Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  The Wonder Years writers’ offices were in a condo complex in a questionable residential neighborhood in Culver City. It was one of those dumps you see all over L.A., three two-bedroom units upstairs over an open garage area below, the kind of place you see on the news that pancakes after an earthquake. At the Universal factory, even as a baby writer, I had my own office in a nice building near the commissary. Scott Baio was in the office next to me. Hey, Chachi, what you working on, buddy? I had all that classic Universal office furniture. I had a union secretary named Ellen who took care of me. If you saw me sitting in there, you’d think I was a kid visiting his father the insurance executive. So to leave my house and drive to a bedroom in a condo every day was bizarre. On the other hand, it was also great fun.

  Story editor Eric Gilliland (future showrunner of Roseanne) had the bedroom across the hall; story editors Mark Perry (future showrunner of One Tree Hill) and Mark Levin (future showrunner of Earth 2) were down the hall in their bedrooms; two assistants, Rita Hsiao (future writer, Toy Story 2) and Jeff King (future writer, Josiah’s Canon), worked in the living room; and the kitchen area was sort of a communal break room. It’s tempting to describe our office as a locker room, but that wouldn’t really be accurate. It was more like summer camp. I brought Maggie, my paper-training puppy, into the office every day. Levin decided he would take up the saxophone, which he frequently played. There were wrestling matches in the living room, practical jokes played in each other’s office-bedrooms, and NERF basketball was a way of life. Bob Brush’s office was over the set, which was in a warehouse in another part of Culver City, so we were pretty much on our own except for the occasional story meetings. Sometimes we worked one-on-one with him to develop an outline that one of the writers would then write. Sometimes we worked with Jill Gordon, the coexecutive producer/big sister, to flesh out a story. The process was always changing, but it was usually extremely laid-back. Unlike sitcoms where the form mandates regular group writing, in a film show like The Wonder Years, pretty much anything goes. And it did.

  The Wonder Years was part of a unique genre that was often called a “dramedy.” In the late eighties, a lot of these kinds of shows appeared, like Slap Maxwell, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, Frank’s Place, and Hooperman. Borrowing elements from both sitcom and one-hour, these were half-hour, single-camera shows shot on film. Although they reached their height of popularity during this time, the idea of telling a story without regard for whether or not the form demanded comedy or tragedy was not new to television. Room 222, the show Allan Burns and James Brooks worked on before Mary Tyler Moore, was one of the first. M*A*S*H was another. Moonlighting is also considered to be one. Most dramedies were very funny. Some were even written with the classic set-up/punch-line rhythm that we used on Major Dad. This was partially because of how they were marketed and partially because so many sitcom writers were working on them. But shows of this hybrid form also had dramatic story lines and emotional moments akin to what one would find on the best dramas, and because of the lack of contrivances like the laugh track, dramedies did not feel hokey.

  The dramedy form lent itself perfectly to the kind of closed-ended sitcom-like stories the show was conceived to tell. I think this material in this form is one of the reasons the show worked so well. I also think timing had a lot to do with it. The show just clicked with its audience, both kids and their baby-boomer parents. It was the perfect time for this show. Not all TV series have the good fortune to be born at the right time. Another reason the show was so successful was because of the opportunities afforded by the narration. Even if we had a huge problem with a story in an episode after it was filmed, we could almost always get it to work in postproduction. If a scene was off, we would simply rewrite the voice-over, have Daniel Stern quickly rerecord the narrative, play “The Long and Winding Road” over it and a shot of Kevin and Paul walking home at sunset, and we had people in tears. But probably the greatest single reason the show worked as an ongoing series is because of the tone in our offices. Somehow that summer camp sensibility, which included a lot of discussion about growing up, made its way onto the page and onto the screen. I would see this sort of thing, the spirit of the writer’s office ultimately defining a series, for better or worse, again and again.

  In the end, The Wonder Years worked for a million reasons that all came together just right—it was a case of catching that proverbial lightning in a bottle. I will never forget the experience of sitting on a train and listening to the people next to me talking about how much they loved last night’s episode of the show, talking about how much it was just like something that had happened to them when they were kids. It was an episode that I had written. Being a professional, I played it cool and didn’t tell them that it was mine…for at least like two minutes.

  While I was working on The Wonder Years, The New York Times interviewed me for a feature story about TV writers. Above a huge picture of me in the Arts & Entertainment section was the headline—SITCOM WRITING: RICHES PLUS RE-SPECTABILITY. The article, published on August 5, 1990, was one of the first major exposés about the explosion in the global television industry and how young people were suddenly flocking to L.A. to write TV. The story focused on “the link between comedy and money that the media has seized upon: it is possible for a twenty-four-year-old television story editor to make nearly $200,000 a year, and that’s just for starters.” The story was really the first harbinger, the first public one at least, of the new Hollywood that was coming.

