I called a meeting with everybody, including the elusive head of Rubicon. By the end of the discussion, I had come to the realization that something was rotten in the state of Norway and that we could not afford to shoot the show we had written.
I called my Agent and told him to book meetings with American networks. “I’ll be in LA in two weeks,” I said.
Why two weeks?
Because somehow, we had to make a trailer out of the first six weeks of shooting that would be impressive enough to get us an American deal. We didn’t have one single completed episode.
It took four or five drafts. I knew what we needed to even have a chance: a little violence, a little sex appeal. We had been pretty much filming chronologically, which helped. In the end, Eilif and Anne and their editors did a great job, and off I went to Never-Never Land to try and score an American deal to save the show.
And my ass.
twenty-nine
Once upon a Dream
(2013–2014)
Warriors of the rainbow unite,
From the darkness of the wasteland,
Open up the inner light,
Oh, Great Spirit, your breath gives life,
I hear your voice in the wind,
I come before you as a child,
Seeking strength and wisdom…
—“BALANCE,” FROM REVOLUTION
I called my Agent and told him to book an appointment with Chris Albrecht, who had moved from HBO to Starz.
I had learned a few things since I’d made my genius Spielberg-Hanks, 50-percent-of-the-back-end deal.
The naive Norwegian rugby farmer had hustled me. He was the con in Rubicon.
What he knew, and I didn’t, was that the company would have given me 100 percent of the back end because Norway had never sold a show to anybody. Ever. There had never been a back end in Norwegian history.
I also found out that the “biggest budget in Norway” was somewhere around $750,000 per episode, equal to a decent reality show budget in the United States but nowhere close to the $3–4 million spent on the sixty-minute American dramas that were our competition.
I played Chris the trailer we’d cobbled together.
“I love it!” he said.
Wow.
“Chris, that’s great. All I need is a million an episode and I can get it done.”
“Brother, I’ll give you two million an episode, but you have to wait until next year.”
Oh man.
“Chris, you don’t understand. We started production. I need the money now to finish.”
“Fuck, I’ve got nothing left this year. All I can do is like half a million.”
Fuck was right.
“I honestly don’t think it can be done for that. I can get big bang for the buck over there, but not that big. Let me get back to you.”
Chris had been my best shot. We knew each other. I could trust him. But I couldn’t wait. We were already shooting.
And so I went to my second meeting of the day, with some unknown company called Netflix. I had read a single article about them. They were a Blockbuster-type movie-rental company about to start creating content, and they had just made their first deal with Kevin Spacey to star in a remake of a British political show.
There were only two names mentioned in the article: Reed Hastings, the tech genius who had perfected streaming (whatever that was), and the new content guy, Ted Sarandos.
A few weeks before, as Eilif and Anne struggled to finish the trailer, I’d made a phone call.
“Hello? You have reached Netflix.”
“Hi. Stevie Van Zandt here. Ted Sarandos, please.”
He got right on.
“Hey, man! This is Ted! Really good to talk to you!”
“Hi, Ted. I hear you’re looking for stuff?”
“Yes, we’re just getting started.”
“I’ve got something.”
“Great. Come on in.”
That was it. The call that would lead to the greatest business meeting of my life.
My Agent and I walked across the street to Netflix.
The receptionist brought us in to Ted, who greeted me with the same enthusiasm he’d communicated on the phone. I wasn’t used to liking LA executives. They all seemed to be full of shit. Probably because most of them were. They were all smiles and compliments and never said no, but the deal never got done and you never found out why.
Ted was different. There was something unusually normal about him. Real confidence, not the phony LA kind. I liked him right away.
I explained that Lilyhammer was unique, to say the least. It was a bit of an experiment. My Agent’s eyes were telling me to shut the fuck up, but I wanted Ted to know what he was buying.
I laid it all out. The ultimate fish-out-of-water premise, a gangster sent by witness protection to a country with no crime. The local color, dialogue in Norwegian with subtitles when I wasn’t speaking. The unique tone of the show, both familiar and freaky at the same time.
“Sounds good!” Ted said.
Super cool. Nothing but positive vibes.
I showed him the trailer.
“I’m in,” he said.
Man, I remember thinking, I’m having a heck of a day. I should leave here and go straight to the track.
I was still trying to talk Ted out of it. “You’re starting a whole new company. Are you sure you don’t want it dubbed or something?”
He shook his head. Norwegian was perfect, he said. They were planning on being the first truly international content network, and this would be their first international content.
Ted made his offer. “I’ll give you a million an episode, and we’ll do a two-year deal, eight episodes a year.”
Holy Fuck! Maybe there was a God after all.
As far as I knew, this might have been the first two-year deal in TV history. They never did that, even with hits.
On the way out he put his arm around me. “Oh, one more thing. We’re gonna be putting all the shows up at once.”
That interrupted my groove for a minute.
“What do you mean?”
“You know how HBO has the whole season in the can before the first episode airs? Well, instead of broadcasting one week at a time, we’ll put them all up at the same time.”
