In private, Littlefield was scared to death. Losing Aniston would mean millions of dollars in reshoots and recasting. But a network president knew what a rare thing it was to feel the chemistry between performers. Something unique was brewing, and Littlefield felt he would have to be a fool to tamper with what was developing. He would just have to wait for CBS to fold.
* * *
—
The mood in the room on the Warner Bros. lot at the end of April was tense, and more than a little awestruck. To be cast on a network show was a thrill, even if the show, like most others, would almost inevitably fail. But to be working with James Burrows, the man who had shepherded the likes of Taxi and Cheers to unprecedented heights of artistic and ratings triumph, was to know that the possibility of success had drastically increased, and that there was an unquestioned master of the sitcom arts present at the first read-through of the Friends Like Us pilot script.
Burrows made a habit of going through the pilot scripts that his agent would send him each spring. Of all the shows he received for the 1994–95 season, the one that jumped out at him was Friends Like Us. Its professional polish appealed to him, as did the clever way in which it managed to introduce a passel of new characters with relatively little strain. Burrows agreed to direct the pilot. His presence alone was significant to the future prospects of the show; being able to say, “Jimmy thinks this is great,” vastly improved the odds of its making it to the air in the fall.
The six actors selected by Bright, Kauffman, and Crane said their hellos and gathered around the conference-room table. They opened to the first pages of their scripts and began to read the lines, and Bright relaxed almost immediately. Often with a pilot, there was a sense of fumbling confusion on a first pass through a script. Everyone was exceedingly polite and cautious, and whatever comedy lurked in the script was stepped on by a lack of familiarity with the material. But something remarkable was happening as they read the story of the runaway bride and the lovesick divorcé and their crew of pals. People were laughing. More than that: People were cracking up.
Unlike on some of the other shows Burrows had worked on, the actors on Friends Like Us had never all read together before, and so there had been no way to confirm that this experiment would work. Two gifted actors might fail to find a way to coexist on camera, and a promising script might fall flat when performed. These actors appeared to have known each other their whole lives. Burrows nodded to himself, his belief that something unusual was taking place confirmed. Chills were running down Kauffman’s spine as they read. This was something extraordinary.
Burrows saw his mission, at this early stage, as encouraging the actors to walk the comic plank for him. He would remind them that the creative process included them and ask them to make suggestions of their own. “Don’t just say the words,” he told them, “act the words.” Burrows would not come into rehearsal with set ideas, would not have spent his evenings moving dolls around a proscenium at home to plan the blocking for a scene. He wanted to be inspired by what his actors did, wanted to oversee a fluid creative process in which his actors peppered him with off-the-cuff ideas and he helped them edit those ideas into a coherent whole.
Burrows wanted the actors, above all, to understand they had the right to create. The actors were themselves taken aback by what their new castmates had come up with. Lisa Kudrow had been sure, after reading the script, that Chandler would be gay and was surprised by Matthew Perry’s more hetero take on the character.
He also encouraged them to use physical action to shape the scene. If Ross was pleased with himself for speaking up to Rachel about his feelings, Burrows suggested that Schwimmer might pop the cookie he was holding into his mouth as a capper to the moment.
Kudrow was more than a little cowed by the presence of the man who had worked with Ted Danson, Marilu Henner, and Mary Tyler Moore. She wanted to impress Burrows, and so when he asked her to try a line while hiding under the conference-room table, she gamely crawled underneath and began croaking out her lines. Kauffman and Crane ambled by as Kudrow was perched on the floor, and they reluctantly approached the actress. Phoebe, they suggested, might not handle this scene in quite that fashion. Burrows jumped in to say that he was the one who had suggested it, and Kudrow, relieved, felt assured that she would not be fired—at least not yet.
