dealing with a teenager rather than an adult. And interestingly, we shot that for the pilot. And I'm sure when the DVD comes out I'm going to insist that we reinstate our original opening of the show. One of the things that UPN did with our pilot was decide that, well, it was a high school show, we should start at the high school. And so this whole image that I started with got cut before it was ever aired.

Did you come up with that image when you were developing it into a show or when you were writing the novel itself?

You know, I never wrote the novel. I wrote a treatment for the novel, which Simon & Schuster bought. So the novel was never written. It was an idea that was probably in my head for five years before I wrote it.

Were your other novels mysteries?

The first one, which is probably the best known, is a book called "Rats Saw God." It came out in '96. I wrote it when I was 28, and though it was about an 18-year-old, I really kind of wrote it for an audience of my peers so, given the sex and the drugs and the language, I really didn't think anyone would buy it as a young adult novel, but Simon & Schuster did and, after that, I was under contract for several more.

You mentioned at the Paley Festival that your original idea for the noir novel involved a male protagonist. When you decided to make the protagonist a girl, did that change the story and if so, how?

At some point in there, I started really thinking about the big picture, like if I'm going to try to tap into any kind of zeitgeist, what is that? I had what I thought was a cool notion about placing teens in a noir universe, but what am I saying, what does that mean? This idea that I was attracted to, and had been thinking about since I taught high school, was this vague notion about teenagers being desensitized and jaded and sexualized so much earlier than I feel like even my generation 15, 20 years before had been. That seemed like a perfect thing to try to shine a spotlight on. [That concept] was interesting to me when the protagonist was a boy, but when I started thinking in terms of a girl who had seen too much and experienced too much at too young of an age, it became even more potent to me. It just seemed that much edgier and more difficult to swallow, in a good way. So, I can't remember exactly when I shifted, but that was why I shifted.

It's fun to watch a character who kind of feels like she's above high school.

The thing that I like about her is that she's been stripped of all of the teen girl insecurities that weigh so heavily on girls who are 14, 15, 16: how they dress and who they're seen with. I taught high school journalism for five years and was the yearbook advisor, so I was around so many teenage girls. And I thought, Well, wouldn't it be interesting if somebody had gotten so far down that she just didn't give a fuck anymore, that that sort of pressure didn't mean much to her?

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