FRANK
Before what?
SNOW REMOVAL GUY
Before I understood what kind of man you are.
SC. 1-02 INT FLAMINGO BAR,
FRANK’S OFFICE—DAY
(Frank smiles with satisfaction and rises. We see the room; others are present. Arne, Torgeir, and Jan get up as well. The Snow Removal Guy follows Frank, and Frank lays his arm over his shoulder.)
FRANK
Good. Someday, and that day may never come, I may call upon you to shovel some snow. Until that day, accept this as a gift on the weekend my kids are baptized. We’ll look into your problem.
SNOW REMOVAL GUY
Thank you, thank you.
FRANK
And please: I understand Norwegian.
SNOW REMOVAL GUY
(in Norwegian)
Of course.
(to the dog)
Happy now eh, Carita? The man is so nice to us!
FRANK
Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to go to my kids’ prechristening party.
(The Snow Removal Guy is escorted out by Jan.)
FRANK (CONT’D)
(straightening his tie in the mirror)
What a putz.
Just before season 2, Eilif and Anne were rattling off ideas they had gathered in the off-season. “Wait, wait,” I said. “What was that last one?”
“Torgeir wrecks a gangster’s Ferrari?”
“No, before that.”
“We replicate the opening of The Godfather?”
I could see the whole scene immediately. “Eilif! This is fucking genius! This is not only gonna be great; it’s a device we can use all the time!”
In that season 2 opening, Baard Owe played the Snow Removal Guy, the Bonasera the Undertaker role, and did a great job, except he was speaking English with absolutely no accent.
I was already pissed. I had told the Director, the Director of Photography, and the Production Designer to study The Godfather because I wanted everything to match exactly. But when I walked in, the lighting was all wrong and the furniture was in the wrong place.
I had to stop production and completely redo it. I got the distinct impression the Norwegians never quite grasped the significance of The Godfather’s place in cinema history, let alone in Italian American history.
And then there was the English. I said to the Director, “I need to hear the actor’s Norwegian accent.”
“He has no accent,” the Director proudly told me. “He speaks English perfectly!”
“Yeah, man, I’m grokkin’ that, that’s really cool.” I was starting to lose it. “But check it out. We’re in Norway, doing a Norwegian parody of The Godfather, so he needs to have a Norwegian accent or it’s not funny, dig? If he ain’t gonna sound as Norwegian as he, in fact, is, I could have fucking filmed this in fucking Staten Island and slept in my own fucking bed tonight, gabeesh?”
He got it. And I love it.
During the second season of Lilyhammer, the completely opposite expectations of the audiences of NRK and Netflix started to take their toll.
Specifically, they started to take their toll on the relationship between me and Eilif and Anne. I was told from the beginning that we would be doing a Norwegian version of The Sopranos, more or less. We needed the “cultural differences,” but we also needed sex, violence, nudity, and language that would be expected on any subscription network.
I had an enormous obligation to Ted, who was trusting me to deliver a great show for a subscription audience. That meant adult subjects, adult depth, adult characters, and yeah, adult language, sex, and violence.
Eilif and Anne must have been getting pressure from the network because suddenly, everything I wrote was an argument. And even if I understood fighting for every act of violence—Norway was less tolerant of violence than the States—fighting for every sex scene or nude shot started to wear me out.
I had to remind them that Netflix was paying two-thirds of the budget and that the expression “tits and ass” did not refer to women breastfeeding or showing a baby’s ass during a diaper change!
It was a crazy combination of contradictory goals and working methods, and sometimes it felt like me against a whole country, but in the end we somehow created a completely original hybrid dramedy and managed to satisfy both Norwegian and American viewers. Plus the international audience, which eventually included 130 countries.
And most important to me, I delivered what I promised to Ted Sarandos, who had staked his company’s new content creation on me with blind faith, without notes or second-guessing.
We’d accomplished more in a few years than the entire Norwegian film and TV industry had in the previous fifty in regards to introducing the country’s enormously talented artists to the world.
I wasn’t exactly expecting dual citizenship or my own cabin in the woods, but not one of the big brass at NRK ever thanked us, visited the set, or seemed to know we existed. We never received one dollar from a very generous government that funded anybody and everybody that even called themselves an Artist.
The creeping tension among the creative team lifted when our second season was nominated by the International TV Awards in Monte Carlo in two Comedy categories, Best Show and Best Leading Man. The competition for the awards, the Golden Nymph Awards, included the whole planet. Just being nominated was amazing.
Would you believe it? Our little local show, underfunded and underpublicized, won both awards? We beat everybody in the world. Shows with three times the budget and big celebrity stars and massive publicity.
The only bummer was that no one was there from Netflix to enjoy it with.
Ted deserved to be there. He had gambled on us and won big. The ballsiest TV executive in history should have taken a bow. I had justified his faith. I wanted to celebrate with him.
In spite of our amazing victory, NRK was not planning on a third season. Remember, they hadn’t even wanted the second one.
