Day Two: On this day, the writers basically pick up where they left off the day before. This is usually the last chance for actors, the studio, and the network to get in their licks. Standards and Practices usually responds by this point as well. These are the fine folks at the network charged with ensuring that nothing illegal, immoral, or unethical gets onto America’s airwaves, aka, the censors. If the notes come in, they are addressed, i.e., they are ignored, negotiated, or appreciatively folded into the script. If anything has come up in the rewriting that might require unexpected production changes, this is the last chance to make the various departments aware. On Major Dad I saw entire sets constructed in twenty-four hours. It was amazing. At the end of the day, or before the sun rises on the next, a revised script is published, couriered, and delivered to all concerned parties. Sometimes, at least on Major Dad, if a script was working, Earl would send us home early. If not, we’d work through the night once again, breaking occasionally to do important things for the creative process, like have golf-cart races through the backlot.
Day Three: Again, the writers continue where they left off, but this day is usually earmarked for polishing and punch-up. I worked with writers who did nothing but show up on writing staffs for this one day. These so-called punch-up doctors might only get one or two jokes in the final produced episode, but they’re often some of the most memorable. Everyone knows sitcoms that are remembered for that one classic line. Needless to say, someone who can deliver that kind of line on a moment’s notice is in high demand. Some of these people make more money for a day’s work than most of the other writers on staff make per episode. I was teamed up with a writer on Major Dad named Peter Tilden. We were assigned several scripts together. A radio personality, Peter didn’t study screenwriting at a fancy school. He didn’t come up through MTM. I don’t think he spent his time going to the Robert McKee classes and obsessing about becoming a story structure expert. But Peter was funny. I mean, he could find the funny in anything. Any situation, any prop, any line in any script, Peter could see certain things, turn a phrase, express an unexpected perspective that was just hysterical. He didn’t work at it. It was just him. These are the kind of people that you often find in a sitcom room.
Day Four: The writers attend the final dress rehearsals. Sometimes, on previous days, if the script is in good enough shape, the writers might attend “blocking rehearsals” in the hope of getting an idea of how the script is playing. No matter how funny a joke may be in the Room, you really have no idea of how well it will work until you hear the actors perform it. Day Four, ideally, is when you are going to get a proper sense of the entire episode. Every conceivable effort is made to have the script completed and working by early morning Day Four. There is hell to pay if it isn’t. I worked on episodes where the staff stayed up all night on Day Three to have a script in the actors’ hands by the time they awoke. However, what often seems like genius when you’re writing under pressure at 3:30 in the morning is not quite as brilliant when the actors read it a few hours later. One time in the middle of the night on Major Dad, we needed a funny line for the major—actually, we just needed a funny word: “Sure, I’ll just quit my job in the Marine Corps and begin my new career as a ______.” Twelve smart, talented, highly paid writers sat on the floor of Earl Pomerantz’s office at Universal for well over an hour and did nothing but pitch funny occupations. Somehow, the idea of Gerald McRaney as an alligator wrestler made us laugh so hard we just had to use it. A few hours later, though, at the final run-through, it didn’t seem so funny. Certainly not to Mackie—“An alligator wrestler?”—who wanted to know what the writers were smoking at 3:30 in the morning. Writers often continue to punch-up the script while or after watching the final run-throughs.
Day Five: Show day. The show is taped (or filmed) before a live audience. All the writers are present, almost always on the stage floor. Some even still punch-up a line or two during the performance. Show day always reminded me of theater. In fact, I always thought that the sitcom taping was to L.A. what Broadway was to New York. Our tapings were always filled with tourists from all over the country, just like a Broadway show. The whole thing feels like a party. There is a great band. There is a warm-up stand-up comedy act, followed by a high-energy introduction of the stars. Then you watch the scenes being taped (or filmed). Then you watch the same scenes over and over. Truth be told, it gets kind of boring watching the same material over and over, but the show never stops being interesting because the show, the real show, is not the material at all but the making of the material. When you go to a sitcom taping, what you are watching is not only the actors performing on the stage, you are watching all the people on the floor in front of the stage, the writers and producers, the director, the executives, and all the agents. More business is probably done on the floor of sitcom tapings than anywhere else in Hollywood. And as an audience member, you get to watch it all. Part populist entertainment, part cinema verité, part tourist attraction, the sitcom taping will probably shed just as much light on our civilization as the ancient theater reveals about the Greeks.
After the show the writers sleep, then two days later the whole process starts again.