Of all the performers, the only one anyone might have recognized on the street was Cox, who had made a splashy debut a decade prior as the fresh-faced fan Bruce Springsteen pulls onstage to dance with him in his iconic “Dancing in the Dark” music video. Cox had been raised in the tony Birmingham, Alabama, suburb of Mountain Brook and had plans for a career as an architect upon starting at Mount Vernon College. She wound up dropping out of school to become a model, and won campaigns for Noxzema and Tampax. Cox was the first person to ever use the word period in the context of women’s health on American television. Cox had built a successful career as a model, even though she had been considered too short for the profession, and she dreamed of establishing a beachhead in acting next.
After “Dancing,” she spent two years on Family Ties as Michael J. Fox’s girlfriend. When the show ended, Cox expected to be vaulted into the stratosphere and instead found herself in search of a big break that was tardy in arriving. She guest-starred on Dream On and Seinfeld, among other shows, but it was the 1994 film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective that finally gave her the opportunity to display her comic chops. She was the straight man to unhinged animal lover Jim Carrey, demonstrating she could hold her own in the wildest situations.
There was an unconscious deference around the table to Cox, as the closest thing the show had to a star. But Cox immediately set the tone for what was to come when she told her fellow cast members that if they had any notes for her, any suggestions about how she might improve her performance, she would be thrilled to hear them. This would be a show about six performers, not one star, and anything that might benefit the quality of the show would be welcomed.
Over the week of working through the script before filming the pilot, Bright watched as the cast grew more comfortable with the material and with each other and began to settle into the roles they had been selected for. Bright believed that they could have simply turned the cameras on for the first run-through and come away with an impressive show.
Nonetheless, the network was unsure about what it had. After a later, less impressive run-through, NBC West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer said he found the show confusing. There were too many characters to follow and too many story lines. This should be a show about Monica, since Courteney Cox was the only star they had. All the other characters should be relegated to secondary status. When Ohlmeyer finished speaking, James Burrows spoke up: “Well, that’s not the show I signed on to do.” The network’s note was dropped. Burrows’s word remained gospel.
Burrows was also studying the actors as they worked together, waiting to see what might unfold between them. He was looking for what he thought of as “the unspoken word”—a kind of extrasensory perception that sometimes developed between two gifted performers, in which they could convey an entire array of emotions through the tilt of their shoulders, the angle of their eyebrows, the way their eyes would meet or shy away. It was not necessarily that David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston were the most gifted members of the cast—it was increasingly clear that Friends Like Us had not made a single misstep in the casting process—but that something profound and unexpected happened when the two actors occupied the screen together.
Traditionally, Burrows would bring in a studio audience about four days into the preparations for the pilot. They would watch what he and the actors had worked out, like a dress rehearsal for a Broadway show, and Burrows would be able to assess how much progress they had made. The audience response was through the roof, instantly reminding Burrows of Cheers and Frasier. This could be the start of something special.
CHAPTER 3
GRAB A SPOON
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Making the Pilot
Having knocked out a first draft of the pilot, Kauffman and Crane called on some of their friends to assist in punching up their script. It was a standard practice in Hollywood for writers to offer a few days’ unpaid labor on tightening and improving a pilot. Sometimes, there might be work to be had if the show made it to air; sometimes, those same friends could be asked for help when the time came to write your own show. Kauffman and Crane turned to a trusted inner circle for assistance: Crane’s partner, Jeffrey Klarik; and the team of Jeff Greenstein and Jeff Strauss. Greenstein and Strauss had been neophyte writers, scrabbling a living out of writing freelance episodes of the likes of Charles in Charge and Mr. Belvedere, when they were hired as staff writers on Dream On. They had all been ushered into the inner sanctum of television success together and had simultaneously received their joint educations in the business.
When Kauffman and Crane left Dream On after its fourth season to sign a deal with Warner Bros., Strauss and Greenstein graduated from being baby writers to showrunners. They oversaw Dream On’s fifth season, with guidance from Kauffman and Crane as consultants. Kauffman and Crane had served as their mentors in television writing, so it only made sense that when they were developing new shows, Greenstein and Strauss would gladly offer their time. In the spring of 1994, the pair assisted with punching up both Reality Check and Friends Like Us.
