by Robin Green
“Tell you one thing, though. I walked into the casting session and I seen him,” Tony said, meaning David. “In the can, I seen a lot of tough guys and I seen a lot of ’em in my life, but the first time I seen David, lemme tell you, I took a step back.”
Frank Renzulli was the sole writing holdover besides us from the first year. He still showed flashes of brilliance, though in time he began to phone it in, repeating dialogue and jokes, even writing on one draft that Mitch and I should do the Carmela scene, it’d come easier for us.
Still, Frank was enough in the show’s good graces to plan a trip east with his family. The trouble started when David got wind of Frank’s request to HBO not of the usual Town Car but a stretch limo to pick them up at the aiport. He canceled the stretch with Frank in the air, fuming around the office the next day. Who did Frank think he was, the fucking cavone (Italian slang for an ill-mannered, lowlife Italian-American)? Lost on him was the fact of Frank’s arriving late at night with three screaming toddlers, a pregnant wife and her aunt, and enough luggage and baby strollers and such to see them through a long visit home to Boston, their ultimate destination.
Things got worse when Frank paid a visit to the pork-store set in New Jersey, where we were filming an exterior scene (a storefront so realistic as a meat market that local cops stopped in for sandwiches when it first opened). On set, Frank continued to make what David considered his cavone demands: Where was his chair? Could somebody get him a Coke?
When David heard about it, he called Frank on location and gave him a bunch of shit. Frank gave him shit right back. David continued to fume around the office. Frank’s TV writer friend Terry Winter, whom he’d helped get a job on The Sopranos that year, called Frank and told him to back off.
“I explained to him that David was his boss,” Terry told us. “I said, ‘You want to keep your job, that’s the ass you have to kiss.’”
At the office in Santa Monica where we first started, if Frank saw people sucking up to David, he razzed them, pursing his lips to make loud kissing sounds. No way was Frank going to kiss David’s ass, which spelled the beginning of an eventual end to Frank’s tenure.
When Frank finally did move on, however, hot from the success of The Sopranos, he landed a two-year, three-million-dollar deal with Reveille, a new production company. That kind of money was a revelation to me and Mitch, and when our current contract was up, and with HBO execs assuming a low take-it-or-leave-it stance in negotiations, as we would learn they always did, our agent went out with us and got an offer from NBC with Frank’s kind of payday. We’d be going on a show called Freaks and Geeks with these young guys we’d never heard of, Apatow or something and Feig somebody.
We liked the show all right—it was sweet if not exactly groundbreaking—but our hearts were with The Sopranos. Elliott went after HBO to match NBC’s money. HBO went to David. He told HBO to do it.
“But David has to come into your office and tell you in person he wants you to stay,” Elliott said on the phone. “I’ll let HBO know that it has to happen that way.”
After a short while, David came in and asked us to stay. Looking back, I’m sure that grated on him. How could it not?
In the beginning at Sopranos, David had sought out my opinion—in the story room, at casting, and more. “He relies on you, it’s obvious,” Frank had told me. “He’s always looking to see what you think.”
“I’ll make a geisha of you yet,” David had joked more than once when I questioned him or disagreed.
As time went on, I began to sense that it was no joke, and by the third and fourth seasons, after 9/11 and even before, things were deteriorating in the story room to the point where David was assigning me and Mitch fewer scripts. I was being marginalized and he was looking more and more to Terry and then later to Matt Weiner when he came on in season five.
There had been overt stuff before that, such as on February 1, 2000, after a new contract had been settled. I know the date because we were celebrating Mitch’s birthday at the posh then-Biltmore, now Four Seasons, in Montecito, California, close to where Tom and Karen Boyle’s Frank Lloyd Wright house sits.
We’d been shown to our hotel room, which was dark and dank, and I called the desk to ask if we could upgrade. The hotel was full but they found a vacancy and put us, at no extra charge, in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Suite, an absurdly huge and plush expanse on the second floor of the main building with a giant living room with a wet bar and a fireplace, a four-poster bed in the bedroom, plus a bath or two and a view over lush grounds to the Pacific.