As you can see, rewriting, especially as a group, is a major part of the sitcom writing process. Nearly all sitcom writers become acutely aware of this the day they turn in their first script. I know I did. As a playwright, I learned that the written word was holy. I sat through many read-throughs of my plays where actors and directors would politely, deferentially, ask permission to drop a comma or add an adjective. After my story was approved for my first TV script, I spent a week off alone writing it with the same care and love that I wrote my plays. Great attention went into every single syllable. I had friends repeatedly proof it. The script was perfect, ready to be shot—or so I thought. I turned it in to my bosses at the end of the day on a Friday. A few days later, they told me I did a great job, thanked me, congratulated me, and told me to join all the other writers for the script’s first story session, where twelve of us proceeded to rewrite the entire script from page one. Oh, the story was pretty much left alone, and a few of my jokes stayed, I think. But we went through my precious work page by page, line by line—sometimes even word by word—and rewrote it as a group. I smiled and tried to join in, but it’s hard to be funny when your beloved words are being torn apart like fresh bread at the dinner table. This was my coming-of-age week.
Earl kept the bones of my plot intact, heard everyone’s best pitches for better lines and funnier jokes, and made decisive decisions about what stayed and what was changed. The result was that my script was made better—better than I had realized that it could be. And I learned not to take my work, or myself, too seriously. This was a hazard of playwriting training, one that sitcom work helped rid me of.
I saw that in TV, words are disposable, jokes can get better through the rewrite process, stories can be improved by additional perspectives, and it’s never done until it’s in the can (filmed). But I also saw on other days that sometimes you do get it right the first time, stories can be destroyed by second-guessing, and sometimes too many perspectives can be the worst thing for a script. Sometimes, it turns out, scripts work just fine on Day One, but by Day Five—when the studio, network, and actors have all chimed in, when you’ve heard the jokes a hundred times—the scripts simply aren’t as good as they were when you started the week. A good showrunner like Earl is usually the difference between improvement and screwing the thing up, but it’s still no guarantee of progress during rewrite week, because there is always a rewrite week even if the script doesn’t need one. Even if a sitcom script ain’t broke, it gets fixed, because that’s what the staff has been hired to do and that’s the tradition.
When I wrote Major Dad, sitcoms were king. Sure, there were the China Beaches, but when regular folks talked about TV, they talked about situation comedies. That’s what people mainly watched. For example, during the 1988–89 season, eight out of the ten top shows were
sitcoms: The Cosby Show, Roseanne, A Different World, Cheers, The Golden Girls, Who’s the Boss?, Empty Nest, and Anything but Love. And Dear John, Growing Pains, Head of the Class, Amen, and Night Court weren’t far behind. In addition, perhaps with the notable exception of ALF, which also wasn’t far behind, most of these sitcoms were also pretty good. Several were great. I would even go so far as to call many of these quality shows. This would be the trend up until the mid-nineties. In the 1995–96 season, 60 percent of the top twenty highest-rated shows were sitcoms: Seinfeld, Friends, Caroline in the City, The Single Guy, Home Improvement, Boston Common, Frasier, Grace Under Fire, Coach, Roseanne, The Nanny, and Murphy Brown. However, as of this writing, in the 2005–2006 season, just one comedy, Two and a Half Men, made the Nielsen list of the top twenty shows.
What happened to sitcoms? A lot of things. But for starters, many of these shows were made by independent production companies.
Although my agency represented Earl and packaged Major Dad, Beth also represented the executive producer of my favorite show on television, The Wonder Years. At least once a month, I dropped hints that I wanted to meet him. Finally one day when I was bringing her daughter back from a day at the arcade, I pleaded with her to set up a meeting. This was something I always seemed to be doing with her, pleading. This was something that many of my friends just didn’t understand. Most working writers didn’t even ask their agents for things, they told their agents what they wanted. But that’s not how it was with Beth. One year I gave her a holiday gift, and after thanking me she told me which store in Century City to buy next year’s gift. It made perfect sense. They had stuff she liked and at good prices. Pushy but pragmatic, she was born to be an agent.
The other thing that was amazing about Beth was that nearly all her other clients felt the same way (perhaps with the notable exception of ER executive producer Lydia Woodward, who, previously an agent herself, didn’t take shit from Beth). She finally did set up the meeting for me with the Wonder Years executive producer, Bob Brush, who was just as scared of her as I was. Even though he had started his career writing for Captain Kangaroo and chain-smoked Nows, he constantly wore his sunglasses indoors and had a Keith Richards troubled cool about him. So swapping stories about Beth not only made me like him, it made me feel a little less like a wuss.
By this point in my career I was starting to realize that these meet ’n’ greets were about more than my choice of shirt and a wide-eyed display of awe at both Los Angeles and the work of the person who was meeting and greeting me. I was now being interviewed for staff positions. So not only did people want to make sure they could tolerate me for long periods of time, they wanted to make sure that I could actually contribute something of use to a writing staff. Now, trying to predetermine this in a meeting is pretty much like interviewing someone you just met to go into a barroom brawl with you. Despite what they say, you have no idea what they’re gonna do when the chips are down. All you can do is look for the most qualified person who, even more importantly, you think you can trust.
