Billion-Dollar Kiss
Billion-Dollar Kiss
THE KISS THAT SAVED DAWSON’S CREEK AND OTHER ADVENTURES IN TV WRITING
Jeffrey Stepakoff
GOTHAM BOOKS
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Copyright © 2007 by Jeffrey Stepakoff
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Stepakoff, Jeffrey.
Billion-dollar kiss: the kiss that saved Dawson’s Creek and other adventures in TV writing / by Jeffrey Stepakoff.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-1690-3
1. Stepakoff, Jeffrey. 2. Television writers—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN1992.4.S785A3 2007
808.2'25—dc22
[B] 2006102541
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FOR ELIZABETH, OF COURSE
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
1 Billion-Dollar Kiss
2 Bochco’s Blood
3 How’d You Like to Make Ten Grand?
4 Green Envelopes
5 Written By
6 Breakfast at the Polo Lounge
7 The Funny Business
8 Life and Times of a Story Editor
9 The Hollywood Gold Rush
10 The Seasons of L.A.
11 Vertical Integration and Segregation
12 Kissing Katie Holmes
13 Adventures in Hair & Makeup
14 The New Reality
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Index
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Look, nobody writes a book like this without a little trepidation. I’ll explain in greater detail later about exactly why I wrote this. But for now, I want you to understand that this is something I felt I had to do. Believe me, I enjoy watching The Donald fire wannabe execs just as much as most. I see the entertainment value in American Idol. But when these shows, and the likes of The Bachelor and Wife Swap and Are You Hot? consistently became the principal offerings from the handful of international conglomerates that control nearly everything we see on TV, I realized it was time to say something.
I came to Hollywood and started writing for television in 1988. That was right about where and when an explosion started, what can really only be described as a modern-day gold rush. The deregulation and consolidation of the media industry, along with record-breaking syndication revenues, fueled a virtual mania for scripted entertainment that quite literally made the TV writer one of the hottest commodities of our generation. The studios fought with one another for the opportunity to throw money at us. It was wild.
But every mania has a dark side. In 2001, the television business hit the skids, reality TV replaced scripted programming as the predominant form of television, and Sony, one of the world’s biggest studios and my employer at the time, fired many of its TV executives and folded its network television production division. My position as a coexecutive producer on Dawson’s Creek and working for Sony during this revolutionary time gave me a front-row seat to the upheaval in Hollywood.
Now, in order to fully appreciate this unreported chapter in the Hollywood story, you have to understand TV writers, our lives, and what it is precisely that we do. So along with a frank, ringside account of the rise and fall—and, I think, rebirth—of TV, I have set out to take you into our world. I have written in great detail about our craft, not what I learned in school, but what I learned on the set and in the story room. I’ll take you to those places, as well as pitch meetings and casting sessions and backstage on shows you know and love. I’ll share with you what it feels like to see your name on the screen, to see stories taken from your life—your personal Wonder Years—performed for tens of millions of people all around the globe. I’ll take you behind the scenes and into a world where high-powered careers, entire networks—billions of dollars—ride on the fleeting whim of a twentysomething writer.
This is a tale few know, fewer talk about, and no one writes about. I do not claim to present an entirely objective or exhaustive history of Hollywood. My account is a personal one. This is the story of television, the story of the television writer, and this is also my story.
—Jeffrey Stepakoff
April 2007
“Mr. Sarnoff next gave a little talk, in which he cheerfully, and with enormous self-effacement, admitted that the real problem of television was not its mechanical vagaries but finding programs for it when it finally gets ironed out.”
—E. B. WHITE,The New Yorker, 1936
CNN Reporter: “A cliché in Hollywood is ‘She was so dumb she slept with the screenwriter’—they’re at the bottom of the totem pole. Do you think that’s still true?”
Robert McKee:“If I were an aspiring actress trying to get ahead today, I’d sleep with a TV writer.”
—CNN, 2004
ONE
Billion-Dollar Kiss
“Content is king.”
—SUMNER REDSTONE
In 1999, at the end of a summer that was hot even by L.A. standards, I sat in the story room with the other Dawson’s Creek writers and tried to keep my panic in check. When you write one-hour TV—feeding the massive apparatus that produces a $2.5 million mini-movie every six days, day in and day out—you are certainly accustomed to round-the-clock doses of heart-thumping, stomach-churning, no-way-in-hell-will-we-make-the-deadline anxiety. But the panic that gripped the writing staff on Dawson’s Creek this particular day was a special kind—an unforgettable kind.
