[media]

The Making of the Resident

LOS ANGELES - On the set of the NBC sitcom "Scrubs," Zach Braff, 27, wanders among his fellow cast members, a whirring Super 8 movie camera pressed to one eye. Braff is directing his first music video: Lazlo Bane's "Superman," the "Scrubs" theme song and the first single from its soundtrack, whose release Tuesday coincides with the acclaimed show's season premiere Thursday.

"Is this gonna be everywhere, like that 'Friends' song?" asks actor Robert Maschio, who plays a cocky surgical resident who calls himself "The Todd."

"That's the idea," says Braff, with a cool deep breath. "That's the goal."

On the set of "Scrubs" these days, any mention of "Friends" sends the collective adrenaline level soaring. As the brash hospital comedy starts the fall season in NBC's coveted 8:30 Thursday time slot, members of the "Scrubs" team know they'll need to do their best work to keep audiences from flipping to the second half of "Survivor," a flick of the remote that has killed lesser shows.

As the star of the show, the pressure on Braff may be especially intense. He's new to this; just a year and a half ago he quit his job waiting tables and took the role of J. D. Dorian, the babe-in-the-woods medical resident whose life lessons, narrated as "Sex and the City"-style interior monologues spiked with "Ally McBeal"-style fantasy sequences, shape the plot of "Scrubs."

Now, as his show enters the "Must See TV" lineup, Braff, who studied film at Northwestern University and has "always wanted to be a filmmaker," is also preparing to embark on a new career as an auteur. The day after he finished filming the "Superman" video, Jersey Films (the production company behind "Erin Brockovich" and "Pulp Fiction," among others) announced that Braff's screenplay, which he's worked on periodically for five years, will go into production in the spring. He will direct and star opposite Natalie Portman in the film, tentatively titled "Large's Ark."

Braff's apparent overnight success has actually been long in the making. He started acting at age 10 in a community theater production of "The Music Man" in his hometown of South Orange, N.J. At 14, he was in the pilot of "St. Elsewhere," which also featured a young Gwyneth Paltrow; and at 18 he played Woody Allen and Diane Keaton's son in "Manhattan Murder Mystery." After college, he moved to New York and split his time between acting and production work, mostly on the set of music videos, where he observed some outlandish prima donnas in action.

"One of the Spice Girls didn't like walking, so her bodyguard would carry her around the set," he says. He also served as a production assistant on videos for Sting, D'Angelo, and Mariah Carey, among others. On one shoot, a rock star refused to drink the bottled water he gave her, explaining "I only drink Evian."

"I was like, 'Dude. People don't really say that,"' Braff recalls. "That's for the spoof of you. Save it for the spoof."

In 2000 he moved to Los Angeles and, with a $4,500 loan from his parents, bought the black 1991 Nissan 240SX he still drives. He turned to acting full time and worked on his screenplay, "a nonlinear story" about a young man, estranged from his family, who returns home to New Jersey for his mother's funeral and falls in love.

He made solid but low-profile independent films (such as "Getting to Know You" with Heather Matarazzo of "Welcome to the Dollhouse" fame.). He earned wider attention for his role as a drug-addicted gay club kid in "The Broken Hearts Club." But with $500 in his bank account, Braff was still waiting tables. "When 'Broken Hearts Club' was out, people would come from the movie to the restaurant for dessert and see me and do a double take. They'd say, 'We just saw your movie. It was great.' And I'd be like, 'Thank you. Let me tell you about our specials."'

Nabbing the role of J. D. on "Scrubs" was Braff's breakthrough. The first season put his character through some extreme emotional situations, from the sober mournfulness of a doctor's everyday experience of death, to the anxious thrill of sleeping with the boss's ex-wife. Following these story lines, Braff moved easily among comedic styles, from slapstick to wry. His pratfalls and jumpy befuddlement are evidence that Braff knows his Don Knotts; and his comic timing, at its best, recalls Michael J. Fox's.

Costar John C. McGinley, who plays J. D.'s supervising physician Dr. Cox, compares Braff's appeal to Mary Tyler Moore's. Like Moore, he says, Braff projects "an informed naivete, an emotional availability, even though it's clear that he's ultimately not going to be a doormat for anybody." J. D.'s winsome blankness also helps to explain why the character is a magnet for patronizing nicknames. Dr. Cox calls him "Muffin," "Lamb," "Newbie," and "Mister Silly Bear," as well as " "Charlotte," "Ginger," "Agnes," "Janet," "Grace," and just plain "Girl." Asked to name his favorite of J. D.'s monikers, McGinley said, "Any chick's name for him is good."

Subjected to such abuse on a weekly basis, Braff's J. D. is easily one of the loneliest and most picked-on characters on television. Appropriately, most of the music in "Scrubs," is angsty white-boy alternative rock and pop with lyrics of neurotic hopefulness. For a mainstream show, "Scrubs" has featured some strikingly edgy stuff, including tracks from Eels, Guided By Voices, and Butthole Surfers, all of whom appear on the Hollywood Records soundtrack album.

"The way we find the music is very organic," explains "Scrubs" executive producer Bill Lawrence, 33, citing the story of how Braff discovered the show's theme song.

At a barbecue last summer, a friend of Braff's who was dating the lead singer of Lazlo Bane gave Braff a copy of the band's self-titled CD. One day, driving down the highway, Braff says, "I finally heard the lyric: 'I can't do it all on my own/I'm no Superman,' which is so appropriate to these young doctors. Everyone thinks they're superheroes but they're not. They're just people. It was so perfect, it was almost like they wrote it for the show. So I took it to Bill, and he loved it."

When "Superman" was selected as the album's first single, Braff showed Lawrence his film reel and asked to direct the video. Charles Pappert, 36, a Brookline native who works as a camera operator on "Scrubs," helped Braff plan the shoot. "Some actor-directors are very focused on performances," Pappert says. "Zach has a strong sense of composition, of color palette."

Braff also has, by his own admission, "a love of toys." For the "Superman" video he rented "the largest crane you can get in the state of California" for a spectacular shot that begins on the roof of a five-story building and descends, twisting and turning like an Olympic dive, to an ambulance on the street below. "A lot of music videos start with a conception like 'Gone With the Wind' and end with a product like 'The Dukes of Hazzard,"' Pappert explains. "Zach planned this one out, and he did exactly what he planned." (Down to the finest details. Pointing out two tiny figures in the background of one shot, Braff notes, "You've gotta put some girls in your video, so I put some hangin' out by a Corvette here."

Asked how his life has changed in the past year, Braff doesn't hesitate to answer: "Success breeds confidence." Then, more slowly, he adds, "It's weird, because nothing's changed in who I am. You wish you could generate that confidence without great things happening externally. But who the hell knows how to do that?"

Regardless of how "Scrubs" fares on Thursdays, and regardless of how his video is received, for now Braff is relishing a state of expectancy about his career that's hard for him to contain. Just after he received dailies from the video's first day of shooting, he ran into the dressing room of Sarah Chalke, 25, the actress who plays Elliot, J. D.'s intern colleague and on-again, off-again love interest. "You've gotta come see this!" he said, leading her into his messy dressing room next door.

Wiping his palms on his sweat pants, Braff said, "Just wait! Just wait! You're about to see the coolest thing you've ever seen." He knelt on the green carpet in front of his TV and cued the tape, blocking the screen with his back. "Don't look!" Then he pressed play, stood back, and watched Chalke watch the crane shot.

She loved it, but he didn't wait for her response to start celebrating. He jumped up and down (" So phat! This is so good!") in the unselfconsciousness excitement of believing he's completely on top of his game.