When the pilot was originally laid out, Kauffman and Crane pictured it as centering around a romantic couple whose ebb and flow would be the source of much of the show’s comedy and serve as its emotional core, with Monica finding herself drawn to the slovenly, womanizing actor Joey.
After casting the show, Kauffman and Crane wisely stood back and watched their new troupe of actors interact, and were immediately struck by the intensity of the scenes that put together David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston. There was something about them—some fascinating, indescribable admixture of attraction and loathing and tenderness and brutishness—that was unlike anything they had ever seen before. The air was charged with anticipation, an empty space that could be creatively filled by the audience. Monica and Joey were no longer, but what about Ross and Rachel? Kauffman and Crane knew that there had to be a lot more of them together, and reimagined the central romantic plotline of the show as being one serving Ross and Rachel.
The pilot, now called Six of One, was filmed on the Warner Bros. lot in early May. It was just four months after the Northridge earthquake, and the ground was still occasionally rattling from unexpected tremors, remnants of the 6.7 quake. The night of the pilot’s filming, Kevin Bright was relieved and glad to have someone like James Burrows present to oversee the shoot. Burrows was so professional and efficient that the potentially terrifying aspect of shooting a pilot—that so much was riding on this one twenty-two-minute demonstration—was muted.
Burrows was blazingly fast—something that Bright and his colleagues would eventually take exception to—and he made sure to get a loose, witty, exuberant version of the script on film. The tone was a reminder of an essential tenet of Burrows’s: Anger was never funny. Anger was a distraction for a comedy. Frustration had a comedic vigor that anger never did, and the trick was always to stay on the side of frustration and never of anger.
Burrows, the one true sitcom veteran among the creative team, was concerned about wearing out the jokes. The audience would be fired up between scenes by a stand-up comedian, but doing too many takes of the same scene would deliver diminishing returns. Burrows had been trained in the theater. He believed that if you wanted to see a second take, you should buy a second ticket, and he directed accordingly. Even still, the process, with camera and lighting resets, was slow enough that some of the audience trickled out before the shoot was complete.
The pilot crisply and subtly laid out much of what would come. It began in the hub of the show’s social life, the Central Perk coffee shop. (Much later, Phoebe would gaze at the sign in the window, smile broadly, and say, “I just got that!”) Each of the six protagonists was given a brief opportunity to introduce themselves. Chandler shared an anxiety dream from the previous night. He was back in school, flummoxed to find himself naked. Worse, his penis had been replaced by a telephone: “All of a sudden, the phone starts to ring and it turns out it’s my mother, which is very, very weird, because she never calls me!” (“One word for you: therapy,” another character had told Chandler in the initial outline of the pilot.)
Ross enters the coffee shop, a rain cloud metaphorically perched over his head. Joey spots him and offers a succinct summary of Ross’s current mental health: “This guy says, hello, I want to kill myself.” Ross has recently been left by his ex-wife, Carol, who has come out as a lesbian, and his friends are curious as to how he could have missed the warning signs. “She didn’t know,” he replies, “how should I know?”
Chandler, already marked by his Oedipal fixation and fears of castration, sees the story of Ross and Carol as yet another reminder of his own romantic failings: “Sometimes I wish I was a lesbian . . . did I say that out loud?” Both Ross and Chandler are presented as anxious neurotics, with Ross lamenting the loss of his romantic sureties and Chandler acknowledging that he has never had anything of the kind. Ross’s sister, Monica, anxiously preparing herself for a date, and eccentric Phoebe round out the ensemble. (In the initial outline, Monica had started off the episode by describing how she never wanted to go on another date again, and then caved when Phoebe offered to lend her a black dress.)
