Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  UNC had a radio, television, and motion-picture department, but with its roots in radio and public broadcasting, the department seemed, well, dusty. And television studies as a proper course of study just didn’t exist in any meaningful way at this time, mainly because the medium was not deemed worthy of study. Learning about television as a vehicle to deliver news and information was one thing. But studying TV shows in a critical and scholarly context was viewed as only slightly less ridiculous than studying the crafts that enabled one to create them. Aside from the fact that no one in mainstream academia had the pedagogical or professional skill set to teach such courses, it would have been career suicide for a tenure-track professor to try to convince a dean that Sitcom Writing 101 had merit. This was the scenario at colleges all across the country. With the exception of a handful of specialty schools in L.A. and New York—Cal Arts, AFI, the film schools at NYU, Columbia, USC, and UCLA—the few film and television departments that existed at universities were out of their element when it came to nurturing and training young writers.

  Writing programs in general were not high on the agenda of academic administrators in the eighties. For that matter, virtually all the liberal arts were avoided like a plague by student bodies across this country. Another reason so few people were thinking about a career writing in Hollywood is because, in the eighties, it appeared that there was only one career worth having—and it was not in Hollywood, it was on Wall Street. In fact, 20 percent of all enrolled college students in 1980 were business or management majors, nearly double the amount just ten years earlier. In 1962, English was the most popular major at the University of Michigan. In 1982, economics was number one.

  There was a fever going around campuses, and it was hard not to catch it. Ronald Reagan—the former head of the Screen Actors Guild who turned in suspected communists in Hollywood—had just been elected president. The Young Republicans were easily the most popular group on campus. Whatever angry protest was coming from the Sandinista card table in front of the student union was inevitably drowned out by legions of preppy, National Review–wielding econ majors. There was no Jack Kerouac or Ken Kesey. The voices of my generation were Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, with their tales of fantastic wealth and excess. From Joel Goodsen in Risky Business to Alex Keaton in Family Ties to Bud Fox in Wall Street, the message was crystal clear: “Greed is good.”

  As my own senior year approached, it didn’t take long for me to realize that dramatic writing was not a critical part of the skill set most desired by campus recruiters. Not that I wanted to work on Wall Street. I didn’t. What I really wanted to do was simply feed myself by writing. If that eccentric endeavor didn’t work out, I figured a living doing something creative would suit me just fine. As much as I appreciated the drama department for helping me attain access to an excellent education, it was clear that a major from the department was not going to go very far to help pay for that education. Journalism, with a concentration in advertising, seemed a responsible and palatable compromise. Advertising was the de rigueur occupation of the day for creative types. It did not conflict with the findings of the high school MAPP test. My parents were relieved. And I figured I’d be like Tad Allagash, the partying ad man in Bright Lights, Big City.

  But six months into my purportedly enviable job at Ogilvy & Mather advertising, I took off my Vuarnets and realized—this is work. Though the yuppie trappings were shameless fun, I could not get past the sense that this was not just a transitory adventure. This was My Life, and for the first time since birth I could now see the rest of it. There were suits and ties and eating cereal out of a coffee mug on the way to an office with sealed windows and work that was fine and respectable but that, I’m sorry, I did not want to be doing. Something was absent from this life. I realized I missed my beret-wearing, clove cigarette–smoking drama colleagues. I longed to be in a class that started with the phrase, “Let’s close the door and pull our seats into a circle.” But mainly, I missed the writing. I missed it so much that I was willing to trade knowing with a high degree of certainty what tomorrow was going to be like for a shot at more time to write. So somewhere between standing on the racetrack at Talladega passing out Hardee’s hats and composing copy about the safety of an insecticide whose active ingredient was made in Bhopal, I decided to apply to grad schools. I was accepted at AFI, Columbia, and Carnegie. I chose the last because of the focus on playwriting that seemed, at the time, familiar. In the summer of 1986, bucking the almost universally accepted wisdom of the time, and with my mother standing on the front lawn crying, I left my $17,000-a-year hard-won job in the Real World and drove off to be a writer.

  A good argument can be made that modern television was invented while I was in college—at least that’s how I felt as I followed Wells’s advice and looked for a show to write in the spring of 1988.

  The programming from the 1987–88 television season that came over the nineteen-inch glass tube in my little apartment in Pittsburgh was better than anything being written for the American theater. This is not hyperbole. The Slap Maxwell Story, thirtysomething, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, The Wonder Years, Frank’s Place, Hooperman, A Year in the Life, Crime Story, China Beach, the shows that aired the season I finished graduate school, led a widespread renaissance that redefined mass entertainment. The term “boob tube” suddenly wasn’t so accurate. These new, so-called quality shows were thought-provoking, revolutionary, and culturally and socially resonant; they shared many of the qualities one might apply to a critical and common definition of (dare I use the A word?) art. And although these shows focused on different subjects and had broadly disparate points of view, they all had something fundamental in common: They were all created and led by writers, writers who had been given uncommon amounts of creative leeway.