I had to think about that one.
“Geez, Ted, are you sure that’s the right move? I mean, you labor and suffer and someone can watch a year’s worth of work all in one night? That seems a little weird.”
“Oh yeah? You mean like working on a record album for a year and someone listens to it in an hour?”
Son of a bitch! He was right.
“You son of a bitch! You’re right!”
And so, for the second time in TV history, I’d find myself at the medium’s crossroads.
The Sopranos would change not only HBO but TV in general. For the first time in history, it would replace film as the go-to medium for creators of serious adult content.
And Lilyhammer would make Netflix the first truly international distributor and the preferred network for all future international content.
I didn’t know that yet. All I knew for sure was that I had met the guy I’d be making TV with for the rest of my life, and I was not about to let him down.
When I returned to Norway to tell the head of Rubicon about Netflix, I was all smiles and expected the same in return. Amazing news, right?
Silence.
Hello? Did you hear what I just said? I saved the show. You know the budget you lied to me about? I just tripled it!
Rugby finally confessed. “There are a few other things you should know,” he said.
What could possibly break my groove?
Turns out he was not your run-of-the-mill con man—he was a full-blown Scandinavian Zero Mostel.
Remember my incredible Spielberg-Hanks deal?
The one where I had 50 percent of the back end?
Well, I had 50 percent.
NRK had 50 percent.
And probably a bunch of horny old ladies had 50 percent each.
How’s that for a groove breaker?
Eilif, Anne, and I had lunch with the executives at NRK. Surely they’d see the brilliance of the deal?
Not exactly.
They explained that they rarely broadcast a series for more than one year. And on the rare occasion when they did renew a series, it only aired… wait for it… every other year.
I took my hands off the cutlery at that point. I was rapidly losing confidence in my ability to suppress the urge to slash someone’s throat. I just couldn’t decide if it would be one of theirs or my own.
We got our second season. Norwegian audiences were too enthusiastic to be denied. But of course, with that whimsical year off in between.
Every once in a while, Lady Destiny takes pity on me.
Ted at Netflix was cool about waiting, figuring that word of mouth would serve us well.
And Bruce decided to tour exactly when I would have been shooting the second season of Lilyhammer.
All I missed was a month in Australia. The first Australian trip for the reunited E Street Band had been a rare disaster. The power went out like three times during our opening gig. Not only did that show never get its momentum back, the entire tour never quite got on track.
For that second trip, Bruce took Tom Morello in my place, and that tour the band broke through.
Beautiful.
We lost Clarence Clemons in June 2011. He had been in bad shape for a while, but it was still a shock.
We’d lost Danny Federici in 2008. I still look over every once in a while and see him there. Who ever heard of somebody dying from skin cancer? It’s still hard to believe.
Replacing original band members and keeping a band relatively the same is impossible. A band changes when members change. If it changes enough, you may have to even change the name of the band.
With Bruce’s name up front we didn’t have that problem. For us, continuing in a way that made sense was a profound challenge. Could we keep enough continuity to make a smooth transition and not disrupt the audience’s expectations and experience?
In a way, the transition had already been happening. Clarence and I were always part of the show, the shtick, but I had been doing more of it lately because Clarence had to sit down for most of the show. The running-around-the stage vaudeville had shifted toward me and Bruce.
But Clarence’s iconic solos were still central to many songs. Would an audience be reluctant to applaud someone new playing them? Would it feel like an insult to Clarence’s memory?
The perfect solution dropped in our laps.
Clarence’s nephew Jake.
Who, as it happened, could play the saxophone.
There would be no conflict about giving love to a blood relative.
The only problem was that Jake had established the beginnings of a career. He sang, played guitar, and wrote songs. The saxophone wasn’t even his first instrument.
Bruce and I talked it over.
“Listen,” I said. “We cannot have him stand in Clarence’s spot. It’s simply going to be too much for the kid. I know he has to play those solos, but let’s go out with a horn section to camouflage him a little bit.”
“Makes sense,” Bruce said.
“And maybe he doesn’t play every solo. Eddie Manion can play a few, to ease the pressure. Whoever solos can come out of the horn section and then go right back into it.”
Rehearsals went well, but I could tell Bruce wasn’t quite settled. After one of the rehearsals, he called me as I drove back to the city. “I don’t know.”
“What’s the matter?” But I already knew.
“Jake.”
“Talk to me.”
“I think he wants to have his own career. I feel like I’m forcing him to do this. Like he’s doing it out of obligation.”
“Look, I’m sure he’s nervous,” I said. “Big shoes to fill. Literally. And he may not know it yet, but he’s gonna love this. He’s used to playing clubs. Just wait until he looks out at fifty thousand people screaming his name. He’ll have an entirely new outlook on life.”
Bruce wasn’t sold. I could tell.
“Let me just suggest one thing,” I said. “Two things.”
“Go.”