We were in bed the next morning, the actual day of Mitch’s birthday, when David called. You could hear in his tone he had smoke coming out of his ears. It wasn’t the big money he was steaming about, it was Elliott’s insistence to HBO that, since we were two people, we should receive two living allowances to what was most likely David’s one, if he had a living allowance at all. He said our agent had made too good a deal before he hung up.
That beef, however, wasn’t on the long-held list of grievances with which he confronted me in 2005 when he came into my office to fire me. Nor was his having to ask us in person to stay. He’d never forgiven me, he said, for ruining the party at the Museum of Modern Art to celebrate the inclusion of The Sopranos in its film archive, five years before.
There had been the screening of an episode in the museum theater downstairs, after which David and other panelists took the stage to talk about the show and answer audience questions.
It was a lovefest until a middle-aged man stood up and excoriated David for his stereotypically demeaning depiction of Italian-Americans as thugs, portrayals to which he and everyone else in the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League objected. That hadn’t been the ruination of David’s evening, however. What ruined everything for him that night, he said, was that at the cocktail party upstairs afterward, I interrupted a conversation he was having with one of the museum’s conservators, and, after the man moved off, he said I’d disparaged Terry Winter. “You called him a Flipper writer,” he said.
“I did?” I said. It was a long time ago. I didn’t remember saying it. Maybe because of the gin and tonic—I remembered drinking that. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I managed not to point out that Terry did write for Flipper, the 1990s remake of the 1960s show about a dolphin who solves crime, before coming to us.
Not on David’s list that day was another incident I remembered—also alcohol-related—when, for the first time, I forgot to watch myself around David. The three of us were at a tony Upper East Side Italian restaurant. It was that first summer of The Sopranos, 1998, and David’s wife hadn’t yet come east and we often found ourselves somewhere at dinner together. We’d had some wine and I started in on David. I wanted him to reassure me that he’d hired me because he wanted me, not because Barbara Hall was tied up elsewhere.
Horrible and petty of me, I know, and add it to the list of my faults, but I kept pressing until he blew, causing Isabella Rossellini, at the next table, to look at us askance. The following day at work, he said to me and Mitch, “If you’re not happy here, leave now.” Mitch said he didn’t want to go. I told him how sorry I was. But the damage was done. I’d lost my cool with him and he became wary of me after that. And the warier he became, the more guarded I got.
That day when he fired me, he told me he’d been thinking about it for a long time, that the idea of firing me had kept him up at night, that he’d had many conversations with his wife about it. I told him I knew he’d been hating me lately. Larry Konner, who was briefly on the show, had even asked me how I could let him talk to me like that, meaning impatiently, derisively, contemptuously. I’d shrugged and told him it wasn’t just me, David was that way with other women on the show—our casting director Georgianne Walken and Julie Ross, his assistant before Jason Mintner.
“This has nothing to do with your being a woman!” David yelled when I told him I’d said that, slapping the desk so hard I jumped. I sat back. Blinked. It occurr
ed to me that David was afraid I’d sue.
At that point, Mitch came in, on lunch break from watching the set. He looked from me to David and back again.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“David wants to fire me,” I said. “He said you could stay.”
Mitch took a seat next to me.
“The fact is, I haven’t been happy with your work for a long time,” David told Mitch.
“He says Terry and Matt get the show,” I said, “and we don’t.”
David blew. “You have two of the funniest writers in the business sitting over there!” he said, meaning Terry and Matt’s offices across the spacious former factory’s floor. “Did you ever even think of going over and trying to learn something from them?”
Mitch’s and my eyes met. It was one of those twins’ communications, as in, Really? It’s not that we didn’t think Terry and Matt were good writers, it was the insult of it all, with a good measure of Then why did he ask us to stay and why did he have HBO pay us all this money when we renegotiated our contract every year or two? And if our work was the problem, why could Mitch stay on?