To say that the show was starting to sink would be polite; at this point at the beginning of Season Three, we were already deep, deep, underwater. When I was hired onto the writing staff a few weeks earlier, Dawson’s Creek was the hottest show on t
elevision. Oh, word was out around town that “The Creek was a crazy place to work” and “Dawson’s was a nightmare, beware!” But every writer heard those decrees about every show in town. I mean, unless you were lucky enough to work for Phil Rosenthal on Everybody Loves Raymond, nicknamed by writers as “Everybody Loves Everybody,” you knew you’d inevitably put up with a certain amount of insanity if you took a staff gig. That was a given. But the truth is, I had no idea what I was signing up for. I don’t think any of the writers really did.
We had been called into the Room to break story, as was our habit; but on this particular day, we had been called much earlier than was our habit. The mind-numbing sound of smashing metal at the body shop on Olympic and Barrington, which our story room overlooked, hadn’t even started yet. Like small animals able to sense an oncoming natural disaster, we knew from the position of the sun, the ubiquitous Venti-sized cups, and the alarming quiet, we were officially entering Crisis Mode. One of our bosses, executive producer Paul Stupin, paced the cagelike conference room, a nervous mother hen encouraging every idea that hatched from the writing staff. “I love it! I love it!” was shouted at even the most inane story ideas. You had to feel for the guy. A former suit who’d made his name developing 90210, Paul openly displayed that special breed of nurturing enthusiasm endemic to nonwriting producers—he had authority and responsibility, but ultimately his fortunes would be determined by the skills of the other eight people in the room, the writers.
Two of these other eight people were also both our bosses—and they were completely at odds with each other. Part of this was simply a difference in sensibility. Coming off Party of Five, coexecutive producer Tammy Ader wanted us to do touching stories where Dawson saved the creek from industrial pollution. Coming off The X Files, executive producer Alex Gansa wanted us to do dark stories about a promiscuous girl named Eve. The more the new writing showrunners would disagree, the more anxiously enthusiastic the nonwriting showrunner would become. In the center of this mad triangle sat the new writing staff, aimlessly pitching anything and everything, looking for direction, and wondering what the hell Sony, our studio, was thinking when they created this scenario.
Kevin Williamson, the creator, had just “left” the series because, in his own words to Entertainment Weekly, he was “starting to crash and burn.” The rest of his writing staff (with one exception) had also “left.” The ratings were falling. The viewers were disgusted with the campy and arbitrary story lines. As one critic put it, fans felt that the zeitgeist-hip Dawson’s Creek was fast becoming “a stagnant pond.” And the actors—James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Josh Jackson, Michelle Williams—were miserable. Some of them weren’t speaking to each other, which made writing scenes where they had to work together quite challenging. Some of them just flat-out refused to do the material we were giving them. I’d never even heard of anything like this before. Oh, and when they soon got wind of our “edgy” new story arch—Pacey and Jen (Josh and Michelle) becoming “bump buddies,” having a purely sexual romp in a bathroom stall at school—the actors literally threatened mutiny, what one writer would later call “the Coup.” Urgent calls went in to agents. Emergency visits were made to executive offices.
On this particular morning in the Dawson’s Creek story room, we knew that if we didn’t come up with a smart, respectable story line that had some drive, the WB, our network, was going to shut down production. What was Sony thinking? How did such a promising new show go south so fast? And was there even a chance that the forces gathered in the Room could save Dawson’s Creek…not to mention ourselves?
It’s impossible to explain what it was like to be a television writer in Hollywood in 1999, or why Dawson’s Creek was in grave trouble, without explaining the money. Even in its most prudent days, it’s hard to imagine a more speculative business than television. The traditional model has always been that the studios deficit-finance their shows, eating substantial losses on the pilots that never air and the series that get canceled, because the occasional hit more than pays for all those failures when it’s sold into syndication. But in the nineties, hit TV shows became so wildly valuable—more than a billion dollars in revenue for shows like ER and Friends, by some accounts more than $3 billion for Seinfeld—that the studios essentially disregarded costs and started doing just about anything to make sure their shows got and stayed on the air.
