Melissa Martin & Jim Tucker Capture Pittsburgh’ Magical Darkness in “Basic Psych”
Pittsburgh has been a stand-in for a wide array of cities all around the world. Location scouts and production designers can turn the old Century III mall into Iraq or Pittsburgh Mills into a bar mitzvah destination. That’s why it’s special when Pittsburgh is allowed to be unapologetically Pittsburgh on film. The beautiful gold bridges against the green hills, the winding roads into the suburbs, the place Melissa Martin and Jim Tucker call home. Tucker is a pediatrician and writer whose script, Basic Psych, was directed for the big screen by Martin. Long before Tucker pursued a medical career, he was captivated by the world of film.
“I saw M*A*S*H in 1971,” recalls Tucker. “I was an engineering student at Tufts University. I’d never done creative writing of any variety, and the thought of writing a novel or screenplay never crossed my mind. My idea for the first novel, Abra Cadaver, was born on the first day of Gross Anatomy at Columbia Medical School. When the professor directed us to pull back the drapes to reveal our cadavers, a guy at the next table exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, it’s my grandmother.’ As a bunch of us turned around to look at an old woman waiting to be dissected, he smiled and said, ‘Just kidding.’”
“Right away I wondered – could there be the circumstance where there was an embalmed body waiting for us to dissect that shouldn’t have been in the anatomy lab? That’s what got my creative juices flowing.”
Martin came across Tucker’s script for Basic Psych by way of one of Tucker’s students at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. That student knew a cinematographer who knew Martin, a fellow CMU professor. What inspired Martin to say yes to the project was the mystery Tucker had written.
“I’m interested in what makes characters do what they do. The script surprised me and frightened me,” explains Martin.
Courtesy of Basic Psych
Basic Psych follows a psychiatrist (Michael Cerveris) and his new patient (David Conrad), who pushes the limits of doctor/patient confidentiality. This isn’t the first time Pittsburgh has been the shooting location for doctors with a complex, complicated connection to their patients. Silence of the Lambs and Mindhunter both called western Pennsylvania home during filming. Tucker and Martin see Pittsburgh’s beauty, but also its ability to hint at something darker.
“Pittsburgh is a city with a very strong medical community. It’s easy to create characters who may – or may not – bear some resemblance to physicians I’ve known in residency or practice,” offers Tucker.
“While Pittsburgh can double as many places, it’s always best when it’s playing itself. Having said that, it can be a mysterious place – full of shadow and intrigue,” agrees Martin.
Much of Basic Psych is built on the connection between Cerveris and Conrad. Some of the most thrilling scenes are when it’s just the two of them in the psych office. Conrad is a Pittsburgh local and Cerveris was raised in Huntington, West Virginia. Martin’s means of casting the two on this project was a little roundabout.
“David Conrad and I became friends and colleagues from working together in the Pittsburgh
theater community,” explains Martin. “Michael was a bit circuitous. I met his father at a coffee shop in a torrential rain. We talked about theater, film, and music until the rain let up. Michael had been in town to do Mindhunter with Netflix and my friend Cotter Smith was also on the show. Patrick Jordan, who is the crossroads for all things, finally made the actual connection to Michael.”
As for whether the two actors had chemistry for the role? That was figured out at dinner.
“David and Michael went out to dinner. I wasn’t there,” remembers Martin. “It was Covid, so we talked on the phone. The two were great together. We shot all the office scenes first, in chronological order, which shaped and informed their characters’ journeys.”
As a film lover, Tucker did his best to get the firsthand experience of being on the set of the film he wrote.
“Although I was still working full-time as a pediatrician, I was able to visit the set a number of times. One day I arrived directly from the office in my typical work clothes. I must have looked like a doctor, because Michael suggested to Melissa that I make a brief cameo walking with him down a hallway,” says Tucker.
Courtesy of Basic Psych
It’s a surreal experience to see all these people come together because of words you wrote. It was a bit of a readjustment for Tucker when he was able to be on set because, understandably, Martin’s vision differed slightly from Tucker’s.
“Several more-experienced movie people warned that it would be different,” recalls Tucker. “As you can imagine, I’d lived with the characters and story for years. I could ‘watch’ the film from start to finish in my head any time I wanted. I had very specific ideas of how each character would look and behave, and I pictured exactly how each scene would be shot. Once Melissa came onboard, of course it was transformed by her vision, and there was a learning curve for me to appreciate the hard work she put in as its director.”
Martin and Tucker keep returning to Pittsburgh as the setting for their artistic work. Martin’s previous, and upcoming, films take place in the city. All four of Tucker’s novels are set in Pittsburgh. The artists find such a wealth of possibility in the natural landscape and the people who reside here.
“I came to do my residency at Children’s Hospital in 1978, fell in love with Pittsburgh, and never left. I can see and feel certain places in Pittsburgh so well that I can’t imagine setting a story anywhere else,” says Tucker.
“I always want to shoot Pittsburgh as Pittsburgh,” adds Martin. “Pittsburgh is a character in all my films. It’s a multi-layered, textured place. The Bread is certainly more focused on the beauty of Pittsburgh’s immigrant community. Dear Zoe’s Pittsburgh straddles two socioeconomic realities – we see affluence and blue-collar worlds in collision. Basic Psych does the same thing, but in Basic Psych, Pittsburgh is a more mysterious, dangerous place, than it is in Dear Zoe or The Bread.”
“There is such a rich variety of people in Pittsburgh from which to draw characters. And as they say, write what you know,” continues Tucker. “I’m sure many people would point to the wide variety of neighborhoods. But my answer is simple: the people.”
“The people,” echoes Martin. “The industrial history. The hills, valleys, rivers. It’s all so insanely beautiful. When I drive away from town heading east as the sun’s rising, the Monongahela is silver below, the bridges stretch over it and I think my head’s going to explode. It’s so pretty. All that contrasted with the hulking relics of heavy industry. It’s magic.”
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