Graham Yost on Justified, Writing (Almost) Everything & What Joss Whedon Did for Speed

Justified creator Graham Yost (center) gave the creative keynote at The 2012 New York Television Festival on Tuesday. Some highlights, via Mandi Bierly of Entertainment Weekly and Todd VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club:

On season four of Justified, now two weeks into production: Patton Oswalt will play a character named Constable Bob, a “cop wannabe” who no doubt complicates things for Raylan (Timothy Olyphant). And what of Jeremy Davies (aka Dickie Bennett)? “We don’t know what’s gonna happen with Dickie, nor do we know what’s gonna happen with Dickie’s hair,” which the actor cut himself in season three. Yost wants the Justified to go six seasons – any longer runs the risk of becoming “Elmore lite,” he said. Which no doubt wouldn’t sit well with anyone, least of all Olyphant, whom Yost says knows the work of Elmore Leonard “chapter and verse.”

Writing, writing, writing: Yost says he wrote “everything but porn.” And it was not school that taught him what he knows, Yost said, but rather it was doing the work: “What I learned about writing I learned from writing.” He enjoyed his time at Nickelodeon’s Hey Dude, but ended up quitting Full House after less than 10 weeks (his edgy stuff just wasn’t working).

Writing, writing, writing: Yost said it was not school that taught him what he knows: “What I learned about writing I learned from writing.” And he wrote and wrote and wrote, “everything but porn.” Yost said he enjoyed his time at Nickelodeon’s Hey Dude, but ended up quitting Full House after less than 10 weeks (his edgy stuff just wasn’t working). An interesting aside: His editor at Encyclopedia Britannica was Charles Van Doren, known for his role at the center of the ‘50s quiz show scandal

On Joss Whedon and the movie formerly known as Minimum Speed: Minimum Speed was Yost’s original title for the 1994 hit – until a friend talked him into cutting “Minimum” from the title, and into raising the mph to 50 from 20. Yost says the classic “Pop quiz, hotshot” line came from Joss Whedon, who did an uncredited rewrite after a different writer (whom he did not identify) made it “awful.” “Joss did a total dialogue rewrite on that script, and I’ll be forever grateful.”

Learn more about the 2012 New York Television Festival, which continues through Oct. 27.