Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  SIX

  Breakfast at the Polo Lounge

  “Television is just a toaster with pictures.”

  —MARK FOWLER, REAGAN’S FCC CHAIRMAN

  The studio, Beth told me, really loved my episode. They were—by now I was familiar with the expression—big fans. But I already knew this, because not only had the upper-level current executives called me to say how much they loved my work, but the junior-level ones did too. And the most amazing thing about it was that they were all complimenting the same parts of my script.

  They all loved the same bits of dialogue, all referenced the same action sequence, and all said that the guest character I created felt very “authentic.” In fact, they all spoke with such stunning similarity that I wondered if they had had a meeting to discuss and agree upon these things. I later learned that in fact they had. I later learned that these talking-point assessments of my work were indeed quite handy, for executives all over town could now love my script without ever having to actually read it, and love me without ever having to get to know me. This was my first direct experience with buzz and the momentum it creates.

  In Hollywood, momentum is everything. And in Hollywood there is only momentum, one way or the other, meaning that you are either succeeding or not succeeding. You see, no one does just okay in TV. People either love your work and are big fans, or they want nothing to do with you. You’re either in or out. If you hear they thought your script was “interesting,” they hate you. If they didn’t “respond” to your work, they hate you. If they had any kind of reaction other than to absolutely love what you did, you’re screwed. And if you don’t hear quickly that you’re loved, you’re not, because in Hollywood, everyone loves to spread good news—that’s how momentum works. In Hollywood, no news is always bad news and bad momentum. Momentum also changes on a dime, but it never sits on that dime.

  I was offered a multiyear overall contract with Universal that would put me on the staff of Simon & Simon and then other Universal shows when Simon ended. The offer was for $250,000 a year.

  Beth, however, would not let me take the deal. We had words. I liked the show. Okay, sure, I thought it was a little cheesy, but it was fun to write and fun to work on. I was high as a kite on the experience of writing something and then seeing it made a few days later. I wanted more and I was being offered more—and they were gonna pay me for it. A shitload of money, by the way. But Beth would have none of this. I found myself pleading with her the way I used to plead with my mother to let me stay out late. And just like my mom, Beth flat-out refused. She insisted that she wanted me to work on a “quality” show. “That’s nice that they want you,” she said. “But we’re passing.”

  “Passing!” I explained to her that just a few months ago in Pittsburgh I was walking five extra blocks by one restaurant where lunch was $3.25 to another restaurant where lunch was $2.75 because that fifty cents made a difference. “This is a degree of security,” I insisted.

  “You want security?” she replied. “Go sell insurance.”

  The truth is, Beth expressed nothing less than disdain for the show. She was annoyed that they were offering me money. To her, they were trying to steal me. She wasn’t involved in getting me my first script. She wasn’t involved in where it was now headed. We had a pretty heated fight. I lost. I’ll never forget the phone call to my father. “Dad, I was offered a quarter million dollars a year to write TV. But I turned it down.”

  “What!” he exclaimed. “Why!?”

  “Because Beth says it’s not a quality show.”

  My agent called me back about two hours after our battle. She was curt: “Tomorrow afternoon, one o’clock, Bistro Garden on Ventura, you’re having lunch with David Milch. You know who he is?”

  “I know who he is,” I lied.

  “Get with the program, Jeffrey. He ran Hill Street with Bochco.”

  “Right.”

  “Call me afterward. Don’t wear a tie. And I told him not to take you to the track, so if he tries you tell me.”

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I think I had the job before I even went to that lunch.

  MTM Enterprises gave me an office on the second floor of the main administration building, often called the “flash cube” building because of its shape, on the CBS/MTM Studios lot on Radford. I had an extra-long sofa that was great for napping, a standard-issue desk with return, and three long windows that overlooked the thirtysomething soundstage on the back lot. I brought in my own computer, a Mac SE loaded with MacWord, because there was no scriptwriting software on the market yet and I never could get the hang of writing a script with DOS commands on the studio IBMs. I also got a parking space, complete with my name printed on a small sign in front of it. A friend took a picture of me standing next to the sign. My Honda’s parking space was right next to one used by a large white Bentley with a license plate that read RESIDUAL.

  My assignment was to develop and write a one-hour script for Milch about life in a college town. David had a deal with MTM to create a new show for ABC called Capital News. Compulsive or ambitious, depending on your perspective, Milch also had several other projects in various stages of development, and this “College Town” show was one of them. David had already hired famed novelist Jim Harrison (Dalva, Legends of the Fall) to write a draft of the project (Harrison called it Teeter-Totter), but Milch also put me to work simultaneously writing my version of the show.