  Astonishingly, up until that time, very few people really understood what I did. My father flew out to L.A. on several occasions just to try to get his head around it. I still think he came out just to make sure I wasn’t dealing drugs. “They pay you for making up stories all day?” Some people actually thought that the actors just made up their lines. Most people I met thought a story editor was a film editor. “I thought you wanted to write, maybe you’ll get lucky someday,” people would say to me. Moreover, no one, especially my family, seemed to believe what I was earning. What TV writers were paid was, quite literally, an inside secret. There was this tacit sense that we weren’t supposed to make a big deal about it. After the article, it seemed that the floodgates opened. Over the next few years, writers began to pour into Los Angeles. Ivy League schools in particular began to send their graduates to Hollywood. Students from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale all found highly organized West Coast alumni clans that helped them get footholds in the television business. Soon, the “Princeton Mafia” or the “Harvard Hasty Pudding Clan” made up entire TV staffs. The most educated, or at least the most expensively educated, young people in the world started flocking to Hollywood. And many of them not only found work very quickly, they found themselves at the center of a decade-long seller’s market for TV writers. The figures that were quoted in that 1990 article were nothing compared to what writers would be earning ten years later.

  Just a few months before the article came out, I got my first sense that the winds of change were beginning to blow. An older writer who had become a friend and taken me under his wing had advised me to put together a “five-year plan.” He said he had done it and it helped him visualize his future and stay on track. I did mine. I wrote that I hoped to get an overall development deal with a studio. Instead of a deal that is linked strictly to a series in production, this is a deal where a studio locks up a writer for several years. The writer might provide services for existing shows or the writer might develop new shows. When I showed it to him, he said everything looked good except one thing. He said he didn’t believe in development deals because although they often paid well, they tied your hands creatively. They kept you from working for other studios. Essentially, he said, they were a form of selling out. He said he would never take one. A few weeks later, he signed an overall development deal with a major studio. It was huge. Really huge. He purchased a $2.3 million house, a mansion, really, that I helped him move into. At that point it was the biggest house I’d ever seen before in
my life. There were, I don’t know, seven, maybe eight bedrooms. A wood-paneled office. A sweeping staircase like something out of Tara. A kitchen with appliances I didn’t even recognize. A spectacular pool. And a view of the 405 and the entire Valley off in the distance. It was breathtaking. I remember hearing that an 80 percent mortgage at about 12 percent (the going superjumbo thirty-year rate) would bring the monthly payment to around $19,000. That’s nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year for a house payment. And he bandied these numbers about as though they were chump change. As much as it blew me away at the time, the fact is, when compared to what the studio was paying him, and what the studio was making off his work, and what the studio might make off the work he might do, those numbers were chump change.

  Now, this was confusing to me. A few years earlier Wells had told me that he was offered six hundred grand to work on a P.I. series, Ohara, I think it was, but he took substantially less to work on new high-brow series that he really loved set on an army base in Vietnam. And there was Milch and the writers at MTM. Money was not the main reason these guys were writing. But something was changing in the nineties. Part of it was the amount of money being offered. Part was the speed with which it was being offered. Part of it was the experience level of the writers to whom it was being offered. Television was not necessarily getting better; it was getting more lucrative. The composite effect of all this, when combined with the palpable changes taking place in the industry, made me smile a little every time a writer after that point told me what he would never do.

  In 1991, I went to work on Sisters as an executive story consultant, another step up in credit and pay from my previous position. At this point, I was no longer just courted by executives, now the agents started. Yes, I already had representation, but along with competing for the same new talent, agencies often steal each other’s working clients.

  Now, entire teams from Creative Arts Agency would crowd into my small office on the Warner Brothers lot. I was taken to frequent lunches and dinners in restaurants that food critics spoke about in hushed terms, restaurants my friends and family back home were reading about. I felt loved. I felt well fed. I felt guilty. Even though I hadn’t been doing this very long, I had been doing it long enough to know that Beth wouldn’t be crazy about me dining with other agents, which is why I wanted to tell her.

  After one obnoxiously expensive meal at the Hotel Bel-Air with an agent who I later heard was well known for poaching other agents’ clients, like a sheepish child, I called to let her know it was “just lunch.” Her response—and I must confess, I can still hardly believe that this is what she said, but this is what she said—was: “You tell [agent] that if he doesn’t stay away from you I will nail his knees into the ground with railroad spikes.” I did not dine with other agents again. Well…actually, I did one more time, and that didn’t turn out so well. I’ll get to that shortly.

  Although Sisters didn’t win snazzy statues like my previous series, it was clear to me very quickly that one-hour dramas were my favorite genre. I knew this when I saw it snow for the first time in L.A. It was in September—probably the hottest month in L.A. because the Santa Anas really kick up—in Burbank on the Warner Brothers backlot. I walked from the Sisters writers’ offices to the set—one of those suburban streets you’ve seen a million times in movies and TV shows—and it was covered in fake snow. Props guys in shorts were dumping heavy canvas bags of the white stuff in front of several massive ten-foot-high fans, which were blowing it all over the place. And those poor actors—Swoosie Kurtz and Sela Ward—standing in the middle of it all, wearing hats, gloves, and heavy winter jackets, sweating their asses off and pretending to shiver every time they heard—“Action!”