Combined with all the new networks and channels in need of programming, this created a wild seller’s market for TV writers, making us the focus of a feeding frenzy that rivaled even the irrational exuberance for dot-com stocks simultaneously underway in the equity markets. Never before in the history of Hollywood—arguably, in the history of American industry—had so many twenty-and thirtysomethings made so much money so fast. Assessing a writer’s level of skill is always a matter of subjectivity on some level. But due to the unique market forces at play during this time, the time-honored fundamentals used to determine our value were thrown out the window. The entire negotiation process started to ignore what a writer had done and focus on what a writer might do. Cool suddenly had tremendous cachet. Hip became currency. Kids right out of school were given a quarter million dollars a year to write TV. And any writer with a track record of any kind, like Alex Gansa, was suddenly an extremely valuable commodity, particularly in the hands of the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), who got Alex a mid-seven-figure deal to work on Dawson’s—a show that he openly loathed.
The anxiety was escalating in the Dawson’s Creek story room. Tammy Ader stood at one of the five large dry-erase boards mounted on the walls and wrote all sorts of words in a wide variety of cheerful colors. “Pretty in Pink Story!” “Risky Business Part 2!” “Pacey Gets Motorcycle, à la Rebel w/o a Cause.” Whenever the story process hits a speed bump, TV writers will often pitch classic paradigms—also known as movies we might be able to rip off. Paul’s cheerleading efforts for the possible story lines just made Alex even more disheartened. It’s not that he was above stealing from movies. TV writers on deadline will shamelessly pilfer just about anything for inspiration. Current events, bible stories, the sex lives of interns are all fair game for next week’s show. Alex hated the tone of Tammy’s stories. He championed mysteries, crime stories, and characters that weren’t quite like what you’d find on the network that aired Felicity and 7th Heaven. “I sold out,” was the explanation Alex oft offered the writing staff as to why he took the Dawson’s job. “Sony backed the Brink’s truck up to my front door and started dumping money until I just couldn’t say no anymore.”
As the day progressed and the story process did not, moving from constructive dialectic into something less collegial, twenty-seven-year-old Greg Berlanti, a former movie producer’s assistant who had just started writing TV the year before, said something that changed all our lives: “Pacey kisses Joey.”
What? I remember thinking. “You can’t do that. Joey is Dawson’s girl. Remember, they are soul mates, and that is the closest thing we have to a franchise around here.”
But Greg was so impassioned, as was his usual state, that he jumped up, grabbed a cheerful color marker from Tammy, and drew a triangle on one of the boards, writing “Pacey” at one point, “Joey” at another, “Dawson” at another. “No, I’m serious,” he said. “Pacey kisses Joey. Think about it!”
And that’s when it hit me. Of course! A love triangle. Heresy is exactly what the show needed. Not only did we have a story, we had a story engine, a dramatic problem that would create many other stories. There had been a love triangle on the show before, between Dawson, Jen, and Joey. There had once even been a kiss between Joey and Pacey. But these stories never went anywhere. As one person closely affiliated with the series put it, “Those ideas were floating around in the ether; Greg pulled them out and focused on them.” For the first time, we had a series. The Katie Holmes–Josh Jackson Kiss, the love triangle it created, and the stories that it bore drove the show to 128 episodes, six seasons, and international acclaim.
> The Kiss also seemed to justify this new formula for valuing writers on their future potential. For its speculative investment of a few hundred grand in Greg, Sony now had the potential to realize a billion-dollar return. The bigger issue, though, was how many other Gregs were not providing a comparable return? What the studios were about to discover was that even with the occasional billion-dollar kiss, by the time you figured in the costs of all the other Gregs on all the other struggling shows that did not pay off, and added all that to all the enormous unproductive deals like Alex’s, and added all that to the costs of producing all these failed series and failed pilots, the business model had become flawed. In fact, it was so flawed that our studio, Sony, would soon settle or just pay off much of their $75 million in TV writer deals, fire seventy of their prime-time TV executives and employees, and drop out of the broadcast television business.
At the beginning of the new millennium, studios and production companies all across Hollywood, in their hunger for hit shows, flirted with disaster. They would soon learn that the formula for creating a hit—some combination of talent, passion, and luck—was as elusive and ephemeral as true love’s kiss. It was something that money alone, even in great quantities, could not buy. On the day Dawson’s Creek was saved, the entire television industry was teetering on the verge of insolvency, and we didn’t yet know it. But we were about to find out. Our careers, our lives, and the nature of entertainment would never be the same.
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