  Perhaps an even better argument can be made that modern television actually reached a popular critical mass around 1988 but, in fact, was invented on January 15, 1981, the night Hill Street Blues premiered. This is a show that Bochco and Michael Kozoll would only agree to develop and run if they were given complete creative freedom, something fairly rare for a TV writer at that time. Fred Silverman, NBC’s president, acquiesced. With its hard-hitting cinema verité realism, fast pacing, and interwoven story lines, Hill Street literally broke all the rules and established a new model for the television show, a model that influences nearly all quality episodic dramas today.

  Until this time, TV writers made their two-dimensional characters move around like chess pieces. Characters were forced to service a story with its predicable car chases and fourth-act resolutions. The good guys always won. Wrongs were always righted. But in Hill Street, character motivated story, as opposed to the other way around. Bochco and his writing staff created stories by asking “What would Renko do? What would Furillo do? How would these characters really behave in this kind of situation?” The results created honest storytelling that was rough around the edges and often unresolved. Just like in real life, anything could happen.

  While Hill Street (which was based on life in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, a place I can assure you most Carnegie Mellon students spent as little time in as possible) was a critical darling, it was never really a popular success. Most people I knew could easily hum the hit theme song but rarely watched the actual series. Nevertheless, the show laid the groundwork for a new kind of television. Syracuse professor Robert J. Thompson refers to this new form of TV as “writer-based” drama. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the year I began to focus on a career in television was right at the dawn of what Thompson calls “the second golden age of television.” Cagney & Lacey, St. Elsewhere, L.A. Law, Moonlighting—some of TV’s greatest shows were created during this era, laying the groundwork for many more to come. And it wasn’t just dramas. In the spring of 1987 a fourth television network, the Fox Broadcasting Company, launched several irreverent comedies, including Married…With Children and The Simpsons, that not only broke the molds but were wildly popular, t
oo—the former ran for eleven seasons and the latter is still in production. Before long, it wouldn’t be so “uncool” to watch—or aspire to write—television.

  This new kind of television not only changed the product, it changed the way the product was made. Shows began to be developed not just around the performing talent, but around the writer. Network executives stopped thinking strictly about what kind of show they needed in a particular slot, and focused more on writers with whom they wanted to be in business. Studio executives began to concern themselves first and foremost with the showrunner—the writing executive producer—and later with what show would actually be run. About the time I wrote my first TV spec script, “What is the price of a writer’s blood?” was being pondered with increasing urgency in executive suites all across Hollywood. The question became a sort of theme for the approaching train wreck between the writers and the studios.

  I chose Molly Dodd as the show I wanted to spec. A darker half-hour version of Ally McBeal, I loved the writing on the show and thought its tone was similar to the kind of work I was doing in my playwriting classes. And I saw playwright Eric Overmyer’s name in the credits. I wrote a script in about a week and mailed it to Wells. He mailed it back with encouraging notes a few days later. I addressed the notes, sent it back to Wells and soon received word that he wanted to send it around to some agents. A few days later I learned that two of the agencies wanted to meet with me, one of which was the William Morris Agency. I was ecstatic. After quickly riffling through my cassettes to find the appropriate music—I think I settled on a Grateful Dead bootleg—I jumped up and down in my bedroom for quite some time. On May 15, 1988, I graduated. On May 16, I left for Los Angeles.

  Several of my friends pointed out that what had happened to me was quite extraordinary. They were right. Even in 1988, before TV writing was big, it was pretty amazing to get such a break in such a short time. Getting a break in television is about all the expected things. You demonstrate you can do the work by writing good spec scripts. You work your ass off networking and making relationships with people who can help you. Sometimes writers get started faster than others because of talent. Sometimes because of force of personality, an obsessive determination to break in and do the job. In my case, as in most, I suppose all these things had some part. But the other (and some would say most important) reason all writers get started is because of fortuitousness. I had the good fortune of meeting someone who was selfless, confident, and kind enough to go to bat for me. Not all writers are so lucky as to meet someone like Wells, and certainly not as quickly as I did. Indeed, what I would soon learn is that simple luck had something to do with not only why some writers got started quickly and why some didn’t; it had to do with a lot in television.

  Although things were going swimmingly for me, this was about to change. For as I headed west, I had completely overlooked the well-publicized fact that Hollywood was virtually shut down. One of this country’s longest, most expensive and divisive labor stoppages was under way, the Writers Guild of America’s strike of 1988. Yes, I had caught a break—in a business that was in explosive and unprecedented upheaval, whose entire future was in jeopardy.

  THREE

  How’d You Like to Make Ten Grand?

  “When television is good, nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.”

  —NEWTON N. MINOW, FORMER CHAIRMAN OF THE FCC

  It’s quite a thing to put absolutely everything you own in the world into a small car. If that doesn’t make you take stock of your life, joining those possessions and driving across the country by yourself will. The transcontinental drive to Hollywood has acquired a status of somewhat mythical proportion. Most people who work in the entertainment industry have made this literal rite of passage.

