THE BARD OF GEN-Y

By MICHAEL KRANTZ

Kevin Williamson's art has always imitated his life. Fifteen years after his high school English teacher told him he'd never make it as a writer, he took revenge in his first screenplay, a dark comedy called Killing Mrs. Tingle. The script got optioned, and the failing Los Angeles actor spent his windfall to repay college loans and lease an Infiniti. But Tingle languished, and by 1995 Williamson was facing the cruel truth: he was not a rising star but a 30-year-old dog walker and word-processing temp, with escalating debt and an old teacher who might have been right.

Then one night when he was house sitting in Westwood, he heard a noise in the kitchen and noticed an open window he could have sworn had been closed. Next thing you know, he's creeping around with a butcher knife in one hand and a cell phone in the other, his friend across town posing Freddy and Jason trivia questions and gleefully whispering "Kill, kill, kill."

Every so often, a writer catches lightning in a bottle. Williamson's magic moment came last December, when millions of shrieking teens watched Drew Barrymore try to guess the original killer in Friday the 13th and, ahem, choose incorrectly. Cannily crammed with the likes of Neve, Courteney and Skeet (if these names seem meaningless, you're just in an obsolete demographic) and directed with twisted bravura by the incomparable Wes Craven, Scream became the highest grossing horror movie ever, reviving the moribund slasher genre and lifting its author into Hollywood's screenwriting elite. When the Williamson-scripted I Know What You Did Last Summer (starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sarah Michelle Gellar) ruled the box office for three weeks running, his coronation was inevitable; just last week Williamson signed a $20 million contract to write, produce and direct movies and TV shows for Miramax into the next millennium.

But this weekend, as the multiplex masses pour into Scream 2 to learn who's trying to carve up poor Neve this time, Williamson will be poring over the decidedly calmer dailies for Dawson's Creek, a coming-of-age TV series whose adolescent anxieties are resolved not by gleaming cutlery but by awkward, angsty dialogue (though the dead-on post-grunge sound track remains the same). Debuting next month on the WB network, the quiet, thoughtful Dawson is about as far removed from slasherdom as you can get and still have L.A.'s BMW brigade return your calls.

In person, Williamson is sweet of nature, mild of manner and decidedly nonviolent. "I'm too squeamish for horror," he says. "I can't handle all the blood." In fact, he really wants to be the next John Hughes, albeit for a far edgier generation than the one that peopled The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink. Williamson's calling card may have been an eye for artful carnage, but his staying power derives from his ear for the voice of the '90s teen, whom he describes as "a very self- aware, pop-culture-referenced individual who grew up next to Blockbuster in the self-help, psychobabble '80s."

Williamson kids may talk like therapists, but they act like guarded and wounded 15-year-olds whose cell phones and videotapes stand in for a sadly absent adult institutional authority. Scream worked not just because teens reacting to murders in their midst by ironically citing old horror movies was a fresh take on a way-stale tale, but also because their jaded nonchalance felt almost frighteningly cynical.

"These characters have all grown up with the media, and I don't think any of them had a safe upbringing," says Party of Five ingenue and Scream centerpiece Neve Campbell. Her Sidney, a dewy innocent in the original, has morphed in the new film into a quintessentially '90s victim/survivor, achieving a kind of tear-streaked operatic grandeur that, frankly, lends Scream 2 more emotional punch than a slasher sequel really deserves. "Young people have been numbed," she says. "Kevin has a way of capturing that cynicism without being naive."

Call it Clearasil Realism. "His characters are incredibly honest," says 20-year-old James Van Der Beek, who plays Williamson alter ego Dawson in the new TV show. "They say things teenagers are thinking but don't necessarily say, especially about sexuality." Dawson is a high school sophomore, aspiring filmmaker and overall sweetheart. He's the rosy lens through which we observe Williamson's latest assemblage of troubled, fumbling teens, notably the two competitors for Dawson's heart: Jen (Michelle Williams), the new girl in town whose dark past will emerge in time for the February sweeps, and his childhood pal Joey (the impossibly lovely Katie Holmes), product of a very broken home, who helps make the show a likely TV-14 by climbing in Dawson's window in the pilot episode, flopping onto his bed and then...

But let's not give away the story ahead of time. Suffice it to say that the pilot's hormonal preoccupations, though largely limited to words rather than deeds, have already drawn a consternated flurry from cultural watchdogs. "You gotta look past the 'size queen' references and masturbation talk," says Williamson. "The show at its core is about sweaty palms, hand holding and 'Will she kiss me?'"

Williamson grew up along the rural Carolina coastline a few miles from the real Dawson's Creek, a die-hard reader and weekend-matinee freak whose own life has served as a rough cut of the screen dreams that Scream is now enabling. His fisherman father was the visual model for the killer in Last Summer. Mrs. Tingle will be his directorial debut. His struggling L.A. young-adulthood informs his in-development twentynothing TV drama Wasteland. The kid who once sat through six straight showings of Halloween recently met Jamie Lee Curtis for drinks at the Polo Lounge to swap ideas for Halloween 7, for which he wrote "a quick treatment as a favor to Harvey and Bob."

The brothers Weinstein, that is, founders of Miramax, the indie outfit that has seemingly released as many quality movies in this brain-dead decade as all the major studios combined. Williamson passed up "quite a bit more money" during the bidding for Scream 2 in order to join fellow youth-centric auteurs Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez (for whom he's now writing a high school sci-fi horror script) in the Miramax stable. "Teens today have been exposed to so much," says Bob Weinstein. "[Writers] that don't pander win the game. Kevin understands this brilliantly, and he's got the talent to go with it."

He's also working really, really hard to make sure his new bosses never regret that sunny assessment. "My days consist of ringing phones," he says of his new mogul's life. "It never ends. I'm finishing up the Rodriguez script this month. Then in January, we're in pre-production for Tingle. We'll shoot that in March and April and edit in May. Then in June, I'll start writing Scream 3."

It'll be interesting to see what he comes up with. The Scream flicks are cool, but they aren't exactly an aesthetic revolution, and Williamson knows this. "I hope I'm not at the top of my game," he says. "I'm a work in progress." Several, actually. In his spare time--think midnight to dawn--he's writing not one but two scripts on spec. "I want to do for action movies what Scream did for horror movies," he says. "I want to attack that genre; I want to kick its butt. And I want to do the same thing for romantic comedy." And to think that, but for one fateful bump in the Westwood night..."I know," he says. "Scary, isn't it?"