The “Veronica Mars” movie’s reunions won’t only take place in front of the camera. Rob Thomas needed help writing the script, so he recruited one of the show’s original – and best – writers in Diane Ruggiero to do it with him.
“I had the outline and the first act of the movie written when we launched Kickstarter,” Thomas explains. “I had no idea the craziness that would ensue once we launched. I was under the naive impression that I’d be able to handle knocking out the script while handling the sundry demands of running the fundraising — the press, questions about T-shirt artwork, etc. The day we launched we received 20,000 emails. The press requests and questions that arose about the specifics of the campaign was almost a full time job.”
Enter Ruggiero, who was part of the show’s original writing staff, and who wrote what Thomas calls “our high-water mark,” season 1’s “A Trip to the Dentist,” where Veronica finds out the truth about the night she was raped. Ruggiero was also a major contributor to the darkly comic voice of the series, and Thomas says it was great to have her for reasons beyond lightening the workload.
“She was really my right hand writing the series,” he says, “and it felt good to have someone who knew the voices as well as I did. We were both in a comfort zone, both writing this show and writing with each other.”