David, an only child, saw this look between us. I could see him bristle, just as I knew he had when he’d learned we’d claimed two living allowances to his one all those years before.
Again, Mitch said he didn’t want to go but would if I did. Mitch asked, though, for a chance to prove ourselves by writing another script, the one for which we’d all just broken the story and that we were in line to write. David reluctantly agreed. And added that I had to stop being such a negative presence around the office. I promised I would.
We went home and started writing, but midway through we realized that we were doomed, that no matter how good we might think our script was, David wouldn’t, and it would serve as his excuse for getting rid of us. We kept at it, though, until we liked it enough to hand it in. The next day, while Mitch again was on the set, David came into my office, the script rolled tightly in his hand. He told me it didn’t work at all, adding, “I’m afraid the time has come for us to part company.”
I turned my back on him and he left. I called the set and Mitch came up. We’d already packed a box with our stuff. Mitch carried it through the office and we went home.
It was true that for a long time, I had been what David described as a “negative presence” in the office and in the story room. As far back as the third season, when Mitch and I wrote the episode “Employee of the Month” that would, that fall, garner us our own Emmy for writing, I felt a schism. David’s idea for the episode was that Dr. Melfi, Tony’s therapist, would be raped and that Tony would exact revenge. I thought it would be more interesting if he never found out about the rape, so the show would be more about Melfi’s moral struggle over whether to tell him or not, sure that if he knew, he’d probably kill the guy.
David said he thought it was a good idea. We wrote the script and it was shot scene for scene, except for Melfi’s dream sequence, which David, loving dream sequences, wrote in his own dream’s image. But I could see when we screened it, he wasn’t happy with the finished product—too dramatic? Turgid? Not funny enough? “Not my cup of tea” was all he said (a phrase I’d used when I’d read his unproduced movie scripts, a way to avoid saying I didn’t think they were any good). He did telephone from New York to congratulate us after we won (it was the month after 9/11 and a lot of people didn’t want to make the flight to LA for a celebration that had been postponed, and now that it was being held, nobody felt much like celebrating anymore).
But when we returned to New York, happily brandishing our Emmy at the office, all we got from him was a sour look from the loft space’s communal couch and a reluctant nod.
But Mitch and I hung in and we did some really good work after that—we all did. I fill with pride whenever I see a list of the twenty-three episodes on which Mitch and I have writing and/or story credit, pride in all seventy episodes, of the eighty-eight that were made, that we co-executive- and then executive-produced. I know my contribution to the show, and each one brings back happy memories of the story room and casting, tone meetings and set, all of us creative and productive and, most of all, having the time of our lives.
But there remained an undeniable tension between me and David. As Mitch is fond of saying, “Nobody forgets where they bury the hatchet,” and I felt a simmering resentment in him, as if he thought we were (or at least I was) too complacent in our jobs, behaved in too entitled a fashion when all we’d done was ride his coattails to our new wealth and comfort and success. Or maybe that was my projection. Or some of both.
I don’t know what Frank-like hubris or misguided humor led me to bring back from a trip to Rome a souvenir for David that made a joke of everything: a little statue of Romulus and Remus suckling on a mama wolf. Maybe I figured that if what we knew David thought of us was owned, claimed, it would become a shared joke. Or maybe it was my way of saying go fuck yourself. Still, it was a gift from Mitch too, and Mitch doesn’t have one passive-aggressive bone in his body. David seemed to see the humor in the figurine and put it on the window shelf next to his desk with other knickknacks and there it remained, where it may have served as a constant reminder of his gnawing disdain.
David, Mitch, and I shared writing credit for the finale of season four, though I’m sure David thought he wrote more than half of it himself. But I can say from years of experience, writing is the hard part; rewriting, not so much. It can come so easily, I had learned myself, that if you’re not careful, you might start mistaking yourself for some kind of TV wizard.