  Here’s the reality: America is big. Very big. Although it seems like a romantic idea for the first five hundred miles or so, let me assure you, by the time you’re parked at a rest stop at three A.M., making dinner out of Combos, beef jerky, and the Stuckey’s pecan logs you bought back in Terre Haute—the last town you passed with motel rooms—the romance wanes. There’s a stretch of I-70 in Kansas that runs through so many miles of corn you’ll promise yourself you’ll never touch another Frito for the rest of your life. There’s a stretch of I-10 in West Texas, between San Antonio and El Paso, that is so long and straight and utterly mind-numbing that AM radio preachers start to make good sense.

  An amazing thing happens to freeways as soon as you enter L.A. County. Suddenly, they are referred to with the definite article “the.” You get stuck in traffic not on Interstate 10, but on “the 10.” Construction frequently takes place on “the 101.” A favorite locale for a slow-speed chase is “the 5.” Although I can find no sociological study on the topic, I believe that this way of referencing freeways can be attributed to the significance they play in the lives of Angelenos. Europeans don’t just have a run-of-the-mill mountain range, but “the Alps.” The religious don’t just have a good book, but “the Good Book.” When so much of your life is spent on a particular road, when the lives of so many are so broadly affected by the vicissitudes of that road, it becomes “the 405.” One of the very first things you learn upon arrival is that to live in L.A. is to drive in L.A.

  The automobile is the first of several building blocks an aspiring writer needs to survive in Los Angeles. Just like in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, certain primitive requirements must be met before new arrivals can focus on higher pursuits. After adequate transportation has been attained, one must next find shelter, food, and a good answering machine.

  Shelter, albeit temporary shelter, had already been arranged for me when I arrived in L.A. My father gave me a coupon he had received as a business perk for a three-day stay at a new hotel that had just opened in Beverly Hills, the Four Seasons. Suffice to say, the doormen did not rush with their usual flair to open the dirt-covered doors of my filled-to-the-roof Honda hatchback. Permanent shelter soon took the form of a room I found for rent on a bulletin board at UCLA. The room (and I use the word loosely) was actually a portion of a garage that had been hastily drywalled, and that had a bathtub set up under a rigged spigot and a broken-down mattress tossed on the concrete floor. Despite the questionable living conditions, the “room” was located in Brentwood Hills, one of the most beautiful and expensive parts of the city. I paid $100 a week to the elderly widow who owned the house, and I had to perform chores. I mowed her lawn, trimmed her hedges, lugged in five-gallon water-cooler bottles. Anything that needed to be done, she’d call the boy in the garage. Okay, it wasn’t the Four Seasons, but truth be told, I couldn’t have been happier. There was no daily housekeeping service, no palm-shaded swimming pool, but I was in L.A., and I was surviving.

  Because of the strike, Bochco didn’t have any work to offer me. But my father had a colleague in the furniture business who was married to someone that worked in movie marketing. The marketing exec sent my résumé to human resources at Universal, and the HR department there sent me to meet the studio’s head of motion-picture research, who needed some cheap and willing help. Because feature films have such a long lead time and, once written, no longer have any use for writers during the production process, there were many movies still in the pipeline. I was offered an internship, for which I was paid $265 a week before taxes. If you’ve ever been to a mall in L.A. you’ve surely been accosted by out-of-work actors offering you free tickets to a screening of a new movie. If you go to the movie, you’ll be asked afterward to fill out a questionnaire. Well, I was the schmuck who stayed up all night and tabulated the responses on the hundreds and hundreds of questionnaires.

  It’s been said that television is a writer’s medium and film is a director’s. This is mostly true. One of the first things I learned in Hollywood is that film, in reality, is a researcher’s medium. And the result of all of the research that goes into creating the Hollywood film produces a unique American art form: story by vote.

  But it was great. I
got to drive onto a major studio lot every day. I squatted in an unoccupied office, and it wasn’t long before maintenance put my name on the door. I had access to a copy machine, a computer, and all the film and TV scripts I could find the time to read. I ate lunch in the commissary next to Steven Spielberg. I rode the elevator with Lew Wasserman. I urinated next to Telly Savalas. I quickly learned that if I looked like I knew what I was doing, people figured I did. When I had a free minute, I would slip out of the 1320 Building overlooking Lankershim and walk the backlot. A few weeks prior I was walking around a college campus; now here I was, strolling around the Back to the Future town square. And at night, if I didn’t have a screening to attend, I would hole up in my stolen office and write.

  In television, network executives can control when or if to air a show. Studio executives can make comments and attempt to influence certain creative choices, like casting or long-term story arcs. Yes, executives control the green light, but at the end of the day, once a scripted television series is up and running, it is primarily controlled by writers. Woe betide those who try to alter this natural condition; story by vote and story by force have ill effect on the medium. For better or worse, a TV show sails or sinks with the writer in charge of the ship. The smartest and most respected TV executives I have met understand this.

  What television studio executives began to realize in the late eighties—a realization that set them apart from their motion-picture counterparts—is that the most influential decision a studio can make on a TV show is simply deciding which writer to place in charge. It is probably this distinction more than any other that is responsible for the rise of television as a quality artistic medium and the simultaneous descent of the motion picture into, first and foremost, a corporate product.