  Much has been written about Milch in everything from the trades to popular magazines. He’s a bit of a mythical figure in Hollywood. After earning an MFA in writing from the University of Iowa, David taught English at Yale, where Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren was his mentor. He was also a habitual gambler, an alcoholic, and a hard-core heroin addict. In 1982, his former college roommate, Hill Street writer Jeffrey Lewis, introduced him to Bochco, who assigned Milch the premiere episode for Hill Street’s third season. The episode, “Trial By Fury,” is widely regarded as the best Hill Street episode ever made and perhaps one of the best hours of television ever made. After the script won the Humanitas Prize, Milch took the prize money, which came from the Catholic Church, and bought himself a stake in a racehorse. Tony Soprano meets Sophocles is the best way I can succinctly describe him. The only person he was even remotely afraid of was Beth Uffner. He never did take me to the track.

  I had breakfast with Milch several days a week at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset. He was always seated when I arrived, always had the same table, and was always reading The Daily Racing Form. We talked about sex, drugs, and defecation, as well as Nathanael West and the latest Paris Review. These were all among David’s favorite topics. The general plan for my script assignment was for me to bring in ideas for the “College Town” project, primarily based on my personal experiences during college, discuss them with Milch, and get direction. But the truth is, this was less of a job and more of a seminar, a sort of life tutorial, really.

  After breakfast I would drive over the hill, across Mulhol-land, speeding back to my office on the MTM lot. Meeting with David was never a dull experience. I was always ready to write after our conversations. (On one morning I was so affected by our breakfast discussion that I nearly ran over Wilford Brimley as I was driving out of the hotel. Suffice to say, the expression on the face of the portly actor, staring at me through the windshield as he was splayed out on the hood of my little red Civic, was less than enthusiastic.) I spent much of my time writing scene ideas on note cards and taping them to the walls. In a few weeks, my walls were covered. I had very little idea what I was doing, of course, but the walls sure looked cool. In the afternoons, David would grab me and we’d walk and talk. Sometimes we’d talk character dialogue. David did not use a computer to write. He did not use a typewriter or a notepad. He dictated his scripts, often the day the episode was shooting. He spoke them aloud while anxious assistants typed or scribbled down what he said. And I mean word for word what he said, right down to the punctuation. “Johnny:
What the fuck happened to that horse in the fifth, question mark. Pete: Stepped on a bottle cap, comma, you prick, period.”

  Milch frequently offered me cash. He almost always had a large wad of cash in his pocket, and sometimes he’d just spontaneously whip it out and ask me if I needed any pocket money. Sometimes he’d peel off hundred-dollar bills and drop them on the desk of an assistant. “Your horse just came in,” he’d say, often just a few minutes after berating them about something. Milch went through more assistants than Murphy Brown. I heard he would offer actors cash on the set if they would get their lines right on the first take. Once he came into my office and asked me if he could borrow it for a minute. I stepped out and a weathered and rather unseemly gentleman in a trench coat walked by me and stepped in. They shut my door, reopened it a few moments later, and left. Milch patted me on the back and went on his way. Why he wanted me to see all that I’m not sure.

  The truth is, I had no reference point for any of what I saw or really any of what I was doing. I had just spent two years and put myself twenty-five grand in debt to learn something that wasn’t helping me a whole lot here. There were no classes in graduate school about story breakfasts at the Polo Lounge or David Milch or what it would be like to work with someone like him. Then again, perhaps that point wasn’t lost on Milch. Perhaps that’s why my whole experience at MTM felt, more than anything else, like I was being educated.

  Many people have called Milch a genius. I have no doubt that this is true. In an exposé about Milch in The New Yorker, for example, Bochco says: “David is a genius in the literal definition of that word.” And yet, Milch told me that when Bochco gave him some script notes with which he didn’t agree, Milch snuck into Bochco’s office and urinated all over the place. Bochco then fired Milch and shortly rehired him, but only after Milch agreed to write “urine-free” on Post-it notes and stick them in the areas where he didn’t relieve himself. Whether this particular anecdote is true or not, I can’t say for sure. And I suppose it’s remotely possible that I’m even combining some of the various elements from many of the tales of debauchery that I heard. But let me assure you, while these kinds of things may sound like collegial pranks, they were more. David once shot out the lights on a police car’s roof with a shotgun. “Haunted” is the word that most comes to mind when I try to describe Milch. This was not a man who simply had a colorful past that he parlayed into a marketable eccentricity. This was a man who had real demons.

  I tell you all this because meeting Milch made me understand, for the first time, why someone really makes a career writing television.

  Money, of course, is one of the primary reasons writers get into TV, but often it is not why they stay. And never does it entice them to do their best work. Hollywood has a long history of luring good writers with the promise of easy money. James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, John Fante, Daniel Fuchs, Horace McCoy, Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Dashiell Hammett—all wrote in Hollywood. However, these writers never worked in television. They wrote movies over which they had little control. Their screenwriting endeavors were really second careers, in most cases used to support other forms of more satisfying writing. Faulkner didn’t write in Hollywood because he loved the movies. He did it purely for the dough. Same with F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  But from what I saw, David Milch, and many other great writers that I met around MTM, were not just writing for the money like a lot of those old screenwriters did. Even with his gambling and other vices, David was rich. I mean, filthy rich, and every year he worked he got richer. In the late nineties, he received more than $15 million to work at Paramount and more than $60 million for his stake in NYPD Blue (according to The New Yorker), and even after undergoing repeated heart surgeries, Milch didn’t buy a yacht and sail the world. The guy worked his ass off to create and run Deadwood. Milch and writers like him that I met at MTM were driven by something besides money.