“You’re always accusing me of being an extremist, but guess what? You’re the extremist! OK, maybe we’re both right, but we don’t have to marry Jake forever. And Jake may not wanna marry us forever.”
“I’m listening.”
“Let’s look at this as a transitional moment. Just this tour and then we see what happens. Maybe later we’ll transform ourselves into some other thing, but right now he can keep the heart of the E Street Band intact. We are extremely lucky that he exists. I’m not sure what we would’ve done without him.”
I could hear him thinking in the silence.
I went on. “The audience wants to grieve Clarence. We all do. But at the same time they’ll see that his spirit is alive in Jake. That gives everybody something to celebrate instead of every night feeling like a funeral.”
Plus, I told him I would talk to Jake and explain that he could pursue a solo career in between E Street tours. “I’m a little bit of an expert in this area. So we’ll not only see how good and dedicated he is, but how smart. Because if he’s smart, he’s gonna embrace this opportunity with both arms.”
More silence.
“OK,” he finally said. “I hear you. I’ll think about it.”
He thought about it, and Jake was in. And man, did he rise to the occasion. He got better every single show.
Turned out to be a good kid.
Smart too.
I had another successful year at the Hall of Fame, where a cabal of us talked the rest of the voters into combining the Faces and Small Faces into a single candidate.
The Small Faces were the Faces’ incredible predecessor, one of the five important British Invasion bands that never invaded. Combining the two was the only way to get Steve Marriott, the Small Faces’ vocalist and one of the greatest white Soul singers ever, into the Hall—he was unlikely to get in with his other band, Humble Pie. I would try the same trick combining Free and Bad Company, who also had two common members, singer extraordinaire Paul Rodgers and the great drummer Simon Kirke, but that hasn’t worked yet.
A few years earlier, Maureen had discovered an organization called Little Kids Rock that bought guitars for kids who couldn’t afford them. It was started by a San Francisco teacher named Dave Wish. They wanted to honor me, but I’m generally not crazy about that kind of thing, and they honored Clarence instead. Maureen, who went to the ceremony, said it was nice but the organization needed help.
When Clarence left us, Little Kids Rock named their yearly honor after him. The first Clarence Clemons Award went to Lady Gaga, who told Maureen and me that she used to wait on us at Palma on Cornelia Street in the Village.
After Gaga, I told Dave Wish that I would accept the honor but that the show needed to be more elaborately produced. He didn’t quite know what I had in mind, but I knew they could do better than the forty grand a year they were raising.
To make the show more interesting, we decided to have a bunch of artists do the honoree’s songs. My year, performers included Bruce, Elvis Costello, Darlene Love, Tom Morello, Dion, and Jesse Malin. The next year, Joan Jett was honored by Cheap Trick, Billie Joe Armstrong, Gary Bonds, Kathleen Hanna and Ad-Rock. And Darlene Love’s year brought out Elvis Costello, Brian Wilson, and Bill Medley.
We got them up to a million dollars net, and I moved on.
Meanwhile, David Chase, the man most responsible for making TV the go-to medium for the whole world of serious content, leaves TV and decides to make his first feature film. He decided on something small and personal. All due respect to my padrone, it felt like a Stevie move.
As a teenager, David had been a drummer in a band in New Jersey before he split
to LA, went to film school, and got into TV. That was right around the time when the Beatles changed everything.
His movie, Not Fade Away, was largely autobiographical, exploring the tricky dynamics of being in a teenage band, and it was also about David meeting and falling in love with the girl who became his wife, Denise.
Midway through the writing, the script stalled, and he put it on a shelf. At around that time he asked me what I was working on, and I played him a new song called “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” and later simplified to “St. Valentine’s Day.” As much as I love Bob Dylan’s work, it was the only overtly Dylanesque song I’d ever written. I intended it for Nancy Sinatra, but for some unknown reason never got it to her and instead we cut it with one of my Wicked Cool bands, the Cocktail Slippers.
“Wait a minute,” David said. “Play that again.” He was always complimentary, but this was different. Turns out the timeline I’d used for the relationship in the song, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, was the same one he had used for his movie. It brought the project back to life for him, and he finished the script.
I tried to talk him out if it.
I tried to reason with him, using the same arguments that people had used to try to talk me out of Lilyhammer.
“David, you just did the greatest TV show of all time. You can do anything you want right now. You can make Paulie Walnuts a Marvel Comics superhero and get a $200 million budget. Then you can make your small personal film. You’ll have a built-in audience ready to go.”
“I don’t want to make Big Pussy Versus the Martians,” he said. “I want to do what I want to do.”
Fuck me.
I figured if I couldn’t talk him out of it, I had to help him make it.
My job was to evolve the Twylight Zones, as the band would be called, through their various stages of development, leading to their one moment of glory, my St. Valentine’s song.
The first question was, Do we find musicians who could act? Or actors who could sing and play? I leaned toward the former, David toward the latter. He needed great acting more than great musicianship. “Can you turn actors into a band in four months?” he asked.
Unrequited Infatuations Page 33