Luckily for us, NRK got a new boss, Thor Eriksen, who arrived just in time. He was a friend of Trond Giske, the former cultural minister, who set up a dinner the night before Thor was starting his new job. Jo Nesbo joined the three of us. Thor turned out to be a real fan and gave us a very, very rare Norwegian third season.
Ted was into it.
Netflix was going to start expanding worldwide, and I suggested what Ted had undoubtedly already thought of: since they already had a local show in Norway, they should make Norway the first country they expanded to. It was a template they could use everywhere. They literally owned the concept of international cross-fertilization at that point. They’d invented it with Lilyhammer, and it was a great strategy.
Start a local show when you start broadcasting in a new country, and then share all your international content. Just make sure you have a worldwide license, which is where HBO and many international franchisers fucked up. They may have had a presence in many countries, but they gave up control to the local territories. Big mistake.
By Netflix’s third show, Orange Is the New Black, they had surpassed twenty years of HBO’s subscribers in three short years.
That third season continued to broaden the show’s creative horizons. It opened in Rio, which gave us new sights to see and new music to play.
We were taking our reputation as the first international show seriously. There was simply no country or ethnic group we wouldn’t hesitate to corrupt!
While Lilyhammer was beating the odds in Norway, my Rascals show was fighting a losing battle back home. The investors never showed up. Once upon a Dream, despite being an artistic triumph, had become my usual financial nightmare.
It was the same story as always. I have never been able to raise money for my own projects. I can do it for others, but not myself. I spend every penny I have while I wait for lawyers or investors or sponsors or donors or patrons, because if I don’t do that I would never create anything.
And I need to work constantly. I simply cannot function at the normal speed
of this planet. The minute I stop moving, I start dying. That’s the pattern of my life, and hard as I try, it never changes. I do what I have to do and then try to get it paid for after the fact.
I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit. I do not like living this way. I don’t have some martyr complex. I come to win.
I always wonder what would have happened to Once upon a Dream with a Manager. Maybe they could have gotten me money up front. Then again, I know from experience that nobody has any imagination. No matter how well you describe something, how passionately, how specifically, investors won’t be convinced until they have seen it themselves.
Still, as we moved the show to Toronto and then to the rest of the United States, it worked better than we could have dreamed.
The show actually transcended the Rascals themselves. Our real achievement was transporting the audience back to the ’60s for two hours.
We spoke to audience members after the show, and they all had the same questions.
What happened?
What happened to joy?
What happened to hope?
Back in the ’60s those questions were asked, and answered, every day. In spite of the turmoil of chaos and protest marches and urban unrest and the Vietnam War and assassinations, we felt every tomorrow would be better than yesterday.
Optimism, man. Anybody remember that? The evolution of consciousness, the combination of joy and hope, the thrill of unlimited possibilities. That’s what we had experienced in the ’60s, and what we brought back with the show.
We had big plans beyond the Rascals. There were so many bands that conveyed the spirit of their time and that had endless stories to tell. Marc and I figured we’d be doing the Eagles next. Then the Who. The Temptations. A Kinks reunion (after the Rascals, nothing would be difficult).
There was no end in sight, and our new template could change the entire future of the Rock and Soul business for the remaining Renaissance Artists.
But then, unbelievably, as Marc took the show on the road, the poisonous relationships in the Rascals, the band dynamics that we had analyzed and filmed and laid out for the world to see, surfaced again.
Three out of four band members started acting like they had just been thawed from four decades of suspended animation, and they resumed being the assholes they always were.
One of the lead singers, Felix Cavaliere, who I’d thought was a friend, had seemingly decided the money he was making—more money than he’d ever made in his life—wasn’t enough. He got two of the other guys, Dino Danelli (who had been in the Disciples for two years) and Gene Cornish (whose rent I’d paid for more than a year to keep him from literal homelessness), to go along with him.
The fact that this very costly show was losing money didn’t seem to matter to them. The fact that I had written, directed, and produced, at my own expense, a Broadway show that let them showcase their greatness—a greatness that the world had long since forgotten—and restore their place in history also didn’t seem to matter to them.
The fact that it was the best they’d ever sounded, even going back to their prime, didn’t seem to matter to them.
Apparently what mattered to them was their egomania. I think what was particularly galling to Cavaliere was the fact that each member of the group was getting a separate standing ovation. I don’t think he could stand that. To me it seemed like he felt, with absolutely no rational basis, that he’d always been a one-man show.
As it turned out, he was just using the entire two years of the show’s run to raise his feeble solo fee. It went $5,000 per gig to $25,000 per gig, and he returned happily to what was, to my mind, a pathetic version of the music he was playing when I’d found him on the oldies’ white chitlins circuit three years earlier.
For forty years, the conventional wisdom had been that the breakup had been caused by Eddie Brigati, the second lead singer, and his decision to capriciously quit the band. As it turns out, Brigati was the only one with any sense of honor, and he had originally split to preserve the integrity and dignity of the group, even after his publishing was stolen and his royalties had diminished to nothing.