  I was fascinated, partly because I grew up in a world where, frankly, everybody I knew had to work. Not working wasn’t an option, unless you wanted to, you know, do something noble, like black-box theater in New York. I was also fascinated because even though I’d only written one produced episode of TV, I was starting to understand what was driving these guys.

  Remember the end of Annie Hall? Alvy writes a play that mirrors his failed relationship with Annie, but in the end, unlike real life, the characters make up and stay together, after which Alvy turns to the camera and shrugs: “Whadda you want? You’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life.” I think that summarizes why writers get addicted to TV writing. The chance to get things just the way you want them, to see this thing in your head, what was once a dream, fully and perfectly realized. And you get to do it again and again every week. Although I’d only done it once, I wanted more. Just like Milch, I had the bug. Sure, money’s great, and I’m told heroin is too, but as ridiculous as this sounds, I truly can’t imagine anything more intoxicating than making TV shows every week.

  I’m sure another reason my job felt so much like a tutorial was because for all practical purposes, I was working at what most in Hollywood actually considered to be a school for writers. MTM Enterprises was established in 1969 by Mary Tyler Moore and her then-husband Grant Tinker to produce Mary Tyler Moore for CBS. Scholars, critics, and professionals alike consider MTM to be singularly responsible for the birth of “quality television.” But more than anything else, the studio was renowned for being, what Tinker called, a “writers’ company.”

  Pretty much from the day I started there, I heard stories about how Tinker would go out of his way to find writers in whom he believed, then leave them alone to do their work, protect them from outside interference, and, most significantly, put them in charge. Tinker created the modern prototype for the TV showrunner, the writer-producer. He also created a corporate culture, a program, really, where young writers were taken under the wings of the more experienced, taught craft, exposed to production, and given time and room to grow into future showrunners. He did this partially because it was the best way to run a business—you know, invest in the future—and partially because, in 1969, TV was pretty sucky. Something radical had to be done.

  When I was a little kid in the late sixties, the TV in my house was almost always set to the same station: Channel 2, CBS. Seriously. Night and day that’s all we watched. My dad would walk across the room, turn on the set, and that was it. From Gilligan’s Island to My Three Sons, from Carol Burnett to the moon landing, it was always CBS in our house. Walter Cronkite was a member of our family. And not just ours. It was the same story all across America. Right after I Love Lucy in the fifties until well into the mid-seventies, CBS was the dominant network. It was not uncommon in some seasons for CBS to have eight of the top ten shows.

  Now, here’s the kicker. CBS was not number one because its shows were so great. To the contrary, they were number one because their shows were inoffensive. The Andy Griffith Show, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C., Mayberry R.F.D., Hee Haw, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, CBS single-handedly mastered the “hick TV” genre not because people loved this stuff, but because guys like my dad simply did not want to get off the sofa to change the channel. Think I’m kidding? NBC even had a name for this thinking, which literally became programming policy at the networks. NBC exec Paul Klein called it the “LOP policy,” meaning “Least Objectionable Programming.” The theory is that people will watch anything on television as long as you don’t offend them so much that they have to change channels. When FCC chairman Newton Minow chewed out America’s broadcasting executives, calling television “a vast wasteland,” this was the kind of TV he was talking about.

  And along with this policy, there was another reason why TV during the sixties was pretty awful—it all came from the same place. In the early fifties, before airing I Love Lucy, CBS gave ownership of the show to Lucy
and Desi’s new independent production company, Desilu. All CBS wanted was the advertising revenue. They did not envision the reruns of the episodes being worth anything. They were wrong. In 1957, at the height of the golden age of television, a third of all shows aired by the major networks were produced by independent production companies. These were small innovative companies that had to think outside the box to survive. But when the networks realized the value of reruns, they put a stop to all that and began to air only shows that they had made themselves or had a stake in. By 1968, independent production companies made just 4 percent of network television programming.

  In 1970, seeing that networks were becoming a “vertically integrated” oligopoly—that is, doing business only with themselves and thus hurting the quality of the product—the FCC created the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, or “Fin-Syn,” and it changed everything.

  The idea here, in the FCC’s words, was to “foster diversity of programming through the development of diverse and antagonistic programming sources.” In a nutshell, this meant prohibiting the networks from making and syndicating (selling reruns of) their own shows, thereby allowing independent production companies to compete.