Ross completes his barrage of woes, which we suspect his friends have heard more than once before, with a lone wish: “I just want to be married again.” And at that very moment, the final member of the sextet makes her entrance, her wedding veil streaming over her bare shoulders. Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston) is now the wish fulfillment of Ross’s nuptial fantasy, a bride summoned out of the depths of his psyche to restore him to marital fullness. (Chandler spots Rachel and, hoping for similar success, says, “And I just want a million dollars!”) The original Bleecker Street script had included Ross’s crush on Rachel but relegated it to a secondary plotline, behind Monica’s bad date and Rachel’s tempestuous arrival at singlehood. Now, with Aniston and Schwimmer cast, and their chemistry so palpable, it occupied center stage.
The ensuing scene is a master class in smooth and efficient storytelling, a compressed love story hidden in the ruffles of Rachel’s wedding gown. The show would be sensational in its use of props as a physical expression of fleeting or emotional frames of mind, and it begins here with a sophisticated dirty joke. As Ross haltingly attempts to say hello to Rachel, his umbrella accidentally flies open. Ross’s excitement is uncontrollable, visible for all to see, and a source of mild embarrassment. We grasp an elemental truth about him instantly and wordlessly, communicated solely through physical comedy.
Rachel, as it turns out, is an old high school friend of Monica’s from Long Island. (Initially, her last name was to have been Robbins, not Green.) Rachel was set to marry Barry (Mitchell Whitfield), her dentist swain, but the sight of a Limoges gravy boat helped her decide at the last minute that a life of wedded bliss was not for her. She and Monica had drifted apart—Monica notes that she was not invited to Rachel’s wedding, which her friend acknowledges with a wince—but when Rachel found herself fleeing her life, she instantly thought of Monica.
Rachel and Ross are nudged forward as twin wounded spirits fleeing, or summarily excluded from, the paradise of marriage. Rachel soon finds herself back at Monica’s apartment, calling her father to explain her rash decision: “It’s like, all of my life, everyone has always told me, ‘You’re a shoe, you’re a shoe, you’re a shoe, you’re a shoe.’ And then today, I just stopped and I said, ‘What if I don’t want to be a shoe? What if I want to be a purse, you know? Or a hat?’”
Rachel is pegged as a spoiled Jewish American Princess type, on the cusp of leaping from her father’s care to her husband’s when she sudd
enly pauses, hesitating. She goes on to tell her father that she might not need his money anymore, only to step back, shocked, from her own self-created precipice: “Wait, wait! I said maybe!”
Joey, with a mop-top do and a black leather jacket to telegraph alpha-male vigor (he has already hit on Rachel, telling her he lives across the hall and that his roommate, Chandler, is often away), pulls Ross aside and, making use of the lines trotted out during auditions, compares women to flavors of ice cream. You could order rocky road or cookie dough, you could ask for sprinkles or whipped cream. “Welcome back to the world!” he tells Ross. “Grab a spoon!” “I honestly don’t know if I’m hungry or horny,” Ross responds.
Rachel, left to her own devices, finds herself sobbing over Joanie and Chachi’s wedding from Happy Days (itself an echo of Aniston’s childhood habit of recording Joanie Loves Chachi). Rachel will never be one of those radiant sitcom brides, she is realizing, and her rash decision has thrust her into an unfamiliar place whose rules are entirely foreign to her. “I’m gonna go get,” she haltingly decides, stumbling over her words, “one of those job things.” Rachel is not quite ready to cut the cord, though. In the next scene, she exultantly sways into Central Perk, showing off her latest purchase—a gleaming pair of boots, bought with her father’s credit card.
Monica, still not entirely formed at this early stage (her plotline in the pilot revolves around a date with a caddish guy), is primarily present as a foil and mentor for Rachel. Monica hugs Rachel after she cuts up her father’s credit cards, telling her, “Welcome to the real world. It sucks. You’re gonna love it.”
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