  You never got to do this kind of storytelling in sitcoms. To the contrary, you were literally writing to the existing sets. As a film show, we had more leeway with The Wonder Years. There’s a certain magic you always felt walking to a location shoot at midnight. We shot a lot of the exteriors on The Wonder Years in Burbank Hills, and even if you parked blocks away, you always knew where the cast and crew were working because of the lighting. There was always that one 20,000-watt Fresnel up on a crane, creating a moonlight effect on the constantly wet-down pavement. But one-hour dramas, even pure character-driven ones like Sisters, had the budget and the resources of an entire backlot, which allowed you to write anything from a winter day in Chicago to a huge rally at city hall to a house fire. It was great.

  When I worked on Sisters I was one of five writers. Two were executive producers Ron Cowan and Dan Lipman, a writing team that also lived together. And the other two were executive script consultants (a small step above story editors) and also a team, Chris Keyser and Amy Lippmann. Writing teams are very common on TV staffs. Many are married or live together. Many writers feel they can be more productive and more marketable with a partner. The perceived advantage for a show is that they get two voices for the price of one. On the other hand, sometimes shows don’t want too many voices. And sometimes, one voice is working and the other is not. In comedy, where group writing is the norm, teams assimilate easily. In one-hour, where the episodes have more authorship, the sum of the two voices is the relevant factor. In half-hour, many teams will work together, one at the computer, one pacing, and write the entire script as one. In one-hour, most partners divide up the script, working on different scenes or different acts. Some one-hour partners even split up a script according to the type of scene. I started to notice that some writing partnerships were great, especially the ones where one partner’s strengths made up for the other’s weaknesses, and vice versa. But I also worked with writing teams who brought their personal lives, including problems they were having with each other at home, into the Room. Sometimes these conflicts actually led to usable stories. But more often they didn’t.

  The five of us almost always broke story together on Sisters. We’d hang out in the EP’s office and just yak. On the wall, as in nearly all one-hour Rooms, were two dry-erase boards. These tracked the arcs of the characters—what happens to them, their emotional growth—through the season, as well as the status of the episodes, such as which writers are working on them and what stage the episodes are in. Some of our story sessions focused on the character arcs through the course of several episodes. Some of our sessions resulted in a loose story that would be assigned to me, Chris and Amy, or Ron and Dan. When a story was assigned, the writer of writers would then break out the beats of the story alone and post these on a dry-erase board. I had one in my office.

  The process of breaking out a story this way is called “boarding.” It helps the writers visualize how an entire episode will play. The classic way to do this is to draw three vertical lines down the board from top to bottom, equidistant apart. This creates four columns, one for each act. In each column you write a line or two explaining what each scene will be. These scenes are numbered. Each act usually has about six scenes (some shows have five per act, some as many as ten, depending on pace and style), so the average script usually has about twenty-four primary scenes.

  Most one-hour dramas have an A-story, a B-story, and a C-story. The A-story, as the name implies, is the main narrative of the episode. It has the most drive and its scenes typically bookend the acts. If a show has a “teaser,” the first scene in an episode that comes before the credit—and most one-hours today do because of the mandated imperative to quickly hook an audience—a scene from the A-story usually leads off. The B-story is the secondary or supporting story line, which can stand alone or intertwine with the A-story. The C-story is a runner, a few skeletal scenes, often created for no other reason than to give the cast members who are not in the A or the B something to do (not only to keep them involved and happy or to sometimes give them requested time off, but also to justify their episodic rate for the week). I found that I liked episodes where the story lines all resonate off each other or inform each other. I liked episodes where even if characters do not interact across story lines, we, the aud
ience, see their parallel or related development, which will pay off when they do come together. And I liked episodes where even if the story lines are entirely separate from each other, the A, B, and C are still thematically linked. There is plenty of good one-hour TV where none of this occurs, but for my taste simply plugging arbitrary story lines into an episode, like ordering from a Chinese food menu—one from column A, one from column B—feels, well, arbitrary. In very broad strokes, in most one-hours, the A-story accounts for about twelve scenes, the B-story for about eight, and the C-story for maybe four.

  After boarding an episode, it would be fleshed out into an outline and then scripted. I always felt that the two young script consultants, Chris and Amy, wrote the best episodes of the show. Curiously, even though they did not create it, they seemed to nail the voice of the show. Before joining the staff, they had previously written an episode for L.A. Law. However, David Kelly, who was running the show at the time, told them he was not going to put them on staff because he would just end up rewriting them. He encouraged them to go find a show where they could learn and actually see their work produced. Although they were bummed about this initially, it turned out to be excellent advice. In 1994, they left Sisters to create and run their own show, Party of Five, for the fledgling Fox network.