Tom Fontana

While Tom Fontana was playwright-in-residence at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Jake and Gwyneth Paltrow saw his play "The Spectre Bridegroom" and insisted their father, producer Bruce Paltrow, give Fontana a job on his new show "St. Elsewhere" (NBC, 1982-88), the perfect prescription for jumping a struggling playwright's yearly income from $5000 to $90,000. As one of the three top writer-producers for that series, he made a name and the beginning of a sizable fortune pioneering the story structure that weaves several narrative threads together in one hour, a formula that still successfully powers shows like "ER." Three Emmy Awards later (all for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series), he is one of the most powerful television producers in the world. And yet . . . Fontana considers himself a writer, period. He produces so that he can have control over what happens to his words, and he does it well.