Nice Boy of the Week: Jeff Eastin

Join us in congratulating this week’s Nice Boy, White Collar creator, Jeff Eastin. L A Times once labeled Jeff the one to watch in the biz and they were right on the money. Helping to shoot USA Network straight to the top of the charts with his original series, Jeff landed a position as director of photography on two Roger Corman films, Lock & Load and White Fury. Heading out to Hollywood had to be the next step.

On his way out west to pursue a career in directing, Jeff penned the screenplay called Shadow Dancer, a thriller inspired by the Billy Joel song “The Stranger”. That screenplay ended up on the right desk, was optioned, and so on and so forth. Not meaning to belittle Jeff’s history by any means, but the fun part for us here is the story behind White Collar.

In a conference call back in October, Jeff talked about the idea for White Collar. “The idea really came about, this was prestrike, pre WGA strike, and I had been kind of playing around with a couple of ideas. I’d been playing around with an idea that I’d called ‘Redemption’ at the time. The idea was sort of a much darker, sort of a Vic Mackey, what would happen if he’d killed his partner and gone to prison. Then, they have to let him out of prison to work with a detective to solve the crime. Then, when it came to that, they decide to put a tracking anklet on him and keep him out. That idea percolated around for a little bit in my head, and somebody had pointed out there was a show called Life that’s on that they said, “Hey, that’s pretty much exactly the same idea.” I had kind of shelved it a little bit.

At that point (I believe this was just before the strike), Travis (Romero) and I were sitting around discussing kind of what wasn’t on the air. The one thing that I hadn’t seen for awhile was kind of the buddy show which I was a big fan of. I did an early draft of Rush Hour 3. I did True Life 2 draft for Cameron which was back before Arnold got elected, and that was sort of in my wheelhouse, just the buddy thing. I loved, absolutely loved, Lethal Weapon and 48 Hours. I said, “You know, there’s nothing really on TV like this anymore.” We kind of looked around and said, “No, there really isn’t.” We kind of dusted off the Redemption idea and said, “What if we took this and turned it into a comedy?” The rest is history.

White Collar began strong for USA and is today one of the network’s top prize-winning original shows. Both of the show’s star boys DeKay and Bomer, were previous Nice Boys, so Jeff is in great company.

Photo shamelessly stolen from @Fearless_90 on Twitter. 😉