The more I went on these meetings, the more I recognized a similar look in showrunners’ eyes, even hugely successful writer-producers who I greatly admired. They were all trying to figure out what I’d do on the battlefield. Would I help take the hill, pee my pants, or shoot them in the back? With some nudging from Beth, I quickly picked up that my task in these staff meet ’n’ greets was to strike a tone somewhere between irreverence and deference. Trust me, I have my own way of writing, but my secret dream is to make it
just like yours. Truth be told, I’m edgy, but manageable. The idea was to be cool, but never cooler than the meeter-greeter.
I got an offer to write a freelance script as a staff audition. I passed the audition and got the job.
EIGHT
Life and Times of a Story Editor
“The only way to change people’s minds is with consistency.”
—JACK WELCH
“Imitation is the sincerest form of television.”
—FRED ALLEN
In 1988, the year I graduated from school, I earned $40,577. In 1989, I earned $152,425. In 1990, at age twenty-six, I earned $275,692. That year, like many other working TV writers had done, I met with Encino CPA Barry Entous and formed a California corporation. It was called Pet Rock Productions, because when I was a kid I always carried a rock with me. My friends thought I was, you know, quirky, eccentric, because they didn’t have terms like OCD in the mid-seventies in Georgia.
At a party thrown by a Carnegie alum, I met a very nice girl who was working as a researcher on China Beach. Although she had an undergraduate degree from MIT, she decided what she really wanted to do was write plays. So she went to grad school at UC Davis and studied the craft. After also meeting an alum of that school, Carol Flint, who was a writer on China Beach, she had come to the same conclusion that I had, that TV was where it was at for writers. So now she was trying to break into it. We found we had a lot in common, and we were pretty much living together within a few days. It wasn’t long, however, before my tiny apartment was too small for the two of us—all our books alone took up half the place—and we started looking at houses.
In the spring of 1990, I bought a 1,160-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath house in Mar Vista for $440,000, and my girlfriend and I moved into it together. It was small and old, but it had a pool, and if you stood on your tiptoes in the westside yard, you could make out the Pacific Ocean. I put a hot tub in a corner of the backyard and got a golden retriever named Maggie. I bought a Mazda Miata, one of the first ones in this country, which was a very big deal in Los Angeles. A new Ghurka No. 5 shoulder bag, in khaki canvas, was almost always on the front seat. Although many of my home furnishings came from IKEA and all the requisite artsy-ironic pictures came from Z Gallerie, I indulged in the dream entertainment system with the big-screen TV, laser-disc player, and KEF surround-sound speakers. Since I used this primarily for business-related purposes, my corporation actually owned it. I had frequent pool parties where Mrs. Gooch’s filet mignon and fresh corn from Gelson’s were barbecued and served to a decidedly under-thirty industry crowd. The writing staffs of numerous prime-time shows were always well represented. Someone would tell a joke, next week it would be on a sitcom. Someone would tell a story, next month a drama episode about it would be aired. The rest of the guests were young writers who were trying to break in, researchers and assistants, several of whom would end up creating and running their own shows and being future multimillionaires. Whenever someone had a show on the air, we would all gather around the TV, watch together, and celebrate. Except for the polo shirts my mother sent me, my clothes came mainly from The Gap and Banana Republic, although I did have to buy a tux—a Mani, the same one that Tom Hanks wore in Joe Versus the Volcano—and a suit, an Armani, blue, double-breasted. I wore the former to industry award events and the latter on the high holidays, which were spent at the Synagogue For The Performing Arts, a growing industry temple where the rabbi was a celebrity, the cantor had been Rodney Danger-field’s opening act, and agents trolled for new clients during the Torah portion. I studied karate at the dojo behind Sports Club/LA, the same place Nicole Brown Simpson and the kids trained. I met friends for brunch at Patrick’s Roadhouse and for late-night chicken and waffles at Roscoe’s. I took my girlfriend to Michaels, Maple Drive, Chinois on Main, Granita, Chasen’s, and 72 Market Street (may the latter three RIP). There were spur-of-the-moment weekend trips. Mud baths at Two Bunch Palms. Swim-up blackjack at the Trop. Tubs of iced Coronitas on the beach in Huatulco. And mostly, there was the work. Developing, writing, and producing a new television episode every single week, forty-five weeks a year. I lived every minute with a sense that I had made it to the absolute center of the world, that there were truly no limits, that anything was possible. I had every reason to believe this, since all the evidence regularly pointed out that this was, in fact, true. Wells’s words from that CMU lecture frequently resonated in my ears. Three hundred people
making a product for 300 million.
Billion-Dollar Kiss Page 11