Not only was the show the best creative work I’ve ever done, but I felt an additional sense of accomplishment at bringing Eddie Brigati, one of the most beautiful, soulful cats who has ever lived, back from cultural exile. His voice, confidence, and reputation were restored, and his corrected important place in history was secured forevermore.
A few years later, Maureen and I designed a cabaret act for Eddie—I supplied the Rock and Roll songs; she made a list of the best show tunes—and we played that at the Cutting Room in New York. We were proud of that show, and especially proud of Eddie, who really stretched to make that radical transition.
Along with the second death of the Rascals, actual death started to become a regular part of my life.
In the spring of 2012, my mother passed away after suffering horribly for months with complications from diabetes. She hadn’t had any quality of life for years. The kindest, simplest woman I knew, she had lived a life of preliberation, old-school obligation. No fun since she was a kid, when, as the oldest of the five children of an Italian family, she became the de facto responsible mother.
I wish that I’d had more conversations with her. My father too. I was just too self-centered. Felt under siege my whole life. Always behind, always running to catch up, never quite getting there. Why couldn’t I relax long enough to talk to my own parents?
My mother’s passing was bookended by other deaths. We lost Steve Popovich, my early champion, in the summer of 2011, and Frank Barsalona, my mentor and one of my best friends, succumbed to his dementia in November 2012. And then, in June 2013 we lost Jimmy Gandolfini. David Chase called me in Spain with the news.
Jimmy’s death was a huge loss to the industry, but I felt it personally. We had been looking to open a restaurant/bar together. We had been talking about the fact that there were no places like the old Columbus, Paulie Herman’s joint, where people in the business, actors, musicians, and writers, could hang out together.
I had also talked to him about filming a scene for Lilyhammer. It was going to be a dream sequence where Frankie wanders through a blizzard and comes upon a cabin in the middle of nowhere. He knocks. The door opens, and there’s Jimmy, Edie Falco, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, and Robert Iler. And Jimmy says, “Sil! You too!”
David Chase had even agreed to direct it.
I began to develop a method to cope with all these deaths.
Denial.
We spend most of our lives breaking down our defenses and trying to confront the truth. When you’re young, denial is the enemy of quality of life. But as you get older, it becomes your friend. I have no real sense of time. I go long periods without seeing my friends, and when I do see them, we pick up our conversation where we left off. It’s like the five or ten years apart never happened.
So when I lose a friend now, I try to avoid the funeral, unless the family really needs me there. Because in my mind, I keep all my friends alive. I tell myself it’s just that our schedules aren’t crossing at the moment.
Eventually… they will.
One other way to keep people alive is to respect their memory and history or to support institutions that do. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for all its flaws, remained important for that reason.
The Hall mostly gets its mission right. Over the years, I had campaigned for the inclusion of Managers, starting with the Mount Rushmore of Managers: Colonel Tom Parker, Albert Grossman, Brian Epstein, and Andrew Loog Oldham. We got Epstein and Oldham inducted in 2014.
Colonel Tom and Albert Grossman were deemed too controversial. It’s a shame. Just as the Art is always better than the Artist, the Manager’s historical impact is always more important than the Manager.
There was one ugly moment when the Hall decided it didn’t want Alan Freed’s ashes anymore, despite the fact that Freed was the reason the Hall was in Cleveland in the first place. Instead of th
e situation being handled calmly and with dignity, it was dealt with in an unnecessarily disrespectful way.
I didn’t learn about the situation until it was too late. Lance Freed was distraught. He is the gentlest, kindest soul I have ever met, completely unaccustomed to adversarial situations.
“Let’s turn this into a positive thing,” I said. Years earlier, Maureen had read about Rudolf Nureyev’s grave. The next time we were in Paris, we went to the Russian Cemetery and found it. It was amazing. A stone mosaic that looks exactly like one of Nureyev’s Persian, tapestry-woven kilim rugs. You would swear it was a blanket until you touched it.
I told Lance about it and suggested having the same artist, if we could find him, create a gigantic jukebox as the gravestone for his father.
Lance loved the idea. He started looking for real estate while I looked for the sculptor.
I found out the Nureyev grave had been created by Ezio Frigerio, the former set designer from the Paris Opera. And, incredibly, we found him! He was a hundred years old, but he was into it.
I connected him with Lance, but the cost of commissioning and shipping something that large turned out to be prohibitive, so Lance decided to have somebody in Cleveland do it.
But it turned out great.
That same year, the E Street Band finally made it into the Hall of Fame. We were inducted by Bruce, who had been in as a solo artist since 1999, and in his speech he admitted that I was right when I’d said the band should have gone into the Hall before he went in as a solo artist.
That had been the third of our major fights.
It was a stunning admission. I give him a lot of credit for admitting he was wrong. Especially in such a public fashion.
I had been promising Darlene Love that I would produce an album for her since I met her in Los Angeles in 1980.
Maureen and I would go see her perform at least once a year.
We were sitting in the audience at the old B. B. King Blues Club and Grill on Forty-Second Street in Times Square when Darlene did a Gospel number, “Marvelous” by Walter Hawkins, and as usual, wiped out the entire audience, including me.
Unrequited Infatuations Page 35