In any case, I wasn’t merely imagining that David resented our presence when we all took the stage to accept the writing Emmy for “Whitecaps.” Mitch and I were standing behind him so he could be the one to receive the award, and he turned and held out the statue to me so he could retrieve the speech he’d written from the breast pocket of his tux, but then, as he saw me reach out to take the trophy, he must have thought better of it, for he snatched the Emmy away for, literally, all the world to see on live TV (and later on YouTube) and ad-libbed his thank-you litany.
And then, in the fifth season, Matt Weiner arrived in the story room. He was fresh off a long stint on Becker, a network sitcom about a cranky physician, starring Ted Danson. The sitcom story room is a different animal than a drama’s in that in sitcom, there’s a constant and rapid-fire barrage of jokes and ideas from writers at the table, whereas in drama, in our story room, at least, there was a lot of silence and mulling; whole quiet minutes might go by. In fact, David might take to the couch, lying down and throwing his arm over his forehead as if in thought, though often, at some point, Terry, Mitch, and I would realize he’d fallen asleep.
I liked Matt but he didn’t shut up; he rattled on, joked, brayed with laughter at his own jokes. Terry and David loved him. There was a lot of appreciative back-and-forth among the three, centering much of the time on The Honeymooners and Jackie Gleason—because who was Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano but an Italian Ralph Kramden? To the moon, Alice! Or Homer Simpson? Doh! The writers’ room was becoming a boys’ club, a club Mitch by taste and temperament wasn’t inclined to join. And me, girl or no, either.
In time, Matt settled down. Thought and focused exchange resumed. It was just the five of us with the occasional freelance writer coming in and going off with an outline. Then Terry went off to write. Mitch went to watch the set. And now there were three—Matt and David and me. Matt and David discovered in each other a love of cinema, particularly obscure French cinema. Their conversations were deep, arcane, and endless. Where was Frank and his kissy noises when I needed him?
In the fifth season the show became more Mob-centric—turf wars between New York and New Jersey, power plays, posturing, and wiseguy banter. As always, really good work was done, but the fabric of the original conceit of the conflicted Mob boss was wearing thin, in the room where the stories were woven, at least.
As the season was drawing to a close, David calle
d an unprecedented Sunday meeting at the office—no Matt (it being a weekend, he was probably back in LA with his family), but me and Mitch and Terry Winter. David had also brought his wife, his trusted sounding board in all aspects of the show. David said he was exhausted. HBO was hounding him for eighteen more episodes but he didn’t know if he had it in him. He wanted to know how we all felt. Could we go on? Terry Winter spoke up immediately—Absolutely! No question! Et cetera.
This would have been the moment for me and Mitch to bow out gracefully, to say that the office atmosphere (meaning David himself) had become increasingly toxic (Larry Konner’s word for it) and intolerable to us, to confess that it had sent Mitch to the shrink for the first—and last—time in his life as well as contributed to giving me a mild case of shingles (though 9/11 may have played a part), and that we weren’t really all that interested in the direction the show was taking.
Instead, we said we wanted to do a sixth season. And it’s true that in spite of everything, we still loved the show and our part in it and felt the same responsibility to it as always. We were also thinking, of course, of our contract and the enormous amount of money we would forfeit if we said we didn’t have it in us to go on, which would be tantamount to quitting. Because we didn’t trust for a minute that David was really about to turn away what we’d heard were vast sums being offered him by HBO and end the show. So we said, Sure! You betcha! Et cetera. I think they call it selling out—on our part and possibly his too.
The Sunday meeting didn’t end there. David said that if we went on he would need more help, that he wanted to bring on more writers. We went over some names, and then Mitch mentioned Andy and Diane. A show they ran had ended and they were looking for work. (It would be years before we learned how they had gone behind my back at Northern Exposure.)
“Great idea,” David said, “they’re good at story.”